Radios Appear

I've never written much about my time at NVIDIA in part because I just wasn't writing a lot here. But also because it was ultimately just a job: there were engaging bits, there were boring bits, there were indifferent bits, but it was never the most important—or even the most interesting—thing in my life.

Anyway, for those keeping score, I worked at NVIDIA from April 1, 2013 to December 31, 2025—just shy of 13 years. I was recruited in late 2012 by happenstance—I inadvertently settled a dispute between a friend from yoga and her girlfriend (now wife) Chloe who worked there. Because I had (again, inadvertently) come down on her side, Chloe looked me up, saw that the list of skills I claimed was a good match for the team she was on and reached out. She was very honest with me about the team's dysfunction, which made me pretty skeptical that I'd even take the job—but I interviewed well, and when they made me an offer it was for enough money that I could not in good conscience refuse.

Still, I tend to come down on side of "corporations are legal entities that are specifically designed to remove legal liability, which creates incentives for them to behave immorally", plus at 8000 employees or so, it would be the biggest organization I had ever worked for¹, so I figured I wouldn't stay there much longer than the two years it would take before I wouldn't have to pay back my signing bonus. I just couldn't imagine it being a good environment for me, given my general obstreperousness—I'm often not patient, not good in hierarchies, not good at being told what to do, etc.

Well, I stayed a decade more than that. They even went and made me a Team Lead for a while, before I asked to be excused. The money didn't hurt, obviously—the golden handcuffs they put around my wrists were exquisitely well-padded. But at some level, I was impressed by how the organization treated people—you can be well-paid but poorly treated, and this was not that. I recognize that I was somewhat lucky in that I ended up with an exceptional Manager, but even the mediocre ones didn't seem malign, just not very effective—it just wasn't that sort of organization. In fact, in the last couple of years there, I remember seeing an email from an EVP that was merely harshly worded—probably no more than, "this is unacceptable" type stuff—and it being sufficiently shocking that it was privately commented on by multiple people.

Like many Silicon Valley companies, NVIDIA doesn't have set vacation amounts; well, let me tell you, there were multiple years where, in aggregate I took a month, or even a little more, off work. No one ever said a thing. When we went to Finland in 2019 for Anne's Fulbright, I let them know early that she was applying and pointed out that there was an office in Helsinki—no one batted an eye. When they realized relatively late in the game that if I worked there more than 90 days, they would actually have to transfer me to the Helsinki office and that it would be a whole thing, the solution proposed by management was, "Yeah, so just don't work more than 90 days, take the rest of the time off".

All of which is to say that even as I was headed out the door, I would happily have recommended NVIDIA as a good place to work to anyone who would listen. I mean, this is a tech company that has never had a layoff—they had a stretch that was bad enough that they did actually have to cut salaries, but they didn't let anyone go, versus the 5-figure layoffs that everyone else in the industry does as a matter of course. Hell, they still hadn't had a return-to-office mandate post-Covid!

Well, with the recent reports of Jensen Huang's apparently falling for a honey trap, I fear that those days are probably going to end, and—despite the fact that I'm also an LLM skeptic, and pretty certain there's a bubble that's going to burst before too much longer—that makes me a little sad.

You see, my thesis has long been that Jensen, as a founder who wasn't an privileged asshole to begin with (as opposed to the more recent crop of Silicon Valley CEOs), identified with the company to an extent that for the company to treat people poorly would reflect poorly on him—he wasn't an MBA who was hired to boost the company's stock price, he was an engineer who co-founded a company and was able to turn that into a category-dominating powerhouse.

One way or another, I suspect that's over. It may be that Jensen is forced out over this, in which case someone is going to come in who isn't likely going to identify with the company in the same way—after all, it's not going to be something they built, it's going to be something they will have been brought in to "fix". Or maybe Jensen holds on, but is perpetually embattled because of this, and gradually no longer feels as connected to the company as he did—because at some level he's never going to be able to look people in the face again without them thinking, "Here's the guy who fucked around and found out". I will take a guess that the quarterly company meetings—the day after the earnings call—where Jensen held court may become a thing of the past.

Either way, I can't help but think that the environment is going to change, and that leaves me worried for the friends I have who are still there.

Footnotes

1. This is technically not true: almost everywhere I had worked before this was probably larger in total head-count, but in terms of the breadth of who I would be interacting with, NVIDIA was much larger---in all my former jobs, I was always in smaller sub-organizations that mostly kept to themselves.

   ↩

Salon.com shuts down with no notice.

I mean, I can't say that I'm absurdly surprised—obviously the media landscape has been hellish for a long time, and I don't know that Salon really had anything that distinguished it from any other allegedly-liberal news website. Still, they've been around long enough—been enough of a fixture—that it's somewhat surprising to see them gone.

A weird coincidence arose as I was thinking about writing this: for some reason I thought that the late, great, Suck.com had grown out of or been affiliated with Salon. That of course led me to look at the Wikipedia page for Suck.com. I realized that I had misremembered Ana Marie Cox as writing the "Polly Esther" bits. In fact, though, those were written by Heather Havrilesky, who is apparently originally from around the Durham area.

Although she no longer publishes under that Nom de Plume, her Substack newsletter is still called "Ask Polly"—a title she's dragged through a few different publishers. I looked it up for fun, and her latest post is a mordantly amusing rant about AI.

Anyway, back to Salon.com: in reading the Wikipedia article on it, I discovered that basically everything I thought I knew about it was wrong. I didn't know that it grew out of a newspaper strike in San Francisco. Given how old it is, there are some adorable moments in the history of the site, like "Subsequently, for the month of October 1999, Nielsen/NetRatings reported that Salon had over two million users." Eventually, though, I realized I was confusing it for Slate.com, a similar site launched less than a year later. Oops.

The other thing that's kept me busier than usual was my resolve to listen to more music—at least one album a day, preferably two. I haven't been as consistent as I'd like, but it has gotten me into the habit of listening more. I'll take what I can get.

It wasn't directly part of that effort, but I had occasion to listen to some tracks on Soundgarden's Superunknown. One of them was Head Down—probably my favorite track on an album that's pretty loaded. I haven't listened to it in a while, though, and I'd forgotten just how heavy it is, and that when you're playing it, during the chorus—I guess you have to call it the chorus, but the structure of the song is weird and chaotic—there's a wonderful circularity to the chord progression that I find almost hypnotic. Best listened to at volumes that will alienate your partner, your cats, and if you do it right, your neighbors:

I don't think Head Down was ever even in the same zip code as their most popular stuff; it's one of the two weird tracks from the album written by their bassist, Ben Shepherd. The other one, Half is even stranger. Still, they seem to have played it live reasonably often. Here's a performance from 1995—the sound quality is good but not great, but being from the tour for the album, everyone's firing on all cylinders:

They would release Down on the Upside the next year, then break up for a dozen years, before reforming around 2010. This other live version is from 2011. Chris' voice isn't up to the high notes on this one—and of course, watching it knowing what's coming is like a paper cut on my heart—but the ending, when Ben leans over Matt on the drums and starts injecting a little chaos, is worth the watch:

While looking for those, though, I stumbled across this cover that is simultaneously so !!EXTREME!! that it's kinda funny (and that gets one note in the weird intro guitar figure flat-out wrong, and I can't not hear it), but it is also somehow perfect:

Yes, it has taken me 7 months to finish another book. It's not like I wasn't reading anything else, or working on anything else, but it's still embarrassing. Anyway.

The books in the John Dies At The End series are interesting, in that you can see their progression from, quite literally, chapters posted on someone's blog each Halloween for several years, to actual novels that are at least inclined to have more substance than the simple balls-out lunacy of the first.

Mostly I love them because in the midst of Lovecraftian horror of various stripes, these books make me laugh out loud more than anything I can remember. I could spend hours reeling out the hilarious turns of phrase, or the careful lead-ups to a punchline you didn't even realize was coming. The writing is far more sophisticated than it might seem at first blush.

That said, it is by any reasonable standard a long-running series, so the inevitable downsides are present if you really want to look for them. Do you really believe any of David, John or Amy really going to die? No. Though if I hadn't known there was already a sixth one planned, I could believe that they might have been turned into beans—I wouldn't be too surprised if Pargin decided to do something of that sort when he does decide he's done.

Anyway, they're just good dopey fun. Can't recommend them enough.

Didn’t have it together to write anything else today, so here’s a picture of a coyote we saw on the trail yesterday.

I don't remember why I first picked up John Dies at the End. It's a determinedly weird book, and then there have been four more. The latest came out yesterday; I was expecting to start reading it to distract myself from the midterms, but, uh, got distracted.

Anyway, I started it this afternoon, and was already laughing from the first non-preface paragraph. This is from There Are No Giant Crabs In This Novel: A Novel Of Giant Crabs:

Texting does to human communication what an outbreak of dysentery does to a ball pit. As such, I’m confident my friend John will be remembered by history as the master of texts that managed to create dozens of questions without imparting a single piece of actionable information. They literally subtracted knowledge from the world. Take this one that arrived at dawn on what was forecast to be the coldest day of the decade:

U up? Cops need us at spirit nothing to look at a log of body parts

The only part of that I understood was that we were needed at Spirit Nothing, which is what everyone called the abandoned department store across town that was vacant for the ten months of the year it wasn’t a Spirit Halloween. I definitely didn’t know what a log of body parts was or why it needed to be looked upon at this hour, by me or anyone else.

I won't pretend that they aren't occasionally disturbing—there's some stuff from the second book that sometimes shows up in the corners of my nightmares—but mostly the sheer boneheaded determination of the character's reactions in the face of Lovecraftian horror makes me laugh. The Zoey Ashe novels and the one-off I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom are also amusing, and not quite as distressing.

