Brandon Sanderson does not disappoint with the sequel to Way of Kings. Quite the opposite, in fact, weaving more and more into the vast tapestry that is the world of the Stormlight Archive series. The characters converge towards a point in time and space where everything and anything will be decided, the fate of the entire world, with just a few courageous people standing between life and complete desolation.

Words of Radiance focuses more on the main characters, with less distractions that might take the reader out of the flow of the story. However, even if the scope of their achievements explodes, the power of their stories loses a bit of the desperation and energy from the first book. We no longer have powerless broken people trying to survive, but magical beings full of strength doing extraordinary things. Ironically, it is their success that makes them less easy to identify and empathize with. The author throws challenges in front of them, but they seem inconsequential compared to the ones in Way of Kings. I feel like he has grown attached to them and finds it difficult to torture them as a good writer should. On the other hand Sanderson is a positive person, most of this writing being lighthearted and less dark and brooding, so this is not a disappointment.

The climax is a gigantic clash between forces that have slowly grown since the beginning of the series. Sanderson does a wonderful job tying the separate strands of his world into a single story, maybe a bit too much so. The Roshar and Helaran connections felt a bit strained, not unlike Luke Skywalker discovering his greatest ally and greatest enemy are family members. The author better be careful not to put immense effort to create a vast universe, only to shrink it by mistake by connecting everything with everything and everybody with everybody.

And again the final pages of the book feel weak, as they come after the powerful climax, yet they are necessary to tie in some story arks and seed the beginning of others. Yes, the book ends with a promise that what happened in it is just the mere beginning, a small part of the larger picture, so expect little closure. Sanderdon is a prolific author and I am sure he will write the next books in the series fast enough to keep me engaged, but be aware the series is planned to be at least ten main books with about just as much companion stories and novels. This... will take a while. Oathbringer, the third book, is scheduled to be released in November 2017.

Bottom line: I recommend the book and the series and the author. No fantasy reader should ignore Brandon Sanderson if they are anything like me. Just make sure you are ready to get invested in the story only to wait every year for the next chapter to be released.

Brandon Sanderson proves again he is a brilliant writer. His Stormlight universe is not only vast and imaginative, but the characters are both compelling and well written.

Way of the Kings has some slow parts, though, and even if I kind of liked that, it is uneven in regards to its characters: some get more focus, some just a few chapters. That means that if you identify with the lead characters you will enjoy the book, but if you empathize with the lesser ones you will probably get frustrated.

I particularly enjoyed the climax. It was as it should be: the tension was rising and Sanderson just wouldn't let it go, it just kept pushing it and pushing it, filling in the motivations of the character, adding burden upon burden, making choices as difficult and as important as possible before finally allowing the release of his characters making one. Alas, the wonderful ending is followed by epilogues, several of them, which just seem boring afterwards, in comparison.

Great series, though, I recommend it highly.

Having been so pleasantly surprised by First Light, the first book in The Red series, I quickly read the next two books: The Trials and Going Dark. However, possibly due to my high expectations, I have been disappointed by the continuation. Linda Nagata seemed to have reached that sweet spot between current tech trends and emergent future that makes stories feel both hard sci-fi and realistic. The integration between man and machine, the politics run by shadowy megarich "dragons" from the background, nuclear bombs detonated in major US cities, artificial intelligence and so on. The potential was immense!

Yet, the author chose to continue the story on the same flat note, like an ode to the Stockholm Syndrome, where the hero gets repeatedly coerced to run missions that at first seem bullshit, but in the end are rationalized as necessary and even dutiful by himself. The common intrusion of external forces into his emotional balance by way of direct brain stimulation also makes his feelings and motivations be completely isolated from the ones of the reader. A strange choice, considering the vast possibilities opened by the first book. Frankly, it felt like Nagata liked writing the first book and then was forced by publishers to make it "a trilogy", since that is the norm for fantasy and science fiction, but her heart wasn't really in it.

