Categories
Playlist

Playlist of the Month: September 2026

Looking out the window at a tree whose leaves are mostly green, with a large chunk that have skipped yellow to go right into a lovely red; it’s fall, folks! September usually is the time when autumnal weather feels about appropriate to me, and it’s certainly delivering on that. This playlist… doesn’t particularly deliver on the fall vibes, but I’ve been making a conscious effort to limit how much I let the seasonal glooms take over, and a big part of that is listening to gloomy new music and then stopping myself from actually putting it into the playlist.

As usual, you can listen to the whole playlist, and/or read below for my interspersed bits of commentary:

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Review

“Price of a Thousand Blessings, Volume 1”

Ginn Hale

I had two clear thoughts in my mind, early on in this book: first, that for the setting, I was picturing Republic City from The Legend of Korra; and second, that the main character’s approach to life reminds me of Sokka from The Last Airbender. While the latter could, conceivably, have been an actual influence, the more I read, the more that I thought the former was just that both were based on the same sort of “1920s New York aesthetic in a heavily Chinese-inspired locale.”

The whole book, really, leans heavily into that Chinese folklore feeling, and it’s absolutely delightful. There’s a strong sense of a weighty, and long, past behind everything. This is a world that has a rich history. It’s also a world that had a People’s Revolution and is now in a very modern-feeling “we’re the People’s Secret Police” sort of place. A different kind of weighty, that.

The protagonist works well, here; he was raised in a temple as a sort of indentured servant of the state, and sets him up for a sort of simultaneous cynicism and naïveté; he’s cynical about his place in the world, about the role of class in his life, but also utterly naïve about the inherent corruption of a secret police. To spoil something from very early on, he saves the day from a bombing, and not once does he come to the (to me) obvious conclusion that it was a plot by the secret police.

The setting also has some interesting mechanics going on: a magic system that works well for big cinematic setpieces, and Avatar-style Doing Magic With Martial Arts, but also feels thoroughly influenced by electromagnetic physics. A delightfully chaotic reincarnation-ish system, which creates some hilarious interactions between characters who either have or haven’t yet figured out that’s what’s going on.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It ends on a vicious cliffhanger, but I at least managed to wait long enough to read this one that the sequel is now out, so hopefully I’ll be reading it soon. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Fair’s Point”

Melissa Scott

Decided to go right from Point of Dreams to the next in the series, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It hit the same kind of fun magical-setting mystery plotline as the previous, but spent more time developing the relationship between the main characters in a way that I enjoyed. It also helps that we got to see the incompetent fool from the last book be more incompetent and make more of a fool of himself; there’s a certain joy to schadenfreude.

One thing I’ve enjoyed in these books that I didn’t mention last time: there’s a subtle touch to the setting, whereby the default person is assumed to be female. Paraphrasing, as I didn’t copy down the exact quote, but there’s a scene where they’re discussing who’s been pulling off the mysterious heists, and the line is “‘. . . the woman who’s doing this.’ He paused. ‘Or man, I suppose.’”

And if you don’t think that’s a nice distinction to make, consider that I typed it backwards, despite very actively knowing what the point of it was; defaults matter.

A fun read; probably start earlier in the series, but if you’ve been following along, maybe you already have! Anyhow, here’s your link.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Point of Dreams”

Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett

This is, apparently, the third book in the series; of more surprise to me was the fact that I’ve apparently read the first, though I have no memory of doing so. I suspect it didn’t clear my tolerance for the fiction rule of thumb. This time, at least, I was interested enough to stick through the vocabulary, and wound up quite enjoying the book.

To sum up the general vibe of the book: queer fantasy police procedural. It’s very much a different world — the setting is vaguely Renaissance-flavored, but between the very present magic system, the different evolutionary path that language took, and the two suns, it’s pretty clearly not doing the alternate-history thing.

