This is the second of a two-part post covering my goals for 2023. See the first part to understand the vision, mission and strategy driving these goals. I want to thank my friend Nat, and Will Larson whose annual reviews I ve always enjoyed reading for inspiring me to write these posts. I ve found the process articulating my motivations and goals very useful to clarify my thoughts and create tangible next steps. I m grateful for that in and of itself, but I also hope that by publishing this you too might find it interesting, and the additional public accountability it creates will be a positive encouragement to me.

2023 Goals My focus for 2023 is to bootstrap a business that I can use to build software that solves real problems (see the strategy from the previous post for more details on this). I m going to track this via three goals:

1. Execute a series of successful consulting engagements, building a reputation for myself and leaving happy customers willing to provide testimonials that support a pipeline of future opportunities.
2. Grow my product development skill set by taking several ideas to MVP stage with customer feedback received, and launch at least one product which generates revenue and has growth potential.
3. Develop and maintain a broad professional network.

Consulting Based on my background and experience, I plan to target my consulting across three areas:

1. Leadership - building and growing operationally focused software teams following SRE/devops principles. A typical engagement may involve helping a client establish a brand new SRE/devops practice, or to strengthen and mature the existing practices used to build and operate reliable software in their team(s).
2. Architecture - applying deep technical expertise to the design of large software systems, particularly focusing on their reliability and operability. A typical engagement may involve design input and decision making support for key aspects of a new system, providing external review and analysis to improve an existing system, or delivering actionable, tactical next steps during or immediately after a reliability crisis.
3. Technology Strategy - translating high-level business needs into a technical roadmap that provides understandable explanations of the value software can deliver in that context, and the iterative series of appropriately sized projects required to realise it. A typical customer for this would be a small to medium sized business outside of the software industry with a desire to use software in a transformative way to improve their business but who does not employ the necessary in-house expertise to lead that transition.

Product Development There are three, currently extremely high level, product ideas that I m excited to explore:

1. Improve co-ordination of electricity resources to accelerate the electrification of NZ s energy demand and the transition to zero carbon grid. NZ has huge potential to be a world-leader in decarbonising energy use through electrification, but requires a massive transition to realise the benefits. Many of the challenges to that transition involve coordination of an order of magnitude more distributed energy resources (DER) in a much more dynamic and software-oriented manner than the electricity industry is traditionally experienced with. The concept of improving DER coordination is not novel, but our grid has unique characteristics that mean we re likely to need to build localised solutions. There is a strong match between my experience with large, high-reliability distributed software systems, and this need. With renewed motivation in the industry for rapid progress and many conversations and consultations still in their early stages this a very compelling space to explore with the intent of developing a more detailed product opportunity to pursue.
2. Reduce agricultural emissions by making high performance farm management, including effortless compliance reporting, straightforward, fun and effective for busy farmers. NZ s commitments to reduce agricultural emissions (our largest single sector) place increased compliance and reporting burdens on busy farmers who don t want to report the same data multiple times to different regulators and authorities. In tandem, rising business costs and constraints drive a need for continuous improvements in efficiency, performance and farm management processes in order to remain profitable. This in turn drives increases in complexity and the volume of data that farmers must work with. Many industry organisations and associated software developers offer existing products aimed at addressing aspects of these problems, but anecdotal feedback indicates these are poorly integrated, piecemeal solutions that are often frustrating to use - a burden rather than a source of continuous improvement. It looks like there could be an opportunity for a delightful, comprehensive farm management and reporting system to disrupt the industry and help farmers run more profitable and sustainable farms while also reducing compliance costs and effort.
3. Lower sickness rates and improve cognitive performance by enabling every indoor space to benefit from continuous ventilation monitoring and reporting. Indoor air quality is important in reducing disease transmission risk and promoting optimal cognitive performance, but despite the current pandemic temporarily raising its profile, a focus on indoor air quality generally remains under the radar for most people. One factor contributing to this is the lack of widely available systems for continuously monitoring and reporting on air quality. I built https://co2mon.nz/ to help address this problem in my children s school during 2022. I see potential to further grow this business through marketing and raising awareness of the value of ventilation monitoring in all indoor environments.

In addition to these mission aligned product ideas, I m also interested in exploring the creation of small to medium sized SaaS applications that deliver useful value by serving the needs of a specialised or niche business or industry. Even when not directly linked to the overall mission, the development and operation of products of this type can support the strategy. Each application adds direct revenue and also contributes to achieving better economies of scale in the many backend processes and infrastructure required to deliver secure, reliable and performant software systems.

Developing my professional network To help make this goal more actionable and measurable I will track 3 sub goals:

1. To build a professional relationship with at least 30 new people this year, meaning that we ve met and had a decent conversation at least a couple of times and keep in touch at least every few months in some form.
2. To publish a piece of writing on this site at least once a week, and for many of those to generate interesting conversations and feedback. I ll use this as an opportunity to explore product ideas, highlight my consulting expertise and generally contribute interesting technical content into the world.
3. To support the growth of my local technical community by volunteering my experience and knowledge with others through activities such as mentoring, conference talks and similar.

Next Steps Over the coming weeks I ll write more about each of these topics - you can use the box in the sidebar (or on the front page, if you re on a phone) to be notified when I post new writing (there s also an RSS feed here, for the geeks). I d love to have your feedback and engagement on these goals too - please drop me an email with your thoughts or even book a meeting - it won t be a distraction to me, you ll be helping me meet my goal of developing and maintaining my network :)

For the fourth year in a row, I've asked Soci t de Transport de Montr al, Montreal's transit agency, for the foot traffic data of Montreal's subway. By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the station's foot traffic.

• Orange line (top10)
• Green line (top10)
• Blue line
• Yellow line
• Global Top 10

Licences

• The subway map displayed on this page, the original dataset and my modified dataset are licenced under CCO 1.0: they are in the public domain.
• The R code I wrote is licensed under the GPLv3+. It's pretty much the same code as last year. I re-used last's year converter script and although I had to clean some of the data by hand, it worked pretty well.

This is the first of a two-part post, covering high-level thoughts around my motivations and vision. Make sure to check out the second part for my specific goals for 2023. A new year is upon us! My plan was to be 6 months into the journey of starting a business by this point. I made some very tentative progress towards that goal in 2022, registering a company and starting some consulting work, but on the whole I ve found it much harder than expected to gather the necessary energy to begin that journey in earnest.

Reflection I m excited about the next chapter of my career, so the fact that I ve been struggling to get started has been frustrating. The only upside is that the delay has given me plenty of time to reflect on the last few years and what I can learn from them and draw some lessons to help better manage and sustain my energy going forward.

Purpose A large part of what I ve realised is that I should have left Google years ago. It was a great place to work, and I m incredibly grateful for everything I learned and received during my time there. For years it was my dream job, but my happiness had been declining, and instead of taking the (relatively small) risk of leaving to the unknown, I tried several variations of team and role in the hope of restoring the dream. The reality is that a significant chunk of my motivation and energy comes from being able to link my work back to a bigger purpose that delivers concrete positive impact in the world. I felt that link through Google s mission to make information universally accessible and useful for the first 10-11 years, but for the latter 4-5 years my ability to see that link was tenuous at best and trying to push through the challenges presented without that link providing a reliable source of energy is what drove my unhappiness and led to needing a longer break to recharge. I expect the challenges of starting a business to be even greater than what I experienced at Google, so the lesson I m taking from this is that it s crucial for me to understand what the link between my work and the bigger purpose with concrete positive impact in the world that I m aiming to contribute to is.

Community The second factor that I ve slowly come to realise has been missing from my career in the last few years has been participation in a professional community and a variety of enriching interpersonal relationships. As much as I value and need this type of interaction, fostering and sustaining it unfortunately doesn t come naturally to me. Working remotely since 2016 and then taking a 9 month break out of the industry are not particularly helpful contributors to building and maintaining a wide network either! The lesson here is simply that I m going to need to push past my comfort zone in reaching out and introducing myself to a range of people in order to grow my professional network, and equally I need to be diligent and disciplined in making time to maintain and regularly connect with people whom I respect and find energising to interact with.

Personal Influences Lastly, I ve been reflecting on a set of principles that are important to me. These are not so much new lessons, more confirming to myself what I value moving forward. There are many things I could include here, but to keep it somewhat brief, the key influences on my thinking are:

• Independence - I can t entirely explain why or where it comes from, but since the start of my professional career (which I consider to be my consulting/freelancing development during high school) I ve understood that I m far more motivated by building and growing my own business than I am by working for someone else. Working for myself has always felt like the default and sensible course - I m excited to get back to that.
• Openness - Open is better than closed, in terms of software, business model and organisational processes. This continues to be a strong belief and something I want to uphold in my business endeavours. Competition should be based on superior technical quality or service, not artificial constraints or barriers to entry that lock customers and users into a single solution or market. Protocols and networks should be open for wide participation and easily accessible to new entrants and competition.
• People first - This applies both to how we work with each other - respectfully, valuing diversity and with integrity, and to how we apply technology to our world - with consideration for all stakeholders it may affect and awareness of both the intended and potential unintended impacts.

Framework Using Vision, Mission and Strategy as a planning framework has worked quite well for me when building and growing teams over the years, so I plan to re-use it personally to help organise the above reflections into a hopefully cohesive plan than results in some useful 2023 goals.

Vision Software systems contribute direct and meaningful impact to solving real problems in our world. Each word has a fair bit of meaning behind it for me, so breaking it down a little bit:

• software systems - excite me because software is eating the world and has significant potential to do good.
• contribute - Software alone doesn t solve problems, and misapplied can easily make things worse. To contribute software needs to be designed intentionally and evaluated with an awareness of risks it could pose within the complex system that is our modern world.
• direct and meaningful impact - I m not looking for broad outcomes like improving productivity or communication, which apply generally across many problems. I want to see software applied to solve specific blockers whose removal unlocks significant progress towards solving a problem.
• real - as opposed to straightforward problems. The types of issue where the acknowledgement of it as a real problem often ends the sentence as it feels too big to tackle. Climate change and pandemic risk are examples of real problems. Decentralising finance or selling more widgets are not.
• in our world - is mostly filler to round out the sentence nicely, but I do think we should probably sort out the mess we re making on our own planet before trying to colonise anywhere else.

Mission To lead the development and operation of software systems that deliver new opportunities for individuals, businesses and communities to solve the real problems in their community. Again breaking down the intent a little bit:

• lead - having a meaningful impact on real problems is a big job. I won t succeed as a one man band. It will require building and growing a larger team.
• development and operation - development is fun and necessary, but I also wanted to highlight that the ongoing operation and integration of those software systems into the broader social and human systems of our world is an equally important and ongoing need.
• new opportunities - are important to drive and motivate investment in the adoption of technology. Building or operating a system that maintains the status quo is not motivating for me.
• individuals, businesses and communities - aka everyone! But each of these groups (as examples, not specific) will have diverse roles, needs and interactions with the software which must be considered to ensure the system achieves the desired contribution and impact.
• their community - refines the ambition from the vision to an achievable scope of action within which to execute the mission. We won t solve our problems by targeting one big global fix, but if we each participate in solving the problems in our community, collectively it will make a difference.

Strategy Build a sustainable business that provides a home and infrastructure to support a continuous cycle of development, validation and growth of software systems fulfilling the mission and vision above.

• Accumulate meaningful impact via a portfolio of systems rather than one big bet.
• Focus on opportunities that promote the decarbonisation of our economy (the most pressing problem our society faces), but not at the expense of ignoring compelling opportunities to contribute impact to other real problems also.
• Favour the marathon over the sprint - while being first can be fun and convey benefits, it s often the fast-followers who learn from the initial mistakes and deliver lasting change and broader impact.

In keeping with the final bullet point, I aim to evaluate the strategy against a long-term view of success. What excites me about it is that it has the potential to provide structure and clarity for my work while also enabling many future paths - from operating a portfolio of micro-SaaS products that each solve real problems for a specific niche or community, or diving deep into a single compelling opportunity for a year or two, joining with others to partner on shared ventures or some combination of all three and other variations in between.

Your Thoughts I consider this a first draft, which I intend to revise and evolve further over the next 6-12 months. I don t plan major changes to the intent or underlying ideas, but finding the best words to express and convey that intent clearly is not something I expect to get right on the first take. I d love to have your feedback and engagement as I move forward with this strategy - please use the box in the sidebar (or on the front page, if you re on a phone) to be notified when I post new writing, drop me an email with your thoughts or even book a meeting to say hi and discuss something in detail.

Goals for 2023 Next up - check out part two of this post to see my goals for 2023.

