Fred and Loathing on The Internet

He Wore Sneakers For Sneaking

2023-Nov-11

The launch of the rebuilt fredlambuth.com is not going to be happening anytime soon. Definitely not in the few weeks left in this calendar year. There is progress being made. The new backend is more or less working, so there will be a little bit of history using the new data model when the front-end changes to accommodate the richer amount of data. The ‘recently_played’ field will definitely be the first Flask view I will write. A very dynamic page swimming with SVGs or any other HTML 5 trick I have learned.

I am nearing the end of the 20 hour audiobook of the historian Calder Walton’s Spies. As the book pushed past the fall of the Cold War the story became much more political rather than a track record of espionage agencies trading blows with one another, which had been the tempo a few chapters in. Rather it shifts to the story of how Putin, a dedicated agent in the KGB, an intelligence agency that became the de facto ruling agency of the USSR before its collapse, navigated the disastrous 90s Russia experienced trying to get capitalism to spring forth after the Soviet collapse.

Unless somebody were to be interested in the intrigues of international espionage, I feel this book does not offer too much. Perhaps I took too long to finish the book, because I can hardly recall what were the outcomes to be concluded that the author mentioned in the first chapter. Instead I took each chapter as 5-10 year episodes in the near century long Cold War. The book and the topic itself is ripe with acronyms that point to organizations in several countries, and code names made to be inscrutable on purpose. Keeping abreast of what is happening requires either a very comprehensive reading style or a familiarity with the insider language of the intelligence community.

After getting such a high up, but thoroughly enjoyable, survey of Cold War intelligence battles I feel the itch to pick one of the new topics I picked up from this book and zoom in. Especially Russia in the 90s. Sounds like the Wild East.

I eventually will write a much larger critique of the video game Cyberpunk 2077 once I finish the last story mission. I have put an embarrassing amount of hours into it over the past few weeks. Open world games and cyberpunk just really do it for me. I was helpless once I saw how high I could get the specs running smoothly on my PC. The game gives me some enjoyable meta moments when I admire my hardware displaying the protagonist’s hardware. It also gives me unpleasant meta moments when I see the similarities in the games alternate history with our own tech-dystopian timeline.

Just recently I found out there is an open-world Robocop game that is made by developers dedicated to the greatest movie ever made. I can’t go on too many video game benders in a row. Once I have that hankering again I think I’ll see how those devs portrayed old Detroit in 2023. With Peter Weller doing the voice!