In addition to my work book club (we’re reading How Big Things Get Done by Brent Flyvberg) I found out that one of my favorite podcasts “99% Invisible” is doing a read-along of the massive Robert Caro book “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York”. It’s a biggie – so they are going to work through it over the course of 2024, with one episode a month covering a 12th of the book. This sounds totally achievable.
I’ve just finished the first part – Robert’s beginnings, his family, his progressive paternalistic origins and the brutal education in power that he goes through. This guy seems to be a massive intellect, a fantastically energetic powerhouse of change, an aristocratic snide jerk who looked down on all of us (my ancestors are particularly some of the people his family organized to keep from embarassing them), and possibly one of the most destructive people who doesn’t get credit for it. Once you listen to Butterflies, the Memory Palace’s story of how Thomas Midgely was inadvertently a destructive monster who murdered so many of us a fraction at a time, you begin to think about the other secret monsters in the world – killing us in tiny slices. They removed so many parts of so many peoples lives, bringing the day of their death closer than needed.
Listening to the first episode of 99PI’s Power Broker read-along was great – Robert Caro is the guest, you begin to grasp that Robert Moses did the same, but in the middle of people’s lives and he did it for aesthetic reasons. He wanted to prevent us from having trains and public transportation. He had the choice and he chose to do things that made so many people in my region sit idling in cars, pumping exhaust out and increasing their blood pressure. It reminds me of the part in Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett where a demon takes credit for a the design of a UK motorway as a force of massive incremental evil. I was hooked in the first 20 pages, but I feel like we are in masterful hands by now. I was eager to not get too far ahead of the podcast – but now I can get through the next chunk. It is definitely not too soon to get started and join in – I am eager to chat with folks about it.
As I wrote aboutMy 2023 in Books, I realized I want to write more about what I read. Just wrote up “A Tasty Introduction” ( a review of “A Deadly Education” by Naomi Novik, who wrote the Temeraire books).
Friends, it consumed me. And then the whole series followed, one after another. I had to see it through. Each book had a new twist, a new country, a new region, new insights into power and servitude and love and friendship. The series takes a premise that sounds a bit ludicrous, then takes it extremely seriously and chases it into every dark corner. That premise is something that is almost embarrassing to summarize: What if in the Napoleonic wars dragons were real, intelligent, commonplace and part of the war. Magic isn’t a thing, there are no wizards, just real speaking dragons exist and are part of the war. In this world, Laurence finds and becomes bonded with a newly hatched dragon named Temeraire.
Laurence and Temeraire go on an epic journey as they travel the whole world in the effort to defeat Napoleon’s relentless army and innovative dragon tactics, to keep Britain free. In each book, Temeraire asks more and more from Laurence about the world as it is, Laurence finds himself trying to explain the contradictions inherent in the system he never questioned before, and their relationship continuously evolves as they encounter other cultures and other relationships between humans and dragons. I got so excited as I read along:
Big tough downer moments! But as always the star of the show is the shifting relationship between Temeraire and Lawrence- and him slowly changing his views on the enslavement of dragons.
Just wonderful. All of the stressors and impossible hypocrisy of the empire begins to rise in the relationship of Laurence and Temeraire. What hope is there for recognition of dragons if humans see other humans as things?
And the action is intense for every book. Huge epic battles with aerial dragon to dragon fighting and mid-air boarding parties, prison escapes, heists, sword fights, pistol duels etc etc. Naomi Novik doesn’t miss a trick. I can’t scratch the surface of the 9 book series for you, but it was worth all the reading. In 2024 I’m going to tackle her “Scholomance” series with high expectations.
There was a really big battle climax to the book – but it was overshadowed by the simple beauty of the relationships developed for every character and the huge emotional stakes. It’s a big universe where humanity is a very very small part. Earth’s gone, humanity depends on the largess of richer species. Rosemary, comes from that background and joins the multi-species crew of the Wayfarer, a working spaceship that gets a very interesting assignment opening up a wormhole to the home planet of a dangerously behaving new species. The journey is fantastic. The end is a gut punch where a difficult choice leads to a precious character’s life being risked. And the risk doesn’t pay off. I wanted to read up on the further adventures of these characters. I wanted to plow through more adventures of the crew of the Wayfarer in the Wayfarers series! More more more!
But Becky is too good. She disappoints you in the absolute best ways. Each new novel is warm, kind and interesting, it’s in the same universe, but it doesn’t just let you stay where you were. Each book takes on a new aspect.
The next book takes two characters that are very minor from the first book and sets them out to grow and learn in a completely new environment. It expands the stage from the size of the ship to a wider society and mixed cultures. Two characters are fleshed out – one as they become a fully realized person growing up from the first page, the other healing from a sickening origin into an independent kind woman. And there’s a heist, sort of. It’s great. It ends with a warm hug and I loved it. (?????)
