HiWire

I've enjoyed most of his books, but The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. was terrible. It had the outlines of Stephenson's usual obsessions, but the plot was terribly weak, the characterizations were cartoonish, and it went way too far in terms of self-indulgence and laziness. I took a hard pass on The Mongoliad. I read half of Seveneves before my library loan expired – I'll get back to finishing it at some point. I loved Reamde, despite its flaws, and I'm looking forward to reading Fall.

Gidget Dela Llana (I Don't Want to Wait – Paula Cole) You've Got a Friend – Carole King

I'm going to attempt Neal Stephenson's Fall at some point.

Happy Birthday!

Maybe a little redundant, but I finally received my copy of J.G. Ballard's High-Rise and I'm enjoying it immensely. The novel is clearly satirical and the film seems to have lost that feeling somewhere in translation. I got the one with the movie cover on purpose, as the novel is supposed to be about a disaster and the movie was one, unintentionally. Looks like a slew of cover artists attempted to visualize the story with varying degrees of success. It is a near-insurmountable challenge to make a condominium appear fascinating to the reading public. https://www.4thestate.co.uk/2015/11/high-rise-40-years-of-cover-design/

Apparently Veyron is the also the name of a river in Switzerland... perhaps they had to pay to license it?

The case of the top secret iPod: https://tidbits.com/2020/08/17/the-case-of-the-top-secret-ipod/ I always treated my iPod as a SpyPod...

Ballroom Blitz isn't even on the bonus tracks on my CD... it's a bonus track on Sweet Fanny Adams. Not really a problem, since I'm planning to get Sweet F.A. anyway.

A.C.DC. (and a lot of the other tracks) are missing from the UK version of the album. Looks like about half the US tracks are from their previous album, Sweet Fanny Adams. And they started their run of hits with "Little Willy".

Happy Birthday!

The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys – Traffic

Desolation Boulevard – Sweet

Shoot Out the Lights – Richard and Linda Thompson

Spaced

The Ars Technica review of the 2020 27" iMac is up – mostly positive: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/2020-27-inch-imac-review-a-classic-mac-for-the-end-of-an-era/ Macworld: https://www.macworld.com/article/3570439/27-inch-imac-2020-review-the-latest-intel-imac-leaves-a-lasting-impression.html

Joe's Garage – Frank Zappa

Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster

First re-discovered this one years ago on Reverberation Radio: Golden Brown – The Stranglers La Mer – Avalon Jazz Band (Charles Trenet) I Love Paris (Cole Porter)

I'll read both of them, The Killer Inside Me and maybe Pop. 1280 too. It's being made into a movie again, but the pandemic probably pushed the release date back by a year or more.

Maybe this one (After Dark, My Sweet – 🥰 Rachel Ward) – I usually read the books before watching film versions: And this one (The Grifters): After reading The Maltese Falcon, I realized that a lot of the cheesy Sam Spade parodies are actually parodies of Spillane's Mike Hammer character (I guess a lot of screenwriters were too lazy to read the original material).

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett Started reading this one after blasting through Hammett's earlier novel, The Maltese Falcon (a bit of a disappointment). His writing style seems a lot clunkier than Raymond Chandler's or even Mickey Spillane's, but there is an energy and drama that keeps you going. Big points for being the first one, too.

AAA review as entertainment:

Macs can be picky about memory, too. I usually go with whatever is labelled "Mac or Apple Memory" rather than going by specs alone, as I've had some problems upgrading iMacs and MacBooks in the past. Since you can't alter memory settings on the logic board, there's no point getting overclocker memory unless it has a good chance of satisfying the basic requirements. In general, you don't want large heat sinks or spreaders that can get in the way of properly seating the memory modules.

The basic architecture (Navi) has been around since last July: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_RX_5000_series#Desktop Lots of reviews of the PC GPU cards since then. Apple has a custom clock and cooling solution, but the PC gaming benchmarks out there should give you a reasonable comparison, especially if you plan to run the iMac with Windows 10 in Boot Camp. PC Gamer on the 5500 XT: https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-radeon-rx-5500-xt-8gb-review/

It really depends on how hard you'll need to push graphics... even the 5300 is probably a big improvement from the GPUs in the previous iMac. The 5500 XT should be decent, but we'll have to wait until the performance tests are published.