Ishmael

Ishmael has been covered ad infinitum elsewhere.  Wikipedia will give you a Cliff's Notes style version of the Takers and the Leavers and how man isn't as outside of nature as s/he s/he thinks s/he is (well...that's why we don't use that style often - it would mess with HTML parsing).  While I don't think Quinn's book is particularly sophisticated or written particularly well, he raises a lot of interesting ideas and I'm glad one of my Facebook friends recommended I read the novel (thanks Kristi!).

What made it more interesting to me is that I've been reading Margaret Atwood's series: Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam.  Many parts of it, including the religion of the Gardeners covered extensively in The Year of the Flood, read like aspects of Ishmael's philosophy.  At one point it's noted that the Crakers, who can eat leaves and poop nutrient-rich leavings like a rabbit, have had agriculture bred out of them.  There's no shortage of discussion in Ishmael about how agriculture is a huge burden on humans, at least the form we practice that requires increasing food to provide for increasing population which can provide increasing food...at the cost of a life more attuned to what's easy and maintainable and operates within the normal dictates of nature.  The entanglement of food and reproduction: both genetically restructured in the Crakers.  I could see hints of the philosophy in PZ Myers The Happy Atheist as well.  But it seems like atheism (atheism as related by a biologist) and a book arguing humanity is not the center of creation should align.

My favorite quote from Ishmael was on page 214, "You can't just stop being in a story, you gave to have another story to be in."  An excellent way to phrase the idea that you should always be trying to tell the story you believe you're in, at least to yourself.  Because if you're not telling it, it's still there and others are telling it.

Cards Against Gallifrey

How to get your own free set of Cards Against Gallifrey.  Still not entirely kid appropriate (e.g. Companion Porn), but closer than the core game.  I suspect it will drive my daughter absolutely bonkers if we play Cards Against Humanity without her and she can hear us constantly referring to Doctor Who themes.

http://nerdapproved.com/gaming/the-doctor-who-version-of-cards-against-humanity-is-hilarious-and-free-to-download/#!tp6JV

Medieval Sex

I shared this article with Kyle already.  How Medieval People Decided Whether Sex Was Acceptable (or not) - I don't think the "or not" was absolutely necessary - by Rose Eveleth over at Smithsonian.com.

This pretty much sums it up:
"Even the children born of sex during a period where the couple should have abstained — mainly based on the Church’s liturgical calendar and on the wife’s reproductive cycle — were to be considered bastards."

And a great link to a flowchart at the History Blog.  Remember to wash afterwards!
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/flowchart.png

Euphoria

Eryn and I took a stab at playing Euphoria this evening.  It's the game of building a better dystopia that we backed on Kickstarter some time ago.  A lot of people backed it as it raised 20 times their goal.  It's been in our queue to try out, but we had a lot of other games to play first.  I was a little worried about how long it would take to learn given all the pieces, but the rules were quick to apprehend, and once we got going, we even figured out a bit of the strategy on our first run.  Although I think as it's a resource/placement game, playing with more than two people would make it much more fun.  Too often one of us was chasing the other's lead instead of carefully planning.

The goal is to build a better dystopia and manage your workers - the dice - to collect resources and products and crate new workers, open markets, dig tunnels, and score points.  The workers are represented by the dice and the pips are important as having workers too smart - total pips - results in their understanding of the predicament they're in, and they flee the coop.  All the while the levels for the various areas increases as resources are collected, changing the collection strategy and opening up your henchmen who provide some special actions and bonuses.


I won the first game, but it was within a point of each other.  I suspect the only thing that helped me was that one of my henchmen let me place my new workers right away. My second worker was too smart for his own good though, and took off.  The markets, where you can score victory points, are tricky because if you're not careful and contribute, you have to suffer a penalty or choose to play catch up and eliminate the penalty.  For example, every three rolled on a worker for me cost a resource.

Reclaiming your workers/dice from the board requires a turn, as does placing one.  Coupling that with the danger of them getting too smart (you roll all of them when you pop them off and the total roll determines whether one takes off) requires some strategy.  If you have three workers, you're pretty sure you'll get less than a 16.  Four or more, it gets dicier (ha) and you're more likely to lose a worker  Although you can choose to only pull three and hope the other one pops off because someone else wants your resource spot.


