The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was part of the kickstarter that funded this book

I did not immediately jump into this book (Sanderson’s Secret Project #2) because it was not a Cosmere book. (The Cosmere being the equivalent of the MCU for almost all Sanderson’s fantasy books) Once I finally got to it, I was a little hesitant at first. The tone was somewhat like an adult version of Sanderson’s Alcatraz series (a middle grade series). Although, seemingly like Sanderson, I’m a fan of dad jokes - this could get a bit tiring over the course of a novel.

It’s been a while since we last went to Disney; five years, in fact. We were originally supposed to go in 2020, but then, a week before our trip, Disney closed for COVID-19. Finally it was time to go back and boy have things changed. Back when we just had Scarlett, I wrote a blog post about Visiting to Disney with a 2-year-old and another about Visiting to Disney with a 3-year-old. While I don’t intend for this blog post to be nearly as formal as those entries, they do serve as a contrast for this trip.

When I was looking at my SFF magazine covers on Calibre-web, I noticed there seems to be somewhat of a house style to the images chosen for the covers. I know I could write a python program to give me a definitive answer, but I’m not currently in the mood for that. So here’s what I saw as the main theme for each of the magazines I’m subscribed to:

Lightspeed Magazine

The main impression I get with the covers (from the issues I own) is that a successful Lightspeed Magazine cover has orange in it.

Fantasy Magazine, Issue #89, March 2023 by Arley Sorg

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Relatively quick read this month. Here are the reviews per story:

Enchanted Mirrors Are Making a Comeback. That’s Not Necessarily a Good Thing. (Mari Ness): I recognized the author’s name, but I couldn’t remember where I recognized it from. Then it hit me, Ness is the author of a series of Tor.com articles that I love in which they compared Disney movies to the original fairy tales and also wrote about production issues and other background information about those movies. So of course Ness would write a short story with this subject. I think it’s done with the appropriate amount of wit and humor to keep it from sliding into eye roll territory. I hope to see more short fiction from Ness in the future.

The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book started off in a very hard to read place because the author had to deal with the aftermath of the first book. It made everything Rin goes through feel earned. Nothing comes too easily. But it did mean that it was a while before I reached a point where I couldn’t stop reading.

It works very well as the second book in a trilogy. There are lots of twists and turns that mirror the chaos of war. Rin struggles with many internal questions - who to trust, are soldiers responsible for their actions in war, who are your friends, and more. But there’s also lots of well-written action.

Uncanny Magazine Issue 26: January/February 2019 by Lynne M. Thomas

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This issue started off unevenly for me, but I ended up liking most of the stories and non-fiction essays.

A Catalog of Storms (Fran Wilde): A fantasy world in which weather becomes sentient. I failed to gel with the premise or consequences of the world. I think maybe part of it was me being unable to figure out at first if it was supposed to be a SF or fantasy world and whether what was happening was metaphorical or physical.

As you know, I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for a while now. I like how they continue to innovate in the browser space while Firefox and Chrome as just standing still. (Which, to be fair to the other two, makes sense given their general purpose audiences) The latest Vivaldi update has some nice theme updates for folks that like to customize their browsers, but what I really like is their addition of Workspaces. Similar to the way that many of us use Virtual Desktops (or the Windows and Mac equivalents) to organize our open windows, Workspaces allow for organizing your tabs. Combine that with tab groups and you get the kind of 2-dimensional organization that I like with KDE Plasma and their use of both Activities and Virtual Desktops.

In March I continued to work on my programming projects as well as a little more Advent of Code.

Things started off with me finishing up my dreamhostapi and Dreamhost_DNS_Go projects in Golang. I got the API working under all the conditions that I need and I worked on both the output of the program and the logging. It now functions quite well for me to keep my dynamic DNS URLs up to date. My next step is something I’m going to do in a few of my cron scripts - have a separate JSON log that could be interpreted so that I could either have a daily email to let me know that the scripts all ran correctly or so that I can load them into Prometheus/Grafana to see on a dashboard how all my scripts are doing.

Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading the book. Dropped the rating from 5/5 stars to 3/5 stars.

On this second time reading through the Discworld books, I’ve come to realize that I really prefer the Witch books to the Rincewind/Wizard books. Usually (or at least up to this point), the Witch books have been parodies or retellings of Shakespeare or Fairy Tale stories. This one is used by Pratchett to formally introduce Uberwald. It will play a larger and larger role in future Discworld books (including City Watch books). Uberwald is where horror creatures like vampires and werewolves come from. It also includes Igors (although within this book we only know of one family line of Igors).

Nightmare Magazine, Issue 126, March 2023 by Wendy N. Wagner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A great selection of stories this month! Here are my reviews per story:

The Dizzy Room (Kristina Ten): While I didn’t have the ESL issues the main character has, I definitely got my first computer around the same time. I remember playing all these edutainment games like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and (of course) Oregon Trail while my brothers played Reading Rabbit. I really enjoyed the twist - since it was in a horror magazine, I knew it was coming, but it was great seeing it gradually emerge.