Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 133 by Neil Clarke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As usual, the per-story reviews are below this section. But first, a ranking of said stories.

The stories I REALLY liked: The Sum of Her Expectations, The Last Boast-Builder in Ballyvoloon, Intro to Prom, Shiomah’s Land

Great: Red Lights, And Rain

Good: The Psychology Game

Not a fan: The Nightingales in Platres

The per-story reviews:

I had been hanging on to these books in case I ever found myself wanting to do some Java programming. But as I’ve come to learn (mostly because of Python, but also through following the Perl 6 saga), languages change and evolve and so a couple books from nearly 20 years ago probably won’t be more useful than a newer book or a good Google search.

Cornell’s CS101 class textbook back when I was a freshmanI don’t remember what class this was for, but Cornell sure loved Java back then.

December had a relatively low number of new dishes. I made a pasta bolognese from a new cookbook that I found rich and delicious. I had an OK attempt at flat bread. I needed to roll out the bread a bit thinner because it didn’t really fulfill the “flat” part of flat bread. The Spanish garlic soup was pretty good, except they didn’t mention how much Sherry vinegar to use and I guessed a little too high. The coffee cake was pretty good, and the first time I’d made one.

I thought last year’s description was perfect, so I’m going to repurpose it here. Yeah, yeah – even before Instagram was a thing my family was already making fun of me for taking self-portraits or for my 365 project of self-portraits 8 or so years ago. But for me this is part of my most primal photographic urge; even stronger than the urge to create art. It’s the urge to document my life and the life of those around me. And so I take these self-portraits at roughly the same time every year to be able to view them as a series documenting my aging. And so here is the one I took in 2019.

While I continued to read lots of cookbooks in 2019, this was the year of Sequels, Sanderson, and Science Fiction Magazines. On the sequels front, I finished The Cosmere (except for White Sands Vol 3), continued The Expanse, The Asylum Tales, Red Rising, The Dresden Files, The Mogoliad, Wild Cards, and the Illumination Paradox. For Sanderson, I not only finished the Cosmere, but I also started The Reckoners and read from his mentor (Robert Jordan - Wheel of Time) and his protege (Brian McClellan - Powder Mage Trilogy). As for magazines, it was all Clarkesworld, but I wanted to keep the alliteration in that sentence.

Over on Adafruit they asked the community, " What do you want from CircuitPython in 2020?" What’s CircuitPython? It’s a subset of Python that’s meant to run on embedded processors. Essentially I could use it (on compatible boards) in place of Arduino’s subset of C++ or TinyGo. As you know if you read my 2019 in Programming post, I love programming in Python and I love making GUIs with Qt. With Adafruit’s PyPortal, I was looking at making a GUI interface for some usecases here, but from what I can find on Adafruit’s tutorials THIS is how you make GUIs. Ugh! I mean, it’s kind of in the whole DIY spirit to make your GUI out of basic elements like circles, squares, and triangles. But, since Qt is available for embedded devices, I’d love to be able to use Qt5 Designer and pyuic5 just as I do with regular Python to create awesome GUIs for my CircuitPython projects (when they have a fully-featured screen, of course).

In 2019 I went to 5 concerts, starting with Neon Trees and Fitz & The Tantrums in May. Then I saw a bunch of my favorite smaller bands like The MiSbehavin’ Maidens, The Doubleclicks, Lionize, and The PDX Broadsides. Anberlin came out of retirement and so it was great to go see them in concert again for the first time in years.

I also got a LOT of albums in 2019. Some were Kickstarted and others were freely available. Others still were purchased for family members. Here is a mostly complete list of all the albums I added to my collection in 2019:

This was a VERY busy year for my coding. This year I had over 769 commits to GitHub; my previous best was 58 in 2014. The commits were very unevenly distributed. If you look at the graph of my commits, outside of a busy week in January and another in May, I didn’t really start coding until August.

GitHub activity graph

But perhaps commits to GithHub isn’t the best metric. If you look at what I accomplished in the second half of 2019, I worked on an incredible number of projects.

First of all, I was wrong about needing to trigger it to update. The default configuration is to update the feeds every hour, 10 at a time. This is configurable, but I think that arrangement works fine to me. Having been using it on my phone for a few days now, I’m really liking the formatting and how nice it looks. If there’s one negative thing, it’s that the links can be a bit tiny for my fingers to click on. Otherwise, it’s looking like I’m going to stick with Miniflux.

Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Can Sanderson write a great non-Cosmere book? The answer is a resounding ‘yes!’

I’ve read quite a few superhero decontructions and reconstructions (most famous being Watchmen and Irredeemable), but Sanderson brings something new to the genre, partially by focusing on the folks affected by gods walking among men. (Which, I just realized, brings the idea of superheros being our version of the Greek gods full circle) This is also what I loved about A Song of Ice and Fire that got swept away for the Game of Thrones adaptation. When the powerful bicker, it’s the powerless that suffer. This book is also a bit of a mystery as we are missing a lot of information and while David, the main character, knows a lot more than we do when the novel starts, he still is missing a lot of information. Sanderson does a good job of planting lots of little clues so that the plot twists are well-earned. Even though I guessed one of the plot twists, I was thrown off by the way in which it manifested. (view spoiler)[Yes, Prof was an epic. No, he wasn’t working for Steelheart to infiltrate The Recokoners (hide spoiler)] The ending really hits hard and works quite well.