Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die by Ryan North

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is, in a way, not what you think it’s going to be when you read the premise. Essentially it’s a dozen or so Oedipus Rex stories - in the oracle sense, not the incest sense. There is a machine called The Machine of Death and it tells you how you will die. Not when (except in one story). Just how. So if you get CANCER you might die of cancer in two months or at age 99. Sometimes, like Oedipus, what you do to avoid it causes it to happen. Other times that’s not the point of the story, but it can’t be avoided. If your death is EATING A PEANUT you cannot commit suicide by any way other than eating one. The predictions are also vague and/or ironic. OLD AGE might mean you die old or it might mean a senior citizen kills you. So I thought this would be a bunch of stories of people trying to outwit the machine. Instead, what I got were about a dozen stories in which the authors explore how our world would change with the existence of the Machine of Death.

Just the Tips by Matt Fraction

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is like the 90s movie Booty Call. It’s funny in a really dumb, immature way. What’s sad is that the tips in all those women’s magazines should be treated with about as much seriousness as these tips, but some people actually take them seriously. It also includes some hilarious joke sex positions and reader-submitted stories.

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I’ve been a fan of Weird Al for about 17 years. I used to have the Disney special Weird Al Going Home, but unfortunately, I lent it to someone and never got it back. Yet, in all the time, I’d never seen a Weird Al concert live. Finally, Weird Al came to Baltimore as part of his Mandatory Fun Tour and I was able to experience an Al Tour. It was a pretty neat experience. It’s only something like the fourth arena concert I’ve been to (even thought it wasn’t technically in an arena). The last arena concert I went to was Rihanna. Interestingly, Weird Al had WAY more costume changes than she did. He had just about one outfit per song with few exceptions. While he was changing, clips played from nearly every video Weird Al has ever been involved in.

I have KDE connect installed on my computer and phone. KDE connect allows phone alerts to appear on my computer - letting me see if I’m getting a text or something. It just went off, letting me know I had a phone call. What’s neat is that I was listening to music and it paused the music until the phone call was over. While there might be some circumstances where that wouldn’t be the best default (say a party where I was playing the music), it’s certainly neat in the context of a personal computer.

Until recently I’d never used a DSLR that was capable of video. Oh, I’d had plenty of point-and-shoot cameras that were capable of shooting video, but not DSLRs. Thanks to my mom, I now have the Canon EOS Rebel T6s Digital SLR and I wanted to try out the video. On the first day, with the auto-focus I was annoyed because it’s incredibly loud on the onboard microphone. More or less impossible to shoot film that way until you’re going to have an external mic. So I played around with it with manual focus. Here is the result:

I still love the innovation coming out of Valve (like their VR and controller work), but today I listened to the Beastcast Episode 2 and saw that Steam is implementing game refunds. This is something GOG has offered for quite some time now. It appears that GOG is starting to eat Valve’s lunch as it’s getting more Triple A games DRM-Free! I have no issues with Valve and I don’t consider them evil or anything hyperbolic, but here’s how healthy competition helps. Now Valve has to match GOG for refunds just as GOG has had to create GOG Galaxy to match the Steam client. I hope they continue to challenge each other in the market and create a good environment for us that is pro-consumer since digital has been anti-consumer for so long. (DRM, games/books/movies/etc being pulled without notice)

Old Man’s War Boxed Set 1 by John Scalzi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have rapidly become a Scalzi fanboy. I’m proof of the sentiment behind Scalzi’s new $3 million deal - when someone reads one Scalzi book, they read them all. I don’t believe it discounts what I’m going to say, but it’s worth noting up front. Starting with The God Engines and going through Red Shirts, I’ve built up a huge enjoyment for Scalzi’s style. What style is that? I’ve had a hard time articulating it to friends and family. Here’s my best shot - Old Man’s War is not a comedy, but it’s funny. It’s an like action movie, but it’s not dumb. The humor mostly comes from witty or sarcastic responses by the main characters. Even though it’s framed as a military action book, it’s mostly a series of character studies. I also enjoy that both within a book and within the series, Scalzi only doles out information as needed. This has two good effects. First, there are no info dumps - or if there’s more than one paragraph of explanation, it’s the only way Scalzi has of conveying it Second, as we learn more of the universe - either through our POV characters learning more or by going from regular army to special forces, it forces us to re-evaluate what we learned before in a new light. Most apt in that comparison is the scientist telling our main character early in the first book about how the space elevator is designed in such a way as to be a symbol of how much more advanced the Colonial Union is than Earth without revealing just how advanced. With all that’s learned (mostly in the second two books), the scale of that deception is truly realized.

The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I haven’t read a lot of autobiographical books, but this is one of the more entertaining ones I’ve ever read. I think part of that has to do with Wil Wheaton’s writing style - I particularly enjoyed his teen-to-adult filters. I think it also is partially due to the fact that many of these stories originally came from his blog. While I’m sure his editor helped him clean it up a bit and make it slightly more bookish, it still retains a lot of that conversational style.

Another event has once again cemented my thoughts that the informed technical person needs to run their own services rather than depend upon the benevolence of companies. It started with Google closing Google Reader. Then Facebook and Twitter got extra censorious. During all that, people started abusing DMCA requests on Youtube. Recently Google decided to close Google code. Now there the Ars Technica story that SourceForge is installing malware on software that is considered abandoned on their site.