Robin Sloan on new avenues for the web now that the platforms of the last decade (like Twitter) are crumbling. Yes, yes, yes. This is so exciting. Very much looking forward to seeing the innovations that come out of this period.
Robert Epstein on our brains not actually being like computers. Food for thought. As an additional observation, and I’ve mentioned this before, I’ve found a lot of value lately in considering humans’ bad behavior as a function of buggy internal state that can be changed.
Minor prefatory note: I’ve updated the reading page with a slight redesign and (for 2022 reads) the year of publication.
Recent nonfiction reads
I Wish I’d Been There, edited by Byron Hollinshead. Historians talking about the parts of American history they wish they could go back in time to see. Really enjoyed this, and now I’ve got a whole bunch more parts of history I want to read up on.
Extra Life, by Steven Johnson. Such a fascinating book. Strongly recommended. (Also, those milk deaths in Manhattan — yikes.) I especially loved the corrective focus on larger networks and activism, which this quote from the book summarizes nicely:
In an age that so often conflates innovation with entrepreneurial risk taking and the creative power of the free market, the history of life expectancy offers an important corrective: the most fundamental and inarguable form of progress we have experienced over the past few centuries has not come from big corporations or start-ups. It has come, instead, from activists struggling for reform; from university-based scientists sharing their findings open-source style; and from nonprofit agencies spreading new scientific breakthroughs in low-income countries around the world.
Recent fiction reads
Petty Treasons, by Victoria Goddard. A novella, and a prequel to The Hands of the Emperor. The second-person POV was a little bit harder to read for some reason (which wasn’t the case with Ogres below). Nice to return to the world, though, and to see some of the retold events from a different perspective.
The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler. This had a bit of an Arrival vibe. Overall, I liked it, but it wasn’t as perfect a fit for me as I’d hoped it might be. Still interesting, though.
Inside Man, by K. J. Parker. A novella. Enjoyed it. The central conceit of this subseries of novellas is fun. (Well, it would be utterly horrifying in real life, but as a fictional exploration it’s fun.)
The Expert System’s Champion, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. A novella, takes place ten years after The Expert System’s Brother. The second half was much more interesting for me than the first half (which I struggled with, not sure why).
The Law, by Jim Butcher. A novella, takes place after Battle Ground. Fun to return to that world (though acknowledging that as usual with the Dresden Files, there are male-gazy parts I could very much do without).
Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Another novella. Yes, yes, it was to pad my numbers. I do really like novellas, though, and I wish more books were shorter. This was my favorite Tchaikovsky read so far. That final twist!
I see this recap as a way to be at least a little more conscious of how and what I’m reading. (Some things are easier to see in the aggregate.) Also cf. last year’s stats.
In 2022 I read an even 100 books, a number I achieved largely because I stacked the end with novellas. I have no shame. There were also 37 books I decided not to finish. (Those abandoned books are, however, included in the count of 36,440 pages that I read, to provide a slightly more accurate picture.)
Of the 100 that endured to the end:
55% were fiction and 45% were nonfiction
Of the fiction, and acknowledging that genre boundaries aren’t always clear cut, the genres were: 53% fantasy (29 books), 35% science fiction (19), 7% horror (4), 4% classics (2), and 1% general fiction (1)
39% of the 100 had at least one female author, 61% did not
14% were written before 2010 (9% were before 2000 and 4% before 1900)
A whopping 54% were written in the last three years (18 from 2020, 19 from 2021, 17 from 2022)
The earliest book I read in 2022 was written around A.D. 731 (go Bede), roughly thirteen hundred years earlier
After looking at this, I’ve got a microresolution to get myself to read more old books this new year, so that I’m not skewing quite so much toward the hyper-recent.
Peter Baker’s Ygt, a TrueType hinting app. Peter wrote the textbook we used in my Old English class many years ago. He also designed the Junicode font.
Wyldcard, e-ink playing cards. Cool. I’d love a small e-reader around this size (smaller than my phone, super lightweight, no bells or whistles), especially once e-ink resolution gets better.
John Keegan on visualizing rivers and floodplains with USGS data. A few months ago I played around a little with QGIS’s hillshade rendering for DEMs and with rendering DEMs in Blender and need to get back to all that. Also, Daniel Coe’s work (mentioned in the post) is lovely.
Tom M on things he wished he knew when learning C. Ah, C. (My first two languages were BASIC and Pascal, but then for a fairly long time my main languages were C and C++. Haven’t used either in years, though, other than during my master’s.)
Markos Kay’s process video for his Creature Perch piece using Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. (I’ll add here that the ethics of the training sets for these aren’t great, especially for the artists whose works were taken without permission. Hoping that gets better.)
Google’s Infinite Nature paper on generating 3D flythroughs from still photos. Slowed down a lot, this would make for a nice screensaver or decorative display. Reminds me a bit of those eight-hour train ride videos on YouTube, too.
New story: Saying Goodbye. About eight pages long, science fiction.
This one came from wanting to write a story with virtual reality involved (which admittedly ended up being more of a bystander in the finished piece) and then my recent experience with my dad took over and became the main driver, though the details in the story are all quite different.
Together Forever II. This one came out of losing my father. (That said, it isn’t actually a depiction of my own family — my parents were divorced and I have more siblings than this.)
Abide with Me II. This has felt applicable to me a decent number of times these past few months.