Excellent game play.  Fast.  Lot of thinking, even in a short two-person game.  I'll definitely be pulling it out next board gaming day.  The stack of minions is pretty sizable.  Basically two card decks.  I like it that I can find people I know in the deck.  Here's the two people I went to Run Lola Run at the Trylon with last night.


This one is pretty cool.  Not having to pay a resource is powerful as the variation in resources means you're generally short of at least something you need.  The minions are tagged to one of the four factions on the board, so it's in your interest to focus on a faction as pushing it's progress level to maximum allows you to score a point for each minion in that faction.  Matthew looks pretty shift with his sash.

Alif the Unseen

I liked Alif the Unseen.  A bit slow in places, but an interesting mix of middle eastern mythology and technology.  My primary complain would be that G. Willow Wilson went a bit light on the mythology, and even lighter on the technology.  It was a good book.  It could have been absolutely exceptional.  When I was at Code Freeze, there were discussions about the misuses of big data and the algorithms that could be generated from using it inappropriately.  Wilson talks about the use of some of those algorithms, but didn't seem to do the research to fully explore it.  Perhaps that's valid.  You wouldn't expect a script kiddy to necessarily know the terminology, even if he had the skills.  But a book demands a bit more in my opinion.

Alif also suffered a bit in my opinion because it's in the same style as Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, set in Minneapolis in the Prince era.  Rather than a mix of tech and mythology, War for the Oaks is a mix of funk and technology.  While that might not sound appealing to some, to me it is - and it's wonderful.  Alif doesn't hold up in comparsion.  I also liked King Rat by China Mieville better - same style.  Not as good as War for the Oaks, but solid.  Here's an old, lengthier, post on the two.  And of course there's Gaiman's American Gods which is right up there with War for the Oaks.  So there are three books you should read first.

Where it didn't suffer, despite what some Amazon commentators state, is in its use of Arabic terms and social practices.  It's not anything that isn't easily discoverable with the internet (and it's not the end of the world to set down the book for a moment and look up a term - no one reads end-to-end anyway - at least no one I know).  And the practices, such as female circumcision being referenced, while potentially upsetting, aren't there to endorse the practices.  They're a way to stress the difference of the culture involved in the fantasy.  I can see that using that as a way to enhance the theme might seem unacceptable, but glossing over cultural differences doesn't strike me as necessarily better. In conjunction with how the characters acted, the mythology, and the general tone, it served to really give the book a different feel from the other books listed above.  I'd recommend the book, but primarily as an interesting addendum to a history of worlds-along-side-our-own-and-within-our-own.

Walk Off the Earth

Last Thursday after Code Freeze, Eryn and I went to Walk Off the Earth at the Varsity Theater on their Gang of Rhythm Tour.  We were supposed to go with Mean Mr. Mustard, Klund, and Mrs. Klund.  Instead, Mean Mr. Mustard cancelled because his wife was sending him to California so she could have some quiet time.  And then, day of the gig, when my wife was supposed to drop Eryn off to meet me (I was already all the way up by the U of MN for the conference - having aforementioned burrito with the Ohio State hockey team at Chipotle), the Klundseses sent me a text message (or maybe it was an email - it was a technology blur) telling me that the weather was dubious and they were staying in the safe, warm bosom of St. Peter (something about family too - which I hope worked out for the better) and I should find alternate attendees.  On short notice, I just told Mrs. Scooter to park and we could all go as a family.

So, in the bitter cold (I'm glad we didn't have to wait in line outside the Varsity like Ming, Kyle, Leonard, and I did for the Suicide Girls), we traipsed across Dinkytown to see Walk Off the Earth and their two opening bands: Camera 2 and Parachute (Eryn really liked Parachute - she bought a CD).  It was a good concert.  Particularly as Klund had purchased tickets upstairs in the mezzanine.  We didn't get chairs, but we did get some standing room against the table running around the edge, so we had a mostly unobstructed view of the bands.  Except for a small pillar that required some leaning left and right to optimize the view.  The main floor was packed by the time WOtE went on - almost front to back.

Walk Off the Earth was great.  Excellent set.  Good job of engaging the audience without it feeling forced.  Good vibe.  Good fun.  Eryn (and I) had a great time.  And there were couches in the Mez for my wife to relax on and listen to the music, so she had a great time as well.  No standing-room-only for three hours.

Here are my kick-ass pictures...