I don't want to spoil the ending, such as it is, but I will say it was disappointing as well, with no real closure for the reader of any of the important questions raised in First Light. Too bad, since I felt the story was beginning to touch on important subjects that needed to be discussed at a deeper level than just "boots on the ground".

I was listening to this Software Engineering Daily podcast about Facebook Relationship Algorithms and I had this weird idea. The more I was thinking about it, the more realistic it felt (as well as more than a bit creepy). Let me lay it out for you. The podcast is interesting in its own right, so go listen to it, it's instructive.

So they describe these metrics of your Facebook connections that they reached while trying to find an algorithm to detect your romantic relationship. They took a large sample of users that have declared their significant other and tried to find an automated way of predicting that from the other information Facebook had. The first idea was to use connectivity, one often used idea in sociology that the more common friends you have with someone, the closer you are, but it didn't quite work. One clear counterexample would be coworkers connected on social media. Instead, they realized that such functional connections often cluster, so you would have the cluster of coworkers, your family, your club friends, the people who share your hobby, etc. The romantic partner would be connected with many of these friends, but across clusters, in other words you would have many common friends that are not really connected with each other. By using this metric they called dispersion, they would guess with more than 50% accuracy from the first try who your partner is from the list of hundreds of your friends.

And here is my idea: why not reverse engineer it? Imagine you have someone you want to hook up with, but have no idea how to proceed. Maybe asking them on a date is not an option or maybe, like any engineer out there, you want to maximize the chances your experiment would work. Why not find the smallest subset of friends of that person that have the largest value of dispersion? So here is what this "hook me up" algorithm would do:

1. Collect the list of friends of your target
2. Find a sample that are well connected to the target, but less connected with each other
3. Approach each of them and befriend them

The result would be that you would become the "natural" choice for a relationship, by going backwards and reversing the direction of causality. Automatic stalking, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood software developer: Siderite! We live in an age in which information about us can be used or abused in innumerable ways and we become addicted and stuck to this way of relating. It's not a bad thing, but it has its drawbacks. It is good to know of them.

First Light is Linda Nagata's first book in The Red series, which follows a military man landing right into the middle of an emergence event. Stuck between his duty as a soldier, his love for his girlfriend and father, the maniacal ambitions of an all powerful defense contractor queen and a mysterious God-like entity which seems to like him, our hero does what he can to survive and do good by his own principles.

At first I thought it was going to be one of those cheap soldiering books. It was short, written by a woman, and frankly I expected a standard pulp fiction "read it on a train" kind of thing. Instead I was blown away by the subtlety with which the characters are being explored and the way the story was constructed. I loved the book and I plan to read all the series. I started reading The Dread Hammer, which is another Nagata book, this time fantasy, but it doesn't even come close to First Light. I may even dislike it.

Anyway, I can't say much about the plot without spoiling it, but I can certainly recommend this book. As I said, it is short enough to read and see if it evokes the same feelings. Instead of hurting it, the female perspective of the author enhances the experience and makes it unique. The technical aspects are spot on and the writing style is fluid and easy to read. Top marks!

Tad Williams probably fancies himself as another Tolkien: he writes long decriptions of lands and people and languages, shows us poetry and songs, tells us about the rich history of the land. And all of this while we follow yet another common, but good boy, with a mysterious ancestry, while he and his merry band of helpers fight THE DARK ONE. It's the same old story, with the hapless youth that is guided by wise but not forthcoming people who tend to die, leave or otherwise shut up before the hero gets the whole story and can do anything about it. Regardless, he is young and lucky, so it's OK.

If The Dragonbone Chair would have been fun or interesting or at least show us a character that we could care about, this book would have been readable. As such it's a trope filled, boring and sleep inducing thing. You have to wait until half of the book to see the things that you predicted would happen from the first few chapters. I couldn't even finish it. More than two thirds in the book and there is no significant part of the story that involves either dragons or chairs.

Bottom line: it sucks!

There was this quiz from the Planetary Society where Robert Picardo was interviewing people at a sci-fi convention and asking them what is the planet with the hottest surface in the solar system. The expected answer was Venus. Yet, if you think a little bit, Jupiter probably has a solid core, gases made liquid by high pressure and the temperature at the boundary between the gaseous and liquid layers is immense. Shouldn't Jupiter be the answer?

