- I found the first Earthsea book to be dry and stilted, but Le Guin’s world and its inhabitants are getting more complex, more diverse, and more human as the series goes on. I finished The Tombs of Atuan and got halfway through The Farthest Shore this week, and I can’t wait to start Tehanu. I can already anticipate the emptiness I’ll feel when I finish all the books in the series, when I’ll be forced to say goodbye to Ged, Tenar, and all the other denizens of Earthsea.
- Champaca has started delivering books across the country, so I got myself all three books from N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy. I now have my eyes on Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series and Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past series. This is going to be a good year for reading SFF.
- Charli is still on repeat. Anthems should be the official anthem of the quarantimes.
- For the last few weeks I’ve been working with a client who wants to create tooling for developers building machine learning models. Every time I step back to look at the work I’m doing I feel immensely proud of what I’ve accomplished, and there’s no greater joy in the world than that. In the middle of this pandemic I at least have my work to keep me grounded and contented. I’m immensely grateful for this.
- From 2009 to 2011 I ran a personal blog not too different from this one. It was served from a cheap shared hosting box, which I lost because reasons. I thought it was gone for good until I looked for it on the Wayback Machine and found that it had been backed up there in its entirety. I spent a large part of the week migrating posts from the backup to this current blog, which means my archives now extend back to 2009. That’s more than a decade of blog posts! You can read a particulary juicy one that went viral here, and you can see the whole archive here.
- I fired up Factorio over the weekend because I was bored. After four hours of messing around with belts, I’m ready to pour my entire life into this game. I’d forgotten the sense of wonder and discovery that I got from city building and simulation games when I was a kid. Console gaming is fun, but you can’t control a game like Caesar, Rollercoaster Tycoon, or Constructor without a mouse and keyboard. I’m now tempted to build a PC so I can play modern incarnations of these games. Somebody stop me.
PS: as an experiment, I’m allowing comments on all my new posts. I’ll disable them if it turns into too much work, but I’m willing to try this out for a little bit. Be kind.
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