First things first: that went better than I could have imagined. Really. Congratulations to all the people who put enormous effort into making an improbable election outcome a reality. I mean, even if he ultimately loses—with 95% of votes counted, the NYT has Colom leading by <0.01, and margins don't get much more razor-thin than that—the idea that a black man was ever leading the race to be a Senator in Mississippi by any margin isn't something I would have expected to see in my lifetime.

Yet, that was the easy part.

Now the Democrats have to make a disciplined push to make a wide swath of people's lives better…and that's a hard problem, and they have a track-record that is kind of spotty.

Take, for instance, the ACA. I am glad the ACA exists. It has made healthcare available to people who otherwise wouldn't have had it, which has absolutely saved lives—some of them have been my friends. It has had knock-on effects like helping to sustain healthcare in rural areas that otherwise wouldn't have it.

But as a retiree who doesn't yet qualify for Medicare, I'm also glad that by happenstance I don't have to make use it. The bureaucracy is confusing, the options are often unattractive, the cost to customers is enormous (though subsidized for many), and somehow it has all lead to enormous profits for health insurance companies. Those are some big caveats that no one outside of the very-lefty "Medicare for All" crowd talks much about but actually touch the everyday lives of working people.

With the exception of the Biden Administration—or at least Lina Khan—Democrats have generally been happy to oversee enormous consolidation of business interests, even as the experience of the last 50+ years tells us that this is going to result in cuts in jobs, and less competition, leaving people out of work and at the mercy of ever-larger corporations.

I could go on, but it would just make me depressed. My point is: Democrats stand up to power occasionally, but not nearly as much as they should if they want to truly improve the lives of most people in their states and districts—or even if they just want to give people hope! You don't have to always win to be respected and appreciated for your efforts—but you have to fucking try.

And this is a particularly tough time to shoulder that burden: the havoc the Trump administration has wreaked across the government, climate change, the national debt, humanitarian crises across the globe, a fucking war with Iran, there's a lot to deal with.

What I hope they don't do is spend all their time going after Trump. Mind you, I do want to see Rule of Law restored as a bedrock principle in this country, and I'm happy to see laws passed to rein in the worst excesses of what Trump has been doing to enrich himself, but I don't want to see the Democrats make going after Trump the core of their mission. There will be time for that later; right now you need to shore up your position by serving the needs of the people who elected you—and going after Trump doesn't achieve that.

By accident, I stumbled across an old article that had some bad markup for block quotes; many years ago (like, 2010 or so), I was using the Textile markup language, and it turns out that my attempts to convert all those articles to org-mode when I dropped WordPress last year were incomplete. So, of course, when I went looking for more instances I found them.

They've now been updated.

One of them was this article, which was just a pointer to something that doesn't exist any more—which tempts me to go looking for other dead links on the site, but honestly that's probably a fool's errand at this point—and the reproduction of a poem referencing William Carlos Williams poem "This is Just to Say".

But, I noted the author of the poem, "Dora Goss". And I find myself suspecting that it is likely Theodora Goss, a few of whose books I have read and enjoyed.

What's that you ask? Am I indulging in inconsequential things to distract myself from Election Day? Fuck yes.

Last March, I started working on the piece of software that is serving this post to you. It's called jaunder, which is a Scottish word roughly equivalent to "prattle" or "gabble". I stumbled across the word in 2012-2013, and it seemed appropriate for what I wanted to do, though that goal morphed somewhat in the intervening years.

As the first major deliverable in a substantial project that I've set myself, it's doing what I want it to do well: it's a lightweight, reasonably-capable blogging engine. You can author via its web interface, which is pretty good on mobile or a tablet, or you can use AtomPub. It has an Emacs interface that works with the AtomPub interface. You can author in Org-mode or Markdown (or straight-up HTML via AtomPub). At some point I should actually put together a site for it, but I probably won't do that until I'm further along—there are many more major deliverables. But this is, for all intents and purposes, v1.0.

But this isn't so much about the software itself, as the process.

To be very up-front: I've used coding agents—a variety of them—to build this. I would strongly reject the description of "vibe coded", though I will also admit that there are parts of the code that I looked at in review before it went in, but could not pretend to be familiar with. I am absolutely certain that a lot of it could be better. In this, though, coding agents are just like the majority of the human programmers that I ever dealt with professionally: stunningly mediocre.

They create structures that are overly complex, or fail to refactor when it would make adding something immeasurably simpler, or just don't think about how one part of the system is going to interact with another. In a way, the worst thing about their coding abilities (I'm eliding all the other things wrong with them) is that they can be so fucking prolific and ruin your life at code review time—but even in that, they're not unlike some programmers I've known whose approach to everything was always more code, even when the right answer was to strip down and simplify and really understand what's going on before you lard more code into the mix.

But that's not even what I'm grinding away at right now. You see, our testing footprint has always been heavy, as an LLM can churn out a metric shit-ton of tests without breaking a sweat. Combine that with a penchant for writing complex code and my desire for good test coverage, and you've got a recipe for a lot of testing that takes a lot of time to complete. And all this is being done in Rust which is not always the quickest language to compile.

So I've spent the last few days directing the creation of a tracing framework for our testing framework, so that we can do a test run and get a trace that tells us where all the time went. And I've been looking at dismantling some of the infrastructure that's been overbuilt, and using more off-the-shelf parts, so that it can all be more inspectable and understandable. I feel like this is essential before I start the drive to v2.0: I don't want the iteration speed to be dictated by a test suite that takes an hour to complete.

But that's got me thinking about Software Engineering in general, and I'm realizing that all of the engineers that I've worked with directly and for whom I feel some admiration have been those who have understood the deep value of deleting code. Figuring out what to get rid of is vital to the long-term health of a software project. And as I've been working on this, I've realized that this is something that LLMs are not good at, and I wonder if anything "generative" can ever really master that approach?

I guess we'll find out over time. But I know I often find myself having to fight hard to get things removed instead of replaced, or new things added.

It's tempting to say something like "I can't believe I haven't mentioned this before…", except the reason I haven't is so very obvious and dumb: I haven't mentioned this before because I've gone months or years at a time without posting. Time to rectify things.

There are five, maybe six, podcasts that I always listen to. That may sound like a lot—I guess it really is—but I listen to them all at double-speed.

The top two

I have two podcasts that immediately brighten my day when they drop. Sometimes I don't listen to them immediately just to savor the wait a bit.

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is my absolute favorite, and it is just what it says on the tin. The creator, Andrew Hickey, is very quick to point out that it is a history, not the history—he is creating his narrative about rock music, not anyone else's. It starts in the '30's, and the episode that just dropped was for Song 187, "Space Oddity" by David Bowie. At this pace, am I certain he's going to make it to 500? Nope! But I don't care. Music is the most important thing to me after my wife, my cats and my friends…and it's nipping at their heels. The opportunity to learn more, to be exposed to things I've never heard of, to learn of some of the completely bizarre connections connections that are out there about a subject I love so much…like what do Al Kooper and Barry White have in common? They both wrote songs for The Banana Splits. Yes, those Banana Splits. And those songs were sung by the same guy who sang "Zomby Woof" for Frank Zappa. And Richard Donner directed most of the first season of the show. Highly recommended. Join the Patreon to support it and get the bonus episodes; it's worth it.

You would have thought that Kill James Bond!, having achieved their objective at the end of the last Bond film, might have sunk into senescence or ended entirely. Instead they kept going, branching out into other series and generally taking the piss out of innumerable movies. Where the vibe in "500 Songs" is respectful, but keeping the receipts—there are trigger warnings up front, people are addressed as they have chosen to be addressed, and celebrities misdeeds are not glossed over—KJB is gleefully, in-your-face WOKE! No asshole will go unremarked on, or escape a good point-and-laugh, no sex-pest will go unmocked. But they also endeavor to meet movies where they are—I was shocked at how actually complementary their recent (paywalled, bonus) episode on Mannequin was, but will also do obscure French cinema from the 50's and 60's. It's one of the few podcasts where I will genuinely find myself laughing—often as they riff on a silly turn of phrase ("Sexual Renfield" most recently), sometimes as they fan-cast a film in the one-human-among-Muppets mold. Patreon recommended.

The others

Trashfuture is a moderately comic podcast about the state of the world. It shares one host with KJB which is how I became aware of it. I do laugh from time to time, but it rarely makes me happier. They also have a Patreon. Though at this point I worry that they're going to have to go all Sally Rooney.

Behind the Bastards is from Robert Evans, and is pretty much what it says on the tin, except you might be surprised at who some of the bastards are. They do an interesting mix of present-day and historical bastards—so, say, week before last was about the rise of rage-bait streamers, while a couple of weeks before that was about Heinrich Schliemann, the idiot amateur archaeologist who both found, and destroyed, Troy. They've done a fair number of Nazis and other stripes of war criminals. They do occasionally get in some good laughs, and I learn a lot, but there's definitely a whistling past the graveyard element to it.

Better Offline is the podcast of Ed Zitron, who is my favorite critic of the industry I left behind when I retired. It doesn't make me terribly happy, but somehow it's always fun when guys with British accents go off on profanity-laced rants.

Ones and Tooze is the only fully adult podcast I listen to; broadly economics-focused, but not dogmatic about it, and never boring.

There are links in the video itself if you want more detailed background, but the short-and-sweet of it is: FAA rules would ground pilots—commercial or otherwise—for an indeterminate time (possibly forever!) if there was evidence they suffered from mental health issues. Seeking treatment, it turns out, was considered evidence; as you can imagine, this gave pilots an incentive to not seek treatment.