No. And that is because of the definition of a planetary surface. Quoting from Wikipedia: Most bodies more massive than Super-Earths, including stars and gas giants, as well as smaller gas dwarfs, transition contiguously between phases including gas, liquid and solids. As such they are generally regarded as lacking surfaces.

So there you have it: Jupiter loses due to a technicality... just like Pluto! Just kidding. I was cheating, as there is no clear boundary between the gaseous and liquid states inside Jupiter. It is hard to imagine that, since we have a clear image of what a liquid and a gas should look and behave like; it's like boiling water in a kettle and not being sure where the steam ends and the water begins. Jupiter, though, is a big kettle.

I got this bundle of four books in the Alcatraz series, by Brandon Sanderson, and since I loved all of his books so far, I enthusiastically started to read them. First, you need to understand that there are five books in the series, with The Dark Talent just published. I think it pays to wait until you have it before you read the whole thing, since it pretty much reads as one long story (unless you read the beginning and then immediately skip to the end of each book, heh heh heh!). Second, you need to know that at the beginning the writing will appear waaaay too silly and under par compared to the author's other works. After a while it kind of grew on me, but be aware that it is written mostly for kids. Sanderson even says so in the story itself.

So at first I kind of thought this will be the series that breaks the rule, the one that I would not enjoy reading, and it took some time to shake off this feeling. It feels like the author could not make up his mind on what to write: the obligatory book about writers (after all, the rule says "write what you know", so in the end it's inevitable) or the recently obligatory Harry Potter spoof (which fantasy authors are peer pressured into writing). In the end he wrote something that has both: a story about a boy discovering he has magical powers and also a book filled with meta comments and breaks in the Fourth Wall (the character has the Breaking Talent, see) that shows some of the tools and processes in the writing business.

In fact, the more I read, the more I enjoyed the books. The characters are as always incredibly (annoyingly) positive and there is that Sanderson smartness behind even the silliest of exchanges. He references future scenes, with book and page number (which is amazing if you think about it), he hooks you to a scene then berates himself on using hooks in the book, he uses really silly and out of context details only to use them at full effectiveness a book later. In the end, you get something that children will undoubtedly read with giggling pleasure and that adults (especially those interested in writing) will see as a deconstruction of the writing process.

Now, I still feel the Alcatraz series is one of the lesser Brandon Sanderson books. The silliness sometimes feels forced and the way he writes each book changes slightly, as he experiments with the crazy shenanigans that he started with this series. It's still very entertaining, though. Give it a try, or give it to your children so they can get into writing themselves and make your life a living hell when they grow up :)

I was in some sort of American campus, one of those where they found a gimmick to show how cool they are. In this case it was reptiles. Alligators were moving on the side of the street, right next to people. They would hiss or even try to bite if you got close enough. I was moving towards the exit, which was close to the sea and leading into a sort of beach, and I was wondering what would happen if one of these large three meter animals would bite someone. And suddenly something happened. Something large, much larger than a crocodile, came out of the water and snapped a fully grown adult alligator like a stork snatches frogs. What was that thing? A family of three was watching, fascinated, moving closer to see what was going on. "Are these people stupid?" I thought.

Sure enough, the dinosaur thing bites through the little kid. The father jumps to help but is completely ignored, his sudden pain and anguish irrelevant to the chomping reptile. Other tourists were being attacked. One in particular drew my eyes: he had one of the things pulling with its teeth on his backpack. The man acted like something annoyed him, making repeated "Ugh!" sounds while trying to climb back on the walkway. His demeanor indicated that he didn't care at all of the reptiles, temporary annoyances that stopped him from returning to normal life. At one moment he paused to scratch an itch on his face. His fingers were bitten clean off, blood gurgling from the stumps. He was in shock.

Somehow, a famous actor jumped from somewhere and made it clear that it had been just a show, although the realism of it was so extreme that I felt an immediate cognitive dissonance and the scene switched.

