I thought I would try something else. Since I liked Blood Song, the first book in the Raven's Shadow series, I went with another Anthony Ryan book, but from another series (Covenant of Steel). This allows me to understand the writer more and pick and choose which series I want to continue with.

  And the verdict is that I liked the main character in The Pariah more, but I liked the story less. Still a good book which I recommend, but the writing patterns that were merely surprising in Blood Song veered towards annoying when also used in a completely different series. And by that I mean the foreshadowing of things to come - which are slight spoilers most of the time - and the obsession with fate or prophecy, both reducing the agency of the main character tremendously. Add to that the levelling up of the character from uneducated to scribe in a merely four years, while also working in a mine, and it gets old fast.

  The story revolves around this kid who is part of a band of outlaws. He is fiercely loyal to the band leader, infatuated with the leader's girl and, other than happily killing for his guy, a pretty smart and decent human being. Yeah, don't overthink it. Stuff happens and he embarks on a journey of adventures in a medieval world with just the right amount of occult and magic to make it not feel like simple historical fiction.

  I was saying that I liked the character best in this book because he is a little more gray than the absolute moral powerhouse that was the lead in Raven's Shadow. Just slightly so, as most of the book we still get the principled moral choice every damn time, but enough to make him feel more real. Other than that: incredibly beautiful women who don't seem to need any sex, medieval battles and politics, heroes and villains, lots of mud and horses and running and planning and the promise of another epic saga of unbridled heroism.

  Bottom line: Good book, interesting setting, good characters, but a story formula that only feels fresh the first time you consume it. It would have benefited from less fate determinism and more moral gray areas. Even the character admits, in situations of very consequential choices, that he didn't have real options because of who he is. Feels like Ryan should listen more to that complaint from his own character!

  Finally, a great fantasy book! A traditional hero that comes from hardship and overcomes through skill and good reasoning, plus a dash of magic that doesn't overwhelm the overall story. Job well done, Mr. Anthony Ryan!

  The only complaint I have is that Blood Song is long, yet still just a slice of the overall story. People already are accustomed to endless magical worlds extending dozens of books, but sometimes it's just nice to have a standalone once in a while, you know. Yet, at least for this story, I get it. The author was a full time researcher and has a degree in Medieval History. There is much attention to detail in the world building and the way society works, the kingdoms, the characters, so to just waste it all on just one book would have been insane.

  So, on to the story: in a country where "the Faith" is all powerful to the forceful exclusion of any other religion, of which there are many, a young boy whose mother just died is left by his father in the service of "the Order". Well, Ryan is nothing if not a poet... Anyway, it's basically a dad sending his grieving son to military school, only also in the service of the Faith and in an adapt or die kind of situation. What a dick, right? Our protagonist thinks so, too, but he is dutiful, intelligent and hard working, so he eventually gets to shine.

  I love this kind of characters: surviving through action and thought, rather than luck, overcoming hardships and thus evolving as a person, rather than just increasing in power level or whatever. Also, no one tries to deconstruct anything or pander to any kind of audience. Vaelin Al Sorna is a classical male hero, well written and well balanced.

  Now, that's just the beginning, because a combination of adventures, foreshadowing and even prophecies let us know in no uncertain terms that he will have a sad but greatly consequential life. And even if he gets through a lot in this book, there are five novels in total and at least as many novellas set in this world.

  Yet, the characters are compelling, the subjects mature, the story captivating and the writing delightful without being too pompous or complicated. This was a near perfect book for me and I expect I will be reading the rest of the series, too, sooner or later.

  Penric's Demon is the first book in the World of the Five Gods series, which spans four novels and eleven novellas, and it's a novella itself - although the same Wiki page saying this has a list of 19 stories, make of this what you will.

  Short, entertaining and with a main character that I immediately liked, there is no reason to not read this book, I think.

  You see, in this fantasy world, Lois McMaster Bujold describes five gods of which one is "The Bastard", responsible with demons and stuff. In fact, there are four "main" gods that each get a season associated with them and The Bastard is responsible for all things out of wack, or out of season, so to speak.

  So in this world there is the possibility to get possessed by a demon which is like a non physical entity that inhabits you, grows with you and also gives you power. A very interesting idea, in which the demon is actually shaped by the people it "rides". It's not so much parasitism as symbiosis.

