Jeremy Keith

This is an infuriating book. So much so that I didn’t finish it.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the idea of The Pirate Queen. Telling the life story of Gráinne Ní Mháille is an excellent premise for some rip-roaring historical fiction. It’s even got an interesting structure alternating between three different parts of her life.

I was pleasantly surprised when I cracked open the book to find a small pronunciation guide to some Irish words in the front matter. It would be nice to have some Gaeilge scattered throughout the narrative. But that’s exactly what made this book so infuriating.

First off all, by dropping in an occassional Irish word into a sentence, it just made me think, “Wait, what language would these people be speaking?” Usually the answer was Irish. In which case, why translate one arbitrary word?

Then there’s the choice of the Irish word that gets dropped into the text most frequently…

The front matter has this to say about the irish word tá:

An affirmative statement similar to yes

Um, not really. Tá is present tense of the verb “be”. The English equivalent is “is”. You can’t just drop it in as a replacement for the word “yes”. But that’s exactly what Ariel Lawhon does.

This continually took me out of the story. One person asks a question like, “Did you see that?” and the other person answers, “Tá.” That just doesn’t make sense.

I know this sounds really nit-picky, but one of the first things you learn about Irish is that there is no single word for “yes” or “no”. It’s most common to respond with the positive or negative form of the verb in the question—“Did you see that?” “I saw!”

So of all the words to pointlessly switch into Irish, “yes” is by far the least suitable.

It happened every couple of pages. I was getting so annoyed, I flipped ahead to the acknowledgements to find out who was consulted on the use of Irish in the book. I found my answer. No one.

That seems somewhat irresponsible to me. It borders on being insulting. Would it have taken so much time and effort to have one single Irish speaker check the text?

Alas, the lack of research wasn’t just evident in the book’s treatment of the Irish language.

At one point, a young Gráinne is out walking with her brother, who is playing the uilleann pipes. I had to stop and check the text a few times. Perhaps I missed a bit where they sat down. But no, this book blithely describes a character walking and playing uilleann pipes at the same time.

Now if you think uilleann pipes are pretty much the same as Scottish highland pipes, this would make sense. But they’re not. A bare minimum amount of research would show that the uilleann pipes are played sitting down (you can try to play them standing up, but you’ll need some kind of extra gadget like Johnny Doran used, but even he couldn’t play them while walking).

I carried on reading even though I was getting more and more annoyed by the shoddiness on display. Then I read this sentence:

No more distant flicker of lanterns in the distance.

I get how you would write that sentence in a first draft. Hopefully you’d catch its redundancy in a subsequent draft. If not, it’s exactly the kind of thing that your editor is there to spot.

But no, this made it all the way to the final printed book, a book that was displayed prominently on tables in major bookstores in multiple countries. Compare and contrast that with When The Boys Came Out To Play by John Mackel, a book which will be likely only ever be read by a much smaller audience but which is crafted with so much more care.

I always feel slightly guilty if I don’t finish a book. I know, I know; life’s too short and all that. But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being a bit disrespectful to the author by not seeing their work through to the end. In this case though, the author displayed enough disrepect to her readers that I don’t think I need to feel bad about slamming this book shut.

The Pirate Queen is a sloppy piece of work. You deserve better.

An Cábla agus an t-Amhrán - YouTube

Well, this short film by the Irish Traditional Music Archive is right up my alley! It looks at the first transatlantic telegraph cable and the traditional music of West Kerry, particularly the song Ámhrán na Leabhar:

From the naomhóg, which for centuries connected the islands, peninsulas and coastal communities of Uíbh Ráthach, to the arrival of the world’s first successful transatlantic telegraph cable at Valentia, An Cábla agus an tAmhrán reveals a remarkable continuity: while technologies evolve, humanity’s desire to communicate, remember and pass stories from one generation to the next remains unchanged.

The Firefox team are asking us to weigh in on proposals for Interop 2027—what features should browsers be concentrating on implementing or improving.

Here are my top five:

1. Web app installation via <install> and navigator.install(). Prompts the user to install a progressive web app.
2. Speculation Rules API. Hints to the browser to proactively download pages in the background so they appear instantly when the user navigates to them.
3. CSS var() in size container queries. Such as @container (width >= var(--min-width)).
4. CSS flex-wrap: balance. Distributes items in a multi-line flex container so each line has about the same number of items.
5. Interest invokers. The interestfor attribute triggers actions on a target element when the user shows interest, such as via hover, focus, or long-press.

Those are very much in order of priority. Imagine them following a Pareto distribution; the top 20% (in other words, the first one) is 80% of my priority.

But other people have other priorities: Stu, Eric, Ana, Tyler, Paweł, Declan, Sara, and Cyd, for example.

There’s a lot of love for styleable select in there—can’t argue with that.

Get in there and rank your priorities. Then share them.

