Chris Angelis's Blog, page 4

Simple Analytics that Respect Privacy: a How-To Guide

A programming post for today, but with a little twist. We’re not making a story planning program or an interactive fiction “game”. In a way, we’re not even making anything concrete – though I will share with you some code samples. Instead, we’ll take a more theoretical look at what I term simple analytics, with […]

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Review of I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava

I picked I Fear My Pain Interests You, by Stephanie LaCava, looking for a literary-fiction story with strong psychological undertones. What I got instead was “the next Great American Novel“, but let me be upfront: I mean this in the worst possible manner, using it entirely ironically. Indeed, my motivation behind writing a review for […]

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“Am I the Asshole?”: The Art of Self-Assessment

There is an often quoted claim suggesting that if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole, but if you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole. This isn’t always true – there are never black-and-white answers – for reasons we will examine, but it implicitly focuses on an […]

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Review of The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

I’ll say it right away: This review of The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, was inspired fully – believe it or not – by its… ending. Quite frankly, it’s so atrocious that it should be taught in literature classes as an example of what not to do. But let’s take a step back. […]

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Why I Want to be Forgotten when I Die

For most people – certainly for most artists – to be forgotten when they die is not something they would wish. They would like to be remembered for a long time. Sometimes, when they fantasize about success, they might even dream of an undefined future, long after their demise, with their name still associated with […]

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Review of The Glasgow Coma Scale

Whenever I go to the library, trying to find something to read, I often end up frustrated. Call me picky if you want. Yet as I’m going through the blurbs (nowadays even they are buried beneath the asinine, useless “INSTANT BESTSELLER!” tags), what I see is more and more authors overly enamored with plot. I […]

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Conscientious Workers: Meaning of a Dying Breed

What’s the first word coming to mind when you hear conscientious? Though it might be objector (an interesting topic for another day), in this post I’m focusing on conscientious workers and why, as a concept, it’s highly revealing of the rapid societal transformation we’re experiencing. Inspiration for this post came from a remarkable interview the […]

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Review of South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

I have a love-hate relationship with Haruki Murakami’s fiction. Well, alright, it’s much closer to love than hate, but I’ve been critical of his fiction before. However, South of the Border, West of the Sun must be my favorite Murakami novel – and I’ve read plenty. Whether we like or not something can boil down […]

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Understanding Depth in Fiction

For most people, depth in fiction sounds like a good thing, right? Just as we conflate vivid descriptions or rich vocabulary with high-quality writing, having a deep narrative must be a great thing, right? Right? The thing is, there are so many fluid variables in the statement “Depth in fiction is a good thing” that […]

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Thucydides and Linux: a Free or a Peaceful OS?

You’ve got to admit, seeing Thucydides and Linux together in the same sentence isn’t something ordinary. “Linux” and “free” is far more common, for obvious reasons. But whether Linux is free is one discussion; whether it’s a peaceful operating system yet another. So where does Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian, enter the picture? You might […]

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