Snow Crash Thread 2: Chapter 11 to end of Chapter 19

[Traveller]

....and chapter 11 starts us off on yet another silly note. An avatar being cut into pieces as if it was a piece of paper. How droll!

I really like the bits with Y.T in it. How come the bits with Hiro in it always turn out to be so silly?

Y.T! Y.T! I want more of Y.T. ;)

[[deleted user]]

I like Hiro's bits. He represents a certain aspect of what people want to be in real life, but can only really accomplish in an online environment, being a complete badass. This includes chopping a derisive, kimono wearing business man into bits.

I agree about Y.T., her character is by far the most engaging, and finding out her mother works for federal agents, wow.

I'm not too sure, but Snow Crash covers the same nonsense that goes on the web nowadays, such as Y.T.'s case; masking her online identity from her mother vaguely correlates with catfish scandals and other shenanigans involving one's internet persona. It was released 3 years before windows 95 which, to the best of my knowledge, had popularized the world wide web. Am I wrong in saying Snow Crash is far ahead of its time as far as speculative goes?

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Four years ahead of Win95, actually, since it was near-Christmas 96 when they finally got Win95 out :-)

But yeah, it's way ahead of its time.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

OK, I had to figure out just how far chapter 19 gets to. My Kobo used to group all my annotations by chapter, but this Sony doesn't, and anyway half the time I make an annotation it breaks the Reader program, and I end up having to copy the annotation from the database manually, then clear the annotations. I'm really starting to dislike this reader.

I'm perplexed by your reaction to the Metaverse, Traveller. Some of the Metaverse is Hiro's own creation—the sword-fighting routines in particular—so he sets it up to be the most fun for him (not to mention, slanting the odds in favor of him winning any particular fight). Sure it's silly, but it's not at all like the pizza delivery, which we can't quite believe, even if it is a somewhat-logical extension of current trends. The Metaverse sword-fighting is just an adolescent programmer having fun, though we do begin to see towards the end of the section that he might actually have some talent in Reality, when he at least manages to survive his first encounter with Raven who has managed to kill a number of gun-wielding Crips with nothing more than a very (very) sharp knife.

Raven (who will pop up in more than one other Stephenson novel) is great. Whenever we see somebody with anger issues, I try to mime writing PIC across my forehead to my wife. It always gets a laugh. One day I'll probably have the misfortune to get caught doing it by someone with both Poor Impulse Control and who's read this book… Raven's impulse control can't be too terribly bad, though, as he hasn't detonated the nuclear warhead yet (or is that actually a spoiler—that either comes up at the very end of chapter 19, or in chapter 20).

I agree Y.T. is a more likeable character. I was wondering if bribing the cops who arrested her to put her in The Hoosegow was a Brer Rabbit "please don't throw me in the briar patch" trick, but she really seemed to be upset when there was no room there. Certainly getting out of The Clink was no challenge for her.

Then there's Ng Se­cu­rity In­dus­tries Semi-Au­tonomous Guard Unit #A-367 (henceforth known as Rat-Thing). Nice doggie.

Y.T. is a moral exemplar. For all that she lies to her mother, she only does it to protect her, and her good deeds always pay back manyfold. So after escaping from The Clink, we see that Uncle Enzo is keeping an eye on her.

Hiro, otoh, is the not-yet-grown up adult male. He'll blunder into things, and despite his intelligence, resort too quickly to force.

[Traveller]

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "I'm perplexed by your reaction to the Metaverse, Traveller. Some of the Metaverse is Hiro's own creation—the sword-fighting routines in particular—so he sets it up to be the most fun for him (not to mention, slanting the odds in favor of him winning any particular fight).."

There are so many little niggles and inconsistencies, Derek. I was going to wait until more towards the end of the novel before saying more about it, but take this very instance for example; the sword-fight.

"So the user can't get back in until his avatar has been disposed of. Disposal of hacked-up avatars is taken care of by Graveyard Daemons, a new Metaverse feature that Hiro had to invent. They are small lithe persons swathed in black, like ninjas, not even their eyes showing. They are quiet and efficient. Even as Hiro is stepping back from the hacked-up body of his former opponent, they are emerging from invisible trapdoors in The Black Sun's floor, climbing up out of the netherworld, converging on the fallen businessman. Within seconds, they have stashed the body parts into black bags. Then they climb back down through their secret trapdoors and vanish into hidden tunnels beneath The Black Sun's floor. A couple of curious patrons try to follow them, try to pry open the trapdoors, but their avatars' fingers find nothing but smooth matte black."

He keeps kind of confusing how this kind of software works and real life. Firstly, why bother not making hacked-off limbs look gory if you're going to go to the trouble of hacking them off? It's not a hard thing to do compared to actually being able to hack the limbs off in the first place. And if you have software that's able to make an avatars' limbs come off, then that same software can, at the click of a keyboard button, just make the remains fade away exactly as it is done in modern games. Simply erase those objects from the currently loaded scene. It's not a hard thing to do compared to hacking off the limbs of somebody else's avatar, an avatar that came in from outside.

