I liked the book, but not a lot. Ian Frisch is an investigative reporter who happened to enter a circle of disrupting young magicians who want to shake the industry and make it ...err.. fresh again. Really didn't intend that pun. However, if you expect revelations of how tricks are done or the deep exploration of the human soul, you won't get a lot of satisfaction from this book.

Full title Magic Is Dead: My Journey into the World's Most Secretive Society of Magicians, it feels more like a roadie story, where the young author gets sucked into a group of charismatic artists and ends up in their group. You can't use it as a barometer of the state of the magic industry, as the story is pretty one sided. The writing style isn't that great either, with some of the ideas repeated several times and none of the emotional bare stripping of the soul that I've come to love in autobiographies. There is no big drama or action of any kind - this is not Point Break or The Magician or anything. Moreover, the "secretive society" isn't all that secret, it is just a club of people hand picked for their innovative contribution to what many see as a stagnant industry and that many people know about. The title is pretty confusing as well, since it is not about magic being dead, alive or anything in between, but rather the pinhole perspective of the author while seduced by this group of very talented and interesting people.

As an introductory work in the world of magicians as a whole, it works pretty well. There is a lot of name dropping and some starter resources for wannabe magicians. It presents the mind set required to do magic in a way that satisfies not only you, but the customs of the magician community. But that's pretty much it. I can't recommend it, while I can't criticize it too much either. I would call it average.

The Priory of the Orange Tree is a typical fantasy story, with realms, heroes, heroines, dragons, magic and the mandatory evil one. It is a large book, that others would have made a trilogy out of; considering it is a single story, I find it most honest that the author published it directly. Samantha Shannon writes really great for a 27 year old and considering she already has under her belt a seven book deal under which she already published four (The Bone Season series), she seems to be doing good. People even hailed her as the next J.K.Rowling, which I personally would think it feels annoying rather than flattering.

So what is the book about? There are several countries with different religions that all stem from the same event: the bounding of The Nameless One, a huge evil dragon with intents to conquer the world. Some think all dragons are evil, some think dragons are cool, some think only some dragons are evil and the others are gods, and so on. There are conflicting stories about who is the hero that defeated evil a millennium ago, too. And of course, evil is stirring once again and a new generation of heroes rises to the occasion. They are mostly female, although some males are prominent in the story. Also, at least three characters are gay and one may be asexual.

About the gay thing, I found it not annoying. Although major events of the plot depend on the love towards another person of the same sex, it wasn't forced towards the reader and it didn't feel like it was glue added to the story. But it was also funny, because in the whole book romance is either gay or really short, chaste, doomed or kind of second rank. I imagine this is how a gay person reads a straight romantic story, where homosexuality exists on a conceptual level at best.

The point is that the story is not difficult at all, except at the beginning when you have to get acquainted with too many characters in too many countries all at once. Then it just flows, sometimes a little bit too smoothly, towards the predictable end. I read it all in a weekend. The main characters are complex and competent, although the minor ones are kind of one dimensional. If anything, I was disappointed with the villains. They were cartoonish, almost. I mean, the most evil of them all was called The Nameless One, like some extra that has one line in a public bathroom in a movie: "the guy in the bathroom". He didn't even have a "same thing we do every thousand years, Pinkie!" moment. Lazy as hell, all the dirty deeds were done by his henchmen... errr henchfolk? And that ending...

Bottom line: nice story to read, above average clearly, but not something to be amazed by.

I've had a blast reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a humorous take on Harry Potter if he were educated in science and not just another emotional teen lucky enough to be "the one", so as I was reading A Girl Corrupted by the Internet is the Summoned Hero? I was really hoping it wasn't just a one off. And it wasn't! Although much shorter and not so rich with references, this novella from Eliezer Yudkowsky is just as funny as I hoped.

A self proclaimed translation of a Japanese manga that was never written, the story follows a girl that gets summoned into another realm as the virgin hero to save the world from evil. However, the reason she is still a virgin is habituation to Internet pornographic depravity and losing interest in any normal relationship. The world she arrives in is a world of prudes and the power of the magic there relies on one) being a virgin and two) asking prudish demons to do something awfully depraved so that they refuse.

