So here is a strange question. I underestimated just how sharp exacto knives are while cleaning up the seams on my minis. Can i just use the plastic glue to seal it rather then keep changing bandaids each time it comes back open and bleeds again?
When I saw this, I realized I really did need to write this up. I cannot allow the public to remain uninformed any longer regarding glue!
Plastic Cement
Also known as: Plastic Glue
This stuff smells like nail polish remover, and it’s no coincidence: they both use Acetone. The Acetone in plastic glue liquefies the plastic surfaces and when they re-harden, they’re very well stuck together. Cement is right; this stuff creates very strong bonds. The drawback is that it’s only good for specific plastics; the sort of polystyrene that you see in typical model kits, but it won’t work if you’re attaching a rock to a base or working with resin parts. It also won’t bind up your skin (otherwise nail polish remover would be far more dangerous. If you take nothing else from this article, take this:
You cannot close wounds with plastic cement!
If something is stuck on with plastic cement, your best bet for cutting it off.
SuperGlue
Now, I’m not a doctor, but I’m assured you can close a wound with superglue. It certainly sticks robustly to skin. Cyanoacrylate, the technical term for this type of glue will readily bond skin, so avoid using it without gloves. If you do, I recommend GoJo. CA glue will work with a variety of materials and form very strong bonds, but it has a few drawbacks: it’s finicky about setting. You get a few seconds to hold your bond steady (pressure is good) and then the glue is no good, you’ll need to try again after removing the now-spent glue. If you glue painted parts you need to make sure you don’t get glue anywhere visible, because it dries opaque. Its quick setting can be an asset though; you can pull off poses that would be slightly trickier for a longer setting glue. I hear you can freeze it off, but I haven’t had success with this myself.
PVA Glue
PVA glue, also known as School Glue, is also used in wood glues. It’s the least consequential of glues; you’re not going to poison yourself with it (unless, I imagine, you drink it) and if it sticks to your fingers you can can just wash it off, or rub your fingers together for a few seconds. It’s popular for basing because it’s thick, goopy, and easy to fix if you make a mistake; just add sand! You can even get it premixed with sand in the form of nice basing paste. It can be dissolved by soaking in water for a day or so and then scraping off with a toothpick.
The line between genius and madness is really in play here. I’m of course interested because it’s retromac and EV Nova related, but it’s also a shining example of people doing really interesting things in the retrocomputing space. Today’s technology isn’t the only valid technology to build for.
That site is a relic! you don’t see many sites like that around these days. I was looking for the EarthSiege music to remix, but found the MIDI already perfectly well arranged. You love to see it.
Been following this story, because not only do they seem to be deliberately disregarding the famous cautionary tale of Jurassic Park, they’re also doing it in a way that’s raising fraud-eyebrows, not just safety eyebrows.
Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we’re living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?
It’s because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They’re rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we’re not futurists, we’re entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it’s a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it. And that’s why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas.
When you’re as enthusiastic as I am for old school computing, you’re bound to run into people writing with fondness about Turbo Pascal. I had no idea someone had reverse engineered the thing.
This amounts to what you might call a retraction of the sensational wood-wide-web story you probably heard or saw a few years back, but I wish it was longer snd more detailed. Never heard of undark before, but will keep my eye on it.
This is yet another example of the AI community refusing to play by the rules and justifying their disregard for other people’s freedom of choice with self-aggrandizing platitudes about how what they’re doing is ‘so important’ that the cost to others doesn’t matter.
If the CD player worked, I probably wouldn’t have needed to go this far. In my ’01 I got used to sitting through full albums during the scenic backroads trip from North Canton to Westfield. When I grudgingly traded in the 01 for an 05, the CD player was busted, but low on the list of repair priorities-the ABS module and fuel pressure sensor both failed in short order!
Replacing the CD player was, I figured, about the same work as replacing the whole head unit, so why not just replace the head unit? There are a staggering number of head units available, so I arbitrarily picked Kenwood because I like my 3010. I wanted Android Auto for navigation and music. Another somewhat arbitrary qualification to narrow it down was that I wanted a USB connection instead of Bluetooth. I’ve found this more reliable.
