If Borges had been born at the end instead of the beginning of the 20th century, we might never have been blessed with his wonderful stories as he would have become a software developer instead. At least he seems deeply fascinated by topics like recursion, logic and infinity. Some of his essays could have been…
I stopped playing competitive Pokemon for a while because I have some networking issues on my switch. It always takes multiple tries to find an opponent, presumably because I have no ipv4 address. But when I realized that there was an interesting tournament this weekend I couldn’t resist participating regardless. In the Armor Beginnings Cup,…
Greg Egan’s latest short story collection “Instantiation” consists of 11 hard science fiction stories that were published between 2013 and 2019. His ideas on how technology and science might evolve are as interesting and mindblowing as ever, and you get a quite diverse set of them here. Just to name a few examples: What would…
Why does God permit the manifestation of evil? I think it’s probably for the same reason that there are small, well-known bugs in every sufficiently large piece of software: The pain that would be caused by trying to fix the bug would outweigh the potential benefits. See, God is a pretty intelligent fellow. He figured…
Gravity’ Rainbow can be a lot of fun. But there are also these episodes being absolutely bleak and repulsive. There is this famous scene where a character eats shit. But I think all the stuff about sexual violence is much harder to stomach: She recalls his teeth before any other feature, teeth were to benefit…
My grandmother always encouraged me to try going all around on a swing. At the time I thought this was pretty reckless of her and I was much too scared to try it anyway. But she probably had read this section of Gravity’s Rainbow and knew I would be fine: Diverging oscillations of any kind…
Yashmeen Halfcourt is a mathematician and one of the major characters in Pynchon’s book “Against the Day”. And she seems to have figured out a way to beat the odds in roulette using prime numbers? But then wheels all up and down the Riviera, at Nice, Cimiez, Monte Carlo, Mentone, through the winter season and…
This year was my fifth time participating in the Global Game Jam and my third time being at my favourite jam site at WERK1 in Munich. Every time I’m going there I’m surprised at how rapidly the area is growing. This year there was a huge new skyscraper being built and also a giant Ferris…
This book was free for a day, so I picked it up on a whim. After reading it, I have an idea why they gave it away: It seems like a thinly veiled advertisement for one of their other (non-fiction) books. At the end of the book, there is an excerpt of it, and it…
Pynchon’s work is often accused of being quite ‘random’. But while Gravity’s Rainbow contains a lot of text about bananas, it could certainly not have been written by a monkey with a typewriter. There is an order to the madness. And I will show this by employing the same technique as one of the book’s…
Niklas Riewald 