Well, I’m just about to Alien vs. Predator, so… I guess I should catch the Predator movies, along with Alien!
Much like Alien, this is a movie that came out a bit before my time, so I’ve never actually seen it. And just like Alien (Aliens even more so), I was kind of amazed at how many lines I’ve quoted any number of times came from this movie…
Dutch: If it bleeds, we can kill it.
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn was a crazy, solid introduction to the world: we have a giant timeless library built into a mountain range, cities built up and around it throughout time and by more than just humanity, and you have a sort of timey whimey mess of a conflict running through everything.
The Book That Broke the World sort of turns that up to 11.
I already told you: we choose sides with our gut. The words are to make us feel better afterwards.
Ripley: You’ve been in my life so long, I can’t remember anything else.
At the end of Aliens, Ripley, Newt, and Hicks managed to survive a second Alien attack–this time with a lot more violence and space marines–only for Newt and Hicks to die off screen, replaced by body doubles in Alien³.
Not even kidding.
Other than, I actually did enjoy this movie. It messes a bit with cannon, making the Alien a bit less a force of nature, which I’m not sure if I cared for. Unfortunately, that does mean that it feels like you could have replaced the Alien with a number of different movie monsters and it would have worked just as well.
Take a world where ghosts are very much real and, along with mediums and spiritualists, can have an impact on the world around them. Run that forward to World War I, where British soldiers have been compelled to, after they die, report back in one last time:
“The Germans were flanking us at Delville Wood when I died.”
Quite a first sentence that.
So when our main character gets report from a ghost close to heart heart–and not only that, reporting that he was murdered–well, of course we kick off a story that’s one part war story, one part murder mystery, and one part supernatural adventure.
Part 3! Wherein we learn about rockets, recursion, and ricocheting items (oh my). And make it to … the end?
Here are all of the commits from part 1 up through part 3.
And here are all of the parts in this series so far:
The Bear and the Nightingale. The Girl in the Tower. The Winter of the Witch. Quite a trilogy.
From a dark Russian fairytale world, full of the spirits of the woods, old gods, and the incoming church up through a more political fantasy, deep into the cities of Russia where spirits hold least sway. And now, it all comes to a climax, with ever more battles between summer and winter, between the old and the new, and between all of Russia and her foes.
And here we have Part 2! It’s not been that long for you, but since the first part took six months for me to actually get around to writing it… well, this is much better!
Things get a bit more complicated this time, with buttons that can open/close doors and even holes in the floor and BOMBS. But what’s really crazy is how we actually get around to solving how to get to new sublevels this time… and how to take penguins back out of them. Things are getting complicated!
Here are all of the commits from part 1 up through part 2.
And here are all of the parts in this series so far:
I really loved Project Hail Mary (the book) and I’d heard good things so far about Project Hail Mary (the movie), so I figured… let’s give it a chance and actually go see it while it’s still in theaters!
Rocky: Amaze. Amaze. Amaze.
I’m so glad I did.
As a movie, you do lose out on some of the real depth of ‘SCIENCE!’ that this story really had as a novel. Some things are left out, others glossed over. But for the most part, there’s still a great feeling of positivity in the face of adversity–of being able to just think your way out of any problem and I just love that.
Rocky: Words of encouragement.
Ryland Grace: That’s not how we say it!
Rocky: Words of great encouragement!
Now. If you haven’t read the book, seen the movie, or even seen the trailers for it, I would say stop reading this and go watch it now. I’m going to spoil a bit–although no more than they already did in the trailers12.
Months ago now1, I started playing Gentoo Rescue (after seeing the Aliensrock video). At the core, it’s a Sokoban style puzzle game where you have to guide cute little sliding penguins to their color coded nests… but oh man does it start getting more complicated quickly.
On top of that, it has a really interesting nesting level concept–the level select screens are levels themselves. You can go several ’levels’ deep into levels or eventually further back out. And that’s just with how far I’ve gotten so far…
Eleven! And the Ponds!