I got a ReadyHarness setup from Crutchfield. I highly recommend this route unless you’re a diehard wiring diagram enthusiast; there’s a lot of wires you need to splice and they do a very neat job of it. Also, it’s rather painful to bench test your work, as I’ll explain further down.
Disassembly Procedure
Luckily, this was well covered by YouTube. Most period P2s seem to have similar consoles, so although I couldn’t find an exact match, I was able to figure out everything I needed to from these videos:
The procedure (so someone has it written out) is basically:
disconnect battery.
Put on emergency brake (this will stick) because next you will…
Put the shifter into drive
Remove shifter trim piece
Remove two screws attaching console assembly, behind the front edge of the shifter trim piece.
Pry/lift out console assembly
Remove bezel from console assembly (all of the screws cracked off of mine so it was just tabs holding it on, but it’s supposed to have screws too.)
Unscrew climate panel and disconnect the cables. There’s one (easy) cable for the cigarette lighter and one mutinous bus connection with a tab. Remove climate panel. Apparently if you do this without disconnecting the battery it will give you a trouble code and mess up the sensor.
Radio is fastened to dash box by several tabs; remove tabs to remove radio.
This all sounds fairly straightforward. I didn’t want to break the extra clip connecting the climate controls from the dashboard assembly though, so I did a lot of work with the console only half out of the car, which turns out to be exhausting. In retrospect I would just break the clip off. The screws are all torx so make sure you have a Torx driver.
Brake light cable saga
Unfortunately, head units with screens seem to need one connection that isn’t on the harness in the ’05: you need to tap the parking brake light wire. This tells the head unit you’re parked so it can pair phones (and I guess play video, if you want that for some reason. I do not.) Since most people seem to just connect it to ground to circumvent the brake requirement, it’s surprisingly hard to find info about doing it the “right” way online. Whelp, there is now!
Accessing the brake cable turned out to be a bit of a mystery. Crutchfield provides nice installation instructions but detailed instructions on the best place to tap the brake cable are hard to find. It turns out that for my money, the easiest move was to lift up the center console and chase down the wire. This video provides instructions for removing the center console.
Note that removing the cigarette lighter plug for the back seats is extremely annoying and probably took 1/4 of the total job time.
The cable in question is easiest to tap right behind the brake lever, but it’s difficult to actually get enough room to do it without moving the center console around. You will have trouble reaching it elsewhere, but you might be able to do the tap just by sliding up the trim piece that attaches to the parking brake knob. I appreciated the extra space afforded by having the center console unscrewed. So I guess that’s a win.
With that tapped, you’re ready to wire up the new radio!
Wiring
You have three cables to manage:
the line tapping the brake cable (green)
USB cable (black, larger)
microphone cable (black, smaller)
All three need to be routed between the center console and the back of the radio. There is a hole at the bottom of the head unit housing and enough room behind the climate control box to make it down to the empty space around the shifter, and through there to the console.
I drilled a hole in the cupholder depression part of the center console to feed the USB and microphone cables through. I plan to drill additional holes in the cupholder to route the cables in the empty void between the cups for a cleaner look and to hold cups again.
The Trouble with bench testing
In order to bench test your radio and make sure you made the connections correctly, you of course need to power the car by (at least) reconnecting the battery. However, you don’t want to connect the battery until you have connected the climate control module again. To get all of that connected, you need to put practically the whole dash back together without fastening it.
Also, do remember to use accessory mode! I managed to drain my battery while bench testing, but luckily I had a jump starter on hand.
Faceplate Scare
I grabbed a Scosche DIN adapter because it was part of the Crutchfield package, and the package seems to be the only way to get the ReadyHarness (which you really, really want.) It connects to the dashboard assembly via a series of tabs just like the stock head unit. Unfortunately, the tabs would not engage! I don’t know if it’s because the fit with the Kenwood was too tight and it was flexing the plastic or what, but at this point, I was pretty worried. Luckily, I happened to have a different faceplate already, from Metra Electronics, purchased back when I’d foolishly planned on doing the harness wiring myself. That one fit perfectly, saving the day!
