Sex on the Moon (Ben Mezrich, 2013)

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.

The Cybergypsies (Indra Sinha, 1999)

If you were to list the great popular historical books of the computer world, you’d probably hear The Cuckoo’s Egg, Soul of a New Machine, and then a smattering of books by Wired Magazine regulars, like Cyberpunks and Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Fire In The Valley maybe, though I imagine Cromemco gets less relevant every day. What I rarely see recommended, however, and what I think belongs on the podium along with Kidder and Stoll, is Indra Sinha’s The Cybergypsies.

The gibsonian flair of the first few chapters creates the impression of a novel, and I think this confused some readers. I had to check out several facts and, low and behold, they turned out true. Eventually I realized “Bear,” the narrator, was Indra, and it’s a memoir. Shades was a real place; you can see a YouTube video playing back a recorded (and very chaotic) session. What else confused people? The terminology is probably period, but it’s a period that was over when the book was published-it’s a story of the modem world and what we would now call BBSs running MUDs.

The characters are drawn with attention to their humanity. It would be easy to turn this story into a people zoo, but Bear never does, instead opting for empathy even when he’s relating outrageous behavior and hilarious drama. In a different era, with a different pen, it might have been delivered as a very long forum post. Nowdays, perhaps as the sort of YouTube essay Folding Ideas produces. Because it really gets to the heart of what it means to be terminally online. Sinha was terminally online before that was even a thing.

You also need to realize that Bear’s got a truly fantastical imagination, and this may have rubbed literal-minded hackers the wrong way. He describes playing online MUDs with a richness that helps justify the outrageous price tag of being online in those days. There’s one scene where you suddenly realize he’s playing Colossal Cave Adventure and you almost don’t recognize it because his vivid description doesn’t betray the spartan description actually given in the game. Indeed, it’s a really interesting appraisal of text adventure games in general and the power of imagination.

So why don’t we hear about it now? Well, for one thing, it’s got a slur in the title. That makes it a bit awkward to bring up. In 1999 the dot-com crazy world wasn’t interested in a book about BBSing; compare similar books and they’re associated with favored technologies like Unix and TCP/IP. It wasn’t associated with any big exciting well known company either. Also, the original dust jacket (NSFW) features a pixelated, suggestively posed woman. It is a mature adult story but not lurid; the cover probably didn’t do it any favors in getting a more serious audience. Oh, and it’s not entirely optimistic, indeed showing the dangers of being terminally online, but again it’s not sensationalized. A lot of reviews at the time latched on to this, selling it as a bit of a horror or anti-tech story. But I really don’t think it earned that appraisal, I just don’t think we had the words we now have to describe what he was writing about.

(Bonus: interview with the author https://in.rediff.com/news/2007/aug/22inter.htm)


October ’24 Web Links

Does Open Source AI really Exist? (tante.cc)

This is an important article and everyone who spends time in the open source community should pay attention to its contents. OSI is preparing to adopt a definition of Open Source specific to AI models which doesn’t fit the definition it uses for code. I assume this is to allow some open source AI to exist, but in effect it is allowing Facebook (and Stability if they don’t go under) to pretend that what they’re putting out as far as weights is the same as the faffing Linux kernel.

Filed: WP Engine Inc. v Automattic Inc. and Matthew Charles Mullenweg (news.ycombinator.com)

Litigant commenting on social media. Always something interesting to see. I have no plans to switch off of WordPress, but that’s of course mostly about inertia and avoiding link rot. I’d be happy to switch to a fork not managed by… a litigant posting on social media.

Redditor linked some old internet resources (reddit.com)

I haven’t actually tried these out myself yet, but if you’re an old internet enthusiast you may be interested.

https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/

I like sites that document old models and stuff like this. Been meaning to ask if they’ve seen anything like those unidentified Archie McPhee ships; when I tried to google for information about some similar stuff, I got there.

Opensourcing of Winamp goes badly (el reg)

A frequent complaint you’ll hear in the retro tech community is wishing that people would just open source beloved old software. Owners of said source code frequently say that that’s not as easy as people might think. This article is an illustration of why that’s correct; it’s not as easy as just throwing it on github and hitting publish, which the owners of Winamp seem to have done.

This awesome DnB clip made out of car noises (youtube.com)

Listen to it. Wish it was longer.

Why are unironic imperium posters so common? (Reddit.com)

Speaking of reddit, this was, embarrassingly, locked. But I think the following article may help answer it:

Satire Without Purpose Will Wander In Dark Places (timcolwill.com)

Put much better than I could have, but a line of reasoning I’ve had to have with folks before. GW definitely wants to sell its exciting world but also get out from under the massive problem it’s created with its lore by calling it satire. Nobody can keep a joke going for that long, not even SNL. The jabs at the US armed forces stings of course, and I’m not saying I agree with all his politics here (remember folks, a link is not an endorsement), but he does an excellent job of laying out the tension of GW’s two sided “it’s a satire / please enjoy how cool space marines are” position.

And while we’re on this general subject…