  Penric is a nice young man going to his wedding, only to accidentally get a demon. Only the demon is not that bad and Penric has not been trained/brainwashed into the religion of the Bastard so that he would not know how to interact with his new companion. It's more of a setup book, as it doesn't span many events, just a short introduction into a world that will become much larger in time.

  I don't know if I am going to try the entire series any time soon, but I might. I really enjoyed Penric's Demon.

  The Rook starts intriguingly with an amnesiac woman with strange powers who receives information in the form of letters from herself written before she lost her memory. And I've read that part, which was decently written, until I realized that I knew the story. They made a TV show out of it, which I did not enjoy.

  You see, from the great start it veers rapidly into a "secret paranormal government organization" thing, which is one of the most boring fantasy genres ever. But it's worse, since the woman is an agent of this organization and she has to hide that she lost her memory. So we're inside the organization in all of its pompous bureaucratic splendor instead of the more appealing side of the genre where the protagonist is trying to evade them without knowing too much of the group.

  Therefore, I stopped reading. I can't comment on the quality of the book or on Daniel O'Malley's writing after only a chapter, so I will leave it at that.

  Spellslinger is a typical fantasy hero journey story, well written and pretty fun. I liked and disliked in equal measure how Sebastien de Castell was edging the typical YA clueless but full of heart hero, alternating between making him incredibly smart and lucky and really dumb and miserable. But in the end it boiled down to the same formula.

  The plot reminded me of a book I've read recently: Unsouled by Will Wight. There is a country where magical power determines social hierarchy and our hero is one smart and crafty guy who, for some reason, can't magic. The more I think about it, the more I realize how much alike these two books are. I won't compare them beat by beat here, as that would mean spoilers, but they contain really similar ideas.

  And while the hero eventually learns some really soul crushing things, it feels weird to have a hero that pulls through every hardship, protects his friends, sacrifices for the motherland and so on, only to be put down by exposition. It was fun stuff and if you're looking for an entertaining light YA fantasy series, you could do a lot worse than with Spellslinger.

  I won't continue the series, but I liked the book and the world.

  Embers of War is a light little space adventure that feels both strangely anachronistic and written by a woman - even if Gareth L. Powell is very much male. Dog/machine spaceships with their own emotions and personality, human and alien factions bumbling around in the universe like they own the place and the hint of something greater waiting to pounce, but the focus is mostly on the emotions of the various characters, most of them women, and their perspective on life, duty, responsibility and ultimately the fate of the universe. This either makes Powell a great writer that can inhabit the characters he creates or a very weird dude. Even the conflicts seem to be more about personal drama and psychological implications than actual important stakes.

  Anyway, the story revolves around a spaceship that was involved in something horrific and decided to resign her commission and, in order to atone, join an organization that specializes in space rescues. You see, in this future, the ships are run by hybrid organic and machine brains, with the organic part derived from dogs and humans, so they are kind of like persons who can do that. That in itself was a bit hard to swallow, especially in a book written in 2018. It really felt like something that has probably been written a long time ago and just now published.

  Another thing that pulled me out of the story was the first person perspective. I don't have an issue with that, normally, but in this case every chapter was written from the perspective of a different character and all of them in the first person. If I wasn't paying attention which chapter I started, I felt like something was really off, since the inner monologue of most characters - the main ones - all sounded the same, but happened to different people, which was jarring.

Final nail in the coffin, the focus was painfully exclusive on the humans, even if the ship had a little engineering alien that had its own little chapters, the other characters never spared it a thought. And all of the inner thoughts of this guy were "work, fix, sleep in my nest, that's what I do!". A little Dobby, but in space, while the humans were whining about how much they care about the crew and had completely forgotten he existed.

  That being said, it wasn't a bad book, but it wasn't great either. The ideas in it are intriguing, but by this point they feel a bit derivative. I am almost convinced that the following books in the series will find a different, better voice and the story will unfold in a more interesting way, but after reading this one book I am not motivated to continue reading the series.

  The Lemon is another DNF for me, but this time it wasn't because the book was bad. It was just too focused when I wanted to be entertained. It explores the world of famous people and the others who want to leech off of them, only the book starts with the death of the single character that I gave a damn about. Good writing, not what I needed now.

