I got a copy of the book free as part of Goodreads Giveaways.

I’m a big history geek. Anyone who talks to me long enough has heard me make reference to history, whether relatively recent or in the distant past. So when this book came up on Goodreads Giveaways I already had it in my To Read list and figured it was worth a shot at getting the book for free.

I blazed through The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. It’s not too hard, as the audiobook is only 5 hours long, but it was also incredibly engaging and I didn’t want to stop listening. I first found Cory Doctorow through his fiction which was what convinced me to try ebooks. His books were available under a creative commons license for free from his own website so it was risk-free. Since then I’ve continued to read both his fiction and non-fiction books.

It’s good to have Dresden back. I prefer to practice “death of the author” when it comes to reviews or analysis. To me it doesn’t matter what they intended or what kind of person they are (mostly). But this book truly seems inseparable from Jim Butcher’s experience exorcising his personal demons. We know he had a hard time in his personal life and it’s at least part of the reason that the Dresden Files books suddenly stopped coming out so frequently.

While this book is not structured in the best possible way to teach a newbie how to play Starfinder Second Edition, the fact of the matter is that this is a reference book. One might use it one time to learn how to play or, perhaps more likely, one will learn from YouTube videos, a Beginner’s Box product or being taught by friends around the table.

As a reference book, the Player Core is very well organized. It has the most likely stuff that the player would look up (character creation) up front. Based on how I’ve consulted the Player books for Tales of the Valiant and D&D, this is the most likely use for the book.

I was a Kickstarter backer on this (or it was a stretch goal for an Apex mag kickstarter - I can’t remember). Since these are micro-fiction I am not going to do my usual per-story review for the anthology as the stories are too short for that.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for an anthology themed around recipes for alcoholic drinks, the stories were overwhelmingly sad and/or angry. Since each story is only about a page long, this might be a good anthology to dip in and out of. Reading it straight through was a bit much. Also, some of the themes are repeated in a way that is made more obvious when reading it straight through.

This is a fun book that takes place on Golarian, the world of Pathfinder. The author does a good job presenting the TTRPG elements - like Zae needing to prepare her spells each morning - without bogging the story down in these things. But for a few things like that, I think it could be handed to any fantasy fan and they would enjoy it without realizing it’s based on a TTRPG.

Years after learning about the genre of dark academia and backing this anthology on kickstarter, the time has arrived to read this book. For my particular tastes the stories were a bit uneven. I loved some of them and others I hated. Also, compared to what I thought the definitely of Dark Academia was, this seemed to simply be an anthology of horror stories that took place in and around schools. Still, there are some gems here and I recommend giving it a read. Reviews of individual stories follow:

A short story that moves extremely quickly but is a fun romp. You don’t need to know anything about Pathfinder other than what the creature accompanying the protagonist is. I had to look it up because I’m pretty new to the Pathfinder universe.

Since it’s a short story it’s not too complicated. It’s a character being heroic and bringing us along for the ride. If you want a fast-paced sword and sorcery story, this one is pretty good.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book. It’s based on a TTRPG. Would it be like the novelization of a movie or some of the books from the Star Trek or Star Wars universes? Would it be cheesy or great? Well, it turned out to be way better than I expected. There were a few things that came through a little bit game-y, but they were few and far between. The two examples that stood out to me were a character who created a psychic bond with her companions allowing them to speak to each other a “battle mind”

There isn’t much to say about an old, outdated technical manual. There’s at least one newer edition of this book released. However, whether you’re using vim or neovim, the basics remain the same. If you only have access to this edition of the book, I would focus on the chapters that teach you how to use vi and vim. In that respect, this book is very well written. Ignore the chapter on plugins and scripts as those have evolved quite a bit (especially in neovim with their use of lua).