Month: August 2026

Prose Poetry Code has been running for over a decade. I’ve written 806 posts, only one of which was never uploaded. (As it turns out, things changed, and I no longer needed to say what was said.) All of those posts were written on the same computer, a home-built PC running Debian, in the same place: my bedroom in the converted attic of the house belonging to my mom and stepdad.

This one’s different in both ways. One, I’m writing for the first time on my laptop. I’ve been using it for most tasks for the past couple of years, as my desktop gets more and more outdated, less and less able to handle the rigors of the modern web. It’s a transition. But I write apps and servers and cloud deployment scripts on here, so why not my "shout into the void" blog posts?

Second, and much bigger, is that I’m writing from somewhere new. Specifically, that’s the apartment I mentioned the other day. It’s not mine. It’s ours. Alas, Leslie can’t be here tonight—she stayed with her mom, at what is now her old home, so she could pick up her wedding dress—which means that I’m truly alone for a night for the first time in my life. A perfect time to do some reading and writing, isn’t it? So that’s why I finished another book for the Summer Reading List.

History

Title: Commodore: The Final Years
Author: Brian Bagnall
Genre: History/Business
Year: 2019

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I was born in 1983. Even if I haven’t said it directly (I honestly can’t remember), you can do the math from my birthday posts. I needed about 8 years to get acquainted enough with computers to become fascinated by them, beginning the obsession that has now stretched to almost three and a half decades. Being fairly poor, I didn’t have a computer at home at the time, so my initial learning came in the form of the salvaged computers in the gifted class at school: an Apple IIe, TRS-80, TI-99, and so on.

In 1993, things started to change. My mom picked up a VTech Laser 128 from a yard sale. Already years old and very obsolete, it still allowed me to learn a bit of programming (Basic and assembly), as well as learn about hardware incompatibility. I played with that for a few months before my uncle, who was moving away for college and needed to offload some things, gave me a Commodore 64. It wasn’t any newer, but it had more games, most of which I couldn’t figure out. Funny how I’m making my own text adventures now.

The Commodore did fascinate me. It had color graphics, a rudimentary GUI, and a friendly feel to it. It was…approachable. For the eight or so months that it was my primary computer, I enjoyed it. I remember tracing out sprites on graph paper and converting them to DATA statements, or reading manuals while trying to fall asleep during a sleepover. I didn’t think anything of Commodore the company at the time; I was just too young for corporate affairs to interest me. For a time, I did wonder why I never saw anything else about them in video game magazines or in stores. I knew my computer was old, but figured there was something else of theirs out there.

Once I grew up, I understood better. Once I found Brian Bagnall’s series about Commodore, I realized how a whole computing revolution really did take place before I was even born. I’m sad that I missed it.

Commodore: The Final Years is the conclusion of the sordid tale of Commodore. It covers the last five years of the company’s existence, picking up where the two previous entries left off. By now, this isn’t the same company that released my beloved C64. It’s not even the one that put out the Amiga, a cult classic I didn’t even know existed until I started running into fans on Slashdot in the early 2000s! No, by 1989, Commodore’s best years are behind it. It’s a corporation run by corporate types, mismanaged at every turn. It’s a sad story, to be honest.

Bagnall is able to capture much of this in his book. It’s a very long, often deep account of each step Commodore took in its path off the edge, and you can get a sense of the characters on the stage. Irving Gould, a multimillionaire business tycoon who ran a computer company despite not knowing how to run a computer. Mehdi Ali, a financier whose ruthlessness in cutting costs was matched only by his ruthlessness in weeding out any critics. Bill Sydnes, a ringer from IBM who couldn’t see past the PC. All the engineers, hardware and software, who built the company but never really got to reap the rewards.

