The value of fiat currency Sunday, Mar 30 2008

So as promised I finished reading Making Money by Terry Pratchett which was yet another Discworld book and the second Moist von Lipwig story after Going Postal. As you might imagine from the title the premise is that Moist is now taking over the bank and mint and he decides to eliminate the gold standard and introduce paper currency. Chaos ensues.

I didn’t find this book as amusing as Going Postal and I think this is because the bank characters were not as interesting as the post office characters. Or perhaps it’s because “Adorable Dearheart” was not as prominent in this book? There was a large subplot having to do with golems and I thought that got botched. I think that this book had a lot to say about society and indeed the matter of fiat currency was something that was on my mind since I had recently, well, found out how it works. Sort of. Basically the thing is that money has value just because it’s valued. The value isn’t necessarily tied down to something. In theory it’s tied down to something, but in reality it’s never tied down to anything but the institution. In other words money doesn’t really exist.

That’s crazy right? Yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. I think that materialism is a problem, I wouldn’t say a sin but at least a demerit, but having some sort of standard just helps things to run. Especially in what has turned into a non-production based and wealthless unskilled labor society. By that I mean for instance a clerk (store or office) who can do their job but isn’t necessarily able to create anything or do anything and doesn’t have anything of tangible value like a cow or transient value like gems and metals. So how would a person like that get a house without money? Yes in truth money is what has let society get to this point. Actually it’s more like the world revolves around credit and money was originally a part of that but one thing at a time. Anyway what I’m trying to say is that money just is so use it, don’t worry about it not having value, or in some cases having too much value, as long your country exists (which is something you might worry about) your money will work. And unless you’re in some kind of questionable business you only need the money that works in your own country.

So saying I somewhat wonder whether or not there will be a discworld novel about something directly comparable to oil etc. but I suppose that was touched on somewhat in The Fifth Elephant with… fat….. hmm… Anyway the book (making money that is) was fine, I enjoyed it moderately. I wouldn’t recommend reading it before going postal though. And apparently the next “main-line” discworld novel will also feature Moist and be about taxes. This was hinted at in the end just as the banking angle was hinted at in going postal but then it was stated otherwise anyway. I suppose this is somewhat of a spoiler but you know… it’s Discworld. That’s all I can say. By the way this is apparently the 22nd book I’ve read this year (I don’t mention them all here). I wonder if I could make it to 100 after hitting 50 last year. There are probably other things I should be doing though.

{ 7/14/2008 Just a small update, the end of this entry ended out being somewhat prophetic as I have only read a handful more books by this point but I did indeed do something better by starting in with math lessons. What the goal of this is at this point in my life I don’t know, it just seemed to me like it was a great deficiency of mine and I didn’t have anything better that I was likely to do or be able to achieve than learn math. By the way this was a pretty shitty review after all that rambling about fiat currency. But there really isn’t a lot to say about Discworld that it doesn’t say itself, I find the books amusing and sometimes possessing remarkably insightful social commentary}

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Hot rainbows Saturday, Mar 29 2008

Q: “What did you think about the soviet union” A: I never thought it was going to fall the way it did and I assumed it would remain a power as long as any other place unless it came to WW3 or something. Which of course always seemed to be a strong possibility. Failing that I thought that they’d take the rest of the world down with them. In a certain sense, they might have actually done that by “waking up” the middle east and having remnant detractors sell off all kinds of munitions. You still hear stories about old soviet warheads, especially nuclear ones, although a lot of them probably are stories. The AK-47 being the most popular assault rifle to be used by terrorists isn’t a coincidence though. Also, the consecutive weakening of Russia after the dissolution created a vacuum of US attention which allowed them to get up to the sort of mischief which apparently pissed off almost every country in the middle east. Now that Russia has been fairly firm (I’m pretty sure that the population is still shrinking with a higher death to birth ratio) it has been reasserting itself as a pissing contest opponent for anyone, particularly the united states which hasn’t been good for the stability of the world. It is true that being essentially on opposite sides of the northern hemisphere the needs and wants of Russia and the US are also opposite in many ways but frankly I feel like there’s mostly just a lot of resentment from the cold war fueling things. eh hem well anyway, I’m not a socialist myself so while on the whole it’s not like I was sad to see the dissolution it’s possible that conventional warfare died with the USSR and while that SHOULD have been a good thing, the reality is that it ended out meaning the proliferation of unconventional warfare.

Well that was a bit more than I’d intended. Yesterday I finished reading Going Postal, another Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett. I found this to be one of the most amusing novels in the series so far and its tone was appreciably lighter than that of Monstrous Regiment. It was also the start of what has turned out to be a new sub-series for the franchise as the protagonist Moist von Lipvig has now been featured again in the most recent discworld book “making money”, which I’m in the middle of now. I would say that the Moist stories are structurally a bit similar to the Sam Vimes/city watch stories in that you have one man placed in a position of power by Vetinari and neither necessarily wants to be there but ends out rising to the occasion anyway. The difference is that Vimes is a cop and Moist is a criminal, their modes of operation are remarkably similar though. I do have one major qualm with the book though, it managed to conveniently rid itself of its initial premise and major difficulty through a pretty big plot twist. Only, I’d call it more of a copout. This point is easily identifiable in the book. Also, everything went just a little bit too smoothly after that. This is not uncommon in the discworld books but sometimes it’s better and sometimes it’s worse. This however is not the worst of such offenses it just happens to have been the one I just read.

