I went to Borders, looking for two excellent books on CSS to learn my next project. Fortunately, I found them.

CSS, if you’re not a webhead, is the technology that allows you to change the way the elements on your page look. Do you want to have all of your links styled with a little globe to their right and made bold so that people will know they lead off-site? You can do that. Want to make a list of items into a navigation bar? You can do that, too.

Basically, the next wave of web pages is going to be a separation of style and content. Currently, if you want to draw attention to a link containing a musical artist’s name, you need to use HTML to make it bold and red…. Which is troublesome if some day you decide you want to emphasize the artist’s names in some different manner. In the next wave of the web, you’ll simply mark that link as “Artist” in the HTML, then use CSS to style it however you want.

(For an awe-inspiring usage of CSS, check the CSS Zen Garden - they may all look like different web pages, but they all have the exact same HTML. They just use CSS to style the page in crazy ways.)

These two books are a good introduction to the concepts.

Book Review #68: Head First HTML With CSS and XHTML, by Eric and Elizabeth Freeman
I used to buy computer books for a living, and then I reviewed them professionally for Amazon.com. So it means no small thing when I tell you that the “Head First” series are, hands-down, the best introductory computer books available. If you’re looking to get started with just about any technology, see if there’s a Head First book on it first.

The Head First books are very light and breezy – they’re designed to be fun. There are crosswords, and silly puzzles, and a lot of 1950s clip art. It’s like a kids’ workbook. Each chapter involves a friendly, supportive boss coming up to you and saying, “Say, we have this project! We need to do this! Can you make it happen?” Then the Head First books show you how.

But more importantly, the Head First books are exceptional at paring away the extraneous detail and showing you the core of what’s important about a technology. You won’t get a full walkthrough of every feature in a Head First book, but you will understand the basic concepts of how this all works so thoroughly that it’ll be a snap to learn more about it. Each page throws just enough at you that it’s never particularly hard to keep up.

In particular, I was weak on CSS layout. I knew some of the ideas of how CSS renders a page, but it wasn’t gelling together in my head into a whole. The Head First series walked me through it very slowly, but thoroughly, and by the time it was done the light had gone on in my head. I might not understand the advanced details, but I finally got the essentials of floats and DIVs.

I was tempted to skip ahead to the CSS part and ignore the HTML, which I knew, but I’m glad I didn’t. This book is very strong on standards, talking about valid markup with enthusiasm, and it taught me some important fine distinctions and best practices for XHTML 1.0 (the next theoretical wave of the Web). If you’re a standards zealot, this book should make you grin from ear to ear.

It gets my highest praises. Better than any Dummies book out there. Really.

Book Review #69: CSS: The Missing Manual, by David McFarland
If the Head First series was the introduction to CSS theory, this was the introduction to CSS reality. This book is honestly fairly weak on introducing CSS concepts – but if you have the basics down, this book is a treasure trove of tried-and-true CSS techniques and tips that are used in the real world.

Oh, I can find some of the CSS techniques on the web. But the Missing Manual gathers them all together into one place and explains them. He dissects some commonly-used techniques (like, say, turning an unordered list into a navigation bar or using the “sliding window” trick to create flexible navigation tabs) and breaks them down so you get why they work.

He also utilizes a fair amount of CSS hacks – techniques used to get around the awfulness of Internet Explorer 6, which is outrageously popular but filled with strange behaviors that break valid web pages in half. He is, perhaps, a little too reliant on CSS hacks – which can break in other browsers – but it’s nice to see someone discussing them. (Other issues involve a distinct lack of screen captures in the tutorials - if he's going to tell you that this looks weird in Internet Explorer 6, it'd be nice to see how - and a lot of text devoted to "press Enter twice, delete this line, type this new line in.")

The writing is not particularly clear when he’s starting to discuss how CSS works, but if you have a medium-sized level of CSS then his tutorials are clear. An excellent, real-world application of CSS.

