Gene's List of Favorites
Copyright © 2001-2006 Gene Michael Stover.
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Why would I write a list of favorites?
Why would you care about my favorites?
Well, you probably don't care, but here's
my list of favorites, anyway.
- Good time with good friends. Like talking for
hours, late at night, over a cup of joe.
- Writing technical prose, computer programs, or fiction
- Reading poetry
- Shopping. It's not so much that I like to buy
things, but I enjoy wandering around stores & malls with
friends.
- Reading fiction
- Road trips & wandering around unfamiliar cities
- Playing video games
I sure wish I could say one of my favorite pasttimes was
writing poetry, but I do it so rarely & so poorly, that I
just can't claim that honestly.
3 Video Games
I only play console video games (Sony
Playstation 1 & 2, to be exact) & games that I can get on
one or another kind of unix.1
- Soul Reaver 1
- I like the story, I like
the premise. I love the mood,
the visuals, & the
soundtrack. I've heard that a
lot of people complain about all
the puzzles, especially the ones
with blocks, but I love those.
Of all the RPG & adventure
games I've played, this is probably
the only I've played through the
most, probably 10 times.
- .hack
- Okage
- Looks like claymation in a video game. Great
soundtrack, cute story & characters. Rosalyn & her pink
shadow are too much.
- Silent Hill 3
- Maybe this game ties with Soul
Reaver 2. I'm not sure. It's not as frightening or
disturbing as the previous two Silent Hill games, but it's
still really good. Maybe what makes it not as good as the
other two Silent Hills is that it finishes the story.
Also, it seems that you do more combat in it & less
running for your life.
- Primal
- I got this game in April 2004, which must
have been more than a year after its release. It's great!
I has a lot of the things I love about the Soul Reaver
games: good characters & story, good puzzles, a modern
mythology that hints of Egyptian & similar inspirations.
The soundtrack is great & also reminds me of Soul Reaver.
I'm sure Primal's designers played & liked Soul Reaver.
- Silent Hill 1
- I love this horrific tragedy.
Good characters, excellent mood.
The grainy picture & the
limited field of vision (whether
from fog or flashlight). The
monsters are made more horrific
by their... hmmm, I guess it's
their abstractness. Ties with
Soul Reaver 1 for best soundtrack.
I also like how the elements of the
(rather detailed & complex) plot
leave unanswered questions. They
aren't gaping & well-defined
unanswered questions that make you
anticipate a sequel. They're better
than that; they are ill-defined
questions that arise because the
elements of the story don't fit
together cleanly. They almost fit
together, but not quite, so you end
up cogitating it for days. Great
stuff, that. Absolutely
a beautiful game.
Update, 2 November 2003: Since writing that, I've
played a lot of video games on Playstation 2 & Xbox.
I've become accustomed to the graphics & sound on those
systems. Silent Hill 1 is a game for Playstation 1, with
noticeably inferior graphics by comparison. Yet I still
love it.
- Silent Hill 2
- Technically better than
Silent Hill 1, but this game loses some
of the SH1 horrific tragedy
appeal because it makes it
a little more obvious that the
game designers were creating a
tragedy. (They were trying too
hard?) In SH1, it sort of sneaks
up on you. The soundtrack isn't
as good as SH1's. Nevertheless,
it's here on my list of five favorite
video games.
- Soul Reaver 2
- Better story than SR1, but it's
kind of short, & the soundtrack
isn't as good.
- Rez
- See my
review.
I like different movies for different
reasons, so I have more than one list
of favorites.
In general, I most appreciate
tragedy, horror, & drama. I'll
never wish I saw a particular comedy,
though I don't dislike them. Action
movies just plain shouldn't exist.
Movies that, I think, qualify as
good movies for traditional,
``important'',
reasons. I guess these are what
I consider the movie version of
what some
people call
``serious literature''.
- F l C l (2000). It's a Japanese anime. ``F l C l''
is pronounced like ``fooley cooley''. Nobody knows what it
means; the characters discuss it briefly without coming to
a conclusion.
- Jaws (1975). Too bad
everyone thinks it's a mediocre horror movie. It's not horror at
all; it's drama.
- Logan's Run (1976). Okay, a lot
of people are probably laughing that
anyone would put this movie on their list
of favorites. I think it's an excellent
depiction of the ultimate myth as
described by Joseph Campbell in
his book Hero with a Thousand Faces.
