Review

** 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: ...

** 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. ...

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.

Author: Joe Abercrombie Score: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Completed: January 1, 2025 Last edited time: January 11, 2026 7:41 AM Status: Reviewed Type: Book Cards on the Table The Devils sits halfway between the grimdark First Law trilogy and the gamified chaos of Dungeon Crawler Carl. It may have been deliberate and more popular, but is not entirely to my taste. The book leans hard on the found-family dynamic. The result is serviceable cohesion rather than earned intimacy. With a large ensemble, the book prioritizes interesting combinations of characters over sustained attention to any one of them. That tradeoff makes sense in a long-running series; it’s harder to pull off cleanly in a single novel. The focus fragments, and no single arc quite takes hold. ...

Author: CJ Cherryh Score: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Completed: January 1, 2025 Last edited time: February 17, 2026 3:39 PM Status: Reviewed Type: Book Diplomacy, in spaaaaaaace Diplomatic crises have been resolved planet-side, so there’s nowhere to go but up. Precursor shifts the setting but not the governing concern. Cherryh remains focused on diplomacy as process rather than event, this time filtered through a claustrophobic space faring human civilization and its political consequences. She has some views on the engineering and mechanics involved, but mostly leaves them unexplored. (too bad) ...

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

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...