I, Zombie by Hugh Howey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

That was extremely intense. I don’t think I’ll ever look at zombies the same way again. I got this book as part of some pay what you want bundle. I never would have bought it on its own - I’m not a big zombie person. I read World War Z because everyone spoke about how incredibly good it was. And, just like The Walking Dead (pretty much the only other zombie story I consume), World War Z was about the people, not the zombies. Really the enemy could have been a contagion virus or out of control vampires like The Strain.

Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is Simon Peg/Nick Frost meets World of Warcraft. I can’t remember if I got this in the same ebook bundle as Jam or a different one, but I chose Jam of this one to read first because it sounded like I’d enjoy more. I never played WoW or any of its ancestors or any progeny. As of this writing never even played Diablo or any of its clones. So Jam seemed more up my ally - especially after I confirmed it was more of a spiritual successor to Mogworld than a Sequel. (One of the programmers in Mogworld is a character in Jam, but other than references via t-shirts, posters, etc there’s no reason to read Mogworld first) I really only read Mogworld because a) I owned it and b) I really enjoyed Jam.

Chrono Trigger by Michael P. Williams

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is exactly what I hoped it would be. It is a deconstruction and reconstruction of the plot; it is an examination of what made the game so special. And it is a chunk of the author’s autobiography.

Unlike the author, and perhaps unlike most Chrono Trigger players, this was my first Square RPG. My brothers and I saw it in a used game sale bin at our local game rental shop. Attracted by Toriyama’s art more than anything else, we bought it for about $20 by combining all our allowances. It is no over exaggeration to say that purchase changed our lives. We had no idea such a game could exist.

Borg Like Me & Other Tales of Art, Eros, and Embedded Systems by Gareth Branwyn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(This ended up becoming almost more like a blog post than a review, but let’s call it new Books Journalism - a riff on new games journalism, which is really just Gonzo from the 70s repackaged for the children of the 80s and 90s)

According to the books I’ve put on Goodreads (which I’ve only been using for a few years), these are my all-time most read authors.

1. Terry Pratchett (40) 2. Isaac Asimov (7) 2. Michael Crichton (7) 4. Neal Stephenson (5) 4. Mark Waid (5) 4. Cory Doctorow (5) 4. Douglas Adams (5) 8. Alan Moore (4) 8. Brandon Graham (4) 10. Dean Koontz (3)

Just as with my music listening and how the top 15 artists usually are no more than 30% of the total listens for a quarter, I read a lot of one-off authors so the numbers very quickly tail off. Dean Koontz is #10 with 3 books and John Scalzi is #15 with 2.

Sometimes you can’t see something about yourself until you see it in someone else.

World-famous lawyer Lawrence Lessig on why we should be protesting like those in Hong Kong.

Havana Nocturne by T.J. English

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I knew that one of the things Castro prided himself on was ridding Cuba of the influence of the American Mob, but I had no idea just how entwined they were with the Batista government. It was also incredible what long-range planners the mobsters were. If younger Americans know anything about these events, it’s from the events of The Godfather, but that movie (or is it part 2?) places the mobster meeting the same week as the revolution. In reality it was decades earlier. In fact, Al Capone had dreamed of Cuba being a Gangster’s Paradise.

I heard an interesting theory today - not sure if it’s a causal or correlation relationship, but it goes as follows:

We know that genetics plays a role in how naturally fearful people are. If you’re more towards fearful on the spectrum, you’re not going to want to live in a big city full of lots of fear-causing agents. So you live in the country. Also, if you’re fearful, you’re going to be happier believing in a god that can protect you from all the things you fear. Finally, fearful people hate change. They’ll want things to remain the same - to be conserved. Conservative. It certainly explains the way conservatism manifests itself in the USA.  (although I’m sure because of the negative connotations, people would resent being called fearful) It also explains the return to conservatism when times are tough. But, doesn’t necessarily mean causation, maybe it just appears at the same time and there’s another explanation we haven’t found.

Hard drives are relatively cheap, especially nowadays. But I still want to stay within my budget as I setup my backups and system redundancies. So, ideally, for my backup RAID I’d take advantage of btrs’ ability to change RAID types on the fly and start off with one drive. Then I’d add another and go to RAID1. Then another and RAID5. Finally, the fourth drive and RAID6. At that point I’d have to be under some sort of Job-like God/Devil curse if all my drives failed at once, negating the point of the RAID. The best thinking right now is that you want to have backups, but want to try not to have to use them because of both offline time and the fact that a restore is never as clean as you hope it’ll be.

So, back when I started this project, I laid out that one of the reasons I wanted to use btrfs on my home directory (don’t think it’s ready for / just yet) is that with RAID1, btrfs is self-healing. Obviously, magic can’t be done, but a checksum is stored as part of the data’s metadata and if the file doesn’t match the checksum on one disk, but does on the other, the file can be fixed. This can help protect against bitrot, which is the biggest thing that’s going to keep our children’s digital photos from lasting as long as the ones printed on archival paper. So, like I did the first time, I’ll first be trying it out in a Fedora VM that mostly matches my version, kernel, and btrfs-progs version. So, I went and added another virtual hard drive of the same size to my VM.