It’s just so calm and kind and full of heart. I really love the way minor characters have leapt into fully dimensioned people with giant stories. It gives you that sonder chill.
She does it again with the third book. In the first book, it’s mentioned that humanity had to flee the dying Earth in an Exodan fleet of spacecraft looking for a new home. These generation ships had to not repeat the mistakes that ruined the planet they launched from, so everyone has work, food, housing in self-sustaining systems. Eventually they find or are found by the wider galaxy – but who cares about some fragile monkeys in steel cans? It takes a very long time until we are allowed to settle and immigrate to other planets. And not everyone wants to leave the sturdy culture humanity has built in their aging ships for the razzle dazzle of the wider culture. This book takes place in one of the Exodan ships, explores who stays, who leaves, who grows and who dies. Their is a mystery that gets solved, but it’s very Chambers – the point is people figuring out how to be together and why. Everyone has stakes, reasons for who they are – and in the end you can celebrate the new places the characters end up. (?????)
The last Wayfarer book leaves it all behind for a crisis of intersecting cultures in an intergalactic truck stop. We get to learn the story behind an incredibly unusual romance, the ways these cultures conflict and work together, the real pressures that divide them and the ways they can help each other grow past those pressures and divides. All this happens in a kind of a “bottle episode” – three strangers are stranded when there is a cascading satellite crisis that renders them incommunicado and unable to take off. The crisis in the sky leads to them having to encounter each other instead of just passing through – and they learn why each is there. As things on the ground are starting to get better, there’s a crisis on the ground and they all help each other to get through it. I don’t want to give too much away, but this is the good kind of bottle episode. (?????)
Where Temeraire is an epic tale of grand battles, it is also a small story of two people growing and maturing as they face uncomfortable truths about how they relate to each other and the world. Laurence and Temeraire are the true constants. The Wayfarer series is about smaller challenges, smaller stakes, but very personal ones. In each one of these books the stakes are just as important to the characters as a grand battle. And Becky Chambers manages to make you care and understand across each character, taking the time to build them fully.
Now I get how a Becky Chambers story works so well. The smallness is part of the point. She can make the small stakes MATTER. They matter to the characters and they matter to me. So I decided to read the sequel to “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” in the “Monk and Robot” series.
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is a gem (?????). It gets smaller and more detailed. The two characters are the same Monk and Robot from the first book are going to tour the world and fulfill a bigger mission – but the way they grow with each other on the journey is massive.
This little arc charms my heart as all of Becky Chambers books do.
The world is so big and the story so intimate, the climax a hidden tiny change in a conversation.
CJ Leede’s, Maeve Fly was something I picked up randomly in a bookshop and had to purchase after a few pages. I absolutely loved it (?????) and cackled at the pitch black darkness in it. It’s a dash of American Psycho, a splash of Chuck Palahniuk, stirred with Elsa and Anna, then strained through a used bandage.
It is definitely the grossest book I read this year, and Mary Roach’s hilarious Packing for Mars has a whole chapter on astronauts pooping. Packing for Mars was probably the funniest book I read, though Mel Brooks’s All About Me came close.
The most depressing book was The Tangled Lands by Paolo Bacigalupi. I mistakenly got my work’s book club to read it and… people weren’t happy. There is no happiness in this very thinly veiled fantasy allegory for climate change.
Two timers
I read some great books that flipped between two times – A Closed and Common Orbit is in there, but I read two right next two each other.
Witch King flips back and forth between two times. One is a mystery – who trapped us? What intrigue is afoot and how can we foil it. The other is a rising challenge, a hopeless rebellion against an overwhelming authority.
Both are told with strength and warmth- our protagonist is frankly a bit of a shit in the beginning, but we learn why and see where they are coming from and where they are supported more than they see.
It ends with the perfect ending for a mystery and the aftermath of a rebellion. The story is done.
There’s so many good bits and little shiny details in this epic redemption journey. In the past, a simple occupation mission by an atrocious all-conquering invasion force goes awry with a mysterious conspiracy coming to a head. The protagonist is an AI ship consciousness multiply embodied in enslaved human soldiers. A crisis builds under the watchful eye of an empress that rules from within thousands of bodies.
In the present, the aftermath of the crisis is our protagonist singly embodied, troubled by the atrocities it committed and dedicated to a hopeless mission of vengeance.
There is a lot of dealing with a… not an untrustworthy narrator but an extremely neurodivergent naive narrator. Lots of fun gender issues and language issues that present as interesting puzzles for the reader.
In 2024, I’m going to shoot for 24 books read, but I think I’d like to write more about them. It’s been fun writing this post, but I could do a little bit more as I read each one.
