The Cycle of Arawn is a three book story arch written by Edward W. Robertson. I have no memory on where I got the idea of reading this series, but now, after researching a bit, I realize is one of those self published books that caught on sooner or later. Robertson is a 30 something guy who wrote a surprising number of books besides Arawn, but he is still young and that may explain the quality of the writing. I mean, he has a blog on Blogspot, for crying out loud! Who does that? (clarification: at the time I had this blog on Blogspot)

The story is about this young orphan who lives his life by the day, stealing, mugging, surviving. One day, though, he sees a wondrous thing: a man resurrecting a dog from death. He then decides, just like that, to find out what that is about and so he learns about the nether, the opposite of ether, which is the normal stuff of wizardry. The writing is not bad, but not good either. The characters are very thinly fleshed out and they change their behaviour as dictated by the plot, rather than be their own people. One thing that immediately jarred me is that the language of the writing is quite modern, while it presents a medieval magical world. The disconnect grows when all the people in the land, including men, women, different nations, different species, seem to have the same sense of humour. But what really annoyed me about The Cycle of Arawn is the inconsistency of the characters and even the story. In a three book series about nether users, ether is merely mentioned in a few places, although it was supposed to be most of the magic used in the land, for example.

Let's start and stop with the main character: Dante. He starts off as a poor street thug, but he can read, learn new languages, go to places to get books and find references on how to translate an ancient tome, all while being chased around by the owners of the book. He is 16 at the time. I would find that difficult to believe even if he were a modern 16 year old, but one living on the streets in medieval times? All the learning that is done after this point, though, is completely different: pompous old people give him hints and let him work it out in the most convoluted unprofessional educational system that ever existed. At every point, when people with vast difference in hierarchical position interact, they joke and make fun of each other like drinking buddies. This ignoring of the way structured societies work makes Dante become the leader of the nethermancer city, the first human member of a clan of non-human tribe, the starter of a war, the ender of the war, the ender of another war, all by the time he reaches 26 and while going around the world doing dangerous stuff. Which is all nice and neat, but completely absurd. At the end, it seems like the reading of the book that started it all wasn't even necessary or even the best way to learn to become a wizard. One begs the question, what exactly did the order of the nethermancers with the magic before encountering an uneducated kid from another country?

One might think that, being a young adult thing, this book has a lot of action, adventure, romance. It is not true. Dante is essentially a geek, a book buff that got superpowers. The most interesting portions of the cycle is when he reads something new or finds new ways of using the magic. He doesn't have any romantic relationship of note from start to finish and the only girl he kind of likes becomes the girlfriend of another and then he accidentally kills her and then he just moves on. The action sequences are poor, uncoordinated, uninspiring and worst of all: not using things the character has learned how to do in previous sections of the story. One thing that permeates the cycle: nobody gives a damn about anything, really. They proclaim some things, then they just brush them away like nothing happened and move on to make the plot work.

Bottom line: it was a classical "boy find special powers" kind of myth, but went all over the place. It was easy to read, even if some descriptions of non essential stuff took pages! (in my mind I renamed it to The Cycle of Yawn), and the series had a finality, sort of, with the third book, so I don't have to read 14 books to get to the end of the story (*cough*Wheel of Time*cough*). I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, really, even if it wasn't completely bad. It was bad, though.

What starts as a slightly humorous book about the differences in perspective between the Chinese and the Western world turns into a deep insight into the raw psyche of women. That's not a nice place, BTW.

The thing that pops up immediately is the style of the English language in which the book is written. Xiaolu Guo creates this character who is a female Chinese coming to England on a year long visa to learn the language so she can get a better job in her native country. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is written as her diary and, true to character, her English is really bad, but getting better, so that at the end of the book it is rather decent. Some things that Zhuan, the protagonist, is thinking are sometimes really funny, but sometimes feel really artificial, so much so that I scoured the Goodreads reviews of Chinese people to see if there were many exaggerations and it seems that the verdict is NO! In that respect, the book shocks a European by how weird the mindset of a Chinese country woman can be, so I consider it a win to have read it.

Also, the book is rather short, so unless you really dislike something about it there is no reason to not finish it up once started. However, the starting premise of the book is immediately changed when she meets this older Englishman, who lives life by the day, dabbling into art that he doesn't really care about and making ends meet by driving a transport van, which he hates. However he is well educated and, besides boning the young Chinese girl, also doubles as her English tutor. So it turns into a love story. But wait, it's not all roses, as her perspective over life (the woman that takes care of the household and makes babies and the man who provides for the family) is completely at odds with his views on intimacy, privacy and personal goals.

