Hey,

Remember, kids, make sure your information is up-to-date when negotiating scenes:

"Two men hired to carry out a stranger’s sexual fantasy of being tied up while clad in his underpants went to the wrong rural NSW address with machetes, but politely left after realising their mistake.

One of the Sydney men, Terrence Leroy, has now been found not guilty in the NSW district court of entering the home in July 2019 intending to intimidate while armed with an offensive weapon."

You can get the rest of the details here.

On another note -- I'm poly and love the poly community dearly but this song is about a type of poly person I meet waaayyy too often (although a lot less now that I'm older).







later
Tom

Hi,

  More books.  More reviews.

  First up:  The Heap by Sean Adams.  In the near future Los Verticales, was a soaring city in a skyscraper.  Then it all came tumbling down and now a group of Dig Hands works out of a makeshift camp in the desert to clear away the debris and salvage anything they can.  Orville Anders is a long-time dig hand.  He's here because his brother Bernard was a DJ inside of Los Verticales and even though the building has collapsed, Bernard is still doing his radio show trapped under tons of debris.  

  Orville is approached by the owners of the radio station Bernard is broadcasting from.  Bernard has a call-in show and Orville makes regular calls that are the highest rated part of the program.  The studio asks Orville to drop in a few product plugs here and there.  Orville refuses and his access to Bernard is cut off.  But the show keeps going on and Orville suddenly hears his voice on the radio, talking to Bernard and doing the product pitches.  Orville determines to find out just what's going on setting off a spiral of chaos exposing the secrets of Los Verticales and the Heap it's become.

  I rather liked this book.  It's very much in the Thomas Pynchon vein with secret societies and odd conspiracies and your enjoyment of such weirdness is probably going to impact how much you like this book.  The main plot is broken up with little vignettes of life in Los Verticales written by the survivors of the disaster that paint a window into what life was like in the city skyscraper and are a fun complement.  Overall a fun read.

  Next up:  The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez.  Nia is a starship captain piloting her ship on a trading route between major planets and their outlying colony worlds.  Travel between the stars is fast, but not that fast -- Nia spends decades in suspended animation plying her ship.  She's asked to help return a boy found at the site of a starship crash to the main world in hopes that he can be reunited with his people.  Nia and the boy grow close and she's reluctant to turn him over to the authorities at the end of her trip.

  Fumiko Nakajima is the genius who opened the stars to mankind.  Thanks to suspended animation and other advances in medicine, she's kept pace with her expanding civilization but she's not entirely happy with the results of her work.  She's working on another project and thinks the boy might have the keys she needs, but for now, she needs to keep Nia and the boy away from civilized space because a lot of people have a vested interest in the system as it is and the boy could upset that.

  Another pretty good read.  The plot clips along nicely, but it's really a much more character driven book with Nia and Fumiko pondering their decisions in the past and how they might make amends or change direction.  The boy, too, has his own moments of growing into a person.  If you're a fan of Becky Chambers's books, this will be right up your alley.  A warm, humanistic sci-fi story.

 Itinerant lesbian librarian-revolutionaries roaming the American Southwest -- I mean, it's a pretty good hook for a book.  Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey is a fun short story with a neat fusion of old west and post-apocalypse...well, maybe not apocalypse.  The US is still around, just worn down into a tired fascism where most people eke out a miserable living and try to keep the war effort alive.   Esther is a young woman who's just lost her best friend (and illicit lover) and is now slated to marry her dead friend's ex fiance.  So she hides in the book wagon of the Librarians, a group of women delivering the approved books, pamphlets, and literature to the isolated towns and farms of America.

  Esther quickly discovers that the librarians are not exactly the models of a patriotic citizens, but they might offer her a chance to make a better life for herself.  So, it's a fairly short book and clips along, but c'mon, secret agents for an antifascist resistance movement posing as government-sanction librarians?  A delightful read.