From the opening acts.  The chandelier in the foreground took quite a beating when Walk Off the Earth cut loose large balloons for the audience to bounce around for thirty-plus minutes.  We were a little worried it was going to fall on someone's head.  Not because they'd get hurt.  But because they might stop the concert for a while if someone great a chandelier hat.  Eryn liked it when the lead singers from the opening acts crawled up on their amps.  She assured me she doesn't need an amp that big.


I've come to the conclusion my iPhone camera isn't optimal in all cases.


This is how far away we were.  It's not as far as it looks.  But that pillar was as big as it looks.  I think that's why the two folks who originally had the spot vacated and waved Eryn over to take their place.


But see...not so bad.  Walk Off the Earth doing their thing.  Not their five people on one guitar thing, but their thing.  They were much better than their opening acts.  A real treat to listen to and quiet the show.  Someone asked me to describe them (at work) and I said, sort of like Arcade Fire but without quite the level of pretentiousness.  My wife hates Arcade Fire and she liked Walk Off the Earth, so perhaps that's not fair.  They're not a flavor of Arcade Fire.  Much better.


Ditto (WOtE doing their thing). I'm disappointed I didn't catch a picture of the ukulele or Sarah Blackwood jamming out.


I believe Gang of Rhythm is Eryn's favorite song.

The Necromancer's House

One of the ways I pick out library books is to stand next to the "new" shelf at the Dakota County Library and peruse by cover and title.  Not a particularly good way to select books, but I've modified it a bit to ensure a better success rate:

1. Look at the books...
2. Is there an author I recognize - take a look.  Maybe I want it.
3. Does it look interesting even if it's not an author I want?
3a. Look it up on my smart phone - what are the ratings?
3b. Ratings look good?  Check it out, take it home.
3c. Check the reviews at home - is the rating better than skin deep?
4a. If not, take it back to the library.
4b. If it is (or I checked it out via step #2).  Read it.

I find some things I wouldn't otherwise get my hands on that way.

That's how I ended up reading The Necromancer's House by Christopher Buehlman.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and I recommend it to Mean Mr. Mustard who was the person who recommended The Magicians to me.  He described The Magicians as Harry Potter for Grown Ups (I'm excited to see the third one is coming out end of this year).  The Necromancer's House fits squarely in that genre.  At first the writing put me off a bit because it seemed pretentious.  But the more I read, the more that style was an absolute fit for the main character, Andrew Ranulf Blankenship.  The writing was sharp, smart, sometimes challenging, often witty, didn't pull punches in any manner (definitely not a book Eryn can read despite my new rule that she can pretty much read whatever her library card will give her access to, including shopping female werewolves who have "hot sex" - I just refuse to recommend this one to her, so she'll never find it on her own), and was fast.  Very different from many things I've read in writing style.  An excellent and relatable Russian mythological/folktale base to book.

A Filler Post Before I Get Back to Business As Usual

As I mentioned elsewhere, a week of reviews totally threw me off my game.  I realize it couldn't have been too bad if I finished three books, attended an all-day conference (and had dinner at Chipotle with the Ohio State hockey team, who was playing Minnesota in the first outdoor hockey game in forever the very next day at TCF Stadium), finally defeated the dragon Eryn and I had been gunning for (swording for?) in the Pathfinder adventure game, and went to the Walk Off the Earth gig at the Varsity.  But still - any time where I wasn't doing those things...reviews.  I'll play catch up during the week.  Unlike my usual moaning about everything I read is getting worse and worse, I've enjoyed a few of the books I've recently read.  I texted Mean Mr. Mustard about one of them, but I don't think it was actually his phone.

Eryn and I had a discussion on the way to coffee this morning (I achieved the upgrade of my phone to iOS 7.x - why the hell do I have to free up 3.8 gigs of space in this era?), and after mentioning a few horror movies, I told her I was going to pitch the following series, to which I know claim copyright:

• Manatee-d Off
• Madatee: Manatee-d Off 2
• Murdertee: You only thought he was Mad before.  Manatee-d Off 3
• Mass Murdertee: It's Time for Genocide  [a prequel which explains why the Mantee is so teed off in the first place]

I may have to go with a Troll 2 riff as manatees are vegetarian and eat seaweed.  They'll have to turn their victims into seaweed first.  That, or a scientist has been breeding them with sharks for the Navy.