I also feel like I have somewhat of a trifecta. If I have the introduction in Head First and the application in The Missing Manual, now I can look through Eric Meyer’s CSS: The Definitive Guide and use it as a reference going forward. Good stuff, all.

Tags: book review, somebody else needs to do tags

(36 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

You actually need to read most comics before you can decide whether you’ll like them. After all, the descriptions don’t tell you much about the execution; “Whacky hijinks at a gaming magazine” could be good, could be terrible. “Funny D&D characters try to kill a lich” might be Order of the Stick or it could be some talentless heap. And “two guys bitch about videogames” could be almost any webcomic pulled at random from the gaming heap.

But there are comics where, by nature of the very pitch, you know whether you’re going to enjoy it or not before you rest one gaze upon it. Last Blood (“Vampires must protect the last humans on earth from zombies”) is one of them.

Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life is another.

Long after humanity has died off, two bohemian robots wander about the solar system to discuss philosophy and drink a lot.

Okay, I lied a little. Some folks will no doubt have issues with the ideas that robots would drink. Or be, as they are, unemployed. Or in fact have a need to discuss philosophy. So let me assure you that all of these strange aspects of robot life are explained, quite rationally, in the comic.

But let us talk about the robots.

Chris and Ben are robot assemblers – they make new robots at the factory. One day, they note that they’re making Robot Assembler 4000s – and they’re the 3000 model. They have succeeded in making themselves obsolete. Now without a purpose for existence, they go on a road trip to explore the nine planets.

And drink a lot. At bars. And experience a lot of squalid life.

Technically speaking, robots don’t need to drink to survive – they’re immortal. But the humans who created their AI discovered that without strong motivations, there was no coherent intelligence. So they gifted them with an urge to taste things, and a need to interact with each other. In fact, except for the fact that they’re immortal and really don’t need anything to survive, they’re a lot like us… If we had everything we ever needed.

(Humanity died out quite peacefully, as it turns out. It turns out they simply preferred to procreate with robots engineered to provide frightfully sinful pleasures; the last human went with a smile on his face.)

Chris is the would-be writer of the robots – he wants to say something, but doesn’t know what. He’s on the road trip to try to find a reason to exist, but in a world where everything is free, there doesn’t seem to be a place for him. That bothers him. It also bothers him that really, he may not have anything at all to say.

Ben, on the other hand, likes to have fun. He knows how to party, loves chatting people up, and he drinks a lot. An awful lot. In fact, he has a drinking problem. He knows this. He’s off the sauce as of tonight. Right after this last drink.

The two of them wander through the planets, starting with Mercury and working their way outwards. They hook up with some women on Venus, explore the remnants of humanity in a museum on a thriving Earth, get trapped briefly on war-torn Mars, spend some time in the emptiness of the Asteroid belt, and so forth.

All the while, though, there’s an underlying tone of bleakness. Not hopelessness, since this is a wry strip with an understanding of how absurd life is, but… Even the rare action sequences are strangely distant. Without us, the robots have created a place where they can have everything they need except for meaning. It is implied that the meaning for most robots comes from their work.

Without work, what do these robot assemblers have? They talk a lot about nothing. It’s an existential crisis; they want a reason to live, but the universe is complex and doesn’t seem to give them much. Ben drinks to mute this strange pain, even as he enjoys life a hell of a lot more than Chris does.

Which is not to say that it’s not entertaining. The robot world is fleshed out well, and one of the joys of the strip is seeing each segment of it revealed to you as these two tourists drink it all in. And Chris and Ben are solidly defined; you know exactly who they are.

Plus, Nine Planets is drawn absolutely perfectly. It’s done in muted earth tones, mostly, and the robots are inked in a way that straddles the line between clunky and organic perfectly. Their faces are dummy faces, with buttons for eyes and a tiny hole for a mouth – but the body language of their stick-thin forms tells you everything you need to know.

The strange thing about it all is that you wouldn’t think this would work. They’re robots. You shouldn’t be able to sympathize with two clearly inhuman protagonists, particularly not on something as human-specific as a Road Trip To Find Oneself. They’re robots. They don’t think they’re special at all.

