Fred and Loathing on The Internet

It has been a few months since I reviewed a big nonfiction book here on the blog. There is a lot of book reading going on with me lately. Honest. You’ll have to take my word for it. Big fat nonfiction books. The kind that take weeks to finish. It should take me less than a few weeks for each of these, but the books are eventually getting finished. To bring myself to dig into these kinds of books feels like a war of attrition. More than I’d like to admit. I know once I actually put the book in my hands, letting go becomes just as hard as picking the book up. These deep books are a drag on the time management of my personal cybernetic systems.

The book we are talking about today was pretty good. It’s called The Rise of The Machines by Thomas Rid. Published not too long ago, so these machines mentioned in the title have been rising for over seventy years, or so says this author. The subtitle of this book is A Cybernetic History. This added subtitle aids in the discovery of this book when using a web search. When you ask a web search machine for the title of the book, the subtitle gives you extra search terms to filter past the third Terminator film. Guessing from how most web search engines want to steer you when searching for this title, T3 is the most popular one.

I found this book to be pretty good. The book entertained me. To me, a seasoned veteran of reading about cyber-whatever-you-can-think-of for decades, fiction or nonfiction—I found the book...

Contemporary enough material is what we have today: an animated feature from DreamWorks released within a year of this blog post’s publication. Wow, that's fresh! Hope that matters when this is (if?) read far in the future.
The other day I watched The Wild Robot. From what I can gather from my doom scrolling, this one was supposed to be a critics-and-awards darling. What drew me to the movie is the very fact that it is a big-budget Hollywood production dedicated to some mechanical lifeform, hopefully up to some thought-provoking hijinks made with dazzling animation.
That is what we have with The Wild Robot: A very decent movie. Not exactly great. Filled with some stunning images, sequences, story points, characters — all the parts that, when put together, make a well-crafted film worth remembering. I would say that this movie has droves of things to commend. However, it did not stir me as much as some other “teaching a robot how to love” movies I’ve seen. That particular movie type is one in which I have echelons of favorites.
I’m not the type to do numerical rankings. Separating films into the S/A/B tier of worth-remembering is something I can endorse — and practice. The Wild Robot is squarely good enough to get into the B class, which is nothing to sneeze at. This rating does get a bit specific because too many could qualify. This very idea of “teaching a robot how to love” is somewhat the original idea of all science fiction. I’m usually only concerned with...

Today we will be talking about the sitcom Father Ted. Before we get into discussing this show, we’ll start with the reason why it was chosen to be in the fredlambuth.com blog spotlight. I have enjoyed a few Father Ted episodes. They were entertaining, but there was no special hold placed on me after being amused. The reason I want to talk about this show is not about discovering the novelty of its oddball style of comedy. No, the reason Father Ted has resurfaced to my attention is because of drum and bass music.

Now, for those readers out there, you might not know this, but the namesake of this website’s blog really enjoys drum and bass music. Just what is drum and bass music, you ask? Well, it does include the sounds of a drum kit being struck. The sound of a string bass is not always present with this drum sound. In fact, quite rarely is there an actual bass in drum’n’bass. Usually, it’s drums and whatever sample the DJ can find and throw into the mix. The drum beat is usually an interplay between the snare and a cymbal on the drum kit. Maybe some hi-hat. These two things are played pretty fast.

This flavor of music nestled its way into my brain since the PlayStation 1 and 2 era video games, mostly from playing a lot of driving games from that period. I think the creators of the games of that era were on to the right idea for selecting music that elicits concerted effort from the audience. Or, I tell myself that and that music is imprinted on the...