Review: Forward, edited by Blake Crouch

Publisher:	Amazon Original Stories
Copyright:	September 2019
ISBN:	1-5420-9206-X
ISBN:	1-5420-4363-8
ISBN:	1-5420-9357-0
ISBN:	1-5420-0434-9
ISBN:	1-5420-4363-8
ISBN:	1-5420-4425-1
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	300

This is another Amazon collection of short fiction, this time mostly at novelette length. (The longer ones might creep into novella.) As before, each one is available separately for purchase or Amazon Prime "borrowing," with separate ISBNs. The sidebar cover is for the first in the sequence. (At some point I need to update my page templates so that I can add multiple covers.) N.K. Jemisin's "Emergency Skin" won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novelette, so I wanted to read and review it, but it would be too short for a standalone review. I therefore decided to read the whole collection and review it as an anthology. This was a mistake. Learn from my mistake. The overall theme of the collection is technological advance, rapid change, and the ethical and social question of whether we should slow technology because of social risk. Some of the stories stick to that theme more closely than others. Jemisin's story mostly ignores it, which was probably the right decision. "Ark" by Veronica Roth: A planet-killing asteroid has been on its inexorable way towards Earth for decades. Most of the planet has been evacuated. A small group has stayed behind, cataloging samples and filling two remaining ships with as much biodiversity as they can find with the intent to leave at the last minute. Against that backdrop, two of that team bond over orchids. If you were going "wait, what?" about the successful evacuation of Earth, yeah, me too. No hint is offered as to how this was accomplished. Also, the entirety of humanity abandoned mutual hostility and national borders to cooperate in the face of the incoming disaster, which is, uh, bizarrely optimistic for an otherwise gloomy story. I should be careful about how negative I am about this story because I am sure it will be someone's favorite. I can even write part of the positive review: an elegiac look at loss, choices, and the meaning of a life, a moving look at how people cope with despair. The writing is fine, the story structure works; it's not a bad story. I just found it monumentally depressing, and was not engrossed by the emotionally abused protagonist's unresolved father issues. I can imagine a story around the same facts and plot that I would have liked much better, but all of these people need therapy and better coping mechanisms. I'm also not sure what this had to do with the theme, given that the incoming asteroid is random chance and has nothing to do with technological development. (4) "Summer Frost" by Blake Crouch: The best part of this story is the introductory sequence before the reader knows what's going on, which is full of evocative descriptions. I'm about to spoil what is going on, so if you want to enjoy that untainted by the stupidity of the rest of the plot, skip the rest of this story review. We're going to have a glut of stories about the weird and obsessive form of AI risk invented by the fevered imaginations of the "rationalist" community, aren't we. I don't know why I didn't predict that. It's going to be just as annoying as the glut of cyberpunk novels written by people who don't understand computers. Crouch lost me as soon as the setup is revealed. Even if I believed that a game company would use a deep learning AI still in learning mode to run an NPC (I don't; see Microsoft's Tay for an obvious reason why not), or that such an NPC would spontaneously start testing the boundaries of the game world (this is not how deep learning works), Crouch asks the reader to believe that this AI started as a fully scripted NPC in the prologue with a fixed storyline. In other words, the foundation of the story is that this game company used an AI model capable of becoming a general intelligence for barely more than a cut scene. This is not how anything works. The rest of the story is yet another variation on a science fiction plot so old and threadbare that Isaac Asimov invented the Three Laws of Robotics to avoid telling more versions of it. Crouch's contribution is to dress it up in the terminology of the excessively online. (The middle of the story features a detailed discussion of Roko's basilisk; if you recognize that, you know what you're in for.) Asimov would not have had a lesbian protagonist, so points for progress I guess, but the AI becomes more interesting to the protagonist than her wife and kid because of course it does. There are a few twists and turns along the way, but the destination is the bog-standard hard-takeoff general intelligence scenario. One more pet peeve: Authors, stop trying to illustrate the growth of your AI by having it move from broken to fluent English. English grammar is so much easier than self-awareness or the Turing test that we had programs that could critique your grammar decades before we had believable chatbots. It's going to get grammar right long before the content of the words makes any sense. Also, your AI doesn't sound dumber, your AI sounds like someone whose native language doesn't use pronouns and helper verbs the way that English does, and your decision to use that as a marker for intelligence is, uh, maybe something you should think about. (3) "Emergency Skin" by N.K. Jemisin: The protagonist is a heavily-augmented cyborg from a colony of Earth's diaspora. The founders of that colony fled Earth when it became obvious to them that the planet was dying. They have survived in another star system, but they need a specific piece of technology from the dead remnants of Earth. The protagonist has been sent to retrieve it. The twist is that this story is told in the second-person perspective by the protagonist's ride-along AI, created from a consensus model of the rulers of the colony. We never see directly what the protagonist is doing or thinking, only the AI reaction to it. This is exactly the sort of gimmick that works much better in short fiction than at novel length. Jemisin uses it to create tension between the reader and the narrator, and I thoroughly enjoyed the effect. (As shown in the Broken Earth trilogy, Jemisin is one of the few writers who can use second-person effectively.) I won't spoil the revelation, but it's barbed and biting and vicious and I loved it. Jemisin does deliver the point with a sledgehammer, so be aware of that if you want subtlety in your short fiction, but I prefer the bluntness. (This is part of why I usually don't get along with literary short stories.) The reader of course can't change the direction of the story, but the second-person perspective still provides a hit of vicarious satisfaction. I can see why this won the Hugo; it's worth seeking out. (8) "You Have Arrived at Your Destination" by Amor Towles: Sam and his wife are having a child, and they've decided to provide him with an early boost in life. Vitek is a fertility lab, but more than that, it can do some gene tweaking and adjustment to push a child more towards one personality or another. Sam and his wife have spent hours filling out profiles, and his wife spent hours weeding possible choices down to three. Now, Sam has come to Vitek to pick from the remaining options. Speaking of literary short stories, Towles is the non-SFF writer of this bunch, and it's immediately obvious. The story requires the SFnal premise, but after that this is a character piece. Vitek is an elite, expensive company with a condescending and overly-reductive attitude towards humanity, which is entirely intentional on the author's part. This is the sort of story that gets resolved in an unexpected conversation in a roadside bar, and where most of the conflict happens inside the protagonist's head. I was initially going to complain that Towles does the standard literary thing of leaving off the denouement on the grounds that the reader can figure it out, but when I did a bit of re-reading for this review, I found more of the bones than I had noticed the first time. There's enough subtlety that I had to think for a bit and re-read a passage, but not too much. It's also the most thoughtful treatment of the theme of the collection, the only one that I thought truly wrestled with the weird interactions between technological capability and human foresight. Next to "Emergency Skin," this was the best story of the collection. (7) "The Last Conversation" by Paul Tremblay: A man wakes up in a dark room, in considerable pain, not remembering anything about his life. His only contact with the world at first is a voice: a woman who is helping him recover his strength and his memory. The numbers that head the chapters have significant gaps, representing days left out of the story, as he pieces together what has happened alongside the reader. Tremblay is the horror writer of the collection, so predictably this is the story whose craft I can admire without really liking it. In this case, the horror comes mostly from the pacing of revelation, created by the choice of point of view. (This would be a much different story from the perspective of the woman.) It's well-done, but it has the tendency I've noticed in other horror stories of being a tightly closed system. I see where the connection to the theme is, but it's entirely in the setting, not in the shape of the story. Not my thing, but I can see why it might be someone else's. (5) "Randomize" by Andy Weir: Gah, this was so bad. First, and somewhat expectedly, it's a clunky throwback to a 1950s-style hard SF puzzle story. The writing is atrocious: wooden, awkward, cliched, and full of gratuitous infodumping. The characterization is almost entirely through broad stereotypes; the lone exception is the female character, who at least adds an interesting twist despite being forced to act like an idiot because of the plot. It's a very old-school type of single-twist story, but the ending is completely implausible and falls apart if you breathe on it too hard. Weir is something of a throwback to an earlier era of scientific puzzle stories, though, so maybe one is inclined to give him a break on the writing quality. (I am not; one of the ways in which science fiction has improved is that you can get good scientific puzzles and good writing these days.) But the science is also so bad that I was literally facepalming while reading it. The premise of this story is that quantum computers are commercially available. That will cause a serious problem for Las Vegas casinos, because the generator for keno numbers is vulnerable to quantum algorithms. The solution proposed by the IT person for the casino? A quantum random number generator. (The words "fight quantum with quantum" appear literally in the text if you're wondering how bad the writing is.) You could convince me that an ancient keno system is using a pseudorandom number generator that might be vulnerable to some quantum algorithm and doesn't get reseeded often enough. Fine. And yes, quantum computers can be used to generate high-quality sources of random numbers. But this solution to the problem makes no sense whatsoever. It's like swatting a house fly with a nuclear weapon. Weir says explicitly in the story that all the keno system needs is an external source of high-quality random numbers. The next step is to go to Amazon and buy a hardware random number generator. If you want to splurge, it might cost you $250. Problem solved. Yes, hardware random number generators have various limitations that may cause you problems if you need millions of bits or you need them very quickly, but not for something as dead-simple and with such low entropy requirements as keno numbers! You need a trivial number of bits for each round; even the slowest and most conservative hardware random number generator would be fine. Hell, measure the noise levels on the casino floor. Point a camera at a lava lamp. Or just buy one of the physical ball machines they use for the lottery. This problem is heavily researched, by casinos in particular, and is not significantly changed by the availability of quantum computers, at least for applications such as keno where the generator can be reseeded before each generation. You could maybe argue that this is an excuse for the IT guy to get his hands on a quantum computer, which fits the stereotypes, but that still breaks the story for reasons that would be spoilers. As soon as any other casino thought about this, they'd laugh in the face of the characters. I don't want to make too much of this, since anyone can write one bad story, but this story was dire at every level. I still owe Weir a proper chance at novel length, but I can't say this added to my enthusiasm. (2) Rating: 4 out of 10

Review: Night and Silence, by Seanan McGuire

Series:	October Daye #12
Publisher:	DAW Books
Copyright:	2018
ISBN:	0-698-18353-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	353

Night and Silence is the 12th book in Seanan McGuire's long-running October Daye Celtic-inspired urban fantasy series. This is a "read the books in order" sort of series; you definitely do not want to start here. Gillian, Toby's estranged daughter, has been kidnapped. Her ex-husband and his new wife turn to her in desperation (although Miranda suspects Toby is the one who kidnapped her). Toby of course drops everything to find her, which she would have done regardless, but the obvious fear is that Gillian may have been kidnapped specifically to get at Toby. Meanwhile, the consequences of The Brightest Fell have put a severe strain on one of Toby's most important relationships, at the worst possible time. Once again, this is when I say that McGuire's writing has a lot of obvious flaws, and then say that this book kept me up way past my bedtime for two nights in a row because it was nearly impossible to put down. The primary quality flaw in these books, at least for me, is that Toby's thought processes have some deeply-worn grooves that she falls into time and time again. Since she's the first-person narrator of the series, that produces some repetitive writing. She feels incredibly lucky for her chosen family, she worries about her friends, she prizes loyalty very highly, she throws herself headlong into danger, and she thinks about these things in a background hum through every book. By this point, the reader knows all of this, so there's a lot of "yes, yes, we know" muttering that tends to happen. McGuire also understands the importance of plot and character recaps at the start of each book for those of us who have forgotten what was happening (thank you!) but awkwardly writes them into the beginning of each book. That doesn't help with the sense of repetitiveness. If only authors would write stand-alone synopses of previous books in a series, or hire someone to do that if they can't stand to, the world would be a much better place. But now I'm repeating myself. Once I get into a book, though, this doesn't matter at all. When Toby starts down a familiar emotional rut, I just read faster until I get to the next bit. Something about these books is incredibly grabby to me; once I get started on one, I devour it, and usually want to read the next one as soon as possible. Some of this is the cast, which at this point in the series is varied, entertaining, and full of the sort of casual banter that only people who have known each other for a long time can do. A lot of it is that Toby constantly moves forward. She ruminates and angsts and worries, but she never sits around and mopes. She does her thinking on the move. No matter how preoccupied she is with some emotional thread, something's going to happen on the next page. Some of it is intangible, or at least beyond my ability to put a finger on. Some authors are good at writing grabby books, and at least for me McGuire is one of those authors. Describing the plot in any detail without spoilers is hopeless this far into the series, but this is one of the big revelation books, and I suspect it's also going to be a significant tipping point in Toby's life. We finally find out what broke faerie, which has rather more to do with Toby and her family than one might have expected, explains some things about Amandine, and also (although this hasn't been spelled out yet) seems likely to explain some things about the Luidaeg's involvement in Toby's adventures. And there is another significant realignment of one of Toby's relationships that isn't fully developed here, but that I hope will be explored in future books. There's also a lot about Tybalt that to be honest I found tedious and kind of frustrating (although not half as frustrating as Toby found it). I appreciate what McGuire was doing; some problems are tedious, frustrating, and repetitive because that's how one gets through them. The problem that Toby and Tybalt are wrestling with is realistic and underdiscussed in fiction of this type, so I respect the effort, and I'm not sure there was way to write through this that would have been more engrossing (and a bit less cliched). But, still, not my favorite part of this book. Thankfully, it was a mostly-ignorable side thread. This was a substantial improvement over The Brightest Fell, which was both infuriating and on rails. Toby has much more agency here, the investigation was more interesting, and the lore and character fallout has me eager to read the next book. It's fun to see McGuire's world-building come together over this long of a series, and so far it has not disappointed. Followed by The Unkindest Tide. As has become usual, the book ends with a novella telling a story from a different perspective. "Suffer a Sea-Change": The main novel was good. This was great. "Suffer a Sea-Change" retells a critical part of the novel from Gillian's perspective, and then follows that thread of story past the end of the novel. I loved absolutely everything about this. Gillian is a great protagonist, similar to Toby but different enough to be a fresh voice. There is a ton of the Luidaeg, and through different eyes than Toby's which is fun. There's some great world-building and a few very memorable scenes. And there's also the beginning, the very small beginning, of the healing of a great injustice that's been haunting this series since the very beginning, and I am very much here for that. Great stuff. (9) Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: The Truth, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #25
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	November 2000
Printing:	August 2014
ISBN:	0-06-230736-3
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	435

The Truth is the 25th Discworld novel. Some reading order guides group it loosely into an "industrial revolution" sequence following Moving Pictures, but while there are thematic similarities I'll talk about in a moment, there's no real plot continuity. You could arguably start reading Discworld here, although you'd be spoiled for some character developments in the early Watch novels. William de Worde is paid to write a newsletter. That's not precisely what he calls it, and it's not clear whether his patrons know that he publishes it that way. He's paid to report on news of Ankh-Morpork that may be of interest of various rich or influential people who are not in Ankh-Morpork, and he discovered the best way to optimize this was to write a template of the newsletter, bring it to an engraver to make a plate of it, and run off copies for each of his customers, with some minor hand-written customization. It's a comfortable living for the estranged younger son of a wealthy noble. As the story opens, William is dutifully recording the rumor that dwarfs have discovered how to turn lead into gold. The rumor is true, although not in the way that one might initially assume.