Does that make you feel safer, or slightly queasy? Probably depends on how often you fly, and how likely you think it is you might have had someone in the cockpit suffering from untreated depression…maybe don't think about it too much.

Xyla Foxlin is, among other things, a creator on YouTube. In 2023, she posted a video discussing how a change in her birth control regimen led to depression. Someone duly reported her to the FAA, and she lost her pilot's license. I admit that I have mixed feelings about this—I believe it was a dick move probably motivated by envy and misogyny. Yet I also believe those rules exist for a reason, and no one should hold themselves above them.

It seems clear that the issue is with the rules themselves: how their black-and-white approach drove people to conceal what was going on with them for fear of losing something joyful in their lives, or perhaps their livelihood.

Xyla was reasonably fortunate—she regained her license in 2025. But she chose not to stop there: she allied herself with a recently started organization that was lobbying to change these rules so that pilots could seek routine mental health services without the expectation of immediately losing their license. She mobilized her followers repeatedly to raise money for the cause—largely to pay for lobbying, which I recognize a lot of people think of as as dirty word, but the video includes some discussion with their lobbyist that is kind of illuminating—as well as to contact their elected representatives to advocate for the bill when the time was right.

As you may have guessed from the tense in the first paragraph, they succeeded! H.R. 2591 passed the House, and according to the video, also passed the Senate, though that's not yet reflected in the link.

What's the lesson, as we stare down these very consequential mid-term elections?

It's your fucking government. If you give a shit—if you're willing to put in the effort and ally yourself with people who share your goals—your voice can make a difference. I'm not in love with the V for Vendetta, "People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people." construction, but I absolutely believe that people should be able to demand that their government listen to them and do what they need done—because the government is, ultimately, us. We, collectively, are sovereign and delegate that power to "the government", but the power remains ours.

Silicon Valley billionaires—and, for that matter, all the other billionaires, and multi-millionaires and other wannabe oligarchs—are under no obligation to give a rat's ass what you think, or want, or need. Remember that when you're thinking about who to vote for? Is that ultra-rich guy going to listen to you once he's in office? Is the guy supported by all the ultra-rich guys going to listen to you once he's in office? Odds are, no. Choose wisely.

Chocolate—Hershey’s, at least—is getting worse. Not that the quality of Hershey’s products really matters to me, as I don’t generally eat a lot of chocolate, and when I do it’s not Hershey’s.

What does matter to me is that due to climate change, cacao is becoming harder to grow and thus more expensive. If they got rid of their child-labor/slavery problems, those prices would go up even more. It’s easy to see how that would lead a large company courting the widest possible customer base to gradually substitute in less satisfactory but cheaper ingredients to hold the line on price—necessary since that wide customer base is the middle class that’s been relentlessly ratfucked since Reagan.

While I might not care about chocolate so much, I care a lot about coffee, which is in a similar position with respect to climate change. I would hate to be throwing away my espresso machine in 20 years because I simply can’t afford real coffee.

But the thing that really freaks me out is the company that is trying to create cocoa substitutes because the industry suspects that actual cocoa may become so scarce that the real thing will, presumably, only be available to the wealthy. If one were to assume that these businesses represent dispassionate, amoral actors—though not necessarily smart ones—what they’re telling us is that they think it’s inevitable that we’re fucked.

Ah, Harvard.

Sunset over Boston

James S. A. Corey's The Expanse is perhaps my favorite space opera series. I don't think they quite stuck the landing, but it was hard to put down right up until the very end.

I read The Mercy of Gods, the first book in their new trilogy, when it came out in August of 2024, so when the second book, The Captive's War came out last week, I re-read that and continued on with the new one.

They're compulsively readable, and much like The Expanse, while there's a lot of plot going on, the characters are compelling. There's one death in the second book that was sad and shocking, despite the fact that they start the chapter where it happens with "The last day of so-and-so's life started with…" I spent the whole chapter knowing that it was going to happen, waiting for it to happen, and yet I was still startled when it actually happened. And they did a superlative job of setting up the reason for that death without (to me, at least) making it obvious that was what they were settng up.

I also find them interesting as books that are, at their core, really about politics—about how different people accommodate (or demand accommodation from) the world and others around them, who has patience in trying to achieve their ends versus who demands immediate change, and how you can best live in circumstances that are beyond your determination.

The capsule synopsis is: patient with terminal cancer is given an opportunity to take on a quest in the world of a fantasy series she enjoyed (but only half-remembers, because chemo brain); if she succeeds, she will be cured. Starts out treating everyone like NPCs and assuming she can fulfill the quest easily because she (sort of) knows what's going to happen, until a) she finds out that she's not the first that offer's been made to, and b) she starts skewing the plot from what she knew, removing her own advantage.

I enjoyed this just enough that I'm willing to take a chance on its sequel, which, it turns out, comes out in three weeks time. But I don't know that I'd really recommend it. There are some things about the presentation that are confusing, and there are some things about the protagonist that are very annoying. I think at this opint it's more about my need to know where the plot goes, because I really don't see how this plan is gonna land in one piece.

I fell out of the habit of reading over the last few years; chalk it up to a creeping inability to focus, what with the world being on fire and having lots of distractions that demanded less of me, but were also, in the end, less rewarding. Consequently, I started 2026 off with an intention to read more.

Still, I took something of a training wheels approach: the last book in Charles Stross' Laundry Files came out, so I started at the beginning and read them all (except for A Conventional Boy, which came out last year, and was a little bit out of main continuity, so I skipped it). I mean, this isn't even the first post I've written about reading a bunch of them, though the last was more than ten years ago. Like I said: training wheels.

I'm not inclined to go into too much detail about the experience. I will say that I think this is the first time around that the original primary character, Bob Howard really got on my nerves. In the early books, he's a bit of an asshole (which is presumably intentional: his alleged full name is "Bob Oliver Francis Howard", or "BOFH", look it up if you don't know the acronym). In the later books…he's just a bit too much of a man-child for me: too feckless to be as powerful as he is.

Conversely, I found myself feeling a lot more sympathy for Mhari Murphy, who starts out as an annoying "bad girlfriend", but ends up being very important to the back half of the series, and is imbued with a lot more substance in the process—perhaps a bit of a try-hard, but the only character with an internal monologue that seems to belong to a reasonably complete human being.

Just to be clear: I think this is all largely intentional. Stross is on record saying that Bob is an unreliable narrator, so one might assume that part of that unreliability might involve describing the actual character of someone he had a problematic relationship with. And Bob does grow over the course of the series, as you would hope for someone who starts out in their late 20s and is the high side of 40 by the story's end (assuming he's actually alive, which is something even the character is uncertain about).

I enjoyed it all, but I don't seem myself picking them back up for a good while.

I finally fixed the images in the blog; I had never really dug into where Hugo was storing them, so all my references were broken. I finally did some searching around, gained some understanding of what's going on, and fixed things (for the moment, all images are in the static/ directory, however I may eventually move them to assets/ in order to be able to do things like automatically generate smaller versions).

As part of fixing things, I needed to edit all the image links in all of the articles in the blog that had one. Some emacs packages I use allow this to be done very efficiently, but I honestly hadn't taken the time to learn them well enough to take advantage of them.

This time, though, rather than just doing things manually, I decided to use this as a jumping-off point for becoming more familiar—specifically, in this case, with consult and embark, both packages from Daniel Mendler.

Now I do actually use consult often, but only as a drop-in for certain bits of default functionality:

;; Better completing-read implementation
(use-package consult
  :after
  (project)
  :bind
  (([remap goto-line] . consult-goto-line)
   ([remap switch-to-buffer] . consult-buffer)
   ([remap yank-pop] . consult-yank-pop))
  :config
  (advice-add #'project-find-regexp :override #'consult-ripgrep))

The one I use the most by far is consult-ripgrep, which will search through files in the current project and allow me to browse through the results interactively. This made it easy enough to find the links I needed to change, but then I needed to change them.

Rather than having this functionality built into consult, embark is configured so that any time it is invoked (it's bound to C-.), it will present me with a list of possible actions to take on the structure(s) it can discern at the current position. In the consult list, this means it can, among other things, export the results to a *grep* buffer, where it will display the searched-for fragments. From there I can invoke wgrep to make those fragments editable, change them all, and save the changes.

It's a little funny that, as I find myself contemplating retirement (17 calendar days, 10 working days!), I'm actually really excited about the prospect of picking up and becoming conversant with even more bits of Emacs functionality. The last time I really set out to try and build my Emacs knowledge was, funny enough, in 2012, shortly before I started was has become my last full-time job.

I have, unfortunately, been lax about managing all my photos: not so much that I haven't been careful with them when I knew where they were—I do have an actual backup regimen—but that somewhere along the line I lost track of where a large tranche of them were, because I hadn't centralized how I was storing them.

As a consequence, I don't have any of the several dozen photos I took between 2001 (when I first bought a digital camera) and 2013, when I got my first replaceable-lens digital camera and reasonably ubiquitous cellphone. This actually makes me really sad sometimes—I had pictures of friends who are no longer around that I'll never get back.

Sigh.

Anyway, for a good long while, I was using Shotwell to manage things. It was…fine. Not heavily maintained, but I don't have exotic needs. I would periodically download everything from iCloud (since my iPhone is what I take the majority of pictures with) and dump it in there. It was awkward, but basically worked.

Then for the last year or so, I've been lazy and just relied on iCloud Photos—again, the iPhone is my primary camera, so that was easy, and if I took pictures with the Sony, it was usually because of a trip, so I wasn't too likely to forget to upload things. But I hadn't done that since our trip to Iceland last September.

