Author: Eric Mesa

  • Happy Pi Day!

  • 2024 Concert #1: MxPx & The Ataris

    2024 Concert #1: MxPx & The Ataris

    I first heard MxPx 28 or 29 years ago. At the time my family was still a church-going family. This was my first experience with the idea of a youth group that played rock song versions of the praise music. So I was jazzed to go to church every Wednesday and Sunday. The middle school…

  • Programs used for Programming in 2023

    Programs used for Programming in 2023

    I didn’t really use any new programs this year. I just continued expanding on programs I’ve used in the past. Python For Python I continued to mostly use Pycharm. I’ve spoken about it for the past few years, but JetBrains continues to add features that make it easier to work with Python. For example, this…

  • Review: Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 113, October 2019

    Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 113, October 2019 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars Another great issue of Lightspeed Magazine. There was only one story I wasn’t a fan of. Science Fiction———–The Beasts We Want to Be (Sam J. Miller) – a historical SF set in Russia after the communist revolution. The SF…

  • Review: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

    Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon My rating: 5 of 5 stars I loved listening to this book. The author (also the narrator) does an incredible job taking a look at every difference between male and female bodies and explaining the current scientific knowledge about when…

  • Review: Starter Villain

    Starter Villain by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars Just like Scalzi’s previous book, The Kaiju Preservation Society, this one is a real popcorn book. It’s also got a pretty silly movie-inspired premise and I consider them to be in a meta series. As the book blurb says, our protagonist inherits his Uncle’s…

  • Review: Night Watch

    Night Watch by Terry Pratchett My rating: 4 of 5 stars this is my second time reading the book. The rating remains 4/5 stars. I didn’t remember liking this book so much given the fact that I’m not much of a fan of time loops, at least, not since I got use to the idea.…

  • Review: Golden Age and Other Stories

    Golden Age and Other Stories by Naomi Novik My rating: 4 of 5 stars A neat collection of short stories that take place in the world of the Temeriare series. Some of them are simultaneous with the series and some take place afterwards. It’s a fun little reunion with our friends from the last 9…

  • 2023 Game of the Year

    2023 Game of the Year

    In my 2022 year-end blog post, I thought I was going to focus more on finishing up the narrative video games I started in the prior years. I definitely made some good progress on Disco Elysium, but not nearly as much as I wanted. I didn’t finish any of the narrative games. In January, I…

  • What 8bitDo can learn from the Competition (and also what 8bitDo is doing better!)

    What 8bitDo can learn from the Competition (and also what 8bitDo is doing better!)

    I’m all-in on 8bitDo. Prior to getting on the 8bitDo train, I was mainly focused on PC gaming, so I would get Xbox controllers (whatever the latest was at the time). But with 8bitDo supporting PC, Switch, Android, and (I think) the Xbox and PS4/5 with addaptors – it’s a no-brainer to go with 8bitDo,…

  • Review: League of Dragons

    League of Dragons by Naomi Novik My rating: 4 of 5 stars A perfect ending to the Temeriare series. There’s finally an ending to the Napoleonic threat – I won’t say whether it follows the same trajectory as in our world. But, more importantly, we finally begin to see dragons finally understand their place in…

  • Review: Mislaid in Parts Half-Known

    Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire My rating: 4 of 5 stars Since this novella only just came out on Tuesday (a few days ago), I’m going to be very careful about any spoilers other than what can easily be inferred from the back of the book description. McGuire has formed a main clique…

  • 2023 in Music (Last.FM and Spotify Listening Trends)

    2023 in Music (Last.FM and Spotify Listening Trends)

    Another year has ended and so it’s time to take a look at the music I listened to all year. First of all, it was yet another year in which I grew my personal music collection. I’ve seen more an more artists removed from places like Spotify, Apple Music, etc, so it’s still important to…

  • Review: Thief of Time

    Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book. I left the rating at 3/5 I debated dropping the rating to 2 stars (“It was OK”), but Lu-Tze was enough to keep it at 3 stars. I am not sure if we learned his…

  • Review: Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 112, September 2019

    Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 112, September 2019 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars Even though AI has been a constant subject in science fiction for nearly 100 years now, it’s interesting reading the two AI-related stories in the 2023, the year of ChatGPT. Although ChatGPT is still far away from general AI,…