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You shouldn’t believe anything that Daniel Kalder, author of Lost Cosmonaut says. Under a list of rules for the anti-tourist at the start of the book he states “The anti-tourist loves truth, but he is also partial to lies. Especially his own.” At times he veers off into the outright fictional, but it’s never entirely clear which bits of his stories are actually true. This is important, because otherwise, Lost Cosmonaut would be, by a very wide margin, the most depressing travel book I’ve ever read.

Kalder goes in search of emptiness, alienation and nothingness in the Russian Federation’s semi-automonous republics. He visits Tartarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El and Udmurtia – places I’ve never heard of and, based on his descriptions, would never want go. It’s hard to believe that Kalder, as he presents himself in the book, is anything other than a characature. He’s arrogant, crude, nihilistic and lazy – someone who’d be a nightmare to actually travel with. But it’s obvious that he knows far more about the Russian republics than he’s letting on and beneath the layer of existentialist crap he piles on, he seems to have a genuine affection for his subject.

It’s a bit like P.J. O’Rourke’s 1989 travel book, Holidays in Hell. Kalder would reject the comparison – in his rules for anti-tourists, he says that the only reason to penetrate danger zones is “vanity and a desire to brag”. Kalder doesn’t search out the dangerous – he finds interest in the banal and mediocre. What he’s really after are people clinging to the tattered edge of their identities, being consumed by Russia. Ethnicities on the verge of extinction, where people live lives of poverty and desperation. Kalder manages to criticise himself as an anti-tourist looking in on people’s misery, while skewering the cultural tourism of his contemporaries. Kalder’s no better than any of them and he doesn’t really pretend to be. It’s all a bit too post-modern, but identity is one of the few things that post-modernism actually does well.

I have no idea how accurate the book is in its depiction of these people, their culture or their countries. Kalder’s often quite funny in a mordant, dark and juvenile kind of way, but the whole effect of the book is rather depressing. I prefer my travel books a little less existentialist and a lot more straight-forward, but Lost Cosmonaut is actually pretty good. Just don’t go into it expecting it to be cheerful.

I like books like this, which take on the philosophical and political through the recounting of practical and personal experience. The Devil’s Picnic has just the right measure of each to provide the balance that I prefer.

Grescoe’s book charts a year-long exploration of forbidden or proscribed substances and foods, from Nowegian moonshine, through unpasteurised French cheese, to the coca tea of Bolivia. With each chapter dedicated to the exploration of a certain substance, Grescoe searches, samples and interviews his way across the world. There’s a hint of journalistic license here – what are obviously planned meetings sometimes seem to be presented as happenstance. It’s not quite as adventurous as Grescoe meakes out; but this doesn’t really matter – the substances and the cultures that surround them are in the foreground and Grescoes musings on the subject are more interesting than what he actually does.

And what he does is to examine the way that societies come to prohibit and regulate the consumption of illicit substances. Grescoe’s political stance here should come as no surprise – you don’t write a book about flying around the world, seeking out semi-legal substances if you think they should be prohibited. The same could be said of the potential reader of such a book – I doubt there’s all that many ardent prohibitionists who want to read a book-length argument against their ideals. It’s mostly preaching to the choir, though Grescoe does take time to highlight the double standard many liberals seem to have regarding tobacco.

Unsurprisingly, I’m part of the congregation on this one. I actually studied this kind of stuff when I was at university (my dissertation was about the connections between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror). At the heart of almost every sane argument on the subject is one idea: The harms associated with prohibition vastly outweigh the harms associated with the substance itself. I don’t want to turn this into a rant on the subject (it’s an easy subject to rant about, so maybe some other time), but it’s astonishingly frustrating that, with a few European exceptions, governments seem to be utterly incapable of even having a sensible debate on the subject, despite the frightening costs, both financial and to human life, of the prevailing policies.

There are an astounding number of books that are essentially the same rant as the one I’ve just narrowly avoided. This isn’t really one of them, but it does build a similar case, chapter by chapter. Gresoe sums up with this:

There is, after all, a middle ground between abstinence and excess: it’s called moderation, and once you’re out of the thicket of post-adolescent overdramatization, it becomes a lot more attainable. Getting there requires a certain amount of maturity and self-knowledge; unfortunately, in a context where prohibition is the reigning world-wide paradigm, where paternalistic laws keep us in protracted adolescense by professing to protect us from ourselves, most people are prevented from every thinking in shades of gray. Since the Harrison Act of 1914 kicked off worldwide drug prohibition, intoxication has become a black-and-white issue. You are either on the righteous side of the line, or in a world of shame, picknicking with the devil.