The world is made up of four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. This is a fact well known even to Corporal Nobbs. It's also wrong. There's a fifth element, and generally it's called Surprise. For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works.

The dwarfs used the lead to make a movable type printing press, which is about to turn William de Worde's small-scale, hand-crafted newsletter into a newspaper. The movable type printing press is not unknown technology. It's banned technology, because the powers that be in Ankh-Morpork know enough to be deeply suspicious of it. The religious establishment doesn't like it because words are too important and powerful to automate. The nobles and the Watch don't like it because cheap words cause problems. And the engraver's guild doesn't like it for obvious reasons. However, Lord Vetinari knows that one cannot apply brakes to a volcano, and commerce with the dwarfs is very important to the city. The dwarfs can continue. At least for now. As in Moving Pictures, most of The Truth is an idiosyncratic speedrun of the social effects of a new technology, this time newspapers. William has no grand plan; he's just an observant man who likes to write, cares a lot about the truth, and accidentally stumbles into editing a newspaper. (This, plus being an estranged son of a rich family, feels very on-point for journalism.) His naive belief is that people want to read true things, since that's what his original patrons wanted. Truth, however, may not be in the top five things people want from a newspaper. This setup requires some narrative force to push it along, which is provided by a plot to depose Vetinari by framing him for murder. The most interesting part of that story is Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip, the people hired to do the framing and then dispose of the evidence. They're a classic villain type: the brains and the brawn, dangerous, terrifying, and willing to do horrible things to people. But one thing Pratchett excels at is taking a standard character type, turning it a bit sideways, and stuffing in things that one wouldn't think would belong. In this case, that's Mr. Tulip's deep appreciation for, and genius grasp of, fine art. It should not work to have the looming, awful person with anger issues be able to identify the exact heritage of every sculpture and fine piece of goldsmithing, and yet somehow it does. Also as in Moving Pictures (and, in a different way, Soul Music), Pratchett tends to anthropomorphize technology, giving it a life and motivations of its own. In this case, that's William's growing perception of the press as an insatiable maw into which one has to feed words. I'm usually dubious of shifting agency from humans to things when doing social analysis (and there's a lot of social analysis here), but I have to concede that Pratchett captures something deeply true about the experience of feedback loops with an audience. A lot of what Pratchett puts into this book about the problematic relationship between a popular press and the truth is obvious and familiar, but he also makes some subtle points about the way the medium shapes what people expect from it and how people produce content for it that are worthy of Marshall McLuhan. The interactions between William and the Watch were less satisfying. In our world, the US press is, with only rare exceptions, a thoughtless PR organ for police propaganda and the exonerative tense. Pratchett tackles that here... sort of. William vaguely grasps that his job as a reporter may be contrary to the job of the Watch to maintain order, and Vimes's ambivalent feelings towards "solving crimes" push the story in that direction. But this is also Vimes, who is clearly established as one of the good sort and therefore is a bad vehicle for talking about how the police corrupt the press. Pratchett has Vimes and Vetinari tacitly encourage William, which works within the story but takes the pressure off the conflict and leaves William well short of understanding the underlying politics. There's a lot more that could be said about the tension between the press and the authorities, but I think the Discworld setup isn't suitable for it. This is the sort of book that benefits from twenty-four volumes of backstory and practice. Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork cast ticks along like a well-oiled machine, which frees up space that would otherwise have to be spent on establishing secondary characters. The result is a lot of plot and social analysis shoved into a standard-length Discworld novel, and a story that's hard to put down. The balance between humor and plot is just about perfect, the references and allusions aren't overwhelming, and the supporting characters, both new and old, are excellent. We even get a good Death sequence. This is solid, consistent stuff: Discworld as a mature, well-developed setting with plenty of stories left to tell. Followed by Thief of Time in publication order, and later by Monstrous Regiment in the vaguely-connected industrial revolution sequence. Rating: 8 out of 10

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In December, 17 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 3.0h (out of 0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.0h to the next month.
• Anton Gladky did 8.0h (out of 6.0h assigned and 9.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.0h to the next month.
• Ben Hutchings did 24.0h (out of 9.0h assigned and 15.0h from previous period).
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Dominik George did 0.0h (out of 10.0h assigned and 14.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 24.0h to the next month.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 8.0h in December, 8.0h in November (out of 1.5h assigned and 49.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 43.0h to the next month.
• Enrico Zini did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
• Guilhem Moulin did 17.5h (out of 20.0h assigned), thus carrying over 2.5h to the next month.
• Helmut Grohne did 15.0h (out of 15.0h assigned, 2.5h were taken from the extra-budget and worked on).
• Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 10.0h (out of 7.5h assigned and 8.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 6.0h to the next month.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 24.5h (out of 20.25h assigned and 11.75h from previous period), thus carrying over 7.5h to the next month.
• Stefano Rivera did 2.5h (out of 20.5h assigned and 14.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 32.5h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 20.5h (out of 37.0h assigned and 22.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 38.5h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 10.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 4.0h to the next month.
• Tobias Frost did 16.0h (out of 16.0h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 51.5h (out of 42.5h assigned and 9.0h from previous period).

Evolution of the situation In December, we have released 47 DLAs, closing 232 CVEs. In the same year, in total we released 394 DLAs, closing 1450 CVEs. We are constantly growing and seeking new contributors. If you are a Debian Developer and want to join the LTS team, please contact us.

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 88 months)
  • GitHub (for 79 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 56 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 99 months)
  • Linode (for 93 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 82 months)
  • Plat Home (for 82 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 38 months)
  • Deveryware (for 25 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 20 months)
  • EDF SA (for 9 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 103 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 97 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 89 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 89 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 83 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 73 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 67 months)
  • CINECA (for 56 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 50 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd (for 40 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 38 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 32 months)
  • Platform.sh (for 32 months)
  • MOXA INC. (for 26 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 23 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 21 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 21 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 12 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 10 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 104 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 104 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 101 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 101 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 99 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 98 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 98 months)
  • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 97 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 97 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 97 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 93 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 88 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 85 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 80 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 80 months)
  • Tesorion (for 80 months)
  • Bearstech (for 71 months)
  • LiHAS (for 71 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 66 months)
  • Supagro (for 61 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 60 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 46 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 38 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 35 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 30 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 25 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 22 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 16 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 16 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 15 months)
  • Alter Way (for 8 months)

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

• devscripts: allow rmadison to query archived releases, unofficial ports
• debiman: update prerequisites
• reportbug: drop cruft, add tags based on subject
• debbugs: fix usertag validation
• Debian DDPO: better syntax error messages
• Debian madison: allow querying archived releases, unofficial ports
• Debian ftp-master website: typos
• Debian mirrors list: fix debian.co.il
• Debian mirror status: fix crash, debianbts usage
• Debian screenshots:
  • deleted pcscd (manual page), stockfish (actually of chess.com)
• Debian BTS usertags: fixed some security, porter, QA, FTP and website usertags
• Debian package uploads: crawl, git-remote-hg, azure-functions-devops-build
• Debian wiki pages: ArchiveQualification (riscv64 (1 2)), BuildProfileSpec, ContinuousIntegration (GUI, TUI), Cruft, DAManager, debconf, DebianIndia, DeveloperNews, FediverseTeam, InterWikiMap, KernelFAQ, Ketchup, LocalGroups, LoongArch, MemberBenefits, MiniDebConf, MIPS/UserTags, Ports (arc, ia64, loong64, riscv64), PortsDocs/New, PortTemplate, qa.debian.org/usertagging, ReleaseRecertification (jessie, stretch, wheezy), reportbug, ServicesHosting, Services/PublicUddMirror, SystemBuildTools, Teams (Debbugs/ArchitectureTags (1 2), DebianNet, ReleaseTeam/ReleaseCheckList), ungoogled-chromium

Issues

• Potential security issue in several Python programs (sent to the Debian Security Team).
• Crashes in Debian Portfolio service (sent privately), GLib
• Broken symlink in llvm-defaults
• Non-breaking-space chars in emacs-cmake-mode
• Features in lintian
• Warnings in pyvmomi
• Inaccurate data in UDD how-can-i-help
• Invalid syntax in rust-plotters
• Fork updated for git-remote-hg
• Conffile removal needed in zutils
• Alternatives removal needed in g++-mingw-w64-x86-64-win32
• Regression in pkgconf (vs pkg-config)
• Unsupported device in ddccontrol-db

Review

• Spam: reported 93 Debian mailing list posts
• Debian wiki: RecentChanges for the month
• Debian BTS usertags: changes for the month
• Debian screenshots:
  • approved ace-of-penguins acfax alacritty bfbtester cwm dolphin freefilesync kleopatra libpam-runtime logsave materia-gtk-theme mesa-utils netselect neverball python3-asdf python3-unyt stockfish xfig xfractint xfwm4
  • rejected pcscd (help output), orthanc (non-anonymised medical data), fonts-courier-prime (better existing screenshot), shutter (Windows, browser screenshot), bash (an editor), dwarves (random instagram account), alacritty (help output), xfonts-100dpi/goxel/gparted (selfie)

Administration

• Debian BTS: unarchive/reopen/triage bugs for reintroduced packages: gnome-shell-extension-no-annoyance
• Debian servers: contact mail server blocking a Debian MX
• Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

• Respond to queries from Debian users and contributors on the mailing lists and IRC

Sponsors The azure-functions-devops-build work was sponsored. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

There is a move to Bring Back Blogging and having recently sorted out my own FreshRSS install I am completely in favour of such a thing. RSS feeds with complete posts, for preference, not just a teaser intro sentence/paragraph. It s also a reminder to me that I should blog more, and what better way to start 2023 than with my traditional recap of my Free Software activities in 2022. For previous years see 2019, 2020 + 2021

Conferences I attended DebConf22 in Prizen, Kosova this year, and finally hit the end of my luck in avoiding COVID. 0/10, would not recommend. Thankfully I didn t come down with symptoms until I got home (I felt fine and tested negative on arrival home, then started to feel terrible the next day and tested again), so I was able to enjoy the conference itself. I also made it to Linux Security Summit Europe 2022, which aligned with work related bits and was interesting. I suspect I would have been better going to LPC 2022 for the hallway track, though I did manage to get some overlap with folk being in town given that both were the same week.