  S.E. Boyd writes (or rather write, since it's a virtual author manufactured by three Irish journalists) really well and it made me want to like the book, but after a while of just trying and failing to connect and care, I've decided to abandon the book.

  A famously iconic person dies, which makes friends, acquaintances and perfects strangers scramble to fight for the void. There are a lot of characters and sometimes it's hard to keep track of them unless you're paying attention. And most of them are really unpleasant or uninteresting. The only interesting guy in the book seems to be - intentionally so - the dead one, and no one of the vultures picking on the corpse of his fame realizes who he was, what he inspired in people and why he was so respected and liked. A book about hungry greedy blind people.

  Bottom line: reading this book probably requires some passing interest in the psychology of fame obsessed assholes, which I didn't have. But the Goodreads rating this has is much lower than what it deserves.

  One of the things that I can observe nowadays as a 50 year old man is how spam has changed the world, but mostly the people. You see, when the Internet started it was just a random connection between people and sites and any part of that could be abused. It was customary to enter some site or another and be bombarded with flashing ads with shrill grotesque colors. Popup ads came later to great mis-effect. Email was just as unsafe, people having to publish their emails in strange obfuscated ways so that they are not scraped into spam lists. Spam was everywhere and people were not prepared.

  But people learn, so even lacking any real technical or legislative support against spam, the smart kids would train their own brains to detect and ignore spam. An almost The City and the City situation, if you will, where strident portions of your online experience were just automatically scrubbed from perception through training. It's the reason why I find it so hard to see big colorful buttons with icons on them, because my brain is looking for the useful link that says "Download" in text.

  Spam evolved as well, though. Today we are just as spammed as ever, but in more civilized and studied ways. The purpose, after all, is not to curb your enjoyment, but to make you spend your money or your attention. It's just that the latter are much more important for just about everybody but you than the quality of your experience. Emails send you legit subscription content that you can (maybe and with great effort) unsubscribe from. Sites pop up small joyous messages that nudge you to buy something only when you do an action like scroll the page or move to a section of the site. Legitimate looking alerts warn you about the danger you are in and how you could be helped by just spending a bit of money.

  So that leads me to today, when even the visual language of the internet has changed. Every action has to show a little reaction, a shading, a rotation, a spark, party poppers, shining stars, animated people and animals emoting to your every gesture. And it only gets worse from there.

  And I am asking myself: how do these sites survive? Surely people open them and their brain shouts SPAM!!! in panic and they close the site, right? Well, no. Apparently, people raised on this stuff got addicted to it. A "normal" site with text and images and links feels bland and uninspiring to them. They NEED the feedback and continuous stimulation. My youth spent in the wild early Internet has created imune responses that just fire up regularly today for things that younger generations feel its completely normal.

  I am not here to argue who is right and why, but just to note how this online experience - like any other experience - changes us without our conscious awareness, in directions that takes a lot of time and self reflection to even perceive. To paraphrase Trainspotting: We are colonised by spam. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy thing to be colonised by. No. What does that make us?

  The Witch and the Tsar started intriguing, with Baba Yaga being the protagonist of the story, but within one chapter it became obvious it was some kind of weird misandrist fantasy instead of a well rounded story. I won't read this.

  The Loop has almost everything that is good about young adult books, but also all of the bad.

  Ben Oliver starts with a somewhat silly idea, derivative from The Matrix, where people can be used as batteries, describes an endless prison of death row inmates that get to delay their sentence every now and then by accepting being guinea pigs for an extension of their life and controlled by a combination of heartless psychopaths and undefeatable technology. So far so good.

  Then he presents cardboard shallow characters that are inconsistent, dimwitted and bland and asks us to care about anything that happens to them. And of course this crap is part of a trilogy! He leaves literal (Chekov's?) weapons lying around and people too dumb to remember they were there to begin with. Ugh!

  As for the author, the only contact for a Ben Oliver I could find was a twitter account that has since been closed.

  When you dump every cliché of YA novels, then refuse to follow up with any of reason, adventure or empathetic characters, all you have is a flashy Apple TV like story, with a lot of form and no substance. I tried and tried to finish it reading it, but I gave up halfway. DNF this thing!

