The Fuller Memorandum is the third book in the Laundry or Bob Howard series by Charles Stross. The series combines hard science-fiction, spy thriller, and Lovecraftian horror. The first two books are The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue.

The book starts very strong, with a prologue titled “Losing My Religion” by Bob Howard, the main protagonist in the series. In this he writes that he started out as an atheist, and wished he could go back to the comforting certainties of atheism, but the nature of his work for the Laundry, Her Majesty’s occult secret service, as a computational demonologist have made him a believer of the One True Religion.

The Truth is that my God is coming back.
When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun.
And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.

The story in this book takes place a couple years after The Jennifer Morgue, the second book in the series. Bob Howard is now the manager of the Laundry’s IT-department and married to Dominique “Mo” O’Brien. Like with any hard working couple work occasionally follows them home, but when work includes zombie assassins and minions of a mad god’s cult things are rapidly spinning out of control. On top of that his boss Angleton disappears and a top-secret dossier, the Fuller Memorandum, goes missing. What’s the connection and who or what is the Eater of Souls?

Rating:

I have some mixed feelings about this book. It’s still very good, but it’s not the same genre anymore as the first book in the series. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, the second book was already different from the first, but the differences weren’t as pronounced.
The first novel, The Atrocity Archives, is fast-paced, geeky, hard science-fiction with Lovecraftian horror and some elements from the archetypal British spy novel mixed with sarcasm, humor and satire. The third book, The Fuller Memorandum, is a Lovecraftian spy thriller. I don’t know if it can still be called science-fiction. A lot — but mind you not all — of the geekyness, wittiness, humor, satire and sarcasm have gone too. The characters have gained in depth and the storytelling has improved, but I liked the first novel of the series a lot more.

See my reviews on the The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue.

The Jennifer Morgue is the second book in the Laundry or Bob Howard series by Charles Stross. This review contains some minor spoilers.

Did you ever experience the feeling of being turned into a zombie while watching a PowerPoint presentation? Well, here it is for real, a PowerPoint presentation is used to turn people into zombies. After barely surviving this ordeal, Bob Howard, computer übergeek and demonology hacker extraordinaire in his Majesty’s occult secret service, must stop software billionaire Ellis Billington. Billington has managed to get his hand on a Soviet Cold War device that permits communication with the dead. He plans to use it to raise an eldritch horror, codenamed Jennifer Morgue, from the Stygian depths, in order to rule the world.

The Jennifer Morgue

The entire operation has been put under a specific geas by Ellis Billington, meaning that if the good guys want to win they have to play it by the rules of the archetypal British spy novel. So you have a huge yacht in the Caribbean, a very rich evil mastermind with a white cat, casinos, martinis (shaken, not stirred), and you also need a British secret agent. Don’t tell Bob, he’s not supposed to know.
And you’ve got to have girls — Bond girls. There is the gorgeous looking (at least glamor level 3) Ramona Random from the Black Chamber, who planted a demon on her in order to control her — not just any demon but a succubus. Every man she has ever slept with died horribly less than 24 hours later. Can she be trusted?  Is she even human? What will Bob’s girlfriend Dominique “Mo” O’Brien do? Lie back and think of England? Yeah right, when hell freezes over.
What is the role of the Laundry, Britain’s occult secret service? The Laundry wouldn’t be the Laundry if they played by the rules, at least to other people’s rules.

Rating:

Charles Stross did it again. This is the second book in the Laundry or Bob Howard series, where hard science fiction is mixed with the British spy novel and Lovecraftian horror, and spiced with humor, sarcasm and satire. Not as geeky, fast-paced and witty as the first novel in the series, The Atrocity Archives, but still very good.
Click here for my review of the first novel.

For the past 7 months I have posted a monthly article on this blog with photos taken during the previous month. I have decided to pull the plug on the series.

Don’t get me wrong. It was fun: taking the pictures, learning how to use iPhoto first and iMovie later, creating my first video, uploading it to YouTube, and receiving comments from the viewers on this blog and on FaceBook.

So, why stop?

At the start, I had hoped I would be able to document my progress fighting this debilitating disease called ME/CFS. Alas, my condition got worse.
This hasn’t stopped me from taking pictures, but I more and more found the monthly schedule too restrictive. I am still taking pictures and I intend to put them on my blog when I have enough photos on a certain topic. Some topics that I have in mind will only take a day or two under the right conditions, others will require a year or more.