The murder mystery part was a bit slow to get started, but took off pretty well after that. There was a scene early on that read at the time as a fairly clearly Chekhov’s Gun, which paid off quite well, but in retrospect was also some excellent foreshadowing; I enjoy when a book pulls off something like that.

I also enjoyed… something I’m going to tuck into a footnote, as it contains spoilers.1

Overall, a fun read; check it out.2

  1. Seriously, spoilers about the murder weapon; skip this footnote if you want to go into the book without that foreknowledge.
    The use of magical flower arrangements as the murder weapon started off as an interesting concept, but became darkly comedic in light of this being a Magic Is A Known Thing fantasy-world. The general fact of them being able to go over to the university to consult with the Department of Magical Flowers makes it feel plausible within this world. The way that conversation went, though, was the funny part. Arriving at the (very real) Department of Magical Flowers to ask about magical flower arrangements. “No, there’s no such thing as magical flower arrangements. No, there’s simply no way that putting multiple magical flowers together could cause any sort of interaction or compound effect.” “Fine, fine, can you at least provide some input on the first murder? The one where it was a single magical flower?” “fake news” ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Luminescent Machinations”

edited by Rhiannon Rasmussen and Dave Ring

And here I am again, reading yet another anthology.1 I think this is the last one in my queue for a while. Ending on a pretty good note, though; while nothing leapt out at me quite as much as with Power to Yield, there’s also the benefit that nothing leapt out at me quite as much as with Power to Yield. Nothing extremely good, nothing deep and depressing.

The choice of “mecha” as a theme was interesting, and while most of them stuck with the classic Big Robot approach, I think every story did something interesting with it, and a few pulled the concept of mecha into a fantasy setting. Quite fun to read through all these different bite-sized pieces of worlds, wondering each time what they’re going to do to differentiate themselves. Delightfully, they all did.

I think my favorite goes to the one that felt the least “mecha” to me—Charles Payseur’s “The Demolition of Trucko Brahe”. There’s a bit of hinting at some giant robot fights, but the mecha here is a truck. A sentient alien truck, but a truck. This reminded me of Animorphs, really, though from a different angle. It’s a world that was clearly built around being a children’s show, but we’re looking at the aftermath. What happens after the war was won by heroic sacrifice, and the saviors of the galaxy get dropped back into the unaware world from which they came. It was sad, melancholy, and hopeful, all at once.

Overall, an enjoyable read; here’s your link.2

  1. Two in a row is already a lot, but it was, in point of fact, three; I just disliked the third one and so didn’t write a review. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Playlist

Playlist of the Month: August 2026

I keep forgetting that I’m switching from “just a list with footnotes” to “bulleted list with indented bullets” and needing to go back and do the edit a second time. Thank you, Sublime Text, for having good bulk-text-editing tools!

The beginning of September is usually when I have to start working on accepting that we’re sliding into autumn, and I really have been working on that – went on a hike on the 30th and spotted a few leaves beginning to change color, which felt like an assault in August, but alas, that’s what’s happening.

Anyhow, please enjoy what is apparently an end of summer playlist, a fact about which I’m in denial. As usual, you can look at individual tracks below, or grab the whole playlist here.

Categories
Review

“Power to Yield and Other Stories”

Bogi Takács

As with every anthology I read, my thoughts are a little mixed. Some of the stories I love, one or two I may hate, and everything in between. This one was net positive, I think. And, being by a single author instead of a mix, there’s more of a sense of ordering to the whole thing.

I absolutely loved Volatile Patterns. I’m always a fan of good worldbuilding, and this was a tour de force, a short story giving me so many fascinating glimpses into what feels like a very full world.

And here’s where the sequencing hits: part of what makes it a very full world is that it’s one entry in a larger collection about this shared world. So some of the details being hinted at are there to uncover, in other stories.

Power to Yield expands on that world. And while it left me some hope that, in the years after Power to Yield and before Volatile Patterns, the situation improved, it has a very… Omelas quality to it. That the utopian society I saw first was built upon something much darker.