  I have no idea why I put Darius The Great Is Not Okay on my reading list. It's a short introspective book about a young Iranian-American boy going for the first time in Iran to meet his mother's family. It's coming of age, deals with clinical depression and it's pretty sweet. But that's about it.

  The guy is a Trekkie - The Next Generation no less - and peppers the book with references, so that was fun, but I guess if you are not most of them will fall flat. Funny enough, just before that I was reading a book about a Jewish girl, but I swear I chose the books at random.

  Anyway, I did enjoy the Persian culture references, which I think it's the best part. Darius himself is a rather dull character: young boy who believes people think badly of him and that he's not enough and then magically grows into a person because he gets some support and understanding from the Iranian part of his family and finally makes a friend. And no, there is no magic, this is a straight book, mostly autobiographical.

  Adib Khorram's writing is good, but almost like reporting. I didn't really feel as things flowed in a literary sense. I did enjoy it, but I can't recommend it, unless you're into this kind of stuff.

Laziness is priced in

  When I was a kid, playing with Windows 3.11, I quickly found out that network drive sharing was on by default. This means that anyone on your local network could read almost any file in your C: drive unless you did something about it. And also, all of your passwords - including the user and password of your Internet connection - were saved into a single file that was poorly encrypted, so that meant that anyone in your local network, with a silly little program that would crack that file in minutes, could have all of your passwords.

  But I wasn't "a hacker" knowing this anymore than a person would be a thief if they found some money on the ground. Why would the premier operating system on the planet be this dumb? Well, the answer was simple: people didn't really do local networks in the age of the modem, people didn't read the technical documentation of operating systems like I did and people weren't aware of what would be going on to complain about it even if it happened. In reality, anyone connecting to any ISP would have their user and password visible to any other person connecting there. Not only that, but any and all personal files on their computer.

  I like to call this "the price of laziness". If it apparently costs more to fix than to ignore, it will never get fixed. This particular issue was trivial to be solved by any ISP, they just chose not to.

  Remember movies like Hackers or WarGames, where kids were routinely entering secure systems to the chagrin of "the man"? It wasn't because they were smart and cool like in the movies, it was because no one was bothering to protect their clients. Did you know that for more than 20 years the nuclear safety codes for U.S. rockets was 00000000? When something awful happens to you and people knew about the cause of your problem way before you had it, it means just that not enough consequential people had that problem before you that someone would be bothered to fix it.

  And now, when I am NOT a kid, I see the same stupid stuff. The official YouTube TV application is punishing me for every video with tens of seconds of ads every time I start one and sometimes smack in its middle anyway. But if you close the video two or three times, it just goes through. This only means they calculated the price of the average person watching videos pressing Back and OK a few times is larger than the price it takes them to passively endure minutes of ads.

  One might say that in this case everybody's happy: Google reports people have watched the ads, smart people get around them, lazy people don't, money flows. But there are people who are paying for those ads to be displayed and even if I find no real sympathy for them, their service provider should!

  Same thing with JavaScript paywalls on major news websites. You open one article or two and they slap you with "You've read the last free article for today". Or... you could just disable JavaScript for the site and read ALL of their articles. And I know there is a feeling of smugness when you do this, but again, it was right there. No one actually cared enough to prevent you to read the article! The SEO score was more important. Most people are paying.

  Piracy is the perfect example. There are today simple ways of watching any movie or series, listening to any song, reading any book, without paying a dime. And while authors are crying about it, no one actually does anything because most people find those ways more complicated than paying tens of dollars monthly for streaming services. Streaming services that will increase the price or bring back ads for the cheap tiers or cancel any show as long as they got people excited enough to subscribe to the service with the first season and so on. There was a time when streaming was considered "the solution to piracy" because piracy dropped sharply once people had a comfortable experience devoid of guilt and priced reasonably. But piracy went back up, because the price did not stay reasonable and the experience got increasingly less comfortable as corporations felt they had you locked in.

  In all the companies I worked for as a software developer, I was routinely denied when trying to fix bugs if "it wasn't planned". So when you use some software or app or web site and it fails in the most stupid ways, remember to not curse the developers, they actually wanted to solve those issues, in their free time, and were denied because there was no money in it!

