When I started reading Dragonsbane I expected something light, young adult, typical dragons and magic and heroic women. And it was, but it was more than that. Barbara Hambly adds a lot of depth to her world, her characters, imbuing them with meaning and subtly anchoring them in real life.

  For example, our hero isn't only a mage, but also a mother, maybe a reluctant one, someone who has to always choose between her craft and her love for family. I understand how a writer might feel like that and after reading the "light book about dragons and magic", so will you. Or how gnomes are being bullied and discriminated against, but it's not empty virtue signaling when the author explores how hidden power (normal power, not magic) is being used to influence people to do that, for nefarious reasons they are not even aware of. Characters who are weak find strength, characters who seem powerful reveal their inner weakness and in the end victory is brought not by magical power, but by knowing yourself and accepting it as it is: mature strength of character.

  Yet, all of this complexity is subtle. You don't have to pay attention to it. One can just read it as a typical magical dragon quest just as well. It's not one of those books that you can reread multiple times, but I appreciate that a kid might enjoy this just as much as an adult, for very different reasons.

  I liked the book, so I might read the sequel as well. Not the best book ever, but a very pleasant surprise.

  Hah, if I'd have looked at the cover I would have probably chosen to read something else. Something that Ann Leckie absolutely loved is definitely not for me. If books had gender, A Memory Called Empire would be 100% female, as it focuses primarily on social cues, personal feelings and attachments, romantic connections, poetry, connotations of every word said, yet everything is so naive in terms of power or violence or even sexuality, like a children's story. There is almost no mention of technology or space travel, people meet face to face all the time, touching each other for whatever reasons and feeling things, and it all happens in a bureaucratic empire where social expectations are high and complex. This could just as well have been set in the 18th century Earth with some little magic McGuffin instead of the tech one Arkady Martine used, and none would have been the wiser.

  The main character is an ambassador from a tiny space station republic to the large empire of the region, which dominates, technologically, militarily, economically and culturally. Everybody dreams to be part of the empire, while they are slowly being devoured by it. So, again, could be any historical era. The ambassador is greeted by someone from the empire who is attached to her as aide. Now, they almost immediately become fast friends, with some romantic tension between them. Imagine this happening: the Chinese ambassador to the US receives an American aide who immediately befriends and helps them reach their goals, sometimes in defiance of American protocols, culture or even authority.

  The book continues in the same vein, with a lot of cultural references that mean nothing to the story, but at least add to the world building. The magical tech that the station uses is an imago, a machine that records one's experiences and personality in a chip that can then be implanted in their successor, as an advisor. The empire could use it, but their morality and laws prohibit it. A lot of intrigue around this little device that any decent security service would find out everything about in days. There are some civil war ideas, some future alien invasion hints, but mainly it is an old fashioned PG13 whodunnit given a sci-fi veneer.

  Bottom line: I found it extremely boring, fell asleep numerous times and only finished it out of spite. It wasn't bad, for sure, but it was anathema to what I enjoy. If you're a typical sci-fi reading guy or if you tried Ann Leckie and found it ridiculous, maybe you should reconsider reading this.

 I don't know if I want to play it more, but I've had fun for a few hours playing Sail Forth, managing my fleet and talking to the weird characters of the game, while navigating by hand a small sea full of islands.

  You start off as a guy with a boat, you find other stranded people, you upgrade your boat, buy cannons, fight pirates, do errands, buy new boats, create a fleet and so on. It's really entertaining! Plus it's a relatively small game that requires no hardware resources to speak of. Recommended!

  Doors - Paradox is a game where you solve puzzle to open doors, but the doors only lead to other doors. The whole concept is rather ridiculous, but one can get into it if they want to waste some time.

  The thing that really pissed me off was the messages you receive in each puzzle, suggesting this is some inner search for meaning or some comatose dream state or something like that, only it doesn't bring anything at all to the game. It doesn't have a story plot that gets resolved somehow, it changes nothing for the game play, it's just another cliché that became popular in this kind of games and we can't get rid of it.

