Eric Mesa > Recent Status Updates

The Only Death in the City - Something has happened on Earth and now people are reincarnated and completely remember their past lives. What would this to do life and society? Then our main character is the first newly born in thousands of years (he does not have a past life) - and so a moving story begins. An excellent selection for this fantasy reprint!

Skimmed chapters 14 and 15 - they don't apply to me now. Onto part 3 - Perl as technology. This is fascinating, even if I'm skimming because it's way lower-level than I need at the moment.

Alsiso - An exploration of how memes mutate that was a lot of fun to read. Also seems to maybe overlap a bit with the premise of Small Gods by Terry Pratchett.

Reading about game engines being used for TV production just makes me think of how, if this was written a few years later, it would talk about The Mandalorian

Observations about Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa - very odd sort of fantasy in which you get glimpses of magic or things not quite being what they seem.

The Day the World Turn Upside Down - A fantastical metaphor for a breakup alongside a literal, non-metaphorical breakup. It was a sweet story and a nice read.

Lucasfilm games - such great games!

Exhalation - a neat metaphor for what the current scientific thought tells us will happen with out own universe as time passes. It has a bit of that SF Golden Age (1930s-1940s) tone to it and I really enjoy that whenever I find it. 5/5 for this story.

Complex God - A very interesting take on the emergent AI concept. It also leads to an interseting twist as our protagonist has their own twist planned as well.

Just about done with OOP chapter. *MY* takeaway - just don't do OOP with Perl. It seems like it's not meant for it and was bolted on. (At least as of v5.14 when the book was written). If you need OOP with scripting/interpreted language - Python and Ruby seem a better bet.

Funny to be reading about the original Mortal Kombat movie in the same month the latest one comes out

Originally I was going to wait to read this until I had time to work through the examples, but since I recently got Head First Go from a Humble Bundle, I figured I'd just read this through so that when I see things in the Head First Book it wouldn't be the first time. I'd then go through all the problem in the HF book to properly learn Go.

Francisca Montoya's Almanac of Things that Can Kill You - what starts off as a darkly humorous explanation of all the ways humans can die ends up telling the tale of a post-apocalyptic world. It's especially creative for the fact that the story is told through ways of daying that are listed alphabetically.

Codename: Delphi - In this story, battlefield oversight and command is now a job contracted out. Our protagonist works in a "call center" providing this oversight role and we spend a night with her. It's one of those short stories that is less about character growth or a full story. Instead it's a scene in what could be a much larger narrative. I enjoyed the story quite a bit.

Package on its own was a bit abstract. I didn't get the point. Once I read about modules it made more sense. I'm surprised (with how detailed this book is) that the module section wasn't larger. But I guess it just falls out from everything else covered so far. Or may is better covered in the Learning Perl trilogy.

This book just compels you to keep reading it...

There was a lot of really interesting stuff in the refrences chapter, but it's way above the programmign I'm currently doing in Perl. Data Structures was neat - basically in Perl everything else is implemented via arrays and hashes. Packages - so far it's been a bit too abstract for me.

Dungeon Dimension time

The mystery is so intriguing, I'd love to just spend the day getting through this story.

I had some FMV games that came with our CD-ROM and Soundcard kit, but I missed a huge chunk of this because my parents wouldn't get me a Sega CD..

Finally came across some stuff that would have helped me yesterday with dereferencing from within subroutines.

Well, this is quite the extraordinary setup. Can't wait to see where this goes.

Done with subroutines and onto reference. A lot of the later stuff went over my head. will have to refer back to this if I ever come across a real Perl-head's code

I've read lots of video game histories, but none have focused on this Hollywood connection so I'm really enjoying this book more than I thought it would when it started with the ET Atari chapter (that "everyone" knows by now)

Finally at subroutines

Trading season is over. Probably on the last chapter

After 10 more pages of regex left.....

Perhaps there will be an early end to the trading season

regexes are complex, who knew?

I think we're getting close to the climax

first non-fiction book in a bit