  I'm sure at some point everyone has tried to learn a magic trick.  Most of the time, it either takes a lot more work than we have the patience for or the trick is so obviously gimmicky that it's hard to impress anyone above the 4th grade.  Some people have a bit more determination and interest in the art though and the last several years have seen a new generation of magicians bring new ideas to the table.  Delving into modern magicians and how they view their work is the subject of Magic is Dead by Ian Frisch.  Mr. Frisch fell in with one of the more popular internet magicians and through him, discovered a secret society of magicians and magic-adjacent people, and becomes something of a magician himself, even inventing a new trick.  

  The book is just as much about Mr. Frisch's history as well as that of the other major magicians he interacts with and while it shows how magic is often a method of working through personal tragedy, it does break up the narrative a bit, a weird focus on the author and not his subject.  Perhaps influenced by a topic that thrives on deception, the book itself feels a little manipulative -- there's a lot of focus on the business of magic and how many modern magicians are using the internet to hawk their wares.  That Mr. Frisch makes it into the mysterious 52 Society as something of a chronicler of the group comes across as perhaps a bit deceptive, an acceptable way for the magicians to sort of toot their own horn.  I will say it's caused me to watch a few more magic trick videos online and there's always a bit of a subtle hustle for merch going on in all of these.

  Again, the book is full of people who make a living by tricking you so it's hard to take the book at face value.  I think a lot of the underlying ideas/principles behind modern magic is interesting, but rather than a manifesto for a new kind of magic, it feels a bit more like hagiography.  Not the worst book in the world, but unless you're fairly into magic, probably not a must-read.

  I also struggled through Mazes of Power by Juliette Wade, but teenagers who are somehow more adept at political situations than their elders just doesn't work right and the main antagonist isn't that compelling.  I also skimmed through A Child's Garden of Grass -- Reloaded by Richard Clorfene and Jack Margolis.  This is a reprint of a book from the late 60's talking about, well, weed.  While there is some genuinely interesting information in the book (some of which is only interesting because it's info from the 60's), this is a humor book and...

  Dear reader, the humor is dreadful.  Do yourself a favor and don't bother.  If you're really curious, drop me a line.

Anyway, that's what I've been reading lately
Tom

Hey,

The new Harley Quinn cartoon show on the DC channel is, hands down, absolutely worth the $7/month to get it. Or wait a couple of months until it all drops (13 episodes, 1 per week like real tv used to do).

This might be the best animated thing DC has done since Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Because it's super-villains, nothing is off-limits and so far, this show has been knocking it out of the park. They dig deep into the DC back-catalog of villains and everyone gets a pretty well-rounded personality. It's funny and goofy but its central idea: Harely doesn't need the Joker and can be a major super-villain in her own right is a deep and compelling premise that carries a lot of other stuff along with it in delightful ways.

Well worth checking out
Tom

Hey,

  So last Wednesday, my company laid off a huge swath of its employees.  I was one of them.
  
  It was a bit sudden but the company had been having trouble over the past year so I wasn't surprised that it happened, just the timing.

  I'm still trying to right the ship a bit and get on the job hunt.

  If you're curious, I do software programming, mostly on the Microsoft stack, with a couple of different Java frameworks under my belt.  We can certainly talk if you think there's a position I might be a good fit for.

later
Tom

Hey,

  Today I learned that Wendy's (yes, the hamburger chain) has released an RPG.  It's short, but fairly complete.

  Is it good?  Who knows? (probably not)  Do I want to play a one-shot?  Dear reader, you know I do.

  Check it out here.

Later
Tom
 

Hi,

  I've set up a bucket list of things I'd like to try and get done in the next year to 2 years.  The items on the list run the gamut of prosaic to logistically arduous, but all of them seem do-able within the time frame so I'm really making an effort to get things knocked off the list.

  And the purpose of this post (and hopefully others in the future) is simply to note/recount doing the thing I said I'd do because it's nice to remember that sometimes you accomplish the goals you have in life.