  The graphics are fun and I can't help but think that with a good design this could have been something special. Alas, the puzzles are either ridiculously easy or annoyingly time consuming, like sliding puzzles. It gets old really quick and there is no resolution or anything for the time you spent opening stupid doors. An opportunity missed.

Beyond Blue has a short and silly story that has no consequences and leads nowhere, but the main point is that you can free dive in several ocean stages and look at and swim with realistic looking and swimming marine creatures, which is very relaxing, but gets old soon.

It's apparently inspired by Blue Planet II and partially financed by the BBC and OceanX, the Dalio brothers' "ocean exploration initiative".

I didn't really understand the point of the narrative, though. While it gets the main character where it needs to be to explore the ocean, there are at least two other characters that bring absolutely nothing to the game other than a waste of time and several subplots that end up nowhere than a footnote in a conversation.

I enjoyed the swimming around part, though. You can finish the story in a few hours and then you have the option to free dive in any of the stages of the game, tag animals and look at logs to learn about the ocean, which is pretty cool. But it gets boring quick if you don't already have an interest in oceanography.

  Awkward: The Science of Why We're Socially Awkward and Why That's Awesome started great! I mean, it immediately opened my eyes in terms of how to define awkwardness, why it's even relevant to other people and the reason they are keeping score. It then proceeded to give algorithmic solutions to blending in social situations even if you are awkward to begin with. Ty Tashiro even mentions that we have two relatively separate systems in our brains: the analytical and the social, and when you use one you inhibit the other. It made so much sense! I immediately started recommending the book, without having read it all.

  However the rest of the book was not as amazing, or at least this is how I felt. Instead it felt inconsistent, like a collection of separate materials that somehow were shoe stringed into a book. Still good, but compared to that stellar start, relatively weaker.

  There was one more thing that bothered me, probably saying more about me than about the book, but there were places where American liberal agenda seemed to infect the scientific discourse. I guess being an awkward individual who managed to become a relationship and social psychologist would adopt some of these concepts as a blending in mechanism, yet it felt a little jarring, like the author "sold out" accepting ideas that forcefully come with his acceptance in the crowd.

  It was funny to me that the metaphor (a very good one, it turned out) to describe how awkward people see the world compared to social ones was a Lion King Broadway play. No one watches those outside some population of the U.S., why would you use it as an example?

  Anyway, the idea is this: awkward people have more intense focus, but also a narrower one. They are compulsively attracted by specific things, ignoring everything else. Normal people just have a broader focus on everything, intuitively making connections between disparate signals, while for an awkward person it takes conscious effort to switch focus and combine things in their head. This leads to advantages and disadvantages, since they can focus on research, invention, refining of knowledge and so on, but they are "felt" by society at large as weird, because they miss social cues which determine social status and even interpersonal trust.

  An interesting question at the end was: if being awkward is something that makes one a social outcast, how come it was not eliminated by evolution. And the answer is that less social people are actually more free to explore the edges of human knowledge and behavior, thus fighting stagnation on the level of entire groups. Groups without their awkwards die off.

  I loved that a lot of vague social terms that we normally use were described and even defined analytically, complete with some ideas and concrete actions on how to reach specific goals. A lot of time when people analyze such psychological traits, they do it from the perspective of a normie. It was nice to get not only the definition, but also the theorems behind, so to speak. 

  Bottom line: I really recommend reading the beginning of the book. The rest you can consider optional, even if it's still very interesting and informative.

  I occasionally try to add to my list books that have won literary awards, so that maybe I start to get what writing masterpieces are about. Unfortunately, most of the time I get to read obtuse and pompous works which have reached the top due to some alignment of agenda or talking about something fashionable. I guess this is somewhere in between.

  The Essex Serpent is certainly not a bad book, but it is boring as fuck. Imagine a gothic novel set in the 19th century where the focus is a giant serpent somewhere in Essex. A science leaning recent widow (coming from an abusive relationship, no less) is fascinated by the possibility of this creature. Around her orbit a socialist maid and good friend, a handsome priest dedicated to his terminally ill wife and a talented but unattractive surgeon who has a crush on the widow. Women kind of win, men sort of lose, but with some dignity. That's it in a nutshell.