I was at the villa of a very rich friend and there was wind outside. Really strong wind. Nearby wooden booths that were at the edge of his garden were pushed towards me, threatening to crush me against the wall of the building. I went inside, telling my friend that he should take whatever he needs from outside because the wind is going to tear them away. He calmly pressed a button on a remote and an inflatable wall grew around the compound, holding the wind at bay. Cool trick, I thought, trying to figure out if it was firmly anchored to the ground by wires or it got all its structural strength from the material it was made of. It had to have some sort of Kevlar-like component, otherwise it would have been easy to puncture. I calculated the cost of such a feature as astronomical.

We went in, climbing to the second or third floor. Out the window I saw buildings, like near the center of Bucharest. The wind was wreaking havoc on whatever was not firmly fixed. The building across the street was 10 floors tall and apparently someone was doing roofing work when the wind started. The fire used to heat up the tar was now really intense from all the fresh oxygen and smoke was billowing strongly. Suddenly the top floor caught fire, flames stoked by the wind into unstoppable blazes. I called my friend to the window and showed him what was going on. While we watched, floor after floor were engulfed in flames, explosions starting to be heard from within. The building caught fire like a cigarette smoked in haste. I thought that if the wind went through the building, via broken windows and walls, then the a very high temperature could be reached. And as I was thinking that, the building went down. It didn't collapse, instead it leaned towards our villa and crashed right next to it.

I panicked. I knew that on 9/11 the towers collapsed because of the intense heat, but a nearby building was structurally weakened by the towers falling and it too went down eventually. I ran towards the ground floor, jumping over stairs. If the villa would crumble, I did not want to get stuck inside. While fleeing, I was considering my options. The building that went down had people in it, maybe I should head right there and help people get out. Then I also remembered the thousands of people helping after the September 11 that later got lung cancer from all the toxic stuff they put into buildings. Besides, what do I know about rescuing people from rubble? I would probably walk on their heads and crash more stuff on top of the survivors. I've decided against it, feeling like an awful human being that is smart enough to rationalize anything.

As I got down I noticed too things. First there was a large suffocating quantity of white big grained dust being blown by the wind, making it hard to breath. The light was filtered through this dust, giving it a surreal dusky quality. I used my shirt to create a makeshift breathing mask for the dust. Then there were the people. A sexy young woman, short skirt, skimpy blouse, long hair, the type that you see prowling the city centers, was now crawling on the ground, left leg sectioned just under the knee, but not bleeding, instead ending with a carbonized stump, like a lighted match that you put off before it disintegrated. I saw people with their skins completely burned off, moving slowly through the rubble, reaching for me. Some where nothing more than bloodied skeletons, some were partially covered in tar, the contrast of red inflamed burns and black tar or burned clothing evoking demonic visions of hell. These people were crying in pain and coming towards me from all sides, climbing over the ruins of buildings and cars. The smell was awful. I ran, parkour style.

As I woke up I tried to remember as much of the dream as possible. I still have no idea what I was doing in that campus and how I had gotten there. I was fascinated by the scene with the shocked tourist, as it implies knowledge of human behavior that I don't normally possess when awake. It was completely believable, yet at the same time bizarre and unexpected. Great scene! I've had disaster dreams before, top quality special effects and all, but never was I confronted with the reality of the aftermath (I usually died myself in those). I am certain I made logical decisions in the situation, but at the same time I felt ashamed at the powerlessness, fear and the fact that I was running away. Should I have stayed and helped (and gotten cancer)? Should I have rushed home and blogged about it? Maybe a strategic retreat in which I would have conferred with experts and then maybe got back with professional reinforcements?

What felt new was that while having all those random thoughts and running, I wasn't really thinking of my life. I wasn't considering whether my life is worth saving or what the purpose of my running actually is. It wasn't thinking at all; just running. It was visceral, like my body was on autopilot, taking that stupid head away from the danger before he thinks itself to death. Considering it was a virtual body in my actual head, that's saying something. I am not just sure what.

