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Review: House of X/Powers of X
House of X/Powers of X by Jonathan Hickman My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is Hickman at his most Hickman. There are repeated timelines, conspiracies, and a semi-non-linear story that goes out 1000 years from the time of the first book. It’s more sci-fi than a typical X-Men book. It’s also, almost 100% setup.…
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Review: Battle Ground
Battle Ground by Jim Butcher My rating: 4 of 5 stars And so it appears we have finished the most recent Arc of the Dresden files. We tied together everything that has come before and just like the previously named book Changes this one changes a whole bunch. We’ve now left the world as it…
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Review: Dead Beat
Dead Beat by Jim Butcher My rating: 4 of 5 stars Even though there’s a timeskip of, I think, a year – this book is a direct follow-on from the previous one. That is to say that Dresden spends a big chunk of the book dealing with the consequences of the last one. Even the…
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Review: Yumi and the Nightmare Painter
Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars On the Cosmere subreddit there’s always a debate on how the eventual Cosmere films should be made. Some of us think it would work best as an anime. There are certain things like the Mistborn jumping around that might look better…
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How My Kids Got into Dungeons and Dragons
Two years ago, while spending time with my brothers, I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time ever. David had been introduced to D&D by a coworker during COVID. Tony and Alex apparently had played in high school. I’m not sure when David’s wife started playing, but she joined us that night, too. David…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 107, April 2019
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 107, April 2019 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars SCIENCE FICTIONThe Archronology of Love (Caroline M. Yoachim) – This short story involves an interesting idea where an alien race has created a VR history, but to make an analogy with archeology, when you view part of the history,…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 104, January 2019
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 104, January 2019 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars I think the only story here that didn’t really click with me was “With Teeth Unmake the Sun”. It was beautiful and I appreciated that, but it wasn’t my fave. “Midway” hit me very hard at this age. Endor…
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Podcasts I’m Listening to In 2023
Once again I used a script to pull out the official descriptions of the podcasts as well as the URL where I access the feed. After the official description you’ll see my commentary about the podcast. Politics 5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive…
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Review: Tress of the Emerald Sea
Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 5 of 5 stars As a Kickstarter backer on this campaign, I was able to read this book immediately on the first day of the year and I bet it will be tough to find another book that I will love more this year. As…
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Review: Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution
Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang My rating: 4 of 5 stars It will be very interesting to compare this book to Seize the Stars when I get to it next year. Both involve the seeming impossibility of pushing for justice against a society…
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Review: The Lost Metal
The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars Well, Sanderson has completed Era 2 of the Mistborn series. Originally intended to just be a bridge novella, Sanderson expanded it to 4 books. (Not surprising since he wrote 4 books during COVID out of boredom) If you’ve been reading the books from…
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Programming Update: October 2022
As October came around, it was time to get ready for Hacktoberfest. I’ve been participating for the past few years and I love the fact that DigitalOcean supports this project which gets more people to contribute to free and open source software. In the past, I’ve often contributed to my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since…
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Review: Calamity
Calamity by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a perfect conclusion to the trilogy. Sanderson does a good job extending out everyone’s character growth and the natural progression of the story. I don’t remember if, while reading the earlier books in the trilogy, I made the leap of Calamity as a…
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Review: Every Heart a Doorway
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire My rating: 5 of 5 stars I got this book for free from Tor.com’s ebook club. I highly recommend it – in exchange for your email address you get access to free books from Tor.com’s catalog; a new one each month. (Currently it’s a Brandon Sanderson book from…