blueduck

The good news is that WaT has a satisfying conclusion to most of the arcs presented in the first five books. New arcs are started, and they’ll be addressed in the back five.

I think the five books are a satisfying whole, especially if you read the novellas

Similar to how the US started enforcing fines for late arrivals of airplanes. So the airlines just extended the “duration” of their flights to include the expected delays and now they’re “99.9% on time”. You can see this in action when the pilot says “well we’re waiting for something before we leave. It’ll be another 15 minutes but we’ll still get you there on time.”

Highly recommend the audiobook version of Project: Hail Mary. You really get a lot more out of the experience. Plus Ray Porter is awesome

Oathbringer can feel like a slog after Words of Radiance.

Unfortunately WoR is by far the best book he’s written so everything else is just a slight disappointment.

Rhythm of War is very good at setting up Wind and Truth… but fails to be entirely satisfying on its own.

The good news is you won’t have to wait years between books, so I can feel like one smooth ride

Big fan of the series by the way. But the pacing of the overall series has its issues

I read Robinson Crusoe a few years ago. Man… the 18th century racism and white superiority was tough to stomach.

Just stated the Bobiverse this week. I’ve finished books 1 & 2. Interestig stuff. Sort of like The Expanse but handwaves the tech in a way that doesn’t disturb the storytelling.

I’m torn on finishing the series or getting into my TBR list:

1. Elita by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum
2. The Everlasting by Alic Harrow
3. The Antidote by Karen Russell
4. Atmosphere: A Love Story by Taylor Jenkins Reid
5. Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
6. Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig
7. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
8. The Devils by Joe Abercrombie
9. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
10. The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

Oh, I also want to look into using a tailscale exit node to use a proton vpn wire guard route so I don’t have to switch between two separate VPNs

So much has been going on

I moved recently and had to change ISPs. I went from 2 Gbps symmetrical fiber to 90/3 Mbps satellite behind CGNAT.

Fastest place to get the WAN cable into the house was through the attic and into my guest room / office. But that caused some serious heat and noise issues.

Ran some structural Cat6, installed new electrical outlet, put in some keystone jacks, wired a new patch panel, then moved the rack to the basement.

Bought and installed a UPS which has already saved me twice in a month.

Up speeds were too slow and the high latency to the satellite constellation was causing issues, so I spun up a small VPS. But that means I have to sync content back to my local.

I’ve been wrestling with rsync for over a month… fiddling with flags to get the best results. I think I finally settled on a config yesterday and the service and timer are working well

CGNAT is messing with remote access, so I set up cloudflare tunnels. But the tunneling is not well suited for streaming. I was only getting ~100 Kbps on remote connections. Ran some iperf3 testing over tailscale and was slightly better.

My preferred audiobook app Prologue released a major update to v4.0 which broke Plex libraries on launch, so I had to quickly pivot to AudioBookShelf.

To achieve remote streaming and access for Prologue, I had to explain Tailscale set up and create new user accounts. Only halfway through my user base. Not looking forward to explaining it to my parents

Finally, I’m trying to set up Claude to run on my server rather than my locked down enterprise laptop. That’ll allow more tooling access like git rather than before when I was spending a lot of time downloading and uploading files manually. I need to figure out how to keep my session open. I’ll probably run tmux inside a docker container then run claude inside the tmux window. Hopefully that works

That was how Adam Sandler handled his movie contracts with Netflix. “Must be in a cool place and all my friends get to come during production.”

One dimension:

Willingness to share Liberties with other people

Far Right = Ayn Rand

Far Left = some guy who just wants to live in a van down by the river and smoke weed all day

You don’t wear an undershirt with your tees?

No helper audio to indicate the difference.

a different narrator, for example, would REALLY help

Yeah I listen to audiobooks and the interweaving plotlines with similarly named characters is confusing

Just finished The Will of the Many on Monday and started Strength. There’s a lot going on in this second book and I’m only 10% in

I migrated from GoodReads to Hardcover.app and I really like it

The Fifth Season has been on my list for a while. I should pick this up!

Just finished:

• How to Be Both by Ali Smith. Interesting concept (two stories, read them in any order, each story recontextualizes the other) that I think I’ll need to read again in the other order.
• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico. Great satire, really enjoyed it

Haven’t picked my next one yet, but probably from this list:

• Spread Me by Sarah Gailey. Looks like a fun take on The Thing
• Sunward by William Alexander. Don’t know much about it, other than it was well reviewed
• The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine. Was well reviewed

Bin Laden was the head of a transitional group seeking to establish Islamist control. While Al Qaeda did not have official recognition as a sovereign state, they were a well known and established organization.

The US and NATO were heavily involved in the regime change in Libya. US strikes disabled the convoy Qaddafi was in that immediately led to his capture.

1. Ngô Đình Diệm leader of south Vietnam - JFK
2. Mohammed Farah Aidid leader of Somalian rebel group - Clinton
3. Osama bin Laden- Obama
4. Muammar Gaddafi - Obama

No qualitative statement about any of those men. Just a list

Don’t read Secret History until after Bands of Mourning. There’s always another secret