And...if those all make it through the pipeline, we'll have to mash up.  These aren't nearly as good as Murdertee.  I'll have to work them over with a focus group - perhaps these are more of an anti-list of what not to use to promote the Manatee franchise:

• Manatornado - I know.  Confusing.  About manatees, or about biblical events?
• Manatidal Wave - same issue.
• Great White Sharkatee - sharkatee sounds like some sort of sleeveless t-shirt
• Shemanatee - I don't know where to go with that one at all, but it could involve the mythology of manatees being mistaken for mermaids.  Sort of a Plankton vibe.

Pi

Eryn was watching videos today, so I recommended she watch this one featuring Danica McKellar about Pi and Math (she was at a Lego League competition in Rochester Friday and Saturday and her team got the judges award and placed third in programming - she's very STEM oriented).  She liked it a lot and I explained to her that I remembered when Danica (Winnie Cooper) was a little kid and that she's 39 now - almost 40.  For a non-math-related video, you can see Danica making out with Avril Lavigne in Avril's Rock N' Roll.  A very very strange video.

A project I don't want to start

There's a big wood trunk in Eryn's room.  Without transferring over half of the contents to a plastic container, it was immovable.  Even mostly empty, I still needed Eryn's help to pop the lip over the steps while I pushed it upstairs to a temporary staging area in my stationary bicycling room..  The trunk contains over thirty years of crap.  A bottle from the old couple I was friends with in high school, Ruth and Hugh McKinnon.  An Oreo Cookie doll.  A Rambo figurine.  Old postcards.  Old writing.  Old newspapers.  Old Boy Scout artifacts like my Eagle award. Old.  And I need to figure out what to do with it all.  Pictures, cards, mugs...so much stuff.  I can just put it up in the garage in the plastic container, but that still requires a bit of pruning and reduction and even a minimal amount of pruning and reduction probably means going through almost everything.  Scanning much of it and uploading it to the web as backup.  So look forward to Throw Back Fridays or some such thing where I try to explain an artifact that makes absolutely no sense to anyone else and that I don't want anyone to have to deal with should I make an attempt at shuffling off this mortal coil once again.

But I didn't get my damn wishes!

My server at Rosemount was not just one genie, but a couple of them.  I should have had at least six wishes.  I'm trying to think of at least one more example where a collective noun is used as a proper name.  I don't know anyone named covert, gulp, or stud.

Indian Spiced Cauliflower

This was absolutely delicious.  Cauliflower.  Yukon Potatoes.  Onion.  Jalapeno.  Some spices.  Cook it all for a while in a baking pan, and then put it under the broiler to crisp the top up just a bit.  Best fresh, before the cauliflower gets soft with reheating, but a few minutes under the broiler for the leftovers and it's back in almost as good as original shape.  So I wouldn't take it to work and reheat it in the microwave, but a head of cauliflower and six potatoes made for a lot of meals.  Between that, the two crockpots of squash-corn soup/chowder, and Kyle's soup and ham, we're only now getting past the lefovers from the first of the year.

Which is good, because I wouldn't eat anything I had touched at the moment (if I wasn't me) - two days of the flu (with a lot more lead up) and I'm a walking bio-hazard.  But try the recipe.  Excellent vegetarian fare.

In which I misuse my blessing from the gods

My Secret Santa (my sister) got me a copy of Pathfinder the RPG card game for Christmas.  I'm not 100% sure why it was on my wish list.  I hadn't researched it well.  I assume I intended to check it out as it was in the top ten over at Boardgamegeek.  We gave it a spin at Dunn Brothers as a family, and Eryn and I have been playing some follow up games following the string of adventures in the basic set.  We even watched a few YouTube videos with a variety of somewhat annoying spazzes to get an idea if our first attempt was directionally correct (take that...management speak).

We've learned a few things...



