Month: March 2025

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Review

“Champion of the Scarlet Wolf, Book 1”

Ginn Hale

I had so much more fun reading this than I expected to. A great deal of giving me exactly what I wanted in the most fun way possible. So much mysterious backstory to piece together! Two missing princes! Quests within quests. A character whose two intertwined emotional arcs are “working through internalized homophobia” and “dealing with PTSD that they’ve spent a lifetime ignoring.” And a truly wonderful “the audience knows but the character doesn’t” scene featuring a shapeshifter who’d been stuck in animal form, and a man in the midst of a severe fever waking up to a twink in his bed wearing nothing but the collar he’d hand-made for the dog he rescued a couple weeks ago. Exactly as hilarious a reveal as I wanted that to be. Absolutely perfect.

The magic system here feels cobbled together out of various other things—there’s hints of Tolkein-style “the magic is going out of the world,” but it feels more like a “… because we’ve deliberately forgotten how to do the really big stuff” in a way that makes the world feel like it has lots and lots of history to dig into. The magic users all at least a little bit know about the other types of magic, some kind of passing familiarity, but there are, indeed, at least three distinct styles that we see. And it feels like they all fit together, like they’re all expressions of the same fundamental thing—reminiscent of the Thirteenth Child series, in that way.1

An absolute delight of a read; I’m about to dive into the second book, because things aren’t neatly tied up at all here at the end, and I’m excited to find out where it goes. Check it out!2

  1. Having just gone to look for a link, it would seem that I’ve never written up a review of those books… so I suppose I now have an excuse to do a reread. ↩
  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

“The Witch’s Lens”

Luanne G. Smith

This held up reasonably well as a story, and had some fun little twists to it. The hidden backstory got revealed at just the right pace, and really changed the tone of the latter half of the book, which I quite enjoyed. There was a bit more ‘monster movie’ to it prior to that, which doesn’t tend to be my favorite, but the action-adventure of it outweighed that long enough to carry me to the end.

The magic system was interesting; there were places where it felt like a hard magic system, but overall, I think it’s really a soft magic system, which contains the occasional regional hard magic system. The presence of a djinn with a wildly different set of powers, including “oh, I actually don’t care about the macguffin, that’s just, like, a normal thing for my people” felt a bit hilarious, honestly. The whole dramatic fight, a large part of World War I coming down to the negotiation about this rarity… and the representative from the middle east is like “oh, I thought you had something interesting to discuss after all this. Peace.” and just up and leaves. Excellent.

The only issue I had with the book was that it was trying to do the “normal people don’t know about magic” thing, but couldn’t actually decide on what level that was a thing. Like, everyone acknowledges superstition and the existence of hedgewitches… but the fact that the government is employing magic users for purposes of war is a deep secret that must be kept from the normals? It’s inconsistent with itself.

That said, since the book is almost entirely the magic users amongst other magic users, it’s not too much in your face, so it’s okay to read past it. Overall, a fun read; 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

“Managing Humans”

Michael Lopp

This was an interesting read — it absolutely feels like each of the many chapters is a blog post that got repurposed into being a book chapter, in large part because that’s what it is; this is Rands in Repose, The Book. A few bits of this I felt like I was skimming past—I don’t have any interest in writing a CV right now, thanks—but a lot of it I at least jotted a couple notes on. I may not be a manager, but having a better idea of how management works can’t be a bad thing.

Compared to my other forays into the ‘management book’ genre, I found this more approachable. Lopp does a better job of establishing his bona fides, both as Someone Who Works In Tech, and as someone who’s got the same sort of internet brain I do.1 He’s part of the old guard of bloggers. His writing is, in a word, approachable to my inarguably-a-nerd self.

So, overall, a good read; the book club discussion ought to be interesting, as well. I look forward to finding out how many other folks read the glossary all the way through—it was, in fact, worth it. Check it out.2

  1. He calls it NADD, which works well enough. ↩
  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

“We’re Here”

edited by L.D. Lewis & Charles Payseur

Anthologies are always an interesting thing to read; they offer more variability than a single book by a single author, and tend to be a lot easier to read in bursts. This one made for some great vacation reading — get through one story, go for a dip in the pool, read another while drying off in the sun.1 That said, it’s not a guarantee it’ll be good; sometimes the focus area is too depressing, or the editors made a succession of bad choices.

This, delightfully, was not one of those. “Queer speculative fiction” is a fairly safe topic area to begin with, as it basically pins a single character trait of one or more characters in the story, and a delightfully diverse character trait it is. The title, as well, adds a certain amount of hopeful tinge to it, and the stories almost universally delivered on that.

Favorites include:

  • A rural Oregonian woman having a big fight with her ex-girlfriend, exclusively in the form of flower language.
  • A woman trapped in a three-day time loop before the space station she’s on explodes, using it to sample every restaurant the station has to offer.
  • A lesbian couple running a magic shop together. The story opens with them having a charcuterie board for dinner, and the vibes stay immaculate from there on out; I want to read an entire series of this one.
  • A POV story of the protagonist in a videogame, learning some things about themselves when the player installs a mod.