Final Thoughts
Even with the stock speakers, the new radio sounds great. The lack of a knob is definitely a downgrade, but radios with knobs are considerably more expensive. I did the job over the course of a couple of very cold days in New England in February. In retrospect, I should have started this project when it was warmer. I seem to have bungled the microphone connection and I’m probably not going to bother trying to fix it, because I don’t like talking on the phone while driving. Next fix: the turn signal switch is going bad!
(Dialing this back to a bimonthly post. I want to try and maintain a minimum ratio of one regular post for every link post and that wasn’t happening. Plus February was busy.)
“Weigh the soul of incoming HTTP requests using proof-of-work to stop AI crawlers” kinda says it all. Not totally unlike a cloud flair Captcha thing, another measure to secure your site from inhuman traffic.
Lanner Chronicle has done something really useful here by gathering up what we know about each individual track from Aphex Twin’s daunting SoundCloud dump. This is much more accessable than the spreadsheet… I’m still contemplating doing a wiki though.
My vow to stop making EV-likes has had mixed results. Here, I’ll discuss some of the more interesting aspects of a recent EV-Like, Galactic Night.
Perspective on perspectives
While I did make a serious run at doing a vehicle game in Godot, it was hard to get around just how excellent the affordances of what I’d already built were, and what was lacking in Godot 3. But it didn’t start there. It started with an observation:
First Let’s Play google gives you for “EV Nova.” I haven’t listened to the whole thing, so I can’t vouch for it. But it’s got footage of the game.
Ships in EV Nova (and MPEVMVP, for that matter) are sprites rendered from 3d models. They are rendered with perspective so that when the front of a ship faces the screen, it appears larger than the back. It’s subtle on some ships, obvious on others.
Perspective camera isn’t the norm for sprite games. Most games with pre-rendered sprites use an isometric camera; here’s Starcraft as an example:
First result for broodwar gameplay. The Terran Siege Tanks are the best example of isometry.
For games where the units are in a rich world with lots of points of reference, rendering them in perspective might look wonky. Too much perspective might look wonky under any circumstances! However, the decision to use perspective in the sparse world of Nova lends the ships a sense of scale.
2.5d games that use a full 3d world instead of sprites tend to either use a perspective or isometric camera. It’s easy to implement either in Godot (and other engines) by changing the camera’s mode. But I was curious: could I implement something with a vertex shader that would deform a mesh such that it appeared to have perspective, even while rendered in an isometric view? Perspective, I should note, not truly relative to the camera, but relative to an imaginary camera ‘rendering’ the imaginary ‘sprite’?
This is difficult to convey with words, so I built a demo:
What’s interesting about this, at least to me, is how difficult it is to notice what’s going on. Your brain seems to happily accept the very unnatural perspective. At least mine does. But if you look closely, you can see that no matter where the spaceship (and thus actual iso camera) move, the spinning cubes maintain their fixed perspective, just like sprites in an old school video game.
Flying around was fun, I wanted to do more stuff. It got out of hand. It’s a whole game now.
More Ship Shader Fun
Using a 3d pipeline offered the possibility of using some nice 3d features, exploiting the fact that the textures and effects were in-engine rather than an external pipeline. Nova has engine glows and weapon glows; I implemented those too.
Nova also has an (unused) feature where you can stain your ship a different color. I wanted to try something similar, but nicer:
You can check out the full ship shader here. Note that in GD4 you can split shaders into multiple files, so the important parts are the perspective transform here, and the color swap logic here.
Union Bytes Painter allows for multiple texture layers, so it’s easy-ish to make separate textures for lights, engines, weapons, paint, and a base. It’s a little clunky for exporting though – I need to show/hide layers and export a few times. Still miles better than the Blender workflow I used while working on Flythrough.Space.
