(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

[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.....