  Now imagine that at every turn of phrase, EVERYTHING is being taken into focus: what people have eaten, eating and what they thought about it, what people have said, felt, felt that someone else feels or thinks or about what they said, colors, smells, sounds, social norms, romantic tension, you name it, it's there.

  I cannot believe many writers would have the talent to write like Sarah Perry, but I feel there are even more who wouldn't ever want to. You have to dedicate attention and effort to dig out the meaning of every sentence and then have the memory and fortitude to weave that meaning into the story that you think the author is trying to tell. There is a saying you shouldn't walk faster than what is needed to look around, but there is a difference between looking around and combing the plane of experience for every single thing. 

  Personally, I gave up after a quarter of the book, when I realized I didn't care about the characters, the world, the time or even the giant creature. This is categorized as fiction, but it's just a slightly dramatic historical tale that just happens to not be about people who have actually existed, although it is inspired by true events.

  Imagine a Western with guns and outlaws and the like, but the world feels like in the times of the Roman Empire, there is magic and technology (fueled by magic) as well as characters that without being exactly the same, are clearly inspired by dwarves and dark elves.

  The Incorruptibles is seen through the eyes of a dwarf. He and his gun slinging human partner partner are caught in the machinations of rich and powerful Ruman nobles while being attacked by dark elf-like creatures. The story is dark and while it provides a kind of happy ending, it's a gritty tale.

  I've previously read a two novellas anthology from John Hornor Jacobs and I felt a similar vibe there: he draws inspiration from history and the worlds and characters of other writers and make them his own, blending them with a lot of creativity. However, the stories are a bit slow and not always enjoyable. They are gripping, though.

  I don't know what to feel about this series. I liked the book and it could be considered stand-alone, but it opened a lot of avenues for new stories and there was a lot of foreshadowing and world building, so it does feel a little incomplete without the rest of the (hi)story. However, I am not sure I want to invest in it, although I am tempted.

  Bottom line: a gritty magical Western hybrid. It was good.

  I am writing this during the second tour of presidential elections, and as the first one has just been annulled. Yes, you read that right, it's a ridiculous situation, but it gets much much worse. After the initial shock of seeing Calin Georgescu clearly winning the first tour of the elections while no one seemed to know who he was, the reaction of people, authorities, media, personalities in culture and science - everyone that supposedly should be steering the country in the right direction - has been a hysterical denial of reality. But in order to understand what the hell is going on, you have to start from the beginning, with the small details that got lost in the media coverage. So bear with me.

  I will be talking about elections, but in the context of this post I focus on presidential elections, not the parliamentary ones, unless specifically mentioned.

  And so it begins

  The first indication that something was amiss was when people started to receive notices and fines from the authorities for posting things on Facebook during the election period, when campaigning is prohibited. This came as a surprise to many people who don't understand how modern social media works, because they had felt their online presence was kind of anonymous, at least protected by that level of unreality that feels natural in the online. How can things happening on the Internet affect your real life? This may seem as a small off topic detail, but it becomes relevant later.

  Then the first tour of the elections came and people were shocked to see that Calin Georgescu, an independent candidate no one seemed to know anything about and who had been predicted to get at most 5% of the votes, got instead close to 25%, giving him a comfortable lead compared to the others. Worse, this guy had clear pro Russian sympathies and maybe even legionary ones (this being a political movement from 70 years ago which was pro Nazi). How can one be for both Russia and Nazism is beyond me, but I digress. And it gets worse, because there were several extremist parties with their own candidates and if you add them all together with Georgescu's votes you get close to 40%. How did this happen?

  The favorite in the presidential race was the current Prime Minister of Romania, leader of the strongest party in the country, Marcel Ciolacu. He got third place, almost tied with the liberal leaning female candidate Elena Lasconi. Another shock, because no one expected one to lose so badly and the other to win so many votes. We are talking about my country, a place that has never had a female president and any woman in power so far has been some guy's puppet. I want to believe Romanians are capable of accepting a female president, but it's unlikely.