Flat Space
I wanted to create a nice set of planets and nail the EV Nova look, so I followed tradition and picked up the venerable LunarCell, which was also used to render the planets for EV Nova. This creates (gorgeous) 2d planet sprites:
Only problem? Lunar Cell doesn’t create masks, just planets on a black background. Solution? This remarkably simple shader:
You’ll notice though that that’s a 2d shader, and the game is 3d. That’s the neat part – the background is a 2d canvas! We use this class to make sure the sprite in 2d space tracks the correct position in 2.5d space:
The background itself is basically the same shader I used in Survive Spacebut with additional special effects you can cue up to make hyperspace more exciting:
I wanted to visually represent folding space, and the looped background made for a unique opportunity to do it. The shader is of course just dropping specific images (Screaming Brain’s awesome Nebula backgrounds) on a couple of layers, but it would look better looped if I did something with Perlin noise.
Procedural Generation
Flythrough.Space used a handmade universe I originally drew on graph paper. While charming, that took a whole lot of work for very little gain at the end of the day. For MPEVMVP I used universe maps generated by Mag Steel Glass’s spreadsheet. Which is fine by all accounts, but I wanted the player to be able to generate new universes on the fly. That’s where I ran into my new best friend: Delauny Triangulation.
Ok, you need to look a bit closely, but in both cases, you’ve got a point cloud that is stitched up by non-overlapping lines. So to generate an EV map, because there’s a library function for that all you need to do is feed it a set of points and get your EV map’s hyperlanes!
That same strategy carried over to Galactic Night, with some modifications, namely the division of space into quadrants to provide a difficulty curve, and the separation of growing biomes from growing faction influence. In Valheim, the game I imitated most on Survive Space, all three are effectively the same; a biome is a difficulty level is a spawn location for various monsters. In Galactic Night, spawns can depend on biome (for asteroid types) faction (for where to spawn enemies or allies) and quadrant (more difficult NPCs.)
Codex
The codex window loads up a folder tree of bbcode (weirdly, Godot’s rich text boxes support this) files and displays them. Item fluff that would usually be embedded in the interface in an EV goes here, a much more conventional placement for a modern game. I never did get around to writing a system for unlocking entries.
Retrospective
I’m proud of the technology and writing that went into Galactic Night, and some of it will certainly be recycled for future projects. I’d be happy if people get any use out of the code or design concepts tested out. I’ll close out with some final thoughts on how the project went.
I think the perspective looked really good, but some people definitely found it jarring. In future projects, it should definitely be an optional feature.
Doing the textures in Union Bytes painter became a slog. Small UI issues compounded over the course of several objects, and it stopped being fun.
Upgrading from GD3 to GD4 mid project was a big hiccup, but ultimately worth it because the syntax of GDscript is far nicer.
Though the procedural universe was really fun to tweak and play with, I don’t think it provided enough stuff for an exploration focused game. Games like Minecraft and Valheim exploit the inherent human desire to play around in a virtual space, and an EV map doesn’t really provide that; in a game like this the contours of the explored world are unique spaceships you find, well written place descriptions, missions, graphics, and the like. I never found a way to work in that level of diversity. Also, I never found an effective way to hint to players that, for example, getting lostech will allow them to increase their tech level and make more options available. Sure, it’s there in the manual, but who’s gonna read that! The upshot was that it felt like a big empty map with nothing particularly interesting going on in it, and no motivation to strike out and try to do stuff. Oh well.
Hindenburg Research is shutting down. They’ve done some excellent investigations, and it’s a shame to see them go. I do worry that this is a canary for being able to say actionable, unflattering things about companies.
An interesting side effect of how surveiled the world is: now incredibly rare natural events are captured on film. Stands in nice contrast to bigfoots and the whole drone situation.
If you’ve ever been curious about what people are watching on Youtube.com these days because you’re an out of touch millennial, this sort of explainer is very informative.
