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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…
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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…
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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,…
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Review: Blood of Tyrants
Blood of Tyrants by Naomi Novik My rating: 4 of 5 stars Oh, Temeriaire, you sweet summer child-dragon (to mix together 2 vastly different dragon-containing series). Yes, you’re learning, but you still are way too optimistic about people, dragons, and battles. This was one of the better Temeriare novels, although so far they’ve all been…
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My 2023 Programming Progress
In 2023 I just didn’t have the urge to do as much programming as in years past. I felt more of a tug towards video games, reading, and baking/cooking. So this recap will be quite a bit shorter than usual. A couple upfront themes and ideas: The programming was essentially Go and Python. I started…
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My Reading Life in 2023
By the end of 2023 I had 3049 ebooks and magazines (a change of 256 – pretty even with last year). Of those, 2434 were unread. Some chunk of those – maybe as much as ¼ were giveaways like Raspberry Pi Magazine, HackSpace Magazine, and Tor.com book club freebies. I stopped getting the monthly free…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 111, August 2019
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 111, August 2019 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars This issue was one in which I enjoyed all of the stories very much. Science Fiction One Thousand Beetles in a Jumpsuit (Dominica Phetteplace) – a dystopian story taking place “20 Minutes in the Future” that seems to me…
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Review: The Kaiju Preservation Society
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars What is this book? It’s a love-letter to science fiction nerds. It shares narrative bits with Jurassic Park. It’s a reminder of how disruptive 2020 was in every day. I had a lot of fun with this story. I think the only…
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Review: Crucible of Gold
Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik My rating: 4 of 5 stars When we last left Laurence and Temeriare, they were in Australia, contemplating retirement. This book has them dragged back in because Napoleon continues to scheme. Thanks to the deviation from our history in which Africa has been wrested from colonialism, Napoleon makes a…
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Review: I am not a Serial Killer
I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells My rating: 3 of 5 stars I’m not a horror person – I got this to listen to with my wife on a car trip. She calls the book Baby-Dexter. She’s not wrong. I think the book fits in a very interesting intersection. It’s (in my…
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Review: Long Past Dues
Long Past Dues by James J. Butcher My rating: 3 of 5 stars (a reminder that I use the star rating tooltips on the goodreads site. 3 stars = “I liked it”.) Butcher, the son, is back with another entry in The Unorthodox Chronicles. Book 1 was a buddy-cop plot. We’re back with the same…
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Review: Tongues of Serpents
Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik My rating: 3 of 5 stars Just like the Africa book, this one is a lot of just passing the time without much happening. Then in the last few chapters we get a bunch of bombshells about how the world continues to differ from ours because of the the…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, April 2018
Lightspeed Magazine, April 2018 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars SCIENCE FICTION What is Eve? (Will McIntosh) – Will does a great job with the story. The reader can probably guess the general direction of the story, but it’s the details that make it shine. I think he also does a…
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Review: Victory of Eagles
Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novik My rating: 4 of 5 stars I found this book to be a nice change of pace from book 4. It was more exciting and moved the plot along quite a bit. We’ve had the dragon suffrage plot as a Chekov’s Gun since around the first book and we…
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Review: Empire of Ivory
Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik My rating: 4 of 5 stars I have come to the realization that what I enjoy in this series is similar to what I enjoy in Anne Leckie’s Imperial Radch series – I enjoy the formality of the systems that govern the main character’s lives. I wouldn’t want to…