I won't spoil it for you, but it's funny and short and I recommend it highly.

I guess when your main work concerns the sex organs of animals, you have to own a healthy sense of humor. That is why, even if I wasn't terribly interested in the subject, I continued to read the book mostly because of Menno Schilthuizen's writing style. This book - full title Nature's Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell Us About Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves - kept being funny and captivating, despite being about a niche subject treated in a very scientific way.

But having read it, I don't regret a thing. There are a lot of interesting insights to be drawn from the book, things I wouldn't have probably thought about for myself. The focus is on sexual organs - mostly in invertebrates, but not only - an area that is both fascinating and rarely explored in a rigorous fashion. Why are they so important? Because in almost every species they are changing from generation to generation faster than anything else. Many species that basically look the same, having evolved in the same particular niche and maybe even from common ancestors, have wildly different genitalia and strategies for impregnation, an intriguing fact that leads Schilthuizen to explore the theory of sexual evolution, in other words changes determined by the choice of partners. You know, like the Pompadour hair style...

Forget human sex, or even mammalian sex. It's spiders, insects, worms and snails that will amaze you with the weird and kinky adaptations in their romantic lives: females that store the sperm of various pretenders and only use the one from the guy they liked most, spoon like penises used to scoop out the sperm of rivals before climax (humans have this, too, BTW), complicated female organs and mechanisms meant to thwart male attempts at forceful insemination and males who choose to stab their mates and short circuit the whole thing. Oh, and did you know snails are hermaphrodites? How does that work?

Bottom line: a very well written little book that may surprise you both through how entertaining and interesting it is. No, a penis is not just a syringe and a vagina not only a hole that accepts anything you put in it. In this book you will learn why, how sexual organs evolved and, indeed, continue to evolve faster than any other organ in most species.

I've stumbled on an article called Create A Dark/Light Mode Switch with CSS Variables which explains how to style your site with CSS variables which you can then change for various "themes". Her solution is to use a little Javascript - and let's be honest, there is nothing wrong with that, everything is using Javascript these days, but what if we mix this idea with "the CSS checkbox hack" as explained in Creating useful interactive elements using only CSS, or "The Checkbox Hack"? Then we could have a controllable theme in our website without any Javascript.

Just in case these sites disappear, here is the gist of it:

1. Define your colors in the root of the document with something like this:

   :root {
       --primary-color: #302AE6;
       --secondary-color: #536390;
       --font-color: #424242;
       --bg-color: #fff;
       --heading-color: #292922;
   }

2. Define your themes based on attributes, like this:

   [data-theme="dark"] {
       --primary-color: #9A97F3;
       --secondary-color: #818cab;
       --font-color: #e1e1ff;
       --bg-color: #161625;
       --heading-color: #818cab;
   }

3. Use the colors in your web site like this:

   body {
       background-color: var(--bg-color);
       color: var(--font-color);
   
       /*other styles*/
       .....
   }

4. Change theme by setting the attribute data-theme to 'dark' or 'light'

Now, to use the CSS checkbox hack, you need to do the following:

1. Wrap all your site in an element, a div or something
2. Add a checkbox input on the same level as the wrapper and styled to be invisible
3. Add a label with a for attribute having the value the id of the checkbox
4. Add in the label whatever elements you want to trigger the change (button, fake checkbox, etc)
5. Change the theme CSS to work not with [data-theme="dark"], but with #hiddenCheckbox:checked ~ #wrapper, which means "the element with id wrapper that is on the same level as the checkbox with id hiddenCheckbox"

This means that whenever you click on the label, you toggle the hidden checkbox, which in turn changes the CSS that gets applied to the entire wrapper element.

And here is a CodePen to prove it:

See the Pen
rbzPmj by Siderite (@siderite)
on CodePen.

Sometimes you get an annoying error after updating your .NET Framework or some of the packages or libraries in your project: "Some NuGet packages were installed using a target framework different from the current target framework and may need to be reinstalled. Visit http://docs.nuget.org/docs/workflows/reinstalling-packages for more information. Packages affected: <name-of-nuget-package>".