Somehow I missed this earlier in the year, but wanted to make sure it was included. We got three new David Monolith albums this year. I dunno how I missed them. This includes the highly anticipated “Madrid Tack” but more importantly it’s assurance that Dave is out there somewhere doing better than we’d perhaps feared.
So far I’ve only given a thorough listen to Custom Groove Set, and it delivers in a big way. I was a huge fan of Time (2015) and this might be his best record since. Crazy to think that it’s been ten years.
Neat idea for a site – a collection of emails from important tech figures released as part of court proceedings. I haven’t read enough of it to see if there’s a major slant.
Surprise Aphex release this month. It’s nothing a hardcore fan who likes YouTube bootlegs hasn’t already heard, but it makes it easier for people who use streaming music services to enjoy these tracks. T16.5 and rfc pt8 are my favorites. Nightmail remains a bop as well.
Authors David Robertson and Bill Breen have unfortunately achieved a dubious honor: they’ve taken an exciting human story and turned it into a stuffy suit.
Brick By Brick details the critical years of The LEGO Group (herafter TLG) as it lost its way, almost went bankrupt, and managed to pull off a feat of business alchemy by becoming (now) the biggest toy company in the world. As a (kid) fan of Lego during that era, I remember watching this from the outside; the Ploughman years where TLG made famous mistakes like Galidor and soaring experiments like Mindstorms are part of the contours of my memory. The inside baseball view was fun, and I’d recommend reading the book if you’re really into that sort of thing, but it’s a lot of book for a few nuggets.
It’s not written as a history, it’s written as a guide for business “innovators,” and as such object lessons sometimes crowd out the finer points. I recognize that I’m not the target audience for the book, and that it’s not the book’s fault that it’s not everything I want it to be. But I can only react to it the way I reacted, so let’s check it out!
Character based themes were nothing new
In Breen & Robertson’s telling, you would be forgiven for thinking that Bionicle was the first time TLG had shipped a theme based on original characters.1 This is plainly incorrect though. We got lore for System themes going way back; it just wasn’t taken seriously early on, see this section from a 1996 Mania Magazine:
Does that support an action-packed space exploration theme? Would the target audience even get the joke that MST3k is a show featuring robots?
It got better though! Check this character bio page from a 1998 mag:
While clearly off-brand Indiana Jones, this takes the premise much more seriously and is trying to design characters. A few other themes from the Ploughman era went in a similar direction; some were even media tie-ins, like Rock Raiders which was launched with a strategy video game.
MindStorms also had a tie in web-game, Stormrunner, quite a high quality one as well; a full on RCX programming simulator in a world you could drive your robot around in to explore. They discussed MindStorms in detail in the book but don’t mention the connection-the online MindStorms game was created by none other than Templar Studios, the same folks that created the Mata Nui Online Game that would prove instrumental in selling Bionicle as a theme with a story.
Another thing I think the book missed about Bionicle is that the art was just far better than what preceded it. Compare this to the above marketing materials, and while you’re at it, compare it to Toy Story 2, the best CGI most of us kids would have been exposed to in 2000:
Kids weren’t used to high quality CGI like this being used to market toys to them. Galador was just a (live action) guy, but Toa were these intricate, alien robots. Unique and memorable. Bionicle does get credit, but the focus is mostly on how innovative it is. But I think not enough credit is given for points on execution; it was just a much better put together marketing package than any theme had ever been treated to. The story was more coherent, the story was consistent (ish) across media, and the story was taken seriously, rather than used as an excuse to write dad jokes. If you were a genuine fan of System Themes, the Magazine blurbs sometimes felt like they were laughing at your expense… Bionicle never felt that way; Faber and co. were clearly huge fans of the material, hell Faber is still talking about it twenty years later! I’d say it was a confluence of factors-trying some of the same things and some new things, plus bringing the quality of the worldbuilding up to the obsessive quality of the bricks.
Nonetheless, Bionicle shouldn’t be seen solely as a unique moment for Lego, but also a progression from earlier attempts, a pulling together of all of the different things TLG had tried, especially during the zany Ploughman era.