But that’s the amazing trick of Nine Planets; you recognize that the robots aren’t like you at all in many ways, but the intersection makes it more compelling, not less. By not being human yet having some human desires, they cast a light on what being human is and call that all into question. No matter what you are, life is going to be confusing and pointless sometimes… And this stark, strangely lifeless and endless rotating bar trip feels like an alcoholic’s fever-dream, boiled down to the essential elements of numbness, rage, and occasional desperate bursts of joy.

There’s intelligent life out there. Somewhere. There must be a reason to go on living, because in the world of Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life, you don’t have to stop until you find it.

It’s out there.

I just know it.

(As always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to the strip I co-created with Roni Pare, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

Tags: somebody else needs to do tags, webcomic review

(10 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

Book Review #58: Lost In A Good Book, by Jasper Fforde
Shameless sequel bait.

Book Review #59: The Well Of Lost Plots, by Jasper Fforde
The Jasper Fforde books irritate me as much as they delight me, though it took me a while to figure out why. Because let’s be honest here: while Jasper is a very, very clever writer with a knack for summing a character up in a paragraph, that’s all he does with them.

Plots? Not so much. The Well of Lost Plots ends on a complete deux ex machine, and Lost In A Good Book doesn’t end at all.

Characters? Thursday Next is pretty close to a Generic herself – she spouts witty lines at will, has enough gumption to keep going when others fail, and… That’s about it. She’s transparent, to the point where anyone can identify with her because there’s so little to her that you can project almost anything onto her. The other characters in the books are rough sketches, with barely any fleshing out beyond a notable, plot-worthy feature or two. They’re some of the shallowest characters that have ever inhabited a work of fiction that I’ve actually quite liked.

Concepts?

Ah, that’s it.

The world of Jasper Fforde is what carries these books, and his relentless imagination is the cornerstone of his success. He’s got great concepts by the dozen, and he pours them into his books with wit and style. It occurred to me that I loved the Jurisfiction department with all my heart, and I totally wanted to live in a roleplaying world, and…

…that was it. The Fforde books were glorified roleplaying supplements.

See, I know I’m kind of freakish in my love of reading roleplaying books, but I love the random ideas that people will throw at me. Sure, they don’t have a plot, but I don’t need a plot; it’s enough for me to see a world that someone’s thrown together and to delight in the cool things he has to show me.

Jasper Fforde’s books are essentially roleplaying supplements with enough plot to keep the punters going. Most of his books are spent with him bending lovingly over some new idea, going, “See this? Isn’t this awesome? And this is a fantastic concept, no?” And while he never does anything with about 90% of the stuff he throws at you, he’s at least shown it to you.

In the meanwhile, there’s some vague semblance of a narrative. But the plots don’t really end as much as land in a heap at the end, and there are a few mysteries but most of them don’t really get revealed. If you were to remove the ideas from this series and leave the scant skeleton of only plot and characterization to read, nobody would treasure them.

Which irks the nerd in me. There are other roleplaying books with ideas almost as good (Unknown Armies is packed with ‘em). But they don’t have the success of Jasper Fforde because they don’t have a plot to hang them on. And people find reading roleplaying books boring because, well, apparently you don’t have a paper-thin protagonist lurching her way through the series to give an excuse for people to see the next item in the exhibit.

I continue to like Jasper Fforde. It is good stuff. But it’s also a one-trick pony – a pony that has endless and delightful variations upon its trick, a pony that can double as a Playstation 3, but a pony nevertheless.

It’s a pony worth riding, mind you. But you know. Pony.

This has officially been the worst wrap-up to a book review ever. Thanks for attending!

Book Review #60: The Kinks’ The Village Green Preservation Society (Thirty Three And A Third Series), by Andy Miller
A lot of my friends have crazy attachments to musicians I don’t get at all. My pals will tell me how Warren Zevon reflects their life, or how Todd Rundgren totally is them, and I’ll listen to the albums and hear nothing of interest. It’s slightly quirky, sure, but it slides off of me effortlessly – the song goes in one ear and out the other, leaving no memory whatsoever.