I started tracking books a long time ago on LibraryThing, when LibraryThing was giving out a CueCat. I liked LibraryThing, but they never got as popular as GoodReads, and I had friends who actually used GoodReads. So I moved on to GoodReads to be with my friends, since community trumps technology. I really wish I could have used the functionality of LibraryThing but still kept tabs with my pals. Sadly, these folks want to have a walled garden and don’t value interoperability.
I don’t want to give my data directly to Amazon (the owners of GoodReads). I don’t want to lose APIs or access to all the data that I’ve been putting in. I also care about my friends, but not that they use the same website as me!
So I was incredibly excited to discover a great book tracker in the Fediverse!
BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what to read next. Federation allows BookWyrm users to join small, trusted communities that can connect with one another, and with other ActivityPub services like Mastodon and Pleroma.
https://joinbookwyrm.com
BookWyrm is open source, decentralized and federated. It’s built on top of the ActivityPub protocol like Mastodon.
BookWyrm is decentralized. That means it isn’t just one website like Twitter, GoodReads, FaceBook, LibraryThing, etc. It is made up of many sites – there are 22 sites live as I write this. If you don’t like one of them, you can leave and move to another, you’re not locked in to the choices and beliefs of whoever owns a server.
And Federated means that all these sites speak about books to each other in a special set of ways called ActivityPub. Some of these sites are for folks who speak a certain language or live somewhere or are interested in a certain kind of book… But if you have a friend on a different site, you can still be friends! The sites all speak to each other in a federation of small common websites. Bookwyrm has good people on it – you can find a good like minded community or span across communities.
And because BookWyrm speaks ActivityPub, it means that people who left Twitter for Mastodon can be friends with you on BookWyrm – they can comment on your books safely from their own community! It’s as natural as sending emails from your work to someone else’s.
And when I want to just get the books that I marked to-read so I can search for them across multiple places, I don’t have to spend a ton of time faking my way to get my own data. BookWyrm is here for me, not as a place trying to find a business model to exploit me.
The world is still nuts. The right wing forces in the government are attacking Dr. Fauci. Sinclair media, who own a huge percentage of local news tv stations, is going to release a truly insane conspiracy report alleging that Dr. Fauci is responsible somehow for creating the coronavirus. Tons of people are going to see it. One of my friends has been whatsapping me some really disturbing stuff that makes me worry about him – ‘context’ around the police beating a guy in a wheelchair, ‘privilege’ from some country music guy, etc.
Biden said Trump was the first racist president, ignoring the one who actually enslaved human beings. It’s gonna be a long 4 years even if Trump loses. It’s incredibly depressing because I really think Biden can screw this up, but even if he wins, he’s pretty conservative and will probably be a really effective block to meaningful change.
Effective work will have to bubble up at city and state levels before it makes it to a federal level.
Family
We bought a car! Now we own a hybrid Rav 4 and it’s pretty cool! Sam did tons of work and found a deal with 0 down, 0% financing for 5 years. So it’s just incredibly easy on us and cheaper than the Budget monthly car rental we’d been doing. I’ve put in a dash cam and it’s a pretty good generic car. I got us the car insurance as well and we saved a few hundred bucks by returning the rental car early. Celebrated with some Aperol Spritz’s and they are STILL the reigning champ drink of the summer!
Got an offer on one of the Brooklyn apartments and accepted it – looking to get the deposit on it and get into contract! Now we’re wondering do we really want to sell the last one or turn it into a rental instead or what. (I really love living there, I just don’t think we can fit back into it.)
Did a little more bike riding with Zebus – she wanted to ride her bike all the way to the bakery to get a cookie! I’m so impressed with her. She did it, too!
Swale found some educational plugin for minecraft that lets you do chemistry, found the recipe for latex and how to make balloons and then tied balloons to chickens so they could fly. He’s also been saying just the sweetest stuff to me. Lots of I-love-you’s and his own special praise to me.
We spent a $60 gift card from work on a crazy strong blender from Cuisinart and its grrrreat. Already made some milkshakes and smoothies and frozen margs.
My Laptop crashed! I was going to have to ship it out for a month to get fixed, but then it started working! That’s terrifying. Good thing I do a lot of git-push on my repos, back up important stuff to our Synology DiskStation NAS. I did a bunch of work as I set up a new account for work on Sam’s laptop to get my jumpstart script to be smoother on OSX.
DIY
Sam found a cool wallpaper and we struggled it up in the downstairs bathroom and it looks great and I never want to do wallpaper again. It’s so tricky!
In the backyard I got up on a ladder with a pole saw and cut down some branches from the mulberry tree in the backyard, months too late to save the trampoline under it from turning into a giant mulberry collecter/fermenter. I either need to get a sawzall or a mini chainsaw or something to deal with all the branches – my small tension saw isn’t realllly cutting it for this many cuts.
Kinda stalled on the patio for a while.