  So here are the first two items:

  Play a game of Root:  I said some of these would be prosaic.  I backed Root after having backed and played the amazing Vast: The Crystal Caverns -- an asymmetric board game that was incredibly fun but quite difficult to teach as each player in Vast take on a role that has different play rules and win conditions.  Aside from some very simple rules on movement, everyone acts completely differently from everyone else.  The upside is that the game has a lot of useful player aids and once you've played through two turns you know how to play your role, though learning how to play it *well* and learning what the other roles are up to is a different story. 

  Root was pitched as an asymmetrical wargame that feels like cute woodland animals having a tussle.  There are four factions, each plays slightly differently than the others, but everyone is trying to get the most victory points and the basic mechanics of movement and combat are the same for everyone (and the exceptions are all pretty straight forward).  So this seemed like a much more approachable/teachable game. 

I backed the base game and the expansion set.  It arrived over a year ago.  It sat there unplayed.  A number of bucket list goals are simply to play new games that I have but haven't played or replay games I haven't played enough.  Root was at the top of the list so a couple weeks ago we all sat down to play.  Along with the generous play aids and rule reminders, the game also has a pre-planned "teaching scenario" that walks all players through their first two turns.  You could stop then and restart, but we were fine playing out the game from there.

  The walkthrough was great.  The sheet has each person explicitly announce what they are doing for each part of their turn.  Obviously that helps you understand how your faction works, but it also gives players insight into how the other factions work.  But the game also has you take some actions that will really guide your strategy for the rest of the game.  The biggest example here is the Vagabond -- a lone adventurer who travels the forest looking for action, adventure, and better gear to keep doing the first two things.  The Vagabond has a relationship chart that tracks how the other factions view her.  You can ally yourself with a faction, or you can earn their hatred and both states offer benefits and challenges.  It's also pretty easy to get a faction to hate you -- just kill one of their dudes.

  The upshot is that you want to think carefully before you get someone ticked off at you, but the walkthrough doesn't care what you think.  Turn two the Vagabond kills a bird warrior and now the birds all hate her.  Remember, this is the very first time the Vagabond player has played the game and turn two she's made an enemy.  It's that kind of bold decision making (taken out of your hands) that really gets you stuck in to the game.  I suspect the other factions also made some very committal moves, but it wasn't as obvious as the Vagabond's.

  The game itself was a lot of fun.  I played the Woodland Alliance (i.e. the rebels caught between the cats and the birds).  So I'm slowly infiltrating spaces on the board with my supporters and forcing the others to pay me cards as they moved through those clearings.  I get an actual rebel base set up but the Alliance has a handful of troops and some of them need to be trained up as officers to help get those troops to do anything useful.  Meanwhile, the Marquis de Cat was fighting fires all over the board while trying to get enough troops together to blunt the advance of the birds of the Eyrie.  The Vagabond mostly did her own thing and stopped by the Alliance from time to time to get more gear.

  In the end, I pulled out the victory.  I'd like to say it was deep strategy on my part, but I think it mostly came down to me not looking like a threat.  I had lots of tokens everywhere but only a few actual troop meeples on the board.  The Cat was everywhere at the start of the game and Eyrie got real big, real fast.  The Vagabond probably needed to be more aggressive -- hey the Eyrie hates you, go kill some birds.  Still, the game has a lot of potential, plays in a reasonable amount of time, and it left us thinking about taking a second go at it.
  
  Special shout-out to the Eyrie player.  The Eyrie faction plays a bit like Robo-Rally for those who remember that game.  Each turn, the Eyrie lays down a couple of cards on their Decree track and then they have to do all the things in their Decree track, in order.  If they can follow their "program" great, next turn add some more cards and try again.  The problem is that eventually, you won't be able to do all the things on your Decree Track and when that happens, the Eyrie's government is overthrown, they lose troops, spaces, and victory points, and finally the Decree Track is cleared and a new leader is chosen.  We were all waiting to see the Eyrie's government fall, but the player managed to keep the same leader the entire game and never failed to carry out the Decree.  He was a very close 2nd and only a last-minute propaganda drive got me over the finish line.  One of the things we need to learn as we play this game in the future is how to make it hard for the Eyrie player to maintain their Decree.  Another is that Alliance bases need to be *ahem* rooted out.  It's costly, the Alliance is very strong on defense, but if you don't do it, the Alliance just slowly get better and if you do destroy a base, that triggers a bunch of bad stuff for the Alliance player which will set them back a bit.