Some of the topics I have in mind:

• Kitesurfing at Ostend Beach
• Kitefestival at Ostend
• the four seasons in nature reserves
• close-ups of plants and insects
• birds (per family or per biotope)
• assignments from books on photography
• …

Maybe I could even make documentaries with voice-over. As you can see, I don’t lack ideas, I just find that the monthly format has become too restrictive.

What do you get when you mix hard science fiction, a spy thriller, a loathing for bureaucracy, a computer hacker as main protagonist, Lovecraftian horror, a wicked sense of humor and set it all in an alternate history? Answer: The Bob Howard or Laundry series by Charles Stross.

This is a review of the first novel of the series: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross.

The grinning sallow face of Fred from Accounting looms out of the darkness in front of me and I recoil before I realise that it’s all right — Fred’s been dead for more than a year, which is why he’s on the night shift.

The premise for the series is that certain mathematical computations, the Turing-Lovecraft Theorem, can be used to open gates to other dimensions and universes or summon demons and even worse things that, as Terry Pratchett puts it, even the dark is afraid of. Or you could use some candles, a human sacrifice, and some other stuff, but that’s old school.

The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic realm of mathematics — computerised or otherwise — draws them forth. (And you thought running that fractal screensaver was good for your computer?)

The main protagonist is Bob Howard, a computer geek now working as a low-level techie for the Laundry, Britain’s super-secret, occult, government agency. As a student they caught him messing with stuff he shouldn’t have and offered him the choice to either work for the Laundry or … Well, it wasn’t much of choice anyway.

I thought I was just generating weird new fractals; they knew I was dangerously close to landscaping Wolverhampton with alien nightmares.

The Atrocity Archives

After a while he gets bored and volunteers for active duty on Her Majesty’s Secret Occult Service, which is something he will regret several times during the novel when fighting zombies, Nazis, nameless horrors, and his line-manager.

Rating:

This is a special kind of fast-paced geeky science fiction that I had never encountered before. Take William Gibson’s cyberpunk, Terry Pratchett’s sarcasm and humor, Lovecraft’s horror, and Ian Fleming’s James Bond and this will give you most of the ingredients. I am not really a fan of Lovecraft, but in the mix served up by Charles Stross it is simply irresistible.
This is not going to be everyones cup of tea. You will either like it very much or not at all. Be prepared to read sentences like “Most of it boils down to the application of Kaluza-Klein theory in a Linde universe constrained by an information conservation rule. ” If this doesn’t put you off, you could be in for a treat.

What was May 2010 like? Some rain, a lot of sunshine, but also very cold. All pictures, photos and videos, were taken within 15 minutes cycling distance from my home.

Green Frog

As you will see in this video and in the other posts in the Pictures of the Months series I am fascinated by nature.
If you want me to take pictures on other topics in my hometown Ostend, just leave a comment.

Pictures for May 2010:

• birds (what did you expect)
• flowers
• Ostend at Anchor, a maritime event
• froggery

To create this slide-show I used the following hardware and software:

Hardware:

• Canon Powershot S3 IS and the Conversion Lens Adapter LA-DC58E with the Canon Teleconverter TC-DC58B 1.5x for long distance shots and the Canon Close-up Lens 500D for close-ups.
• Canon Legria FS20
• Manfrotto tripod

Software

• iPhoto ‘09
• iMovie ‘09

Below you will find two videos: the first one is with English subtitles and the second with Dutch subtitles.

May 2010 in Pictures (English)

Mei 2010 in Beeld (Nederlands)

What do you think? Is 4-5 topics per slide-show enough or too much? I intend to keep the duration of the slide-shows below 5 minutes, or is this already too long? Do you have any suggestions for other topics? Leave a comment.

A lot of people with a garden put out food for the birds during the Winter. So do we. The food can be fat balls, peanuts, breadcrumbs, sunflower seeds, a grain mix, and fresh water.

Blue Tit

We started feeding the birds a couple of years after we moved into the house—when the trees and hedges had grown enough to attract birds. This was over 30 years ago and during those years some things have changed.

Thirty years ago the fat balls, sunflower seeds and peanuts were the exclusive territory for Great Tits, Blue Tits and Greenfinches. Breadcrumbs and grains were for all the other birds: Blackbirds, Wood Pigeons, Chaffinches, Song Trushes, Hedge Accentors, Wrens, Collared Doves, House Sparrows, Common Starlings, and Robins.

