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Review: I Fight Dragons – “Canon Eyes”
I have been following I Fight Dragons for almost a decade now, including their journey from self-produced to being a label band and rejecting that to going back to being self-produced. I was a backer on their last album, the ambitious concept record The Near Future. That was a seemingly long five years ago. I’ve…
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Podcasts I’m Listening to in 2019
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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HDRMerge and CC Extractor RPMs
A while back I created a copr repo for HDR Merge. I hadn’t kept up with it because there weren’t regular HDRMerge releases going on, but I noticed the git repo has been very active, so I decided to create a new RPM for Fedora 29. And recently I learned that for the newest version…
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Reviews: Babylon’s Ashes; Katamari Damacy; Milk Street: Tuesday Nights: More than 200 Simple Weeknight Suppers that Deliver Bold Flavor, Fast; Zeroes; Oathbringer; Nightflyers & Other Stories; Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook: Recipes and Recollections from the Pit Bosses; The Alloy of Law; Allomancer Jak and the Pits of Eltania; A Planet for Rent ; Adrift on the Sea of Rains; Shadows of Self; The Bands of Mourning; Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell; Cook’s Illustrated Magazine 2018
Babylon’s Ashes by James S.A. Corey My rating: 4 of 5 stars This book is probably the most direct sequel so far in The Expanse. It pretty much picks up right where the last one left off (not counting the interstitial novella). One thing JSAC use for great effect in this book (and I think…
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Reviews: The Future is Japanese: Science Fiction Futures and Brand New Fantasies from and about Japan; Cibola Burn; Edgedancer; Sixth of the Dusk; The Virtuous Feats of the Indomitable Miss Trafalgar and the Erudite Lady Boone; The Churn; Altered America: Steampunk Stories; Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games; Nemesis Games; Legion
The Future is Japanese: Science Fiction Futures and Brand New Fantasies from and about Japan by Masumi Washington My rating: 3 of 5 stars Another anthology. As usual, I’ve included my status updates with some spelling fixes. Overall it was a very uneven collection in terms of what I enjoyed. The stories all seemed to…
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Review: Chester 5000 XYV: Isabelle & George
Chester 5000 XYV: Isabelle & George by Jess Fink My rating: 3 of 5 stars I thought the first book was a great example of how erotic fiction could also be a work of art. Jess Fink did so much with so little. Despite a lack of dialog, a great story was told and titillation…
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Review: The Emperor’s Soul
The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 5 of 5 stars I read this book without knowing anything about it other than the fact that it takes place on the same planet as Elantris, Part 1 of 3. I didn’t have the book description as I got it from the Sanderson Humble Bundle and…
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Garden Report 2018
We’ve been growing plants and herbs at the house for a few years now (but not as many as I wish we had in retrospect). But, as far as I could find with a cursory search, I’d never done an end of summer summary of how the growing season went for us. I know there…
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Podcasts I’m Listening to in 2018
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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Review: Golden Son
Golden Son by Pierce Brown My rating: 3 of 5 stars To be fair to Mr. Brown, I find it hard to fairly rate second books in a trilogy. They have to both be the middle part of what is essentially one large story split into 3 books (or pdfs or epubs) and also as…
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Review: The Bloodline Feud (The Merchant Princes, #1-2)
The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book was a free giveaway for Tor’s ebook club This book checks a lot of boxes for me: thriller, science fiction, multiple universes, alternate histories. But I just couldn’t get into it as much as I wanted to. I think it was…
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Review: Buying Time
Buying Time by Joe Haldeman My rating: 4 of 5 stars Earlier this year I read The Forever War for the first time after having read Starship Troopers. So when there was a Humble Bundle with a bunch of books I didn’t care about, but which had a book by Joe Haldeman, I jumped on…
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Review: Orbital
Orbital by Andrew Mayne My rating: 4 of 5 stars Recieved this book in anticipation of a review As I mentioned in my review of the previous book of this Duology, I got this book free and so I went back and bought the first book. Where the first book is a self-aware reconstruction of…
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Review: Wild Cards
Wild Cards by George R.R. Martin My rating: 4 of 5 stars With anthologies, I *usually* just present the status updates I made while reading, sometimes with some modifications since there are character limits on the updates. However, Wild Cards is a bit different. Like the Machine of Death anthology that Dan gave me, Wild…
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Review: Elantris, Part 2 of 3
Elantris, Part 2 of 3 by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars As the middle section of a novel, it was mostly concerned with expanding backstory and a few false starts at the climax. (Intentional false starts….more of a meta note) The three main thesis Sanderson seemed to have for this part of…