   Reaction

  To see the reaction to these events was both entertaining and terrifying. Being politically naive, I was initially happy, because while I hold almost no common views with the extremist discourse of the winner, I wanted to see people shocked out of their complacency, forced to think and consider the implications of their action and inaction. I wanted the arrogant country authorities and people of influence to get jolted into at least pretending to do their job. I wanted the "you have to vote no matter what, even if you're not represented by any candidate" mob to eat their words. Just like the Colectiv situation ten years ago, I was hoping against hope that this will be a drive for positive change. But again, I let hope guide my thoughts, to no positive result. What was awakened was the collective mindless monster of the populace and nothing more.

  In order for a relatively unknown person to win the elections there were several institutions that had to have failed utterly in their work: election officials, security services (which were giving fines for Facebook posts just a few days before), counter candidates (one of which was Prime Minister), their campaign engines and all the government mechanisms they controlled, the media (whether controlled or not), sociologists gauging the people's choices, the statisticians creating the polls and interpreting them (both before elections AND at the exit polls). In other words: politics, authority, media and science failed completely and irrevocably.

  The general reaction to this was panic. Not "well, I messed up, let's fix this", which I had hoped, but "I couldn't have messed up this much, something else is to blame". In a matter of days everyone rallied to... save their asses. Election authorities approved recounting of votes based on a complaint raised by a less than 1% candidate, after 30 years of refusing such things with a lot more evidence of fraud. Media was flooded with exposés of the evil candidate Georgescu, somehow overly religious, misogynist, pro Russian, Nazi and legionary at the same time, financed by shadowy forces connected to Russia and maybe China, supported by priests in the backward churches outside the cities and TikTok influencers, a true Rasputin. Talking heads switched their discourse from who should have seen this coming to how defenseless Romanian people have been manipulated by the unstoppable forces of doom scrolling on social media. Authorities got into action to determine the outside influences that had caused this, against their best efforts. The highest Romanian court started deliberating based on all of this new information. People got into the street spontaneously and peacefully demonstrating for democracy and European identity. Just today police started to raid "extremists" that posted images of weaponry on social media - for the first time I've seen this.

  I call bullshit!

  Just days before the annulment of the election tour, the head of the same institution that did it said he sees no significant changes in the count of the votes. In fact, this is not even the reason of the annulment, but the "declassified" documents coming from the security services who now, suddenly, had evidence of external influence of the elections and "continuing cybernetic attacks". Well, duh! Cybernetic attacks, by their nature, never end.

  But while declaring no campaign finances and clearly having someone with a lot of money support his campaigning, while publishing ultra professional high res videos on media platforms, some mimicking the ones Putin did, but tailored towards Romanian traditional sensibilities, while showing a public presence that people just don't have without a lot of preparing and training, Georgescu did nothing provenly illegal, so all the votes coming his way were sincere, regardless of how misguided. To protect democracy, government institutions just decided, together with the media, young people in the streets chanting for democracy and European freedom and old people talking in scared high pitched voices in the park, that elections just didn't yield the correct result, so we must redo them.

  I can't imagine better results for shadowy anti-democratic forces than this! On one side, a complete failure of democratic institutions, both before and after the fact, as well as the kneejerk reaction of people who should have known better. On the other side, a large disillusioned portion of the populace just having their choice forcefully eliminated, like they don't exist. Not only they, but also the pro liberal Lasconi supporters, who will now lose any chance of winning the presidency. In the end, the worst result for most of the electorate, a terrible long lasting blow to democracy and trust in authorities in general and a higher polarization between "city people" and "countryside people".

  Ignoring 40% of the population won't make them go away, you know. And they won't just die off and leave their smarter and more educated children behind, instead just younger, even less educated by experience, copies of themselves, fighting for whatever random cause or belief they're manipulated into.

  Witch hunt

  There is a term called Witch hunt which applies to what is happening here. I urge you to read the Wikipedia article, because it's very revealing.