I think they’re odd. I get nothing from this, but it speaks to them in thunder. I don’t see what’s there within the bland music churned out by these singer-songwriters.

But if you don’t get Ray Davies, lead singer and songwriter of the Kinks, you don’t get me. There’s no shame in that; my wife doesn’t feel Ray in the same way that I do.

To me, Ray Davies writes exactly what I feel – that strange melancholy, the realization that things are shit but there’s the potential to be better, that unfounded and indomitable hope that better things are on their way. His songs are dredged up from the bottom of my soul – I could have written them, but not nearly as well.

Above all, Ray’s a rebel. The Village Green Preservation Society album was a rock opera of purest rebellion – back when the Who were shouting how they hoped they’d die before they got old and the hippies were blathering on about not to trust anyone over thirty, Ray devised an album that shattered the status quo.

The Village Green is about the joys of old-time England.

It didn’t sell, natch. When youth was all the rage, it was truly daring to stand up in the middle of the psychedelia and say, “You know what? I really like drinking a beer in a pub with my mates! I like Disney, and photographs of family trips, and weddings!”

The album never sold. It’s been viewed as a minor pop masterpiece since then, with songs like “Big Sky” and “Picture Book” rocking the house, but Ray nailed the antithesis of the sixties’ counterculture: he was noting, quietly, the things we were losing. And he was correct.

The book is about what you’d expect; it’s short, and made for die-hards who know the songs already, and discusses both the troubles in making the album and dissecting the tracks with an eye for detail that only Kinks fans can love. (“At 1:33, note the slight change in tempo….”)

Really, this book isn’t about the Village Green. It’s about remembering how good it is. And it is.

Book Review #61: The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest To Become The Smartest Person In The World, by A.J. Jacobs
This is the story of a man who sets out to read all 44,000 pages of the Encyclopedia to become a smarter person. It could be boring, but A.J. – an editor at Esquire – has a good understanding of what sort of pop facts people find fascinating, and he is a very funny writer. As such, it’s like a condensed encyclopedia, with all the most interesting bits of science and history brought out and mocked before your eyes.

Plus, the narrative is a true narrative, because reading the encyclopedia changes him. As a boy, A.J. used to think secretly that he was the smartest kid in the whole world – something he was disabused of rapidly when he became a teenager. Now, he’s reading the encyclopedia as kind of a ha-ha way of improving his mentality… And the dry entries of the Brittanica alter the way he begins to think about the world, as his wife and friends look on in disbelief.

I can say no more than that without giving too much away. But it’s an oddly sweet book, filled with gentle self-deprecation and actual reverence for learning. The review is short, but this is one of the better books I’ve read this year.

Book Review #62: The League Of Gentlemen: A Local Book For Local People, by Mark Gatiss
A birthday gift from my friend Josh, this is a scrapbook of various bits from the Cthulhu-meets-Monty-Python-meets-Days-Of-Our-Lives League of Gentlemen. It is filled with awful things, but I don’t know if I’d appreciate it at all without knowing the series as intimately as I do. That said, if you do love League of Gentlemen – and dammit, you should – then this is a worthwhile read.

Note that many members of the League of Gentlemen now write and act in the new Doctor Who. If that’s not enough for you to go seek it out, I don’t know what is.

Tags: book review, somebody else needs to do tags

(28 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

True story. When I was young and teenaged and callous, my punk friends and I were driving past a frightful wreck on the freeway. Being dedicated subscribers to Fangoria, we geeked when we realized this was a font of actual gore in front of us.

“Aw, man!” one of my friends shouted. “There’s a body on the road!”

“Cool!”

“There’s a body through the windshield!” another shouted. “Someone’s actually hanging out the windshield!”

“Holy shit!”

“And a dog got thrown out of the car, too!”

