We live as long as we fly
The land of the victorious revolution burns in a bright-orange hallucinogenic haze:
mr_carbo, have you tried the chocolate bars with LSD there yet?
And they say all the drug dealers have left Riga for England and Ireland, following their customers. So the people will have to go on a chocolate-free diet and eat smoke whatever is still left.
I compensate for my informal communication style and clipped, slang-peppered speech in real life with pompous bureaucratese and compound sentences on LJ.
As you know, the new Mogwai album titled Mr. Beast appeared on peer-to-peer networks long before its official release.
Nowadays, this happens pretty often with popular mass culture goods due to the unscrupulousness of journalists who receive promo copies like the ones I wrote about in the first part. It also frequently happens that the album gets pirated by the very studio workers where it's being recorded. Apparently, the aforementioned categories of citizens haven't read comic books about copyright, or they just don't believe them. By the way, I scored some of those at the patent library today.
Promised to write about music, but I'm too lazy.
I'll just say that I finished reading Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon". I probably wouldn't be lying much, if I called the book post-cyberpunk sci-fi. The previous two books by Stephenson that I read - "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" are also strong (take the title alone!), but Cryptonomicon is something else.
Something without equal. To have a work of fiction seriously explain real encryption algorithms with formulas and examples - it's hard to even imagine. And considering the presence of
1)A ton of plausible historical and technical details about World War II and the functioning of modern Western high-tech corporations
2)The intertwining of three independent storylines, elegantly converging at the end of the book
3)Humor expressed through an impeccable style and vivid postmodern language
4)A treasure hunt in classic adventure traditions
It's hard to call the book anything but a masterpiece.
I was especially impressed by the explanation of how the German "Enigma" cipher machine works using a bicycle chain as an example and the description of the proper way to eat cereal "pillows" with milk.
You can download the book at https://lib.aldebaran.ru
To temper my fierce enthusiasm and compensate for the hole in my cultural baggage, I'm reading "War and Peace". Yes, yes, I didn't read it in school - I got scared that I wouldn't be able to stomach the murky snooze-fest. But now I've devoured a third of the first volume in just a couple of days - it turned out to be nowhere near as boring as it could have been.