צריך עזרה

[דלית - delete]

עוד שניים שאני מכיר

אני התכוונתי בתור תרגום, לא לגבי הספר עצמו.

 

[מיתר נדיר]

אה, אם ככה - מחריד.

וגם מזכיר לי את הסיפור על טום להרר שהמציא את הוודקה-ג´לו, כי היה אסור חהכניס משקאות אלכוהוליים למעונות... ואיך תתרגם deliverator?

 

[גוטמן האפור]

הפרק הראשון משעמם?

אם כבר אז "בעייתי" כי סטיבנסון פשוט זורק אותך לתוך העולם שלו, שמלא בכל כך הרבה מושגים קאסטום, שאם אין לך שליטה טובה מאוד באנגלית, אבל מאוד מאוד מאוד, אין לך מושג על מה הוא מדבר. אבל משעמם? עם הפיצה? גדול! כל השאר הוא מבריק, כהרגלו.

 

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משלוחנוען?

אכן, כמעט הזוועתי ביותר שיכולתי לחשוב עליו. סנואו זה שלג גם בטלויזיות שחור לבן הישנות, לא?

 

[דוד כפרי]

אפשר הסבר על מה אתם מדברים?

 

[דלית - delete]

deliverator

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He´s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like a gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books. When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway - might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aerostyled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity. The Deliverator never pulled his gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn´t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball hat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned in to a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn´t get nothing but trouble from Deliverator. Since then Deliverator has kept the gun in glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren´t afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstration. The Deliverator´s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator´s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car´s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places size of your tongue. The Deliverator´s car has big sticky tires with contact pat ches size of a fat lady´s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on peseta. Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it - talking trade balances here - once we´ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they´re making cars in Bolivia and microvave owens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here - once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel - once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity - y´know what? There´s only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator´s report card would say: "Hiro is _so_ bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperative skills." So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved - but no cooperativity either. Just a single principle: the Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes. Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it: homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice and job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing their Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I swear, can´t you guys tell time? Didn´t happen anymore. Pizza delivery a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And theyhad studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable. Sent psychologists out to these people´s houses, gave them a free TV set to submit to an anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs, studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn´t respond without commiting a venial sin.​

המשך...

 

[דלית - delete]

המשך...

The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn´t fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator´s head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator´s car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box´s built-in RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down. If thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to CosaNostra Pizza Hedquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself - the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the straight razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator´s nightmare, the Capo and figurehead of CosaNostra, Incorporated - who will be on the phone to the customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. The next day, Uncle Enzo will land on the customer´s yard in a jet helicopter an d apologize some more and give him a free trip to Italy - all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and basically end his private life as he knows it. He will come away from the whole thing feeling that, somehow, he owes the Mafia a favor. The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumours. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening hours, which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would you feel if you had to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late fucking pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, at the age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters, he can get out of the bathtub dripping wet and kiss the feet of some sixteen-years-old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. Oh, God. It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea. But he wouldn´t drive for CosaNostra Pizza any other way. You know why? Because there´s something about having your life on the line. It´s like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your high school classmate two blocks down the stri p is flipping or debugging, because we´re in competition with those guys, and people notice things. What a fucking rat race it is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn´t have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don´t work harder because you´re competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy - but what kind of life it is anyway, you have to ask yourself. That´s why nobody, not even the Nipponese, can move pizzas fast er than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits blazing proud numbers into the night: 12:32 or 15:15 or the occasional 20:43. The Deliverator is assigned to CosaNostra Pizza #3569 in the Valley. Southern California doesn´t know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot. Not enough roads for the number of people. Fairlanes, Inc. is laying new ones all the time. Have to bulldoze a lot of neighbourhoods to do it, but those seventies and eighties developments exist to be bulldozed, right? No sidewalks, no schools, no nothing. Don´t have their own police force - no immigration control - undesirables can walk rig ht in without being frisked or even harassed. Now a Burbclave, that´s the place to live. A city-state with its own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything. The Deliverator was a corporal in the Farms of Merryvale State Security Force for a while once. Got himself fired for pulling a sword on an acknowledged perp. Slid it right through the fabric of the perp´s shirt, gliding the flat of the blade along the base of his neck, and pinned him to a warped and bubbled expanse of vinyl siding on the wall of the house that the perp was trying to break into. Thought it was a pretty righteous bust. But they fired him anyway because the perp turned out to be t he son of the vice-chancellor of the Farms of Merryvale. Oh, the weasels had an excuse: said that a thirty-six-inch samurai sword was not on their Weapons Protocol. Said that he had violated the SPAC, the Suspected Penetrator Apprehension Code. Said that the perp had suffered psychological trauma. He was afraid of butter knives now; he had to spread his jelly with the back of a teaspoon. They said that he had exposed them to liability. The Deliverator had to borrow some money to pay for it. Had to borrow it from the Mafia, in fact. So he´s in their database now - retinal patterns, DNA, voice graph, fingerprints, footprints, palm prints, wrist prints, every fucking part of the body that had wrinkles on it - almost - those bastards rolled in ink and made a print and digitized it into their computer. But it´s their money - sure they´re careful about loaning it out. And when he applied for the Deliverator job they were happy to ta ke him, because they knew him. When he got the loan, he had to deal personally with the assistant vice-capo of the Valley, who later recommended him for the Deliverator job. So it was like being in a family. A really scary, twisted, abusive family.​

 

[דוד כפרי]

|לוקח נשימה עמוקה...| עוד!