Which is an effective arc, but I don’t think that I actually like it. There’s a pattern in our culture, thinking that for something to be “realistic” it has to be dark, grim, depressing. Treating those qualities as a necessary component of a story, rather than simply qualities that can be present or not, without that valence. A story can just be happy; fiction can give us utopian societies without necessitating that there be a twist, a darkness hidden beneath the candy-shell exterior. We can be hopeful. That’s allowed.

I did enjoy reading this collection, though, so I’ll have my usual Bookshop link here.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“They Don’t Represent Us”

Lawrence Lessig

It makes sense as a structure for the book, but golly, opening with over a hundred pages of detailed explanation of everything wrong with the political system in the US at the moment sure was depressing. Took some work to make it through that.

The second half, though, which does a little bit of “in an ideal world, we could do X and Y…” and then immediately discards that as “but we live in the real world, so here’s A and B that we could actually achieve, and how” was a lot easier. Which isn’t to say easy, but campaign finance reform, for example, sure would be worth the effort.

This is an impressively non-partisan book, with a thoroughly non-partisan call to action. Because it isn’t about “these structural inequalities are benefiting one party to the detriment of the other,” it’s about “these structural inequalities are detrimenting the concept of democracy.” To echo my own personal bugbear, it’s not calling for ranked-choice voting because RCV would mean My Team would win; it’s calling for ranked-choice voting because RCV would mean politics would suck less. If the Other Team wins more, it’s still a net benefit, because it won’t be the primaried-in extremists of the Other Team, it’ll be the moderates that My Team can at least tolerate. And My Team’s primaried-in extremists would be having the same issue. We, the voters? We’d be getting representatives that actually represent our values — or, at least, the values of a majority, rather than the values of the primary voters of whichever team won that time around.

Well worth the read, even with that opening slog; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“When Driving Is Not An Option”

Anna Letitia Zivarts

This was a fairly quick read, and one I thoroughly enjoyed. Zivarts does a good job of diving into the details without getting getting bogged down in them, and I’m particularly fond of the fact that, after the ‘conclusion’ chapter, there was an ‘action items’ chapter.

If I could pull out one factoid from this book that I think a lot more people should know, it’s this: roughly one in three Americans do not drive. Sometimes this is by choice, but frequently, it isn’t; roughly one in four Americans can not drive. And we as a country have spent a long time completely ignoring them, content in the fact that Everybody Knows that everyone can drive, right? Wrong.

Overall, a very good read, well worth the time; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“How to Talk to a Science Denier”

Lee McIntyre

Quite frankly, my takeaway from this book is that I am not the right person to do the talking to science deniers. I spent a lot of this book absolutely infuriated that the people in his examples of science deniers are like that, and one of the key things to do, if you’re going to try to get through to them, is to not be incandescent with rage at them. Whoops.

If you’re less prone to trying to set people aflame with your mind, then you might find some value in this book. It’s worth a shot, anyways.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Playlist

Playlist of the Month: July 2026

Going to see a lot of carry-over into next month with this one — for whatever reason, I had, like, a two-week pause in going through new music, and then caught up on it all on the 28th, so I haven’t really had time to get to know the latter chunk of this list.

Check out the entire playlist here, and see commentary on individual tracks below:

Categories
Review

“Why Nothing Works”

Marc J. Dunkelman

I’m of two minds about this book. It has definite positives—within the subtitle, “who killed progress—and how to bring it back,” it did a pretty good job of answering the first question.

