Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Collection of short stories. Before this the only thing I’d read of Ted Chiang’s was Story Of Your Life, which was a fun concept but didn’t move me much. That throughline pretty much held up here - for all of these stories I enjoyed their thorough exploration of a concept, with the emotional underpinnings only landing for me about half the time. (Which is a higher than usual hit rate for me reading a short story collection IIRC). Am again reminded I should read more sci-fi short stories.

Notes on my favorites below.

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The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard

Via a rec from shadaras, a (very!) loose Sherlock Holmes adaptation where Watson is a sentient spaceship still recuperating from a terrible injury and Sherlock is a scholar-detective, set in a Vietnamese-inspired galactic empire. Their names are The Shadow’s Child and Long Chau respectively.

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Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic Of Military Coups - Naunihal Singh

Non-fiction book about, surprise surprise, military coups. Essentially argues two main points (1) the most important dynamics in military coups are intra-military ones, as opposed to anything to do with civil society or the government (2) military coups are best modeled as coordination games, not battles or elections - coups don’t succeed due to superior military force on the challengers side or popular dissent among the ranks, but due to enough people in the military thinking that a coup is going to succeed.

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Nona The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Shout-out to library holds coming through. Brief thoughts under the cut.

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Progress through the video game franchises continue.

Ace Attorney Investigations 2: The Prosecutor’s Path

A really good game! The cases are intriguing and intricate, the antagonists-that-are-not-villains are probably my favorites since Miles himself, and somehow there is still more backstory behind DL-6 to be spilled.

Overall case rankings: 3 > 5 > 4 > 2 > 1

The Dadworth of it all

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Prosecutor’s Path

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Case solving

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Anyway, 100% would recommend, solid Ace Attorney installment.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Definitely less clunky gameplay than the first one - no godforsaken boat sections to make one queasy and smoother gunplay - but IDK if I bought into the plot as much? It was still fun to hang out with Nate and [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], I’m fonder of them than I thought I’d be.

Instead of Francis Drake, this time we are following the path of Marco Polo. Why? Well...

Why Nathan Why

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Plot Why

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Gameplay

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Obi-Wan Kenobi

Pretty meh as a TV show but I turned my brain off for Star Wars as per usual and enjoyed watching very morose Obi-Wan hang out with precocious young Leia - this is the Leia iteration I've been most attached to. She was very good. Wish we'd gotten both the Anakin flashback and the obvious revelation of Reva's motivations earlier in the series. Probably only worth the watch if you are also an Obi-Wan fan.

Heartstopper

Exactly the slice-of-life teenage m/m show I expected it to be, was charmed by all these silly and/or sad kids and the various animations.

Ms Marvel

The cast for this show is so fucking good that it's unreal, especially Kamala Khan herself. If you liked the comics and/or teenage superhero shenanigans, would recommend! I also found it very easy to follow as a standalone series, I don't watch much Marvel stuff.

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Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

Decent first game in that Naughty Dog series, going to play through the rest. I quite like Nate and Elena. The mutual disinterest in self-preservation makes them work for me, as does the nerdery. Have minimal thoughts on Sully so far. Was absolutely not prepared for the late-game twist in enemy combatants and played through the last quarter of the game yelling whenever I got scared, which was quite often.

Recs

I received this cute Kiyoko/Yachi (Haikyuu) fic in the fandom5k exchange. Great characterizations, covers both canon and post-canon shenanigans.

This Ace Attorney Trilogy vid to Look What You Made Me Do works so frickin well. Did not expect the puns.

Six

Saw this musical about Henry VIII’s six wives, liked it far better than I expected. Will take non-fiction book recs about any/all of these wives! (I had zero historical knowledge beyond reading the playbill’s short-and-sweet bios before the curtains rose, so I cannot comment on the historical accuracy here.)

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Everything Everywhere All At Once

That Michelle Yeoh multiverse movie. Unreal how good it was, I can’t remember the last time a work left me with the feeling of “you’re allowed to do that??” (Maybe The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, in a very different way.)