We all suddenly got very depressed. “The dog, man,” we said. The wreck was all just fun and games ‘til a dog died.

This doesn’t say much about me as a teenager except that I was pretty goddamned insensitive, but the comic I am about to mention today would be a lot less without the dog factor. For that comic is Post-Nuke Comic, the story of a man struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

…with his dog.

Let’s start off by talking about the bad points of Post-Nuke, since it’s interesting how these points would normally be show-stoppers for me in other comics. It takes some looking at where Post-Nuke (and other less-successful humorless comics) fail in order to see why it succeeds so roundly.

See, Post-Nuke is a pretty straight dramatic strip. It’s the story of a guy, wrapped in bandages and wrappings and a gasmask to keep him warm, as he struggles through a landscape choked with radioactive snow (since the blanket of dust has cooled the planet to sub-Alaskan levels). He fights radioactive mutants, goes crazy with loneliness, stumbles over survivors and deals with their betrayal.

Because it’s largely a one-man show, it consists of a guy narrating everything he does. The trope is that he’s talking to his dog Aries, of course, but the end result is that there are a lot of panels where he’s actually telling you what’s happening on-screen. “I can’t believe it! We’re stuck!” he says, or “Is that a grenade in his hand?” And it’s not like the art isn’t strong enough that you can’t see what’s going on.

(That said, the “talking everything out” does add some personal reaction to what could otherwise be a silent and all-too-short action sequence. It may well be that it’s an awesome technique to use for people writing webcomic action sequences, albeit slightly more sparingly.)

Later on, when he encounters other characters, the dialogue is stilted – characters don’t actually interact with each other so much as they do exchange information in word balloons that swell to fill the panel so tightly that the characters look like they’re getting pressed out to the side by an exploding airbag.* And they’re not really talking so much as they are blatant vehicles for the author to provide exposition; there is a lot of discussion of What Happened Before The War, all told in the same essential voice.

(And to be fair, the author admits this as a failing that he’s trying to work on.)

Plus, there are a lot of spelling and grammatical errors. Enough so that it’s going to grate if you were an English major.

The story is also butt-simple. There’s nothing new here; it’s essentially the same “The nuclear apocalypse arrived, one man survives among the mutants.” It’s a bare plot and sparse characterization.

All right. Criticism time over. Now’s the big question:

If there’s all of that to weigh it down, then why does Post-Nuke Comic succeed so roundly?

The answer is because Andreas Duller, the creator, knows how to write action comics for the web. For all of that, there’s one thing the man knows how to do better than just about anyone else on the web, and that’s to keep you hanging consistently. The man is awesome at providing a little hook in almost every final panel that keeps you turning that page.

The problem with writing action webcomics is that it’s very difficult to create action setpieces that work on the web. In a normal comic, if Batman gets into a fight with some generic mooks, that’s five pages’ worth of quiet mook-thrashing, surrounded by a happy layer of plot, dialogue, and character development. You read the set up, watch the thrashing, move on to other things in the book, because it’s all presented in one lump sum.

That whole rhythm changes if the pages are presented one day at a time.

When the comic is revealed so slowly, five pages of nothing but Batman head-beating can take forever – in this case, since Post-Nuke’s a weekly comic, that’s over a month of just watching Bats thrash some thugs. You will get bored if you don’t structure it just so.

But Andreas has a positive knack for knowing how to end a strip, even a short four-panel one, the precise moment where you need to know what happens next. It’s a simple plot, but simple plots can be compelling… Particularly when it’s the struggle for a man’s survival. And even though Post-Nuke is told at a glacial pace when viewed in real-time, reading the archives goes through in a flash because it’s a continual whir of Wanting To Know What Happens Next.

Stephen King believes that this is the best talent a writer can have. Andreas has that.

Plus, as I said…. There’s the dog. There were times when I didn’t care overmuch about the protagonist, but when I wasn’t worried about the guy I was filled with concern for the dog. And the dog is awesome – like his master, he too is wrapped in bandages and is wearing a gasmask, which is some stunning imagery. The dog looks cool, a sleek survival dog.