The books thesis is that, within the ‘progressive’ movement, there’s two approaches to what should be done with power: the Hamiltonian, centralizing power, and the Jeffersonian, decentralizing it. The New Deal was Hamiltonian, creating agencies with sprawling powers to fix the problems facing the nation. But Robert Moses was also a Hamiltonian figure, who sure could get stuff done, but didn’t have much regard for if that stuff was worth doing. And so, in response to the failures of that Hamiltonian mode, we have the Jeffersonian, which I think is best embodied by the National Environmental Policy Act; it created an ability for individuals to block projects on the grounds that the environmental impacts were too great. Which, y’know, was quite often a good thing. But that same Jeffersonian approach has gotten us to where we are now, with the most expensive infrastructure projects in the world, because everyone can block everything, so every big project gets dragged through court time and time again.

My first issue is the degree to which the book discards the impact of people outside the progressive movement. Conservatives do, in fact, exist, and have frequently held both Congress and the Presidency. They’ve got a pretty solid lock on the judiciary of late, too. So acting as though the only source of this Jeffersonian gridlock is progressives is a bit irritating—especially since this same Hamilton/Jefferson divide can work just as well as a lens to examine conservative politics! It’s easy to equate the GOP’s “party of small government” stance with the Jeffersonian plan for power, but they have their Hamiltonian moments as well.

My second issue is the latter part of the subtitle, “how to bring it back.” Because that’s barely touched on at all. The conclusion has a bit of it, but by and large this book exists to point out the problem and state that, golly, we should really work on that. And, yes, there’s value to it; I’m a life-long progressive, but hadn’t ever thought of this ‘balance of power’ question, and now I’m aware of it and thinking about it. It’s perfectly fine for the book’s goal to be drawing attention to the issue, putting some framing around it so we can actually discuss it and figure out our approach to fixing it. But if that’s the goal, the subtitle is marketing it very wrong.

Still, though, I found it quite a useful piece of framing, and genuinely did find value in reading it. So, having spent most of the duration of this review talking about what I didn’t like about the book, I’m still going to recommend it. Worth reading.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“Curbing Traffic”

Melissa Bruntlett & Chris Bruntlett

I think my favorite line in this book came from the conclusion:

Sure, the Dutch have had a five-decade head start, but that means they’ve shown what is possible if decision makers take risks and put people first.

Because everything leading up to that is, basically, a paean to the Dutch approach to city planning and traffic engineering. Which does mean that me reading this is the choir going to stand where they can be preached at; I’m already sold on the argument they’re making throughout the book. I already know that car-centric infrastructure is inefficient, expensive, and makes for bad built environments. I don’t need to read a chapter about noise pollution. I don’t need to read a chapter about resilience in transportation network design. I already know this stuff!

But there was also plenty of new things in there. The entire first chapter is about the benefits to children, the increase in safety and the ability to develop independence that’s missing in the American “indoor children” or “backseat children” options. So, in that sense, it was useful for me—my own ability to argue for this stuff has been improved. Beyond that, though, now I have a book I can point to when someone wants to know why I’m at the very bottom of the urban planning opinion progression.1

For the most part, I enjoyed this book; the biggest negative was that, in a couple spots, I had to stop to be angry at American civil planning. Not only would I say it’s worth the read, I would actively encourage all of my readers to check it out.2

  1. I’m not kidding. There’s a spot on my favorite bike route where the pedestrian and bike zones are just painted on the pavement, and quite often, a semi truck (bonus points: delivering a load of Teslas) will park on them, forcing pedestrians and cyclists both to swerve out into the car lanes. I have had to be talked out of buying caltrops before, and likely will again. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Photography United States

Photos: June-July

I’ve really been diving back in to photography lately, as I’d previously mentioned. Turns out having a creative outlet is a lot of fun! Who knew?

While I post things fairly regularly on my Glass profile (and wow, I hadn’t actually looked at their web UI, beautiful layout there, well done them), the only acknowledgement of it I’ve had here is occasionally, silently, adding new things to my list of available prints. You can tell it’s not intended as my primary source of income by the way I am absolutely terrible at promoting it.

(Guy who has next to no social media presence and just quietly blogs into the void doesn’t like self-aggrandizement; more at eleven.)

