Random Developments

More things I’ve been reading in the last year…

Books

• The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel: these are very interesting and hard-to-describe books. They are more or less set in the same universe, but the latter is not technically a sequel of the former. The Glass Hotel is about a bartender at a fancy hotel in an isolated Canadian island who meets a rich customer who convinces her to pose as his wife and changes her life, in many ways. And Sea of Tranquility is a sci-fi novel set in multiple timelines that are connected in ways that eventually become clear, and that connect back to the bartender from the first book. Emily St. John Mandel is also the writer of Station Eleven, a novel about a deadly pandemic, that was made into a TV series more or less when the Covid-19 pandemic was starting, and some of this comes across in Sea of Tranquility (which was published in 2022).

• Death, Todd May: fans of The Good Place will recognise this book as the one that Chidi recommends after Michael goes through his existential crisis (season 2, episode 4), and they may also recognise Todd May as the philosopher who was a consultant for the TV show and who made a quick appearance in its final episode. Death (the book) is a less gloomy read than one might expect from the title; it is about finding ways to live in peace with the fact that death will come to all of us, and about the many ways philosophy and religion find to deal with that. It is in no way an easy read but it’s an important one.

• A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Becky Chambers: this is the second book in the Monk and Robot series (the first one, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, was mentioned in my previous post). This one has a bit more of a plot than the previous one but really, that doesn’t matter; this is still a story that you read for how it makes you feel more than anything else. If you liked the first one, you’ll like this one, but if that wasn’t for you then this one won’t either. For me, I really enjoy her writing style and world-building, and most of all the coziness of her stories.

• Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky: hard sci-fi set in the distant future; humans fail to find life anywhere else in the universe and decide to start propagating it ourselves, by terraforming promising planets and seeding them with life, with specially-programmed viruses nudging the process of evolution in the direction we want it to go and making it faster. Not all humans like the idea, and this disagreement is expressed quite violently, which doesn’t go well for the humans still on Earth. The terraforming does go well for at least one planet, but not quite as expected. Overall, very compelling story and very competent story-telling.

I thought I’d write a bit about some media I’ve been consuming lately… starting with books (not a lot of spoilers ahead, but I do mention major plot points). Other media to follow.

Books

• The Scholomance series (A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, The Golden Enclaves), by Naomi Novik: this is a story about a school for magical children: children who will grow to become witches and wizards. I know that sounds familiar, but the world of this series is very different from that other one. These young children live in a very dangerous magical world, full of malevolent creatures who survive on the life energy of others, and young, untrained magical children are easy and very “nutritious” targets – which is why they are sent to a school that is as isolated from the world as it could possibly be. There are no teachers, no adults in charge, no holidays at home, no letters in or out… and even then the survival rate of the students is not great. Oh, and using magic requires energy, which needs to come from somewhere, and this simple constraint makes a big difference. I loved these books for the world building: it all seems very realistic, which is a weird thing to say about a world of witches, wizards, evil creatures and a school suspended in the void. And if you think this story seems dark… it is so much darker.

• The Thursday Murder Club series (The Thursday Murder Club, The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet That Missed), by Richard Osman: a few residents of a rural retirement village meet once a week to talk about and investigate old police cases that were never solved, so they’re ready to jump into action when a murder happens right at their doorstep. This is the story of the first book in the series, and throughout the investigation we get to learn more and more about our characters, the residents of the retirement village, and about the lives they lived before then. These books are all murder misteries, but the appeal for me was in the character development, their relationships and the fact that they have to deal with concerns of old age: losing friends and lovers, the slow decay of body and mind… There’s a hint of sadness all throughout the stories, but overall these are delightful novels.

• A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers: a monk who has some worries about the meaning of life (in general, and his in particular) goes on a journey into the wildness and meets a robot who is trying to learn more about people. This is a sci-fi story set in a world where humans live in harmony with nature and don’t seem to have many problems, but our monk character is looking for the meaning and the purpose behind everything. I don’t really know how to describe this better, but if you’re read anything else by Becky Chambers you kind of know what to expect; this is a story that feels good - cozy sci-fi, let’s say - even if it doesn’t really have much of a traditional plot, with a start and an end (although, if anything, this is one the most “plotty” of her books). This novel is the first part of the Monk and Robot series; the second book is A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, but I haven’t read that one yet.