Anyway, beats the crap out of the one with being late for the exam, not having studied anything...

Copyright is something that sounds, err... right. It's about keeping the profits of the sale of work to its author. If I write a book, I expect to get the money from it, not somebody who would print it and sell it in my name. With the digital revolution, copy costs collapsed to zero: anyone can copy anything and spread it globally for free. So what does that mean for me, the author? Well, it sucks. The logical thing for me is to try to fight for my rights, turn to the law which is supposed to protect me, find technical ways of making copying my work harder, preferably impossible, going for the people who are chipping away at my hard earned profits.

However, that only makes sense from the author's point of view, specific to their work, outside of any context. Now, imagine a system that allows me to anonymously share anything to anyone, while they also can get it with no chance of being identified or even detected. Me, the author, can see that my work is being circulated, but I can't stop it or determine who is spreading it. My only recourse is to try to dismantle this devilish system that destroys my living, with the full support of law and various companies that want to get their share of the profits. And here comes the context: in order for me (and the entire media industry) to be able to protect my way of life I need to actively fight against any method that allows anonymous and/or secret sharing of information. In fact, I would be fighting for a global system of surveillance and censorship.

As you have seen, I tried to present the situation from the standpoint of the author. I feel for the poor guy (less for the snakes that get most of the money by controlling distribution and marketing), however it is clear that I can't be on his side. The hypothetical system that I have been describing kind of exists right now in various forms and media companies are making efforts to thwart attempts to make it more user friendly and more widespread. What we see today is the logical continuation of the situation. Forget intelligence companies looking for terrorist threats. Forget tyrannical states trying to find dissidents. Forget the political correctness police trying to expose and shame people for their beliefs. The real money is in stopping people distributing knowledge for free and it has direct (and dire) implications on our ability to speak freely.

Note: I used the expression "speak freely" rather than free speech, because free speech is not actually free at all. Read about it and you will see that is a completely different thing than the ability and permission to express yourself without repercussions.

Of course, I am not the first one to have thought of that. In the world it often has become more effective to use copyright in order to censor things you don't agree with. Just google it and see. Every time you hear something about economic accords, freedom of information, net neutrality, they are all talking about the same thing, only from different angles. The war is active, in full swing, with all of us possible casualties, yet few people are even aware of it. Oh, I am not saying that you can do anything about it... or can you?... but at least you should know about it.

The Emperor's Soul is set in the same world as Elantris, but for all intents and purposes it is a standalone story. It's not a full size book, but it's a bit longer than a short story. In it we find a type of magic called Forging, by which someone can carve and use a complicated seal to change the history of an object or, indeed, a soul. The forging needs to be very precise and as close as possible to the actual history of the target, otherwise the magic doesn't "stick". So what must a brilliant forger do in order to do the forbidden soul forging? They must know their target so intimately that they can't ultimately hurt them.
An intriguing idea, yet Brandon Sanderson does what he does best and focuses on the characters, while the story itself reveals the underlying motivation of each and how it affects the final outcome. The descriptions are minimal and the ending is optimistic and personal as Sanderson often likes his finales.
Since the story is short and I had no trouble reading it in a single evening, it is almost a pity not to read it, even if in itself is just a tiny "what if" tale and offers nothing spectacular.

I've read the book in a day. Just like the other two in the series (Steelheart and Firefight), I was caught up in the rhythm of the characters and the overwhelming positivity of the protagonist. Perhaps strange, I kind of missed descriptions in this one, as both locations and characters were left to the imagination and everything was action and dialogue.

Brandon Sanderson ends (why!!?? Whyy?!!?) the Reckoners series with this third book called Calamity. You absolutely have to read the other two books to understand anything about it. In fact, Reckoners feels more like a single story released in three installments than a true trilogy. In it, the team has to reckon (heh heh heh) with their leader going rogue and have a decision to make: either bring him back or kill him. All this while fighting off various Epics in different stages of madness.