 

[דוד כפרי]

תרגום: אפשר ב|בקשה| לקבל את הספר?

(שייקח לי הרבה זמן לקרוא כי אני עסוק, אבל בכל-זאת?)

 

[WaveGal]

../images/Emo63.gif גם אני, גם אני.. ../images/Emo92.gif

אם אפשר, אחרי דוד

ובינתיים, מאיזה הכי כדאי להתחיל? (זה ההיצע בחנות הספרים השכונתית): Snow Crash The Diamond Age The Big U Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller In the Beginning...Was the Command Line

 

[גוטמן האפור]

סנו קראש

ואז הכתבה שצירפתי. ואז קריפטונומיקון זודיאק חביב אך הזוי. דאימונד אייג´ מיותר לדעתי.

 

[idoru]

../images/Emo45.gif

למה הסייבר פאנק כלכך מושפע מאמנויות לחימה?

 

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אני הייתי הולך הפוך - קודם קריפטו

אח"כ סנואו ובסוף הדיאמונד. לא שיש משמעות לסדר - זו אינה סדרה אחת קוהרנטית (למרות השמועות שמסתובבות כבר שנים על כך שקריפטו וסנואו חלק מטרילוגיה). דיאמונד אייג´ אינו מיותר כלל, אם אתה חובב ספרים טובים

 

[דלית - delete]

אגב, סדר כתיבת הספרים למי שמתעקש

* The Big U (1984) * Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller (1988) * Snow Crash (1992) * The Diamond Age (1995) Hugo Award Winner - Best Novel * Cryptonomicon (May 1999) * Quicksilver (September 2003) Non-Fiction * In the Beginning... Was the Command Line (1999) Written as Stephen Bury (with his uncle J. Fredrick George): * Interface (1995) * The Cobweb (1997) * Artists´ Multiples, 1935-2000 (February 2002)​

ולמיתר שביקשה - עוד סיפור שלו ברשת. אגבון אחרון: לא יודע עד כמה יעניין אתכם, אבל מסתבר שתור היהלום הגיע אלינו מהעתיד... (רמז - התבוננו בתאריך ליד מספר ה ISBN)

 

[מיתר נדיר]

זה דווקא לא רע. יאללה תתחיל לעבוד.

 

[Erunaamo]

אתה מתבלבל בין העכבישה בכניסה

למורדור - Shelob, לבין העכבישה שבילבו הורג בספר "ההוביט". שם הטיעון של "העכבישה שיפדה עצמה על עוקץ" לא יילך. שילוב אכן שיפדה את עצמה על עוקץ, שהחזיק סאם.

 

[דלית - delete]

רגע, עכבישה לא שיפדה עצמה על עוקץ?

שיפדה. ולא היה זה הוביט שאחז בעוקץ באותו זמן? היה. אז איפה הבלבול? ההוביטים, עם כל הכבוד, לוחמים גדולים לא היו. לבד ממרי ופיפין שצמחו עם האנטים. הרי את הבריון מהפלך מרי ופיפין הבריחו, לא פרודו שהיה שקוע במרה שחורה.

 

[Erunaamo]

אבל היה עוד מקרה

בו בילבו הורג עכבישה שמנסה לכבול אותו בשלשלאות (=לטוות סביבו קורים) ולאכול אותו. (זה היה השימוש הראשון ב"עוקץ".)

 

[דלית - delete]

וזה היה בשר"ה? אני הנחתי שמדסקסים

שר"ה, לא ספרים נלווים סתמיים וחסרי חשיבות

 

[Erunaamo]

טולקין מתהפך בקברו! ../images/Emo2.gif../images/Emo11.gif

(למרות שכבר מסתובב לו הראש אחרי הסרטים...) "סתמיים וחסרי חשיבות"?! החימום הוא סתמי וחסר-חשיבות? הצ´ינה? עבודת הזוגות? האם בפורום הזה - אתה סתמי וחסר חשיבות? האם הפורום הזה הוא סתמי וחסר-חשיבות? קיים ספר, בשם "ההוביט". שם מתוארת ההרפתקה של בילבו, בה הוא מוצא את הטבעת, עוזר בקטילת סמוג וכיו"ב. בספר יש פרק, שבו הוא נלחם בעכבישים שששבו את ידידיו (תורין ושות´ - אבל מה זה משנה? זה הרי סתמי וחסרי חשיבות).