Of course, iCloud Photos doesn't handle a lot of stuff—like RAW images—so I still had the spectre of having to maintain copies of some things locally hovering over my next trip.

And then a few months ago I heard about Immich, and was intrigued, but didn't act on it. And then I saw a video from Lawrence Systems about it:

And that convinced me to try it, and so far it's been absolutely worth it. I've got everything moved into it from iCloud Photos, as well as all the RAW images that I kept copies of. It even made it reasonable to take the "dump everything in, sort it out later" approach—it has good support for de-duplicating images, and although it was tedious, I was able to get rid of every lower-quality JPEG in favor of the RAW versions of things, as well as lower-res copies of stuff that I ended up with. Images from the mobile devices are automatically uploaded whenever I'm on the home WiFi, so I can feel secure about that.

It's got a good track record of bug fixes and new features, but at some level one has to understand that that is proportional to either how new the project is (when it's running just on sheer enthusiasm), or how well compensated the author or authors are for their time. As a consequence, I plan to "purchase" it before the end of the year—it's Free Software, but I'd be a fool to not help provide material support.

I don't know what n is this year, but it's embarassingly low. I intend to do better.

Anyway, I read King Sorrow by Joe Hill. I enjoyed it—much like his father, Joe tends towards producing books that I find compulsively readable, even if both tend to do it in doorstop increments. The premise was interesting, the characters were likeable, and since he's part of the same early 70s clade as I, the feel of the time where the story starts—1989—felt familiar.

That said, I was a little surprised to see it on the lists of notable books of 2025 for both Vulture and the New York Times because so much of it felt like he was almost plagarizing himself.

The things that I noticed most were those that matched the first thing of his I read—and that I have re-read several times—Locke & Key.

At a high level, the entire plot of "young friend group becomes wrapped up in ancient evil" is the same. Gwen reads a lot like Kinsey (or maybe Vic from NOS4A2). Donna's characterization bears more than a little resemblance to Jordan Gates, especially at the end of the book. There's other stuff, but it's late and my intention isn't to be exhaustive, which would involve spoilers—just to note that it feels like familiar territory.

Familiar territory isn't intrinsically bad—I mean, I read and loved 40+ Discworld novels, and those all have that feel of being in familiar territory because it's a series—that's a feature, not a bug. And you could make an argument that a lot of these are just elements you're likely to find in stories in a particular horror-adjacent genre.

But still, Joe's only got 6 works on this scale—5 novels and Locke & Key—and the others feel more diverse in their elements. I just hope that the next one treads some new ground.

Last night we watched Questo's new documentary, Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) on Hulu. It is undeniably worth watching if you have access to it.

I was actually acquainted with much of the early biographical information from A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs's two-parter on Everyday People. And I was at least vaguely aware of his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame appearance—I remember reading an article at some point in the early-to-mid '90s (when I still subscribed to Rolling Stone) that was describing him having to wear a back brace and other mildly harrowing things.

But to see his whole arc, from childhood through today, laid out in one place is pretty wrenching—especially combined with Questlove's conversations with a number of other well-known black musicians of many ages about what it even means and what it implies.

It's also sad to see some of it documented on video. Several chunks are taken from an interview from what I would guess was the early 80s—though I honestly don't know; he was taking so many drugs (at least according to George Clinton) and in so much legal trouble at the time, it's hard to square with him doing what seemed like a pretty vulnerable interview. Anyway, there's several points in the interview that really seemed to bring him some pain—a question would be asked and you can just see him freeze for a second as if he's tamping down the truth to try and come up with something "acceptable" to say.

It got me thinking about a recent topic of interest: self-actualization. This was largely provoked by Philosophy Tube's "Was Nietzsche Woke?" video:

One of Abby's comments is that Nietzsche's "Will to Power" could also be thought of as the "Will to Agency"—the wherewithal to assert your ability to do what you really want.

Perhaps it's just because it's the lens through which I've been viewing a lot of things lately, but I found myself wondering if the burden so many of us carry is that we know what we truly need to do, but despite everything, we don't do it out of fear of what others will think—and how freeing it would be to walk away from those expectations.

Sly Stone, like so many of us, seems to have failed to dispense with those expectations, and it led him down a road to try and drown out his discomfort.

So, yeah, Warren Ellis (not that one) seems credibly accused of being a creep, though far less of a monster than Neil Gaiman has been accused of being.

And I might have gone quite some time longer before I re-read anything of his…but John Cassaday, the artist on Planetary passed away last September, so when I was scrolling through things looking for something to re-read (because the world is on fire and it's hard to concentrate on new stuff), I decided to give it a spin.

It's still fun, and amongst the mayhem, there's an impression of a fierce sense of caring that is hard to square with someone who would apparently treat so many people so poorly.

And it's so, so beautiful. I know John got a lot of grief in the last year or two of his life for some covers he did that weren't to the impossible standard he set in Planetary. It's shocking how good it is.

Still, I also realized that in some ways I've outgrown Ellis' work. It has come to feel a little too arch, a little too pleased with its own cleverness. A little too edgelord.

These days I find myself gravitating—at least in the super-hero genre—more towards Tom King and Jonathan Hickman (with sides of Keiron Gillen, G. Willow Wilson and Kelly Thompson). I find they are able to tread an interesting path that acknowledges many things that came before (like the "grittiness" of the back half of the 80's, or the irony-poisoned 00's) without being overwhelmed by it.

There's still a sincerity to the work that I appreciate as an antidote to the clusterfuck of the last few (and probably next few) years.

So when I'm having a down day, I often find myself thinking about the last page of Hickman's Fantastic Four run, in FF (not Fantastic Four) ​#23. It actually starts about 8 pages earlier when the time-travelling Franklin Storm is putting his child self to bed before he leaves:

"Franklin. There's one last thing I want you to remember about today before I go. This door…is more than it appears to be."

His younger self sleepily acknowledges and then drifts off, and the older version goes off to make other goodbyes. But when you get to the last two pages, which are largely wordless pictures of young Franklin and his friend Artie playing, and the captions read:

This door…is more important than it appears to be.

It separates who you are from who you can be.

You do not have to walk through it…you can run.

I find it helpful to remember that even as a grown-ass adult staring down double-nickels, there are still opportunities to change and grow—and you should embrace them wholeheartedly.

I've decided to configure things so that the WP site can be my Fediverse presence, at least for the moment.

I can certainly subscribe to other users, this is to see if I can spit things out into the void.

Under just the tiniest bit of duress, I've moved this blog to a new host. OK, maybe not duress, but it was something I might otherwise not have done because, as you might notice (or probably not because I don't know that anyone at all reads it), posting has been pretty light for years a while.

However, while I was taking stock of all the things that are broken (to a first approximation, every post before ~ 2013 is going to be poorly formatted, but otherwise things seem OK), I stumbled across a post that referenced the fact that this blog was started on February 10, 2003.

Since today is February 10, 2025 (already an altogether shittier year than 2003) it seemed worth it to take note.

Who knows, in this new era of digital serfdom, maybe I'll start posting here regularly, just to stick it to our wannabe-overlords.

Ignoring a post made to verify that some unintentional breakage was fixed, this blog has been silent for more than 18 months. It wasn't overly active even before that, though.

I've decided that, one way or another, 2019 is going to be it—either I will manage at least one post a week, or else I'm just going to walk away.

I'm not sure which outcome I'm hoping for.

I might have something more to say, but for the moment, I'm just running a test.

And a little more Scalzi—just a novelette this time.

What if being murdered violently delivered you back into your bed in the state you were a short time before you died?

At the very least, it opens up some interesting new career options.

It's a fun, if light, read in a world that seems like it has more depth than just a novellette would require. I wonder if this world might make another appearance?

Even after my mild disappointment with the tone of his last book, The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island, which struck me as often sharp or even mean-spirited, I still have an affection for Bill Bryson. What better way to guarantee a more pleasant encounter, then to go back to the beginning (almost) to The Mother Tongue.

So I'll say at the outset that I have no idea how much of the content of this book is still considered…correct. I mean, like all of Bryson's books (that I've read, at least), it's a mostly coherent-ish narrative drawing a line through a metric ton of facts, and all I can really speak with authority about is the value of the narrative part.

And the narrative is pretty interesting—English as a language is clearly a bit of a mutt, and seems poised to go and have even more puppies with more partners in the future; there's no end in sight.

Even more interesting, I think (and something that almost certainly wasn't clear when Bryson first wrote the book in 1990), is that there's a reasonable chance that it will continue to be more or less a single language, because the Intertubes provide such unprecedented opportunity for groups with nothing in common geographically to nonetheless interact—in effect, to hold a dialog about what the language will become.

At this point my feelings about John Scalzi should be clear: when I want a book that will be smart, entertaining, absurdly readable and maybe, occasionally, a little profound, I could do a lot worse.

The Collapsing Empire is in this regard no different from any other. It's a strong start for a new series (though I do hope for another Colonial Union novel one day), and if the the characters are recognizably Scalzi-esque, they're not retreads. And one of them is hilariously profane.

The only funny thing about it is this: having read it in ebook form, I have no real sense of how long it is. When he mentioned on his blog that it was (IIRC) his second-longest book, I was pretty startled, because I think I read it in about four hours, with breaks.

Terrifyingly readable, in other words.

It was inevitable that I would read this two-part biography of Robert Heinlein.

Though my feelings about him are more complicated than when I was a teenager, to pretend that my exposure to Heinlein in those years didn't have a profound effect on me would be dishonest in the extreme.

