{"id":547,"date":"2003-10-18T14:59:38","date_gmt":"2003-10-18T21:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=547"},"modified":"2003-10-18T14:59:38","modified_gmt":"2003-10-18T21:59:38","slug":"quicksilver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2003\/10\/18\/quicksilver\/","title":{"rendered":"Quicksilver"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m about halfway through <i>Quicksilver<\/i>, Neil Stephenson&#8217;s new novel.  This book is going to appeal to a lot less people than <i>Cryptonomicon<\/i>, mostly because you have to be a real hard core geek to love what he&#8217;s doing in this novel, not just some half-ass computer nerd who built his last computer.  That being said, and unhumbly labeling myself as a member of the former class, so far the book has me hooked.<br \/>\nBut what I&#8217;m really writing this entry about is not to give a review of the book (see the New York Times <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2003\/10\/05\/books\/the-original-information-age.html\">review<\/a> or Lundblad&#8217;s review.) &#8230;especially considering I haven&#8217;t finished it yet! What really struck me in reading Stephenson is how his books remind me of the best conversations I&#8217;ve had.  You know one of those conversations at a party where the ideas flow like spittle from a rabid dogs mouth (hee hee!)  Where you lose track of time and how cold it is standing outside on the back porch in the middle of winter but wouldn&#8217;t give up your company or the conversation for anything.  In fact, when I think about all of the authors that I consider my favorites, all of them, Philip Dick, Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, etc. give me this same feeling.<br \/>\nWell in honor of Stephenson, I don&#8217;t know how to end this entry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m about halfway through Quicksilver, Neil Stephenson&#8217;s new novel. This book is going to appeal to a lot less people than Cryptonomicon, mostly because you have to be a real hard core geek to love what he&#8217;s doing in this novel, not just some half-ass computer nerd who built his last computer. That being said, &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2003\/10\/18\/quicksilver\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Quicksilver&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-read-you-tweed"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}