Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 103, December 2018 by John Joseph Adams

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was an awesome issue of Lightspeed magazine where I really enjoyed every story. I was especially happy to find out that I started out my Lightspeed magazine subscription with this issue because for the next 5 issues they had stories by Ashok K Banker that all take place in the same universe and I loved the story in this issue. Here are my reviews per story:

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this book along with the Sword and Laser group on Goodreads as the April 2023 book pick. I’m glad this ended up being the pick. That said, this is probably going to be a very divisive book. It’s a book in which, to some degree, “nothing” happens. Our main character is an Orc member of a fantasy adventuring party (think RPGs or Lord of the Rings). She wants to retire to start a coffee shop in a fantasy world where coffee is new (and unknown in the city she chooses).

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I got this book for free from the Tor.com ebook club

Once again Vo creates a novella from The Singing Hills Cycle that I had so much trouble putting down. Vo expands the world a little more as Chih ends up in the north this time, traveling with the mammoth corps.

Vo finds another way for Chih to end up in story telling and recording mode without feeling repetitive with the first book. This time the names are mostly (from what I can tell) Vietnamese so I wonder if this is a retelling/remix of a Vietnamese legend. What I loved was mixing this with a (view spoiler)[Thousand and One Nights (hide spoiler)] situation to create a greater sense of tension.

The Story Behind: The Extraordinary History Behind Ordinary Objects by Emily Prokop

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve always liked books, articles, and podcasts about little trivia like this. There are so many objects in our world and they each have a history! We often gloss over those things that have existed since we were born. For me that includes all the items on the cover (like the traffic lights and the slinky). What separates this book from others in the same genre is that the author isn’t afraid to say when the true story is unknown or when there are multiple claims to the creation of a particular object.

Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System by Dominic Arsenault

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is written at the level of a college paper with lots of footnotes, citations, etc. There are even some sections of chapters that get into some heavy terminology that didn’t really mean anything to me. But overall, I found the book to be written in a very approachable way.

What was incredibly fascinating to me was that, given my age, I lived through the NES -> SNES transition. I remember all the commercials and the rivalry with Sega. I remember wondering why some arcade games were way better on the Sega Genesis. I remember being incredibly impressed with late-era SNES games like Super Mario RPG and Donkey Kong Country. And I remember strange translations, but not knowing why they were so strange.

Nightmare Magazine, Issue 125 by Wendy N. Wagner

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another issue of Nightmare Magazine I bought to read and discuss with the wife. I bought it thinking she’d prefer Who The Final Girl Becomes (having only read the synopsis), but our favorite ended up being Home.

Who the final girl becomes - an interesting examination of the trauma of being a sole survivor. Obviously, horror stories wouldn’t be the same if we always examples the aftereffects, but it can be illuminating to explore it occasionally. As they state in the author interview, the story becomes (at least partially) a critique of the true crime genre. The trans aspect of the story is interesting. At first I thought maybe it was giving the wrong message that there was a transition that took place in the face of trauma. But the author also presented a more traditional transition, so perhaps it’s even better because it presents how complicated real life is.

Spelunky by Derek Yu

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have enjoyed many of the books in the Boss Fight Books series. They’re each unique in their own way, but this is the only one (that I know of) written by the creator of the game. It was fascinating to read Yu’s thought process as he chipped away at various ideas and finally ended up at Spelunky.

Yu mentions in the final chapter that his game came about at the right time for an indie resurgence, but it’s especially interesting reading this book at the same time as Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware: The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, a history of the SNES. That is a period where, on consoles, it was more or less impossible to be a bedroom developer because of the way Nintendo controlled the market. So this book also functions as somewhat of a history of the early days of the indie video game market.

Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef by Cassandra Khaw

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I bought this book as part of a story bundle collection.

I haven’t read any of the other books in the “Gods and Monsters” universe, but (as one of the ads at the back of the book says) it’s somewhat similar to American Gods. The gods of various religions and traditions are real and interact with humanity. This book (more like novella) takes place in Malaysia where Rupert Wong cooks humans for some gods or demi-gods. Interestingly, this story has almost nothing to do with that.

Once again I used a script to pull out the official descriptions of the podcasts as well as the URL where I access the feed. After the official description you’ll see my commentary about the podcast.

Politics

5-4 Pod - Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court’s most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects. Eric’s Commentary: If you really want to see how crazy it is that 9 men and women who server for life have such control over American life, you can be silly like me and listen to this show. I often find the topics and conclusions depressing (whether it’s the current Supreme Court or one from the past) The hosts are entertaining, though. They’re all practicing or former lawyers.

I recently used Mastodon to ask for recommendations for Go podcasts and one of the suggestions was Go Time. One of the recent episodes in the feed was a rerun of an older episode about " How Go helped saved HealthCare.Gov". This was extra interesting to me since I wrote my Master’s Special Project on Healthcare.gov. (I haven’t read it in nearly a decade, so I don’t know if it’s cringe-worthy at this point). The episode had on one of the programmers who helped get things back on track for the site. It was incredibly informative about the problems that led to the site not being responsive enough and how they were able to help fix it without scrapping the entire site. No matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on or if you’re even an American, the episode is fascinating for understanding how things can go wrong even when everyone has the best intentions and how to fix a large, complex code base.