I finished Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest (paid link) today, and it blew me away. I wasn’t sure he could follow The Three-Body Problem (paid link),and the first 80% of the book was a solid four stars — I thought that was about the best I could hope for, given how amazing and surprising and wonderdul […]
What’s that, Empire State Building? I can’t hear you from the top of the Burj Khalifa. Today I hauled 135 boxes up from the basement to the ground floor and staged them for our upcoming move. Then I jogged up and down the stairs a few extra times to hit 163 floors for the day.
163 flights of stairs Read More »
The Three-Body Problem (paid link) was amazing. The hook is great. The story it promises puts a twist on a premise I’ve seen before, but it’s solid. But underneath that story, unfolding throughout the book, is a story that went nowhere I expected it to, in the best way possible. Reading it reminded me of
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Terry Pratchett’s final Discworld book, The Shepherd’s Crown (paid link), came in the mail today, a bittersweet arrival to say the least. I almost never buy fiction in print anymore, but I’ve got every Discworld book in print; it felt right that I should read this one in print as well.
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Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (paid link): All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology
If you know me well, this might be surprising — I don’t think of myself as a musical person, and I’m partly tone deaf. Prior to this, the only time I’ve ever done something musical by choice was in my sophomore year of high school, roughly 20 years ago, when I was in a Renaissance
I’ve taken up the didgeridoo Read More »
Same-sex marriage: now legal in all 50 states! What an amazing day! When my daughter asks me where I was when I heard the news, “in a McDonald’s drive-thru” is maybe not the most dramatic answer. Holy shit, what a fucking fantastic thing. It’s electric. My whole body feels like it’s vibrating.
The US has finally legalized same-sex marriage Read More »
After making my support payment to BoardGameGeek/RPGGeek, my 1/1 (or sometimes 1/2) tradition, I decided to write the post I meant to write last night — I was too tired to do it last night. So here’s my 2014 in games, by the numbers, and with more personal reflection than I was planning when I
Personal fitness post ahead! Flee now, or proceed at your own peril! So two years ago I was basically a plant. I owned a shirt that said “Unathletic” in that college Athletics Department font. It was funny, but also true. A year and a half ago I started Weight Watchers. I dropped 45 pounds in
Today my friend Christian and I hiked up Pfeifferhorn (Utah, 11,326 feet), my second elevener and the third-highest peak in the Wasatch range. It’s a 9-mile round trip with quite a bit of elevation gain (about 3,700 feet in 4.5 miles); my ass feels pleasantly kicked. Pictured below is the sight that greets you when