Misunderstanding Minecraft
The chapter on Lego Universe unfortunately lacks depth on Lego’s history with gaming, and maybe gaming in general. I wish they’d tapped a seasoned games journo for this one rather than their kid who plays Minecraft. I suppose to be fair, Gaming was taken quite a bit less seriously ten years ago when Brick By Brick was written.
What they don’t seem to see is that Lego was no stranger to publishing games that promote a building play style. Lego Loco (Intelligent Games, 1998) was also an open ended sandbox game, a much gentler, challenge-free take on a sort of Sim City type of game, featuring lego minifigs and trains:
(Wikipedia)
In the same year, TLG also published Lego Creator, an immersive 3d Lego building simulation featuring the ability to build lego models at minifig scale. It wasn’t exactly Minecraft, but it can be easily described in terms of Minecraft, it’s like Minecraft except:
(Wikipedia again)
You could build drivable vehicles
Static flat ground, no mining
Not voxel based; you could build with bricks of various shapes
No enemy npcs, threats or challenges; you just kinda build whatever you want with unlimited resources
Single player; no multiplayer
Apart from that, it was comparable to Minecraft, at least for its day. The sequels may have added some challenges, I never played them. But the prior art was clearly there. Had TLG chosen to develop along that path, it’s possible that they could have shipped something remarkably similar to Minecraft before Infiniminer, which inspired Minecraft, got off the ground. And I think it’s worth asking why and laying some blame on the inability for the culture of TLG to understand the industry, but I wish the book really engaged with that question instead of just lambasting the way they engaged with MMO producers in a fairly shallow way. I agree that perfectionism was the enemy, but I think that it was also a question of seeing kids MMOs like Toontown succeed massively and wanting to replicate that success, another subject not touched on.
The book I want someone to write
A book more focused on the Ploughman era specifically, with a deeper look at what TLG tried and when, when it worked and when it didn’t, and how the things that worked culminated in Bionicle and subsequent themes. I’d love to hear the inside story of TLG working essentially as a video game publisher, something Brick By Brick basically skated over! I want to know how we went from seemingly goofy after the fact ideas like Ann Droid to intentionally created stories like Johnny Thunder. This was clearly a gradual process, and one that’s as responsible for saving the company as a particular fire truck model was!
What I’m asking for, in other words, is a history of Lego Themes.
I gave both the same rating on Goodreads, but in retrospect, I enjoyed Anderson’s story a lot more. It also lacked a lot of theme-level coverage I crave, but it did attempt to tell a story and ground that story in research instead of fitting the narrative to instruct on some specific lesson (besides of course being a hagiography of Kjeld Kristiansen.) If you absolutely loved Anderson’s book you might find additional insight by comparing the two. If Anderson wasn’t for you, or if you were only mildly enthused, I’d give this one a pass.
Footnotes:
Actually they do bring up Fabuland for some incomprehensible reason. I dunno.
More on the WordPress affair and the Open Source AI definition affair. Excellent coverage and a lively guest. I’m waiting for the dust to settle before I upgrade!
Somehow I’m missed this the first time around. Designer of the ubiquitous Jazz print got some recognition. Interesting to know it’s originally a charcoal sketch that was then colored on a computer.
When I got back into MTG in college in 2013, one of the exciting new features was the EDH format. It was much more casual, closer to the kitchen table tomfoolery that kept me entertained back in the my first run (~2002-~2005.) We didn’t all run Sol ring.
It’s interesting to see what the format has become since then. The bans seem good, but I suppose the writing was on the wall when Wizards decided to print those cards in the first place.
Designing a few cards for EDH was neat; people were using commander precons. But the coolest thing was how it made you reconsider the types of cards that never saw play in constructed before. Overcosted things that fit into weird archetypes. Jank old legends like from actual _Legends_, amd trying to make them work. I get the sense that commander has become more like other constructed formats, with people making tuned decks using good cards.