  Societies function on a very simple contract: a relatively common narrative must be maintained and some institutions are created to curate and enforce it. When that narrative is contradicted by reality, society unravels, so there are only two choices for stability: craft the narrative to be a balance between reality and the people's needs or eliminate the source of contradiction. It's that simple. The spirit of democracy is closely linked to this, as it attempts to provide the mechanisms to keep that delicate balance and stave off as much as possible the necessity for "eliminating contradiction". But when that fails, the only solution is blunt force, mob fear, fanatical clinging to the narrative, which most of the time leads to tyranny and/or atrocity. Why is it so hard to realize that the narrative has to change a little?

  In our case, the narrative is the naive and stupid comfort of authority functioning regardless of what we do, that so many communities tend to fall into. It's already a first step to autocracy, the same narrative applies there as well, in the beginning. But when it fails, people have to find a culprit and ritualistically sacrifice them. I don't know what will happen with poor Georgescu, but as I see it he will either become the dictator of Romania or be burned at the stake.

  And a lot of other things are going to fall with him: online privacy, as little as it is nowadays, honest public discourse, as little as it is allowed now - even in countries which are paragons of democracy, opportunity to choose anything unexpected. We may see even more fanatical adherence to the mythical concept of a united Europe, regardless of its state, while becoming even more afraid of technology. And this just because we obstinately refuse any opportunity to open our eyes and think for ourselves. We have people to do that for us! If he somehow wins, which I find unlikely, things would be even worse.

  Can't wait for mandatory identity checks everywhere online and a global ban on social media for under 16 and of TikTok in general, as a means to protect democracy and free speech. What a joke!

  My thoughts

  Well, obviously all of these are my thoughts, but as a conclusion, I am terrified. Not by Russia, Europe, China or the United States, but by the people of my own country. We have lived in fear for so much time that it has become part of our DNA. We are controlled by it. Make Romanians afraid and you can make them do anything, say anything, think anything. Maybe that's true for everybody.

  I was disgusted to see how the Russian boogie man was resurrected once more to justify unilateral reactions by clueless authorities. What are you going to do? Fight Russia? Send security to arrest the priests who campaigned in churches before and during the election in the countryside, probably for heavy fees? How ironic is that Romanians are crying to the skies for security forces to validate and protect democracy. I guess in 30 years one forgets everything.

  I was happy to think the veil of illusion will be lifted from the eyes of Romanians, but what happened instead is that some of my own illusions have been blown away. Of course, I don't like it and I feel fear. That's natural. What we do with it is what counts. I wrote a blog post. Yay, me!

  To people who think leaving Romania will somehow solve the problem, it does not. But when freezing and fighting seems to not do anything, what is left but to flee? I get it.

  Personally, I want my country to get through this and become stronger for it, but the idea of Romania is just as much an illusion as anything else. And we've already proven that we can ignore every reality and forget any past, unless it suits us otherwise. This is not the country of my childhood or of my youth and it will continue to change in the future. But the attachment is still there and I wish it well.

  David Brin was 30 when he published Sundiver in 1980, but the book, his first, feels much older, almost van Vogtian. The writing style and subject matter further strengthen the feeling. Imagine a bunch of humans and aliens in the future, diving into the Sun to communicate with a newly discovered race of intelligent beings there. A tree alien, an uplifted chimp and others are part of the expedition.

  All the tropes of sci-fi pulp are there: a youngish protagonist of the same age as the author, romance, mystery and its deductive solving as well as its revealing in elaborate group discussions, the belief in the power of meditation and trance to improve the mind, people having Erich von Däniken as the prophet of the origin of the human race, lasers, fist fights, hints of colonialism, and so on and so on. The book is very entertaining, but it's spectacularly outdated. I guess the lasers and the Däniken references place it after 1960, but ignoring that, one could believe it was written in the '40s.

