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| Horrible things are happening...you'll see... |
Besides computer things, I've been reading books and watching movies & series. For books I'd like to mention two books, neither of which are about computers this time. Firstly I'll talk a few words about Pussikaljaromaani (literally Bag Beer Novel) by Mikko Rimminen from 2004, which was a Finlandia nominee at the time. The novel was compared favorably to old modernist (from early 20th century) one day novels with stream of mind narration, Alastalon salissa by Volter Kilpi and Putkinotko by Joel Lehtonen. Those on their own part were back in the days compared to Ulysses by James Joyce.
Shortly, I was not impressed. For structural reasons I can see why it was being praised, but I just didn't find it very fun or pleasant to read. Content did not give anything to me and it felt more like a phony-funny postmodern parody of those modernist novels, and more of a chore to read than the old books.
I do admit though, that I found it better than most Finnish books - on the other hand I have hard time thinking of a handful of Finnish books that I'd ever liked of. Also to be honest it felt like a book I could have imagined to write myself, not to mention how in literature studies it used to be common to come across with "unusual" features in literature. Those might be two reasons why I didn't really like the book: to me it felt like something too much dealt about both on narratological and content-wise level. What feels like a cliché to me is often not that to the big audience. Unfortunately that goes also vice versa at times: I follow mainstream entertainment so little that sometimes the most typical events in everyman's entertainment fiction feels fresh to me.
Samurai
Another book I'd like to talk about is Samurai - Japanilaisen hävittäjälentäjän muistelmat by Saburo Sakai and Martin Caidin & Fred Saito, which is a Western variant of Japanese flying ace Saburo Sakai's autobiography. The Finnish translation was released in 1958. I had had this book on my reading queue since at least 2000's, but I'm actually recalling I was supposed to read it already in 1990's. I had it once borrowed already from the library of Tampere, but I had so many other books as well that someone reserved the book before I had started it. That was unexpected, since the book was a storage book which had not been borrowed very frequently.
After having read the book I also found out that it's argued that Caidin exaggerated various factors in the book in order to increase its sell value in the Western markets - there'd been no proper possibilities to check facts in 1950's anyway, and the English language original book was never released in Japan as such. I have no proper ways to check facts either - there are many cases in the book which are about to suspend disbelief, yet they could well be possible. For instance there is a case where Sakai encountered 15 Grumman Hellcat planes and came close by because he thought they'd been friendly Zero planes (Sakai had lost sight on his another eye from earlier wounds). However, he managed to survive the encounter intact back to base on Iwo Jima after long pages of evading (p. 256-265). If the opposing pilots were inexperienced, it definitely could've happened. Nevertheless, my point here is, that I can't confirm these cases: from Wikipedia I can find this case being referred to another book from 1985, but since I don't have that book, I can't check if that book has gotten its data straight from Samurai for instance.
The translation does not exactly alleviate the issues with text. In Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saburō_Sakai) there is an English quote from Sakai about ruggedness of American Wildcat planes:
"I had full confidence in my ability to destroy the Grumman and decided to finish off the enemy fighter with only my 7.7 mm machine guns. I turned the 20 mm cannon switch to the 'off' position and closed in. For some strange reason, even after I had poured about five or six hundred rounds of ammunition directly into the Grumman, the airplane did not fall, but kept on flying. I thought this very odd — it had never happened before — and closed the distance between the two airplanes until I could almost reach out and touch the Grumman. To my surprise, the Grumman's rudder and tail were torn to shreds, looking like an old torn piece of rag. With his plane in such condition, no wonder the pilot was unable to continue fighting! A Zero which had taken that many bullets would have been a ball of fire by now. "
This section also is in Finnish in the book I read, or at least almost:
"Tältä etäisyydeltä en tarvinnut tykkiä; lasketin 200 konekiväärinluotia sen ohjaamoon ja näin niiden repivän rikki ohutta metallia ja lasien pirstoutuvan. En voinut uskoa silmiäni; Wildcat jatkoi suoraa lentoaan kuin mitään ei olisi tapahtunut. Zero, joka olisi saanut niin monta luotia sisuksiinsa, olisi ollut nyt jo yhtenä tulipallona."
The Wikipedia reference's source is not fully clear, because it refers to a webpage which claims the quote coming from Sakai's book "Zero", but I can't find reference to a book exactly by that title. Therefore it might well be that the English quote is not from the English version of Samurai but another book where the quote is dealt differently - I don't know.
In any case, for those who can't read Finnish, the differences (in addition to obvious abbreviation) are that in the Finnish text it's claimed Sakai shot only 200 bullets to the cockpit of the plane. These claims of 200 bullets to cockpit are already internally a bit inconsistent, since elsewhere in the book it has been insinuated earlier that 200 shots per shot down plane was a fairly nice result. In addition it sounds odd if shooting specifically the cockpit did not kill the pilot - Sakai is told to go closer after shooting to look hail the pilot while wondering how it was still just flying forth. In my quote there are no remarks about the shredded rudder, but that actually is in the book later down the page.
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| Sort of an Easter egg: Doesn't this look like a murder weapon? |
Assembly mnemonic HCF
Then is the turn of a television series - although I'm not even certain are fictional video series entertainment really counted as television material anymore, since more and more people are not exactly watching them by television broadcasts. At least as far as I know, nobody I know would call direct-to-video shows or movies as television programs if they're not actually broadcast by a TV channel. Anyway, I watched a full season of a modern series (2014-2017) for the first time since the 2003 launched Battlestar Galactica (which on its own right was approximately the first contemporary non-animated fictional series I had seen since 1990's).
The name of the series is Halt and Catch Fire. It was their last, best hope for a better IBM PC compatible computer. It failed - to become a Macintosh before Macintosh. And I'm well aware that I'm having an allusion to a completely irrelevant another series. In any case, I had not really seen much fiction which would have a strong plot device on historical computer(s). As in this was not retrocomputing even while I think one reason they decided to make a period drama revolving around computer emergence of 1980's, was that retrocomputing has been sort of fashionable in 2010's. Nostalgia bites sweetly.
Basically content of the series was nice, although I was slightly annoyed by so many storytelling conventions that I assume are trendy nowadays with most American "quality" fiction series. Those things would probably be also part of the reasons why those series are nowadays popular and compared favorably to older style of making series TV fiction. That is drama for reasons of drama. I found the characters highly fabricated - not so much of uncreditable by acting, but rather made filled by "drama potential" by their nature just for story reasons. Ie. every character in the series seems really wrecked from some point of a view in such fashion that it will "naturally" cause conflicts with other people, and therefore there will be gain of dynamic events and excitement from plot twists all the time. That feels to me mostly as annoying and estrangening - especially as of as two of three (or four) protagonists annoyed. Again, I'm not sure about how common this is, since I don't watch series, but I have indirectly gotten the impression that this kind of scriptwriting would be typical lately. If it is, I just find it a stupid fashion which got old 10+ years ago. Still, the core content and some other characters carried out the season easily, despite the sides which I disliked in the series.
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| At least I won't get spoiled with German texts. |
Hollywood went computers
Finally movies: I have had this theme of "computer" with films I've been trying to muster for watching. Since I've already written so much, I'll try to abbreviate my comments on movies to only a sentence for two movies:
1. The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969) - a disappointment, since most of the movie the "computer" was really just a kid who got his brains act like a computer, but what should be expected from a Disney produced comedy.
2. Electric Dreams (1985) - otherwise an average romantic comedy/drama apart from the very prominent presence of a vintage computer in da haus which made me quite excited and perplexed about the model of the device used in the film; also from a modern point of view the natural 1980's contemporariness felt really fresh after all these years.