In the end I would recommend Going Postal and I’ll probably recommend Making Money unless it really spirals past the halfway point. Always a possibility. As a side note, I don’t think that Going Postal is a bad place to start yourself on the series since it’s a pretty good indicator of most of the rest of the series. In fact the archetype for most discworld books is “protagonist that’s more inclined to run than anything undertakes (typically is forced to undertake) to save some failing or otherwise doomed enterprise, hilarity ensues”. As it turns out you can turn that into almost anything since all stories are about the same anyway (they begin and they end and they never cover everything).

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That part can remain at ease Thursday, Mar 27 2008

Q:”Did Margery Daw die in episode 23 of Shakugan no Shana II (second)?” A: No she was just unconscious, look for her to possibly make a final desperate contribution in the finale. But seriously they don’t even have the guts to kill of enemies in this series, there is very little chance of them killing off a major, and I think popular (well I certainly like her), character. There is one character who might die, but it seems to me like they left the way wide open for that to not happen either. hmph… series these days have no guts.

That aside I finished reading Monstrous Regiment, another discworld book by Terry Pratchett at some point. In case you can’t tell, yes I do indeed spend the majority of my time on fiction but I think that my reading speed (in english that is) isn’t that bad. Anyway this was a book that in spite of a lot of humor was frankly downright depressing. The premise is that a girl from a before unnamed country (I think)  on the Disc disguises herself as a boy to join the army in order to bring back her older brother from the war that’s ravaging her nation so that he can inherit the family inn. The cast is fairly colorful and of course they have even more colorful reasons for being that way. Similar to “small gods” there’s a heavy dose of religious skepticism thrown into the work but while the focus of that book was religion the focus of this one was on war. Something that’s easy to forget at times is that satire doesn’t always have to be comedic, it just has to be mocking, and so quite serious stories with quite a lot to say can still be satires. Unfortunately I think the book got carried away with plot twists and hurt itself a bit. It also seems to have set itself up either for a direct sequel or to be tied in with other works. Having not read all of the discworld books I suppose that perhaps it has already been tied in with some others while I was not aware of it or have already forgotten. Anyway this is one of the darker and heavier discworld books and as such was not the most enjoyable but if you only get your serious thinking done thanks to fantasy novels then you might check it out. Or if you’re just reading all the discworld books in the order that you get hold of them like I am then you might also consider it, the book has fewer ties to past works although Samuel Vimes from the Ankh-Morpork City Watch themed books factors into the story in an unconvincing manner.

On that last note, something that I may or may not bother to find out about is why, though only Terry’s name appears on the cover and the flap of the books his wife is still also credited with writing. Which makes me wonder whether this is cursory acknowledgement of inspiration or whether as has been the case in other long running series whether he isn’t actually running the show. I have remarked recently that there tend to be two distinct styles of Disworld novels with ones like Monstrous Regiment, Night Watch, and Small Gods, being a lot darker and ones like The Last Continent being somewhat lighter. Now to be fair I haven’t read as many of the recent novels as the older ones (maybe) and it’s not as though a person can’t write different stories different ways. But it just seems pretty dramatic. Not that I care that much, I’m reading them anyway.

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the sounds we made Tuesday, Mar 25 2008

Indeed it is so that as the days go past the only things that seem to increase are my age and trepidation. If anything I find that the older I get the more hesitant I’ve become, as though I need to walk as carefully as possible lest my next step be the one that shatters the glass staircase that is my life.

I would not say that I long for my childhood, but I would say that knowledge has only made me worse off over the years.  I finished reading “the last continent” by terry practhett earlier, another discworld book, and I found myself relating to Rincewind. I found myself relating to Rincewind. Let me try that out one more time. I FOUND MYSELF RELATING TO RINCEWIND. It’s not a great thing.

There’s not a lot of point in thinking about it though, I’ve always been the type to know just what the right thing is, or at least to realize when I shouldn’t be doing something, and to go on anyway.

The Last Continent was pretty amusing by the way. I’m always up for ripping on australians and I think that I caught most of the references but quite possibly not all. I knew somebody who lived there for a long time but wasn’t born there. Maybe I technically still know that person, I’ve never been sure when, after being out of contact for years, you’re supposed to switch from “know” to “knew”. And does it change if you could still get in touch with that person if you had any desire to? I don’t know.

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further days further questions Sunday, Mar 23 2008

While drinking alcohol recently, which is an activity that I of course discourage heartily, I found myself in an exceptionally philosophical mood. And a question popped to mind not unlike that of “which came first? the chicken or the egg” in the form of “does drinking make me philosophical or does being philosophical make me drink?”. Of course the answer to the chicken thing is that some other creature lay an egg or three and it’s been all chickens ever since. Probably. Well I suppose that selective breeding came in along the line somewhere. hmm… well never mind.

