(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

[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...