Because of various issues I wrote about before (mostly stemming from the issue with my right sesamoids), I ended up canceling my summer and fall races. The last one I was really looking forward to was the Ted Corbitt 15k, honoring Mr. Corbitt who has a long list of achievements, including being the first African-American to run the Olympic Marathon event and being a founding president of the New York Road Runners. This was to be my final competitive road race of 2022.

The Blackcollar by Timothy Zahn

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ll start off with a reminder that I use the tooltips for Goodreads ratings and 2 stars is “it was ok”. It may possibly have hurt that this was my first Zahn novel and I’ve heard so much about him because of the Thrawn Star Wars novels. But I think it’s really more that the novel reads like it was written in the 1980s (which it was). It’s full of that “karate stuff is cool " feeling from the 80s that culminated in films like The Karate Kid. I tend to do alright with Golden Age SF because I like the philosophical aspect behind most of the characters’ dialogue. But the 1980s seems to just fall into an uncanny valley - it’s almost like the modern SF I read, but just full of enough older tropes to feel a bit clunky. This story also seemed to revolve a bit too much on the one character in the know always having a bunch of gambits going on at once and refusing to reveal anything to the main character. So sometimes the wins felt a bit cheap. I also think the idea of training super karate soldiers to fight aliens just doesn’t make sense in the context of an interspecies war.

Nightmare magazine 122: November 2022 by John Joseph Adams

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I really was not feeling it with this issue. The editor mentions that these are all stories in Weird Horror. I’m not a big fan of Weird Science Fiction either, so I’m not surprised these stories all bounced off of me.

Devil Take Me - The main character is a kid in an abusive household. Things got a little too metaphorical and weird and I couldn’t really understand the source of the horror or what was going on.

The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, Sanderson has completed Era 2 of the Mistborn series. Originally intended to just be a bridge novella, Sanderson expanded it to 4 books. (Not surprising since he wrote 4 books during COVID out of boredom)

If you’ve been reading the books from Mistborn Era 2, you know that Sanderson has used it to bring the series more into the cosmic war between gods that appears to be the full Cosmere story. Previous entries were mostly confined to easter eggs and the mention of a rival god known as Trell. This book takes things up to 11 and, if you haven’t read other parts of the Cosmere before this, you will be partly lost and partly truly missing out on the consequences of what’s going on as part of the mystery Wax and friends are solving.

The Sacred Land by H.N. Turteltaub

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Once again we join Menedemos and Sostratos as they sail around the Med. This time they head to Phoenicia and Israel. I was very curious what a pre-Hellenized Isreal would be like and what our Sostratos would think about the Isrealites. As usual it was a fun journey through history with our usual cast of characters. By this point in the series you should know whether or not you enjoy this writing which is centered on philosophical debates, traders haggling, and Hellenic partying and sexual escapades. It’s more of the same which is exactly what I wanted.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I know a lot about money and its history and I still learned a bunch in this book. Jacob Goldstein, who also narrates, uses his podcast-acquired skills to make the stories he uses to illustrate the history of money very accessible. It felt like I was listening to a podcast series with a bunch of episodes (each chapter) that were fascinating and illuminated a lot about the history of money. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand money and what’s been happening in the world economy over the last few decades.

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts by Kevlin Henney

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think this book is best read by someone who’s been in the software field for a few years - it provides the perspective to truly understand what the Experts are communicating. I think a recent CS grad could certainly understand the words and concepts, but would be lacking the perspective of working in the real world with real life-cycle requirements and customer requirements and time crunches.

Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back by Rebecca Giblin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Rebecca Giblin and Corey Doctorow have written an incredibly important book for everyone to read, whether you’re a producer or consumer of cultural products (books, movies, music, etc). They do a great job of explaining how, over a bunch of industries, a handful of companies have made themselves into both monopolies and monopsonies. This allows them to screw over both the producers and the consumers by being the sole buyer and seller. Also shows how certain things like Spotify playlists are actually pretty insidious. (Spoiler: it’s because they train you not to care about the artist so that if the artist threatens to take their music off, no one will care)

Back when I first started getting into the internet and hadn’t started using Linux yet, I needed a way to get onto the chat protocol known as IRC. Back then I used mIRC. Later on I started using Linux and used all kinds of IRC programs including XChat, BitchX, and Konversation. But recently most open source projects (which is what I’d used it for recently) have moved to the Matrix protocol. So I was surprised to see that mIRC was still a thing when I saw this news post:

The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a very interesting collection of short stories. They are companion piece to the dystopia described in Janelle Monáe’s concept album Dirty Computer. That said, these stories are mostly full of hope. They also depict a world in which there is more room for LGBT+ members and with intersectionality. That is to say, yes, the LGBT+ individuals are hated within the dystopia of New Dawn, but within the various communities explored in the short stories, everyone who’s against New Dawn is OK with the LGBT+. This is a world where no one blinks at pronoun preferences or various types of couples. (Except in one story where the weakness of not accepting it is kind of the point of the story) Most of the morals and lessons of the stories are pretty obvious (at least to me), but I feel like Monáe and her collaborators do a good job of not distracting from the quality of the stories.