John Scalzi: Redshirts

Scalzi's Redshirts is his homage to the "have Kirk, Spock, McCoy and someone else on an away team, and have the last guy die to show how dangerous it is" idea spawned by StarTrek.

On the one hand, it suffers from driving the joke into the ground in some places. On the other hand, it does a reasonable job at taking the premise and building a decent novel out of it. On the third hand, it doesn't explore the premise as far as I'd have liked. On the gripping hand, it looks at it more than most other novels I've read.

In fact, come to think of it, if one already knows the general theme, I might enjoy it a lot more if you skip the prologue (which establishes the "redshirts" theme, but drives the joke into the ground) and start with chapter 1, and get a natural unfolding of "this is a normal introduction to some characters" before becoming "hang on, has anyone else noticed something about these away missions...?" slowly.

Follow-up post: details I liked and things that bugged me

( Read more... )

Internet in new house

Arranged to transfer internet to new house ✓

Although, not until the 2nd of January, alas.[1]

And changed to a less stupid package, and fixed several other things. But oh dear.

* If you really, really want you to set up e-billing, don't make people wait a month and then jump through a lot of hoops in order to do so.
* Everyone is not born known knowing the technical jargon specific to your company. If you want people to know the difference between "foo" (which is referred to exclusively on your website as a 'password') and "bar" (which is referred to exclusively on your website as a 'password'), you may have to TELL THEM, preferably clearly.
* Please, please, please stop telling me to do things I can't do. Yes, I'd dearly love to set up ebilling BUT YOU TOLD ME IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE. Yes, I'd dearly love to arrange this on the website rather than trying to phone you BUT I CAN'T LOG IN. Yes, I'd dearly love to enter the first character of my password[2] BUT MY PROBLEM IS THAT MY PASSWORD DOESN'T WORK.

[1] The people on the phone were really helpful, but I always take it as a personal attack if someone doesn't say "Sorry, I know it's inconvenient, but..." before asking you to take four hours off work to wait in for a 20 min appointment. It feels like, it should be obvious that's inconvenient, and social protocol when asking you to do someone a favour is apologise for the inconvenience, so if you don't, you're saying their time is worthless compared to yours. But no-one else cares about that, their attitude is "ask for what's convenient for them and hope you say yes".

[2] In fact, this raised a different problem I'd not forseen, that if you have a smartphone with a keyboard, entering an alphabetic password by typing the numbers which have those letters on on a traditional numeric keypad is surprisingly confusing.