In the end, I have to say that if you want to start hating the relationship you're in, you should read this book. Like the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang, the two characters in the book are complementary, but separate, archetypes of the male and the female and the great attraction between them cannot nullify the classical disparities on their value systems. I don't know about women, but as a man I started to hate the pitiful neediness that Zhuang was exhibiting and I totally understood how the distance between the two people grew. I despaired when I read her thoughts on her own actions, when she knew what she was doing was hurting him and their relationship, but she found herself unable to stop.

What's worse is that, being archetypes, none of the characters compromises in any way, so I believe the reader is then faced with their own failings, but also with their compromises, laid bare, made evident and seeding regret. In that regard, it is a brilliant book. It pits West against East, male vs female, real vs ideal. It's not for everyone though. While I do not regret reading it, I don't think I would have read it if I really knew what it was about.

Continuum is a strange TV series. It starts as some sort of police procedural, only set in the past from the standpoint of a future in 2077, where the corporations won and the future is stateless, corporate run business, where the police is just another private security force, etc. The crisis point is one from which a cell of anticorporate terrorists are sent back in time, together with a Protector (a cop from the future) to the near future (from our perspective). Each season from there on is more or less a different story, where the viewers much suspend their disbelief (again) to understand the new timeline story. As usual, a time travelling idea destroys, rather than rejuvenates, a story. Instead of a steady, involving plot, we get an all you can eat buffet of redefining the story. Each season we get basically a new series, but with the same characters. And it kind of works, but it loses all sense or meaning. (Meaning you would be dumb as fuck - and as me - to watch this)

I was fortunate enough to watch the last episode of the series (season 4, episode 6), when I was inebriated. I have to say that this is the only way Continuum will make sense to you: utterly drunk and on fast forward. This way, the storyline invented by cocaine driven Hollywood execs makes a little bit of sense and gives one the feel that the idea Continuum had has a sort of ... pardon my pun... continuity. Other than that, you should definitely avoid this series.

Rachel Nichols is super sexy and cute. That's the only thing going for the TV show. I am not kidding; I actually watched the series exclusively because she was hot. The story, the characters, the way everybody would get in bed (so to speak) with everybody - without having sex, mind you - was just puerile. And the last episode (read this: the last episode they had the budget to finish) was so underwhelming that it made me cringe with pain and disgust, only I was so piss drunk I didn't care. And I would definitely bone Rachel Nichols if I had the chance, so you, the more moraly advanced human beings, should ignore this series altogether.

Bottom line: everything that happens in Continuum feels natural when you are piss drunk. You should avoid it, if possible, if not inebriated.

Update 31 December 2018: After five seasons, Z Nation was cancelled. It had its ups and downs, with inconsistent levels of quality and storytelling, but it was very nice overall and I am glad to have watched it. Personally, I loved the innovation in the sci-fi and the way the show did not take itself too seriously, but sometimes tackling serious and contemporary social issues was important, too. The last season, for example, was all about democracy and egomaniacs trying to subvert it. Perhaps it wasn't the right show to try that on, but I appreciate that the creators thought it was worth it. So, no Z Nation in 2019, but maybe SyFy will learn from this and continue with fun and intelligent storytelling. I certainly hope so.

And now for the original post:

Due to the sheer number of TV series I am watching, I've abandoned the list format, in which I would give a short review of each. I am thinking that I will periodically review shows that I think are exceptional in some way or another. Z Nation is something that sounds stupid from the get go: a low budget Walking Dead clone from SyFy, made by The Asylum. I mean, can this be good at all? The Asylum are famous for the low budget rip-offs and SyFy... well, they changed their name from SciFi Channel to reflect their utter disrespect for the genre that they were supposed to promote. And, to paraphrase Woody Allen, it involves zombies.

The answer to the question is a resolute YES. While it doesn't take itself seriously at all, it is not a comedy. It is not like Sharknado, for example. Most humor in it is ironic with some occasional and subtle references to other work in the genre. The characters are complex and wacky, the story gets more original as we go and the show is full of death and gore. Let me tell you this: Walking Dead is a boring piece of crap compared to Z Nation.

Is it also bad? Yes. Some of the non permanent actors can barely act, the pacing is all over the place, the budget is low and the things that go on in the series don't always make a lot of sense. But compare it with, say... Farscape, which was much better funded, it is more consistent and more fun.