Man, I don’t even known which doctor is my favorite. Each has their strengths. But if I had to pick one (I haven’t seen 13-15 yet), it would probably have to be Eleven. He’s just such a mix of chaos, fun, and an absolute confidence in himself.
Say what you will, but he starts the season running an alien spaceship off of Earth with nothing but his reputation and ends it with literally the entire universe at stake.
Mad Men is probably not a show I ever would have chosen by myself. It’s highly rated and got a cost full of people I recognize… but on the other hand, there’s a complete lack of aliens/magic/what have you. Still, I’ve liked other non-speculative fiction TV shows before… so what about this one?
Well, first, what does Mad Men have?
You have smoking (so much smoking):
Don: Except they aren’t.
Mr. Garner: That’s your slogan? “You’re going to die anyway. Die with us”?
Pete: Actually, it’s a fairly well-established psychological principle that society has a death wish, and if we could just tap into that, the market potential is–
Mr. Garner: What the hell are you talking about? Are you insane? I’m not selling rifles here, I’m in the tobacco business! We’re selling America! The Indians gave it to us, for shit’s sake!
A few months back, I gave a Kobo a try. I’m still really enjoying it. At the time, I was using a script on the Kobo + Dropbox to sync annotations. But it was a little heavy (to send the entire database) and tended to fail silently. Plus, I had to use a second script to take the exported database and actually turn it into Markdown I could easily read and share.
So I took a chance to make that a bit better!
The code for this is available on Github here: https://github.com/jpverkamp/kobo-highlights/
“One thing’s for sure, I’m not in kansas anymore.” It was a phrase in half the languages he knew and one that had led to a saying almost as ancient: “We don’t even know what kansas is anymore.”
Imagine a room. A single colossal room, jam packed with shelves. And on those shelves, books, thousands and millions of books.
Now imagine that that’s only one such room, miles to a side. And there are doors to other rooms, also full of books. Uncountably many such rooms behind uncountably many doors. And there are even more. Doors to nowhere. Doors to an ‘in between’.
As had become his custom in recent mornings, Hugo Longchamp, captain of the guard of Marseilles-in-the-West, climbed the tallest tower in New France to await the end of the world. Doom had proved slow to arrive. The captain was getting impatient.
A rising war. And not just between the Dutch and the French…
Jax is on his own, fleeing free and northward. Berenice is on her own, causing chaos (both on purpose and inadvertently) behind enemy lines.
There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?
False Memory Syndrome–a mysterious medical condition where you are absolutely sure you have memories of another life lived.
A novel about chess, set in the 1960s? How good could that even be?
Turns out: fairly good.
Although (and this isn’t that common for me) I did enjoy the TV show more.
It’s an entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it; I can dominate it. And it’s predictable. So, if I get hurt, I only have myself to blame.
In a nutshell, we follow orphan Beth Harmon as she discovers chess–but also drugs–gets adopted, really gets into chess, wins a bunch of games, loses a few, faces addition and loss, and ends up playing the best in the world.
“We are what we choose to be, girl,’ she said. ‘Let others determine your worth, and you’ve already lost, because no one wants people worth more than themselves.”
The setting and world building in this book remind me strongly of The Runelords / The Wheel of Time / Brandon Sanderson’s works, which is already a solid win so far as I’m concerned.
Basically, we have a world where ‘demons’ form out of thin air (more or less) at night, free to terrorize anyone left outside without a circle of wards around them. It’s literally ‘what if the monsters in the night were real’. From there, we have a world that finally fought back against the demons, managed to drive them off, and had a golden age… only to forget. And fall once again–making this world feel post apocalyptic, humanity on the brink of losing for good. But even then, people will fight to survive.
Oh man. Faction Wars.
We’ve spent several books referring to this or actually planning it… and now, we’re finally here! The one where powers in the universe come to the Dungeon planet and lead armies of their own as a larger than life sort of war game.