The action sequences don’t often hinge around the dog, but the dog is there. If the guy buys it, so does the dog, so it’s a great two-part package; don’t like the dude? We have a dog in danger, too! Which, combined with the quick-moving plot and the what-comes-next style, leaves us with something that’s a truly great pulp read.

Post-Nuke has the feel of a man who’s working hard to get a story out of his brain. It’s not the most polished effort, but it’s got something raw and vibrant about it – the aura of a man who has something to say and needs to tell you. That urgency fills every strip.

It’s good stuff, but I wonder what’ll happen as he refines his technique. This guy’s someone to watch.

(As always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to the strip I co-created with Roni Pare, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

* - Yes, I’ve been guilty of this myself. I’m trying to get better. But the amount of dialogue here is larger than anything I’ve done.

Tags: somebody else needs to do tags, webcomic review

(17 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

Book Review #56: The Moral Animal: The New Science Of Evolutionary Psychology, by Robert Wright
The problem with teaching evolution to the masses is that it’s taught as an isolated concept, and people don’t learn from isolated concepts. I can explain all about the forces of motion and kinetics – but if you knew nothing about them, chances are good you’d learn more about how they work by trying to throw a ball into a hoop.

The problem is that we’re problem-solvers. As a race, we tend not to value knowledge until we can put it to use ourselves (or see how it works for others), and as such isolated facts tend to dissipate from our mind. Hence, most of us know the bare ideas behind about evolution, but the details of it all don’t really stick that well.

There are books, however, that use evolution to answer some heavy-duty questions. These tend to be the ones I’d recommend to the evolutionary skeptics.

One of the best books on the topic of evolution – even if it’s not strictly about evolution – is Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was written in response to a friend’s question. The friend was a tribesman in the Caribbean, and by and large the author had found the hunter-gatherers to be smarter than most of the men from the “normal” society. This makes sense, because non-smart hunter-gatherers tend to get eaten, making for a group of uniformly intelligent, dextrous people.

This came up in conversation, and the friend asked a vital question: “If we’re smarter and stronger individually, how come the Europeans chumped us?”

The author thought about that, and then really analyzed it from a scientific perspective. The traditional answer had been something along the lines of either “Manifest Destiny” or “The Europeans were so much smarter” (with its faint echo-argument of “The Europeans had better weapons that the natives were too dumb to make”), but that didn’t seem right.

As it turns out, the reason we won is because of a confluence of events.

First, there are only a handful of animals that can be domesticated (ever wonder why hardly anyone rides zebras?), and the Europeans had most of ‘em. This allowed them to domesticate animals, which in turn put us in close proximity with a lot of animal diseases that rapidly spread to humanity. But we developed immunities while the Indians did not. Hence, we arrived with a ton of germs that were deadly to them, but not to use.

That’s not all! As it turns out, Mesopotamia had one of the greatest clusters of easily-domesticated plants – because not all plants can be farmed easily. (And the earliest farmers tended to be worse off than their hunter/gatherer brethren, because not surprisingly spending a whole season tending to a crop that might die to an early frost can lead to ugly situations… Whereas if you’re a hunter, you can almost always find another deer.)

The Europeans took their lessons in farming and their seeds from Mesopotamia…. And good farming means food surpluses. Those surpluses means that your society now has the means to support people who do something other than get food. You can create specialists who don’t have to make food for a living – like scientists. But particularly critical is the idea of soldiers, who can go wage war for you while the bulk of your population remains safe at home.

If you’re a hunter/gatherer, you can’t fight for overlong – everyone has to fight. Eventually, your tribe starts to starve and you have to go back to hunting. But the Europeans had a never-ending supply of toxic warriors they could send out in a steady stream to conquer the world. How awesome.

The net result of all of this is that it makes you realize in the power of circumstance. We’ve always believed that our world dominance had something to do with our character, but no – it’s a lot of circumstance that shaped us into what we are, which is one of the core concepts of evolution. Seeing the ideas stripped away in this fashion shows you the ideas of evolution thoroughly at work, even if it’s not strictly evolution that’s the reason for the European rise to power.