Bottom line: I don't believe this is a show for everybody, but it certainly is not a fringe thing, either. It's like somebody said "We know TV series are mostly crap and instead of trying to pretend they are not, we accept it. But we will make fun crap!". It is a really refreshing TV series and I enjoyed every episode. Give it a go!

I am going to go ahead and say that I didn't like Glasshouse. To be fair, after the amazing achievement that was Accelerando, my expectations from Charles Stross were quite high, but I believe this book was quite frankly badly written.

The story is set somewhere in the distant future, after "the Acceleration" which permits easy transport and energy generation through wormholes that instantaneously and safely connect two points in space. This permits creation of anything from pure energy that is just harvested directly from stellar coronas, for example. This further allows for people to choose their bodies at will, making them male, female, changing the shape, the functionality, the species, etc. While being 3D printed like this, one can also make modifications to one's brain and thought patterns. Software, like malicious worms, can infect "gates", the machines that record and create matter, and proliferate through the brains of victims that unwittingly went through those gates.

So far so good. The hard sci-fi background set, I was expecting something amazing. Instead, it's about some whiny person who gets into an experiment to recreate the "Dark Ages" (read "our present") in order to fill in knowledge gaps of the period and discovers he got more than he bargained for. I thought that the idea of the book was to describe the present through the eyes of an Accelerated person, revealing the ridiculousness of the rituals and hard set ideas that hold us back - and it certainly started like that - but in the end it was impossible for Stross to keep up with it and everything devolved in a silly detective story that made no sense in any period, especially the far future.

My review thus denounces this book as clumsy, both in the chaotic change of direction and pace and in the writing style. The only good thing about it: it was rather short.

If Adam Nimoy's name sounds familiar to you, it most likely is you recognized his last name. Yes, he is Leonard Nimoy's son and, ironically, he sounds as happy as the son of Spock probably would have sounded. However, My Incredibly Wonderful, Miserable Life is not, as one might expect, a whining account of what it means to be the offspring of a celebrity, but a heart wrenching anecdotal account of Adam's personal life, going through parenting, addiction, divorce and trying to pull himself together. The book is a collection of very short and stand alone chapters which feel like, and probably are, Alcoholic Anonymous stories about himself, just as raw and open as one might expect from the floor of a meeting of people following the 12 step program.

My personal opinion is that I absolutely loved it. As any good autobiography, it teaches something beyond a mere story, it reveals. I enjoyed the book not as a Star Trek fan, but as a human being. This stuff is not easy to get, at least not for me. I recommend it highly.

Not as complex as Daemon, Kill Decision still manages to impress, thrill and terrify with the very believable subject matter. As for the other two previous books by Daniel Suarez also covers the subject of technology disrupting the political and economical makeup of our society, this time focusing on unmanned autonomous killing drones and it also draws ideas from multiple very real and very interesting scientific fields.

I don't want to spoil anything, but it is mostly a book about the good underdogs fighting the all powerful bad guys, so in that sense it is most like FreedomTM than Daemon. It doesn't have a twist in the middle of the story, either, changing the perspective of the subject matter, it is a simple and by the book (pardon my pun) technological thriller. Perhaps that sounds a little disappointing, but it was a fascinating book and I finished it in mere days while also travelling abroad and visiting Italian cities.

I highly recommend it, not so much for the story directly, as for the multitude of subjects it touches, the sense of eye opening knowledge and the terrifying feeling that everything that happens in the book is not only realistic, but possibly happening as we read.

FreedomTM is the sequel, or rather the second part, of Daniel Suarez's Daemon, which I've reviewed previously. While Daemon spooked me with its realism, FreedomTM does away with all that and changes both pace, scope and plot. I guess Suarez had this in his head from the beginning of starting the book, but I didn't see it coming. Be warned, if you have not read Daemon, this review is going to have some serious spoilers.

You see, from a technological thriller, the book directly goes into socio-economic commentary and from a dumb AI engine that treats the world as a computer game, we get an Agent Smith Emperor of Dune kind of thing, which recognizes humanity as the scourge it is and assumes the role of the solution. Suspension of disbelief is almost impossible as you see "the good guys" surviving death (repeatedly), the bad guys being bad just because they can and being defeated with deus ex machina kind of solutions, and technological solutions solving every problem humanity ever had or could have. FreedomTM is the software developer's wet dream, where the algorithm that rules all other algorithms is not only possible, but implemented and bug free.

