Tamahome > Recent Status Updates

I've always been curious about this since the 80's. I've always liked his comics, especially Doctor Strange with Frank Brunner.

All systems go!

I'm trying not to completely read every footnote. Wish me luck. Emma is basically crazy in the beginning, and the narration reflects her viewpoint. More and more unique characters are being introduced, interacting with each other. How did Austen write this without a computer? And paper was expensive. If only her sister Cassandra didn't burn thousands of Jane Austen's letters.

Liked the sample. Hope it's like The Martian. Hope I like the rest of it as much as boot camp. Learned about algorave coding music.

Doing audio at 1.5x speed. Should finish Book 3 in 30 minutes. Some characters are imprisoned. This is some pretty dark material. Is it my idea of a good time?

Ok, up to the first interlude was good. It could have ended there. Let's see what happens when everyone gets older. I've one hour left in my spotify audiobooks until next month (you get 15). I've never used so many before. I think the end of the first interlude has some more dramatization, where it becomes present tense and it's all italicized (who originally thought reading a lot of italics was a good idea?).

Actually, I'm only 15% through. Ok, the italicized parts of chapters 8 & 29 are dramatized so far. Hey, the eyes on the cover are supposed to have almost vertical pupils. I like how the narrator voices the dragon.

Listening to the audiobook on Spotify while reading the hardcover at the same time. The italicized part in chapter 8 is dramatized with actors and sound effects, but that's a very small part of the book. The audiobook is 26 hours so maybe it's not as long as it appears. There's many small chapters. The ebook looks lackluster with the right side unaligned and none of the dragon graphics. I relate it to Locke & Key.

My interest is waning in all the Bob clones. I'll probably get back to it. It's definitely hard sf in space, which should be up my alley, and it's different. Poor Earth.

Scifi, humor, and now it's in space. All the good things. And a pretty hardcover with "Bob" printed on the page edges.

Undeniably keeps the ball rolling, and is sprinkled with tidbits of interesting information. It talks a lot about consciousness. I wonder where it's going. I think I can finish it in 9 hours.

I ordered the blue hardcover Bartlett translation. I don't see it on Goodreads. This is the paperback version.

Started listening to this dramatization in my car. Ooo, this is fun. I'm a sucker for spaceship sound effects. And the disciplined new former military female captain is there to kick this slacker crew in shape. It's actually a civilian space "yacht". Grrr, somehow Spotify skipped ahead.

Still waiting for Robin to go undercover in the cult. There's lots of other things going on from previous books, which I haven't read to be honest, but I've watched the tv show. I guess once you get big your books don't get edited. Also it's pretty dark. Do I want to spend 30 hours on this?

I read the ebook sample a while ago, and starting over on Spotify. Ugh, it seems long, but sounds harrowing when Robin goes undercover in the cult.

This was mentioned in a youtube video, "How to give your novel scrotum-tightening prose". The chatgpt summary sounded really good. He really likes free indirect discourse like with Jane Austen, rather than simply first person or third person. Now he's talking about "thisness" with carefully chosen details. I wish these critics didn't have to talk in their own weird vocabulary. The audiobook sounds amazingly snooty.

Ok stuff is happening. I'm getting more into it. I think I prefer the spaceship stuff to the planetside stuff still, but it's coming together.

The cosmic s**t has hit the fan in the outer circles! But do I really care about the Tines planet except for the aliens themselves?

The prologue was cool, but I don't like when a scifi book goes into a primitive civilization. But I just watched a scifi books explained video by Sci-fi Odyssey (with some fancy visuals and spoilers), and the book will go to more advanced places later, so I'm going to continue. At least we got to the Tines hive aliens early on.

Margaret's dad was such a...wimp. Margaret was the first girl boss.

So The Methods of Rationality podcast just did 12 episodes on Blindsight. So I'm catching up on things that I've missed in the book along the way.

Watts convinced me to want multiple personalities now to get some multitasking done.

Hmm "Chinese room" sounds like "large language model". And I think Siri just got Jack Ryan'd.

And I don't like that the kindle ebook doesn't have chapters, although the chapters are un-numbered and un-named.

Hmm there's not only a lot of challenging technical aspects, but lots of literary tricks, like changing points of view and nonlinear timeline. So I read it slower than I usually do. There's pros and cons to this. I'll try to get through even if I don't understand every single thing.

Ok, I have both hemispheres of my brain, unlike one of the characters, Siri (as I've always suspected). Let's do this, finally. Kobo says I can read it in 8-9 hours. Even my town's brand new Barnes & Noble has a fresh new copy. It has that new book smell.

Skipped chatpers 10-17 because they weren't from Arliss's pov. Yep.

I'm only going to read the chapters from Arliss's point of view. I certainly don't care about the villain's pov. I felt the same way with the Joe Pickett series. Sorry, if there's a Grumpy Rule against this.

It seems like all the men are crazy.

People in the band are getting shot. Is this my idea of a good time. Brian Lee Durfee loves it, but he seems to have dark tastes. The chapters take about 40 minutes to listen to (20 hours total), twice as long as Expanse. Maybe I should switch to Swan Song, but it's so much longer.