Introducing the Accessible Components Library - TetraLogical

A great little collection of accessible interactive components: dialogs, tabs, accordions, stuff like that.

Best of all, the components come with documentation: what problem is solves; when to use it; when not to use it; where to use it, and more.

Hot on the heels of reading and enjoying The Mountain In The Sea, I picked up Ray Nayler’s next work, this tightly constructed novella.

Once again it deals with inter-species communication. This time it’s de-extincted mammoths. Once again, it’s set in the relatively near future. Many of the same gadgets reappear in this book. It may well be set in the same world.

There’s a tangible atmosphere to this story. But despite it’s high-tech premise, it’s not escapist. The narrative is driven by the all-too-real issues of ivory poaching and big-game hunting.

And this is where I start to get a nagging feeling about Ray Nayler’s work. At times it seems to relish in describing the worst that humanity is capable of. It starts to veer into misanthropy. If you yourself are misanthropic, it will just come across as realism. But it feels a bit too easy, a bit too cheap.

I remember this happening with Paolo Bacigalupi’s books. I enjoyed The Wind-up Girl, but by the time I read The Water Knife, his misanthropy (and misogyny) had become self-parody:

Instead of asking what the future might actually be like, it instead asks “what’s the absolute worst that could happen?” Frankly, it’s a cop-out.

The book takes a similar tack with its characters. It assumes everyone’s terrible and will do terrible things. It’s lazy.

So you’ve got an unrelenting series of people behaving terribly in a horrific setting. It gets boring.

The Tusks Of Extinction isn’t that. It manages to maintain a balance. But I hope that the next Ray Nayler book I read won’t tip over into wallowing in the worst of our species.

I’ll find out soon enough. I’ve already got Palaces Of The Crow on loan from the library.

Back in 2019, I read the book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith and said:

I really enjoyed this evolutionary tale. It’s equal parts biology and philosophy. I will never look at cephalopods quite the same way again.

Reading Ray Nayler’s The Mountain In The Sea reminded so much of that book that I couldn’t resist flipping ahead to the acknowledgements at the back. Sure enough, Other Minds gets a big shout-out.

But that’s only part of the make-up of The Mountain In The Sea. There’s just as much William Gibson as Peter Godfrey-Smith.

I don’t just mean that the book is an unexpectedly rip-roaring cyberpunk thriller—which it is—but that it’s also got that Gibsonian narrative structure; three disconnected protagonists in three separate stories that you just know are going to connect before the book is done.

The great accomplishment of this book is how well it balances the two genres of philosophy and cyberpunk. There’s plenty of musings on the nature of consciousness, be it human, octopus, or artificial intelligence. But there’s also plenty of high-tech hacking shenanigans.

Above all, it’s an excellent example of one of my favourite subgenres of science fiction: first contact. It’s as linguistically satisfying as Ted Chiang’s Story Of Your Life, the pinnacle of the first-contact subgenre. The fact that there are no extra-terrestrial species just adds to its realism.

I am afraid my stuffed dinosaur will eat us all. He must be stopped

My computed probability of the risk that Chomp will eat me, or in statistical terms, P(CHOMP), is approximately 95%. This has been a tough realization for me, because I consider Chomp a close friend, and I insist that no harm or regulation should come to him. However, if he should succeed in making me his first human sacrifice, it gives me no joy to inform you that there is nothing to stop him from eating us all.

I know what you’re thinking, because I’ve heard it all before: Aren’t you just making up the words he’s saying? You’re the one who’s saying he wants to eat humans. I have to say, I’m insulted, and kind of sad for you. This kind of ad hominem attack only bolsters my argument. Why won’t you engage with the facts I have presented, namely that a stuffed dinosaur wants to devour all humans and only I can save us from that outcome?

Installing Websites Must Be Easy

A message to Apple from the W3C Technical Architecture Group:

We expect user agents to make installation an obvious affordance to users. Specifically, we expect the install option to clearly name the action, and to be easily reachable from the browser’s UI. An entry inside a menu with an unrelated label (such as Share), or several menu layers deep, does not meet this expectation.

The term “no-brainer” refers to a suggestion that is so compelling that it would be foolish to even consider not doing it.

I came across a no-brainer recently, thanks to Matt Hobbs:

Make all UK Government websites free to access without mobile data charges.

When I was done slapping my forehead at how obvious this proposal is, I signed the petition. If you’re a UK resident, you should do the same. And then spread the word.

This is the kind of proposal that I imagine any politician would be happy to support, regardless of party affiliation, so don’t be shy about contacting your local MP.

I guess in theory this could be opposed on the grounds that it technically violates net neutrality, but I would hope that the obvious societal benefits would outweigh that objection.

Like I said, a no-brainer.

The people holding up the internet | Data Drop

Bringing receipts for xkcd.com/2347.