More images here, at the flickr set.

Some stories are great because of the tremendous imagination of the author. Some are great because of the engaging tone and style in which they are written. This book is great because every word intensifies a single emotion: despair. Not one is wasted or counterproductive.

I like to think of myself, in general, as a happy nihlist. There’s no inherent meaning or purpose in life, but that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying myself in the meantime. This book is the story of a nation forced to the same outlook.

I loved it. You may not have the same reaction, but you will absolutely react to it in some way. It is worth reading for that alone.

Nevil Shute, On the Beach (Amazon)

Who wants Bioshock?

I will not succumb to an atmosphere of paranoia in which I am required to keep my hands visible, my lap clear, and in which I am prohibited from movement during any portion of a flight. Instead, I boycott the industry until it stops mistaking liberty for threat. I encourage you to do the same. There exist other options than commercial air: general aviation is a lot of fun, but there also exist long-haul bus and train lines even in the US.

At some point, commercial air travel stops being worth the hassle. For me, that point has just been reached.

It was good! I gave gifts, got gifts, played with tiny cousins, decorated a tree, and feasted. Nothing radical happened, but it was a happy day.

What’s a little less obvious until you’ve actually seen for yourself is that whoever’s in charge is clearly a huge fan of SimCity. It’s a big, successful city, so there’s no question that they’re good at it. Still, it also shows some of the limitations of the engine: vast stretches of perfectly identical apartment buildings, with perfectly identical parking lots, tiled out for miles. There are stoplights at every intersection, regardless of their utility in helping traffic flow effectively. Even the terrain seems pulled straight from the game: vast swaths of perfectly flat ground interrupted by hills too steep for anything except trees and the occasional monument at the crest.

Will Wright’s games are notable, among other things, for including very user-friendly tools which can be used to rough out basic ideas for complex things like architecture, ecosystems, creatures, and urban planning. Until now, however, I’d never expected to see anything pulled directly from the game and implemented in reality exactly as it appeared in the simulation.

Now that I’ve seen it, it’s still hard to believe, but the evidence is hard to dispute.

A human-faced “goldfish” seems to be the natural form of the mermaid. One of these creatures is accidentally captured by a human boy, who in the course of releasing it from a glass bottle cuts his thumb. The mermaid licks the blood from the guy’s thumb, with two consequences: the wound is magically healed, and the mermaid gains the ability to extrude creepy chicken limbs with which to walk, like a hovercraft, on any surface which seems convenient.

Mermaids on land are a violation of the natural order of things, so a tsunami submerges all but the highest mountain peaks of the island where the boy lives. Luckily for him, he lives on one of the island’s peaks. Nobody dies in the deluge; the inhabitants of the island instead form a boat parade complete with brass band and flag section to move in orderly fashion to the hotel on the other peak.

The mermaid and the boy set out in the boy’s magically enlarged toy boat to find the boy’s mother. It turns out she’s been hanging out inside an enormous jellyfish bathyscaphe with the goddess of the ocean, who is the mermaid’s mother. Together, they work out an arrangement in which the mermaid loses her magic and turns human for the rest of her life, which will be short given that she will turn to bubbles as soon as the boy stops loving her. The boy is five.

For a very small child, this could be a very fun movie. For anyone much older than the main characters, though, it’s best avoided; there is simply no attempt made to induce anyone to suspend their disbelief at any point.

It’s better than Porco Rosso, at least.