I don’t know if I should care, I do not play a whole lot anymore and new cards aren’t really printed with me in mind. But it’s interesting to see the last gasp of a truly community driven hack of Magic as it’s absorbed into Wizards.
Delicious page design, but a chilling investigation. The idea that we’re all building our own digital tombs only for them to be refurbished as spam instruments is a sobering one. I suppose it’s a consequence of two factors: nothing can resist entropy forever, and on the internet the form entropy takes, the heat death, is turning into spam. Spam and bots are the gray nothing of the dead web.
The premise held promise, but I think Mezrich fumbled this one. Sex on the Moon is too excited about telling convicted moon rock thief Thad’s story and not interested enough in informing the reader about anything in particular. If the story had enough juice to support a novel, it might have been worth it, but Thad is a poor fit for a hero and his story isn’t a heroic journey, or even a very good yarn.
The initial promise of a moon rock heist as a heist story is dashed fairly quickly; this seems like as much as an insider threat crime of opportunity committed by a habitual swiper as it is a proper caper. To summarize it: A couple of NASA Interns showed up at NASA with a dolly, stole a safe full of tiny moon rocks from a favorite processor’s office, and proceeded to try and sell them to an FBI agent. You don’t want to read a book about a bank robbery committed by a bank teller unless it’s told in a particularly compelling way (it isn’t) or it tells us something interesting about our world (I would argue that this does not.)
It’s written like a novel (interspersed with absolutely atrocious blank verse-presumably excerpted from Thad’s returned-to-sender jailhouse love letters to his accomplice) but heroes are usually expected to change or grow in some way. He starts the story casually stealing from his employer and ends the story after a jail sentence for stealing from another employer. There’s no sense that he has learned anything about right and wrong or trust or greed. His apology in court was barely a step from ‘it’s just a prank bro.’
It’s important for true crime writing, if it wants to be remotely tasteful, to make sure there’s empathy for the victims of the crime. There’s very little here. I wish he’d gone into what the effects were on the culture of NASA after the heist. Did interns still enjoy the same level of access? Is it still a viable pathway to an Astronaut career? Did they implement new security procedures? The scientist who’s safe NASA Intern thad and his co-conspirators stole testified in court that he left precious notebooks that represented thirty years of work in the safe and they were never recovered, but we don’t hear that in Thad’s telling. His co-conspirators told the FBI that Thad insisted they throw the notebooks out!
And that’s really the crux of the problem. The story puts us in the Perp’s head for the most part. The book is interesting enough when he’s describing how fun it is to be a NASA Intern and barely worth reading when he’s describing his head over heels plunge into adultery with a coworker. We don’t get a whole lot of empathy for his wife either, just his side of the story about how her… career was getting in the way of their relationship? Despite the fact that he of course moved out of state to chase a highly unlikely dream of becoming an astronaut and then threw it away for a life of crime. I suppose the book is trying to answer the question “what would drive a man with so much going his way to risk it all?” But the best answer we get is ‘he is very bad as gauging risk and engages in lots of risky behavior’ or ‘Thad, who seems to be telling the story, doesn’t want you to think that he was just greedy.’
I don’t believe Thad. He tells an improbable story of using a Hollywood chemistry trick to steal the keypad combination to gain access to the facility he stole from. I suspect one of the conspirators was leaked the code, and Thad lied to the author to protect that source. Why the author pointed it, I don’t know. We don’t know if there was any physical evidence for this story. The names of the co-conspirators are changed even though they’re a matter of public record. What journalistic purpose did that serve, besides (I assume) help assuage the guilt of the perpetrator? These make it difficult to take any of the facts in the book at face value. As a work of journalism it’s frightfully compromised.
As a yarn it’s frayed. It certainly kept me turning the pages to see what stupid mistake Thad would make next, but the sympathy left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s salaciousness wasn’t offset by any other qualities; it reads, partly, as a really weird love letter to a person who clearly no longer wants anything to do with the narrator. Skip this one and read the Atlantic article linked above instead.
