Marco books have some of the best snippets.

I jumped in, feet first, around the eight-foot marker. I bobbed back up to the surface and said, “This is insane, Marco.”

To which I answered, “So I’ll be careful.”

To which I countered, “You’re talking to yourself, do you know that?”

“Oh, shut up,” I said.

And:

“You know, sometimes there’s just a very fine line between us and the Three Stooges,” I said.

<What are stooges?> Ax asked.

“A stooge is a guy stupid enough to run around inside a Yeerk stronghold wearing a pair of bike shorts and accompanied by a Deer-man from outer space and a mouse-eating Bird-boy. That’s a stooge.”

Also, SHARKS!

They’re the Hork-Bajir of the sea! Apparently literally. It’s an odd one to pair right fater The Unknown. Back to back books talking about non-human/animal Controllers, although with rather different outcomes. And now I want to look up the differences between shark and horse brains…

Plus, we get an appearance by a new, interesting race (mind reading amphibians!), more Visser One scenes (of course, it’s a Marco points of view)/Visser Three politics, and some underwater adventures, which are neat.

Overall, a decent entry. Up from The Change and The Unknown, I think.

Onward!

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HTMX. HTML, but better*!

<button hx-delete="/contacts/{{ contact.id }}"
        hx-push-url="true"
        hx-confirm="Are you sure you want to delete this contact?" (1)
        hx-target="body">
Delete Contact
</button>

Basically, the entire idea is that you don’t need quite so much (explicit) JavaScript everywhere. It should be possible to declaratively design pages that can automatically take actions (including HTTP verbs other than GET and POST) and replace (partial) content on pages.

That’s why I read the book.

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Rhai is a scripting language written in and generally used by the programming language Rust when you want something a bit more dynamic/don’t want to recomile.

The Rhai book is the mdBook style documentation that describes the language, gets into how to use it (in both straight forward and more complicated scenarios), and acts as a reference when needed.

It’s a bit of an odd one to read straight through, but I’ve been looking for exactly this sort of thing (an embeddable scripting language for Rust) so I figured I’d give it a chance!

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“And what do you want, Tobias?”

”You know what I want,” I said, almost choking on the words. ”You know.”

”Yes. But do YOU know what you want, Tobias?”, the Ellimist asked. ”And if you get it, will you still know?”

Yes. Spoilers. The Ellimist is around.

And since this originally released the same day as The Andalite Chronicles–and because it’s a Tobias book, you had to expect it.

In short, the Ellimist is (totally not 😉) interfering to free some Hork-Bajir. Tobias gets roped in. We do learn a lot more about Hork-Bajir (more than we will really until somewhat later in The Hork-Bajir Chronicles). It’s a good thing to be doing.

And yet, I still totally get Tobias lamenting getting jerked around like that.

But in the end–it was all worth it?

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Something new! (If you not on a reread :))

Rather than the shared points of view of The Andalite's Gift, we now have the first [[Animorphs Chronicles|chronicle]] book: a book written from a completely alien (heh) point of view to fill in some other part of the universe.

In this case Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul. The one who in a lot of ways started this whole mess. And after reading this book–apparently in more ways than we could believe.

On the plus side, we get a lot of fascinating world building. Learning more about Andelite culture directly, as opposed to via our normal human filters. Learning about Yeerks. Visser Three (before he was Three!). And Taxxons. And Skrit Na.

The Skrit Na ship was round, with tapered sides. It looked like a fat disc. You could hardly even see where the engines were, and the Skrit Na had blinking colored lights all around it. I guess they find that attractive or something.

(it’s a typical saucer shaped UFO)

On the other hand (minor spoilers, but it becomes obvious fairly early), time travel.

We’ve done that already–and not that long ago (The Forgotten). And… while it’s got some interesting points here, it makes things a bit too messy and convenient, at least in my opinion.

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It’s kind of amazing how many different one off plot lines this series introduces and just never (so far as I remember) deals with again.

This time around… being (somehow) allergic to newly acquired DNA!

It’s a neat idea and does enough to support the story by itself…

So of course we have to deal with some random made up teenage heartthrob storyline.

I ignored Marco. I almost always do. Instead I made sure Jake was paying attention, and I said, “Jake, you’re not getting it. About half the girls in our school have a poster of Jeremy Jason McCole in their bedrooms or in their lockers, or both. He is the number one cute guy in the country. He has like twenty Web sites just about him. If he endorses The Sharing, it would be as if . . .” I looked to Cassie for help.

It’s… weird. I get it. They’re teenagers. But it’s still not something I really understood even then.

Such is life.

Onward!

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FLASH.

The one with a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.

There’s weird tension (did he finally go crazy?) and a neat resolution (possibly, but at least this time around he’s not) that theoretically raises some big interesting world building problems–that we probably won’t ever have to deal with.

It’s a good one.

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My eyes latched onto his black ones, his desiccated lips moving. Shock thrummed through me like the single tone of a large bell, recently struck, vibrating, a pounding pulse of surprise. As the vibrations hit me, I realized that the pulse wasn’t just shock, but was part of the word I’d been hearing. Joses Bar-Judas was speaking that word. That wyrd. A spell of darkness encoded into a single word, the power released when it was spoken.

And so we’re introduced to a really old big bad.

It’s interesting in books like these when you have relatively ’normal’ points of view mixed in with characters that are literally centuries/millennia old.

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The one where Marco gets a haircut.

And we discover yet another random alien species that’s been living among us all along.

It’s an interesting book, digging (if less than it could) into ideas like radical pacifism, free will, and the domestication of modern dogs. All with the trademark Marco snark as the point of view.

“English paper?” Jake asked as he sat down across from me.

“Yeah.”

He laughed. “You’re good for me, Marco. Compared to you, I’m so responsible. You have a topic?”

I looked up at him and thumped my finger down on the paper. “I’ve already written three pages. What do you mean, do I have a topic?”

But Jake knows me. “So,” he said. “Do you have a topic?”

“A topic will . . . emerge. I’m going to just write until I discover a topic. The topic will rise from these pages. It will reveal itself to me. I just have to keep writing.”

He nodded and made a face at the Goo of the Day on his tray. “This food is blue. Food should not be blue. Hey, here’s a topic for you - the use of total bull in the writing of English papers.”

I grinned. “I am the master of bull. Three pages so far and I haven’t actually said a single thing.”

I don’t particular remember if/when we see the Chee (spoilers!) again, but if we do, I’m looking forward to it. There’s a lot left on the floor here.

One of my favorites so far.

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It’s amusing just how much trouble the Animorphs (six kids, remember) cause the Yeerks on Earth (and Visser Three in particular).

So much so that they’re willing to come up with convoluted schemes to get approval to log an entire forest where they suspect those ‘Andelite bandits’ are hiding. (Which, to be fair, they’re not entirely wrong about).

So of course, Cassie gets the point of view and we have to SAVE THE SKUNKS! (it makes more sense than you might think).

A solid entry.

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