• Stephen King novels, by, well, Stephen King: last year I embarked in a probably ill-advised project of reading (or, mostly, re-reading) all Stephen King novels and short-story collections in chronological order. There are a lot of them – my list has 75, and I’m not sure I have all the most recent ones. I’m only on number 5, at least in part because I’ve also been reading other stuff (see above). The ones I’ve already finished are Carrie, Salem’s Lot, The Shining and Rage, and I’m most of the way through The Stand. I imagine most people are familiar at least to some degree with all these, except maybe Rage because this is the one about a school shooting incident and it doesn’t get a lot of publicity anymore (the other four are “girl with telekinesis”, “vampires”, “haunted hotel” and “pandemic”). I’ve been a fan of his writing for a long time, and I like his way of describing the world the characters live in with enough detail to make it seem real (the characters are sometimes a bit two-dimensional, but the world they live in is very 3D). Very recently, I found out about a podcast where two “cultural critics” are doing exactly the same thing, and talking about it as they go along. The podcast is Just King Things, and they’ve already got to Insomnia, which is number 33 in my list (but their 38th episode – they are covering more material, such as King’s non-fiction writing, which I don’t intend to read); I’ve started listening to the episodes about the books I’ve already finished, and will be following them as I continue (at this rate, I’ll be doing this for the next decade or so).

So, I used to have this blog.

I used to write here on and off, about different subjects that interested me: technology, astronomy, science fiction, travel… I mostly stopped in 2011; I published a couple of posts after that, but very infrequently; from 2018 to 2020 I used it to publish photos I had taken, with some commentary, just so that Instagram was not the only place where they were published. And then 2020 happened, and I stopped that too.

Reading old posts, my interests haven’t changed all that much, and I’ve been kind of missing having some place to write and post… stuff. Even if there’s noone really reading it.

Then, this is it – let’s try again. The first thing I did was to change this from a Wordpress blog to something that allows me to simply serve static pages - I’m running this with Jekyll, and this means I have all the source content on my desktop machine, as markdown files, and when I want to publish updates I just run jekyll build and I “deploy” the changes with rsync; my webhost has only static HTML and CSS files, which is a lot safer than, well, self-hosted Wordpress.

I also imported all the old content into Jekyll, which took a few tries but was not terribly hard to do; I exported the posts using Wordpress’s “export” function, which gave me a large XML file, and then I used the jekyll-import plugin to split that into individual posts. I had some issues with character encoding for posts that were not pure ASCII (some posts mention the names of Icelandic places and needed to be fixed), and some posts that linked to images needed some adjustments (but I imagine they were already broken in the old blog), but then it was just a matter of selecting a nice theme (I went with Beautiful Jekyll) and I was done.

Now all that’s left is to keep writing.

A grey but colourful morning at Tavistock Square.

(Google Pixel, ISO 152, f/2.0, 4.67mm [~26mm eq], 1/100s)

Photo taken in November of 2017.

A different autumn, a different New York.

(Sony a65, ISO 100, f/6.3, 20mm [~30mm eq], 1/160s)

Photo taken in October of 2015.

The Tongariro Alpine Crossing track in New Zealand takes you through volcanic areas, with active steam vents and the very much active Mt Ngauruhoe, which "played" Mt Doom in the Lord of the Rings movies.

(Google Pixel, ISO 51, f/2, 4.67mm [~26mm eq], 1/1900s)

Photo taken in May of 2017.

Another photo of the spring flora at Fort Tryon Park, in New York.

(Sony a65, ISO 100, f/1.8, 85mm [127mm eq], 1/250s)

Photo taken in June of 2017.

Fort Tryon Park is near the north end of Manhattan, and in spring and early summer it is filled with colours. This is a great masterwort (Astrantia major) in all its glory.

(Sony a65, ISO 100, f/2.8, 50mm [75mm eq], 1/200s)

Photo taken in June of 2017.

Another image from New Zealand, this time a cosy little corner by the side of the road in the sea-side town of Coromandel.

(Sony a65, ISO 100, 20mm [30mm eq], HDR composite)

Photo taken in May of 2017.

Rotorua is in a very geologically-active location; the water in this pond is constantly bubbling, and there are hot steam vents all over the park - which is right next to the city centre.

(Sony a65, ISO 100, f/5.6, 26mm [39mm eq], 1/125s)

Photo taken in May of 2017.