Reading the two fairly doorstop-like volumes, it's hard not to see this as hagiography; one is left with the impression that Heinlein never seems to have done anything wrong:

Perhaps he was naive, but never foolish (as, say, when he plunged into a first marriage that seems like it must have been doomed from the start). Perhaps he was too accepting, but never unsupportive (as, say, he watched his second wife slide into alcoholism). Perhaps he was too clever for most readers, but never flat-out wrong (as with Farnham's Freehold).

Maybe this would be easier to take if the book didn't get relatively easily checked facts wrong—for instance, at one point Barry Goldwater is described as having supported the New Deal:

Certainly Goldwater's voting record helped Heinlein to support him. It showed he had his heart in the right place—he had voted for the New Deal when it counted […]

It is to laugh.

That this is asserted in a chapter that also asserts that the Democratic Party had been infiltrated by "Leftists" (a thinly-veiled euphemism for "Communists"), which was pushing Heinlein—who had worked with Upton Sinclair's campaign for Governor of California on an almost-socialist platform some thirty years earlier(!)—toward the "center", represented by Goldwater, doesn't pass the smell test. I swear, if I never hear another old white man trotting out that "I didn't abandon the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party abandoned me," line, it will be too soon.

At least he did the smart thing and passed on Dianetics.

What it comes down to, the thing that ultimately drove me away from his work, is the lack of humility. He is quite open that his work is meant to be at didactic in fuction. OK, that's fine, but, if you're going to purport to teach, you better have the right fucking answers, and this is a guy who was wrong again and again, constantly predicting the downfall of civilization, whether to Communism, or nuclear holocaust, or simply the encroachment of other less cultures in a less Western liberal mode.

It's all a bit too much for a book with the subtitle "In Dialog with His Century", because it comes off as much more of a monologue.

That said: I would prefer a world that had a more liberal bent—government that interceded when it could be effective, and stayed the fuck out of people's business when it couldn't. I suspect he and I would have had rather different ideas about when and how it could be effective, though.

So this wasn't actually my 11th book of the year, it was the 9th. It was a nice light, airy palate cleanser that I promptly forgot; I think that's mostly the intent though. Perhaps not the entirely forgetting part, but certainly the light, airy part.

I was born in the South, and I have lived most of my life in the South, but I moved around as a kid, and lived other places besides, so I think it's fair to say that I'm not really "of the South".

I suspect one of the better arguments bolstering this assertion is that I never listened to the Allman Brothers Band until I was in college. And while they're still not a band I listen to on a daily or even weekly basis, I own their core albums, and know most of the material pretty well…even if I first knew "Whipping Post" as a Frank Zappa performance.

Anyway, I feel kind of fortunate that all the "oral histories" I've read over the years have generally been pretty good—and this is no different; it's well edited, so that there's a sense of narrative, rather than things just rambling all over the landscape, it attempts, when possible, to get all sides of the story.

I think what I take away from this on is that the band may never have really recovered from Duane's death. I mean, yes, they produced Brothers and Sisters, but against the backdrop of the rest of their career, that seems like a heart continuing to beat for a while after brain death.

Without someone to lead them who afforded everyone a chance to also be themselves, they never quite found the true vision of what they wanted again. They let themselves become distracted, and even when they brought in capable new people…it was never quite the same.

All that said, obviously I wasn't ever in a position to see them with Duane; in fact I never saw them at all. In retrospect, though, I suspect I would have enjoyed seeing one of the shows they put on this century; it seemed like—even though it apparently required throwing one of the original members out of the band—that they found their way back to some of the sympatico that marked their early work.

I am well aware that there are plenty of people who think Gary Taubes is bad at what he does—that his writing is too biased (such that it displays the same failings of fitting evidence to theory that he calls out in others), or that he is out-and-out untruthful, whatever.

On the other hand, I've now read all of his books regarding diet, and I find his writing to be open and honest about the possibility that he has incomplete or incorrect information, and that his hypothesis does seem to represent far simpler and more believable explanation for—to borrow one of his book titles—"why we get fat".

In the end, the arguments against his hypotheses remind me of epicycles, the ever more elaborate explanations for observable movement of the stars and planets in a geocentric model. They had to become more and more elaborate and complex because they were working from a flawed premise that was dictated and enforced by the power structures of the day (the Catholic Church in this case), that the solar system is geocentric, not heliocentric.

When I then consider the simple observation that over the course of my lifetime—which roughly corresponds to the rise of the low-fat approach to diet—my peers and my country have become enormously fat, and that I can easily observe in my own body the effects of consuming carbohydrates and especially sugar…well, "Eppur si muove."

All of that material is in his prior books, too; what distinguishes The Case Against Sugar is that it also goes into greater detail about the actions of the sugar industry—which shared both tactics and even actors with the tobacco industry. This new material is interesting…but at this moment in history, demonstrating the malfeasance of corporations and people in their employ is shooting fish in a barrel. It's also a little dispiriting.

So if you haven't read anything of his, I would stick with Why We Get Fat, which is short and to the point—an uplifting book trying to show a path forward. This is more like horror, showing the unfortunate things taking place around us.

When I read about people whose work I admire, I am almost always reminded of the Buddhist admonishment, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him"; which in this instance I think of as reminding us that the person is not the teaching or the product, and it lives independently of them.

To say that I admire Paul Simon is an understatement.

I've seen him perform three times: during the 1991 Born at the Right Time tour, in Birmingham, Alabama; in 2011, during the tour behind So Beautiful, So What; and then in 2014 during the On Stage Together tour with Sting. I haven't seen anyone more than that, and although there's a few other acts I've seen that many times—Concrete Blonde, King Crimson, Adrian Belew are the only ones I can think of right now—none of them hold quite the same place in my heart.

I have memories associated with his music—both as part of Simon and Garfunkle and as a solo act—that are so strong that when I listen to some tracks, it's like being transported back in time. One of the first two albums I ever owned was his Greatest Hits, etc., and I still have it, though it probably hasn't been played in 25 years. For that matter, I realized on my birthday last year marked exactly 30 since my parents had bought me Graceland.

So of course when I saw there was a biography of Paul Simon, especially one published just last year, I was going to read it; I didn't consider it terribly dangerous, given that I already knew that he was an imperfect person—the truth is, his failures as an individual are well-documented; his tempestuous relationship with Art Garfunkle, his long but ultimately broken relationship with Carrie Fisher, questions of credit with Los Lobos and others.

If you look beyond, or perhaps just around, those imperfections, his life is fascinating; being a teenager at the beginning of rock and roll, finding a temporary niche in the folk movement, which parlayed into pop stardom, which led to an unexpected prominence in world music, which led to spectacular failure on Broadway.

The number of people he has worked with—whether their partnership panned out or not—the number of people he was associated with early in their careers, the number of people he got to know, the sheer breadth of his place in music, it's all fairly breathtaking (I will note for at least one person's benefit that there is a citation for The Real Frank Zappa Book, regarding one encounter between Frank Zapp and Simon & Garfunkle).

Anyway, Carlin strikes me as even-handed: while he's unstinting in recording the places Simon seems all too willing to act without regard for his partners and collaborators—a pattern that starts at the very beginning and continues on to pretty much the present day—he leaves you wondering if the sort of drive it takes to excel in this field isn't all too likely to lead one toward this sort of behavior; not excusing it, but explaining it.

Maybe you don't actually need to kill the Buddha—maybe you just need to cross over to the other side of the road, and let him keep his distance.

If you got to #5 of this series unsure if you want to continue, I'm not going to convince you.

The vast majority of this book is a great example of the Space Opera genre in action—I literally found myself unable to put it down even though I really, really needed to get to sleep.

But it doesn't quite stick the landing, IMHO: even though the authors had carefully set up the scenario that allows our heros to triumph in the prior book, it ultimately feels a little too Deus Ex.

And even if it didn't, while many of the plot threads that came into play in the prior book get wrapped up, the ones that are left too obviously end up feeling like they're leading up to The Next Book; it looms just a little too large.

But man, until that last 30 pages or so, it's a nailbiter, and well worth your time. The question in my mind at this point is whether they can sustain the energy for #7.

Oh, and Clarissa becomes an official part of the crew!

Yeah, it's all about the characters.

Which is to say: my ambivalence about various of the viewpoint characters in the last two books made them both feel like something of a slog. On the other hand, the use of Amos, Alex and Naomi as viewpoint characters helped make this book zip by—and it's not just that I care about them, but that they are voices that I'm already accustomed to.

As for the what happens…I'm interested to see where it's going in the long haul, beyond this book and the next. It's interesting to realize that the seeds of many of the plotlines that drive this book were baked into the first couple of novels—clearly Abraham and Franck have had a larger plot planned out.

For instance, it seems clear the Martian commander who has an important, but off-camera role in this story is the same one who was involved in attempting to create the protomolecule soldiers in Caliban's War.

Similarly, the past Naomi has always hinted at comes to a head, and some interesting plot points spin out of that…but at the same time, some of it doesn't quite ring true to me. I understand the way that our old patterns resurface when we find ourselves back in those contexts, but Naomi seems weirdly naive for much of the beginning of the book, which just feels wrong since she's a badass basically every other moment.

Undoubtedly the parts of the book that I most enjoyed were Alex and Amos' elements. Alex's is fun for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it brings back Bobby Draper, and they have a bit of a caper to solve.

Amos, on the other hand, takes a surprising detour, and ends up picking up Clarissa Mao…and she becomes an incredibly interesting character, because she seems to have truly embraced being a better person, being a more aware person, and ultimately making thoughtful choices. And the authors avoid it being pure Mary Sue…by making Holden consistently and forthrightly unhappy about her presence.