The problem stems from the fact that NuGet packages have variants for different .NET flavors and in your project they are "hinted" at by the <HintPath> child element in the <Reference> elements in your .csproj file. Somehow, the hint still points to a different variant than the one you need and that's why you get this error. The explanation in length can be found in this great post: Why, when and how to reinstall NuGet packages after upgrading a project, but just in case his blog disappears (as so many great ones did in the past), here is the gist of the solution:

In Visual Studio go to Tools → NuGet Package Manager → Package Manager Console and type:

Update-Package <name-of-nuget-package> -Reinstall -ProjectName <name-of-project>

To add some value to Derriey's post, you can solve all the similar issues in your solution by copying the entire list of errors from all projects by going to the Output pane, selecting them all and right clicking Copy, then run search and replace in your favorite editor with this regular expression:

^.*?Visit http://docs.nuget.org/docs/workflows/reinstalling-packages for more information.  Packages affected: ((?:[^,\s]+(?:, )?)+)\t([^\t]+)\t\t\d+\t\t$

and replacement pattern

Update-Package $1 -Reinstall -ProjectName $2

Then make sure there is only one project on each line, copy paste the result into the Package Manager Console window and the entire solution will get fixed.

Example: Error Some NuGet packages were installed using a target framework different from the current target framework and may need to be reinstalled. Visit http://docs.nuget.org/docs/workflows/reinstalling-packages for more information. Packages affected: Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration, Serilog MyProject.Common 0

Turns into: Update-Package Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration, Serilog -Reinstall -ProjectName MyProject.Common Since Update-Package only supports one package and regex replace doesn't have a syntax for multiple captures in the same group, you will have to manually turn this into:

Update-Package Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration -Reinstall -ProjectName MyProject.Common
Update-Package Serilog -Reinstall -ProjectName MyProject.Common

Copy paste the result and the two projects will be reinstalled on the affected projects in your solution.

Tiamat's Wrath comes after a roller coaster of a ride. I absolutely loved the TV show so I started reading the books, concluding that the show was better. Of course, being good, it almost got cancelled until it was picked up by Amazon (thanks, Jeff!), but I continued to read the books. The part that I loved, the realistic colonization of the Solar System, got quickly left behind in favor of Stargate-like portals to other worlds, not one but two God-like alien races and, in the seventh book, a Nazi-like occupation of the entire humanity. Like? Even the small hints that suggested space travel using (impossibly efficient) fusion drives takes months and years got left behind in favor of fast paced action. The books themselves followed the same pattern of going bad, then coming back up again and being amazing, with the only commonality being the crew of the Rocinante, smack in the middle of everything, somehow always influencing things at planetary and civilization level.

So how was the book? Predictably bad. Predictably good. Equal bite size chapters that tell a rather bland story until the end when everything comes together in a cathartic way and kind of makes up for the rest. The writing style of the two authors known as James S.A. Corey is professionally good, without anything outstanding. The characters are empathetic: a major one dies, one is reborn, a new one appears. The same roller coaster and the expected, but still annoying, desire to read the next book when I know it will take another year for it to be written.

As far as I know, the next and ninth novel will be the last of the series, which is painful, because The Expanse, for me, was the perfect blend of pulp and space science. Typical to serialized American fiction it went too far too fast (leaving its soul behind to catch up). Yet I still enjoy it. I wonder what my response would have been without the TV series. Still, if you are new to the subject, I recommend you read the first three or four books, then watch the TV series.

I remember reading Greg Egan books when I was very young and loving them, so when I've seen he was still writing, I've decided to read one of his earlier books: Diaspora, published in 1997.

It's hard to describe it in a way that makes it justice. Imagine a poker game where you bet not with money, but with imagination. You look at the cards, you think you've got a good hand, and you place all your imagination on the table. Greg Egan looks at you, looks at his hand, looks at what you put down, then bets 100 times more. And while you are looking at the table, unbelieving, you realize that his bet spreads out in multiple dimensions, more than you can handle by orders of magnitude of infinity. It was like that.