  There are some ingenious ideas in the book, though. In this universe, intelligence is believed to never have been evolved by itself, instead "patron races" uplift existing native animals to intelligence, generating a complex web of patrons and clients. Not humans, though. They have been partially uplifted then left to their own devices, thus placing them in a dubious middle of the hierarchy, while kept away from the somewhat monolithic culture of the galaxy. Humans are both exotic and quaint, ignorant and arrogant, daring to know things they figured out for themselves rather than spoon fed by "the Library".

   I don't think I will read more of this series, but I might read more from Brin, whenever I feel the need to go classical without diving into a time compression bubble.

  Unique visuals, inspired by Japanese theater, tell the story of a hunter of demons, or mononoke. It's not action as it is basically a procedural, where the hunter needs to determine the root cause of the appearance of the demons. A bit too drawn out, but very nice otherwise. The weird graphics, the sounds, the weird symbolism all work together to build an unsettling feeling that evokes the supernatural without ever trying to fully explain it.

  Mononoke has twelve 20 minute episodes, where a story is told in two or three episodes at a time. It is a spinoff of Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales, by the same studio, that I have not watched. I just rewatched the Mononoke series - of which I remembered nothing - because Netflix just released a film called Mononoke - Phantom in the Rain (or Paper Umbrella?) and I wanted to know the context.

  The plot is as follows: an elfish looking person carrying a mysterious sword and advertising himself as a Medicine Seller is always in situations were mononoke appear. These are like ghosts "supernatural disease" created by the intertwining of the fates of people or whatever. There is a catch, though. The sword can only be drawn when the Form, Truth and Regret are known: the true shape of the demon, its physical manifestation and its spiritual manifestation. In other words, one cannot vanquish a demon without understanding it completely. Pretty therapeutic.

  In the entire series we don't learn who the mysterious hunter is. The stories, though, happen in different historical eras, thus implying he is not human.

  I can't say the anime is perfect, though. Scenes seem to be drawn out, kind of like Japanese theater itself where they move, say something very slowly, then everything stops, then they do it again. Maybe that would have been fine if not for unexplainable moments of verbosity when, after an episode and a half of saying a few words syllable by syllable, the hunter was suddenly dumping pages of wiki lore before doing anything. But I liked it and maybe the film will be more refined. Just have to see.

  It's not that Titanium Noir is a bad book, but it's the same tired cliché of the cynical private investigator trying to unravel a simple murder that turns out to be a global conspiracy that makes the reader think of social issues. The sci-fi is almost incidental, so I kind of listened to a third of the book, then fell asleep and woke up close to the end and I didn't find anything exciting in it. A disappointment from something that has such a cool title and intriguing cover.

  Nick Harkaway is the son of John le Carré and he mostly writes fantasy, apparently, but in this he went a bit, just a tiny bit, towards science fiction. Not enough to induce me to finish the book, unfortunately.

  Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup is a book worth of a political thriller miniseries, only too real. It shows the 10+ years history of Theranos, a "unicorn company" formed only on personal charisma and lies and which reached a top valuation of ten billion American dollars at its peak. Billions, with a B! It also shows how that can happen within the American economic, political and social system, which - if you ask me - is much more damning and interesting than the exposure of Elisabeth Holmes and her cronies.

  John Carreyrou also had the faith, training and backing of a powerful journalistic entity just to be able to bring this to public attention, something to be considered in this climate of journalistic consolidation into partisan corporations that care nothing for the truth. It would have been so easy for this to have continued for years, unchecked and uncheckable, if it weren't for this tiny detail.

  To boot, this book will be extremely triggering to anyone working in a corporate environment, especially Americans. Let's play some corporate bingo: sociopath CEO claiming their vision is paramount to anything and anyone, older generation Indian management that feels the lives of employees belong to the company, paranoid NDA backed culture where people just disappear without any mention to the remaining employees, totalitarian control of data, communication and the general narrative, backed by law firms hired on millions of dollars to intimidate anyone who might challenge it, inner-circle privileges given to loyal individuals, university dropout visionaries that consider any technical hurdle something to be solved by lowly multiple PhD holding peons and not something that can hold them back, even if they themselves are technical imbeciles, yes-men culture where dissent or even mere criticism is considered treason, to be punished by immediate termination, public humiliation and legal action. The list can go on...