Even easier and better, would be a routine that automatically removes a body once it has been decapitated and dismembered, as in "Event: limbs chopped off">>> activates "event: remove limb objects from loaded scene". This is also a common feature of modern games, btw.

And why bother with the conceit of a "pyre"? You could simply erase the remains.

Since nobody else can access the supposed space under the 'floorboards", why bother bogging the server down with all of that extra computing?

But that is just one example. Like I say, I was saving them up for later, bec. he might explain things a bit better as we progress.

The other thing I'm not enjoying too much, are the cheap shots he keeps taking at various groups and ethnicities, like for instance how he makes fun of "Hong-Kong" with his pidgin English translation of the sign in the Hong Kong yard. He obviously meant that to be funny, but clearly at someone's expense. This is exactly the kind of thing that racists do.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

I think you're confusing how this kind of software works with the way you've seen game software work. I think this goes straight to the Uncanny Valley: they don't want it to work too much like real life. The whole purpose of the graveyard daemons and the pyre is to impose a time limit. As long as the avatar exists (even in pieces) the user can't log back in. It seems overly complex, but I've seen things done the hard way more times than I can count…

As for "nobody else" being able to access the space under the floorboards, that simply can't be true. Da5id (before his Crash) and Juanita, and probably other Black Sun shareholder/developers, would be able to. L.Bob probably can. But the clientele at the Black Sun can't.

Of course the cheap shots are exactly the kind of thing that racists do. America is a pretty racist society, and Stephenson's future America is more racist than ever. I don't know how you can depict a racist society in a novel without sounding racist. Despite Hiro's own mixed racial background, he's pretty nearly as racist as the next guy. He's OK with YT and the Cosa Nostra, but even though he's a citizen of Mr Lee's Greater Hong Kong, he clearly doesn't think much of the Chinese; nor any of the central Asian immigrants.

[Traveller]

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "The whole purpose of the graveyard daemons and the pyre is to impose a time limit. As long as the avatar exists (even in pieces) the user can't log back in. It seems overly complex, but I've seen things done the hard way more times than I can count…"

..but the explanation of why he cannot log in seemed to me to be more practical than a device to "punish" the loser. For practical reasons you can't have two versions of the avatar on the server. It would simply be easier and much lighter on the server itself to have it disappear after, say a minute.

Hmm, regarding depicting America and the metaverse at the same time, I was actually just thinking that the whole novel would have gone down more smoothly if NS had made his setting on some fictional 'planet X' like Mièville tends to do.

You know, even if it was a kind of parallel universe or something. After all, when I started nitpicking on CM like this, all that you guys had to say to shut me up was: "But the rules work differently in Bas-lag!" :P

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Traveller wrote: "..but the explanation of why he cannot log in seemed to me to be more practical than a device to "punish" the loser. "

No, that's explicit. He wants the user locked out. "So the first thing that happens, when some­one loses a sword fight, is that his com­puter gets dis­con­nected …. all it re­ally does is cause the user a lot of an­noy­ance.
"Fur­ther­more, the user finds that he can’t get back into the Meta­verse for a few min­utes … be­cause his avatar, dis­mem­bered, is still in the Meta­verse, and it’s a rule that your avatar can’t exist in two places at once. So the user can’t get back in until his avatar has been dis­posed of."

And as for the lack of blood and gore, that's equally intentional: "It breaks the metaphor. The avatar is not act­ing like a real body. It re­minds all The Black Sun’s pa­trons that they are liv­ing in a fan­tasy world."

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

'After all, when I started nitpicking on CM like this, all that you guys had to say to shut me up was: "But the rules work differently in Bas-lag!" '

Well, the rules DO work differently in the Metaverse, and they don't work differently in Reality.

[Traveller]

The reason why I use what can be done in gaming as examples, is because I am relatively familiar with how such software works and because gaming has striven towards emulating a virtual reality quite similar to what whoever designed the "Metaverse" in Snow Crash must have had in mind.

But keep in mind, there are reasons why we prefer doing things with software rather than doing them the long way round in real life. There are reasons why we type docs on our PC's instead of writing them by hand, and a lot of it has to do with saving time (and space, and doing things more efficiently). This is why the "long way around" and the energy-wasting way of doing things that we witness in the Metaverse tends to grind on me.

For instance, in games, you can "fast travel" from one location to another. On the internet, by making use of search engines and bookmarks, we can "fast travel" from one website to another. Why would one want to walk all the way, (every single time, the same boring old way) expending actual time to get to a place when you can fast travel to get there? For instance, if you wanted to be in the Black Sun, why not simply go straight there- why spawn in "The Street" (Or a cubicle/station next to it, supposedly) when you could spawn inside the Black Sun? (If you have access to it, like Hiro does.)

[Traveller]

Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Traveller wrote: "..but the explanation of why he cannot log in seemed to me to be more practical than a device to "punish" the loser. "

No, that's explicit. He wants the user locked out. "So the ..."
Well, the bit you quoted there, says something different to you than it says to me, obviously. There he says it: ""Fur­ther­more, the user finds that he can’t get back into the Meta­verse for a few min­utes … be­cause his avatar, dis­mem­bered, is still in the Meta­verse, and it’s a rule that your avatar can’t exist in two places at once. So the user can’t get back in until his avatar has been dis­posed of."

