(no subject)

[camwyn]

I just finished reading Snow Crash.

I'm suddenly rather glad that I can't code for beans. Safer that way.

I'm also vaguely creeped out by a few things: the surfacing of a line from my women's Torah commentary about how for four hundred of the six hundred* years that Solomon's Temple stood in Jerusalem, there were Asherah statues in the sanctuary- well, that's the big one. Followed closely by:

"Now, are we actually gonna go before a federal judge, and tell him that some moldy Babylonian God is going to drop in on Central Park West, and start tearing up the city?"
"Sumerian, not Babylonian...."
Evo Shandor just got a lot more scary.

No more than that. No spoilers. Well, okay, one thing: glass knives? This is the big surprise no one can detect? This lies at the core of Raven's badassery and people consider it a surprise? Dude. I'm really sorry, but the instant the first scan of Raven said they weren't seeing any weapons on him, what went through my head was: "no one here is a cook, obviously." Because, see, Kyocera? The nice folks who make laser printers? They also make scary-ass ceramic knives. Not like they have monomolecular edges or anything, but seriously, they're scary and nasty and have a Mohs rating of about 8.2. Average glass has a Mohs rating of around 6. I guess it's easier to make the glass knives, but if I were looking for an edged weapon that wasn't gonna turn up on scan I'd be running straight to Japan to buy me some knives that wouldn't shatter if they dropped and never needed sharpening, not ever. And that I could use on my food if the whole cutting-people-really-deep part didn't come up..

Having said that, I've got work to do. More later.

*I may be remembering the numbers wrong, as I have not been able to pick up said commentary or a Tanakh since the idea occurred to me, but that's the best I can do.

Comments

[prodigal.livejournal.com]

The reason why glass knives is that if he ever runs out of weapons, all he has to do is break a window to make more.

I'd say that the real heart of Raven's badassery would be his status as a nuclear power.

[camwyn]

Nah, that's just the confirmation thereof. He became a nuclear badass after he put everything he had into becoming a generic badass; it's like the difference between conquering an empire, and conquering an empire in accordance with divine will and prophecy.

[thekit.livejournal.com]

I thought his badassery was his "poor impulse control". The knives, the katanas, the guns, the mag-poon & board... all those props are just expressions of the badass within.

[thekit.livejournal.com]

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Raven's character is that he's self reliant, and able to improvise, whereas Hiro starts off as a consumer junkie what with all the bought (or corp issued) toys Mr Protagonist carries.

[camwyn]

Mm. I guess what I was thinking sort of ties into that. He made himself the badass before the rest of it happened. I think if you took all his stuff away and left him naked and apparently helpless somewhere, he'd still be able to manage- if only by biting someone someplace very soft, gouging something else, and then pounding them against something very hard until he got enough of a bone fragment to be a weapon. Like you said, poor impulse control.

[thekit.livejournal.com]

"YT was trying to remember something... something important about birth control."

[kali921.livejournal.com]

HAHAHAHAHA!

I'm the one who gave her Snowcrash.....

Badassery?

[maps-or-guitars.livejournal.com]

I love that word.

Ya, Raven would be a badass with nothing but a toothpick and a loincloth. He would be a badass if you were able to shoehorn him into a 3-piece suit. His ass is just plain bad.

[jjloa.livejournal.com]

hee. not just scary ass ceramic knives. Wonderful knives for their original purpose apparently.

Even though the chef that I live with is still partial to Henckels (once a chef finds a set he loves, it takes a LOT for him to ever leave it/try another. which makes sense), he says the Kyocera are lovely knives- although somewhat impractical for general use in a busy large professional kitchen (lots of people, lots of potential for it getting hit - they're not dead easy to break, but they still have some disadvantages against steel in that way)

I've never asked about the practicality as a weapon, mind you .. but I don't want to give him ideas ;)

[camwyn]

Once I got past the Kyocera bit, I was perfectly happy to admit that glass knives are t3h shiznit, for entirely personal reasons. Aeons ago I played at a MUSH called TwoMoons. It was based on Wendy and Richard Pini's ElfQuest comics. My character, Crowmark, was part of the tribe of the Forbidden Grove. Mostly this meant that she was a Palaeolithic elf among other Palaeolithic elves, living in a society where they shared quite a lot of characteristics with the local wolves (this was not much of a surprise given that they also shared genetics). However, Crowmark was not much good at hunting compared to the rest of the tribe. This was not all that much of a handicap, since she was the tribe's clayshaper; she got to play with mud in the name of making bowls and other basic implements, and when she couldn't get meat, other tribe members brought her some.

And then one fine fateful day she discovered what happened when lightning struck a sandy patch, and then she discovered what happened to lightning-struck sand when you dropped it on a rock by mistake.