Debian Most of my contributions to Free software continue to happen within Debian. We continue to operate a roughly 3 month rotation for Debian Keyring in terms of handling the regular updates, and I dealt with 2022.03.24, 2022.06.26, 2022.08.11, 2022.09.24, 2022.09.25 + 2022.12.24. There were a few out of cycle updates this year and I handled a couple of them. My other contributions are largely within the Debian Electronics Packaging Team. gcc-xtensa-lx106 saw a few updates, to GCC 11 + enabling D (10 + 11), then to GCC 12 (12). binutils-xtensa-lx106 got some minor packaging cleanups, which also served to force a rebuild with the current binutils source (5). libsigrokdecode got an upload to enable building with Python 3.10 (0.5.3-3). Related, I updated sdcc to a new upstream version (4.2.0+dfsg-1) - it s used for the sigrok-firmware-fx2lafw package and I do have a tendency to play with microcontrollers, so it s good to have a recent version available in the archive. I continue to pay attention to OpenOCD, with a minor set of updates to pull in some fixes from master (0.11.0-2). I was pleased to see the release process for 0.12.0 kick off and have been uploading RCs as they come out (0.12.0~rc1-1, 0.12.0~rc2-1 + 0.12.0~rc3-1). Upstream have been interested in the upcoming bookworm release cycle and I m hopeful we ll get 0.12.0 proper in before freeze. libjaylink also saw an upstream release (0.3.1-1). Package upload sponsorship isn t normally something I get involved with, because I find I have to spend a lot of time checking over things before I m comfortable doing the upload. However I did sponsor an initial upload for sugarjar and an update for mgba (0.10.0+dsfg-1, currently stuck in NEW). Credit to Michel for dealing swiftly with my review comments, and Ryan for producing a nicely reviewable set of changes. As part of the Data Protection Team I responded to various inbound queries to that team. There was also some discussion on debian-vote as part of the DPL election that I engaged with, as well as discussions at DebConf about how we can do things better. For Debian New Members I m mostly inactive as an application manager - we generally seem to have enough available recently. If that changes I ll look at stepping in to help, but I don t see that happening (it got close this year but several people had stood up before I got around to offering). I continue to be involved in Front Desk, having various conversations throughout the year with the rest of the team and occasionally approving some of the checks for new applicants. Towards the end of the year I got involved with the Debian Games Team, largely because I m keen to try and get my Kodi working with libretro based emulators - I d really like to be able to play old style games from the same interface as I can engage with locally stored movies, music and TV. It turns out there are a lot of moving pieces to make that happen, some missing from Debian and others in need of some TLC. I updated retroarch to current upstream (1.13.0+dfsg-1 + 1.13.0+dfsg-2) but while I was doing so upstream did another release. I plan on uploading 1.14.0 once 1.13.0 has migrated to testing. It turned out I also needed to update libretro-core-info (1.13.0-1) and retroarch-assets (1.7.6+git20221024+dfsg-1). In terms of actual emulators I pulled in new versions for genesisplusgx (1.7.4+git20221128-1) and libretro-bsnes-mercury (094+git20220807-1). On the Kodi side I haven t uploaded anything yet. I ve filed an ITP for rcheevos, which is a dependency for game.libretro and I have a fledgling package for game.libretro that I finally got working today. I m not sure if I can get it cleaned up enough in time to make the bookworm release, but I m hoping that at least the libretro piece is in a bit better shape now (though I m aware there are more emulator cores that could do with being updated).

Linux This year was a quiet year for personal Linux contributions. I submitted a minor fix for the qca8081 PHY with speeds lower than 2.5Gb/s that caused me issues on my RB5009.

Personal projects 2022 finally saw a minor releases of onak, 0.6.2, which resulted in a corresponding Debian upload (0.6.2-1). It has a couple of bug fixes but nothing major.. As I said last year it s not dead, just resting, but Sequoia PGP is probably where you should be looking for a modern OpenPGP implementation. I added some basic Debian packaging to mqtt-arp - I didn t bother uploading it as it s a fairly niche package, but I m using it locally.

Work related I changed jobs at the start of the year and surprisingly this marks the first time I have had a role where I ve been actively encouraged to work on Free software projects and push upstream, both at an organisational and team level. That s been pretty cool and early on I managed a minor cosmetic fix in zstd, some certificate checking in a calnex tool and an optimisation for fetching sensor data on network switches. There was also some performance investigation that led to the discovery and fixing of excessive heap allocation in a torrent library. Finally I managed to submit my first kernel contribution that was part of a day job need rather than just a personal itch - it only took me 18 years from my first contribution being taken. That work enables IMA measurement logs to be carried over kexec on x86_64. I ve got some additional patches (to export Intel TXT info via securityfs and support measurement of kexec initramfs components) but both haven t had a lot of feedback and I need to do some clean-up and re-submit. That wraps up 2022. For 2023 I m hoping to get the remaining Kodi/libretro pieces in place in Debian - I think I m close to having something that works well enough to upload, and I have some ideas about general infrastructure to make things easier longer term. I m expecting to chase up the 2 stalled work-related kernel contributions (and I ve spent some time trying to cleanup the early decompression logic too but not in a state suitable for submission yet). Conference-wise I hope to be at DebConf23. I ll miss FOSDEM - it s too close to a few other things I ve got going on. And I m sure some unplanned stuff will come up too. While this is still a fairly insignificant amount of contributions compared to others I see posting on Debian Planet I do feel I ve managed to increase my involvement this year, and hopefully that ll continue. Happy New Year, folks!

In my three most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, classics and fiction books that I enjoyed the most in 2022. But in the last of my book-related posts for 2022, I'll be going over my favourite works of non-fiction. Books that just missed the cut here include Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost (1998) on the role of Leopold II of Belgium in the Congo Free State, Johann Hari's Stolen Focus (2022) (a personal memoir on relating to how technology is increasingly fragmenting our attention), Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex (2021) (a misleadingly named set of philosophic essays on feminism), Dana Heller et al.'s The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity (2005), John Berger's mindbending Ways of Seeing (1972) and Louise Richardson's What Terrorists Want (2006).

The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989) Paul Fussell Rather than describe the battles, weapons, geopolitics or big personalities of the two World Wars, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory & Wartime are focused instead on how the two wars have been remembered by their everyday participants. Drawing on the memoirs and memories of soldiers and civilians along with a brief comparison with the actual events that shaped them, Fussell's two books are a compassionate, insightful and moving piece of analysis. Fussell primarily sets himself against the admixture of nostalgia and trauma that obscures the origins and unimaginable experience of participating in these wars; two wars that were, in his view, a "perceptual and rhetorical scandal from which total recovery is unlikely." He takes particular aim at the dishonesty of hindsight:

For the past fifty years, the Allied war has been sanitised and romanticised almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant and the bloodthirsty. I have tried to balance the scales. [And] in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war [seems] inaccessible.

The author does not engage in any of the customary rose-tinted view of war, yet he remains understanding and compassionate towards those who try to locate a reason within what was quite often senseless barbarism. If anything, his despondency and pessimism about the Second World War (the war that Fussell himself fought in) shines through quite acutely, and this is especially the case in what he chooses to quote from others:

"It was common [ ] throughout the [Okinawa] campaign for replacements to get hit before we even knew their names. They came up confused, frightened, and hopeful, got wounded or killed, and went right back to the rear on the route by which they had come, shocked, bleeding, or stiff. They were forlorn figures coming up to the meat grinder and going right back out of it like homeless waifs, unknown and faceless to us, like unread books on a shelf."

It would take a rather heartless reader to fail to be sobered by this final simile, and an even colder one to view Fussell's citation of such an emotive anecdote to be manipulative. Still, stories and cruel ironies like this one infuse this often-angry book, but it is not without astute and shrewd analysis as well, especially on the many qualitative differences between the two conflicts that simply cannot be captured by facts and figures alone. For example:

A measure of the psychological distance of the Second [World] War from the First is the rarity, in 1914 1918, of drinking and drunkenness poems.

Indeed so. In fact, what makes Fussell's project so compelling and perhaps even unique is that he uses these non-quantitive measures to try and take stock of what happened. After all, this was a war conducted by humans, not the abstract school of statistics. And what is the value of a list of armaments destroyed by such-and-such a regiment when compared with truly consequential insights into both how the war affected, say, the psychology of postwar literature ("Prolonged trench warfare, whether enacted or remembered, fosters paranoid melodrama, which I take to be a primary mode in modern writing."), the specific words adopted by combatants ("It is a truism of military propaganda that monosyllabic enemies are easier to despise than others") as well as the very grammar of interaction:

The Field Service Post Card [in WW1] has the honour of being the first widespread exemplary of that kind of document which uniquely characterises the modern world: the "Form". [And] as the first widely known example of dehumanised, automated communication, the post card popularised a mode of rhetoric indispensable to the conduct of later wars fought by great faceless conscripted armies.

And this wouldn't be a book review without argument-ending observations that:

Indicative of the German wartime conception [of victory] would be Hitler and Speer's elaborate plans for the ultimate reconstruction of Berlin, which made no provision for a library.

Our myths about the two world wars possess an undisputed power, in part because they contain an essential truth the atrocities committed by Germany and its allies were not merely extreme or revolting, but their full dimensions (embodied in the Holocaust and the Holodomor) remain essentially inaccessible within our current ideological framework. Yet the two wars are better understood as an abyss in which we were all dragged into the depths of moral depravity, rather than a battle pitched by the forces of light against the forces of darkness. Fussell is one of the few observers that can truly accept and understand this truth and is still able to speak to us cogently on the topic from the vantage point of experience. The Second World War which looms so large in our contemporary understanding of the modern world (see below) may have been necessary and unavoidable, but Fussell convinces his reader that it was morally complicated "beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest," and that the only way to maintain a na ve belief in the myth that these wars were a Manichaean fight between good and evil is to overlook reality. There are many texts on the two World Wars that can either stir the intellect or move the emotions, but Fussell's two books do both. A uniquely perceptive and intelligent commentary; outstanding.

Longitude (1995) Dava Sobel Since Man first decided to sail the oceans, knowing one's location has always been critical. Yet doing so reliably used to be a serious problem if you didn't know where you were, you are far more likely to die and/or lose your valuable cargo. But whilst finding one's latitude (ie. your north south position) had effectively been solved by the beginning of the 17th century, finding one's (east west) longitude was far from trustworthy in comparison. This book first published in 1995 is therefore something of an anachronism. As in, we readily use the GPS facilities of our phones today without hesitation, so we find it difficult to imagine a reality in which knowing something fundamental like your own location is essentially unthinkable. It became clear in the 18th century, though, that in order to accurately determine one's longitude, what you actually needed was an accurate clock. In Longitude, therefore, we read of the remarkable story of John Harrison and his quest to create a timepiece that would not only keep time during a long sea voyage but would survive the rough ocean conditions as well. Self-educated and a carpenter by trade, Harrison made a number of important breakthroughs in keeping accurate time at sea, and Longitude describes his novel breakthroughs in a way that is both engaging and without talking down to the reader. Still, this book covers much more than that, including the development of accurate longitude going hand-in-hand with advancements in cartography as well as in scientific experiments to determine the speed of light: experiments that led to the formulation of quantum mechanics. It also outlines the work being done by Harrison's competitors. 'Competitors' is indeed the correct word here, as Parliament offered a huge prize to whoever could create such a device, and the ramifications of this tremendous financial incentive are an essential part of this story. For the most part, though, Longitude sticks to the story of Harrison and his evolving obsession with his creating the perfect timepiece. Indeed, one reason that Longitude is so resonant with readers is that many of the tropes of the archetypical 'English inventor' are embedded within Harrison himself. That is to say, here is a self-made man pushing against the establishment of the time, with his groundbreaking ideas being underappreciated in his life, or dishonestly purloined by his intellectual inferiors. At the level of allegory, then, I am minded to interpret this portrait of Harrison as a symbolic distillation of postwar Britain a nation acutely embarrassed by the loss of the Empire that is now repositioning itself as a resourceful but plucky underdog; a country that, with a combination of the brains of boffins and a healthy dose of charisma and PR, can still keep up with the big boys. (It is this same search for postimperial meaning I find in the fiction of John le Carr , and, far more famously, in the James Bond franchise.) All of this is left to the reader, of course, as what makes Longitute singularly compelling is its gentle manner and tone. Indeed, at times it was as if the doyenne of sci-fi Ursula K. LeGuin had a sideline in popular non-fiction. I realise it's a mark of critical distinction to downgrade the importance of popular science in favour of erudite academic texts, but Latitude is ample evidence that so-called 'pop' science need not be patronising or reductive at all.

Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court (1998) Edward Lazarus After the landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in *Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that ended the Constitutional right to abortion conferred by Roe v Wade, I prioritised a few books in the queue about the judicial branch of the United States. One of these books was Closed Chambers, which attempts to assay, according to its subtitle, "The Rise, Fall and Future of the Modern Supreme Court". This book is not merely simply a learned guide to the history and functioning of the Court (although it is completely creditable in this respect); it's actually an 'insider' view of the workings of the institution as Lazurus was a clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun during the October term of 1988. Lazarus has therefore combined his experience as a clerk and his personal reflections (along with a substantial body of subsequent research) in order to communicate the collapse in comity between the Justices. Part of this book is therefore a pure history of the Court, detailing its important nineteenth-century judgements (such as Dred Scott which ruled that the Constitution did not consider Blacks to be citizens; and Plessy v. Ferguson which failed to find protection in the Constitution against racial segregation laws), as well as many twentieth-century cases that touch on the rather technical principle of substantive due process. Other layers of Lazurus' book are explicitly opinionated, however, and they capture the author's assessment of the Court's actions in the past and present [1998] day. Given the role in which he served at the Court, particular attention is given by Lazarus to the function of its clerks. These are revealed as being far more than the mere amanuenses they were hitherto believed to be. Indeed, the book is potentially unique in its the claim that the clerks have played a pivotal role in the deliberations, machinations and eventual rulings of the Court. By implication, then, the clerks have plaedy a crucial role in the internal controversies that surround many of the high-profile Supreme Court decisions decisions that, to the outsider at least, are presented as disinterested interpretations of Constitution of the United States. This is of especial importance given that, to Lazarus, "for all the attention we now pay to it, the Court remains shrouded in confusion and misunderstanding." Throughout his book, Lazarus complicates the commonplace view that the Court is divided into two simple right vs. left political factions, and instead documents an ever-evolving series of loosely held but strongly felt series of cabals, quid pro quo exchanges, outright equivocation and pure personal prejudices. (The age and concomitant illnesses of the Justices also appears to have a not insignificant effect on the Court's rulings as well.) In other words, Closed Chambers is not a book that will be read in a typical civics class in America, and the only time the book resorts to the customary breathless rhetoric about the US federal government is in its opening chapter:

The Court itself, a Greek-style temple commanding the crest of Capitol Hill, loomed above them in the dim light of the storm. Set atop a broad marble plaza and thirty-six steps, the Court stands in splendid isolation appropriate to its place at the pinnacle of the national judiciary, one of the three independent and "coequal" branches of American government. Once dubbed the Ivory Tower by architecture critics, the Court has a Corinthian colonnade and massive twenty-foot-high bronze doors that guard the single most powerful judicial institution in the Western world. Lights still shone in several offices to the right of the Court's entrance, and [ ]

Et cetera, et cetera. But, of course, this encomium to the inherent 'nobility' of the Supreme Court is quickly revealed to be a narrative foil, as Lazarus soon razes this dangerously na ve conception to the ground:

[The] institution is [now] broken into unyielding factions that have largely given up on a meaningful exchange of their respective views or, for that matter, a meaningful explication or defense of their own views. It is of Justices who in many important cases resort to transparently deceitful and hypocritical arguments and factual distortions as they discard judicial philosophy and consistent interpretation in favor of bottom-line results. This is a Court so badly splintered, yet so intent on lawmaking, that shifting 5-4 majorities, or even mere pluralities, rewrite whole swaths of constitutional law on the authority of a single, often idiosyncratic vote. It is also a Court where Justices yield great and excessive power to immature, ideologically driven clerks, who in turn use that power to manipulate their bosses and the institution they ostensibly serve.

