January

January was a relatively light programming month for me. I was focused on finishing up end of year blog posts and other tasks. Since Lastfmeoystats is used to generate the stats I need for my end of year music post, I worked on it a little to make some fixes.  The biggest fix was to change the chart titles not to be hardcoded. I didn’t realize it until I was reviewing my blog post, but I had hard-coded the year when I first wrote the code a couple years ago. I also changed the limits on some of the data I was collecting so that I could do more expansive trending for my overall stats.

This was on the treadmill at the gym

Continue? The Boss Fight Books Anthology by Gabe Durham

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This whole collection of essays makes me think a lot about the semi-gonzo video game reviews that Tim Rogers is known for. The shorter format allows the authors to be much more creative than they can be in the full-size Boss Fight Books. It’s a very fun read overall. Here are my thoughts per entry:

Ken Sent Me - A fun piece about playing Leisure Suit Larry back in the 1990s and more recently. I was also a big fan of the Sierra games of the period, although I never played LSL. The essay is written with just the right amount of humor for talking about an early Sierra game.

Witches Be Crazy: A Tale That Happened Once Upon a Time in the Middle of Nowhere by Logan J. Hunder

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Ever since I put this book on my shelf “digital-on-deck” - most likely somewhere around 2019 - I’d been looking forward to reading it. The title seemed interesting and the description on Goodreads seemed fun. (I got this book as part of a Humble Bundle) It seemed as though it might fall into either a Terry Pratchett-like parody of fantasy or maybe a fractured fairy tale. At first it seemed to go alright - it had some dad-joke level puns, and I like those. (eg a town called Farrawee) Or a Who’s-on-First style joke with someone named Herrow.

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A love letter to New York meets Lovecraftian Horror and you get this book.

I believe this is probably one of those love or hate books with very little room in between. As someone who married into a NYC family, I was able to nod along with a lot of the narration in the book. I could see some of it going over the heads of people less familiar.

Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Well, that was incredible and deserving of all the praise it got. I was already a fan of T. Kingfisher from when my eldest daughter convinced me to read A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, but this was just so perfect to me.

It’s essentially a fairy tale, but told for adults. Not in the way that Shrek or other fractured fairy tales make everything into sexual innuendo and fart jokes and so on. Just a fairy tale that can go a little darker, maybe speak about material that would be a bit much for the average child. Even mundane things like the politics of kingdoms and how that affects the choices we have. In that way it reminded me a lot of Tress of the Emerald Sea, which I just read last month. Except Tress has a more whimsical nature to it and is being narrated by a narrator that is in conversation with the reader. So more about the tone than the style as Tress is also told as a fairy tale for adults. One other commonality is that Tress is Princess Bride if Princess Buttercup had more agency. This book is a typical fairy tale if one of the princesses had more agency. This book also has more horror elements to it. The market scene also gave me strong vibes of the spa in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. In fact, the book seemed to have a somewhat similar tone to his manga and anime in that it’s mostly naturalistic, but with magical/supernatural elements sprinkled throughout.

The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading. I dropped the rating from 2 to 1 star

The first time I read this book, I thought, “I’m done with Rincewind stories”. And this second time around cemented that. The book is essentially Pratchett riffing on every Australian stereotype, Mad Max parodies, and what I think (having learned about it recently, but not having seen it) a parody of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories by Tara Moore

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thoughts as I first read through this collection:
Boy, modern English is so dumbed down. I love to read and read voraciously and still found it so laborious to read some of these short stories. Everyone speaks in purple prose and it takes a bit to figure out what each sentence is saying. (And that’s before even considering the words that have morphed since then)