Maureen’s Comments (group member since Mar 02, 2009)

Maureen’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

could somebody else start a thread? maybe ben or patty because they aren't moderators? so we can test that? :)

i'm not feeling well you guys. i will pick up on ubik commentary later if i can, if not tomorrow...

dick was accurate, no? the clothes of 1992 were wacky! this kind of thing comes up quite a bit in his futuristic novels, depleted resources of some kind or another that inevitably sponsor some kind of fetishism of ersatz versions of by-gone products or creatures, or what have you. pat sounds like she knows her way around a vidphone (at least she says she does), so she may be wearing her work clothes, and hasn't splurged on the kind of finery that the others wear.

pat is fishy -- but then having the kind of power she has would make her automatically a very unsavoury, untrustworthy person to have around. after all, how would you ever know which of your actions she had decided was inappropriate and wished to negate? she signifies huge amounts of power with no controls. my favourite again! time travel! i'm surprised they don't immediately lock her up and throw away the key, despite how potentially useful she could be to the runciter organization.

runciter: i can't decide if i like him. he seems like a blustery old man, and yet he seems to feel very responsible to the world, that his company is providing a service that truly protects the people it serves, rather than supplying a false demand.

recap of chap 1-4: so we have a man who is worried about his business going to see his wife in half-life, which seems to be a kind of limbo between life and death, or at least rebirth. we meet his employee, joe chip, who we are to understand is worth more than his squalid surroundings, and the mysterious pat, and a mysterious mission to an off-world location, which runciter suspects may be the key to his business concerns. how will the image shift?

thanks brian for posting the forward. i wanted to read it once i finished, and now that i have, will enjoy it. :)

as for preferring his characters to be selling used cars, i don't know. for me, i love how dick imagined the future. a lot of his ideas seemed crazy to people then, and now but i think he was pretty damn visionary. this especially struck me about his short stories, which i guess are more firmly ensconced in the world of spaceships and interstellar travel. the characters are always believable, familiar, understandable but the how they deal with the outlandish schemes he comes up for them transplanting them out of our day-to-day reality? genius. to me that would be a tremendous loss. i bought voices from the street because you liked humpty dumpty so much but i'm not sure that i'm prepared to read it yet. :)

maybe i will scan a short story for you guys to read after UBIK to give you an idea of what i'm trying to get at. this talent for putting ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances, and have it be believable. i trust philip k. dick as a narrator even as i have learned to mistrust his characters, to not necessarily take them at face value.

ben: i think your point about the assholes was well taken (over in the comments under the poll re myspace or goodreads). my thought would be to make it a private group, and have a big group of moderators. ultimately, i think us being here will attract more group members because i know at least jonathan will have a lot of traffic coming from his author page, and his group, no doubt, and you, brian, and i have all been writing reviews of books we read, and if somebody reads our reviews, and comes to our profile to see what else we like to read, they will see the group and ask to join! well, we can have a poll to see if that's what we do, but you know what i mean.

i think jonathan had it as public over on myspace. of course, that way we did get assholes. to asshole or not to asshole, that is the question. :P

so you guys: thinking about how to minimize the effort this experiment will take, since we're talking here and there. how about we craft our emails about our thoughts on the book here, and then copy them to fiction files. there, we can reply and discuss with others on their thoughts, but if we are initiating ideas we start them here? i thought at first it would be a simple copy and paste but if other people do end up talking about it on ff we don't want to ignore their contribution. so i will write all my thoughts about the book here to you. then we can copy and paste until we end up with some variation in the dynamic.

am i over thinking this? it's clear i need a job, isn't it, with the gusto in which i am testing this page, and reading this book. :)

Ben wrote: you CAN just copy and paste.

somebody is hankering for a spankering. :P

Maureen wrote: "Ben wrote: "well, it IS a site designed for book discussion. not trying to be an ass, just saying. there are a lot of advantages.

it's not particularly beautiful, but...

also: how firmly grounded..."

one thing i'm not liking is this truncation of quoted posts...

i guess, for me, i still want to talk about books, and if we do this from a book site and not myspace maybe we can find more people to talk about 'em. :)

Ben wrote: "well, it IS a site designed for book discussion. not trying to be an ass, just saying. there are a lot of advantages.

it's not particularly beautiful, but...

also: how firmly grounded is goodread..."

i take the first point, and to the second i say, we weren't really trying to improve on aesthetics -- and it's not like our current space is beautiful.
as for the third, i think that a great question. i did a quick check, and it's only been around since dec '06... the wiki notes are quite comforting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodreads

add suggestions of books that we can read together in the future here. we can make polls out of the suggestions! :)

mondo pro: i can't believe i didn't mention that we can search the threads!!!!

feel free to check out my notes in the testing post in announcements in case you're wondering if i've tried something out or not.

so far so good: multiple moderators, polls, automatic hotlinking of html links, folders for our many different subfolders, ability to paste in html so can put up images... and i think, most crucially, a way to find more readers to talk to about books.

i also think the authors in the group will like the idea we can add them to our bookshelves and link to their profiles here.

haven't found any cons yet...

hey! there is also a search function! i tried it and it seems to work! i used the word greek and it found the comment from dan and from me! whooot!

Maureen wrote: "i also set up a poll. so far so good. :)"

no need to reply to the poll just yet. i have it set to end in april. it's really so that i could test the polling utility. i like it that i can type stuff in the boxes, or pull books authors out of their database to poll on. ideal for selecting group reads because it's a democratic process that can be set to anonymous -- nobody will know how you voted. :)

i thought i should test this some html is okay. sometimes we like to post pictures...



also i think it may make urls live automatically but not sure...

http://groups.myspace.com/thefictionf...

www.goodreads.com

why yes it does! look at that!

i also like that i can go in an edit a post after i have made it. sometimes i think faster than i type. :)

i also set up a poll. so far so good. :)

i just changed the group to "secret" in case our fellow ff'ers saw some evidence of it in my update feed and started freaking out. hopefully this will nip that possibility in the bud.

we are testing out the goodreads group functionality.

Here's a place to talk about the skipper's book: all about lulu.

Maureen de Sousa
Today at 10:54pm
pkd loves greek -- i think you are absolutely right, and that it was intentional. where it will go, if anywhere will be another thing. one of the characters in my favourite (and possibly his most twisted) VALIS, is called horselover fat. i didn't realize that if you make that first name greek and the second german, it's really:................

a riddle for you two to figure out!

Dan Newton
Today at 10:44pm


did you notice the name melipone, mo? possibly from Μελπομένη (melpomene) the greek muse of tragedy?

Dan Newton
Today at 10:26pm
Holy shit, how have I missed this many messages?

I am not a Sci-fi-guy myself. In fact I dislike Star Wars, Star trek, star gates, that one sci fi show that everyone likes currently. I do love both futurama and the 5th element.

Aside from the standard dystopian classics, Atwood's (sorry Mo!) Oryx and Crake about ten or so Vonneguts and Electric Sheep I am a rookie.

I really enjoyed electric sheep and ben has assured me that it was by no means his best so I am really looking forward to this one. My copy is also void of introduction. 46 pages won't take long. I could get it done sometime tomorrow, I will be fighting sleep soon reading it tonight so I probably won't get too far.

It seems someone slipped the cover artist a copy of photoshop and a few tabs of acid. Here is a link to my ugly ass copy:

http://www.amazon.com/Ubik-Philip-K-D...