Lazurus does not put forward a single, overarching thesis, but in the final chapters, he does suggest a potential future for the Court:

In the short run, the cure for what ails the Court lies solely with the Justices. It is their duty, under the shield of life tenure, to recognize the pathologies affecting their work and to restore the vitality of American constitutionalism. Ultimately, though, the long-term health of the Court depends on our own resolve on whom [we] select to join that institution.

Back in 1998, Lazurus might have had room for this qualified optimism. But from the vantage point of 2022, it appears that the "resolve" of the United States citizenry was not muscular enough to meet his challenge. After all, Lazurus was writing before Bush v. Gore in 2000, which arrogated to the judicial branch the ability to decide a presidential election; the disillusionment of Barack Obama's failure to nominate a replacement for Scalia; and many other missteps in the Court as well. All of which have now been compounded by the Trump administration's appointment of three Republican-friendly justices to the Court, including hypocritically appointing Justice Barrett a mere 38 days before the 2020 election. And, of course, the leaking and ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, the true extent of which has not been yet. Not of a bit of this is Lazarus' fault, of course, but the Court's recent decisions (as well as the liberal hagiographies of 'RBG') most perforce affect one's reading of the concluding chapters. The other slight defect of Closed Chambers is that, whilst it often implies the importance of the federal and state courts within the judiciary, it only briefly positions the Supreme Court's decisions in relation to what was happening in the House, Senate and White House at the time. This seems to be increasingly relevant as time goes on: after all, it seems fairly clear even to this Brit that relying on an activist Supreme Court to enact progressive laws must be interpreted as a failure of the legislative branch to overcome the perennial problems of the filibuster, culture wars and partisan bickering. Nevertheless, Lazarus' book is in equal parts ambitious, opinionated, scholarly and dare I admit it? wonderfully gossipy. By juxtaposing history, memoir, and analysis, Closed Chambers combines an exacting evaluation of the Court's decisions with a lively portrait of the intellectual and emotional intensity that has grown within the Supreme Court's pseudo-monastic environment all while it struggles with the most impactful legal issues of the day. This book is an excellent and well-written achievement that will likely never be repeated, and a must-read for anyone interested in this ever-increasingly important branch of the US government.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (2018)
Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy (2021) Adam Tooze The economic historian Adam Tooze has often been labelled as an unlikely celebrity, but in the fourteen years since the global financial crisis of 2008, a growing audience has been looking for answers about the various failures of the modern economy. Tooze, a professor of history at New York's Columbia University, has written much that is penetrative and thought-provoking on this topic, and as a result, he has generated something of a cult following amongst economists, historians and the online left. I actually read two Tooze books this year. The first, Crashed (2018), catalogues the scale of government intervention required to prop up global finance after the 2008 financial crisis, and it characterises the different ways that countries around the world failed to live up to the situation, such as doing far too little, or taking action far too late. The connections between the high-risk subprime loans, credit default swaps and the resulting liquidity crisis in the US in late 2008 is fairly well known today in part thanks to films such as Adam McKay's 2015 The Big Short and much improved economic literacy in media reportage. But Crashed makes the implicit claim that, whilst the specific and structural origins of the 2008 crisis are worth scrutinising in exacting detail, it is the reaction of states in the months and years after the crash that has been overlooked as a result. After all, this is a reaction that has not only shaped a new economic order, it has created one that does not fit any conventional idea about the way the world 'ought' to be run. Tooze connects the original American banking crisis to the (multiple) European debt crises with a larger crisis of liberalism. Indeed, Tooze somehow manages to cover all these topics and more, weaving in Trump, Brexit and Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, as well as the evolving role of China in the post-2008 economic order. Where Crashed focused on the constellation of consequences that followed the events of 2008, Shutdown is a clear and comprehensive account of the way the world responded to the economic impact of Covid-19. The figures are often jaw-dropping: soon after the disease spread around the world, 95% of the world's economies contracted simultaneously, and at one point, the global economy shrunk by approximately 20%. Tooze's keen and sobering analysis of what happened is made all the more remarkable by the fact that it came out whilst the pandemic was still unfolding. In fact, this leads quickly to one of the book's few flaws: by being published so quickly, Shutdown prematurely over-praises China's 'zero Covid' policy, and these remarks will make a reader today squirm in their chair. Still, despite the regularity of these references (after all, mentioning China is very useful when one is directly comparing economic figures in early 2021, for examples), these are actually minor blemishes on the book's overall thesis. That is to say, Crashed is not merely a retelling of what happened in such-and-such a country during the pandemic; it offers in effect a prediction about what might be coming next. Whilst the economic responses to Covid averted what could easily have been another Great Depression (and thus showed it had learned some lessons from 2008), it had only done so by truly discarding the economic rule book. The by-product of inverting this set of written and unwritten conventions that have governed the world for the past 50 years, this 'Washington consensus' if you well, has yet to be fully felt. Of course, there are many parallels between these two books by Tooze. Both the liquidity crisis outlined in Crashed and the economic response to Covid in Shutdown exposed the fact that one of the central tenets of the modern economy ie. that financial markets can be trusted to regulate themselves was entirely untrue, and likely was false from the very beginning. And whilst Adam Tooze does not offer a singular piercing insight (conveying a sense of rigorous mastery instead), he may as well be asking whether we're simply going to lurch along from one crisis to the next, relying on the technocrats in power to fix problems when everything blows up again. The answer may very well be yes.

Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (2021) Elizabeth D. Samet Elizabeth D. Samet's Looking for the Good War answers the following question what would be the result if you asked a professor of English to disentangle the complex mythology we have about WW2 in the context of the recent US exit of Afghanistan? Samet's book acts as a twenty-first-century update of a kind to Paul Fussell's two books (reviewed above), as well as a deeper meditation on the idea that each new war is seen through the lens of the previous one. Indeed, like The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and Wartime (1989), Samet's book is a perceptive work of demystification, but whilst Fussell seems to have been inspired by his own traumatic war experience, Samet is not only informed by her teaching West Point military cadets but by the physical and ontological wars that have occurred during her own life as well. A more scholarly and dispassionate text is the result of Samet's relative distance from armed combat, but it doesn't mean Looking for the Good War lacks energy or inspiration. Samet shares John Adams' belief that no political project can entirely shed the innate corruptions of power and ambition and so it is crucial to analyse and re-analyse the role of WW2 in contemporary American life. She is surely correct that the Second World War has been universally elevated as a special, 'good' war. Even those with exceptionally giddy minds seem to treat WW2 as hallowed:

It is nevertheless telling that one of the few occasions to which Trump responded with any kind of restraint while he was in office was the 75th anniversary of D-Day in 2019.

What is the source of this restraint, and what has nurtured its growth in the eight decades since WW2 began? Samet posits several reasons for this, including the fact that almost all of the media about the Second World War is not only suffused with symbolism and nostalgia but, less obviously, it has been made by people who have no experience of the events that they depict. Take Stephen Ambrose, author of Steven Spielberg's Band of Brothers miniseries: "I was 10 years old when the war ended," Samet quotes of Ambrose. "I thought the returning veterans were giants who had saved the world from barbarism. I still think so. I remain a hero worshiper." If Looking for the Good War has a primary thesis, then, it is that childhood hero worship is no basis for a system of government, let alone a crusading foreign policy. There is a straight line (to quote this book's subtitle) from the "American Amnesia" that obscures the reality of war to the "Violent Pursuit of Happiness." Samet's book doesn't merely just provide a modern appendix to Fussell's two works, however, as it adds further layers and dimensions he overlooked. For example, Samet provides some excellent insight on the role of Western, gangster and superhero movies, and she is especially good when looking at noir films as a kind of kaleidoscopic response to the Second World War:

Noir is a world ruled by bad decisions but also by bad timing. Chance, which plays such a pivotal role in war, bleeds into this world, too.

Samet rightfully weaves the role of women into the narrative as well. Women in film noir are often celebrated as 'independent' and sassy, correctly reflecting their newly-found independence gained during WW2. But these 'liberated' roles are not exactly a ringing endorsement of this independence: the 'femme fatale' and the 'tart', etc., reflect a kind of conditional freedom permitted to women by a post-War culture which is still wedded to an outmoded honour culture. In effect, far from being novel and subversive, these roles for women actually underwrote the ambient cultural disapproval of women's presence in the workforce. Samet later connects this highly-conditional independence with the liberation of Afghan women, which:

is inarguably one of the more palatable outcomes of our invasion, and the protection of women's rights has been invoked on the right and the left as an argument for staying the course in Afghanistan. How easily consequence is becoming justification. How flattering it will be one day to reimagine it as original objective.

Samet has ensured her book has a predominantly US angle as well, for she ends her book with a chapter on the pseudohistorical Lost Cause of the Civil War. The legacy of the Civil War is still visible in the physical phenomena of Confederate statues, but it also exists in deep-rooted racial injustice that has been shrouded in euphemism and other psychological devices for over 150 years. Samet believes that a key part of what drives the American mythology about the Second World War is the way in which it subconsciously cleanses the horrors of brother-on-brother murder that were seen in the Civil War. This is a book that is not only of interest to historians of the Second World War; it is a work for anyone who wishes to understand almost any American historical event, social issue, politician or movie that has appeared since the end of WW2. That is for better or worse everyone on earth.

As a follow-up to yesterday's post detailing my favourite works of fiction from 2022, today I'll be listing my favourite fictional works that are typically filed under classics. Books that just missed the cut here include: E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his later A Passage to India (1913), both gently nudged out by Forster's superb Howard's End (see below). Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard (1958) also just missed out on a write-up here, but I can definitely recommend it to anyone interested in reading a modern Italian classic.

War and Peace (1867) Leo Tolstoy It's strange to think that there is almost no point in reviewing this novel: who hasn't heard of War and Peace? What more could possibly be said about it now? Still, when I was growing up, War and Peace was always the stereotypical example of the 'impossible book', and even start it was, at best, a pointless task, and an act of hubris at worst. And so there surely exists a parallel universe in which I never have and will never will read the book... Nevertheless, let us try to set the scene. Book nine of the novel opens as follows:

On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began; that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes. What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? [ ] The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible they become to us.

Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon's invasion of Russia, War and Peace follows the lives and fates of three aristocratic families: The Rostovs, The Bolkonskys and the Bezukhov's. These characters find themselves situated athwart (or against) history, and all this time, Napoleon is marching ever closer to Moscow. Still, Napoleon himself is essentially just a kind of wallpaper for a diverse set of personal stories touching on love, jealousy, hatred, retribution, naivety, nationalism, stupidity and much much more. As Elif Batuman wrote earlier this year, "the whole premise of the book was that you couldn t explain war without recourse to domesticity and interpersonal relations." The result is that Tolstoy has woven an incredibly intricate web that connects the war, noble families and the everyday Russian people to a degree that is surprising for a book started in 1865. Tolstoy's characters are probably timeless (especially the picaresque adventures and constantly changing thoughts Pierre Bezukhov), and the reader who has any social experience will immediately recognise characters' thoughts and actions. Some of this is at a 'micro' interpersonal level: for instance, take this example from the elegant party that opens the novel:

Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same words, about their health and her own and the health of Her Majesty, who, thank God, was better today. And each visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the whole evening.

But then, some of the focus of the observations are at the 'macro' level of the entire continent. This section about cities that feel themselves in danger might suffice as an example:

At the approach of danger, there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude, a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.