After a decade or so the Common Starlings had discovered the fat balls and had a go at them. It was a moderate success; they fed off the fat balls occasionally, but they preferred breadcrumbs over fat balls. Since then their numbers have dwindled and now we don’t see that many Common Starlings in the garden anymore. They are still in the neighborhood and sometimes I spot them on fat balls in other people’s gardens, but it is clearly not their first choice.

Great Tit

The next species that gave the fat balls a try were the House Sparrows and it became an instant success. An entire group would descend on one or two fat balls and start bickering who could have a go at it first. The individual Great Tit or Blue Tit is no match for a group of streetwise House Sparrows. Luckily for the Tits we have 5-6 fat balls hanging in the garden at any given time during the Winter so there is always food available for them.

In the meantime the Greenfinch couple had died and hasn’t been replaced. There are a some couples in the wider area, but they haven’t claimed our garden yet.

Blackbird

During the past winter, 3 common garden species tried feeding off a fat ball, a new food source for them,  for the very first time in over 30 years.

The Hedge Accentor

The timid Hedge Accentor tried feeding off a fat ball, but it wasn’t a very successful attempt. I guess it didn’t like to swing on its food high above the ground. Instead, it stuck to picking up the leftovers on the ground underneath the fat balls.

The Blackbird

One male Blackbird  was spotted several times a week feeding off a fat ball, but it wasn’t easy as you can see on the photo. I suspect it was the same male every time because he chased all other Blackbirds away from his part of the garden. I wonder whether it will catch on and if other Blackbirds will follow his example next Winter.

The Robin

Robin

The Robin was spotted almost daily feeding off a fat ball. It’s easier for a Robin to feed of the fat ball than for a Blackbird, but the Robin isn’t as comfortable hanging upside down as Great Tits and Blue Tits do. As Robins are a very territorial species I believe it was the same Robin every day.

The pictures of the Robin and Blackbird aren’t that great, but that’s because I had to take them through the kitchen window.

What makes this Winter so special that 3 species of garden birds tried out a new food source? Past Winter wasn’t very severe, but more severe than the last couple of Winters and it lasted longer.
Is this the explanation. Or is it a next step for those species in their adaptation to living around humans?
Time will tell.

I wasn’t a big fan of the superhero comics (Batman, Spiderman, X-Men, Avengers, Fantastic Four, Hulk, …), but I had a friend who was so I read quite a lot of those comics during my teens. They provided a nice pastime, but nothing more. I was much more a fan of Guust Flater, Durango, Rode Ridder, Soda, Jeremiah, Blake & Mortimer, … which non-Belgians probably never heard off. Your loss.

The very first page of the Watchmen immediately sets the tone with an excerpt from Rorschach’s journal, October 12th, 1985:

Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save us!” …
… and I’ll look down and whisper “No.”

How’s that for change? Can you even imagine Superman, Batman, Spider-man, Wolverine, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Storm, Wonder Woman, … utter a phrase like that? Saying no to a person in need. The Watchmen grabbed my attention from the very first page.

When the story takes place the glory days of the costumed heroes or masked vigilantes are over and they are outlawed. Costumed heroes because apart from Dr. Manhattan they do not have superpowers. The only ones still active are Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian, but these last two work for the government.

The story starts with the murder of one of the costumed heroes. Is it a standalone event or is there a plot to kill and discredit these masked vigilantes? Or is there something much more sinister going on? Will the remaining heroes find themselves out of there depth on this one? Follow Rorschach on his, initial lonely, quest for answers.

The author makes no effort whatsoever to make the costumed heroes look sympathetic: paranoid, cynical, estrangement, aggression, violence, rape, murder,  … You sometimes wonder what the difference is between the heroes and the villains. The characters transcend the simplistic good versus evil so often found in comics. How do you judge someone like Rorschach or the Comedian? How do you judge a god-like being as Doctor Manhattan? How do you judge Ozymandias?

I can see the world through Rorschach’s eyes, understand Doc Manhattan’s estrangement from humanity, kinda get the Comedian’s joke, follow Ozymandias’ logic, and sympathize with the Night Owl 2.0. If you have read the novel, you realize this is kinda scary. It only shows Alan Moore’s genius.