That’s not to say Commodore didn’t try. In its last years, while the C64 was fading to its penultimate fate of a preteen’s hand-me-down computer, Commodore released a number of products that I never saw as a kid. The various Amiga models with their confusing numbers, for example. They were mostly absent from America, and I certainly don’t recall ever spotting one in Radio Shack. The CDTV, their attempt at sneaking a computer into the living room. The CD32, a console that EGM and Gamepro completely ignored. (Let me go back to my mom’s and pull out my magazine collection to check. I still have it somewhere!) Commodore tried, but failed. The reasons are many, as Bagnall is able to illustrate.

Where this book shines is in its attention to detail. It doesn’t shy away from much at all. The author lets the engineers and those higher-ups who were still alive in 2019 to tell the stories, and most of them aren’t afraid to air the dirty laundry. Sometimes, you get the feeling that they’ve waited for the chance. It’s refreshing, especially when you compare it to so many narratives of recent history that are filled with redactions to protect the guilty. (Commodore: The Final Years does do this on one occasion, refusing to name a single programmer, which makes me wonder what sort of threats "Ray" sent the publisher.)

If the book has any flaws, they all stem from the writing style. Bagnall has definitely improved over the course of the Commodore series, but he still writes as if he’s writing the script for a documentary. He offers very little narrative focus or structure, and has the annoying habit of saying something in his terse narration, only to follow it up immediately with a quote from an interested party saying exactly the same thing. Word for word. Take out all instances of this, and the book would be about 100 pages lighter. It would probably flow better, too.

In the end, it doesn’t detract from the story too much. It makes it repetitive and a slog at times, but it’s still a worthy read, if only to see how the mighty can fall. Even today, Commodore serves as a cautionary tale. Any company could meet the same fate. Maybe that’s even more likely now, since so many corporations are run by incompetent managers whose sole purpose is collecting a golden parachute. Or they’re DEI hires who only received their C-suite positions because of their race or sex. Whatever the case, as we race towards another computing bubble, anyone in the business world would do well to read this book. This whole series, in fact. Commodore was once the giant of the home computing revolution. Now it’s nothing more than a name passed around from one shell company to the next to cash in on nostalgia. The same as its bitter rival, Atari.

While that end might not come for Nvidia or Anthropic, the market forces at work remain the same as they were in 1994. A couple of missed quarters, a botched product launch, and the wrong people in the hot seat, and we might be reading AI: The Final Years in 2050.

It’s a bit late, but I have a very good reason. The same reason, in fact, that has led me to only make a handful of posts since last year’s Summer Reading List. The wedding is a little more than two months away, we just signed the apartment lease today, and reading has to take a back seat to all of that. But I did get one finished, so here we go.

Fantasy

Title: The Eye of the World
Author: Robert Jordan
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Year: 1990

I’ve read a lot of fantasy novels, and a lot of series. Many of them are good: Sanderson’s Mistborn and the Stormlight Archive series; Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Some hooked me early, but faded as they progressed or stalled: Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. And there’s even the occasional one that I tried but gave up on, like Anthony Ryan’s The Draconis Memoria series.

I’ve never read the Wheel of Time.

I have heard of it, of course. You couldn’t walk into a bookstore in the 2000s without seeing at least a full shelf of Robert Jordan’s books. But I never gave it a shot. The cover art didn’t grab my eye. The descriptions and blurbs felt kind of opaque. The Wheel of Time, to me, struck me as a series intended for Wheel of Time fans. Since I wasn’t one, I didn’t bother.

Lately, fantasy has left me feeling a kind of burnout. The most popular entries are female-focused, and little more than softcore porn…when they stay softcore, anyway. What little remains once all the shades of gray and sparkly vampires and self-insert Mary Sues are taken away is mostly mediocre. Half of it is the same recycled assassin tropes, and I have half a dozen "loner assassin" books in my pile already. So I decided to go back to what’s considered one of the classics.

Let me just say that now I understand. Not why Robert Jordan is considered a classic, but why he’s seen as so divisive. The Eye of the World, the first in a 14-book series that had to be completed by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death, is a book that’s very hit or miss. It has many flashes of brilliance mired in a sea of meh.