  Overall, this game is a lot of fun.  It's easier to teach than Vast and the cutesy woodland theme disguises some serious gameplay.  

  Take a bike maintenance class:  I've been doing a bit more cycling over the past few years.  For a while I've been meaning to take a bike maintenance class, mostly just to get a better understanding of how my bike works and general stuff you can do to keep it in good condition.  This summer, I took the basic bike class at Broadway Bicycle School.  It was a six week course that met on Wednesdays.

  The class covered a lot of ground.  Fixing flats, adjusting hubs, wheels, and brakes, chain sizing and replacement, and working with the shifter -- it's a pretty comprehensive course.  This didn't turn me into a wrench monkey.  If anything, I'm more likely to take the bike to the shop and have them deal with it because man, it can be fiddly.  That said, I have a *much* better understanding of how everything works and I'm much more likely to correctly identify problems before they get worse.  Also, truing a bicycle wheel is quite...meditative.  I also picked up a few basic maintenance tips that I can do for myself (a little bit of chain lube makes it all better).

  Anyway, the course was fun, our instructor was great and I feel like I learned a lot of useful stuff.

later
Tom

Hi,

  Been a while, but I do have some books to report on:

  First up:  Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of John Whiteside Parsons by George Pendle.  As you might guess this is an autobiography of one of the more interesting characters of early space exploration.  John "Jack" Parsons was the scion of a wealthy family who fell on hard times during the Depression.  Parsons read a lot of early sci-fi and got excited about the idea of space exploration and rockets.  Unable to afford collage, he started working for companies producing explosives for mining/construction and on the weekends would make different sorts of chemical rockets.  Although not formally schooled in chemistry, he had a very nimble mind and probably knew more about explosive chemicals than anyone at CalTech, where he managed to cobble together a small rocketry research program (at the time, rockets were considered nothing more than toys). 

  When WWII broke out, he created a rocket fuel formula to help large planes take off on short runways.  These rocket boosters were called JATO units (Jet Assisted Take-Off) -- note that they called them jets not rockets because jets were cool and rockets were dumb.  He formed a company to produce the JATO units called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and you probably know it toady as an integral part of NASA.  Those boosters he produced in WWII became the template for solid fuel rockets such as the boosters for the Space Shuttle.

  All of this is interesting enough but when you add in the fact that he got inspired by Alistair Crowley and set up an OTO temple in his house...well, you'd expect more but honestly there aren't a lot of records and most interviews are with people who were at the fringes of his crowd.  You want to hear about the rituals and the orgies and there's some of that, but there's a lot of stuff that's still quite opaque about the man and what he was doing.

  The general picture that you get from the book is that Jack Parsons was kind of a real life, low-budget Tony Stark, a bit of an asshole genius.  It's not clear if more funding or additional education would've helped, he clearly seemed to be the kind of person with his head in the clouds and a burning desire to achieve his goals.  It's too bad there's not more detail about his life, although I suspect frustration would factor large in it.

  It's a niche subject so I'm not recommending it to you unless you've got a real interest in this kind of stuff.

  So it's back to fiction with:  Edges by Linda Nagata.  Ms. Nagata is an author from Australia who wrote a series of transhuman sci-fi.  This is the start of a new series set in that universe.  I don't usually like dealing with coming into the middle, but this is a pretty good starting point and I never felt too lost so that's a point in it's favor.