Anyway, much more fun than the last couple of novels, and a good setup for the next entry.

Cibola Burn is my least favorite book in The Expanse.

I think, in the end, it comes down to the primary antagonist, Murtry—he's not just an antagonist, he's a villain; too obviously a psychopath, too mustache-twirlingly pleased with behaving in an almost inhuman manner.

Even Captain Ashford in Abaddon's Gate is clearly…well, at this moment in time, I have to say, he's Trumpian—obviously mediocre but placed in high position for reasons other than competence, and thus given to defensive, authoritarian, megalomaniacal behavior, because he mistakes being a strongman for being strong. It's ugly, but it's all too understandable. Also, he's just not in the story that much, so you don't have an opportunity to get tired of him.

Murtry, on the other hand, quickly outstays his welcome.

But his malign presence did make me start to think a bit; if you look at who the villians are—as opposed to merely antagonists—they're generally corporations and their representatives: Protogen, Mao-Kwikowski, and Royal Charter Energy. Is that simply because, in our post-2008 crash world, the amoral venality of corporations is the evil most visible to us?

And what does that say about our current President?

Anyway, while I found the first half of the book fairly interminable, it does pick up the pace somewhat in the last half. We do see the last of Miller, which is perhaps a little sad, but also, I think, a necessary precondition to moving on to stories set in a somewhat different arena.

One more to re-read and then on to new material.

So here's the thing: when you have books that, in order to really justify being re-read, are dependent on the characters being compelling enough that they will minimize visibility for the plot happening, you damn well better make each and every one of those characters awesome.

Now The Expanse has compelling characters—I could read about Holden and his crew for extended periods without any complaint. And Bobbie Draper and Chrisjen Avasarala are a similar delight to read. Clarissa Mao starts to get interesting, but mostly right at the end of the novel. Pastor Anna and Carlos Baca…just aren't.

What that means is that something like half our narration is focused on people who just don't hold your attention the same way the second time around, which means you end up staring at the plot happening, and that makes things a lot less interesting.

Sure, Bull is smart enough to understand the politics that put him where he is, and how to at least attempt to leverage whatever he can to get a good outcome, and owes Fred Johnson…but that isn't enough.

And Pastor Anna is obviously a good person, and asks us to think about WTF does the idea of meeting actual aliens would mean for humanity, and provides wonderful contrast to Amos, our endearing, light-hearted psychopath. I mean, it makes for some wonderful copy…

"Killing people won't make him feel better," Anna said, regretting the words the second they left her mouth. These people were going to be risking their lives to protect her. They didn't need her moralizing at them.

"Actually," Holden said with a half smile, "I think it might be for him, but Amos is a special case. You'd be right about most anyone else."

…

"God damn, Red," Amos said, putting his hand on hers. "You must be hell on wheels as a preacher. You're making me feel the best and worst I've felt in a while at the same time."

…

Good-hearted unrepentant killers were not something she'd had to fit into her worldview before this, and she wasn't sure how it would work. But now she'd have to try.

…but it ain't enough.

All of which feels a little bit like nit-picking, insofar as it's a still a fun read, but it just doesn't feel like it's going to hold up like the first two novels—I found myself putting it down far more than the first two books because I could too easily find something more interesting to do.

That said, plot-wise, it is a big shift for the universe of The Expanse, and opens up a whole lot of new possibilities to be explored (at least through book #9).

I've read critiques of Leviathan Awakes that felt the Noir backdrop for Miller didn't work, and that they were happy he was gone by the end of the first book.

Although I certainly found the crew of the Rocinante more fun, I still kind of liked Miller; still if we had to lose him, could we do better than gaining Chrisjen Avasarala and Bobbie Draper? Easy answer: No. Especially Avasarala:

"They're all fucking men," she said. "Excuse me?" Soren said. "The generals. They're all fucking men." "I thought Souther was the only—" "I don't mean that they all fuck men. I mean they're all men, the fuckers. …

Whatever my feelings about the plot and in some cases character changes they made in the TV show, the only thing that really hurts is that Avasarala simply can't be so casually foul-mouthed on basic cable.

Or just some of the text that comes along with her:

She'd stopped looking tired a while ago and had moved on to whatever tired turns into when it becomes a lifestyle.

Still, Amos does ultimately win the quotability competition:

"When it comes to scrapes, I'm what you might call a talented amateur. But I've gotten a good look at that woman in and out of that fancy mechanical shell she wears. She's a pro. We're not playing the same sport."

Or:

He turned toward the galley, but the conversation wasn't finished. "If I had. If I had done those things, that would have been okay with you?" "Oh, fuck no. I'd have broken your neck and thrown you out the airlock," Amos said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Ah," Prax said, a gentle relief loosening in his chest. "Thank you." "Anytime."

At least as far as my enjoyment goes, it's important that these two compelling characters get added for this second book, because on re-reading, it feels like the gears of the plot are clanking just a little bit in the background—I feel like there's some manufactured conflict that doesn't play out as smoothly as it should have.

Still nothing more than typical sophomore slump, and not anything like, say, the second book in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey & Maturin series, where things totally go off the rails before he figures out how to manage the whole notion of a sequel.

I also book-ended this with the short story The Butcher of Anderson Station, which gives some background on Fred Johnson and how he got his sobriquet, as well as the novella Gods of Risk, which is what Bobbie Draper does on her summer vacation. I think the interstitial story strategy is a pretty brilliant one—it lets the author address things that add some richness to the main line of stories without having to have an awkward flashback or play stop-the-world for an awkward infodump.

By any measure, I was late to the party with The Expanse. I hadn't heard of the author (either pseudonymously or individually), the books, or the SyFy Channel adaption until it was well underway—and I assumed, since SyFy hadn't done anything of interest to me since before they changed their name, that it was probably going to be crap.

Still, I saw a review at Tor.com that was quite complimentary, so I set the TiVo to pick up everything and waited for the earlier episodes to come back around, and then started watching.

Something like four episodes in, I bought all (at that time) five books, and devoured them all in short order. But I had utterly lapsed in tracking my reading by that point, so I never mentioned them here.

With the knowledge that the second season of the TV program is coming up, and the advent of a sixth novel being published last December—and knowing cramming down five novels in a couple of weeks doesn't necessarily lead to the greatest retention of the material, so I didn't want to start it and be confused—I decided to re-read them. And just for good measure, I decided to re-watch the first season of the show.

Whew, that's a lot of preface.

I think the most interesting thing for me is really the contrast between my experience of this, and Last Year.

This is so unambiguously what I was thinking of when I talked about a plot-driven book.

Don't get me wrong, there are some extremely likable characters, of whose interactions I am delighted to partake, whether it's Miller in all his dourness, or Holden in his occasionally moronic idealism, or Amos in his…Amos-ness.

But in the end, the focus is ultimately on "what happens"—you can see the strings pulling the characters along. It's not even enough that they simple witness the action, they have to play their part and read their lines so that Stuff Can Go Down. When the book ends, it's hard to imagine these characters continuing narrative.

All of which sounds terribly pejorative, which isn't really my intent—I'm not here to run these books down at all: I really enjoyed them the first time around, and I think I enjoyed them even more this time. But it's a very different experience.

And the text is done with plenty of skill and attention. It is far more quotable than Last Year. To pick out a few things that I highlighted during this read:

The circle of life on Ceres was so small you could see the curve.

All the energy he'd put into holding things together—Ceres, his marriage, his career, himself—was coming free.

He changed to a competition show with incomprehensible rules and psychotically giddy contestants.

The second most interesting thing for me is the difference between the book at the TV show.

I hadn't quite paid enough attention to the finer details of things the first time around, I guess, or maybe it was just lack of familiarity such that I didn't notice it, but the way things play out in the book at the TV show are very different.

Some of it, I'm sure, was to keep production costs down—the escape from Eros, for instance, has a lot less going on in the TV show, and some of it is probably about things that would be a lot harder to present without requiring more telling and less showing—I'm thinking of the mechanism that brings Miller and the crew of the Rocinante to meet for the first time.

There were a number of things that were setup for events that happen in later books (I'm thinking of Naomi and Fred's interactions here), and introducing Chrisjen Avasarala earlier was something of a no-brainer given how great she is in the books, and how important she becomes.

But the way they present Amos, or even, to a lesser extent, Chrisjen, ends up being less nuanced, and even hints and distorting the characters in a way that starts to remind me of what Peter Jackson did to Faramir the The Lord of the Rings—and that is the single thing about those movies that still sticks in my craw nearly a decade and a half later.

What I would really love to see, I think, would be an analysis by Todd Alcott, (or someone like him) who was both very familiar with the source material, and with what things work and don't work in the visual medium, to perhaps try and understand why some of the changes were made.

I didn't expect to make a first post in this series this quickly—but I started this book around 6pm yesterday, and ended up finishing just after 11pm. A little late for me, but I wasn't inclined to stop.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised—I've found most of Robert Charles Wilson's books compulsively readable, and one of their virtues is that they don't carry a lot of fat; although reading ebooks can obscure relative length, he simply doesn't do doorstops.

It's one of the several ways they're not your average Science-Fiction novels.

If you read the synopses you could be forgiven for thinking they were plot-driven; certainly they all start with some relatively high-concept plot: Spin - the Earth has been enclosed in a bubble that retards time. The Chronoliths - mysterious monuments start appearing from the future. The Affinities - humans can be classified into 22 distinct groups.

But they're not plot-driven, or at least they bury the mechanics of their plot deep within the organic choices of their characters. Specific individuals, who get caught up in events; often through relationships, sometimes because small actions of theirs pull them in, or perhaps because their action is an unintended precipitating incident.