  I can't recommend this book enough. It's not entertaining in any meaningful way, instead it's terrifying. Imagine being in a situation where you have the knowledge, the certainty, the moral high ground, the awareness of your absolute right in a matter, only to give it all away because someone with a lot of money sics a law firm on you. Imagine bullying at every level once you have haphazardly signed some documents that you assumed were standard corporate operating practice, but instead signed your soul to the company. Imagine trying to tell people that something is terribly wrong, only to be met with dismissive comments on your character and expertise, just because someone believes in a PowerPoint presentation more than in any deity and because you are not part of the in-group.

  But one thing that the book did not discuss, although it implied heavily through out its length, is how can something like this happen. How is it possible that somehow law can be corrupted to stop people from reporting unlawful acts? How can a company be created and thrive and be financed by people on promises alone, while heavily educated and well informed naysayers can be summarily dismissed at any moment and their input suppressed? In fact, this is a direct and informed criticism of the way American society works at the higher levels. Theranos was a symptom that, unchecked, led to Trumpism. There are direct parallels between the mindset of the management in this 2010 company and the political system taking over in the 2020s, with mindless loyal cronies being hired for all of the critical jobs on a wave of populist faith.

  Even more spooky is the strong desire people felt for this book be a hit-job, to have the young female charismatic Elisabeth entrepreneur somehow be the victim of the male dominated system, the disgruntled employees, the Svengali 20 years older lover and irate Indian bully, the vengeful journalist, all working together to stop her from playing her fantasy of becoming the next Steve Jobs. You can imagine a Scooby Doo moment where she could have just made everything work out if it weren't for the pesky kids. But the truth documented in this book shows that, while certainly some sort of victim, Holmes was a mentally deranged individual who still managed to play the entire world and reach wealth and prestige even some nations in the world only dream of.

  Bottom line: you have to read this book, even if it's very long, terrifying, frustrating and its "happy ending" only demonstrates that you have to make a LOT of mistakes for justice to happen when you have enough money and political backing.

  Jesus Christ, this book has 100000 chapters! And that's because there are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

  Anyway, Sea of Rust starts off as yet another western with robots, set in a post apocalyptic desert, where machines with guns act and feel like people in a lawless land. But as the book progressed, it became more of an exploration of what means to be alive, what meaning we derive from life and what means to actually live as opposed to just survive. It wasn't a literary or philosophical masterpiece or anything, but it did carry a nice punch to the gut in some scenes. The book became better as it got close to the end, to the point that I could have considered reading the next book in the story, if there was one.

  In fact, there is another book in the series, but it's a prequel. Film writer types, right?

  There are about three major twists, one that you kind of guess from the beginning, one that I should have seen, but never thought about and another that is more or less a hope to get into another genre later on. There are also some major plot holes, but just a few and they underpin the story, so you just have to ignore those if you want to enjoy the book.

  Robert C. Cargill is a film writer as well as books, he did the Sinister films and Doctor Strange and The Black Phone, the last two having seen and enjoyed. His writing is good, although you feel the cinematic nature of it. Writing from the perspective of robots did help with limiting things to just sound and visuals anyway.

  I liked the book, although I didn't feel it spent enough time creating the world or its characters. A world of machines should have been orders of magnitude more diverse and interesting than what's in this. It's one of those stories that need to be told in a certain way, and the world around is just a prop for it. It feels linear and without breadth. If I were to compare it with anything, it would be the Fallout TV series, but seen only from the perspective of the ghoul.

  The anime Dan Da Dan has a funny and endearing first episode where two awkward high school students dare each other to test each other's paranormal/alien beliefs. And what do you know? Both find stuff! But then it gets into the same terrible Japanese clichés of monster of the week and new nakamas and high school dramas.

   The start music is fun, too, which probably hits hard when you first watch the series, but then, together with the content, it fades into the background.

   But the first episode is worth it.