You can call this story impressive, awesome, a master-piece, or a classic, but it’s not a nice or enjoyable story, it grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. The scope, the setting at the height of the cold war in an alternative history where the USA won the Vietnam war, the flashbacks to the early years of the Watchmen and even into the origins of their predecessors the Minutemen, and the mix of comic and text makes this book a master-piece. For a comic this book contains an unusual amount of text; excerpts from (auto)biographies, interviews, news paper clippings and psychiatric reports.

Usually a story written for a certain format doesn’t do well in another format. Who doesn’t know the expression “the book is better than the movie?” However, this comic would hold it’s ground if published as a novel. The story, the setting, the scope, and the depth would make sure of that. Which is probably why it made Time Magazine’s list of 100 best novels.

The first time I read this, I just grabbed it on impulse in the adult comic section in the public library where it was on display between the Star Wars comics and the comic adaptations of Agatha Christie’s and Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels. They should have put a warning label on the cover, “This is no ordinary comic.” If I would have to compare it with a well-known novel than it would be George Orwell’s 1984.

I am not the first one who finds it hard to write a review of the Watchmen. How good is this book? What do you have to compare it with? I have less than a dozen Marvel comics, but even if I would have 5 times as many, I would give them all up for a copy of the Watchmen. I wouldn’t give up my Guust Flater collection though. I would also find it hard to part with my Blake & Mortimer collection or with the beautiful, 3-part, hardcover, comic adaptation of Joe Haldeman’s Forever War by Marvano.

Some of the references to other comics might seem obscure, but Belgium has more to offer than fries, chocolate, beer, and waffles. Belgium is also known for its comics, but unfortunately you will have to learn either Dutch or French to read most of them. Point of reference: Tintin wouldn’t make it to my top 10 list of best Belgian comic series.

I hope you found this review helpful.

Rating:

In my previous post I wrote that this series needed a change. Well, the concept is still the same, pictures I have taken during the past month, but I have created a different interface. I have organized the photos on topic and made a slide show with the movie editing software iMovie ‘09 and posted it on YouTube. Previous slide shows were uploaded to Flickr and displayed with the Flash-plugin Pictobrowser.

Northern Lapwing

April 2010 is the first month of 2010 that my condition, I have the chronic illness ME/CFS, has slightly improved. I am no longer bound to my neighborhood, but the outskirts of my hometown are still out of reach for me. Still, any progress is still better than no progress at all.

Pictures of April 2010:

• birds (what did you expect)
• village of Leffinge (Middelkerke), where I spend 4 days housesitting
• village of Stene (Oostende), renowned for its many restaurants and cafes, the small, picturesque church and less renowned for its bat sanctuaries
• the Himmunitas Foundation, a ME/CFS clinic near Brussels

All photos were taken with my Canon Powershot S3 IS. For the long distance shots I used the Canon Teleconverter TC-DC58B 1.5x with the Conversion Lens Adapter LA-DC58E.

The video was made using iMovie ‘09 and is the first video I ever created and posted on YouTube.

Below you will find two videos: the first one is with English subtitles and the second with Dutch subtitles.

April 2010 in Pictures (English)

April 2010 in Beeld (Nederlands)

As this is my first video ever, let me know what you think of it. Did you get enough time to see the individual photos and read the texts?

I would be exaggerating when I say that I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook; a mix of curiosity, boredom and irritation describes my feelings towards it much better.

Facebook & Me

In September 2007 I created a Facebook account because it seemed to be the next big thing and everyone had one. I looked around for a while, discovered that no one I knew had an account, didn’t find a use for it, and quickly forgot all about it.
A year later I logged in again deciding to give it another try, which I did for a couple of months, until I got bored, which was followed by half a year of inactivity.
Late Summer of 2009 I logged in again encouraged by members of the online ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) community and have been active ever since. In half a year the number of friends has increased fivefold, but to be honest I have no idea who most of them are.
Early on I made the decision not to spend waste time playing games on Facebook and to limit the number of applications to Goodreads Books, NetworkedBlogs, and Causes. No snowball fights, no horoscope, no hearts, no hugs, …, and certainly no sucking of lollipops.
Yet when I look at my Facebook page, on average once a day, I have to wade through a seemingly endless amount of messages like person A has become friends with person B, horoscopes, hearts, person C joined group D, hugs and sucked lollipops. If people enjoy using those applications, that’s fine by me, but I have decided not to use them and still get all those messages. There is useful information in my feed, but the signal-to-noise ratio is just horrible.
I considered deactivating my Facebook account or unfriending everyone and start over again, when I saw an article on committing virtual suicide. I couldn’t help laughing. I just love the creativity of people on the internet.

