Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson

Another of my rare DNFs. I started reading this to my eldest years ago. She eventually read the whole series. I would have LOVED this series from about age 10 to about age 14. I love me some dad jokes, but now in my 40s the quantity of kid-level dad jokes in this series drives me bananas. I cannot finish this book on my own.

Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When Mickey7 ended, I didn’t think there was any need for a second book. I just grabbed this one because I had an audiobook credit and figured - why not? Although the narrative is a bit slow to get going, I think Ashton does a good job closing the loop on a the few loose ends in the first book. There is one plot thread that Ashton leaves hanging (or perhaps I missed it): What happened to the extra Mickeys from this book?

Think Julia: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Ben Lauwens

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a great book introducing you to how to use Julia to solve problems. I describe Julia to others as - what if Python had been designed for data analysis instead of falling backwards into that role? This book is well-written and does a great job at presenting the way Julia works.

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly Weinersmith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Any time anyone on the news or a podcast talks about us founding a colony on Mars, you should hand them this book. Basically it is a ridiculous thing to say on any timescale that the people currently advocating it would want. Zach and Kelly go through all the reasons why we are NOWHERE near the level of tech we would need for this to work. (Also, it’s on bad legal ground and would probably lead to war)

The Innocent Sleep by Seanan McGuire

3 of 5 stars

I had a feeling I would like this more than the previous book (which covers the same events from Toby’s point of view) and I was right. A large portion of book 17 took place in a world without consequence. Meanwhile, this book, told from Tybalt’s point of view, has him working actively the entire time to fix things.

I’m finally caught up with the main novels. Just have to finish the final novella and a few short stories while I wait for the next book this fall.

Sleep No More by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Maybe you read Marvel’s What If back in the day or saw the recent series. Maybe you’re familiar with DC Comics’ Elseworlds. This book was mostly like reading one of those. It’s not a spoiler since the last chapter of the previous book revealed what revenge on Toby looked like. That made this book less interesting to me.

Because Toby was either dreaming or in The Matrix or somehow else experiencing a fake world, none of the consequences of her actions felt like they had any stakes. Very late in the book it was revealed that there were SOME consequences - mostly mental/emotional. Near the end I felt that perhaps there was some interesting emotional work that McGuire did via this book. (And the last 7 or so chapters did resolve the conflict from the previous book and get things back to a clean slate as well as revealing a little more about the world)

It’s time once again for my annual podcast list. The formatting has changed a little from last year: Podcast Republic (the podcatcher I use) no longer provides the podcast’s official description. In lieu of that, I have the “My Thoughts” section which is part description and part opinion. If you click on the podcast’s title - that is the link for the podcast’s feed. If you click on the link for the Podcast website, that should take you to whatever website the podcast lists as their official website.

I was a backer for Kobold Press’s Monster Vault 2. Here’s what I thought about it:

For most (if not all) of the past 20 years I’ve had the same tagline on the blog: “Insights on fatherhood, technology, culture, photography, and politics”. It is still TECHNICALLY accurate, but it doesn’t really reflect the balance of posts for the past few years. I’ll be changing it soon and just wanted to document it here since it’s been the tagline for so long.

A while ago I wrote about the need to spend money for each publishing type of a TTRPG “book”. My opinion at the time was that the PDFs should come for free with the physical books and I was annoyed, but somewhat understanding of the need to charge extra for a VTT version of the book. My thoughts have evolved somewhat, so I wanted to write an updated post on the different ways a book could be published and what I thought about it.