Except this time, it’s no game. This time, they can die just as easily as the crawlers can.
This time, it’s war.
Oh, and this time the crawlers have an army all their own–with some unexpected allies.
Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen. Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.
The sequel to The Bear and the Nightingale. While the first mostly took place in the edge of the Russian wilderness, this one travels far and wide. To towns being raided to Moscow itself. And all the while, we have Visilisa, refusing to choose either life in a convent or married. One thing leads to another, she disguises herself as a boy–as one does–and things escalate from their.
“… That could have gone much worse,” said Three Sea-grass, when she could. She straightened up. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. And didn’t try to get away from Mahit’s touch, not at all. “Look, Mahit-nobody died, not even slightly.”
Well that’s a fascinating change of pace.
In A Memory Called Empire, we pretty much stayed in the heart of Teixcalaan. A single planet, mostly a single City. We had all sorts of politics and worldbuilding and hints of what else was out there, but for the moment, it felt like a fairly contained story within that larger world.
It started more than a decade ago now (2012!). I was catching up to 30 new releases in a year in theaters and reviewing them. Then at some point (2014), life happened1 and I didn’t make it to the theater as much anymore.
After that, starting in 2015, I realized I could do the same thing with books! And I started writing a review of every book I read. And I read a lot. Since then, I’ve reviewed over 1300 books–and I still have over 1000 on my to read list. So that isn’t likely to stop any time soon.
It’s mostly fantasy and to a lesser extent scifi, although I do get a few horror novels in there, along with a couple non-fiction or poetry anthologies a year. I’m always looking for more to add though. Hit me up!
Then, starting in 2021, I started again with the movie reviews, this time mostly ignoring what was in theaters, instead watching whatever seemed interesting, much like my book reviews. And this time, I added TV reviews as well.
And… here we are. Really, it’s as much a memory aid for me as anything. I love being able to look back at all the covers I read in a year, pick one at random, and use my own writing to remind me of a particular book/movie/show. And if anyone else is inspired to read something out of it? Well, all the better!
Current book bingo: 2025 Book Bingo
My oldest was born in 2014. A coincidence I’m sure. ↩︎
The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…
After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.
After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security… before taking a hard turn into the private sector to follow my PhD advisor.
Since then, I’ve worked in the computer security space at a couple of different companies. Some don’t exist any more, some you’ve probably heard of. I still program for fun too, and not just in security.
But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!
… other things I currently haven’t put into a category!
I love to take things apart and put them back together. It’s one of the reasons I work in computer security for a living. But more recently, the dropping prices of 3D printing and entirely not dropping prices of wood working have led to a few new hobbies. :D
I’ve always had a soft spot for photography. I borrowed my mother’s camera in high school and eventually bought my own. These days, I mostly use my phone (it’s amazing how good those have gotten), but I still pull out my years old DSLR from time to time.
Mostly, I have pictures organized by photosets, but I’ve started adding a few ‘meta sets’ like Mini Worlds, Bugs etc (macros), and Fungus Among Us.
Another hobby I’ve been getting into more recently is Home Automation! Previously these posts would have been in Other, but it’s nice to have them all in one place.
I am a writer–I just don’t always remember it.
I wrote my first novel in 2011. I’ve started 14 more since then, finishing about half of those. One of these days I’ll actually try to find someone to publish them (or just do it myself). Onward!
(If anyone would like to be a beta reader, feel free to drop me a line).
Once upon a time, I was on track to get a PhD in censorship/computer security. I was ABD (all but dissertation) when my advisor decided to leave and go into the private sector. When that happens… you either find a new advisor or you go with them. I decided to go with them, move to Silicon Valley, and join a startup. It was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to me. While I sometimes regret not having the extra letters after my name, I love the practicality of working in the ‘real world’. Not to mention the job prospects are better. :)
So for the most part, these posts are archival, but there are still a few gems in there.