That said, in the same way I do my monthly playlists, I’m going to try to do the occasional “here’s the latest photos” post on here, as well. In the interest of not needing to shuffle around my far-too-deep queue of book review posts, I’m just going to throw ’em out whenever, rather than fit into my usual Saturday-morning schedule.

Without further ado, some of the photos I’ve taken lately that I enjoyed:

Ape Caves

Hiking through Ape Caves! It’s a very cool (literally – underground is a pretty constant temperature regardless of what’s happening outside, so it was a bit chilly down there) hike to do. Also a great change to play around with the settings on your camera, and figure out how to do long exposures. (Long exposures: pretty easy. Getting the auto-focus to stop screwing things up: shockingly difficult. I miss the ‘auto/manual’ switch on the T3i.)

And, to do some cross-promotion, my favorite photo from that whole expedition, which is available as a print.

Cave

$50.00

Willamette River

I mentioned that selling prints isn’t my day job, yes? My actual day job had a summer “picnic” on the Portland Spirit. I wasn’t the only one who brought a camera along, nor was I the only one who quite enjoyed looking at all the bridges — programmers are a certain sort of person, after all. From the water was a different angle than I usually get, though, which made it quite fun.

Marquam

$50.00

Olympia

… was what I called this trip in my mind, but I never actually got up to Olympia, it was just the Olympia area.

While hiking around Mima Falls, I wound up stumbling into doing some approximately-macro photography! Not something I’ve really tried before, at all, so I had a lot of fun trying it in a few different places along the hike.

Turns out foxglove is a very pretty flower! Just don’t, y’know, ingest any. Unless like you like cardiac arrest.

While I’m normally not a huge fan of graffiti, it is an art form, and sometimes the results are deeply touching, even when they’re very simple.

I Did

$50.00

Also went up to Tumwater Falls, which is along the secret, second Deschutes River in the Pacific Northwest! (It’s not really a secret, I just didn’t know about it.)

An absolutely beautiful park, this, built around some old industrial works that were, of course, built around the falls. Get enough water dropping enough distance, and someone will have used it to drive machinery.

Pacific City

The Oregon Coast is a beautiful place, and Pacific City is no exception. This was a group trip with friends, and we got there well before sunset, but it was the sunset colors that really caught my eyes as I was going through the (couple hundred — I’m a “storage is cheap” sort of photographer) photos I took over the course of the day.

Towards the end of the day, the wind and chill were getting to be enough, and we decided to put out our fire and head home. One of the steps of this was grabbing a driftwood log that hadn’t been in the fire, but had been near enough to start smoldering, and getting rid of that fire hazard by… tossing it in the water.

I couldn’t help but call this a “viking burial”, in my mind, because what else would I call it? It’s a piece of wood, being launched out to see at sunset, spewing smoke (well, steam, but close enough) as it drifts away.

Viking

$50.00

That’s it for my recent photography. I’ll probably do another of these in a month or two — this write-up has taken me a surprising amount of time, and even with the effort put in, it still feels quite odd to mix in all those ‘add to cart’ buttons.

(And, as an aside, which doesn’t at all help with that feeling: if any of the photos above that don’t have an ‘add to cart’ button are one that you think should, let me know – I do, in fact, read the comments here.)

Thanks for bearing with me, and I hope you enjoyed coming along on these various outings.

Categories
Review

“On Freedom”

Timothy Snyder

It is summer 1976, a sunny afternoon on an Ohio farm. Wisps of cloud flit across the sky; gravel presses underfoot. A boy of six, going on seven, stands in line next to a farmhouse to ring a bell: the me that I once was, full of futures.

This is a beautifully-written book about all kinds of things, but I think the core discussion that sticks with me is the distinction between positive and negative freedom—the difference of freedom to and freedom from. And I truly won’t be able to do it justice, if I try to summarize any more than that; this is a book that I’ll be chewing on for a while, I think. It’s certainly not a light read, but it’s one well worth reading. Give it a go.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