The book is about a posthumanist era on Earth where most people have chosen to live in virtual constructs called polises. They have translated all relevant biological and mental functionality into the Shaper language which polises run. As the book describes the birth of a new citizen, its ascendancy to consciousness, there is no actual story. In that way, the whole book is rather dry, because it is about reason and science and mindblowing theories of consciousness, physics and mathematics. And that's only the beginning. Split into several parts that have common characters for no other reason that they've been described before and that are mostly independent, the book's driver is first a gamma ray burst that destroys the fragile remnants of the Earth's biosphere and then another, more colossal catastrophe that threatens the entire galaxy. That's basically the whole drama, the rest is just mental exercise as humanity explores, then escapes the universe into a infinite multidimensional ladder of universes that makes faster than light or time travel as ridiculous as it is pointless. I mean, really, the entire plot of the book revolves around a completely new theory of how physics work which is described (in layman's terms, with explained diagrams) by Egan.

Bottom line: filled with real scientific theories and ideas that transcend just about anything you thought means anything, the book is at the same time amazing and difficult to enjoy. It starts as something that you have a hard time wrapping your head around, but you can just about do it, then goes on exponentially from there. It's Asimov on steroids (if steroids would be produced by femtoscale machines using the complete simulation of all possibly interactions in a living human body stored into a single neutron-as-a-wormhole). I am at once both elated and terrified to read one of his recent books.

Favourite quote: "Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships would do - knowing no better, having no choice".

When we are children we can believe anything and everything we see carries hidden, if false, meaning. It is the time when fairy tales enchant our imagination with just a little bit of detail, a simple story, a happy ending. We ask our parents "why?" and take their answers for granted. Later, we gain the experience to understand fancy from real, yet we rarely go back on the whys or on the fairy tales, to revisit them with our grand new outlook on life. They have become cemented into our childhood and have become the roots of our personality.

It seems to me that revisiting fairy tales is what Ursula Vernon, under the pen name T Kingfisher, wanted to do in Toad Words and Other Stories. So I enjoyed the dark ironic attention to details like why would a peasant girl wear a red hood, when the pigment is so expensive and unstable, or why would the grandmother choose to live in the forest rather than in the village with her niece. I liked the talking animals, often more wise and kind than the people. But it went from interesting to old really fast. At least the short stories were concise and to the point; if I didn't like one, I would maybe enjoy the next. But then there was the Boar and Apples novella which bored (heh!) the hell out of me.

So bottom line, an interesting concept, but I have not enjoyed the execution.

I am conflicted about this book. On one hand, the subject is of terrible relevance and needs to be known by as many people as possible. On the other, the authors are not very good writers: the whole book feels like a big blog post, filled with repetitions, personal opinions and little in the way of hard data. Most of the information in it I already knew, but that's because I am fascinated with the subject. If I didn't know it, I would have probably loved the book.

But what is The Hidden Half of Nature? It's an ecology book. It explains how microbes are the unsung true heroes of plant growth and animal health, including humans. While we cling to narrow views of us versus them and try to kill anything that doesn't agree with us, our lives, our food, our health and our lands depend on the biological health of the microbiome. And it makes a lot of sense. Why would a plant develop a way to absorb nitrogen or break down rock, if all it has to do it exude some sugar and bacteria or fungi are going to do it for it? Why would animals develop complicated organs to break down complex molecules like cellulose when all they have to do is make a space where microscopic creatures live off them and give the animal simple nutrients back? How would it even work to evolve completely independent of the life that you can't see with the naked eye, but outnumbers and outmasses any macroscopic life? We thus learn that most microbes are beneficial and imbalances are much more dangerous than a specific species of a bug.

The book starts with the authors, David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé, husband and wife, buying a house and dreaming of tending a garden, only to discover that their yard had almost no soil. Bringing a lot of organic matter to decay and be assimilated by microscopic life and then other creatures, from insects and worms to birds and other animals, they are shocked to discover that soil recovers much faster and in inexplicable ways than they were taught. Following the rabbit in its hole, they embark on a journey of discovery on how the microscopic influences every aspect of the macroscopic. It all starts with soil, but then it goes into nutrition and health and it all comes together: the idea that good comes from the health of the entire ecosystem, as all we can actually see with our eyes are big enough to be counted as such, colonized and tended by microscopic creatures that have evolved and cooperated with us to reach an equilibrium.