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Chinatown Detective Agency

A Carmen Sandiego-inspired point-and-click adventure game about a private investigator, set in futuristic Singapore. Puzzles are of the kind that require looking things up on the internet, like figuring out where an old stamp originated from or finding a quotation.

Loved the vibes, art and a good number of puzzles. The story, mechanics and programming felt underbaked, and could have used several more months of work. (They’re still releasing bugfixes currently, so I’d recommend holding off on getting it until that’s done tbh.)

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Links

Reality has a surprising amount of detail

Sci-fi In Singapore: 1970s to 1990s

The Indiana Jonesian discovery of the Royal Game of Ur

Sad men hours??? Plus one (1) sad teenage girl who’s probably gonna end up more well-adjusted than all of’em.

The Legend Of Vox Machina

A fun watch, though unclear to me how much appeal it has for those unfamiliar with Critical Role. While I’ve never watched Campaign 1, I have approximate knowledge of many aspects, and of course the residual affection that comes from being a fan of C2.

Loved the Briarwoods arc and Percy throughout it. The terribly angsty backstory and the way the flashbacks are distributed across the episodes, the names on his gun and the overall style of his vengeance, his very stricken expressions and his occasional smiley faces. My favourite interactions of his were with Cassandra, I think, and how fraught it is from being the survivors (possibly only because they weren’t adults or the youngest kids) and from him leaving her behind. Literally the only other thing I would have wanted was more emphasis on how neither of them expected to ever rule, given the resolution to Whitestone this season.

Strangely enough, I think the Percy relationship I bought least was....Percy & Vox Machina? I understand the Doylist reasons for the structure of the pilot, but the ultimate effect is that I never really bought the speedy transition from “we are shitheads who are just stuck with each other ooooh we killed a dragon” to “we will follow you back to your vampire-and-witch-ruled hometown to help you with some vengeance”.

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Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth

Who needs magatamas or your dead boss’s ghost or lie-detecting size-changing bracelets...when you have the power of LOGIC! - Miles Edgeworth, probably

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Cyrano

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Turning Red

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Cain's Jawbone has me fully within its grip - I am far too uncultured for its domain, but the internet, as always, is sufficient enough recourse to maintain progress. Or at least the illusion of it.

Fic recs

The World As It Appears To Be by Benedict_SC - Overwatch. Contains Mercy's healing taken to extremes, AIs and our area gorilla coping with very real magic. The kind of rec you get back from a friend when you recommend Luminosity to them. I found it a fun read, was especially fond of the brief Symmetra PoV and was delighted to encounter a Mercy f/f ship I'd never seen before.

not everybody gets a new life by suspiciousfern - Ace Attorney. In which Mia and Edgeworth pretend to be functional humans at each other post 3-4, causing a whole host of changes in how things go. Very satisfying for my constant "I know what happens to Mia in the first game is necessary...but what if it didn't" urges.

It must have been the roses and wine by Ehlana - The Strange Case Of Starship Iris. How Captain Tripathi made that greenhouse for her first mate. As cute as it sounds.

Vid recs

I Knew You Were Trouble by findmeinthealps - Miss Sherlock. This song really works and I didn't expect it to?? Sherlock is trouble, lbr.

American Coach by periru3 - Ted Lasso. Everyone/Ted Lasso! It's a Ted Lasso Harem universe and we just live in it.

Dune by Frank Herbert

I liked the first half or two-thirds of this book a lot more than the second. After the timeskip, the Fremens won many battles with Paul leading them, but I didn’t care about any of it or the murdered-offscreen-son. In contrast, I enjoyed the politics that House Atreides and Paul had to deal with as they settled into Arakkis, with poor doomed Duke Leto and the ever-sharp Jessica. The Litany Against Fear was appropriately badass in context. Might read the sequels sometime, IDK.

