Excellent read, nice mix of psychology with sci-fi. A lot of technical details of how they are able to survive in various ways underwater are ignored but I think that is the right choice as it lets the story stay focused.
I will be grabbing Michael Crichton books when I see them in the future. I knew he was a very popular author but I don't think I had read any of his works prior to this one.
An easy read for the easy price of free via Prime Reading. Good enough that I will probably spend the $4 for each of the sequels in the next week or two.
The balance of real quantum theory and made up stuff was OK, and the puzzles of the communication devices were nice. The analogy to explain how 3D space appears from a fourth dimension was very reminiscent of how it was described in The Three Body Problem. In the afterword the author does cite The 4th Dimension by Rudy Rucker as "a fun book about dimensions" so maybe that is a prior work that both of them built on.
While I have long been familiar with Sudoku puzzles, this is my first experience doing them at a rate of more than one per several years. I cannot imagine a more helpful UI that wouldn't feel like plain cheating. Which is to say that the UI is very helpful but I am still convinced that I am really good at solving. Doing puzzles on paper would surely be a slow and frustrating experience for me.
The achievements are well done, pretty standard for a Microsoft Casual Gaming game. I am working on doing all of the challenges for this month, but doubt that I will do them for 12 months to get all the achievements.
Anna plays the new puzzles as they come out and I play from the archives. I have completed May and April 2019 and almost completed March 2019.
For Monday and Tuesday I can usually finish the puzzle after revealing 1 to 5 squares that stump me. For all the other weekdays I play with autocheck on, which helps a lot because I can guess. Then I still usually have to reveal ~5 squares, and often more on harder Friday puzzles. I often play in the evening when I have had a few drinks or in bed while falling asleep so not when my mind is the sharpest.
There is one annoying bug: with autocheck on, if you put in the first character of a rebus square there is no way to change it. Say the correct rebus is SALT and I type an S in the square. Now there is no way to change that square to SALT, because it counts the S as a correct answer.
Overall I have gotten a lot of enjoyment from this app. It is pricey though!
Fairly interesting book about the Rothschilds family. I'm writing this up maybe six months after I stopped reading it, and I made it about 2/3 of the way through. I guess now I know that there was a father and five sons, they were into banking, had a lot of nice houses/castles, etc. To many names to remember though!
Overall good. I read reviews for the sequel and some of them said that reading this is a necessary slog and the sequel is the big payoff. One of the best sci-fi books of all time I guess. I do plan to read it.
This itself is still a good book though. I found it hard to keep track of the characters, I think because they all have Chinese names. Maybe I don't have anything to visualize for names that I am unfamiliar with, or maybe my brain just isn't wired to track those "words" as characters. Otherwise the Chinese setting and cultural influences are interesting.
I actually should reread the book as I read a lot of it while falling asleep. Might help rewire my brain for the names too!
The second novel in this trilogy. Overall a good read. After the hint about the moon at the end of the first novel, I expected more to happen with that in this novel. Instead it is just a build up (explanation) of the mechanisms that will presumably be used to manipulate the moon in the third novel. And those mechanisms are so tediously explained, in such an "emotional" way that it is really a challenge for me to read. Unbelievably, this second novel also ends with basically the same cliffhanger about the moon.
I say so much negative about these books, probably because I have such high expectations. I chose to read them only because they were award winners.
This was a pretty solid read, interesting story line and good world-building. The writing style was not my favorite with so many paragraphs consisting of one short quip by the character and then a few sentences of the character's thoughts adding further context. Sometimes it seemed like a really tedious way of revealing the "world" to the reader.
I started out thinking that the book probably won so many awards on a sort of "social justice" basis. It seemed like a passably strong story, but I speculated internally that it might have been taken to award-worthiness by virtue of the strong female leads and non "white male" author. These were unnecessary bitter thoughts and I left them behind as I got further into the book, please forgive me. I still regard it as interesting that this book is different than so much (older, male-centric) sci-fi, containing homo, trans, and three-way relationships. And the book is probably good enough to win awards without standing on a pedestal of social justice feel-goods.
I haven't watched this movie for 10 or 15 years but I still found myself trying to remember it for comparison. I'm not sure there is that much similarity! I suppose the majority of the content of the book is not suitable for the movie screen.
I did enjoy the philosophical parts, there were some interesting ideas. For example, the discussions of value, who is qualified to vote, etc.
I found this clone of Civilization (the fifth release I believe?) on the F-Droid app store. I played through on the apparently pretty easy settings that were mostly default and got a science victory on my second playthrough. On my first playthrough I reached 100 turns and got a message from the developer saying something like "I'm sure by now you've noticed that the game is incomplete" and just sort of put the game aside for a week or two until I decided to try it again. Maybe the AI isn't finished as I was never attacked, or maybe it was just on that easy of a difficulty.
Overall the game played quite well. The graphics were occasionally a little difficult for me to figure out but got easier as I got more experienced. There is a lot going on!
It was fun to build out a big civilization and I could see myself doing it again in a month or two.