This collection was a delight; for any one of the above stories, I’d call it worth it, and it includes all of them and more. Give it a go!2

  1. And getting a little sunburned, but oh well. ↩
  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: February 2025

This is a bit of a weird one, to me. I spent most of the month very sick, and at least half of it, even listening to music was just… a lot. And while I still managed to put together something of a playlist for the month, it’s a bit misleading; a lot of the time, even when I felt up to listening to music, I was doing a lot of “hit shuffle on the playlist, then scrub through the queue and remove a bunch of stuff that still felt like Too Much.”

Still, though, there was a bit of music in the month. If you’d like the whole playlist in one go, here’s the link, or do the piecemeal-with-occasional-notes style below:

Machine Learning – J. Maya on Machine Learning – Single

Sad Girls (feat. Rema) – Clean Bandit & French The Kid on Sad Girls (feat. Rema) – Single

O Superman (For Massenet) – Laurie Anderson on Talk Normal: The Laurie Anderson Anthology (Remastered)

Oklahoma Smokeshow – Zach Bryan on Summertime Blues – EP

Dicked Down in Dallas – Trey Lewis on Dicked Down in Dallas – Single

Midnight Drive – HurricaneTurtle on Midnight Drive – EP

Towers – Zach Bryan on The Great American Bar Scene

Sorry 4 The Wait – Lil Wayne on Sorry 4 The Wait

Up, Out, and Leaving – Hayden Blount on Up, Out, and Leaving

The Emptiness Machine – LINKIN PARK on From Zero

Overflow – LINKIN PARK on From Zero

Great Mother (feat. Neco Novellas) – HAEVN on Wide Awake (Deluxe)

Hotel Bible – Max McNown on Night Diving

i Am A Mountain – Coldplay on Moon Music (Full Moon Edition)

Breathe – RÜFÜS DU SOL on Inhale / Exhale

How About a Drink? – Billy Raffoul on How About a Drink? – Single

Medusa – Cameron Whitcomb on Medusa – Single

Bears & Wolves – Lilith Max on Bears & Wolves – Single

Rust – Ben Böhmer on Bloom

need dat boy – Lil Nas X on need dat boy – Single

Sometimes We Come Back – THE RUNAWAY WILD on Sometimes We Come Back – Single

Drunk Again – Aidan Canfield on Rivertown – EP

Breathe, Be Happy – Tep No on Breathe, Be Happy – Single

Old Neptune, He’s Roaring – Brian Sauvé on Hearth Songs

Plead the Fifth – Cooper Alan on Plead the Fifth – Single

I’m Good (Blue) – David Guetta & Bebe Rexha on I’m Good (Blue) – Single

Crazy – Doechii on Crazy – Single

Crossfire – Waves_On_Waves, SHKHR & Waves On Waves Armada on Crossfire – Single

Falls Down – James Carter & Lucas Estrada on Falls Down – Single

Wake Me up (Country Version) – Cooper Alan & Aloe Blacc on Wake Me up (Country Version) – Single1

TRANS AM – Jeremiah Kane on TRANS AM – Single2

Living In The Sun (feat. okafuwa) – DALEXO on Living In The Sun (feat. okafuwa) – Single

The Abyss – The Weeknd & Lana Del Rey on Hurry Up Tomorrow

Fright Night – THE RUNAWAY WILD on Fright Night – Single

Open Hearts – The Weeknd on Hurry Up Tomorrow

Blue Jean Baby – Zach Bryan on Blue Jean Baby – Single

Heartbreaker – Hayden Blount on Heartbreaker – Single

Pantheon Passion – Harper Quinn, Michael FAY & Fuat Sunay on Pantheon Passion – Single

ONANON – Killen. on ONANON – Single

São Paulo – The Weeknd & Anitta on Hurry Up Tomorrow

Silver Spoon – Erin LeCount on Silver Spoon – Single3

Clockwork – Masked Wolf on The Devil Wears Prada but God Wears Gucci

22s – KOKO, Nina Chuba & Dillistone on 22s – Single

Revolú – Rauw Alejandro & Feid on Cosa Nuestra

Dear Me (From The Original Documentary “Diane Warren: Relentless”) – Kesha on Dear Me (From The Original Documentary “Diane Warren: Relentless”) – Single

Hit The Ground – Poul & Alberto Ciccarini on Hit The Ground – Single

Always Remember Us This Way – Poul, Alberto Ciccarini & Alexia Di Lorenzo on Always Remember Us This Way – Single

Ordinary – Alex Warren on Ordinary – Single4

Dreaming – Otrebor on Dreaming – Single

Mona Lisa (feat. Kendrick Lamar) – Lil Wayne on Tha Carter V

4X4 – Travis Scott on 4X4 – Single

Chasing Paradise – Kygo & OneRepublic on Chasing Paradise – Single

hey baby – Famestelenia on hey baby – Single

  1. This feels like the kind of thing that I should be a little ashamed that I love. ↩
  2. Something about sampling old ads just hits really well, I dunno. ↩
  3. Slowly picking up the lyrics to this one, “silver spoons and butter knives” just sticks right in my head. ↩
  4. Kept thinking to myself “shoutout to the music history classes for helping me understand all these Catholicism references.” ↩