- Invaders from Mars (1953). If you've seen it at
all, you think it's a bad science fiction movie. Don't
look at it as shallow science fiction. Look under the
surface. It's a great, possibly perfect, demonstration of
the paranoia of the 1950s. In that respect, it's like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), but I think
Invaders from Mars does a better job. What's more,
it shows the situation from the point of view of a little
boy, in which the motivations & actions of adults are a
mystery-possibly natural & possibly not. It also
depicts lots of symbolism that might come from the same
paranoid little boy's sexual fantasies: He becomes the
saviour of his prone, pretty teacher
whose mind is about to be invaded by a descending,
telescoping, metal probe. Tell me there isn't Sigmund
Freud wouldn't find that interesting. The straight-armed
running aliens are a laugh, though; I haven't seen the
likes of them again until an episode of Doctor Who
called ``Time & the Rani''.
- Jacob's Ladder
Movies that might not have
the best story, but appeal to me
for cinematography, soundtrack,
or an artsy mood.
- Boogiepop Phanton (2000).
It's a Japanese anime, sort of
The Outer Limits meets
Jaccob's Ladder. Excellent
soundtrack. Great stuff.
A nice Web site about Boogiepop,
complete with a timeline, list of characters,
& some discussion to help you make sense
of the complex stories is
John's Boogiepop Phantom Shring.
- Suspiria (1977).
Absolutely beautiful cinematography &
a perfect soundtrack.
- The Keep (1983).
- Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).
Subtly spooky if you let your
imagination go with it.
- The Big Blue
- City of Lost Children
- Legend
- Nadja (1994)
- Days of Heaven (1978). I like it for cinematography
& the little girl's narrative. I've never been
able to detect anything that resembles a true plot.
I've heard that
Il Conformista (1970)
has some of the greatest cinematography
ever. I've long since intended to
see it for that reason, though I've
never gotten around to it.
After seeing any of these movies,
I left the theatre (or rewound
the video tape) feeling that I had had a
good time.
- Serial Experiments: Lain (1998).
Another Japanese anime. My only wish
is that the separate episodes had a
more cohesive story.
- The Secret of Roan Inish (1994).
- A.I. (2001). I liked the
modern, fairy tale feel,
the symbolism, the romance, & the
moral. Yeah, hyped
though it was, I thought it had
a moral.
- Tron (1982)
- City of Darkness.
Not sure what I liked about this.
Maybe I liked it for the mood,
in which case it should be in that section.
- Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969). Hey,
it's got a computer in it. I'd like to
see more movies about doomsday machines.
(Yeah, I know about Wargames, not bad, but
the original Star Trek episode called
``The Doomsday Machine'' was far
better. Hell, it's even better than
Colossus. Maybe I should list it here.)
There are no good comedies. It is impossible for any movie
to be good based on comic merit alone. To deny this fact is
to deny the nature of reality itself.
- The Prisoner
- The most complex commentary about
the individual's relationship to
society.
- Doctor Who
- An excellent & stable morality play, & I want a TARDIS.
- Christian Death
- My favorite album is ``The
Scriptures'', by Christian Death. Their version of
Hendrix's ``1983'' on that album is the best version
of that song. ``Jezebel's Tribulation'' is too funny.
They are the source of 1,001 great quotes, including:
- ``Vendors of love, standing on end. And the
world's destiny? Adultery.''
- ``If a god let's us live, should we be greatful?''
- ``Cast her into a bed, & them that commit
adultery, with...me.''
- ``Get thee behind me!'' ``Sure thing, I like it
that way, in the flesh of the temples is where I play.''
(From some song on``Sexy Death God'')
- Tangerine Dream
- There's no such thing as ``too many
notes'', & these dudes understand that completely.
- Miranda Sex Garden
- Dreamily romantic, beautiful
female voices, & sometimes complex á capella.
- John Cale
- Dry, witty, poetic, & wise.
- Switchblad Symphony
- I can dance to it.
7 Programming Languages
- Lisp
- If you don't know why it's my
favorite language, it's because
you don't know Lisp, & that's
fine. Lisp isn't for everyone.
- C
- Pure, simple, flexible, portable.
Possibly the perfect low-level
language, but that doesn't mean
it's the appropriate language
for directly
implementing modern applications.
I think it's the perfect portable
intermediate (or pseudo-assembly)
language.
- Bourne shell
- Great for scripts. And Unix pipes are
a primitive, useful, &
criminally underappreciated
implementation of the currently
vogue component-based
software engineering.
Korn shell & bash are
close enough pseudo-Bourne
shells.
- Perl
- It ain't pretty, but it's damned
useful. When a C implementation
would take too much time to write,
Bourne shell won't do the task
conveniently, & the program
requirements exclude Lisp, Perl
is the winner.
- Ada
- One of it's design goals was that
the average programmer2
could do
less harm than good with Ada.
It's unambiguous,
flexible, documented, & endeavours to
be maintainable.
If more modern programming projects
used Ada or a similar language,
the world would be a better place.