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Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ by Giulia Enders

A quick non-fiction read about the human digestive system (mostly the intestines), with charming illustrations (like this one). I should read more books about human biology, this was fun! Learned about the mechanisms behind some food intolerances, various gut bacteria, the connection between our gut and our brain, and so on.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

One of those books that I may have previously read in hand-sized-paperback-form as a kid, my memory is very unclear - all I remembered was her cousins being shit to her and then the surprise wife that will not help us later.

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After the Bible-venture of 2016-2020, for 2021 I read something I had a fair bit more context on, namely the Ramayana. I read a more-literal less-abridged translation, which I wouldn’t recommend for someone who didn’t already know the story.

It had a lot of footnotes, which was useful given the epic’s fondness for epithets (a non-exhaustive list of the non-exclusive ways Rama is referred to: Raghava, Kakutstha’s descendant, lion among men, tiger among men) and that every god has a billion names. The introduction offered more context. I hadn’t known that while the Ramayana is set before the Mahabharata, there’s evidence suggesting the latter was composed first. Nor did I know that the first and last kandas were thought to be much later additions, which explains the crammed-in-worldbuilding energy of those sections.

Before we progress to the flippantly earnest/earnestly flippant reactions of an atheist who had some context, enjoy this god family tree. It might help.

My Prior Ramayana-related knowledge:

• An animated movie that covers the story from Rama’s marriage to Sita, to Sita’s rescue, that I watched multiple times as a kid
• Various comic books covering the above and Hindu mythology in general, read and reread as a kid
• An illustrated version aimed at teens that I indeed read as a teen, that went up to Sita getting swallowed by the earth

The story of the Ramayana is as follows: Ravana, the demon-king of Lanka, is a terror to people everywhere, but the gods are powerless to stop him since Ravana obtained a boon that makes it so only a human can kill him. Why the gods would give such a boon is unclear, but I digress. In classic rules-lawyering fashion, the god Vishnu reincarnates himself as the human Rama, the eldest prince of Ayodhya. Rama’s wife Sita is abducted by Ravana. Rama spins up an army to get her back, kills Ravana, gets Sita back, they live happily ever after. (Except jk, the last book happens and Sita is exiled by Rama because one washerman says taking back an abducted wife looks bad.)

Stuff I didn’t pay attention to/know as a kid

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Stuff I liked

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Other Comments

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Late bc my life got taken over by: the Survivor finale, getting so obsessed with Arcane that I tripped into a new medium, and booster shot side-effects.

something regarding your experience with live vs recorded performances of plays/theatre (via flowersforgraves)

Hmm, this is a good one.

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ramble on a computering topic of your choice (via queenlua)

because that one doc still cracks me up, let's talk about endianness.

Let's say we're storing a 32-bit integer in a computer. It'll get stored as four 8-bit bytes, each with its own address in memory. Endianness is whether it's the most significant byte (big endian) or the least (little endian) significant byte stored at the smallest memory address. These images from Wikipedia probably illustrate it best:

As you can imagine, this decision doesn't matter within the same computer since it's going to be using that one format for reading or writing. Matters when transmitting, but there are defaults and ways of specifying formats, and so on. Honestly, I hadn't really thought about it since covering the topic in systems stuff, this literally never comes up in my day-to-day.

Then I read Gulliver's Travels for the first time this year. And get to the whole egg dispute between the little-endians and big-endians and go haha what a coincidence, and go wait, that's too convenient.

Because the byte-storage format was indeed named after the egg dispute in this note written in 1980, with a title of ON HOLY WARS AND A PLEA FOR PEACE and an appropriately dramatic first sentence of "This is an attempt to stop a war. I hope it is not too late and that somehow, magically perhaps, peace will prevail again."

I also enjoy that at the end of this note, Cohen points out that byte-storage endianness is orthogonal to egg-cracking endianness. Everyone can crack eggs their own preferred way, but Cohen thinks people ought to pick the same single format for their data. (Am now imagining an argument that the actual disagreements Swift were satiring are closer to bytes than eggs, pfft).