We become familiarized with the concept of dysbiosis, or dysfunctional symbiosis, and how it affects the nutritional values of food, the quality of the land, our chronic and acute diseases, cancer, allergies. Parallels are drawn: the digestive system as roots, a person as an ecosystem, our gut as a garden. All in all a fascinating and cutting edge subject where the ecology, the systemic health on all levels, is the important driver of our lives.

Yet the style in which the book is written really put me off. I started finding reasons not to read. The first half especially. The book starts by bemoaning the dry style of scientific publications and vows to tell the story in a way that anyone can understand. That means a lot of dramatizations, personal opinions, very little in the way of sourcing the ideas other than a name here and there. And whenever they were getting into something promising, they skirted on the details. I believe that if this book would have moved just a little bit away from the conversational blog-like style towards the Wikipedia format it would have been at least twice as valuable.

Bottom line: a book that most people should read, but I wish it would have been written differently.

I was browsing the selection of films on HBO Go and I have to say, for someone who is used to the options available on torrent sites, the films and series that are available there are both incredibly diverse and woefully inadequate. But if there is something that I am grateful for with that particular network, it is Billy Crystal's autobiographical play. It's called 700 Sundays and it is everything I have come to love about actor biographies... in video format. Within two hours of wonderful acting and playwriting, Billy finds the way to tell the story of his childhood, adolescence and adulthood without once getting into the things we actually know him for: acting, comedy, Hollywood. It's so wonderfully personal that is feels a bit too intimate, like someone describing in detail their love life.

Boy, does this guy love. There is this cliche about comedians that are essentially depressed and fight it, for a while, with humor, until their inevitable depression and subsequent suicide. Billy Crystal is nothing like that! He owns every scene, he fights for his audience and he is proud of his legacy. He is blessed, even while he mourns the death of his parents, because while they were alive, they loved him with all their strength and while he is alive, love is what defines him.

Bottom line: it is two hours of wonder. Whether you watch it on HBO Go or download it from somewhere, it is a must, it is absolutely necessary that you watch what a 67 year old master of storytelling and comedy will make out of his life story. I like biographies and this it one of the best, created in the medium Crystal feels most at home: stand up comedy.

I was half expecting the show to be freely available on YouTube or something similar, but in this day and age, quality is always behind some paywall. I leave you with a trailer to the show and I urge you to see it:

[youtube:S2BhJg7nGjA]

I spent hours trying to manually fix the assembly redirects in a web.config, only to give up and use the default Add-BindingRedirect in the NuGet package manager. And it worked! I have no idea if this won't break something else, but I got it from Rick Strahl's blog and it worked for me. More in his article. Thanks, Rick!

One thing to remember is that you first have to delete the dependentAssembly elements from the .config file in order for the command to work.

Update: there is an issue related to NuGet packages. I was recommending to run MsBuild with the command line option /t:Restore;Rebuild which should restore packages and rebuild the solution. However, as detailed here, the MSBuild Restore option only restores packages defined in the project PackageReference elements, not the ones in packages.config. In order to restore those, you still need to manually run nuget restore. Where do you get nuget.exe from? Obviously not from the Visual Studio Build Tools... but from the NuGet Gallery.

Now, for the original post.

So I had this medium size Visual Studio solution, in .NET Framework 4.6.1, containing a bunch of projects, including a Wix setup and a web API and I wanted to build it on a machine that did not have Visual Studio, for Continuous Deployment reasons. Since Visual Studio uses MSBuild to compile, I thought it would be a five minute job. Boy, was I wrong!

First of all, the command to build a solution is clear:

MSBuild You.sln

and since it was a .NET 4.0 project, it made sense to use the MSBuild.exe from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319. Well, enter the first error: CS1617: Invalid option 'latest' for /langversion; must be ISO-1, ISO-2, 3, 4, 5 or Default. This is caused by the project using C# version 7 which is NOT supported by the MSBuild version in the .NET Framework, you need MSBuild version 15, which comes with Visual Studio. I didn't want to install Visual Studio.

The solution is to install Visual Studio Build Tools, preferably using the Visual Studio Installer. Now, the correct MSBuild version is found at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe. Note that it is in located in a Visual Studio folder, not the MSBuild folder, which is also there.