1.) It's intended as a bit of a money suck with the expansions.  There are five of them and a character expansion pack.  Admittedly, it's not much different from buying scenarios for AD&D, but it is a bit more difficult to create your own cards to represent items/etc (we haven't done that), particularly as how it works doesn't exactly follow my AD&D way of thinking and how you acquire weapons of increasing power.  Fortunately, the base set gives you three scenarios plus the first expansion pack, so there's plenty of play and replay.
2.) It's more structured than a regular RPG.  There isn't quite the same free form element.  I guess that's obvious.  After all, you're playing a card game.  You sort of have to make up the story in your own head.  Like when the dwarf can inspect the top card of his location deck at the end of his turn, I say, "I hear something growling ahead of me," or, "I see a bottle glinting ahead," so the other person (Eryn) knows I'm using the equivalent of night vision.  Similarly, when the head villain we were trying to catch got away from us on the very last card we turned, we talked about how clever he'd been to hide and then slip away.
3.) It's harder to role than an RPG for the most part.  Your attributes use different dice and quite often there's not an outside chance you'll roll a natural 20 and call it a surprising success.  Instead, you're faced with trying to roll a 9 on a d4 and deciding whether to supplement or just let the loot get away.
4.) Cards doubling as hitpoints is ROUGH.  You're losing your stuff, your hitpoints, and your flexibility all at the same time.  That requires some serious balancing and forethought about what to do.  When it gets tight, the ability to inspect the top of the deck is incredibly useful.
5.) You have to READ all the cards.  The adventure has extra rules.  The locations have several extra rules (for actions in the location, for closing the location, for the closed location - you close locations so the primary bad person/monster can't escape if they're defeated.  Escaping means they run off to another deck under a location card and get mixed in.  If there are multiple locations still open, you mix a few cards in so you don't know where they're hiding.  So closing locations is crucial to forcing them into dead ends).  Your character has extra rules.  For helping yourself, for helping allies in your location, for helping allies in other locations.  The monster has rules.  The items have rules.  And it all meshes together.  Go too fast and you miss something important.
6.) Blessings of the Gods are not as powerful as they seem.  Eryn and I were playing our last two games by assuming that the Blessing of the Gods, when it said it was an exact match for the card on the blessings deck (which counts down 30 turns you have to defeat the bad guy or try again if you don't die), and the card on the blessings deck wasn't a Blessing of the Gods, but one of the other cards that said you may recharge instead of discard (the card goes to the bottom of your deck instead of into your discard, so you don't lose the equivalent of a hitpoint), the Blessing of the Gods does not copy the recharge.  Only the powers.  That's per Mike, the designer of the game, out on Boardgamegeek, so I'm going to assume he's right.  And the fact that I went to look it up because it seemed too powerful - that's another tell.  So we don't get as many re-explore attempts and we don't get to recycle those hit points with nearly the frequency we were recycling them.  That's a huge deal for Eryn's mage, because it has so few hitpoints.  Next game she'll have to manage what she disposes much more carefullly, and we'll have to save those healing potions when we find them (I've directed her to a few after looking at the top card at the end of my turn, but there's not a guarantee one will be in a location).  It also means we should be looking at the non-Blessing-of-the-Gods blessings as they have a chance to recharge if there's a match, while there isn't that options with BoftG.

You can imagine Eryn and I spazzing out if that helps the visual.  We're having fun and Eryn is keen to play some of the other sets if we finish this one.  Personally, I'm looking forward to dying and trying a new character at some point, although I'll do my best not to perish on purpose.  I like the ranged abilities of my dwarf and I have an urge to try out his new heavy crossbow Eryn acquired for him at the general store.

Check the Time

Here's the new gear clock Kyle gave me for my birthday on my wall.  A little difficult to read with out numbers if you're just taking a quick glance, but very stylish.  I gave my old clock to another manager, and the wall clock I brought from home I thought about giving to Goodwill to yet another manager.  Many employees may thank me for ensuring their one on one's never run long and they can say, "Oh, it's # o'clock, I better get to my meeting.....at Caribou coffee."

A Year in Reading - 2013

You'll have to suffer through my &'s in my table.  I'm too lazy to fix the export from Access.  Yet one more year where my average rating decreased.  This year by 3/10 of a percent.  Ouch.  Maybe I am turning into a critical old man.  I'm impressed I read 1000 more pages than last year.  I thought I was really on the road to reading significantly less, particularly as I'd sort of made a commitment to read about 1500 pages a month (50 pages a day) and utterly failed (by over 5000 pages).  It could be argued those graphic novels don't count, but I didn't read them to make up the difference.  They were earlier in the year.  And I always have a few in my list so relatively, they count.