And because the admin felt that I was able to justify it enough, Crowmark- who had never been much good at the Wolfrider Way to begin with- started toying about with making Very Very Hot Fires, and adding things to sand to see if that changed anything, and... well, she had a metal knife she got from the local trolls, but she also carried a glass one and she took the first glass she ever managed to make herself and chipped it into a spearhead. So I have a warm spot in my heart for glass knives.

[jjloa.livejournal.com]

hehe. well, the kyocera thing makes sense actually on it as the japanese tend to be more sensitive on certain tastes (or at least Iron Chef tells me so *L*) ... and with sushi, the whole 'taste' of the metal - which I CAN actually understand - so they looked for alternatives that were as good as metal knives, but had the advantage of the traditional no metal tools (also saw someone on tv fillet a fish using some sort of clam shell, which was the 'traditional' way - very interesting).

Very cool development though. I like playing with people's characters who have that much thought and history written in ... it makes it a lot more interesting.

I like admins who are that way too - the ones that make it so that you have to be able to back it up and explain it and be willing to work through the time it would take to get to that stage. vs. the (unfortunately) more common one where people would show up and go 'oh, I can do this' for no reason with no backing and no logic (even logic by the fantastical standards of the setting) and you just want to scream .... *L*

[camwyn]

Oh, Crowmark was boatloads of fun. She was, more or less, the tribe's focal point for Pratchettonian inspiration particles. She had a lot of trouble immersing herself in the Wolfrider Way, which is rather like Taoism when it comes right down to it. She kept wanting to fiddle with stuff and poke at stuff instead of just letting it be. Seeing what fire did to sand left her wondering what fire did to clay, and got her a few interesting trips to the healer, since she never really did figure out why clay sometimes exploded in fire and sometimes didn't. She got permission from her tribe's chief to dig herself a pit for her fire experiments, so that she didn't set the forest on fire, and she spent quite a lot of her leisure time in there. Took a lot of teasing from her tribemates, who joked that she must surely have had troll blood, the way she carried on. They put up with it, though, mostly because the glass knives made deboning easy when troll knives weren't available and because she was able to use the glass spear quite effectively to catch and kill large fish.

She wound up discovering a number of things, but I had to justify them to the tribe admin every step of the way. I don't think she ever really let go of the idea that rocks could melt- she once encountered an elf who'd been so far underground that he saw a magma flow, and the thought of MELTING ROCK left her wanting to create a supremely hot fire and throw things into it to see what she could get. Alas, she never did get to pursue that very far.

[mattador.livejournal.com]

I refuse to think about Ghostbuster tie-ins on general principle.
...yeah, a lot more scary.
I just feel kind of sorry for the Bruce Lee pirates...

[kali921.livejournal.com]

Now I feel guilty for giving you Snowcrash.....

But I'll have to agree with some of the below. I think Raven would be somewhat of a Heavy regardless of weapons - he's Mission Focused™.

I love YT.

[firestrike.livejournal.com]

Raven is a poster-child for the expression that 'there are no dangerous weapons, there are only dangerous people". Hiro did not start off as a particularly dangerous person, in spite of his gear and abilities. He is becoming one by the end of the book because he feels that he has to. Raven? From what the reader can determine, he's always been like that. On the other hand, anyone can be assassinated, which makes the sidecar a handy little deterrence device.

-M

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Well, Hiro is a trickster, and one of the core ideals of the trickster, however he's framed, is that of shapeshifting.

One of the weaknesses, of course, is an inability to deal with stasis -- so he could be a programmer for awhile, but couldn't stick with it, and so on.

-- Lorrie

[camwyn]

MMmmmm. Shapeshifting. The one thing I always desperately wanted but never could manage to pull off in a dream. Fly, yeah, run on all fours, yeah, run from the Thing That Pursues and successfully elude it through wits alone, yeah; shapeshift, no...

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Obsidian. Better than regular glass for blademaking because of the high carbon content. Knaps exactly like flint, too, or so I'm told.

They make eye scalpels out of obsidian.

And besides, a dude named Raven knocking around with pure black glass? Just kicks even more ass.

The Diamond Age is an arguable sequel to Snow Crash, with one potential continuous character (a middle-aged adult has one blink-and-you-miss-it throwaway line). It studies nanotech, fairy tales, Confucianism, and synthetic tribal formation and maintenance in the same way that Snow Crash studies the Internet, the Descent of Inanna, low-level mental programming, and corporatism taken to a logical extreme.

's in China. And has postmodern Victorians. You need to read this.

However, in both cases, I must admit that Neal Stephenson can't write an ending to save his ass.

-- Lorrie