We’ve foamed up some cable holes in the walls, need to go spackle and paint them. Also started adding trim to the bottom of the bathroom sink cabinet – trimmed off one of the cabinet shims with a Dremel to make the trim flush. Also put in some under-sink rolling trash and recycling cans in the kitchen and put handles on the cabinets.
Did some stuff around making documentation easier, and thinking about how to make your docs and walkthroughs look good, but be testable. Nobody likes a stale documentation site! Also getting ready to launch in the UK. Office re-opening is postponed until at least September. I don’t see it happening.
Nerdery
I installed Regolith as a tiling window manager for my laptop and it seems pretty cool. Took a little while to get used to, but I’m wondering why it isn’t easier to just drag windows into tiling window manager with the mouse. I spend a fair amount of time fiddling with things to get them looking right, so why is this better then just dragging a bunch of windows into the right spot?
If you’ve got a terminal open right now try this:
http://wttr.in/?format=v2
Pretty cool! They have tons of formats available so you could make widgets on your desktop or tmux statusline.
Just finished Sam Miller’s beautiful book in the wee dark hours and it is a GEM. Qaanaaq is a place – I can see it and feel it’s culture, smell the noodles and the brine, feel the bitter cold. It’s like a long Geoff Manaugh article come to life. The nano-bonded orca-amazon that opens the book is one of the least weird things in it.
I enjoyed this as much as The Fifth Season, which is to say: immensely. Ended up checking it out twice from the NYPL on my Kobo just to savor through it.
Just finished up Tigerman by Nick Harkaway and it was a delight. A lovely struggle of a man who wants to be a father and ends up being a mysterious crime fighter, set against a post colonial outpost island sentenced to die and rotting as a Black Fleet uses the death of a nation to set up a zone without law. Really good fast-moving stuff of heroes and villains. Randomly checked out Lost Gods by Brom from the NYPL ebooks and it is holding up so far, though I feel irrationally suspicious that it will disappoint.
Also started The Fifth Risk after being reminded of Michael Lewis by the excellent Against the Rules podcast. I’m a bit full up on the mind bending horror of this age, though. My heart is really struggling for more meaningful ways to contribute within the time I’ve got.
Code
Got an hour or so over the weekend to make a wee bit more movement on the Trello release notes.
I learned that you typically have 2 months of leaving notice in India and I can’t quite wrap my mind around it and all the implications of staffing and pacing of projects.
Also started working on an internal document around API deprecation policy. We do a pretty decent job of communication etc, but I want to make it a clear guide so that we can get better at it. Standards and checklists are good for things that we intend to do often.
Maxwell is sleeping on the couch nightly. He goes from the bed to the couch in the middle of the night, some sort of bi-phasic sleep thing I imagine. Zelda sleeps through the night for the most part!
Finished Walkaway last night. It’s the hard utopian bit of wonderful you need in dark times. To live in the first days of a better nation, you have to build and believe that you can be in that nation before it is supported.
In Walkaway, the rich keep getting richer, the poor get poorer, the middle class is gutted out of society, fearfully scrambling to keep out of poverty and ignoring how close they are to being out on the street. Automation keeps progressing and the uber wealthy don’t need surplus people.
There’s no death camps, there’s just no jobs and no safety net and no healthcare for the unneeded.
So some folks walk away from money and just do for each other. That’s a threat to the base of a greed-sick society, so that society moves to protect itself.
My nook finally died, so I upgraded to a Kobo Aura One.Â
I wanted to treat myself to a really good e-reader.
Why not another nook? Meh. I heard that this one was pretty amazing. I don’t really like being locked into one store. Why not a kindle? Amazon already knows a hell of a lot about me and my family, we don’t really need to give them anymore info.
Besides, I heard a group of loyal and passionate readers contributed to the design of this reader. That’s a good sign that they made product testing part of the campaign.
What I like about it:
It’s waterproof. I can read in the tub or the rain. Which I do.
The integration with Pocket works great. Instead of falling down a twitter hole into an article in the morning, I can just send it to Pocket and set up a bunch of great reading on the subway.
You can check out books from the library right from it! This is a big deal – I can’t stand having to hook the thing up to a computer to transfer library books in.
I like the auto-warm light for nighttime.
Little stats all through it warm my nerd heart! Lots of little measures of how fast you’re reading or how many minutes of book you’ve got left sprinkled throughout the interface.
Easy to load on e-pub files!
Could be better:
It’s too big. Only fits in one jacket I own! My nook used to even fit in my back jeans pocket.
Wishlist:
I wish I could buy an e-reader that could integrate with my Calibre library of drm-free epub files. If I’m on a wi-fi network with a Calibre library, why can’t I have some sort of UPNP browsing through the books I’ve got? I’d chip in on development if this were a thing someone was making.
