book interlude
Sep. 20th, 2023 10:18 pmClasses are going ... alright? I have no concerns about three of five: Intro to ArcGIS is "just how to use this fairly complicated program," and Intro To GIS and Intro To Mapping are, well, intro courses. I'm more concerned about GIS Programming and GIS Computing but that's mostly because I am annoyed by the professor (and, in the case of Programming, at potentially having to spend $90 on a book to learn Python).
What are you reading?
Other than stuff for class, which is mostly PDFs and video lectures at this point ... oh, I guess I'm still in the middle of Mike Carey's The Unwritten comic, I should get back to those. And I've still got a bookmark in Jessica Fern's Polysecure.
What did you just finish reading?
Rick Shelley's early-nineties portal fantasy The Varayan Memoir, because I had fond memories of them and they were in the used bookstore. More specifically, I had fond memories of the first but not so much the other two, which seemed odd. Having reread, I can confirm. These ... are not good. Shelley's got some interesting worldbuilding ideas but with maybe three exceptions his characters are not even two-dimensional, they're one-dimensional, and his plots are "a bunch of stuff happens, with no real narrative progression from A to B." I couldn't tell you most of what happens in the second book and I literally read it three weeks ago. The first book sets up an interesting world ("the buffer zone" between Fairy and the 1990s human world) and some potentially intriguing characters and situations. Then the second throws all that away for a stupid end-of-the-world fetch-quest, and the third doubles down on that. Oh well.
Over the last week and a half I also read the entire archive of the webcomic Dumbing of Age, which is a terrible name for a really good comic. It follows a bunch of college students, mostly freshmen, through, well, so far through their first semester and a half or so. (The first nine? years of real time got through I think about two months of comic time.) The characters are an interlocking Absolute Drama-Prone Mess, and it’s genuinely amusing and occasionally actually-laugh-out-loud-funny, and well-written and plotted and drawn. And with a dash of unreality to keep it interesting. The "main" character's a recovering fundamentalist evangelical Christian, which felt pleasantly familiar. (I shook that off mostly during high school, but the process was not dissimilar.)
It's also got an Obviously Autistic character, Dina, who's my favourite (everyone's favourite) who everyone thinks is weird but is also solidly a part of the group. Here, have some Dina comics:
What do you think you'll read next?
Jeez, I don't know. I'd like to read either The Dragon Republic or A Spindle Splintered but I do not know that I have the brain for something new. Maybe I'll go back to Mercedes Lackey ebooks.
What are you reading?
Other than stuff for class, which is mostly PDFs and video lectures at this point ... oh, I guess I'm still in the middle of Mike Carey's The Unwritten comic, I should get back to those. And I've still got a bookmark in Jessica Fern's Polysecure.
What did you just finish reading?
Rick Shelley's early-nineties portal fantasy The Varayan Memoir, because I had fond memories of them and they were in the used bookstore. More specifically, I had fond memories of the first but not so much the other two, which seemed odd. Having reread, I can confirm. These ... are not good. Shelley's got some interesting worldbuilding ideas but with maybe three exceptions his characters are not even two-dimensional, they're one-dimensional, and his plots are "a bunch of stuff happens, with no real narrative progression from A to B." I couldn't tell you most of what happens in the second book and I literally read it three weeks ago. The first book sets up an interesting world ("the buffer zone" between Fairy and the 1990s human world) and some potentially intriguing characters and situations. Then the second throws all that away for a stupid end-of-the-world fetch-quest, and the third doubles down on that. Oh well.
Over the last week and a half I also read the entire archive of the webcomic Dumbing of Age, which is a terrible name for a really good comic. It follows a bunch of college students, mostly freshmen, through, well, so far through their first semester and a half or so. (The first nine? years of real time got through I think about two months of comic time.) The characters are an interlocking Absolute Drama-Prone Mess, and it’s genuinely amusing and occasionally actually-laugh-out-loud-funny, and well-written and plotted and drawn. And with a dash of unreality to keep it interesting. The "main" character's a recovering fundamentalist evangelical Christian, which felt pleasantly familiar. (I shook that off mostly during high school, but the process was not dissimilar.)
It's also got an Obviously Autistic character, Dina, who's my favourite (everyone's favourite) who everyone thinks is weird but is also solidly a part of the group. Here, have some Dina comics:
- Dina doesn't understand people ("I prefer dinosaurs.")
- Dina likes cereal (I sympathise a lot with Amber in this one)
- Dina plays Apples to Apples ("In my experience, whenever someone claims that there is no correct answer, that is never actually the case.")
What do you think you'll read next?
Jeez, I don't know. I'd like to read either The Dragon Republic or A Spindle Splintered but I do not know that I have the brain for something new. Maybe I'll go back to Mercedes Lackey ebooks.