Java ain't bad, though it's sure boring, & all
those remora technologies3muddy the Java waters. Java doesn't really give you
anything new; it's an imperative Algol-descendant, just like
most modern languages. No big deal, & no new ideas.
Java
is the Cobol of object orientation: A
worthy attempt. It achieves a sort of
simplicity through brute force. If the goal is to
create a language that nearly anyone can use &
learn, & whose standard is open, & which
can be (or has been) ported to nearly any
platform, I still say we should use Ada, &
instead of compiling to instructions for
a virtual machine, which are sometimes
then compiled to native code, I say we should
compile to C as the intermediate language,
then compile that to native code in all
cases.
C++ is just stupid. Look how complex it
is. It must be the most complex
programming language yet devised by the
human race.4And what special features does
it give you in exchange for all
that complexity? Nothing! C++
doesn't have any features that some other
language hasn't had for years, & probably
with less complexity. Lots of languages
have classes, objects, strong typing, &
compile-time typing these days.
And templates? Ha! Lisp macros blow 'em away, trust
me (& any other Lisp programmer), & you can get a more
manageable parameterized modules even in C by generating
code at compile-time. Ada has
some features that rival C++'s templates, too;
they are simpler to use & less error-prone for
the programmer.
Word processors & their WYSIWYG
interfaces are well-intentioned
evils. You're better off with
LATEX. If not that, then write
in raw HTML. A document-description
language like LATEX or HTML
allows you to concentrate on your
content where a WYSIWYG interface
distracts you into worrying about
appearance.
Appearance can be
important - if you're designing
greeting cards or movie posters.
The farther your document is from those,
the
more time you should invest in your
document's content & composition. For a novel, a short
story, or an essay, WYSIWYG is useless or truly detrimental.
- Peter Norvig. Paradigms of Artificial
Intelligence: Case Studies in Common Lisp. Published
by Morgan Kaufman in 1992. It's my
single favorite book about programming &/or
computer science.
- John Gardner. Grendel. 1989. Most
thought-provoking
book I've read. Hell, I'm still trying to
figure out some of it. Poor Grendel had an accident.
- The Moomintroll books by
Tove Jansson. (I've read the
English translations only.)
I re-read them nearly every year. Great
stuff. Sort of Winnie-the-Pooh from a
culture that doesn't try to keep their
children naïve until they're 30 years old. (I don't mean
any disrespect to the Winnie-the-Pooh
books, though.)
- Larry Niven. Protector. 1973. It's a great
hard-sci-fi novel in many respect, but by intention or
accident, it's a perfect demonstration of ``Necessity is
the mother of invention''.
- Keither Laumer. Bolo. The original, not the
newer ones. It's a collection of short stories about some
autonomous continental seige machines. Good, classic
science fiction.
- Mysteries, especially
dry, pure ones, like those by
P.D. James. I don't like those
comic mysteries that appear to be
so common. Ugh.
My favorite cuisines are Indian & Japanese. My favorite
food is probably fish & salads.
Don't care much for
chicken; it's too bland & character-less. Some people
have said in reply ``But with the right
sauces, you can make chicken taste like
anything you want!'' True, & that's what I
dislike about chicken. I like foods with
lots of character, not so little character
that they can be dressed-up as anything else.
- Tea
- Coffee
- Meyer's dark rum sour
Well, I don't like the doomsday machines themselves because
they spell D O O M, but I love the genre in any medium.
Some examples of the doomsday machine genre include:
- The ``Doomsday Machine'' episode of original Star
Trek. Independent of being a Star Trek episode, this is
one of the best doomsday machine stories of all.
- The Bolo stories by Keither Laumer & some guest
authors. These are sort of doomsday machine stories in
reverse.
- The Berzerker novels & short stories by Fred
Saberhagen & a few guest authors. Some of the best were
in the Berzerker Base collection.
- Battlestar: Gallactica
- Movie ``The
Terminator'' (1984)
- The ``Nomad'' episode of original Star Trek.
- Movie: ``Colossus: The Forbin
Project'' (1970)
It's not really a doomsday machine movie, but it's
close.
- honorable mention movie:
``Wargames''
(1983)
I call this an honorable mention because it isn't
exactlya doomsday machine story, but if I include the
Colossus movie (which I have), I can't think of a reason
the Wargames isn't one, too.
What is the doomsday machine genre? It features ancient,
misunderstood automatons which intend to destroy anything
living. You can't reason them out of their task. They are
usually space-faring, maybe even un-manned starships
themselves. Saberhagen's berzerkers are the epitome.
- Suizette & Leopold
- Melissa S.
- Alan Turing
- Ryoko
Gene Michael Stover
2008-04-20