In retrospect, I'd rank Sweet Tooth lower (graphic novel).  Map of Sky lower (almost negative. Damn did I hate that book.  Particularly as Map of Time wasn't too bad - I feel mislead.  Deceived.  Duped.).  The Future is Japanese Higher (I still think about some of the stories).  Cryonic (my RAGBRAI book I purchased from The Vault in Iowa) lower.  Perhaps a negative .5 if Map of the Sky were a negative 1.  Law 101, Joe Hill's books (not graphic novels), Sacre' Bleu, Banks, Scalzi, Howey (I have a book left in the Silo Series - the writing isn't as solid in Shift, but the story was enjoyable), and Expanse were all highlights with The Expanse Series still being my favorite of the last year or so.  Hard scifi usually wins for me.  I'll also point out I really enjoyed Constellation Games, a recommendation from Mean Mr. Mustard.  More than the rating indicates.  He's never led me wrong (yet).

Scooter's Short List Current Year

DateRead	Title	Author	Rate
12/21/2013	Long War, The (Long Earth II)	Pratchett, Terry and Stephen Baxter	6.50
12/8/2013	How to Make a Zombie: The Real Life (and Death) Science of Reanimation and Mind Control	Swain, Frank	8.00
12/7/2013	Goliath Stone, The	Niven, Larry & Matthew Joseph Harrington	2.00
12/1/2013	How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You	The Oatmeal	3.00
11/25/2013	Evil and the Mask	Nakamura, Fuminori	8.50
11/17/2013	Creeps, The	Connolly, John	5.00
9/1/2013	Shift Omnibus Edition (Shift 1-3) (Silo Saga)	Howey, Hugh	8.50
8/14/2013	Abaddon's Gate (The Expanse III)	Corey, James S. A.	9.00
8/7/2013	Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest	Martinez, A. Lee	8.25
8/7/2013	Half-Made World, The	Gilman, Felix	7.50
8/1/2013	Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons and Dragons and the People Who Play It	Ewalt, David M.	8.25
7/31/2013	Doctor Who the Wheel of Ice	Baxter, Stephen	7.50
7/21/2013	Law 101: Everything You Need to Know About American Law	Feinman, Jay M.	9.75
7/14/2013	Cryonic: A Zombie Novel	Bradberry, Travis	2.00
6/1/2013	Sword of Shannara Trilogy, The	Brooks, Terry	6.00
5/30/2013	Nos4A2	Hill, Joe	8.25
4/30/2013	Sacre' Bleu: A Comedy D'Art	Moore, Christopher	9.25
3/22/2013	Map of the Sky, The	Palma, Felix J.	2.00
3/15/2013	Constellation Games	Richardson, Leonard	8.25
3/1/2013	Horns: A Novel	Hill, Joe	8.75
2/22/2013	Subterranean Scalzi Super Bundle	Scalzi, John	8.00
2/19/2013	Cipher, The	Koja, Kathe	7.50
2/15/2013	Locke & Key: Clockworks (5)	Hill, Joe & Gabriel Rodriguez	7.50
2/14/2013	Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows (3)	Hill, Joe & Gabriel Rodriguez	7.50
2/14/2013	Locke & Key: Keys to the Kingdom (4)	Hill, Joe & Gabriel Rodriguez	7.50
2/1/2013	Sweet Tooth: Out of the Deep Woods (1)	Lemire, Jeff	6.00
2/1/2013	Sweet Tooth: In Captivity (2)	Lemire, Jeff	6.00
1/31/2013	Blueprints of the Afterlife	Boudinot, Ryan	6.00
1/22/2013	Wearing the Cape	Harmon, Marion G.	5.00
1/21/2013	Map of Time, The	Palma, Felix J.	8.50
1/15/2013	Future is Japanese, The	Masumi Washington (Editor), Nick Mamatas (Editor)	7.50
1/8/2013	This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It	Wong, David	7.00
1/4/2013	The Hydrogen Sonata	Banks, Iain	8.75

Scott's Summary

DateRead By Year	Sum Of Pages	Avg Of Pages	AvgOfRate	Min Of Pages	Max Of Pages	Count Of BOOKSCOT
1994	15144	378.6	6.05	89	914	40
1995	13961	349.025	7.075	55	990	40
1996	18248	331.781818181818	7.21818181818182	7	985	55
1997	7997	333.208333333333	6.85416666666667	54	929	24
1998	9639	459	7.16666666666667	160	780	21
1999	7551	444.176470588235	8	159	835	17
2000	3770	418.888888888889	7.72222222222222	222	774	9
2001	16308	429.157894736842	7.38815789473684	184	1009	38
2002	10455	387.222222222222	7.61111111111111	123	783	27
2003	13203	400.090909090909	7.93181818181818	83	870	33
2004	12479	297.119047619048	7.88095238095238	8	815	42
2005	12890	322.25	7.6	103	1083	40
2006	16616	353.531914893617	7.6436170212766	114	845	47
2007	14219	236.983333333333	7.49166666666667	1	759	60
2008	19524	253.558441558442	7.38961038961039	60	593	77
2009	14273	223.015625	7.6953125	32	582	64
2010	7841	326.708333333333	7.30208333333333	136	1072	24
2011	14004	269.307692307692	7.85096153846154	96	656	52
2012	11735	366.71875	7.2890625	40	954	32
2013	12882	390.363636363636	6.93939393939394	125	1200	33

