Fred and Loathing on The Internet

I Take My Eggs The Way Spies Take Their Messages: Scrambled

2023-Oct-31

A backend only update to report. The multi-genre data model uses all three genres to assign a master_genre derived from polling all the possible genres each artist possesses. Dealing with the nulls was a pain. The pain of dealing with nulls in data bending cannot be understated. They’re the likeliest culprit in any data engineering error. Like a homicide detective too long on the job, I’ve come to rely somewhat on the heuristics of my professional experience.

The reviews will have to be fast and loose. I don’t want to bog down any blog post with too many opinions about all the media I consume. I try to go with Halo rules. Only two weapons at a time, and perhaps a few post scripts or interjections to pepper in between using the two primary weapons. Meaning I’ll do 2 books, games, movies, whatevers at a time

Books take primacy, and I am proud to relay to you dear readers that I’ve been a devout reader the past week or so. Several books assailed and surmounted. Midnight in Chernobyl had been gestating in my online library app for weeks. This slow movement was purely for personal reasons. I have been enamored with how close and pragmatic of a look at Soviet bureaucracy the writer has put forth. I bulldozed through the remaining three quarters of the book in days. I had thought I knew the extent of the damage caused by the Chernobyl incident. I was gravely mistaken. I was under the impression a ‘dirty bomb’ level of meltdown occurred. In reality there was an actual big blast explosion at the start of the incident, causing massive structural damage to the facilities, even having a reactor exposed and eventually sealed in a coffin engineered to contain its hazardous reactions.

The book is an overdose of little stories supporting the grander theme of Soviet style management that mitigates short term problems which exacerbate long term problems that could have been averted by tackling immediate problems head on, instead of dancing around the stigma of an incident that embarrases Soviet pride. I’d recommend the book to anybody who would want a first look at late Soviet style incompetence. It is as Kafkaesque as I think real life ever has been.

The other book to blog about is Spies by Calder Walton. A 20 hour audio one volume history of the US/UK vs USSR intelligence services. A book this long about Cold War espionage is pure catnip for me. I enjoy it most when they talk about the stuff I already know. I get as excited as I do when I see landscapes in movies that I have been in myself. I ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ everytime something familiar comes up. I do enjoy seeing the broader context of how these spy stories fit into a 100 year narrative about intelligence agencies. Deep down I know the real payoff is the revisiting of sensational stories about covert actions behind enemy lines or deep cover agents living a high tension life lying to institutions made to create and detect lies.