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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, June 2014: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue
Lightspeed Magazine, June 2014: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue by Christie Yant My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is one of my favorite collections of stories and one of the best anthologies/magazines I’ve read so far in 2021. A lot of the stories in here a phenomenal. There are also a lot of…
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Completing Advent of Code 2015 with 3 Programming languages
Throughout the spring and summer of 2021 a few of the times that I mentioned on the Advent of Code subreddit that I was doing the 2015 problem set in all 3 languages, some folks said they’d be interested in a writeup on the experience. Now that I’ve finally finished 2015 (my first set of…
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Making sure video games can be played by the widest group
Ever since a class during my undergrad which mentioned technology that can help make sure the real world is accessible to all folks no matter what their physical limits may be, I’ve been very interested in the topic. It’s led to my interest on web accessibility (although I’m not always perfect when it comes to…
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Review: Death Masks
Death Masks by Jim Butcher My rating: 4 of 5 stars If Goodreads had half-stars, I’d definitely give this one 4.5 stars. Butcher has taken everything I like about the Dresden files and eliminated a lot of what was annoying. Dresden has FINALLY earned the trust of Murphy on the SI unit at the Chicago…
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Review: Guards! Guards!
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book We finally are introduced to The Patrician as he will be portrayed for the rest of the Discworld books. He’s no longer the overweight Patrician we saw in the first two books. He’s infinitely more cunning…
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Review: Pyramids
Pyramids by Terry Pratchett My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book. I have dropped the rating from 5 to 3 stars This book is all but divorced from all the other Discworld books. There’s at least one other one like this one – Small Gods. In that sense,…
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Review: Mort
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…
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Podcasts I’m Listening to in 2021
I’ve both added and dropped some podcasts since last time around. Where I’m listing the same podcast as last year I may use the same description as in the past with slight (or no) variation. Public Radio Radiolab – Heard about them because sometimes their stories are used on This American Life. Radiolab is a…
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Mozilla’s Legacy
A few days ago I read this article over at Tech Republic about how, Mozilla’s greatest achievement is not Firefox, but the Rust programming language. They point to Firefox’s declining numbers in the face of Chrome and Chromium-based browsers and I’m inclined to agree with the author. There is, of course, a kind of poetry…
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2020 in Music (Last.FM and Spotify listening trends)
Thanks to COVID I missed out on the concert where I was going to see Paul and Storm and Jonathan Coulton. Compared to last year, I also barely bought any music. This year I switched from using Ampache to listen to my music at work, to using Funkwhale. The more responsive interface has led to…
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Review: Snow Crash
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is the second time I’ve read this book. This first time was something around 20 years ago and it was definitely a 5-star book to me at the time. I’d never read anything like it. Reading it in 2020 is very interseting. Some…
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Review: Hippopotamister
Hippopotamister by John Patrick Green My rating: 5 of 5 stars I interviewed John Patrick Green at Baltimore Comic-Con 3 years ago. You can watch it here! Although I liked the concept behind Hippopotamister, my oldest (the right age for it at the time) didn’t care for it. But now, one of my twins is…
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Review: The Mongoliad: Book Three
The Mongoliad: Book Three by Neal Stephenson My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book was a great cap to the long trilogy (although – put together I think it’s not longer than a Brandon Sanderson Stormlight Archive book). While the first third of the book continues to build things up, we’ve met just about…
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Sam and Stella Birthday Portraits
Somewhat without intention, I’ve ended up alternating portraits for the twins between outdoor portraits and indoor portraits. This year was time for indoor portraits. (Although, to be fair, if it hadn’t been freezing, I might have ended up breaking the tradition) Here’s the setup I used: It’s a variant on a setup that has been…
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Review: InvestiGators
InvestiGators by John Patrick Green My rating: 4 of 5 stars Read this to my four-year-olds and I found it to be a blast. Most of the word-play went over their heads. In fact, after finishing it with my four-year-olds, I recommended it to my 8-year-old. We’ll see what she thinks. This is definitely one…