I’m not drinking now, just to throw that out there. But while looking at an ubiquitous list that certainly did not contain every anime title I’ve ever watched I was forced to ask myself just how much anime one person should watch in their lifetime. So I’m thinking of making a bit of a go at it and then hanging up my hat. But without my hat the sun will just get in my eyes so bugger it.

In news of no consequence I happen to have read some more Discworld books since the last time I said anything about the series. These were Soul Music and Small Gods, in that order, which is not the order they were released in I don’t think. Soul Music was pretty amusing, mostly being a rock music parody while focusing on the exploits of Death’s granddaughter trying to fill in his role for a while, however Small Gods, which is about religion, was entirely too serious. Pretty morbid in fact. Some of Pratchett’s books get that way, Night Watch also comes to mind as a pretty miserable story. Now that I think of it both might have had the minimal character Lao-Tze or whatever his name is in them. Well, for a fantasy author I think that Pratchett is writing to a more mature audience for the most part, keeping with his age and whatnot. Which includes some good old fashioned sexual innuendo of course, very british humor that, staffs and knobs and what have you. But of course in the end like all others he is writing for himself and that seems to include some particularly manic bends here and there. The highs are highe and the lows are lowe as it were. Indeed.

So that was Soul Music: thumbs up and Small Gods: thumbs down.

You want to know something a bit queer? It rather seems that the cheaper the alcohol you’re drinking the more philosophical it makes you. This also holds true of weaker alcohol and worse tasting alcohol. Which means that the most philosophical alcohol you can get is probably canned beer.

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What would you propose to do if the world was flat? Saturday, Mar 15 2008

I’ve been reading some of the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett again recently. It had been close to 3 years since I’d read one, Night Watch I think it was. Although I did read the first book The Colour of Magic first, I’ve pretty much read them here and there since. Being a fan of police procedurals of apparently any sort I had ended out reading the “city watch” sub-series of books more or less in order somehow but it’s gone every which way otherwise. Like reading Eric before Sourcery and Thud! before about 1/4 of any of the others etc.

The thing I have to say about that is that Terry Pratchett is a lot better now than about 30 years ago (which is how it should be, unlike Ursula K. Le Guin who just gets worse and worse) so it’s hard to get enthused about reading his older books compared to the newer ones. There is a certain merit to all of the books, and recaps and explanations are blessedly sparse (otherwise almost all the books would be 50-100 pages longer just repeating the same things) so it helps to know what’s going on if you start with the first book, but do as you like.

Just as a matter of personal interest I was introduced to the series by an asexual physicist of all people who I was casually acquainted with. It seems to be not terribly uncommon that the types you’d least expect would be into fantasy as a genre enjoy things like Cthulu and Discworld. In fact someone into both in the first place seems strange enough.

If you want to get information on the Discworld books you can go almost anywhere else, I think all you need to know is that they’re satirical high fantasy and there’s no limit to what they parody while not neglecting to visit a subversive moral lesson like “be careful what you wish for” (Eric). Some of the books are also more socially relevant than others, perhaps in unexpected ways. I personally would say that Discworld is the right type of fantasy in that, metaphors aside, it’s totally separate from our world.

The writing in the Discworld, or should I say Pratchett’s writing, might in fact be genius. Some bits are questionable, and if these stories were anything else but satirical fantasy they would not work and I’d have to pick apart every inch of the way, but for what they are the writing works very well. Which is probably part of the reason that the books have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide.  There is usually a reason for high sales, I’m just glad that for once that reason is clever writing. As opposed to say, whatever the hell the reason is (religious pandering, touchy feely crap) that Paulo Coelho has allegedly sold over 100 million books (hearing that makes me sick, every time I hear how many books of his have sold the number is exponentially higher, and they’re all terribly written).

So in the end I’d say to check out the Discworld books if you’re looking for something amusing, are a general fantasy novel fan, and maybe are tired of overly pompous and pretentious works like A Song of Ice and Fire and could use a break. I’d say the books make for some pretty light reading over all as well, especially the earlier ones (I think I read Eric in little more than 2 hours today) if that’s something you’re looking for. Say if you’re attempting the 50 or 100 or whatever book challenge (that is, you try and read a certain number of books, I suppose for some people reading 10 books in a year would be a big thing although I personally read more than that the first month of the year). I might be on track for 100 books this year. Then again that’s what I thought last year before I barely made 50 on the last day of the year so whatever. Well giving the matter some thought, my conclusion was that I probably would not be able to read more books in a year than there are days and have them be of any respectable average length. This is mostly because after a certain amount of anything, no matter what it is, I grow weary of it. My tolerance is apparently much greater than other people, such as reading two books in a day and not doing much else, or watching an entire anime series subsequently, but even I have my limits. And your limits are good to know. Oh yeah

• Wyrd Sisters: OK, I had a few moments of prolonged laughter but some parts were confused and questionable which I’d say is almost a hallmark of the early 80s Pratchett novels.
•  Eric: pretty amusing, although I read the version sans illustrations which was below ideal.
• Thud!: Deeper than I might have expected and appreciably more interesting and less amusing than a lot of the earlier Discworld novels (this one is from just a few years ago).

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