enne 💤

assorted #SFFBookClub blabs

(1) my recent review of Luminous for last month: https://books.theunseen.city/user/picklish/review/196025/s/luminous#anchor-196025

I thought it was an interesting comparison between Ray Nayler's The Mountain in the Sea that has a side plot point of virtual partner "point fives" as compared to something like the boyfriend robot Stephen in Luminous. Stephen is partially treated as a thing but the book is also about him developing his own sense of agency.

(2) my (less recent) review of The Library of Broken Worlds for this month: https://books.theunseen.city/user/picklish/review/102139/s/library-of-broken-worlds#anchor-102139

I asked this before, but: is there a word for a literary technique where the narrator elides obvious-to-them physical details about the world, speaking almost metaphorically, and leaving the reader having to do a lot of imaginative heavy lifting (and possibly bewildered)?

The Library of Broken Worlds does this in a similar way to books like Ninefox Gambit and The Archive Undying. If other folks read this book for June, I'd definitely be curious to hear about your thoughts on this style/technique.

wb everyone <333

@tripofmice@friend.camp much clearer to my eyes, thank you!

#SFFBookClub is our informal fediverse science fiction and fantasy book club. Everyone reading this is welcome to participate this month if any of these books look interesting, even if you've never joined before. See: https://sffbookclub.eatgod.org/

As a reminder, our May book is Luminous by Silvia Park. Tak quite liked it, so I'm excited to get to it this week: https://gush.taks.garden/note/2cf3d32d-bf50-4a52-a76e-4dc3cb6dca83

Please reply with suggestions or ideas or arguments for your favorite book.

@Fragglemuppet@fandom.ink I quite enjoyed Shelly Jay Shore's Rules for Ghosting: https://www.shelly-jay-shore.com/rules-for-ghosting

@twistylittlepassages@weirder.earth this is so cute! what a good idea

@afreytes@mastodon.gamedev.place I think that is the zeitgeist, but I will say that duolingo seems very "sticky" for the folks in my life who are using it; none of them find any other language learning tools to be something they can stick with, and nobody wants to "break their duolingo streak", and so they stick with it, even though it's gotten worse (and they too complain about it)

@Kiki@chaos.social Sorry to be so long-winded. <_< To answer your original question: (1) I don't know specifically that graphics tech evolved directly out of floating point units (2) I think the evolution towards highly parallel general purpose processing devices was pushed by a desire for better 3d graphics and was a natural evolution of rendering pipelines rather than an explicit goal

@Kiki@chaos.social

• somewhere in here I'd also say that integrated graphics became a thing, where motherboards got shipped with 2d graphics so you wouldn't need a separate video card, and these increased in capabilities from no 3d, to software 3d pipelines, to some hardware 3d

• shaders: the step after fixed-function pipeline is programmable vertex/pixel shaders, where you can submit geometry and then transform it semi-arbitrarily, and similarly write a program to transform the pixels going to screen; this started with like GeForce 3/xbox era

• highly parallelized etc: I'm out of the loop these days but this is like the era of nvidia cuda things, of highly parallelized uniform microprocessors that can perform arbitrary tasks. They can obviously do the things that the more static vertex/pixel shaders could do, but are infinitely more flexible.

@Kiki@chaos.social I am not an expert, but my informal understanding of graphics card hardware progression over time:

• 1980's: 2d graphics support via cga -> ega -> vga progression; hardware so that your computer could display pictures that weren't a terminal; as more memory was available then it could switch from low color/palettes to 256 colors?

• SNES Mode 7 Graphics is sort of an inbetween; hardware support to matrix transform a 2d buffer to make it appear 3d

• opengl / 3dfx voodoo cards: framebuffer support (for depth buffered polygon drawings) and texture mapping units to perspective transform 2d textures onto polygons; these early cards didn't support 2d graphics either so you'd also need one of those; this eventually led into fixed-function pipelines, where there's a set of vertex/pixel shader transforms that you can control knobs for and have set variables you can tweak, but aren't programmatic. The Nintendo Wii is in this category as an advanced example.

@DanUnhinged@weirder.earth I hate that the answer people take from this is "we should entrench ourselves further in this outwardly hostile platform"