I can't really say anything about the story without spoiling the hell out of it. I loved the first two books and I loved this one. Indeed, I have yet to find a Brandon Sanderson book that I don't like. If you are into superhero stories, the Reckoners series has a refreshingly original plot, a wonderful main character and true debate about what heroism really is. I recommend it highly!

The Mirror Thief is a really interesting book. It is well written, original in ideas and Martin Seay has his own unique writing style. It is also a very deceptive book, always changing shape, misleading the reader over what he is actually reading.

The book starts in Vegas, with a black former military policeman named Curtis arriving in search of a certain Stanley, in order to give him a message from a friend. The story feels like a detective-noir, but immediately there are things that just don't belong. The apparent mystical talents of Stanley, the very detailed descriptions of the surroundings, using rarely met but very specific words. At the time I thought I was going to read some sort of mystical noir thing akin to Cast a Deadly Spell.

But then the plot switches to the story of Stanley when he was a kid, hustling people on the street and doing various other bad things, his only anchor a book called The Mirror Thief, a poetry book that describes the adventures of a certain Vettor Crivano in Venice at the end of the 16^th century. While he doesn't really understand what it is about, he feels that the unnaturally meandering book hides some sort of universal secret. As a reader, you start to doubt what you have read until now. After all, aren't you reading a confusing meandering book with a lot of unexplainable details? Stanley has traversed the United States in order to find the author of the book and ask him to reveal the mystical secret that would give him the power he craves.

And just when you think you figured it out, the book reveals a third story, that of Crivano himself, but not in poetry and apparently unrelated to the book about him. While he is an alchemist and physician, his best skill appears to be fighting, and he only uses it effectively at the end. All main characters: Curtis, Stanley and Crivano feel absurdly human and flawed. Curtis carries a gun everywhere and he doesn't get to use it once, while being disarmed multiple times. He doesn't get what's going on up until the very end. Crivano is also deceived several times, another pawn in the big game of life. Paradoxically Stanley is the one most in control of his life, mostly by rejecting everything society considers normal or even moral and choosing his every step.

To me, the book was most of all about perception. The reader is confusedly pinballed from perspective to perspective, even with each of them painstakingly detailed. While reading the book you learn new words, old words, history of three different times and places and intimately get to know each character. When you get tricked, you are just following characters that get tricked, disappointed or set up themselves. The three stories are really completely unrelated, at most red herrings when mentioned in the others, and offer little closure. It is all about understanding there are other ways of looking at the world.

Bottom line: Martin Seay is often accosted by readers begging for explanations of what they have read. You cannot read the book and not feel it is a good book, but actually enjoying it is a different thing altogether. At the end you start thinking about the book, about the world, about yourself, wondering if you didn't just read the whole thing wrong and whether maybe you should start over.

Other resources:

• Martin Seay’s The Mirror Thief Is about Mirrors and Cities and Cities in Mirrors
• Martin Seay’s ‘The Mirror Thief’ as Explained by Martin Seay
• Peter Chelsom to Direct Adaptation of ‘The Mirror Thief’

My mind has been wandering around the concept of gamification for a few weeks now. In short, it's the idea of turning a task into a game to increase motivation towards completing it. And while there is no doubt that it works - just check all the stupid games that people play obsessively in order to gain some useless points - it was a day in the park that made it clear how wrong the term is in connecting point systems to games.



I was walking with some friends and I saw two kids playing. One was shooting a ball with his feet and the other was riding a bicycle. The purpose of their ad-hoc game was for the guy with the ball to hit the kid on the bike. They were going at it again and again, squealing in joy, and it hit me: they invented a game. And while all games have a goal, not all of them require points. Moreover, the important thing is not the points themselves, but who controls the point system. That was my epiphany: they invented their own game, with its own goal and point system, but they were controlling the way points were awarded and ultimately how much they mattered. The purpose of the game was actually to challenge the players, to gently explore their limitations and try to push boundaries a little bit further out. It wasn't about losing or winning, it was about learning and becoming.