In the case of Last Year, Jessie Cullum is in the right place at the right time—twice in fact—and his life is upended. Again.

Another distinctive feature of his stories is that their ends are…hard to describe. It's tempting to call them messy or ambgiuous, but that isn't quite right—it brings to mind authors who can't stick the landing, where the book ends because they just ran out of stuff, or got tired of typing.

It's a little more like they're open-ended, except that's not really it either—although Spin did end up with a sequel (though it was more a book in the same universe), that's the exception rather than the rule.

I guess the best way to describe it is that the characters rarely feel like they quit existing the moment you turn the last page—that they have more life ahead of them, and more stuff is going to happen to them; it may be epic or mundane, it doesn't matter. All that matters is that while this particular story may be done, while this particular segment of their life may be finished, it's neither an end nor a setup for more.

I'm a little bit behind. OK, a lot—I read this back at the end of September.

Anyway.

I don't actually remember when I first read A Fire Upon the Deep; probably 20 years ago or so. I've read it three or four times since—maybe more—but it's been a while since the last time.

It's a better than average adventure story. It features a lot more alien aliens than most similar material, it doesn't hinge on anyone being particularly stupid, and while there is, arguably, a deus ex machina, it's virtually laid out as such on the first page, so I'm not sure it counts.

Still, I find its nominal prequel, A Deepness in the Sky to be superior.

These days, though, it mostly makes me remember Usenet, because the idea that any sort of interstellar network would end up looking like Usenet makes a lot of sense—bandwidth would be expensive and relatively scarce (not unlike the state of networking when Usenet was started), so messages aren't going to be holograms and audio, but some sort of text-analogue.

As an aside, I had long forgotten that Usenet originally developed just up the road(s) as a way to link UNC Chapel Hill and Duke…until last year when I had the unexpected opportunity to meet Steve Bellovin at a conference my wife was attending in Berkeley, and his mention of his connection to UNC reminded me.

Anyway, I remember first reading Usenet using a spectacularly bad newsreader on an IBM mainframe in 1990 or so. It was an amazing revelation, really: while the web was non-existent, and the Internet was, generally, far far smaller then than it is now, Usenet was already sprawling. There were topics for everything. I suspect I hung out mostly in groups that were concerned with the Atari ST I had at the time, though I know at some point I downloaded the source to the last version of Conroy's microEmacs, because I hacked on it some while I was still in school.

It was, in fact, around this point I stopped doing so much with Borland products—and gradually the Emacs keystrokes supplanted their WordStar equivalents in my muscle memory. These days, I have absolutely no memory of what they were.

I was on Usenet fairly often for about the next ten years; even after the Atari ST died and bought my first IBM PC, I was still quite involved—first in the ReXX and OS/2 communities, and then, before long, in the Perl and Linux communities.

I remember seeing dozens of copies of the "Green Card" spam, which is generally considered to be the first commercial spam, in 1994.

And then in 1999, I moved, got DSL, and no longer had easy access to any sort of Usenet server—I had been using the one provided by my dial-up ISP in Miami, but Verizon had no such setup. Sure, there were public NNTP servers of certain limited sorts, but the fact was it was becoming a less and less interesting place to be. So I stopped.

I'm sad to say that I think Usenet dying was always in the cards—I don't see how it couldn't have succumbed to the tragedy of the commons. There's simply too many people for whom the value of the community cannot—especially when they're not part of it—outweigh some potential personal benefit.

The problem, though, is that the alternative seems to be the commercial walled-garden model, so that the owner can fund policing it, and I don't find that compelling—because to get any penetration, the service has to be "free", but as they say, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

While there have been several attempts to create federated systems that allow for personal, decentralized discussions and the like, none have really succeeded. And that's sad. There is so much amazing stuff in the world, but it can be surprisingly hard to find.

There's an old Tom Waits quote (that I can't seem to source) about the Chamberlin: “It's a beautiful instrument that dies a little every time you play it.”

When I was growing up, vinyl had a special place in the house—because, like a Chamberlin, every time you played an album, you deformed the record groove just a little bit; whether from too much down-force on your stylus, or the uneven force applied to the inside and outside of the groove when using a fixed tone-arm, or dust or fibers getting in the way, not to mention the possibility of scratching it taking it out of the sleeve, or even a strong enough jolt near the record player causing it to skip.

I was taught at perhaps six to use the Discwasher D4 to clean each album before each use. There was an even more obscure process—I forget the name of the product—that was supposed to be done before the first time you played an album that supposedly protected it in some way I don't understand at this point.

Anyway, all this ceremony around vinyl was almost a sideshow anyway, because the real principle was that you Didn't Play The Vinyl. It's like living off a trust fund, where you Don't Touch The Capital.

No, vinyl was expensive source material, that you played only once, to record it onto cassette tape, which had the virtues of being both more portable and relatively easily replaceable.

Actually, you played the album twice: the first time watching and adjusting the level meters on the cassette deck to make sure that the peak loudness on the album went right up to, but did not exceed, the clipping point for the cassette.

You never used Dolby B, because that just made it sound like crap, and you didn't use Dolby C because that was only on crazy high-end tape decks, and sounded like crap if your deck didn't have it.

And you sure as hell never bought pre-recorded cassettes, because first, they probably used Dolby B on it (see above), and second, cassette tapes are actually a stupidly delicate medium—even more delicate than vinyl!—so why would you want your primary copy of something on a medium that you know from the get-go is going to die before long?

In college, I always looked down on my friends who obviously lacked the self-respect to not buy pre-recorded cassettes. Sorry guys; I got better. Mostly.

Anyway, all this is to say that I had neurotically intimate knowledge of blank cassette tapes in the early- to mid-80s. I obsessed over the purported difference in frequency response of various formulations of ferrous particles on the tape, while still paying attention to the aesthetics of the shells. I had preferences based on whose insert card I found was better at letting me write down what was on the tape, for crying out loud!

(Am I better now? No, not really.)

So imagine my simultaneous joy and horror at seeing this catalogue of blank cassette tapes show up on Boing Boing. Of going back and seeing the still-familiar-labels-30-years-later of my favorite cassette types (BASF, mostly—we were living in Germany during most of this, after all—with a turn toward TDK at some point). Of seeing some of the early Sony tapes that my Dad would send back from South Korea when he was stationed there in 1974/1975, and that I would thoughtlessly repurpose for music five or six years later.

And, ultimately, of realizing how much better off I am now.

Although I still carry around some of the neuroses—I rarely buy tracks digitally, really only when they offer FLAC as a source format, or maybe some situation where I truly only want to own a particular single, preferring to buy the CD and rip and encode it myself—I must also say that I cannot imagine where my 1000+ albums would live if they were on vinyl, and it would take a lot of cassette tapes to hold the 16K tracks on my somewhat hot-rodded circa-2007 iPod.

That is the size of a cassette tape.

I have a hard time articulating my reaction to this novel.

Something about this book evoked the late-90's "Otherland" series by Tad Williams for me—I'm not entirely sure why, insofar as the narrative trope of having events in some virtual world paralleling and ramifying out into the outside world verges on hard to avoid these days, and that's about all the connection I can make between them.

On the one hand, I found myself drawn in by the plot and intrigued by the way society seemed to influence characters' outlooks and behavior in ways that felt very different from the norms to which I am accustomed. Interested enough that I intend to read the second book in the trilogy soon.

On the other hand, there is a particular quality to some of the characters—their desire to be subjugated, their almost nihilistic conviction that anything must be better than the slice of mankind they are familiar with—that fills me with this almost surreal revulsion.

I guess it's a testament to the delivery in the text, but something about the behavior of some of the characters simply set me so on edge that I felt as if I were to ever actually meet one of these people, I would be driven to physically assault them—to somehow try to beat humanity back into them.

It was weird and disturbing, and I still don't know where it came from. Even just thinking back on it is hard to process—I don't remember ever having such a visceral reaction to a book.

For about the last year, I've been trying to understand why I have taken the time to read all 20 books in the Jack Reacher series.

They're competently plotted. The execution is fine. The characters—even the title character—aren't usually all that deep, but Jack Reacher does have an interest in the trivial that appeals to me: it's present in the first book, where he gets off a bus because he dimly remembers that the town it's stopping in is where Blind Blake died, and it's present here, where he gets off the train because he wonders about the origin of the name of the town in which it's stopping.

Ultimately I suspect it's my need to have words on a screen to read like a shark needs water to swim through, combined with a certain appreciation for the "Jack blows into town, stumbles on bad stuff, justice is done" plotting. I continue to enjoy superhero comics, after all.

But at the same time, as I alluded to in my review of The Deep in February, I find this genre to be a disturbing reflection of our society.

Probably the scene in The Wire where Bunk and Omar agree that "A man got to have a code" is the best known instance of that idea—it's certainly the one that seemed to get referenced most when Sandor Clegane said the same thing in Game of Thrones—but one of John Wayne's characters said roughly the same thing. It's not a new thought.

What it is, though, is a reflection of a notion on masculinity—because you'll notice that everyone who says it is inevitably male—that asserts a right to act in ways that are explicitly, egregiously, counter to any sense of respect for the law.

Sure, in most of the fictional instances, there's always that sense put forth that the law is insufficient, or it is corrupt, or incompetent: that they only way to find true justice is through this extra-legal "code".

But that's a fucking frictionless slope.

Are we really going to pretend that these stories don't help convince people that they only way they'll get "justice" is to take it into their own hands? What if their idea of "justice" involves punishing people for rejecting them? Or simply punishing the world for their own sense of failure? Or seeking confrontation over some besmirching of their honor?

