Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is definitely more political than the last non-fiction book I read, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, but that makes sense. The author’s entire thesis is not so much about butts in the abstract, but more specifically the female butt. As part of that explanation she also considers how the butt was used as one dimension across which to define the differences between European and African bodies. Since race as a concept is itself political (more or less emerging in the Age of Exploration), this causes the book to be more political. This isn’t a knock against it or for it. It just means it’s going to be a bit more contentious and, at times, opinionated than Eve, which was simply talking about science and how our bodies evolved.

I came across this video that’s a pretty in-depth history of video game controller that taught me quite a bit I didn’t know and helped bridge some connections between the different companies throughout the industry’s history.

https://youtu.be/-E9Uw3lhWsI?si=MV4yjhOcZ1RPwnrL

https://youtu.be/lVhEo31wAw0?si=JP83c21ajUUI4kfe

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 youth group also had a CD lending library. Thus was I introduced to DC Talk, Newsboys, Audio Adrenaline, and MxPx via their album Teenage Politics. At the time, although my household wasn’t one of those that was against dance, alcohol, or whatever books religious folks paniced about (since Harry Potter wasn’t out yet), we weren’t allowed to listen to current secular music because it was a bad influence. We mostly didn’t really know what we were missing. We didn’t have to listen to the religious station because, again, my parents weren’t fanatical about secularism, they just didn’t think rap and modern rock was something we should listen to. So we would listen to the oldies station. To this day, I know just about any pop song from the 50s or 60s. All this is to say that I had no reference point for punk rock. Compared to the other Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) artists out there, this was fast and hard and loud. I was fascinated. Also, unusually for CCM artists at the time, the music was more about being a teenager than it was about God. That’s not to say that God and religion aren’t mentioned on MxPx albums, but they weren’t the majority of what the songs were about.

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 year they added a model explorer to have better visibility into your models in Django. They also make running development servers for Django, Flask, and FastAPI a breeze. (Including restarting the server after every save).

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
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The Beasts We Want to Be (Sam J. Miller) - a historical SF set in Russia after the communist revolution. The SF is almost incidental to the story, merely a way to explore the ideas behind the way humans act under different regimes and how much is conditioned vs free will.

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 and why these differences came about. Bohannon tackles some of the current received wisdom and explains ways in which these hypothesis fall apart. Usually the culprit is folks taking our current situation and trying to explain back rather than going in the actual direction of evolution.

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 villainy business (think Dr Evil and Scott in Austin Powers). Because Scalzi has good writing chops, this turns out to actually be a pretty neat story and not one overly long joke. Just like The Kaiju Preservation Society I feel like this story ends just as it’s really getting started. In a way, both of these books have the feel of a short story with the length of a novel. It’s the only real criticism I have and the biggest reason for just 4 stars.

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. (I remember thinking the Terminator/Terminator 2 time loop was pretty neat) But, as in the best of Pratchett’s books, this one only incidentally has the time loop to set the plot in motion. It’s really a character study about Samuel Vimes. By this point Pratchett has been building him up and getting the audience to really understand how he works. This book puts it all to the test by asking him to make some impossible choices.

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 books.

Volley’s Cow: Almost microfiction length short story in which we find out a bit more about how the draconic parliamentary participation is going.