And finally, in his lengthy epilogues, Tolstoy offers us a dissertation on the behaviour of large organisations, much of it through engagingly witty analogies. These epilogues actually turn out to be an oblique and sarcastic commentary on the idiocy of governments and the madness of war in general. Indeed, the thorough dismantling of the 'great man' theory of history is a common theme throughout the book:

During the whole of that period [of 1812], Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements as the figurehead of a ship may seem to a savage to guide the vessel acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it. [ ] Why do [we] all speak of a military genius ? Is a man a genius who can order bread to be brought up at the right time and say who is to go to the right and who to the left? It is only because military men are invested with pomp and power and crowds of sychophants flatter power, attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess.

Unlike some other readers, I especially enjoyed these diversions into the accounting and workings of history, as well as our narrow-minded way of trying to 'explain' things in a singular way:

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.

Given all of these serious asides, I was also not expecting this book to be quite so funny. At the risk of boring the reader with citations, take this sarcastic remark about the ineptness of medicine men:

After his liberation, [Pierre] fell ill and was laid up for three months. He had what the doctors termed 'bilious fever.' But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him and gave him medicines to drink he recovered.

There is actually a multitude of remarks that are not entirely complimentary towards Russian medical practice, but they are usually deployed with an eye to the human element involved rather than simply to the detriment of a doctor's reputation "How would the count have borne his dearly loved daughter s illness had he not known that it was costing him a thousand rubles?" Other elements of note include some stunning set literary pieces, such as when Prince Andrei encounters a gnarly oak tree under two different circumstances in his life, and when Nat sha's 'Russian' soul is awakened by the strains of a folk song on the balalaika. Still, despite all of these micro- and macro-level happenings, for a long time I felt that something else was going on in War and Peace. It was difficult to put into words precisely what it was until I came across this passage by E. M. Forster:

After one has read War and Peace for a bit, great chords begin to sound, and we cannot say exactly what struck them. They do not arise from the story [and] they do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters. They come from the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens and fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them. Many novelists have the feeling for place, [but] very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy s divine equipment. Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time.

'Space' indeed. Yes, potential readers should note the novel's great length, but the 365 chapters are actually remarkably short, so the sensation of reading it is not in the least overwhelming. And more importantly, once you become familiar with its large cast of characters, it is really not a difficult book to follow, especially when compared to the other Russian classics. My only regret is that it has taken me so long to read this magnificent novel and that I might find it hard to find time to re-read it within the next few years.

Coming Up for Air (1939) George Orwell It wouldn't be a roundup of mine without at least one entry from George Orwell, and, this year, that place is occupied by a book I hadn't haven't read in almost two decades Still, the George Bowling of Coming Up for Air is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in a distinctly average English suburban row house with his nuclear family. One day, after winning some money on a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up in order to fish in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. Less important than the plot, however, is both the well-observed remarks and scathing criticisms that Bowling has of the town he has returned to, combined with an ominous sense of foreboding before the Second World War breaks out. At several times throughout the book, George's placid thoughts about his beloved carp pool are replaced by racing, anxious thoughts that overwhelm his inner peace:

War is coming. In 1941, they say. And there'll be plenty of broken crockery, and little houses ripped open like packing-cases, and the guts of the chartered accountant's clerk plastered over the piano that he's buying on the never-never. But what does that kind of thing matter, anyway? I'll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. IT'S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It's all going to happen. I know it - at any rate, I knew it then. There's no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there's no way out. It's just something that's got to happen.

Already we can hear psychological madness that underpinned the Second World War. Indeed, there is no great story in Coming Up For Air, no wonderfully empathetic characters and no revelations or catharsis, so it is impressive that I was held by the descriptions, observations and nostalgic remembrances about life in modern Lower Binfield, its residents, and how it has changed over the years. It turns out, of course, that George's beloved pool has been filled in with rubbish, and the village has been perverted by modernity beyond recognition. And to cap it off, the principal event of George's holiday in Lower Binfield is an accidental bombing by the British Royal Air Force. Orwell is always good at descriptions of awful food, and this book is no exception:

The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren't much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn't believe it. Then I rolled my tongue around it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.

Many other tell-tale elements of Orwell's fictional writing are in attendance in this book as well, albeit worked out somewhat less successfully than elsewhere in his oeuvre. For example, the idea of a physical ailment also serving as a metaphor is present in George's false teeth, embodying his constant preoccupation with his ageing. (Readers may recall Winston Smith's varicose ulcer representing his repressed humanity in Nineteen Eighty-Four). And, of course, we have a prematurely middle-aged protagonist who almost but not quite resembles Orwell himself. Given this and a few other niggles (such as almost all the women being of the typical Orwell 'nagging wife' type), it is not exactly Orwell's magnum opus. But it remains a fascinating historical snapshot of the feeling felt by a vast number of people just prior to the Second World War breaking out, as well as a captivating insight into how the process of nostalgia functions and operates.

Howards End (1910) E. M. Forster Howards End begins with the following sentence:

One may as well begin with Helen s letters to her sister.

In fact, "one may as well begin with" my own assumptions about this book instead. I was actually primed to consider Howards End a much more 'Victorian' book: I had just finished Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and had found her 1925 book at once rather 'modern' but also very much constrained by its time. I must have then unconsciously surmised that a book written 15 years before would be even more inscrutable, and, with its Victorian social mores added on as well, Howards End would probably not undress itself so readily in front of the reader. No doubt there were also the usual expectations about 'the classics' as well. So imagine my surprise when I realised just how inordinately affable and witty Howards End turned out to be. It doesn't have that Wildean shine of humour, of course, but it's a couple of fields over in the English countryside, perhaps abutting the more mordant social satires of the earlier George Orwell novels (see Coming Up for Air above). But now let us return to the story itself. Howards End explores class warfare, conflict and the English character through a tale of three quite different families at the beginning of the twentieth century: the rich Wilcoxes; the gentle & idealistic Schlegels; and the lower-middle class Basts. As the Bloomsbury Group Schlegel sisters desperately try to help the Basts and educate the rich but close-minded Wilcoxes, the three families are drawn ever closer and closer together. Although the whole story does, I suppose, revolve around the house in the title (which is based on the Forster's own childhood home), Howards End is perhaps best described as a comedy of manners or a novel that shows up the hypocrisy of people and society. In fact, it is surprising how little of the story actually takes place in the eponymous house, with the overwhelming majority of the first half of the book taking place in London. But it is perhaps more illuminating to remark that the Howards End of the book is a house that the Wilcoxes who own it at the start of the novel do not really need or want. What I particularly liked about Howards End is how the main character's ideals alter as they age, and subsequently how they find their lives changing in different ways. Some of them find themselves better off at the end, others worse. And whilst it is also surprisingly funny, it still manages to trade in heavier social topics as well. This is apparent in the fact that, although the characters themselves are primarily in charge of their own destinies, their choices are still constrained by the changing world and shifting sense of morality around them. This shouldn't be too surprising: after all, Forster's novel was published just four years before the Great War, a distinctly uncertain time. Not for nothing did Virginia Woolf herself later observe that "on or about December 1910, human character changed" and that "all human relations have shifted: those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children." This process can undoubtedly be seen rehearsed throughout Forster's Howards End, and it's a credit to the author to be able to capture it so early on, if not even before it was widespread throughout Western Europe. I was also particularly taken by Forster's fertile use of simile. An extremely apposite example can be found in the description Tibby Schlegel gives of his fellow Cambridge undergraduates. Here, Timmy doesn't want to besmirch his lofty idealisation of them with any banal specificities, and wishes that the idea of them remain as ideal Platonic forms instead. Or, as Forster puts it, to Timmy it is if they are "pictures that must not walk out of their frames." Wilde, at his most weakest, is 'just' style, but Forster often deploys his flair for a deeper effect. Indeed, when you get to the end of this section mentioning picture frames, you realise Forster has actually just smuggled into the story a failed attempt on Tibby's part to engineer an anonymous homosexual encounter with another undergraduate. It is a credit to Forster's sleight-of-hand that you don't quite notice what has just happened underneath you and that the books' reticence to honestly describe what has happened is thus structually analogus Tibby's reluctance to admit his desires to himself. Another layer to the character of Tibby (and the novel as a whole) is thereby introduced without the imposition of clumsy literary scaffolding. In a similar vein, I felt very clever noticing the arch reference to Debussy's Pr lude l'apr s-midi d'un faune until I realised I just fell into the trap Forster set for the reader in that I had become even more like Tibby in his pseudo-scholarly views on classical music. Finally, I enjoyed that each chapter commences with an ironic and self-conscious bon mot about society which is only slightly overblown for effect. Particularly amusing are the ironic asides on "women" that run through the book, ventriloquising the narrow-minded views of people like the Wilcoxes. The omniscient and amiable narrator of the book also recalls those ironically distant voiceovers from various French New Wave films at times, yet Forster's narrator seems to have bigger concerns in his mordant asides: Forster seems to encourage some sympathy for all of the characters even the more contemptible ones at their worst moments. Highly recommended, as are Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his slightly later A Passage to India (1913).

The Good Soldier (1915) Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier starts off fairly simply as the narrator's account of his and his wife's relationship with some old friends, including the eponymous 'Good Soldier' of the book's title. It's an experience to read the beginning of this novel, as, like any account of endless praise of someone you've never met or care about, the pages of approving remarks about them appear to be intended to wash over you. Yet as the chapters of The Good Soldier go by, the account of the other characters in the book gets darker and darker. Although the author himself is uncritical of others' actions, your own critical faculties are slowgrly brought into play, and you gradully begin to question the narrator's retelling of events. Our narrator is an unreliable narrator in the strict sense of the term, but with the caveat that he is at least is telling us everything we need to know to come to our own conclusions. As the book unfolds further, the narrator's compromised credibility seems to infuse every element of the novel even the 'Good' of the book's title starts to seem like a minor dishonesty, perhaps serving as the inspiration for the irony embedded in the title of The 'Great' Gatsby. Much more effectively, however, the narrator's fixations, distractions and manner of speaking feel very much part of his dissimulation. It sometimes feels like he is unconsciously skirting over the crucial elements in his tale, exactly like one does in real life when recounting a story containing incriminating ingredients. Indeed, just how much the narrator is conscious of his own concealment is just one part of what makes this such an interesting book: Ford Madox Ford has gifted us with enough ambiguity that it is also possible that even the narrator cannot find it within himself to understand the events of the story he is narrating. It was initially hard to believe that such a carefully crafted analysis of a small group of characters could have been written so long ago, and despite being fairly easy to read, The Good Soldier is an almost infinitely subtle book even the jokes are of the subtle kind and will likely get a re-read within the next few years.

Anna Karenina (1878) Leo Tolstoy There are many similar themes running through War and Peace (reviewed above) and Anna Karenina. Unrequited love; a young man struggling to find a purpose in life; a loving family; an overwhelming love of nature and countless fascinating observations about the minuti of Russian society. Indeed, rather than primarily being about the eponymous Anna, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. Nevertheless, our Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of government official Alexei Karenin, a colourless man who has little personality of his own, and she turns to a certain Count Vronsky in order to fulfil her passionate nature. Needless to say, this results in tragic consequences as their (admittedly somewhat qualified) desire to live together crashes against the rocks of reality and Russian society. Parallel to Anna's narrative, though, Konstantin Levin serves as the novel's alter-protagonist. In contrast to Anna, Levin is a socially awkward individual who straddles many schools of thought within Russia at the time: he is neither a free-thinker (nor heavy-drinker) like his brother Nikolai, and neither is he a bookish intellectual like his half-brother Serge. In short, Levin is his own man, and it is generally agreed by commentators that he is Tolstoy's surrogate within the novel. Levin tends to come to his own version of an idea, and he would rather find his own way than adopt any prefabricated view, even if confusion and muddle is the eventual result. In a roughly isomorphic fashion then, he resembles Anna in this particular sense, whose story is a counterpart to Levin's in their respective searches for happiness and self-actualisation. Whilst many of the passionate and exciting passages are told on Anna's side of the story (I'm thinking horse race in particular, as thrilling as anything in cinema ), many of the broader political thoughts about the nature of the working classes are expressed on Levin's side instead. These are stirring and engaging in their own way, though, such as when he joins his peasants to mow the field and seems to enter the nineteenth-century version of 'flow':

The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.

Overall, Tolstoy poses no didactic moral message towards any of the characters in Anna Karenina, and merely invites us to watch rather than judge. (Still, there is a hilarious section that is scathing of contemporary classical music, presaging many of the ideas found in Tolstoy's 1897 What is Art?). In addition, just like the earlier War and Peace, the novel is run through with a number of uncannily accurate observations about daily life:

Anna smiled, as one smiles at the weaknesses of people one loves, and, putting her arm under his, accompanied him to the door of the study.

... as well as the usual sprinkling of Tolstoy's sardonic humour ("No one is pleased with his fortune, but everyone is pleased with his wit."). Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the other titan of Russian literature, once described Anna Karenina as a "flawless work of art," and if you re only going to read one Tolstoy novel in your life, it should probably be this one.

