Review

Regrets of a Reader of Pages The premise of Player of Games reminded me of a Dune board game tournament—strategic, layered, and plenty of intrigue. (As an aside, if anyone ever writes a book purely about that, sign me up.) •Thematically, the book didn’t bring much new to the table. •The empire is evil? Check. Its elites are masochistic? Sure, why not. •The idea of a game being central to deciding reality—or being reality itself—is a retread of concepts explored in Ender’s Game decades ago. •The central player’s manipulation by shadowy agents for their own purposes felt similarly derivative. Again, Ender’s Game. •The setting ends on a planet that periodically goes through apocalypse. Not the first time I’ve encountered this concept, not even the first time this week. While there was nothing so glaringly bad as to make me put the book down, there also wasn’t much to make me pick it up again. ...

** The Coddling of the Online Mind ** I spent 10 years working at Facebook, of which I spent 5 years in trust and safety (the part of the company responsible for harms happening on the platform), and 1 year directly responsible for youth issues on Instagram. Since Facebook was my first private sector job, I tried to keep a tab on the negative effects (and have the bookshelf to prove it) of social media. Most of the narratives, either complaining about how evil big tech is, or rallying people to the call of neo-ludditism, fell flat to somebody whose world has been unlocked by the possibilities of the internet. “Anxious Generation” is the first book I’ve found that takes a balanced approach to dissecting the mountains of correlational data, offering a convincing, if narrow, causal diagnosis: ...

** 1st Book of 2025: Entirely Forgettable. ** Read through this in one sleepless post-surgery night, and it just felt like a draft of a side-plot from a Stormlight Archives. There’s not much new in the premise of trying to escape dawn, and many other authors have tried to take on stories of mobile cities with much more success. The references to the rest of Stormlight Archive are vague enough that without wikipedia or a recent reread, you’re going to be hard pressed to link this to anything meaningful. Apparently I even reading the entire main series of Stormlight Archive isn’t enough, I should have read Dawnshard as well. ...

** Private Property is my Safe Word ** I have a rule in Sci-fi: If main characters engage in taboo sex while discussing esoteric politics, I’m out. Based on the fast pace and historical bent of Iron Widow, I wouldn’t have guessed the need to invoke this rule, but alas. Most of the pages are like an Ayn Rand novel without an agenda, deliberating personal property vs. private property, fictional revolutionaries vs. reactionaries as well as over-enforcement and the masses vs elites. At the same time, a romantasy relationship develops between Zetian, who spends most pages raging or pouting, and what seems to have been the true brooding main character of the story, Qin Zheng. ...

Footnotes to Thucydides A War Like No Other works best as a second pass through the Peloponnesian War. If you haven’t read Thucydides, start there. If you have, this goes one layer deeper without sending you into into Herodotus. It’s less a fresh narrative and more annotations with the context of a few more millennea of human conflict. One marker of the thirty-year struggle between Athens and Sparta is how little either side understood what they were starting. Missed exits accumulated. Short pauses for negotiation gave way to a conflict that grew harsher, less restrained, and harder to stop. So, the Greeks did to one-another what Xerxes could not. ...

It’s interesting that this is where I landed with my computer playing time. It’s also a good cautionary note for where AI falls short. It dissuaded me from trying to play AOE4 citing the shorter pace, and tried to convince me to play more Halo, but turns out that code was buggy for LAN. Such a shame. The AOE2 campaign was probably a bit too easy and I ended up going through the motions. I even delayed the start of the LAN party to finish one campaign that I was working on with castle age tech, which is similar to the loop I found myself in playing AOE4 after the fact. ...

What did I get out of this film? I enjoyed it, perhaps over-chatGPTd it. I get the allegory ot the 1920’s Irish civil war, I understand Colm perhaps more that I expected, and perhaps most of all, I enojoyed being able to watch a movie where its harder to see around corners, and the narrative structure of the format doesn’t destroy inevitability. 2 weekends with LX, and we watched a movie in each of them. I think watching about 10 movies a year and reading 100 books would e a pretty fine ratio. And watching the movies with LX is the right way to do it. Also watching movies with the kids, if they are new to me, could be fun.

Heat Before Serving There’s a limit to how much grimdark fantasy I can take, and Best Served Cold found that limit. The book begins with echoes of Victor Hugo—a sense of grand tragedy and sweeping revenge—but quickly settles into a relentless bleakness where nobody is allowed a good time. Not even a little bit. Part of my struggle might have been circumstantial: this was a book to fall asleep to, and fall asleep i did many times. I experienced sections out of order and never quite found my footing in the story. But even discounting my non-ideal reading experience, I lost steam. There are only so many partially failed assassination attempts you can read before fatigue sets in, physically and mentally. ...

ChatGPT, write a novella with sad narrator, based on this prompt: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Let’s turn this into a review: I deliver Parcels in Beijing Competently written. One of the nicest things about reading is just the ability to get the details of a different life, one that I will perhaps never live. Hu Anyan does a great job depicting both the ups and downs of blue collar work in modern day China. What are the social relationships that form, and what are the hardest parts. I appreciate the revenge list, the things that really pissed him off, and the honesty that he never really acted on it. ...