Book Review: Dead Astronauts By Jeff VanderMeer
My first crucial piece of advice about Jeff VanderMeer’s newest novel, *Dead Astronauts*is, you should get this book physically if you can. The cover design is gorgeous. The dust jacket is a glossy embossed rainbow, but beneath it, the book itself is embossed with blue foil writing excerpted from the book. Also, throughout the book, there are . . .
Worshiping The Future
This American Life replayed an episode about the founder of cryonics, and it’s a great exploration of how an inadvertent con was born. Two things stood out to me. First, it was how fake the whole thing was from the outside. The other was that it was apparent that everyone believed that the future would deliver a miracle cure for . . .
Book Review - Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt by Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard
Even though Peter Cannon/Thunderbolt was a standalone character, he’s likely more famous as the inspiration for Ozymandias in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen. A book so ubiquitous it almost defines superheroes despite not having a single character that’s a household name.
Of course, that’s because Moore and Gibbons’ seminal . . .
Cronyism, Conspiracy, and Incompetence
In what is likely in the big book of worst-case scenarios for 2020, a complete meltdown in Iowa that seemed to go against Bernie should have topped everyone's list. He has a mobilized army of online supporters who know that no one on the inside likes their guy, and they’re ready to burn the place down to get him through the . . .
Learning Diary: Python Tic Tac Toe
I am slowly working my way through the book Automating the Boring Stuff with Python by Al Sweigart. I'm mostly working through a lot of the same concepts I previously covered in earlier entries in the series. While that content is useful to reinforce concepts for someone swapping between learning a new language and coding in Powershell at . . .
Performative Consumption
One of the reasons that I stopped doing the link posts is I really didn't want to make it a daily chore to scan through hours of news to write a sentence or two of snark. I still read about the same amount, but what I read isn't based on finding stories fit for riffing a couple of sentences.
The internet fuels . . .
Book Review - BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns, & Moonage Daydreams
If there were a rock biography fit for the comic pages, it would be David Bowie. Mike Allred chooses his most visual and iconic era, Ziggy Stardust, to fill out the pages of the rise from London folkie to glam superstar. * BOWIE: Stardust, Rayguns, & Moonage Daydreams* is partially a biography, but mostly a loving tribute to Bowie’s sheer . . .