The first fresh release of our RcppDE package in over four years (!!) is now on CRAN. RcppDE is a port of DEoptim, a popular package for derivative-free optimisation using differential evolution optimization, from plain C to C++. By using RcppArmadillo the code becomes a lot shorter and more legible. Our other main contribution is to leverage some of the excellence we get for free from using Rcpp, in particular the ability to optimise user-supplied compiled objective functions which can make things a lot faster than repeatedly evaluating interpreted objective functions as DEoptim does (and which, in fairness, most other optimisers do too). The gains can be quite substantial. This release brings two helpful patches from Max Coulter who spotted two distinct areas for improvement, based on how DEoptim how changed in recent years. I updated a number of aspects of continuous integration since the last release, and also streamlined and simplified the C++ interface (and in doing so also squashed a bug or two). Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppDE page, or the repository. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

While my first impression of Guix 1.4rc2 on NV41PZ was only days ago, the final Guix 1.4 release has happened. I thought I should give it a second try, although being at my summer house with no wired ethernet I realized this may be overly optimistic. However I am happy to say that a guided graphical installation on my new laptop went smooth without any problem. Practicing OS installations has a tendency to make problems disappear. My WiFi issues last time was probably due to a user interface mistake on my part: you have to press a button to search for wireless networks before seeing them. I m not sure why I missed this the first time, but maybe the reason was that I didn t really expect WiFi to work on this laptop with one Intel-based WiFi card without firmware and a USB-based WiFi dongle. I haven t went back to the rc2 image, but I strongly believe it wasn t a problem with that image but my user mistake. Perhaps some more visual clues could be given that Guix found a usable WiFi interface, as this isn t completely obvious now. My main pet problem with the installation is the language menu. It contains a bazillion languages, and I want to find Swedish in it. However the list is half-sorted so it looks like it is alphabetized but paging through the list I didn t find svenska , but did notice that the sorting restarts after a while. Eventually I find my language of chose, but a better search interface would be better. Typing s to find it jumps around in the list. This may be a user interface misunderstanding on my part: I may be missing whatever great logic I m sure there is to find my language in that menu. I did a simple installation, enabling GNOME, Cups and OpenSSH. Given the experience with sharing /home with my Trisquel installation last time, I chose to not mount it this time, fixing this later on if I want to share files between OSes. Watching the installation proceed with downloading packages over this slow WiFi was meditative, and I couldn t help but wonder what logic there was to the many steps where it says it is going to download X MB of software, downloads a set of packages, and then starts another iteration saying it is going to download Y MB and then downloads another set of packages. Maybe there is a package dependency tree being worked out while I watch. After logging into GNOME I had to provide the WiFi password another time, it seems it wasn t saved during installation, or I was too impatient to wait for WiFi to come up automatically. Using the GNOME WiFi selection menu worked fine. The webcam issue is still present, the image is distorted and it doesn t happen in Trisquel. Other than that, everythings appear to work, but it has to be put through more testing. Upgrading Guix after installation is still suffering from the same issue I noticed with the rc2 images, this time I managed to save the error message in case someone wants to provide an official fix or workaround. The initial guix pull command also takes forever, even on this speedy laptop, but after the initial run it is faster. Here are the error messages (pardon the Swedish):

jas@kaka ~$ sudo -i
...
root@kaka ~# guix pull
...
root@kaka ~# guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm 
guix system: fel: aborting reconfiguration because commit 8e2f32cee982d42a79e53fc1e9aa7b8ff0514714 of channel 'guix' is not a descendant of 989a3916dc8967bcb7275f10452f89bc6c3389cc
tips: Use  --allow-downgrades' to force this downgrade.
root@kaka ~# 

I ll avoid using allow-downgrades this time to see if there is a better solution available. Update: Problem resolved: my muscle memory typed sudo -i before writing the commands above. If I stick to the suggested guix pull (as user) followed by sudo guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm everything works. I ll leave this in case someone else runs into this problem. I m using the Evolution mail/calendar/contacts application, and it was not installed via GNOME so I had to manually install it using guix package -i evolution . Following the guided setup worked remarkable well (it auto-detects all my email settings after giving it my email address), although at the end I get a surprising error message:

Puzzling error message from Evolution

If I didn t know a bit about how Evolution works internally, I would have been stuck here the solution is to install the evolution data server package. This should probably be a dependency from the main package? Fix it by guix package -i evolution-data-server . It works directly, no need to even restart Evolution or go through the configuration dialog again. After this, I m happily using email against my Dovecot server and contacts/calendars against my Nextcloud server via GNOME s builtin Nextcloud connector which was straight-forward to setup.

Review: Artifact Space, by Miles Cameron

Series:	Arcana Imperii #1
Publisher:	Gollancz
Copyright:	June 2021
ISBN:	1-4732-3262-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	483

Artifact Space is a military (mostly) science fiction novel, the first of an expected trilogy. Christian Cameron is a prolific author of historical fiction under that name, thrillers under the name Gordon Kent, and historical fantasy under the name Miles Cameron. This is his first science fiction novel. Marca Nbaro is descended from one of the great spacefaring mercantile families, but it's not doing her much good. She is a ward of the Orphanage, the boarding school for orphaned children of the DHC, generous in theory and a hellhole in practice. Her dream to serve on one of the Greatships, the enormous interstellar vessels that form the backbone of the human trading network, has been blocked by the school authorities, a consequence of the low-grade war she's been fighting with them throughout her teenage years. But Marca is not a person to take no for an answer. Pawning her family crest gets her just enough money to hire a hacker to doctor her school records, adding the graduation she was denied and getting her aboard the Greatship Athens as a new Midshipper. I don't read a lot of military science fiction, but there is one type of story that I love that military SF is uniquely well-suited to tell. It's not the combat or the tactics or the often-trite politics. It's the experience of the military as a system, a collective human endeavor. One ideal of the military is that people come to it from all sorts of backgrounds, races, and social classes, and the military incorporates them all into a system built for a purpose. It doesn't matter who you are or what you did before: if you follow the rules, do your job, and become part of a collaboration larger than yourself, you have a place and people to watch your back whether or not they know you or like you. Obviously, like any ideal, many militaries don't live up to this, and there are many stories about those failures. But the story of that ideal, told well, is a genre I like a great deal and is hard to find elsewhere. This sort of military story shares some features with found family, and it's not a coincidence that I also like found family stories. But found family still assumes that these people love you, or at least like you. For some protagonists, that's a tricky barrier both to cross and to believe one has crossed. The (admittedly idealized) military doesn't assume anyone likes you. It doesn't expect that you or anyone around you have the right feelings. It just expects you to do your job and work with other people who are doing their job. The requirements are more concrete, and thus in a way easier to believe in. Artifact Space is one of those military science fiction stories. I was entirely unsurprised to see that the author is a former US Navy career officer. The Greatships here are, technically, more of a merchant marine than a full-blown military. (The author noted in an interview that he based them on the merchant ships of Venice.) The weapons are used primarily for defense; the purpose of the Greatships is trade, and every crew member has a storage allotment in the immense cargo area that they're encouraged to use. The setting is in the far future, after a partial collapse and reconstruction of human society, in which humans have spread through interstellar space, settled habitable planets, and built immense orbital cities. The Athens is trading between multiple human settlements, but its true destination is far into the deep black: Tradepoint, where it can trade with the mysterious alien Starfish for xenoglas, a material that humans have tried and failed to reproduce and on which much of human construction now depends. This is, to warn, one of those stories where the scrappy underdog of noble birth makes friends with everyone and is far more competent than anyone expects. The story shape is not going to surprise you, and you have to have considerable tolerance for it to enjoy this book. Marca is ridiculously, absurdly central to the plot for a new Middie. Sometimes this makes sense given her history; other times, she is in the middle of improbable accidents that felt forced by the author. Cameron doesn't entirely break normal career progression, but Marca is very special in a way that you only get to be as the protagonist of a novel. That said, Cameron does some things with that story shape that I liked. Marca's hard-won survival skills are not weirdly well-suited for her new life aboard ship. To the contrary, she has to unlearn a lot of bad habits and let go of a lot of anxiety. I particularly liked her relationship with her more-privileged cabin mate, which at first seemed to only be a contrast between Thea's privilege and Marca's background, but turned into both of them learning from each other. There's a great mix of supporting characters, with a wide variety of interactions with Marca and a solid sense that all of the characters have their own lives and their own concerns that don't revolve around her. There is, of course, a plot to go with this. I haven't talked about it much because I think the summaries of this book are a bit of a spoiler, but there are several layers of political intrigue, threats to the ship, an interesting AI, and a good hook in the alien xenoglas trade. Cameron does a deft job balancing the plot with Marca's training and her slow-developing sense of place in the ship (and fear about discovery of her background and hacking). The pacing is excellent, showing all the skill I'd expect from someone with a thriller background and over forty prior novels under his belt. Cameron portrays the tedious work of learning a role on a ship without boring the reader, which is a tricky balancing act. I also like the setting: a richly multicultural future that felt like it included people from all of Earth, not just the white western parts. That includes a normalized androgyne third gender, which is the sort of thing you rarely see in military SF. Faster-than-light travel involves typical physics hand-waving, but the shape of the hand-waving is one I've not seen before and is a great excuse for copying the well-known property of oceangoing navies that longer ships can go faster. (One tech grumble, though: while Cameron does eventually say that this is a known tactic and Marca didn't come up with anything novel, deploying spread sensors for greater resolution is sufficiently obvious it should be standard procedure, and shouldn't have warranted the character reactions it got.) I thoroughly enjoyed this. Artifact Space is the best military SF that I've read in quite a while, at least back to John G. Hemry's JAG in space novels and probably better than those. It's going to strike some readers, with justification, as cliched, but the cliches are handled so well that I had only minor grumbling at a few absurd coincidences. Marca is a great character who is easy to care about. The plot was tense and satisfying, and the feeling of military structure, tradition, jargon, and ship pride was handled well. I had a very hard time putting this down and was sad when it ended. If you're in the mood for that class of "learning how to be part of a collaborative structure" style of military SF, recommended. Artifact Space reaches a somewhat satisfying conclusion, but leaves major plot elements unresolved. Followed by Deep Black, which doesn't have a release date at the time of this writing. Rating: 9 out of 10

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In November, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
• Anton Gladky did 6.0h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
• Ben Hutchings did 9.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Dominik George did 10.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 0.0h (out of 38.0h assigned and 19.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 57.5h to the next month.
• Enrico Zini did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
• Helmut Grohne did 17.5h (out of 20.0h assigned).
• Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 7.5h (out of 11.0h assigned and 5.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 20.25h (out of 0.75h assigned and 31.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.75h to the next month.
• Stefano Rivera did 2.5h (out of 0h assigned and 17.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.5h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 35.5h (out of 23.0h assigned and 34.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.0h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 41.0h (out of 32.5h assigned and 25.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In November, we released 43 DLAs, fixing 183 CVEs. We currently have 63 packages in dla-needed.txt that are waiting for updates, which is 19 fewer than the previous month. We re excited to announce that two Debian Developers Tobias Frost and Guilhem Moulin, have completed the on-boarding process and will begin contributing to LTS as of December 2022. Welcome aboard!

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 87 months)
  • GitHub (for 78 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 55 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 98 months)
  • Linode (for 92 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 81 months)
  • Plat Home (for 81 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 37 months)
  • Deveryware (for 24 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 19 months)
  • EDF SA (for 8 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 102 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 96 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 88 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 88 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 82 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 72 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 66 months)
  • CINECA (for 55 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 49 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd (for 39 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 37 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 31 months)
  • Platform.sh (for 31 months)
  • MOXA INC. (for 25 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 22 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 20 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 20 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum f r Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 12 months)
  • Soliton Systems K.K. (for 9 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 103 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 103 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 100 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 100 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 98 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 97 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 97 months)
  • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 96 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 96 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 96 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes - LHEEA (for 92 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 87 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 84 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 79 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 79 months)
  • Tesorion (for 79 months)
  • Bearstech (for 70 months)
  • LiHAS (for 70 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 65 months)
  • Supagro (for 60 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 59 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 45 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 37 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 34 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 29 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 24 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 21 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 16 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 15 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU R sif (for 14 months)
  • Alter Way (for 7 months)

On the shortlist of things to try on my new laptop has been Guix. I have been using Guix on my rsnapshot-based backup server since 2018, and experimented using it on a second laptop but never on my primary daily work machine. The main difference with Guix for me, compared to Debian (or Trisquel), is that Guix follows a rolling release model, even though they prepare stable versioned installation images once in a while. It seems the trend for operating system software releases is to either following a Long-Term-Support approach or adopt a rolling approach. Historically I have found that the rolling release approach, such as following Debian testing, has lead to unreliable systems, since little focus was given to system integration stability. This probably changed in the last 10 years or so, and today add-on systems like Homebrew on macOS gives me access to modern releases of free software easily. While I am likely to stay with LTS releases of GNU/Linux on many systems, the experience with rolling Guix (with unattended-upgrades from a cron job to pull in new code continously) on my backup servers has been smooth: no need for re-installation or debugging of installations for over four years! I tried the Guix 1.4 rc2 installation image on top of my previous Trisquel 11 installation; following the guided Guix installation menus was simple. I installed using wired network, since the WiFi dongle I had did not automatically become available. I put the Guix system on a separate partition, that I left empty when I installed Trisquel, and mounted the same /home that I used for Trisquel. Everything booted fine, and while I had some issues doing guix pull followed by guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm I eventually got it working by using --allow-downgrade once. I believe this was a symptom of using a release candidate installation image. Guix did not auto-detect Trisquel or set up a Grub boot menu for it, and I have been unable to come up with the right Guix bootloader magic to add a Trisquel boot item again. Fortunately, the EFI boot choser allows me to boot Trisquel again. Guix 1.4 uses Linux-libre 6.0 which is newer than Trisquel 11 s Linux-libre 5.15. The WiFi dongle worked automatically once the system was installed. I will continue to tweak the default system configuration that was generated, it seems a standard GNOME installation does not include Evolution on Guix. Everything else I have tested works fine, including closing the lid and suspend and then resume, however the builtin webcam has a distorted image which does not happen on Trisquel. All in all, it seems the resulting system would be usable enough for me. I will be switching between Trisquel and Guix, but expect to spend most of time for daily work within Trisquel because it gives me the stable Debian-like environment that I ve been used to for ~20 years. Sharing the same /home between Trisquel and Guix may have been a mistake: GNOME handles this badly, and the dock will only contain the lowest-common-denominator of available applications, with the rest removed permanently.