American Psycho is another of the books I read when I was a teenager who chose books on the basis of their shock-value. I bought my copy when I was 16 or 17. I’m sure my first read-through was rather shallow and uninformative, but I have very fond memories of reading it again after university. Mostly I read it sitting in Swansea’s Castle Square, which is a lovely place to enjoy your lunch in the summer.

Over the course of American Psycho, Patrick Bateman describes his life as an investment banker and serial killer. Bateman’s murderous impulses are simply an extension of his other impulses: He murders because he can, much as he buys expensive things and eats at expensive restaurants. Written in 1991, as the boom of the late 80′s turned into the recession of the early 90′s, Ellis’s depiction of Bateman and the people around him is a needle sharp satire of yuppie culture and capitilistic excess. It’s peculiarly relevent these days, for obvious reasons.

It was a controversial novel at the time, mostly because of its extremely graphic scenes of murder, sex and the combination of both. While Bateman murders a variety of people, the scenes that describe his rape and slaughter of young women are by far the most lurid and detailed. It seems obvious to me that this is intentional and consistent with the larger goals of the novel, but it does open the novel and author up to charges of misogyny. I’ve never found fictional descriptions or depictions of violence to be all that disturbing – after all, they’re not real – but I can understand that some readers might prefer not to expose themselves to this kind of thing.

The least interesting question about the novel is whether Bateman is really a “fucking evil psychopath” or if he’s just a twisted fantasist. It’s possible to make the argument either way, but Ellis has left the question intentionally ambiguous, which is the real point. As the novel’s epigraphic quotation from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, says: “such persons as the composer of these Notes not only exist in our society, but indeed must exist, considering the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed.”

American Psycho is a surprisingly rich novel and Bateman a surprisingly complex character. It’s hard not to pity him, in spite of his reprehensible behaviour. It’s revealed in one key passage that Bateman doesn’t need to work – his father owns the company he works for and he doesn’t need to work. He only works because he desperately wants to fit in. There are some surprisingly touching scenes where it becomes clear that Bateman is utterly miserable.

If you want to read something shocking then it’ll do, but there’s much more to the novel that that. It’s a genuinely inventive and original work.

It’s disappointing when you get to the end of a book and find you have little to say about it. I’ve had significantly less time for reading recently, mostly because I’m now working full-time again. I tend to spend my lunch-breaks reading, though, and over the last few weeks I’ve worked my way through Stella Gibbon’s 1932 novel, Cold Comfort Farm. Set on the bleak titular farm, the novel follows Flora, a city girl, who arrives to fix all her relatives problems.

It’s weird reading it today because the pastoral novels that it parodies are much less famous than the novel itself and so most modern readers, myself included, miss most of the references. Still, it’s readable enough and seems to be well liked, finishing 88th in the Big Read, the BBC’s 2003 survey of Britain’s favourite books. I have to concur – its story is enjoyable and it’s easy to appreciate the satire, if not the parody.

Sluggy Freelance. One of the longest-running webcomics still going, I’ve been reading this for ten years or so. Pete Abrams has continued to improve as an artist and storyteller and, while the level of drama has steadily increased, it’s mixed with some of the funniest absurd humour and downright awful punnage available. Heading for it’s 12th birthday, the archives are huge; daily updates mean there’s somewhere above 4000 comics there. If you read them at an average speed of one per minute, it’d take nearly three whole days. So if you’re new, it’s quite an investment of time and energy to get acquainted. Definitely worth it, anyway. I mean, what else were you going to do with your weekend?

The Order of the Stick. The geekiest webcomic that I read. It’s a comedic fantasy based around Dungeons and Dragons. The art style is distinctive, with characters represented as stick figures. Suprisingly, it works well and looks better than lots of comics that use more traditional artwork. Like lots of webcomics, the early humour has given way to more dramatic storytelling. Fortunately it remains funny, even if you do have to have a passable knowledge of the RPG in question to get some of the jokes.

Gunnerkrigg Court. One of the best looking webcomics I’ve ever seen. The style has evolved as the comic has developed. It started dramatic and continues that way with occasional touches of humour. It’s set in a very unusual school and blends everyday emotional themes with some of the most original fantasy I’ve seen in any medium. I look forward to every update.

Basic Instructions. Simple premise: Each comic tells you how to do stuff in four panels. But it’s really funny. The art is comprised of tracings of photos, but it serves the purpose.

Wondermark. With it’s distinctive use of period illustrations, snark and dark humour, Wondermark’s strips are consistently funny. No ongoing storylines or characters, just enjoyable jocularity twice weekly.

Sorry to any arachnophobics out there, but here’s another spider picture. This one lives in my wardrobe. It’s been there a while and doesn’t seem to be doing any harm so I’m letting it stay. It seemed kind of nonplussed about having a camera-phone stuck in its face.