That doesn't mean that the book is bad. Far from it. I liked it a lot. However, compared with Daemon, it's like an American blockbuster movie cop out from a situation that is dramatic and full of tension: everything is going to be alright. Instead of maintaining the tension and having the reader on the edge of the seat, so to speak, everything gets explained in the first part of the book and the rest is just dedicated to epic conflict. Oh, and some completely unnecessary and quite difficult to believe romance. In fact, quite paradoxically, I will suggest you do not read FreedomTM immediately after Daemon. Instead, live with the daemon inside of your head, let it make you think about possibilities and wonder about what could be coming next, then, maybe, read the second part.

I read this short novel from start to end in under a day. Osamu Dazai writes from the point of view of a sociopathic young man who cannot seem to understand the human condition and fears all people around him, mostly because he expects to be found out at every moment. The title of the book can be translated in several ways, the English one relates to the protagonist's feelings of losing one's humanity, while the literal translation reads as "disqualified from being human", implying a societal judgement. Imagine a Japanese version of The Stranger, by Albert Camus, and you get a good picture of the plot and feel of the book. Both books were written in the same period, more or less, but while Camus probably imagined the character, many believe Dazai was talking about himself - he committed suicide soon after.

No Longer Human is the second best rated Japanese book and was adapted in movie and manga. It is difficult to imagine those being better than the dry accounting of the inner turmoil of the character, starting as a little boy who devises "clowning" as a method of passing the test of humanity, outwardly fun and good natured and inwardly terrified of being discovered as a fraud and punished by the society of strange human beings that he cannot understand or empathize with. I highly recommend it.

I have been watching horror movies since I was six and read books of all sort through the years, but rarely have I seen something so truly scary as Daemon. Daniel Suarez manages to convey terror not by upgrading the villain, but by making it mundane. The daemon is not an all knowing Artificial Intelligence that takes over the world, but a stupid game engine run by a logic tree. The ease with which something like this could be created makes the book truly terrifying, particularly for me, who has actually thought of the weakness of humans when faced with decisions and pondered a world where machines make the decisions not because they want to rule us, but because we don't want to choose.

But there is more to this book than its subject. It is actually very well written and that is remarkable considering it is Suarez' first book. I will read the sequel to Daemon, Freedom™ as soon as I can. I loved the attention to detail, not a descriptive boring series of useless trivia, but a close focus on what makes people tick and how technology falls into place to fill the gaps that our failings leave. On the cover of the new book that Daniel Suarez wrote there is a quote that I feel is totally true: he is a true heir to Michael Crichton.

Bastard!! is an adaptation of the manga with the same name. The manga itself is ongoing, but very slowly. At the moment of the writing it had 138 chapters. The genre of it is magical fights in an action comedy kind of style. Bob Samurai has a video review of it.

For myself I have to say that I had fun watching it, in a mindless "I come from work and I don't feel like doing anything" kind of way, but it wasn't that special in plot, animation or feeling. The "anti-hero" is actually the typical hero that does incredible good deeds for the love of women and the biggest source of humor are the few lines peppered throughout the episodes that break the fourth wall. Stuff like "What would have been the purpose of defeating that guy when we were off screen" or "a handsome hero like myself couldn't possible lose to one as ugly as you". The manga is a little bit more about the scoundrel nature of the main character - as it should be, there are 70 chapters (the Host of Shadows) covered by mere 6 episodes of the OVA - but it is also rather different from the anime: more story detail, more types of magic, etc. Probably the OVA, as quick dirty fun as it was, is not a very good one, since it relays only bits and pieces of the manga.

One can watch the anime at AnimeDreaming, read the manga at MangaHere and watch BobSamurai's video review on YouTube.

Another book that can easily be found in audio format on Librivox and YouTube, Creatures of the Abyss (also known as The Listeners), by Murray Leinster, is a slow mid 20th century sci-fi that reads as a cross between Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft and one of those books about people drinking and falling in love on boats in South America. More Verne, though.

The thing that made me continue listening to it was its way of depicting the mentality from back then. Written in 1961, it tells a story of people who, faced with extraordinary circumstances, first evade formulating a theory in their own head, for fear of contravening their own set view of the world, then - forced by events - they do allow themselves to formulate a theory, but keep it to themselves for fear of ridicule, even when they see other people considering the same things, then they proceed to test those theories by themselves and only then share them with others. Compared with the modern culture of sharing half formed thoughts before they can constitute complete phrases, it is quite different. It is also fun to read about people that think Venus is a large ocean planet, as is Jupiter, with a gravity four times that of Earth.

