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Thoughts on Worldcon 2021 (Discon 3)
This strange, COVID-filled year was the year WorldCon was local to me, so I figured it was the best time to check it out. I didn’t need to pay for a hotel or flight, just a few days of parking and metro line fees. Overall, I thought it was fine. I enjoyed the panels I…
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MxPx – Panic and Secret Weapon (Special Edition)
I continued to catch up with the MxPx back catalog and purchased both Panic and Secret Weapon. My initial feelings upon listening were that I liked a lot more songs on Secret Weapon. But maybe, as with Before Everything & After this would turn out to be just a first impression where when looking at…
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Review: Axiom’s End
Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis My rating: 3 of 5 stars I received this book for free as part of 2021 Hugo voting process. Also, a reminder that I use the Goodreads tooltips for ratings – 3/5 means “liked it” – it’s not a bad rating. Let’s use the whole scale, guys! I have been…
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Review: Network Effect
Network Effect by Martha Wells My rating: 5 of 5 stars I got this book for free by being a World Con member for the 2021 convention. It’s part of the review packet.So, that was really flippin’ good. I wasn’t sure how well Martha Wells would do at transitioning from novella length Murderbot to full-length…
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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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Review: The Collapsing Empire
The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars I can’t believe I waited so long to read this book, it’s so great. The quick summary: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series meets the family competition dynamics of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Interesting to read at the same time as The Ballad of Songbirds and…
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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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Review: Crimson Son
Crimson Son by Russ Linton My rating: 3 of 5 stars I got this book from a Story Bundle called “Immerse or Die”. The editor of the bundle had a process that went something like, “I got on the treadmill and started reading. If the book wasn’t pulling me in by the time I finished…
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Review: Reaper Man
Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is my second read. I have dropped the rating from 4 stars to 3 stars I love Discworld’s Death. He makes any book better by his presence and so I especially love the books that feature Death. In this book Death is the…
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Review: The Most Dangerous Game
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell My rating: 4 of 5 stars My enjoyment of this short story (or was it long enough to be a novella?) was only marred by the fact that the story is so famous that I’ve seen it referenced and parodied a million times. Of course, that’s part of…
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Review: Lightspeed Magazine, April 2014
Lightspeed Magazine, April 2014 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars This was a GREAT issue. I don’t think there was one story that wasn’t top-notch. My favorite SF stories were Codename: Delphi and Exhalation. My favorite fantasy was The Only Death in the City. The Afterparty excerpt was great and I…
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20 Years Ago Today
Twenty years ago today I was a freshman at Cornell University. I’d only been to NYC once before, during my family’s college tour trip in spring of 2000. I was in class when the attacks happened. Eventually when I got to our creative writing class (or whatever it was called – Cornell made every freshman…
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Review: Parable of the Talents
Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler My rating: 4 of 5 stars Welcome back to the crapsack/grimdark world of America in the 2020s as created by Octavia Butler in the 1990s. It is sometimes eerily prophetic. More about that later. The addition of Lauren’s daughter’s (Larkin) annotations to her mother’s journals provides a…
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Programming Update for July and August 2021
I didn’t do much coding in July, so I decided to combine the July and August wrap-ups. Python Dreamhost Dynamic DNS I decided to clean up and update some code that uses the Dreamhost API to allow for Dynamic DNS. I cleaned up the logging output so that I could figure out why it was…
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Programming Update for June 2021
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…