I’m reasonably certain that this is an example of pholcus phalangioides, the daddy long-legs spider. From its pale, almost translucent colouring it’s probably young. They go pale brown as they grow up.

Just evicted this spider from my flat. I thought it looked kind of interesting so I took a photo first. I think it’s probably a lace webbed spider or one of the clubiona species. But I’m basing that on a few other pictures I saw online, so it’s probably not very reliable.

I present to you Jimm’s Page of Groovosity – one of the first websites I ever made. I only found it tonight by accident. Indeed, I have absolutely no memory of making this. Judging by the timing of it, I think it dates back to 1998 or thereabouts. I’d have been 16. I can’t believe it still exists. I can vaguely remember making those graphics in the version of Paintshop Pro 4 that came free on the CD of a computer magazine.

There’s some stunningly awful poetry there. I mean look at Visions of a Seer. I point out on the site that it won the senior poetry competition at school. What I fail to mention is that it was the only poem entered into the senior poetry competition at school. Seriously, how angstful is this?

Gaze upon the pain that you never dared believe existed.
Gaze upon it now.
But when you look away you won’t remember.
You won’t want to remember the truth.
For the truth
is pain.

Ha!

I do kind of like my collection of javascripts though. I particularly like the Shakespeare Quote Generator. I think I must have spent an evening typing in the Shakespeare section of the big book of quotations we had when I was a teenager.

I apparently only got the first bit of the website done and the section about my ‘online aliases’ is missing. Calaxir (which is the search term that led me to this ridiculous little piece of personal history) was the name a character I played in one of the early chat-room style free-form RPG’s on WBS. I really should have chosen a better name – one that didn’t sound like a laxative. I mostly hung out in the Realm of Elahrair.

Bah. Kids today with their MyBook and FaceSpace. Back in my day we had to hew the raw HTML out of the internet with our teeth. And we liked it that way.

While on breaks at work I’ve been reading a bit about Genetic Programming. The following is a quick-and-dirty python script I threw together (mostly for myself) the other night. It evolves the target string “Hello World” over several generations, starting with random strings. After a bit of experimentation I found that a population size of 300 seems to work best for this.

import random
import string
 
class GenePool:
    def __init__(self, population_size):
        self.population_size = population_size
        self.population = [self.generate()
                           for i in range(population_size)]
 
    def run(self):
        i = 0
        while True:
            print "Generation " + str(i) + ": " + self.population[0]
            i = i + 1
            if self.step():
                return
 
 
    def step(self):
        fittest = self.get_best(self.population_size/2)
        if self.successful(fittest[0]):
            print "Success! " + fittest[0]
            return True
        else:
            self.population = self.get_new_generation(fittest)
            return False
 
    def generate(self):
        return "".join([random.choice(string.ascii_letters + " ")
                         for i in range(11)])
 
    def evaluate(self, individual):
        s = "Hello World"
        total = 0
        for idx in range(len(s)):
            if individual[idx] == s[idx]:
                total = total + 1
        return total / 11.0
 
    def get_best(self, n):
        fitness = []
        for idx, individual in enumerate(self.population):
            fitness.append((idx, self.evaluate(individual)))
        fitness.sort(cmp=lambda x,y: cmp(x[1], y[1]), reverse=True)
        best = []
        return [self.population[tup[0]] for tup in fitness[:n]]
 
    def successful(self, individual):
        return individual == "Hello World"
 
    def get_new_generation(self, individuals):
        population = []
        while len(population) < int(self.population_size * 0.75):
            population.extend(self.breed(
                                    random.choice(individuals),
                                    random.choice(individuals)))
        while len(population) < self.population_size:
            population.append(self.generate())
        return population
 
    def breed(self, mother, father):
        point1 = random.randint(0,len(mother)-2)
        point2 = random.randint(point1+1, len(mother)-1)
        new1 = mother[:point1] + father[point1:point2] + mother[point2:]
        new2 = father[:point1] + mother[point1:point2] + father[point2:]
        if random.random() < 0.05:
            new1 = self.mutate(new1)
        if random.random() < 0.05:
            new2 = self.mutate(new2)
        return (new1, new2)
 
    def mutate(self, individual):
        x = list(individual)
        x[random.randint(0, len(x)-1)] = random.choice(
                                            random.choice(
                                              string.asciiletters + " "))
        return "".join(x)
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    G = GenePool(300)
    G.run()

I don’t have much to say about this book. Originally called The Psychology of Everyday Things, it’s a long musing on the poor design that surrounds us. I found it reasonably interesting, but I think I’d have preferred a more rigorous approach than the loose and chatty style Norman uses. All the same, it’s certainly affected the way I look at things around me and it’s going to have a permanent place on my bookshelf for whenever I’m called upon to design stuff.