  The basic premise is that transhuman society has spread throughout the galaxy.  However, around the fringes, a fleet of ancient war machines search out technically advanced civilizations and then crushes them.  Near a weird machine/neutron star called Deception Well, humans have found a refuge from the machines.  Towards the interior of human space, the oldest settlements eventually created Dyson spheres and other high-tech stellar engineering.  But they've got silent and from Deception Well people can see those megastructures are breaking up and they're not sure why.  It doesn't seem to be the war machine's fault but there's no way they can reach it.

 Until Urban, a human sent out from Deception Well as part of a team trying to beat the war machines returns in control of one of the warships.  He offers his old lover and a few others from Deception Well a chance to upload to his ship and come with him to go exploring into the core to find out what happened.

  They almost immediately run into transhuman trouble.

  I enjoyed the heck out of this book.  The concept of an "inverted frontier" is fun and the book really stares down the barrel of the various ramifications that transhuman technologies would produce.  I'm looking forward to the next book in the series.  Recommended, especially for fans of Ian Banks and the like.

   Let's roll back to a bit of fantasy.  The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey is set in a not-quite-steampunk world trying to recover from a devastating war, in particular, we focus on the city of Lower Proszawa.  Berlin during the Weimar Republic is the obvious analog and the german words for streets and slang really helps orient you.  Largo is, for now, a bicycle messenger with a famous theatrical girlfriend and just a *teensy* morphine hobby.  One day, the chief messenger at the company is hauled away by the secret police and Largo gets a promotion, thanks in large part to his photographic memory of the city and its layout.  From high-class mansions to abandoned factories, Largo delivers packages and takes signatures and then comes back to the office to be quizzed about the day by his boss Herr Branca.

  Largo's deliveries get more and more strange and as rumors of war start to swirl, Largo is going to have to wise up about who he is and what he's doing.

  Another really solid book.  I enjoyed the world-building (and learned a bit of German too).  Largo is head-smackingly naive but once he starts to realize what's going on, well, he's still out of his depth but he knows he has to do something.  Very much a "so now I'm an adult, now what?" kind of journey for him.  I would say this is a slightly better fantasy LeCarr than the Amberlough series touted itself as (though that series really had a different idea in mind vs. it's ad copy).  A fun read.

  Back to space with The Outside by Ada Hoffmann.  When humans hit the Singularity, the Singularity decided that humans just couldn't be trusted with advanced science and technology so...they took it over.  Now AI Gods control and watch over human development.  They allow some level of experimentation but generally keep them firmly sandboxed.  Yasira Shien is a scientist working on an interesting new piece of science and the AIs are letting her have a go at it, but the new tech promptly unravels the space laboratory she's working on and the Gods scoop her up.  Branded a heretic and a murderer, the Gods are giving her a shot at redeeming herself by tracking down her mentor, a woman who has big plans to upend the gods and reality itself.

  A fun book that explores a theme I think is more likely in a transhuman future -- AIs who simply keep humans like...well, not like pets exactly, but more like toddlers who keep grabbing for things they shouldn't.  Banks's Culture novels sometimes touch on this a bit, but it's a theme that's front and center here and I kinda like it.

  I had one minor niggle.  Dr. Shein and her mentor are both described as having autism (it's suggested that this, in part, explains their scientific insights).  I realize that I don't think I've read any book, fiction book certainly, that has an autistic character at its center and really tries to get into their head.  My issue is that....Shien doesn't seem terribly different from a lot of other protagonists.  If she's freaking out about being abducted by AI gods and dragooned into a galaxy-wide hunt for a reality bending mad scientist -- that's an emotional crisis most people would have.  I didn't feel like her autism was something that came through on the page.  If it's deliberate, if it's a "autistic people are like everyone else", that's fine, but it's not like she's being ostracized because she's autistic, she's treated as a slightly eccentric genius and that's it, which seems like it really undercuts whatever sort of message they wanted to go with here.  Again, I can't recall a central autistic character in a book I've read in the past few years so perhaps I'm completely missing the point, but I don't feel like I got a sense of how her autism shapes her compared to any neurotypical character.

  Still, it's a pretty good book and I do recommend it.