In fact, another word for point system is currency. We all know how money relates to motivation and happiness, so how come we got conned into believing that turning something into a game means showing flashy animations filled with positive emotion that award you arbitrary sums of arbitrary types of points? I've tried some of these things myself. It feels great at times to go up the (arbitrary) ranks or levels or whatever, while golden chests and diamonds and untold riches are given to me. But soon enough the feeling of emptiness overcomes the fictional rewards. I am not challenging myself, instead I am doing something repetitive and boring. That and the fact that most of these games are traps to make you spend actual cash or more valuable currency to buy theirs. You see, the game of the developers is getting more money. And they call it working, not playing.

I was reading this book today and in it a character says that money is the greatest con: it is only good for making more money. Anything that can be bought can be stolen. And it made a lot of sense to me. When you play gamified platforms like the ones I am describing, the goal of the game quickly changes in your mind. You start to ignore pointless (pardon the pun) details, like storyline, character development, dialogues, the rush of becoming better at something, the skills one acquires, even the fun of playing. Instead you start chasing stars, credits, points, jewels, levels, etc. You can then transfer those points, maybe convert them into something or getting more by converting money into them. How about going around and tricking other players to give you their points? And suddenly, you are playing a different game, the one called work. Nobody can steal the skills you acquire from you, but they can always steal your title or your badge or your trophy or the money you made.

What I am saying is that games have a goal that defines them. Turning that goal into a metric irrevocably perverts the game. Even sports like football, that start off as a way of proving your team is better than the other team and incidentally improving your physical fitness, turn into ugly deformed versions of themselves where the bottom line is getting money from distribution rights, where goals can be bought or stolen by influencing a referee, for example.

I remember this funny story about a porn game that had a very educational goal: make girls reach orgasm. In order to translate this into a computer program, the developers had several measurements of pleasure - indicated in the right side of the screen as colored bars - which all had to go over a threshold in order to make the woman cum. What do you think happened? Players ignored the moaning image of a naked female and instead focused solely on the bars. Focus on the metric and you ignore the actual goal.

To summarize: a game requires of one to define their limits, acknowledge them, then try to break them. While measuring is an important part of defining limits, the point is in breaking them, not in acquiring tokens that somehow prove it to other people. If you want to "gamify" work, then the answer is to do your tasks better and harder and to do it for yourself, because you like who you become. When you do it in order to make more money, that's work, and to win that game you only need to trick your employers or your customers that you are doing what is required. And it's only play when you enjoy who you are when doing it.

As an aside, I know people that are treating making money like a game. For them making more and more money is a good thing, it challenges them, it makes them feel good about themselves. They can be OK people that sometimes just screw you over if they feel the goal of their game is achieved better by it. These people never gamified work, they were playing a game from the very start. They love doing it.

Stay true to the goal! That is the game.

Lab Girl should have been the kind of book I like: a deeply personal autobiography. Hope Jahren writes well, also, and in 14 chapters goes through about 20 years of her life, from the moment she decided she would be a scientist to the moment when she was actually accepted as a full professor by academia. She talks about her Norwegian family education, about the tough mother that never gave her the kind of love she yearned for, she talks about misogyny in science, about deep feelings for her friends, she talks about her bipolar disorder and her pregnancy. Between chapters she interposes a short story about plants, mostly trees, as metaphors for personal growth. And she is an introvert who works and is best friends with a guy who is even more an introvert than she is. What is not to like?

And the truth is that I did like the book, yet I couldn't empathize with her "character". Each chapter is almost self contained, there is no continuity and instead of feeling one with the writer I was getting the impression that she overthinks stuff and everything I read is a memory of a memory of a thought. I also felt there was little science in a book written by someone who loves science, although objectively there is plenty of stuff to rummage through. Perhaps I am not a plant person.

The bottom line is that I was expecting someone autopsying their daily life, not paper wrapping disjointed events that marked their life in general. As it usually is with expectations, I felt a bit disappointed when the author had other plans with her book. It does talk about deep feelings, but I was more interested in the actual events than the internal projection of them. However if you are the kind of person who likes the emotional lens on life, you will probably like the book more than I did.