Bren > Recent Status Updates

Uh oh. There are multiple discrepancies between this book & the others in the series. E.g. Piemur's attitude about his duties, when & how he got his fire lizard, ... It's so soon in the book that I'm expecting more.

I was only reading this for "Beyond Between", which I must say is a serious call for a sequel.

I don't remember kids' books being so weirdly repetitive. I do remember them leaving SO MANY loose ends, though.

The recipes definitely have less prep than my average, but they are also less healthy. They're comparatively low on vegetables & high on meat and refined grains.

About half the recipes sound tasty, which is nice. Most need substitutions to work with my pantry. I tried 2 today and the timing & temperatures were WAY off for both; after an hour & a half, I finally had burnt, unevenly done, but surprisingly tasty food. I'll try a few more recipe before I write my actual review.

“Typically, the layman approaches [identifying wildflowers] in a haphazard, illogical way, searching at random through his favorite wildflower book, hoping to stumble on a picture or description that matches his specimen.”

The author has my number all right. It’s not that I *want* to search randomly, it’s that I have yet to find a book or website that lets me do anything else.

These guided meditations are a lot less annoying than others I have sampled & been unable to stomach.

The author has a sense of humor, I’ll give him that.

The organization is bizarre. I feel like I am reading the encyclopedia straight through, starting at A. I cannot imagine how this book is going to meet its lofty goals.

This first section is exactly as offensive as one would expect from a person strongly affiliated with the winning side in a less socially conscious time. There is a lot of sneering and very thinly veiled racism. This is not a good start.

It never ceases to amaze me when characters who are being pursued by extremely powerful agencies blab the super secret stuff they know over land lines, cell phones & other effectively unencrypted media. In this case there is probably no consequence, since the book is of the nearly vanilla paranormal variety, but the ocean in the bathroom is more believable to me than that opsec this poor actually works.

I was expecting to like this book, but it seems to be a book about exactly what tech is doing wrong, except written for consumers (who can’t directly change any of these things). I disagree with the author on a bunch of points about what tech is doing wrong, and I’m not seeing many proposed solutions for either tech or consumers. So far, it feels like waste heat for the outrage machine. It’s certainly annoying me.

When I started reading, I felt very hopeful that the strategy described could work for me. Sadly, this book mixes good information with pseudoscientific bull pucky. I wish there were a similar book that separated speculation from what is actually proven.

Innovation accounting is one of the key ideas in this book, but after chapters of hand waving, I found the "explanation" unsatisfactory. It is muddled with build-measure-learn in a way that duplicates build-measure-learn & obscures what I *think* is the actual meaning of innovation accounting: managing to metrics that actually affect the sustainability of your business.

The woo woo is strong in this one.

The woo woo is strong in this one.

Stuffed full of information. Gotta read this one slowly. Unfortunately, I still haven't gotten to the nitty gritty how-to. I am hoping it shows up later. There is probably enough information here to construct it, but I was really hoping someone else had done it already.