However, while it was interesting in a sociological way and good as a background for other activities, its slow pace might feel excruciating for the casual reader. More than half of it is more about boats and sailing and catching fish. The science fiction part is slowly creeping into the story and the climax is in the last chapter alone. Maybe my association of the book with Lovecraft is strained, as the only commonality is touching on tentacled abyssal creatures that might appear disturbing to human sensibilities and certainly the elements of horror are very rare in Creatures of the Abyss. The book does feel more real, though, as it goes through this slow process of examination of evidence and formulating hypotheses and testing them before jumping to conclusions. It depicts the beginning of the modern era of scientific thought, back when it was respectable and desirable to be thinking like that.

Bottom line: Slow paced, but very well written, you should at least try it, since it is so readily available. You can even listen to it right here, on this post.

[youtube:IlKJbS4NU1A]

Another great Star Trek novel placed in the Kirk era, Star Trek Prime Directive keeps the reader/listener on the edge of their seat. It starts with a disgraced Kirk, a scattered crew and a scrapped Enterprise. It shows the dark, bureaucratic side of the Federation, cruel and merciless when you are not the lucky wearer of the golden captain uniform or, even better, an admiral. How did it come to this? The answer is both captivating, original and with deep roots in the Star Trek basic tenant: the Prime Directive.

I actually listened to the audiobook, also on YouTube (see embedded video), which was very well narrated. If I had any problems with the story was that it was clearly very biased. Kirk is always thinking of the poor alien species that are like humans, but seems to have no qualms to experiment with phaser fire and even slightly torture other alien beings if they are bug like. Also Spock seems very little a Vulcan in this.

Bottom line is that the idea was intriguing and original and the style of the writing was very good. One of the best ST novels so far.

I've come upon this strange Not enough storage is available to complete this operation ArgumentException when creating an instance of EventSource derived classes. This class is responsible for creating entries in Windows logs. Strangely enough, there are very few articles on the Internet connecting the class with this particular exception, so I started to investigate. One important thing to notice is that the exception is intermittent. Basically you can cycle a few times with a try/catch block and get a valid instance. That seems to indicate some sort of race condition. So far, this is the easy solution I could find. However, I really wanted to know why does it happen.

If I remove the EventSource class from the searches I get more pages reporting the same exception and one of the reasons that people say it happens is related to the size of the registry. Retrospectively it makes sense, but it never occurred to me that the system registry has a maximum size. But is that the problem? Looking with the EventViewer summary I see something like this:

Of course, the most obvious thing there is the exact size of each log category: 20.00 MB. If one right-clicks on any of the log groups and goes to Properties, the size limit for each is clearly shown and configurable. So is that the problem?

The exception is thrown almost exclusively when the logging is heavy: multiple threads trying to log stuff at the same time. Since retrying usually solves the problem, my guess is that the exception is thrown somewhere between the request for a new log entry and the process that eliminates old entries to allow for new ones. Unfortunately I don't see any configuration option for how many entries to eliminate. I would have liked to clear, let's say, 20% of the log when it is full to make this problem less relevant. Perhaps hidden in the bowels of the system registry there is a way to set this, but at this time I don't know it. Nor is it clear if I have the option to remove more of the less important events rather than just the oldest. Clearly the EventLog class in .NET supports deleting individual log entries, so this is feasible if it ever becomes a real problem.

So far, my solution is to just try again when the error is thrown:

LoggerEventSource eventSource = null; //EventSource derived class (see documentation)
for (var i = 0; i < 5 && eventSource == null; i++)
{
    try
    {
        eventSource = new LoggerEventSource();
    }
    catch (ArgumentException)
    {
        Thread.Sleep(100);
    }
}

Star Trek: Strangers from the Sky is an audiobook read by George Takei and Leonard Nimoy. While it is a typical ST The Original Series plot, with god like aliens, travel back in time to significant moments of Earth's history and a focus on high moral values that, in the end, save the day, I felt that it was a little bit more subtle, deeper than a typical episode of any of the series. Was it because of the introspection of the characters, or the wonderful narration of Nimoy and Takei, I do not know. What I can say is that I enjoyed listening to the story quite a lot and I recommend it highly for any Star Trek fan.

I also don't know if it is in the public domain or not, all I can say is that I listened to it on YouTube and so can you:
Of course you cannot listen to it on YouTube anymore. Some lawyers saw to that.