Unfortunately, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a terrible book. It has awesome ideas contained in it, but the writing is as dry as a cup of sawdust. (I only got through it thanks to listening to it on CD during a long car trip.) I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading more than ideas, which is most of us.

The Moral Animal, on the other hand, is a much better look at how evolution shapes us.

The Moral Animal is a dangerous book, because it asks a lot of questions that nobody really wants answered. See, we like free will. The idea that we’re actually not beholden to our instincts is what drives a lot of us – anything we feel is something we decided on, coming to it via a rational process. We don’t like being told that the things that make us feel happiest may well be evolution at work.

But The Moral Animal is about asking really interesting questions. And he’s not afraid to follow through with them at all.

See, what Robert Wright says is that the feelings we have are simply evolution’s method of getting us to act in ways that spread our genes. We love our children because, well, if we love them then we’re far more likely to act in ways that protect them and hence nurture our precious genetic material until it can breed.

The argument he makes is complicated, and easily prone to being misunderstood by people who haven’t read the whole thing. This is an argument that’s not easily summed up in a silly LiveJournal essay, and I don’t want to have the debate here. I would, instead, advise you to read it, because he makes many interesting arguments that range far and wide about the nature of altruism, jealousy, parenting issues, poor self-esteem, and sexual attraction – saying that in the environment that these emotions were created in, they were actually quite rational reactions to have.

Of course, in the past, Darwinian Psychology has been used to justify right-wing philosophies, but the matter’s more complicated than all of that, and he does an admirable job of darting constantly between “as a whole, evolution causes us to do this” and “individual people can choose to break their instincts, but it is difficult.”

Still, a lot of the book revolves around asking interesting questions. For example, since men are evolutionarily-groomed to have sex with as many women as possible, and men are largely in charge of society, why isn’t polygamy the default in large civilizations? He then asks, “Well, what happens when it isn’t?” and looks at societies where polygamy is common, and shows how committed marriage affects the nature of society as a whole.

(Short version: Women get the shaft in single-marriage societies, because multiple women can’t glom onto a rich and powerful man and thus are more limited in their social mobility. But they also end up in a more stable society, since the dregs of the male population can’t get married in a polygamous society, and thus without commitment or children are far more likely to become criminals and itinerants.)

It’s a fascinating book. I doubt anyone will agree with it 100%, but sometimes interesting arguments are worth more than settled books. This will make you think about the way society works… And it’ll make you think twice about how you think.

Book Review #57: The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
This one was stashed in my luggage by the intelligent and attractive yakavenger* as a going-away gift from Penguicon. We didn’t find it until she fished it out of our luggage after meeting us at Pi Con, and showing me how I don’t really unpack all that well.

In any case, Kati and Josh said, “You have to read this. I can’t believe you haven’t.” And while Gini devoured it (she’s reading the fourth book in the series in the other room as I type this), I myself had severe problems getting through it. My teeth clenched, my blood pressure skyrocketed, my vision narrowed.

Why can’t I write like that?

The first two paragraphs of The Eyre Affair are among the most compelling introductions in modern fiction. I dare any vaguely-nerdy person to sit down and read those two paragraphs and not want to know what happens next. Jasper makes it look easy.

Every time I cracked the cover on this damn book, it made my own novel-in-flogging seem like a lumbering dinosaur…. Which was excruciating. The writing is light and airy yet still filled with fascinating concepts and awful puns, and it’s bursting at the seams with good stuff.

This is the kind of book that makes me want to pack it all in. I can’t do this. Oh, maybe I can do something else, but there’s that deep needle in the heart that this guy can spool off this stuff effortlessly… And good for him.

You may note I finished it. I had to, of course. That’s the nature of this book. And I’ve started on the second.

Dammit, this kind of writing is worth a heart palpitation or two.