Jack Glass

Well, finally something that didn't wander all over unnecessarily.  The one-star reviews at Amazon say there's no action in Adam Robert's Jack Glass and it gets boring, but I disagree.  Some very clever ideas some involved and convoluted political ruminations on a solar system ruled by a combination bureaucracy and royal family, and not all scifi is headlong action and running around.  Space is a big place - when you think about it, it should take longer for things to develop than in Lord of the Rings, and it was definitely faster than most Tolkien.  And the idea that faster than light travel enabled by modifying the value of c (e=mc^2 and all) could be used to destroy a sun by idiots...particularly believable.

Despite the pretty, stained-glass cover, Jack Glass is about a murderer.  The book is written in three parts.  The first a straight up "how to escape a locked cell" story that surprised me in a Use of Weapons sort of way.  The second a sort of play/who-dunnit on the order of Agatha Christie, complete with list of characters at the start of the section.  The third a locked-room mystery made tricky by the idea of faster than light capabilities.  The third part did start to wander a bit and I wasn't as happy with the ending as I'd hoped.  I'm not sure if he's planning a sequel, or if he's just capturing the idea that not all stories have nice tidy endings and the point isn't the space opera, but the character interactions and the nature of the mystery stories.

I liked the quote, "they believed that economics preserved the special place for humankind at the universe's heart," after a discussion about how humankind had incrementally lost their ability to believe they were the center of the universe, how they'd sought to repeatedly recapture it, and how, in the end, it came down to a matter of us being the opposite of particularly important.  Humans, or flesh, is the cheapest commoedity in the universe.  I also liked, "Because pulling the trigger is the end of the process of firing an FTL pistol, not the beginning."  That's a confusing idea, and played with to good effect in the locked-room mystery of the last section when Iago and Diana (and Sapho) try to determine how a policeman blew up without an obvious shooter.

A bit more postpourri

I read a good book, which I think I'll talk about tomorrow.  And I went back to work, which was pretty productive given I was already done with all my email and the short week has most people fairly busy and I'm coming off two release cycles.  And we had our annual New Year's party which involved the least amount of cards/poker ever and was more a few board games and watching the children wrestle in the frontroom while Kyle told them it wasn't allowed.  Instead, I'll list a few things I've been reading.  Only a few, because I've been spamming the hell out of Kyle with things I find interesting on Zite, the Eagan Patch crime section, and a variety of other locations.

• Making waffles out of leftover Thanksgiving stuffing.  Something I would have never thought to do but which is an ingenious use of leftovers.  Gravy AND maple syrup - decadent.
• Indigenous Native American Food of the Southwest - Part I and Part II.  I wish I had known about some of the restaurants that did locally sourced food when I was last down there.
• Skinny orange chicken - I was also reading about velveting meat, but that just seems like extra calories.  This looks pretty straight forward for something I like to eat.
• 22 recipes under 500 calories.  I have to try pumpkin lasagna.  Then I have to modify it to try butternut squash lasagna.  I can find the other 21 or 22 recipes on that page.  Maybe it doesn't like my browser.  But the pumpkin lasagna alone is worth my time.
• The 124 United States that could have been - even in that world, RAGBRAI would have been just as long.
• 15 ways to exercise in under 5 minutes - basically the 7 minute exercise set, but with demonstration videos in case, like me, you sometimes don't know what the hell they're trying to describe.
• 12 maps that changed the world - the map of the 124 states is not among them.
• 10 ways to be happier - I agree with them.  Live close to work and plan your next bicycling vacation.  Helps keep me happy.
• The Forgotten Souls of London's Women of the Night - Amazing little bit of history Justinian  pointed me at.  Which led me to...
• Lost Frescoes of the Maginot Line - also wonderfully interesting.