The bolded bit is a practical rule. It's how such software works. In such a scenario, objects like avatars get awarded an ID number, and although it is possible to have more than one example of certain ID numbers, how confusing do you think it would be for a person (and everyone else concerned) to walk in and look down on the shredded bits of his own avatar?

As for: " "It breaks the metaphor. The avatar is not act­ing like a real body. It re­minds all The Black Sun’s pa­trons that they are liv­ing in a fan­tasy world." Yes, exactly! Why would one bother to pull out all the stops to create virtual reality, only to purposely break the immersion?

I mean, this is a world where people actually have "virtual offices" in which they walk around as an avatar and have "virtual librarians" to make search engines look more glamorous, which can do voice recognition and is so sophisticated that they can actually converse with initiative just like a human being....-do you have any idea how sophisticated your software and hardware has to be to have a creation like Hiro's librarian? I mean, that, right there, is artificial intelligence as in 'real' AI.

[Puddin Pointy-Toes]

Yet the Librarian is confused by computer metaphors. It's very contradictory.

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Traveller wrote: "Why would one want to walk all the way, (every single time, the same boring old way) expending actual time to get to a place when you can fast travel to get there? For instance, if you wanted to be in the Black Sun, why not simply go straight there- why spawn in "The Street""

Money. afaict, L.Bob controls the infrastructure, and he wants you to pay for levels of access. But Hiro, it seems, except for the first time we're shown the Street, does in fact always materialize either in his own property in the Metaverse or in the Black Sun.

I know your bolded rule. He explicitly says that he used that rule to intentionally lock the user out of the Metaverse for a period. It's purely punitive, and it's completely in character for Hiro, who for all that he is about twice Y.T.'s age, is less mature.

"Yes, exactly! Why would one bother to pull out all the stops to create virtual reality, only to purposely break the immersion?"

You and J are the ones who are so enamored of the Uncanny Valley. This is clearly done to prevent it.

J. wrote: "Yet the Librarian is confused by computer metaphors. It's very contradictory."

I was going to leave that for thread 3…. I intend to contradict your argument of contradiction! For now, I'd say that if we put the Librarian to a Türing test, he fails.

[Traveller]

Okay, let's continue the next round in thread 3. Give me until tomorrow to get it up, please...

[Saski]

Just to be obnoxious and change the subject, anyone else like the SemiAutonomous Guard Unit, aka doggy, aka Rat Thing?

[Traveller]

I apologize, I'm just not getting the time to read, what with all the work I have to do, but anyway, the next thread is here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Ruth wrote: "Just to be obnoxious and change the subject, anyone else like the SemiAutonomous Guard Unit, aka doggy, aka Rat Thing?"

I did say "Nice doggie!" I love the Rat Things. I wonder if my wife would let me call my next dog (I'm currently looking for one) "Rat Thing"!

[Traveller]

So far I've only met a Rat Thing where it saves Y.T. from a hand grenade. Not too sure how it works- some kind of dograt cyborg? Was also wondering what it runs on.

[Traveller]

Btw! I've noticed by now that you guys were actually not joking about the retinal scans... :0

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

Traveller wrote: "So far I've only met a Rat Thing where it saves Y.T. from a hand grenade. Not too sure how it works- some kind of dograt cyborg? Was also wondering what it runs on."


At the end of the next section, we meet Mr. Ng, of Ng Security, the manufacturers of the SemiAutonomous Guard Unit, though I think it will be thread 4 before he explains what they are.

(view spoiler)[They're called Rat Things only because they look more rat-like than dog-like (if you ever get a chance to look at them, which is rare). They are definitely dog-cyborgs, powered by "radio-isotopes" (a little bit of handwaving, there). You certainly could power things by radio-active decay, but to the extent of a Rat Thing, which is only restricted from exceeding the speed of sound by Mr. Lee's "Good Neighbor" policy (that comes up at the very end of the book)… I think not.(view spoiler)[ (hide spoiler)] (hide spoiler)]

[Puddin Pointy-Toes]

This is rather off-topic, but about radioisotope power sources, I was reading a while back that NASA is planning to use Stirling engines powered by radioisotopes in future spacecraft. I find it fascinating that a steam engine design has utility in outer space. Science is so cool.

That aspect of the Rat Things is definitely a case similar to positronic brains in Asimov: catchy buzzworditis!

[Derek, Miéville fan-boi]

J. wrote: "This is rather off-topic, but about radioisotope power sources, I was reading a while back that NASA is planning to use Stirling engines powered by radioisotopes in future spacecraft."

Cool! (well, hot, really)

That makes perfect sense for something like that. A handful of radioactive waste (maybe less) could probably power my house, too! But as a propulsive power for a Rat Thing…nah.

[Michele]

Ruth wrote: "Just to be obnoxious and change the subject, anyone else like the SemiAutonomous Guard Unit, aka doggy, aka Rat Thing?"

Ruth, I really liked the Rat Thing. Very clever.