* - And her husband Josh. But Howard Tayler recently referred to Katie as “Intelligent and attractive,” so I couldn’t resist. But it’s true. Dammit, her secret’s out!

Tags: book review, somebody else needs to do tags

(42 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)

Full Frontal Nerdity is the webcomic that I forget that everyone isn’t reading. In my mind, it’s a juggernaut, right up there with Penny Arcade and PVP – a perfect gem of nerd culture so exquisitely done that I just assume that everyone’s already glommed onto it.

But it’s come to my attention recently that the glory of FFN is a localized phenomenon. Oh, it’s got a print comic that gets into shops occasionally, but it doesn’t get nearly the cred that it deserves. And so today, my task is to convince you that Full Frontal Nerdity is the strip that you should be reading.

That is…. If you’re a nerd.

The concept of Full Frontal Nerdity is simple: Four nerds (one of them attending via webcam) hang around a game table, discussing the latest news in the gaming world and trying out their own games. There are no extended plotlines – just a straight gag-a-day strip about the deepest recesses of the nerd psyche.

FFN is relentlessly topical. Was there an announcement about the Fourth Edition of D&D? You can be pretty sure it’ll get a reference. GenCon’s in session? FFN’s on it. World of Warcraft CCG? They're on it. FFN has its finger on the pulse of the nerd heartbeat; in a sense, it’s like a newsfeed for What Nerds Are Talking About.

But to call FFN a simple “gag-a-day” strip doesn’t cover it. The great thing is that Aaron Williams is the undisputed master of throwing four or five punchlines into his strip at a time. Other strips might end on a single gag, but Aaron somehow manages to stack his Funny so that three or four pieces of zippy dialogue build on the last line until it just comes together like a miniature sitcom compressed into four panels. Aaron’s second panel is often a better laugh than lesser comics’ final panel.

That kind of writing is remarkably hard to pull off, because finding a single good gag is hard enough. It’s tempting when you find a good and satisfying line to just end on it, and have the other three panels leading up to that boffo laugh. But Aaron works overtime to make the first panel as amusing as the last – something rare in comics in general, let alone webcomics.

How does he do it? Well, mostly by selling zany concepts. The joy of FFN is watching four guys take an idea and watching them run with it all the way to the end zone – just as you think they’ve exhausted this particular idea, they’ve got some other ideas to spin on it.

It’s like the conversations you wish you had with your friends. Except Aaron’s are better.

Here, I’ll just highlight some of the better comics from the past eight months:

• The only White Wolf World of Darkness crossover that would actually make me play the game.
• Some much-needed advice on costumes.
• “I printed up these homebrew cards for a Warcraft CCG Pre-Game Game. It simulates attempting to log into Blizzard’s servers.”
• On the demise of Dragon magazine.
• “I can almost hear his childhood crumbling.”
• There’s a new author writing the Justice League.
• “Before we start tonight’s gaming, are there any developments we need to pass judgment upon?”
• What happens when nerds argue about pizza.
• Stephen King: The Roleplaying Game.

Honestly? FFN is one of the best comics I’ve ever reviewed here. (The other still-active ones that I’d consider “best” are Yet Another Fantasy Gaming Comic, DM of the Rings, Minus, and the tragically-underupdated Malfunction Junction.*) It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that FFN might have even counted as one of the strips that fell within my purview to review… But if I have the slightest chance to point you in its direction, I will.

It’s quality stuff. Go nuts with it.

(As always, if you have an underappreciated webcomic you think I should review, leave a comment and I’ll take a look at it. Reviews will be only for strips with less or equal traffic to the strip I co-created with Roni Pare, Home on the Strange, in order to highlight smaller comics; as such, the reviews will always be at least mostly positive. If you note any traffic I’ve sent your way and feel the urge to shower me with gratitude, feel free to plug HotS in your own comic. Danke!)

* - With a tip of the hat to The New Adventures of Queen Victoria, natch.

Tags: somebody else needs to do tags, webcomic review

(24 shouts of denial | tell me I'm full of it)