The setting itself seems like a fairly generic fantasy world to start. You’ve got your small villages somehow fifty miles apart, a population density more like 1800s Canada than medieval England. There’s a cosmic struggle between Light and Dark, with Dark starting to win. A shadowy cabal of mages serves as the power behind the throne, while most of the characters start out not knowing there’s even a throne in the first place.

The characters themselves also seem generic, although part of this can be attributed to the Tolkien effect: Jordan did, in a way, invent a whole new kind of epic fantasy. His characters are generic because they’re archetypes. Rand is the farmboy turned unlikely hero; never mind that his heroic transformation doesn’t occur until the penultimate of the book’s 50-plus chapters. His friends run the gamut from love interest to comic relief to token healer.

What’s good about the book is that worldbuilding. While the vast stretches of wilderness are very out of place, and some of the names are plainly ripped from real history—there’s a King Arthur, for example—what we get of the world does make it feel like something someone put a lot of thought into. Rand’s home village feels like a village, and its remoteness allows for a plausible explanation as to why he and his friends are so ignorant of the world. Which also gives the author a good excuse to explain it.

The overarching story is also interesting. Once again, it might seem plain and bland in 2026, but there wasn’t a lot of epic fantasy 35 years ago. The snatches of history, the glimpses of fallen empires, the brief meetings with other races, the perils of the Blight, those are genuinely interesting. I’d love to explore them in more detail.

But that’s where things start to take a turn for the worse. The Eye of the World just doesn’t do that. It’s around 900 pages in my astigmatism-friendly EPUB version, but it very often feels rushed despite its length. Most of the story happens on the run: Rand and the party are bouncing from village to town to wilderness, chased by the Dark One’s legions. They split up—Jordan clearly forgot the cardinal rule of a GM—and reunite after a brief chance to give multiple POVs a chance.

In the decade I’ve been writing Prose Poetry Code, I’ve often lamented my lack of skill in pacing a novel, but nothing I’ve written has ever felt as plodding, yet also as hurried, as The Eye of the World. It’s a literary sort of punctuated equilibrium, but with an odd inversion: the chase scenes are the ones that feel slow, while the respites in towns leave me out of breath.

Part of this, I think, is that there’s so little internal exposition. Moiraine, the wise witch you’d expect to be the lore-dump character, mostly keeps her mouth shut, except when she’s barking orders. Lan, who is totally not an Aragorn ripoff, trust me, often goes entire chapters without saying more than a single sentence. The rest of the group has no idea what’s going on, where they are, or even why they’re being chased. They’re villagers plucked from their rural homes and thrust into the wider world, and they’re utterly lost. So is the reader.

But they are the narrative characters, so their ignorance is ours. I do the same with my own books, so I can’t complain too much. On the other hand, I rarely write characters who refuse to inform. That’s an issue I had here. You mean to tell me that these seven or eight people were on the road together for weeks, but never once did the one leading them deign to say why? Yes, you can use worldbuilding as an excuse—there’s a cultural taboo against even naming the enemies—but that’s all it is. It doesn’t explain anything.

It’s also a serious clash between what the author is telling us about his world and what he’s showing us through the lens of the characters. Despite being so far out in the middle of nowhere that they don’t even realize they’re part of a kingdom (or the matriarchal equivalent), Rand and company have enough contact with the outside world that they know common songs, legends, and histories. It’s hard to square that circle.

So, to sum up, The Eye of the World is a seminal work of epic fantasy, one that deserves praise for kickstarting the subgenre. Yet it’s also a deeply flawed tale. It gives me the sense that Jordan didn’t know what he was writing as he wrote it. There are vast swathes of pages that could be left out with no harm done, while crucial details, things you would expect the characters to say or do or ask, are only mentioned in passing. Add to that a generally abrasive, know-it-all elitism from those who are supposed to be helpful, and a worldwide lack of empathy, and you’ve got a setting that makes me want to learn more about it, but puts me off reading anything else that takes place in it.

The Wheel of Time can keep on turning forever. I’ll just make sure to keep out of its way.