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.

Limbus, Inc. by Anne C. Petty

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The best way to describe what I just finished: a series of short stories in genres I may not have read as standalones but which combined into a highly enjoyable book. Not perfectly true as they all tended to have a bit of science fiction and a bit of detective fiction. But I do not think I would have sought many of these out.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a little Enders Game, a little Battle Royale, and a little 1984 with a dash of Harry Potter.

I don’t usually write such short reviews, but in some ways, while a lot happens in this book, not very much happens. Which is to say that it’s the first book of a trilogy so nothing huge can get resolved. It’s a lot of setup in 3 parts, each with their own beginning, middle, and end. That’s what Pierce Brown does so well and which keeps me from being TOO upset at the fact that at the end of this book, things are only beginning for the main character. Yet we have already seen him have 3 arcs. He’s grown so much in the approximately 2 years in which the book takes place and yet he also reminds somewhat blinded in simplicity by his goal.

Mother Fucking Flowers by Tammy L. Witzens

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Let me begin by saying that I enjoyed this book. I won it as part of Goodreads’ FirstReads program. The title looked insane and so did the description; the subject of many an Internet joke and comic strip: if you could go back in time, should you kill Hitler? The Aeon Flux-looking woman on the cover was interesting as well. Unfortunately, I was delayed by a couple weeks in getting the package because I had a business trip. When I did get the book, I was amazed at how thin the package is. Other than, perhaps, The God Engines, this is shortest book I’ve read in a long time.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it. Brooks does an excellent job putting together a history of both how the zombie virus became an epidemic and how the human race came on top. He gives each character their own voice and style. I really felt as if it were a real documentation of history. I also enjoyed the meta-story told through both the names of the countries/provinces and the introductions to each section.

Jam by Yahtzee Croshaw

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had no idea what to expect when I started reading this book. All I knew was that I found Yahtzee Croshaw’s reviews at Zero Punctuation to be pretty funny. I’d acquired Mogworld and Jam via Humble ebook bundles. I’m not sure, but I think they were in two different bundles. I can’t remember. Anyway, after looking at all the descriptions, it appeared that Jam was just Croshaw’s next novel, not a sequel to Mogworld. So, since the description of Mogworld sounded a little too close to what I do for a living, I went with Jam. It is a standalone book. I ALMOST changed my mind when one of the characters in Jam turned out to be a Mogworld developer, but that was of no consequence. The character may or may not be in both books, but it appears they merely take place in the same universe without any part of Mogworld being necessary before reading jam.

A Midsummer Night’s Steampunk by Scott E. Tarbet

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s always tough when people redo Shakespeare. Sometimes it works really well and sometimes it’s just horrible. I absolutely loved the way Scott Tarbet resets a Midsummer Night’s Dream in a Steampunk Victorian England. He was able to use Steampunk to handle the existence of fairies in the original and he uses wordplay to deal with stuff like the ass. It was only the love potion that had to resort to hand-waving to work with the story. I didn’t mind it too much.

The Silver Ninja: Indoctrination by Wilmar Luna

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Disclosure: I got this book for free for review.

Let me start with what I liked. Wilmar does a good job creating a believable female hero. She has flaws. She sounds like a woman; not a man with breasts. At the same time not a caricature of womanhood or a ditz. The sisterly relationship seems like a girl’s version of what I’ve seen with my brothers. While the dialog sometimes fell a little flat, the martial spat and relationship and sexual dysfunction seemed realistic.