An issue that occurred here was that previously warning messages saying the framework is 4.6.1 and the installed framework is 4.7.2 now became errors. The solution is to install the .NET Framework SDK 4.6.1 or to upgrade all your projects to 4.7.2. Warning: you need the Developer Pack, not just the Runtime.

Second error: error MSB4036: The "GetReferenceNearestTargetFrameworkTask" task was not found.. The problem? The NuGet package manager and/or the NuGet targets and build tasks are not installed. In order to install them, run Visual Studio Installer and look under the Individual Components tab, in the Code Tools section. See this Stack Overflow question for more details.

Next problem: The type 'IDisposable' is defined in an assembly that is not referenced. You must add a reference to assembly 'netstandard'. This is a weird one, since the compilation in Visual Studio had no issues whatsoever. This is related to the framework version, though, as .NET 4.6 uses netstandard 1.0 and 4.7 uses 2.0. The solution is to add a <Reference Include="netstandard" /> tag in your .csproj (tip: Search and replace <Reference Include="System" /> with <Reference Include="System" /><Reference Include="netstandard" /> in all your .csproj files)

Another problem similar to the one above is Predefined type 'System.ValueTuple´2´ is not defined or imported and that is because ValueTuple is not in .NET Framework 4.6.2 or earlier and you need to install the System.ValueTuple package in your project (using the NuGet package manager, more details here)

For both problems above as well as for the issue with the framework conflict further up a possible solution is to upgrade all projects to .NET 4.7+ or whatever is latest.

Next, targets errors: error MSB4226: The imported project "Microsoft.WebApplication.targets was not found. and error MSB4057: The target "_WPPCopyWebApplication" does not exist in the project. This is because even if Visual Studio Build Tools is installed, the targets for it are not. The solution is to copy the folders Web and WebApplications from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v15.0 to "\\BuildMachine\C$\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v15.0". You may need to copy the NuGet targetss as well, I don't remember if that is what I did or the NuGet package manager installation solved it.

Last but not least, Wix errors. Obviously, for the Setup project to compile you need to install the Wix Toolset. However, you may still run into this error: error MSB3073: The command "heat dir ..blah blah blah" exited with code 9009. If you were trying to executing the build from a command prompt and you installed Wix while it was open, you need to open another one in order to refresh the changes the installer did to your environment PATH variable.

Finally, in order to compile for a specific platform and configuration, use the flags: /property:Configuration=Release /property:Platform=x64.

Then just run the line:

nuget restore
"c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\BuildTools\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe" /t:Restore;Rebuild Your.sln /property:Configuration=Release /property:Platform=x64

Hope it helps.

Part of the TED Books series, Asteroid Hunters is a tiny booklet, with few ideas other than those expressed in Carrie Nugent's TED talk: Adventures of an Asteroid Hunter. They even repeat. It feels like someone wrote a blog post and was in the mood to write and then they thought to make it a book, but without adding more material to the original post.

Nugent presents the job of asteroid hunter, which makes it technologically feasible to detect potentially dangerous asteroids years before they have a chance to do damage to the Earth. In that time frame, changing the rock's trajectory would be within our means. Let us do our job and fund it, she says, and the Earth will be safe from an asteroid impact, a predictable and preventable event.

Bottom line: that's the entire book. No funny anecdotes, no personal stories or insights, no analysis of the world of asteroids and meteors outside the job of finding them. It's informative, terribly bland and a bit repetitive. I didn't like it.

High Stakes is so full of interesting and delicious horror that I am willing to forgive the bland and boring setup in the previous Wild Cards book, Lowball. A mosaic book like many others in the series, where different characters are written by different authors, it describes the coming of a supernatural horror that can change reality itself. People (normal, joker and ace alike) get turned physically and psychologically into rage filled monsters that want to eat babies and kill everything for the glory of their dark god. Even if some sections were reminiscent of the bore in Lowball, with love between people and worry and relationship issues, the bigger problem of the end of the world took precedence and made this into one of the best books in the series.

In many ways it reminded me of the early Wild Card books, when the virus was still a thing of awe and fascination, horror and fear, but with even more oomph. I think this particular volume washes the sins of many of the recent others that kind of forgot what the Wild Card was all about. I do hope this becomes a trend and the next books are at the same level.