neko cam > Recent Status Updates

'Anda's Game' was so vanilla having read 'For The Win' already. To be fair, I believe 'FTW' was written later to expand upon the themes presented in 'AG'.

'When Sysadmins Ruled the World' was one hell of an original sort of post-apocalyptic narrative.

'Printcrime' was thoroughly average.

Be the trouble you want to see in the world.

Puckering your anus can help you beat a polygraph machine? Duly noted.

"A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down."

The chapter that covers inflation and deflation uses such vivid and accessible metaphors

The chapter with the Prikkel equations, man. Good stuff.

Arbitrage, man. Wow.

It's been a long road, but I've finally finished Lovecraft's complete fictions! Review soon.

Part 2 was pretty so-so. Fingers crossed that part 3 is good again.

Part 1 was enticing despite not having much actually going on in terms of a narrative. Part 2 is more humdrum progression without the ingeniously creative ideas that dotted the landscape of part 1.

'Little Brother' has proven to be the most surprisingly wonderful reading experience I've had in a long time. Between the exciting narrative, the fascinating bytes of real-world information, and the remarkably perfect balance of the two, I think this is the single best Cory Doctorow novel I've read to date.

The discussion on the paradox of the false positive was wonderfully concise. I really like the way Doctorow is summing up these pretty complex and very interesting packets of information in such an easily understood and easily digested manner.

I appreciate how very solidly the story is grounded in reality; the in-world discussions of things like TOR hold fully true in the real world, lending the narrative a nice amount of weight.

Things were left very differently to how they began, but it's a fertile soil. I can't say much for fear of spoilers all over the place, but the culmination was in keeping with the feel of that from The Rules of Engagement

More so than perhaps any other, this story is proving to be a real game-changer. It'll be interesting to see what's left standing after the dust clears at the end of the narrative

I'm very pleased to find that part 2 of the book was infinitely more enjoyable than part 1. If the rest is of this same standard I will be pleased indeed with mister Detwiller

The narrative is more than a little bit all over the place, but it's much better than Denied to the Enemy at least. And there was one fuck of a revelation just unveiled that made me sit up and take notice. It's probably a factoid I'd read long ago in one of the DG RPG books, but that was quite some time ago and the little (or, in this case, HUEG) things tend to slip my mind

Urgh, already I've encountered a couple of typographical errors and the story has the same sense of blandness that I've regretably come to associate with Dennis Detwiller after 'Denied to the Enemy'. I'm interested to check which stories he contributed to the earlier DG anthologies to see if they were ones I disliked even back then before I knew his name

The grammar in this book is so flawed it's actually distracting. Misplaced or misused commas were a problem, as well as failure to adhere to the rules governing when does or does not close a paragraph of speech with quotation marks. Looking past that, the story was unengaging, the characters one-dimensional, and the overall reading experience thoroughly unsatisfactory

More of the same.

Still trudging on by.

Markedly less engaging than 'Rules of Engagement', really it just feels like it's plodding along. Admittedly I find the Karotechia amongst the least interesting elements of the DG universe. The blurb alludes to DG actually becoming involved in the proceedings at some point, and I early await the fruition of that promise

'The Fast Track' was a brilliant close to the anthology, detailing the personal suffering and struggles of a particular DG agent and closing with a fine moment of the wizened long-game plays that earned Alphonse his posting.

'Good night, Bach Ma, Good-Bye' was average at best. It was shallow, trite and uninteresting.

'The Corn King' was a brief vignette that sketched DG's old leader, from after it was officially disbanded but before it was restructured as a cell-based conspiracy, with crazed, brash strokes. He was very different to the resigned old man I'd previously imagined, though perhaps my image had been trained from what I knew of his eventual successor. It was a fun read but shallow, bringing little to the table

'Suicide Watch' was... wow. Not at all what I expected, but absolutely amazing all up. It didn't feel like a DG story, but one that drew upon a wide gamut of the Mythos. The story within the story of a virtuoso violinist and his lover, Lanois' lyrics, and the hallucinations during the march through Laos were all so poignant, intense, and resounding that I'm sure they will haunt me for a long time yet

'As I see It' filters some of the low-level all-but-incomprehensible extra-dimensionality that features in so many Mythos stories through a human protagonist to make it more palatable and easily digested by the reader. I really appreciate the stark vividity of Stolze's descriptions of the tricks of perspective exploited by the extra-dimensional beings in this story