Committing Virtual Suicide

Committing virtual suicide, aka social network suicide, is a way to remove yourself from social media like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or LinkedIn! unfriending everyone and deleting all your messages in the process. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is the work of a group of artists, designers and programmers based in the Netherlands who wanted to create a way to let people destroy their social networking accounts.
As lots of people post stuff on social media they might regret later this free service is priceless because deactivating your Facebook account doesn’t remove your data.
Anyway, I didn’t want to take such a drastic step yet, so I started looking for a way to filter my news feed.

Feed Filter

Feed Filter, previously know as Facebook Filter, is an add-on for the Firefox web browser. It’s purpose is to filter out some types of messages from your Facebook News Feed.
Feed Filter is as easy to install as any other Firefox add-on; all it takes are some clicks. The add-on is under active development so if you want the latest version you can install it from the site of the developers.
As you can see on the screenshot below there a quite a lot of settings to play with. When you check the option “Highlight items above in yellow instead of hiding” you will be able to see the effects of the selected filters. The messages that normally would be hidden are now displayed with a yellow background. Once you have configured Feed Filter to your liking you can uncheck the option.
Gone are all the messages like “is now friends with”, “joined the group”, “became a fan of”, …
Gone are all the messages from applications like Farmville, Anita predictions, Daily Horoscope, iHeart, Suck My Lollipop, Zoo World, Fortune Cookie, …
The applications that are white listed by me are Goodreads Books, NetworkedBlogs, and Causes.

Still not a fan

Even after using Feed Filter for some weeks now I am still not a fan of Facebook. I have nothing against Facebook and lots of people are enjoying themselves on it, but I don’t feel like sharing (a lot) of my personal life with people I hardly know and on a site I do not trust. Unlike Google, Facebook hasn’t made the promise to do no evil.
I met some nice people on Facebook and discovered and received interesting news, but …

• as a source for important news I prefer RSS feeds and Twitter over Facebook
• as a means for communication I prefer email, Twitter, Yahoo! Messenger, and Google Talk over Facebook.

Thanks to Feed Filter I am going to give Facebook a second fourth try, but I guess it will turn out that I have just postponed committing virtual suicide.
Maybe I am just antisocial.

Resources

• Chocolate Software – Feed Filter for Firefox (previously known as Facebook Filter)
• Mozilla – Firefox Browser
• Mozilla – Add-ons for Firefox: Feed Filter
• Web 2.0 Suicide Machine

This just won’t do. The intention for this series was to show how I expand my horizons; from being city-bound by a debilitating disease to slowly being able to visit neighboring cities, towns and nature reserves on my own. Alas, subsequent infections in March left me nearly neighborhood-bound.

Hedge Accentor

I intend to continue this series for at least the remainder of 2010, but maybe I should change the formula. Instead of just taking some photos of landscapes and birds, maybe I should try to look at Ostend from a tourist’s point of view, of someone who has never seen Ostend before. Maybe I should include some movies instead of just a slide show with photos.
Let’s see what April brings. But for now back to March.

In my previous article February 2010 in Pictures I complained that there was still no sign of Spring. Well, the Black-Tailed Godwits have arrived, 3 weeks late, and birds have started singing, so I guess Spring has finally arrived.

The photos taken in March will bring you some more birds and pictures from the motorway into and out of Ostend. The motorway was very quiet as it was already close to 4.30 pm. Could this be an indicator for the state of the economy in Ostend?
The last photo is from roadworks near my home. They have been at it for a year now and it’s about time they start wrapping it up. It will be an improvement for cyclists.

I must confess that I have been outside of Ostend in March; my father drove me to Neder-Over Heembeek near Brussels to a clinic for tests. On all occasions I forgot to take my camera with me. In April I will go house-sitting in a neighboring town for 4 days and I will try not to forget my camera.

All photos were taken with my Canon Powershot S3 IS. For the long distance shots I used the Canon Teleconverter TC-DC58B 1.5x with the Conversion Lens Adapter LA-DC58E.