And then they blame you

  This post is not about software or the Internet, it's about everything! The curse of "Good enough" is what led us to this. The laws that only work for some, the way everything seems to get more and more complicated by the day for no reason, the "security" that everyone shoves does your throat even if you don't want it, because they need your data or identity or shopping patterns, the sad predatory state of human relations. Ah, it's good enough! What could possibly go wrong?

  But it gets worse. When people inevitably start taking advantage of these blatant holes, the answer of the authorities is to heavily punish the people that do it rather than the people that leave those in. That's why when I was a kid I could find tons of documentation on how to do all kind of fun stuff in libraries maintained by groups of dedicated people, but then you just couldn't, because it had become very very illegal. That meant that yes, it was harder to find the simple ways in which you could circumvent systems, but also that it was a lot harder to train to harden systems. If you meet security experts nowadays, they are all paranoid as fuck, not only because they know how easy it is to get somewhere and cause harm, but of how random and stupid authorities treat people with such knowledge.

  It had become routine for companies that are approached by people who found security holes in their systems to sue them for hacking, rather than thank them, reward them and fix the hole. And even if it's evil, it's also partially understandable, because in the idiotic legal systems of today, rewarding someone for finding a security hole means admitting you had one, so you can be sued!

  If Hackers and WarGames were pure entertaining fantasies, something like Takedown - also heavily dramatized - is closer to the truth. There is a scene where the hacker laments that he could do any number of evil deeds, crash systems, steal millions, but he choses not to, yet all law enforcement is after him. Ironically, the movie is based on the demonstrably self-aggrandizing book written by the guy who caught Kevin Mitnick, not on Kevin Mitnick's book.

Other thoughts

  I wrote this post because I remembered the Takedown movie, perhaps Skeet Ulrich's best role ever. Mitnick was a slightly annoying personality for me, but I was sad to hear he died of pancreatic cancer three years ago.

  For a long time I thought of how to create a web site that would allow people to pay for what they stole, if that thing turned to be as good as advertised and people would afford it. For example you would download a movie off the Internet, watch it, enjoy it, then go and pay the company anything for the movie. If someone would get to sue you for pirating content, you could use proof of that payment to justify a reduced punishment. But of course it wouldn't work. Who would be stupid enough to declare they have stolen something knowing full well that some asshole would find a way to use that against them?

  But maybe it would work as a kind of donation system, a delayed Kickstarter, where you just send a tip of appreciation to authors. But it doesn't work like that, either. You would want to send the money to the author of the book you liked, not to the publishing house which essentially owns the book. They would immediately find a way to stop or leech off the money you send like that.

  And final nail in the coffin (quoting ChatGPT here) "Financial systems generally require consent and identification on the recipient side. There’s no standard “send money to this person by name only” system for privacy, fraud, and compliance reasons."

  In conclusion, you pay for "just good enough" and get worse, you are villainized for finding ways to abuse that, even if you don't actually use them and report them for fixing and trying to retroactively fix/pay for your abuse doesn't work either. Meanwhile anything better than "good enough" is altered to be more expensive until it becomes "good enough for what I am paying". Some might call it equilibrium of demand and offer, I call it paying to stay lazy.

Intro

I am sure you have heard of Universal Basic Income (UBI), the idea that every citizen should receive a monthly payment, regardless of any employment, effort or role in society. For obvious reasons, it has its detractors, but also it represents a simple and equitable way of providing to even the poorest of us.

I don't want to get into UBI itself, there are a lot of smarter people debating it, but the discussions about it flare up every time new developments in automation happen. If people are replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots, then it's easier to imagine a post scarcity civilization where machines do the work and humans enjoy the rewards. Human nature, though, makes this hard to conceive.

But what if ubiquitous AI and robots logically lead to the same ultimate outcome regardless?

The shareholder market

In today's Western capitalism it's common to invest in shares or other financial instruments which abstract participation in wealth creation. Instead of creating your own business, working for one or partnering with someone for one, you just buy a piece of an existing business and you get to own a part of its future profits, if any. What does this sound like to you? There is a non-human entity - the business - that does the work and you - the human - enjoy the rewards.

Now imagine you have an AI that you run from home. You install it on your computer and you give it access, configure some skills, give it some money, then tell it to make more of it. You will own its future profits, if any. It's exactly the same thing.

