Sourcery by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book

I believe this book marks the inflection point from the retconned books to the more continuity focused books. It appears that Equal Rites has already been retconned away by this book or else Rincewind is ignorant of those events when he tells Conina that no women enter the doors of the university. Although, I guess we can’t trust him too much because I believe even this one mentions that women work in the kitchens and so forth.

Mort by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading Mort

I dropped the rating from 5/5 to 4/5 because I’m using the tooltips for the ratings. I really enjoyed this book a lot. In my re-read this is the first tone I have enjoyed without any reservations. But it wasn’t “amazing”.

This is the first Discworld book that can be read completely independantly of the others. Are there some Easter Eggs if you’ve read the first 3 books? Sure. There’s mention of Granny Weatherwax’s Discworld version of “marital aides”. You’ll know why the librarian at the Unseen University is an Orangutang. And this will be the second time you meet Death’s adopted daughter. But, outside of that, this really is a great standalone book. If I wanted to do a survey of British fantasy humor (say I was a University professor), I could assign this book and folks would get the idea without feeling that they were being dropped 4 books into a 30-something book series.

Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book

This is DEFINITELY a book of its times. I remember in the late 80s and early 90s there was a lot of fiction around whether women could really equal men in the workplace. Why then? I guess because it’s one generation removed from the Civil Rights era in the 60s and 70s? I know the backlash had grown by then, leading to Atwood to write The Handmaid’s Tale. Of course, that leads later into the Girl Power movement.

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book

This second time around I dropped the rating from 4 stars to 3 stars. The book is definitely an improvement over The Color of Magic. I think, perhaps, Pratchett was starting to consider that Discworld might extend beyond a couple books. That said, from my memory, there’s about 1-2 more books that contain plot points that are effectively somewhat retconned later. A the very least, Equal Rites seems to never be spoken of again - and Discworld seems to revert to male wizards and female witches. And I can’t remember if Sourcery has last consequences or not.

On 30 June 2021, I attended my first concert since COVID-19 started. I was masked since the Delta variant is a thing and singing indoors is definitely an activity that increases transmission. Despite that, it was awesome to get to do it again and there was a real sense of joy in the room from both the audience and the performers at once again being able to engage in the ancient human ritual of enjoying music as a crowd.

Not sure what the story behind this setup, but Scarlett set it up one day. Also, she made some of the clothes the dolls are wearing.

Upgrade the main computer to Fedora 34. The upgrade was uneventful, but left me with a few little annoyances. It’s running Wayland, so there’s no longer a primary monitor. Also, something is slamming my processors and some programs are taking a long time to load. I was hoping things would be in better shape by this point in the life-cycle, but every once in a while there’s a buggier Fedora.

June was mostly Python, although I did do chapter 1 of Scratch 3 Games for Kids with Sam. He really, really enjoyed it and I anticipate doing the challenge problems and maybe chapter 2 in July or August.

Books

I read the intro and first couple chapters of both Flask Web Development, 2nd Edition and Data Visualization with Python and Javascript, both from a recent Humble Bundle. The Flask book may be useful for learning more about creating a non-Django site and, even if I mostly stick with FastAPI, it should provide some concepts that are applicable across both frameworks. With the data visualization book, I would love to use that to better visualize my annual Last.fm stats.

MxPx Front Cover

Last October I came back to MxPx, as I detailed in this post about how the lyrics for Friday Tonight led me to finally watch Friday. Over the past half year I would return to their self-titled album on Spotify. (I don’t subscribe to Spofity, but I do use the free tier to discover new artists) Eventually I decided to go ahead and buy the Deluxe version of the album directly from MxPx. It doesn’t appear they’re selling the CD anywhere else (at least it’s not on Amazon).

Over the 16 years that this blog spans I must have, at some point, mentioned that I believe sometimes we get knowledge when we’re not ready to receive it.This isn’t some spiritual or new age thing (although you’ll hear Chopra and/or Tony Robbins talk about the phenomenon). It’s simply my lived experience. Sometimes you come across some knowledge, but there’s some underpinning knowledge missing or maybe some life experience you don’t yet have to put your new knowledge into context. So sometimes this leads to a difficulty in learning the concept and other times you just don’t get the point of it and file it away or throw it away - no need to waste neurons on this!