In case anyone missed it, I’ve named the AI coach that lives in my Garmin Forerunner Lola.
Since my first full day with Lola at my side, March 19, I’ve averaged 19,679 steps a day, which I think is excellent. But she’s gone from asking me to do 10,000 per day to 20,390. At this rate, I’m going to be expected to walk forever by the end of the year.
Besides, once this shitty Smarch weather dies (there was frost this morning… FROST), I’ll switch to cycling as my primary activity. Or golf? Apparently, Lola knows a thing or two about golf.
On the sedentary side of my life, while Kristen continues lapping me on StoryGraph, I’ve finished my second science fiction novel of the year: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
I rated it a 2.75 on StoryGraph. I felt bogged down by the writer’s aggressive use of grandiloquent words. (I actually got the word “grandiloquent” by Googling “word for big words” like a dum dum. Maybe that’s what Tchaikovsky also does? “Word for air” Google: “ether” “Ah, yes, I like that…”)
The sole sex scene was stripped (hoho) of any details. It served more as a transitional scene, allowing my imagination to fade to black before the next chapter began. After fighting through thickets of pubes in Murakami’s 1Q84, I have lost all desire to read sex scenes written by men.
The story is about a spaceship carrying human cargo looking for a new planet to settle on after fucking up Earth. When they finally zero in on a planet with a habitable environment, they discover it is inhabited by sentient giant spiders that are protected by their creator, Dr. Kern. She is a human drifting in orbit, trapped in a half-conscious state within a suspension chamber.
Unbeknownst to Dr. Kern, her “children” have evolved into arachnids rather than the primates she had intended. Her mind, which has been uploaded into a computer system, begins to defend the planet aggressively, attacking the ark ship whenever it ventures too close.
As the protagonist tries to find a way to bypass Dr. Kern’s defence system in order to land on the new planet, he must also navigate drama aboard the ship, including a cult that has formed during his time in the suspension chamber. The whole ordeal spans a few generations, and the key characters survive by going in and out of cryosleep, but because they take so long to solve the problem, the ship starts deteriorating beyond repair.
I found myself rooting for the semicomatose doctor: come on, humans, you already fucked up an entire planet. After that, how can anyone delude themselves into believing the human race is worth preserving? Frankly, given the current state of the world, I am already dubious.
Children of Time has a strong premise, but its convoluted vocabulary weakens it.
I’ve switched to the Fantasy genre with The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman. It was one of the books Daniel recommended, and as luck would have it, I scored a copy in one of those little free libraries in the neighbourhood. Just a week earlier, I snapped up another book from my To-Read list in one of those mini libraries: RF Kuang’s Yellowface.
Being forced to read books the old-fashioned way has robbed me of the convenience of bringing forth a word’s definition merely by placing my finger over it. The first night I climbed into bed to cozy up with my large paperback, I realized the 5 metres of fairy lights I had pinned along where the wall meets the ceiling weren’t bright enough for me to get past even the first page. I’d never gotten past the first chapter of Children of Time if it weren’t in the digital format. At least Buehlman doesn’t force me to fumble through poorly illuminated pages to look up the meaning of a word. (In the early 2010s, before everything went digitized, I kept a hardcover thesaurus on my bedside table. Truly.)
Lola doesn’t count the workout my thumb flexors have been getting from holding a book open towards my daily intensity minutes. Nor did she catch the spike in my heart rate when a tubeless setup blew up in my face this afternoon, spraying sealant everywhere except for a clean outline around my eyes where my safety glasses sat. A mist of liquid latex landed on everything within a 2m radius of where I stood.
The sight of my workspace would have appeared comical to anyone not a bike mechanic, but the looks on my colleagues’ faces when they checked out the aftermath were nothing short of pity. They all understood how much it sucks having a mess like that to clean up; how much it sucks to wash sealant off your skin, as it just balls up and grabs onto your hair. I’ve since showered, and I’m still pulling globs of latex out of my hair.
I googled, “How to get latex out of hair.”
Google: “WD-40.”
Have we lost the ability to make sound, independent decisions and assess situations accurately? Are we now deferring to AI, unaware of the sinister intentions laid out by real-life Dr. Kerns? Are the 15,000 satellites that are in orbit right now zapping our brain cells to make way for our arachnid overlords?
Relevant Simpsons reference:
On that note, fellow raging Simpsons nerd, Daniel, celebrated his birthday last Saturday. The reason I was running around last week trying to find someone as antiquated as Mr. Burns to sell me a cel was so that I could make this for Daniel:
It took about 15 minutes of me explaining what I was looking for to various staff at Staples before a lady in the copy centre figured out what I needed and sold me a single sheet from their stock.
It was all worth the trouble just to enchant Daniel’s birthday with what was probably the silliest gift he’s ever received.
squaremeat.com 