Väster haninge (Swedish) is a small town at the centre of its commun, served by the Pendletåg from Stockholm central.
Väster haninge
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
Björnö Nature Reserve
Ice Race Track
I found a car race track on the ice near Nacka, by the time I got there the weather had warmed a little so I didn’t want to risk taking the car out myself.
Book review: All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland
[Read while waiting for appointments]
All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland
Coupland is generally easy reading for me, with rambling sentence structures that flow with the consciousness and ordinary seeming characters getting themselves into extraordinary relationships with each other and the world in general. He holds a mirror up to show the darkness of the world through those interactions.
This book didn’t flow so well for me, this time around. Largely, I think, because it was an intermittent companion, I lost the flow in the gaps between appointments.
It centres around the Drummond family, their coming to terms with terminal illness and the launching of their daughter in the Space Shuttle. It is set in and around Daytona Beach, near the launch site.
There are some elements of a road movie here, with a lot of action taking place on journeys, without there being any real structure to them except for their advancement of the plot.
Overall, a good read but, like all his work, rather disposable. Its fun during the reading, but dissipates once you close the back cover.
Nacka Strand again
I went for another explore around Nacka Strand. Noticing this time that it must have been an old car works, with a similar feeling to the old Mini factory in Oxford.
Skeppsholmen in the fog
We went to the architecture museum on Skeppsholmen, the boat was making a good subject for photographers.
Drottningholm lake
The lake at Drottningholm was frozen over, but we weren’t brave enough to try walking across it.
Drottningholm gardens in the snow
A walk around the gardens at Drottningholm in the snow.
Drottningholm in the snow
We went back to Drottningholm Slott after the recent snowfalls. It makes such a difference to see them covered in snow.
Book review: Idoru by William Gibson
[Read aloud to Adelle]
This book revolves around Rez, the lead singer of the Lo/Rez pop group, with two main story arcs following Chia, a fan club member from Seattle, and Laney, a quantitative analyst of data. Both brought to Tokyo because of rumours of the marriage of Rez with Rei Toei, the titular idol.
Chia accidentally gets caught up in the smuggling of contraband into Japan, her naiveté rapidly waning as she discovers more about her travel companion.
Laney is recruited for a job watching the data stream of Rez, whose life creates a functionally non-existent data exhaust, nothing onto which Laney can latch his insights.
While this is solidly set in a cyberpunk future, it is more a story about the coming of age and loss of innocence of a young fan-girl travelling to unknown lands, and encountering an underworld she had never known the existence of, for the first time.
There is also a commentary on the creation of follies by the wealthy, Rez builds a real version of a virtual site, itself based on the real Kowloon walled city – a notorious lawless slum demolished even before the writing of the book and replaced with a park.
I love being immersed in these cyberpunk futures, this a little less dystopian than most I read. The story here is gentle, almost charming, were not for the Russians trying to reclaim what they think of as rightfully theirs.