I've been in the back seat of a car when a friend of mine—incidentally, built a lot like Jack Reacher is described in the books (which is the very amusing opposite of Tom Cruise in the movie)—decided that someone in another car had been disrespectful to him, executed a quick turn and then floored it to catch up to him and…what?

I'm going to guess that involved the gun—that is still the only firearm I have ever held in my hands—that he had stashed under his front seat. Or perhaps it was just going to be a round of at least intimidation, or maybe actual force, to garner an apology.

Either way, redress for the imagined slight on his honor was something that his code demanded, and if there hadn't been three of us to talk him down from his rage-high, who knows what might have happened.

It is certainly true, guns don't kill people, people kill people—but we have created a society that tells itself stories constantly about how your only option is to fend for yourself, to take matters into your own hands, to "do what needs to be done"—and then we make it easy for things to go wrong by making guns easy to get.

• The Wee Free Men

• A Hat Full of Sky

• Wintersmith

• I Shall Wear Midnight

• The Shepherd's Crown

I'm writing this on a laptop named 'aching'. The routers in my house are 'weatherwax' and 'vetinari'. My local server is 'carrot', and my prior laptop was 'ogg'.

I have named cloud servers I manage after guitarists I admire, but my home machines are all Terry Pratchett characters.

I haven't written any "book reports" in two months because the prospect of writing this one was too depressing—until reading his last book, I could always pretend that Terry Pratchett wasn't gone, that the world wasn't a poorer place for his absence.

…

Some time mid-to-late 1990, I did something rare and amazing: I stopped by a professor's office. I don't actually remember what the precipitating event was—I'm not even 100% sure what the class was, but odds are very good that it was Shakespeare—but as I was sitting there, my professor, Matthew Winston, pulled a copy of Sandman #19—"A Midsummer Night's Dream"—from between some other books on his office's capacious shelves, I assume in order to illustrate a point about Shakespeare's continuing influence.

I picked up "A Season of Mists" #0 the next time I was in my local comic shop, and worked my way back a couple of issues—including "A Midsummer Night's Dream"—but this was a series that was just beginning a run of dominance in the form, and older issues were starting to be priced beyond what I could justify at the time.

And then, one day that fall, I saw Neil Gaiman's name on a book in the Waldenbooks in the mall—the best outlet for books we had in that impoverished time and place. That book was Good Omens.

From there I started picking up Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels—first, Mort, I think, then perhaps Wyrd Sisters. Pyramids was in there somewhere, Reaper Man, definitely Moving Pictures. Basically anything I could get my hands on…which, it's funny to realize, wasn't all that much—for the first ten years or more, Terry Pratchett had a US publishing deal that, for whatever reason, meant that the Discworld novels didn't make it to the US for up to a year after their initial publication in the UK.

Understand: Terry Pratchett was the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s. He was only unseated by someone you probably heard of: J.K. Rowling. But for half of that decade, you had to work surprisingly hard to buy his books here in the US.

I cannot understate my glee when, upon moving to Massachusetts in the late fall of 1992, I discovered that there was a most amazing bookstore near Harvard Square, Wordsworth (sadly long closed), that actually imported the UK editions. They were right there on the shelf.

Even more importantly, this seemed to coincide with Terry really figuring out his own voice; if you go back and read the earlier books, they're not without some commentary on the real world, but they still read as mostly light-hearted—the characters a little lacking in bite, the scenarios a little light on consequence. Wyrd Sisters and Guards! Guards! start to hint at something more, but they never quite fulfill their promise.

And then there's Witches Abroad and Small Gods.

The best way I can characterize the difference between them and the books that come before is that Terry Pratchett no longer worries about letting you see his anger. Moreso in Small Gods—a book that seethes—but Witches Abroad has some of it, certainly more than I remember in anything that preceeds it.

It's an anger at all the ways that we, as humans, choose to do the wrong thing, for the wrong reasons—or even the right reasons. Or the ways in which we are simply thoughtless toward one another. The ways in which we sell one another and ourselves short. The ways in which we fail, and then fail all the harder by not trying.

From there, well, it's not that there are no missteps—honestly, Rincewind was never my favorite character, so Interesting Times and The Last Continent aren't my favorites—but I find the characters become more compelling. The best of them are fueled by the flaws in themselves of which they are all too aware. All of them acknowledge the relentless hamster-wheel that is rising above your basest desires—just how easy it would be to quit caring about others, about yourself, about anything.

And then, 12 years ago, he introduced Tiffany Aching.

I didn't initially pick up the Tiffany Aching books, because they were characterized as Young Adult, and when the first one came out, well, no one knew how little time Terry had left. When the stream of books—which had often been two a year when I first started reading them, but had at least been a consistent one a year—suddenly dried up after Snuff in 2011, I decided to get my fix wherever I could.

I have to assume, at some level, that he felt there was nowhere futher to go with The Lancre Witches themselves—he hadn't written anything with them since 1998—and so they become a backdrop for his new character. And to say I was inordinately pleased that Granny Weatherwax was present is an understatement. But that would have just been fan-service, if it weren't for the fact that these books also presented something new: a portrait of a young girl learning—and as often as not, teaching herself—how to become a good, responsible, compassionate person.

They say that girls develop faster than boys—well, this is the ultimately more sophisticated sibling of Harry Potter. There is less adventure, there are few confrontations and even fewer battles. The focus in not on what happens, but why and how it reflects and ramifies out into character. In this respect, they remind me of Patrick O'Brian's Master & Commander series, which will regularly spend pages and pages (let me be clear: delightful pages) on minute observations of life on extended sea voyages, and then a couple of pages on a major naval battle—the action is there just to make sure the characters don't get bored.

And then Prospero drowns his books.

In the end, the only way to truly allow Tiffany Aching to stand as her own person was to allow her to succeed Granny Weatherwax, and the only way that could happen is if Granny Weatherwax is no longer there.

As a result, the first fifth? quarter? of The Shepherd's Crown is an extended goodbye. Knowing, as we do, that this was his last book—and his editor includes a note in which he is quite clear that Terry wrote it entirely himself, but didn't have as much time to refine and rewrite as he generally would have, which suggests that ultimately, he knew it was his last book—this is a punch in the gut.

But, ultimately, I would have expected nothing less. To live a life worth living will ultimately involve loss.

So if you haven't browsed through Internet K Hole (Occasionally NSFW), and you are more or less of an age with me, you should seriously consider it.

More than anything, for me it has caused years of self-doubt to vanish in moments.

While I might have, at the time, regretted not being particularly cool—not investing heavily in any particular trend, not spending time trying to achieve some particular "look"—in retrospect, this seems like the sanest possible path.

I will always be grateful for Jo Walton, because it was her reread for tor.com of Patrick O'Brien's "Master & Commander" series that finally got me to read them, and I enjoyed them immensely.

I read her Hugo-winning novel Among Others when it came out, and while I enjoyed many parts of it—it is, after all, a love letter to the genre of SF—it didn't quite hit for me.

So I'm uncertain why I picked up her earlier novel Farthing, but I did, and I'm glad.

Imagine if Gosford Park (I was of course tempted to use Mr. Fellowes' more recent and better-known work as a referent, but Gosford Park fits better) was set in an England that had successfully negotated peace with Nazi Germany. The murder is political, rather than personal, and British politics have become corrosively anti-Semitic and anti-Communist, while keeping the same streak of homophobia that led to Alan Turing's demise, and the class system remains ever the same.

The whodunit is really secondary—the interesting bits are the characters, and the way they co-opt or chafe against the milieu in which they are force to exist. Against my expectation, it worked quite well.

Two books in one year with "of Speculation" in the title. Weird.

Remember what I said about not quite buying the fated aspects of Rose Red and Snow White's relationship when talking about Fables? I have the same sort of reaction to this novel.

The prose is lovely, the atmosphere is interestingly off-kilter, the central narrative conceit—a narrative of the lives of two late 18th century carnival performers and their early 21st century descendent—is interestingly done…and yet the central action seems set up to make a lie of the title; there's no speculation here. It's ultimately all about fate, and even the defeat of the heavy hand of fate ultimately leaves me cold.

I wanted to like this much more than I actually did.

A consistent—and in most cases spot-on—criticism of comic books is that Nothing Ever Really Changes. Characters of any significance have too much economic value to risk alienating their audience by having them change signifcantly. More ambitious authors may make some changes, but when they move on, the narrative always seems to muddle its way back to the status quo.

Thus Wolverine, having "died" near the end of 2015 will almost certainly be back, no matter Joe Quesada's assertions of "Dead is Dead"; in fact, by any strict interpretation he's already back, insofar as there's a…nah, I don't want to get into that.

In many ways, this is the same for Lee Childs' "Jack Reacher" novels; they jump forward and back in relationship to one another, and his circumstances may be different in some ways, but by the end of the novel, he's generally back to the same situation he started in. He certainly hasn't changed or grown as a character—still an amoral, violent, near super-human instrument of retribution.

One day before long I will re-read Patrick O'Brien's "Master & Commander" series, and I wonder if I will find that they break out of this pattern of long-running series', or not.

Aud Torvingen, on the other hand, changes.

In fact, the two sequels to The Blue Place show a character who is broken and isolated and decides to heal and engage. Not always well—sometimes with an excruciating level of obliviousness—but motivated.

As whatever-sort-of-novels-these-are, they seem to work well enough: character is injected into extraordinary events in others lives, takes action, occasionally fucks up, eventually resolves problems. The difference is that you can see how the events act on the character, not just the other way around.

It's an interesting strategy.