With smart machines, what we now call "passive income" is the only type of income we will get to have.

AI capital

Running the hypothetical AI to generate profits makes you a shareholder in the AI. As long as you own a computing device and have the resources to run a truly intelligent AI on it, you don't have to work anymore.

You don't need to run the AI yourself, you can buy shares from the company that does run it, or you can split the ownership between multiple people. It then gets complicated when any of those people may be themselves artificial. It leads to an interconnected network of people and machines, ownership, control and work that has only one purpose: reduce human effort and maximize returns.

This is just UBI with a different name. Instead of society assigning everyone a piece of the pie, some other entity does it, an AI, a company, a corporation, a group, a relative, another machine, and so on. To me this is the logical, almost inevitable, outcome. Have you ever heard the proverb "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." ? Now imagine its corporate version: "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Give a man a share of a fishing business, and it feeds him for a lifetime."

And yes, some people will have more and some people will have a lot less, but when the entire thing dwarfs human scale and understanding, it will not matter that much.

The end

I've written a lot more on this until I decided to delete it. But you can take this idea further for yourself. In a sense, eternal heaven feels almost inevitable, but at the same time there is nothing for people to do in it anymore - it's also hell. You will get tired of games, cyclical fashion and never ending sexual orgies soon enough. Disease, aging and maybe even death will lose all meaning. We will get worlds of our own where we can do anything we choose.

The funniest thing of all this is that the same mechanisms that make some people want to take control from you, own you, grab everything for themselves are the ones that will slow this process down. Maybe before we all get there, some asshole is going to blow it all up out of spite or incompetence. There will be people who will not get to control any resource generating machine and have no say in what happens. Their suffering will stain our legacy forever, give us another round of strong feeling, meaning and direction, but ultimately it will slightly slow down the final result.

Just like we toil today in thankless workplaces just to make ends meet, then get home to some animal that is ecstatic to see us and will make us smile and give us a sense of meaning, I think machines will take that role, leaving us the only remaining option: being the pet.

  I can't say anything really bad about The World That We Knew. The writing is very good, the characters interesting, but I couldn't find the will to continue reading the book. I may be retrying later, when the zeitgeist is different.

  One problem with the book is that is another story about Jews being oppressed by the evil German Nazis, and at this time I found difficult to separate that idea from the things happening right now. Rather than try to avoid resolving that internal conflict, I've decided to postpone.

  A rather more relevant problem is that... other than the presence of a golem, the story is hardly fantasy, at least up to the point where I stopped reading. One could just as well not make it fantasy and just write a regular historical fiction set in WWII.

  Bottom line: slight chance to try again much later.

  What a delightful dark Icelandic folklore inspired fantasy! If you liked the Arcane animated series, Shadows of the Short Days feels just like that. Young revolutionary young women who go too far, mad knowledge obsessed geeks who go too far, fascist governments with crazy magical steampunk SS corps going too far, and dark and depressing, as any good Nordic writing has to be. The writing of Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson is good, the world building really detailed, I loved it!

  One thing I didn't like was the info dump at the beginning of the book, a bit like the Irulan presentation in the beginning of Lynch's Dune film, which made me think it was also mandated from up high so that the book doesn't put off the normies. It introduces some sort of space colonization story that doesn't really fit with the rest of the book, for starters.

  Another thing that was hard to swallow were the characters. They were very well written, but all of them were selfish delusional assholes. Hard to truly root for any of them.

  But the story was amazing and I lapped it up. An alternate world Reykjavík where magic of two types is real, magical creatures are real and the human government oppresses everything not human, especially the halflings. One of the protagonists is one such halfling, a young woman determined to start a revolution for equality and freedom and ready to walk over corpses to achieve her goal. The second is a student of magic, expelled by the unimaginative authorities of the university, and willing to do anything to understand and tap into the source of magic. They attract the attention of the sadistic government magicians who will, of course, also do anything to achieve their goals.

  Needless to say, things don't really go great for anybody involved. In a world where you can drink or take drugs to alter your magical abilities, not even these sure way solutions to relax and chill the hell down can work.

  Bottom line: it was a very exciting book to read and I intend to continue the series, although not right now. It was actually taxing to live through it and the ending was quite satisfactory. Honestly, this doesn't need a continuation, even if I am glad there is one.