  Finally, a new Max Gladstone book.  I've been eagerly devouring Max Gladstone's Craft series books since the first one.  A magic-fantasy take on modern finance that is *way* better than that description sounds.  His latest book, however, is a stand alone sci-fi novel called The Empress of Forever.  Here we have Vivian Liao -- entrepreneurial wunderkind whose made and lost fortunes in a near-future, ecologically failing Earth.  But now the Feds are closing in, ready to break her.  So Viv hatches a last-ditch plan to sneak in to an MIT server farm and...create a benign Skynet?  But in the process a glowing green woman suddenly appears, grabs her, and spirits her away to the far future.  

  With a little help, Viv escapes her prison and learns that here in the future there's The Cloud -- a digital mapping of...everything.  And the Empress (the green woman) basically rules and owns it.  If Viv wants to get home, she has to beat the Empress.  She also has to fend off the Mirrorfaith, techno-priests who try to study the Empress to learn her secrets, the Pride, war-toys of the Empress that she's discarded, and the Bleed, an alien species who show up when a civilization reaches a certain level of sophistication and....eat everything.  To prevent the Bleed, the Empress herself usually does this stunt.

  So...Viv gets the party together, a god-like space pirate, a techno-monk, a barbarian pilot, and a sentient blob of grey goo.  Together they go on adventures.

  Friends, Max Gladstone is a fantastic writer and this book is flat-out amazing.  Wonderful world-building and grand vistas, you can imagine how lush the movie would be.  Beyond that, the thing that really characterizes Gladstone's books is the human, emotional core a the center and how it addresses the numerous challenges we face here in the real world and how we attack those problems.

  Highly recommended, definitely check it out.

  OK, I think that covers it.  Happy reading everyone.

later
Tom

Hey,

  How's about I review the books I read in a more timely manner?

  First up, Luna:  Moon Rising by Ian McDonald.  This is the concluding volume of his Luna series.  The short version is that in the future the moon is run by five corporations and the families that own them.  The series primarily focuses on the Corta family who produce helium-3 for export to an energy-starved Earth.  But then their dome gets blown up in the first book, the Corta patriarch gets banished to Earth, but then returns with terrestrial allies to take over the moon in the second book, and now it's time for a showdown between the people of the moon and the people of Earth.  The story sprawls out over a fair number of Corta family members so you get to see the conflict from a few different angles.

  Overall, this book brought everything to a solid conclusion.  The writing in this series has always been quite good along with most of the hard science.  An easy recommendation if you're looking for intrigue, action and drama in a near-future setting.

  Next up:  Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K.J. Parker.  Mr. Parker has written a number of well-received fantasy novels most of which make liberal use of actual history to help flesh out the details.  This is a standalone novel about Orhan, leader of a regiment of Imperial Engineers.  He spends most of his time building bridges and tearing down or building up defensive works.  He returns to the Imperial City to discover unknown enemies have lured the defenders out into an ambush and they'll soon be bearing down on the city itself.  Orhan has to organize his forces and the people remaining in the city to stall the enemy long enough until help arrives.

  I stayed up waaayyy to late finishing this book off, which should probably be all the endorsement you need.  The chapters are short, punchy, and always make you want to "read just one more chapter".  The dialog is good, and Orhan is an active protagonist who is making plans, solving problems, and adapting to the enemy's efforts.  The plot suffers a bit from Orhan's interactions with the enemy commander (in the sense that the enemy deliberately does stupid things sometimes) and the end is a bit unsatisfying (but it's not an unreasonable or illogical ending and it's only the last 10 pages or so).  Still, this is a fun low-magic fantasy book which should make for some nice summer reading.

later
Tom

Hey,


Next year, in 2020, I'm planning on running a short Cyberpunk 2020 campaign because...why not. Now, comparing the game world to our real one, it would seem like we've got all the dark, corporate dystopia with none of the cool toys.

Well...here's a brand new way to get a bit closer to cyberpsychosis -- and infrared vision.

later
Tom

Later
Tom