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.

By the end of 2022 I had 2793 digital books and magazines (a change of 264). Around twenty-four of those came from free books I get monthly from Tor.com and Amazon Prime. This year I’m also going to start the amount of audiobooks I have: 144. In 2022 I started up my libro.fm subscription and listened to quite a few great audiobooks.

Although this year I read some cookbooks and comics, I read far fewer of each of those than in other years. The biggest surprise was the discovery of the trilogy starting with Gideon The Ninth. The world is so incredibly vast and the narrative voice was so much fun. I heartily recommend it to all. The Becky Chambers stories starting with the book A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was the nice, cozy story that I needed as the real world continued to get crazier and crazier.

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.