Review: The Unbroken, by C.L. Clark

Series:	Magic of the Lost #1
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	March 2021
ISBN:	0-316-54267-9
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	490

The Unbroken is the first book of a projected fantasy trilogy. It is C.L. Clark's first novel. Lieutenant Touraine is one of the Sands, the derogatory name for the Balladairan Colonial Brigade. She, like the others of her squad, are conscript soldiers, kidnapped by the Balladairan Empire from their colonies as children and beaten into "civilized" behavior by Balladairan training. They fought in the Balladairan war against the Taargens. Now, they've been reassigned to El-Wast, capital city of Qaz l, the foremost of the southern colonies. The place where Touraine was born, from which she was taken at the age of five. Balladaire is not France and Qaz l is not Algeria, but the parallels are obvious and strongly implied by the map and the climates. Touraine and her squad are part of the forces accompanying Princess Luca, the crown princess of the Balladairan Empire, who has been sent to take charge of Qaz l and quell a rebellion. Luca's parents died in the Withering, the latest round of a recurrent plague that haunts Balladaire. She is the rightful heir, but her uncle rules as regent and is reluctant to give her the throne. Qaz l is where she is to prove herself. If she can bring the colony in line, she can prove that she's ready to rule: her birthright and her destiny. The Qaz li are uninterested in being part of Luca's grand plan of personal accomplishment. She steps off her ship into an assassination attempt, foiled by Touraine's sharp eyes and quick reactions, which brings the Sand to the princess's attention. Touraine's reward is to be assigned the execution of the captured rebels, one of whom recognizes her and names her mother before he dies. This sets up the core of the plot: Qaz li rebellion against an oppressive colonial empire, Luca's attempt to use the colony as a political stepping stone, and Touraine caught in between. One of the reasons why I am happy to see increased diversity in SFF authors is that the way we tell stories is shaped by our cultural upbringing. I was taught to tell stories about colonialism and rebellion in a specific ideological shape. It's hard to describe briefly, but the core idea is that being under the rule of someone else is unnatural as well as being an injustice. It's a deviation from the way the world should work, something unexpected that is inherently unstable. Once people unite to overthrow their oppressors, eventual success is inevitable; it's not only right or moral, it's the natural path of history. This is what you get when you try to peel the supremacy part away from white supremacy but leave the unshakable self-confidence and bedrock assumption that the universe cares what we think. We were also taught that rebellion is primarily ideological. One may be motivated by personal injustice, but the correct use of that injustice is to subsume it into concepts such as freedom and democracy. Those concepts are more "real" in some foundational sense, more central to the right functioning of the world, than individual circumstance. When the now-dominant group tells stories of long-ago revolution, there is no personal experience of oppression and survival in which to ground the story; instead, it's linked to anticipatory fear in the reader, to the idea that one's privileges could be taken away by a foreign oppressor and that the counter to this threat is ideological unity. Obviously, not every white fantasy author uses this story shape, but the tendency runs deep because we're taught it young. You can see it everywhere in fantasy, from Lord of the Rings to Tigana. The Unbroken uses a much different story shape, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the author is Black. Touraine is not sympathetic to the Qaz li. These are not her people and this is not her life. She went through hell in Balladairan schools, but she won a place, however tenuous. Her personal role model is General Cantic, the Balladairan Blood General who was also one of her instructors. Cantic is hard as nails, unforgiving, unbending, and probably a war criminal, but also the embodiment of a military ethic. She is tough but fair with the conscript soldiers. She doesn't put a stop to their harassment by the regular Balladairan troops, but neither does she let it go too far. Cantic has power, she knows how to keep it, and there is a place for Touraine in Cantic's world. And, critically, that place is not just hers: it's one she shares with her squad. Touraine's primary loyalty is not to Balladaire or to Qaz l. It's to the Sands. Her soldiers are neither one thing nor the other, and they disagree vehemently among themselves about what Qaz l and their other colonial homes should be to them, but they learned together, fought together, and died together. That theme is woven throughout The Unbroken: personal bonds, third and fourth loyalties, and practical ethics of survival that complicate and contradict simple dichotomies of oppressor and oppressed. Touraine is repeatedly offered ideological motives that the protagonist in the typical story shape would adopt. And she repeatedly rejects them for personal bonds: trying to keep her people safe, in a world that is not looking out for them. The consequence is that this book tears Touraine apart. She tries to walk a precarious path between Luca, the Qaz li, Cantic, and the Sands, and she falls off that path a lot. Each time I thought I knew where this book was going, there's another reversal, often brutal. I tend to be a happily-ever-after reader who wants the protagonist to get everything they need, so this isn't my normal fare. The amount of hell that Touraine goes through made for difficult reading, worse because much of it is due to her own mistakes or betrayals. But Clark makes those decisions believable given the impossible position Touraine is in and the lack of role models she has for making other choices. She's set up to fail, and the price of small victories is to have no one understand the decisions that she makes, or to believe her motives. Luca is the other viewpoint character of the book (and yes, this is also a love affair, which complicates both of their loyalties). She is the heroine of a more typical genre fantasy novel: the outsider princess with a physical disability and a razor-sharp mind, ambitious but fair (at least in her own mind), with a trusted bodyguard advisor who also knew her father and a sincere desire to be kinder and more even-handed in her governance of the colony. All of this is real; Luca is a protagonist, and the reader is not being set up to dislike her. But compared to Touraine's grappling with identity, loyalty, and ethics, Luca is never in any real danger, and her concerns start to feel too calculated and superficial. It's hard to be seriously invested in whether Luca proves herself or gets her throne when people are being slaughtered and abused. This, I think, is the best part of this book. Clark tells a traditional ideological fantasy of learning to be a good ruler, but she puts it alongside a much deeper and more complex story of multi-faceted oppression. She has the two protagonists fall in love with each other and challenges them to understand each other, and Luca does not come off well in this comparison. Touraine is frustrated, impulsive, physical, and sometimes has catastrophically poor judgment. Luca is analytical and calculating, and in most ways understands the political dynamics far better than Touraine. We know how this story usually goes: Luca sees Touraine's brilliance and lifts her out of the ranks into a role of importance and influence, which Touraine should reward with loyalty. But Touraine's world is more real, more grounded, and more authentic, and both Touraine and the reader know what Luca could offer is contingent and comes with a higher price than Luca understands. (Incidentally, the cover of The Unbroken, designed by Lauren Panepinto with art by Tommy Arnold, is astonishingly good at capturing both Touraine's character and the overall feeling of the book. Here's a larger version.) The writing is good but uneven. Clark loves reversals, and they did keep me reading, but I think there were too many of them. By the end of the book, the escalation of betrayals and setbacks was more exhausting than exciting, and I'd stopped trusting anything good would last. (Admittedly, this is an accurate reflection of how Touraine felt.) Touraine's inner monologue also gets a bit repetitive when she's thrashing in the jaws of an emotional trap. I think some of this is first-novel problems of over-explaining emotional states and character reasoning, but these problems combine to make the book feel a bit over-long. I'm also not in love with the ending. It's perhaps the one place in the book where I am more cynical about the politics than Clark is, although she does lay the groundwork for it. But this book is also full of places small and large where it goes a different direction than most fantasy and is better for it. I think my favorite small moment is Touraine's quiet refusal to defend herself against certain insinuations. This is such a beautiful bit of characterization; she knows she won't be believed anyway, and refuses to demean herself by trying. I'm not sure I can recommend this book unconditionally, since I think you have to be in the mood for it, but it's one of the most thoughtful and nuanced looks at colonialism and rebellion I can remember seeing in fantasy. I found it frustrating in places, but I'm also still thinking about it. If you're looking for a political fantasy with teeth, you could do a lot worse, although expect to come out the other side a bit battered and bruised. Followed by The Faithless, and I have no idea where Clark is going to go with the second book. I suppose I'll have to read and find out. Content note: In addition to a lot of violence, gore, and death, including significant character death, there's also a major plague. If you're not feeling up to reading about panic caused by contageous illness, proceed with caution. Rating: 7 out of 10

My NovaCustom NV41PZ laptop arrived a couple of days ago, and today I had some time to install it. You may want to read about my purchasing decision process first. I expected a rough ride to get it to work, given the number of people claiming that modern laptops can t run fully free operating systems. I first tried the Trisquel 10 live DVD and it booted fine including network, but the mouse trackpad did not work. Before investigating it, I noticed a forum thread about Trisquel 11 beta3 images, and being based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and has Linux-libre 5.15 it seemed better to start with more modern software. After installing through the live DVD successfully, I realized I didn t like MATE but wanted to keep using GNOME. I reverted back to installing a minimal environment through the netinst image, and manually installed GNOME (apt-get install gnome) since I prefer that over MATE, together with a bunch of other packages. I ve been running it for a couple of hours now, and here is a brief summary of the hardware components that works.

CPU	Alder Lake Intel i7-1260P
Memory	2x32GB Kingston DDR4 SODIMM 3200MHz
Storage	Samsung 980 Pro 2TB NVME
BIOS	Dasharo Coreboot
Graphics	Intel Xe
Screen (internal)	14 1920 1080
Screen (HDMI)	Connected to Dell 27 2560 1440
Screen (USB-C)	Connected to Dell 27 2560 1440 via Wavlink port extender
Webcam	Builtin 1MP Camera
Microphone	Intel Alder Lake
Keyboard	ISO layout, all function keys working
Mouse	Trackpad, tap clicking and gestures
Ethernet RJ45	Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 with r8169 driver
Memory card	O2 Micro comes up as /dev/mmcblk0
Docking station	Wavlink 4xUSB, 2xHDMI, DP, RJ45,
Connectivity	USB-A, USB-C
Audio	Intel Alder Lake

Hardware components and status

So what s not working? Unfortunately, NovaCustom does not offer any WiFi or Bluetooth module that is compatible with Trisquel, so the AX211 (1675x) Wifi/Bluetooth card in it is just dead weight. I imagine it would be possible to get the card to work if non-free firmware is loaded. I don t need Bluetooth right now, and use the Technoetic N-150 USB WiFi dongle when I m not connected to wired network. Compared against my X201, the following factors have improved.

• Faster CPU benchmark suggests it is 8 times faster than my old i7-620M. While it feels snappier it is not a huge difference. While NVMe should improve SSD performance, benchmark wise the NVMe 980Pro only seems around 2-3 faster than the SATA-based 860 Evo. Going from 6GB to 64GB is 10 times more memory, which is useful for disk caching.
• BIOS is free software.
• EC firmware is free.
• Operating system follows the FSDG.

I m still unhappy about the following properties with both the NV41PZ and the X201.

• CPU microcode is not available under free license.
• Intel Mangement Engine is still present in the CPU.
• No builtin WiFi/Bluetooth that works with free software.
• Some other secondary processors (e.g., disk or screen) may be running non-free software but at least none requires non-free firmware.

Hopefully my next laptop will have improved on this further. I hope to be able to resolve the WiFi part by replacing the WiFi module, there appears to be options available but I have not tested them on this laptop yet. Does anyone know of a combined WiFi and Bluetooth M.2 module that would work on Trisquel? While I haven t put the laptop to heavy testing yet, everything that I would expect a laptop to be able to do seems to work fine. Including writing this blog post!

I m about to migrate to a new laptop, having done a brief pre-purchase review of options on Fosstodon and reaching a decision to buy the NovaCustom NV41. Given the rapid launch and decline of Mastodon instances, I thought I d better summarize my process and conclusion on my self-hosted blog until the fediverse self-hosting situation improves. Since 2010 my main portable computing device has been the Lenovo X201 that replaced the Dell Precision M65 that I bought in 2006. I have been incredibly happy with the X201, even to the point that in 2015 when I wanted to find a replacement, I couldn t settle on a decision and eventually realized I couldn t articulate what was wrong with the X201 and decided to just buy another X201 second-hand for my second office. There is still no deal-breaker with the X201, and I m doing most of my computing on it including writing this post. However, today I can better articulate what is lacking with the X201 that I desire, and the state of the available options on the market has improved since my last attempt in 2015. Briefly, my desired properties are:

• Portable weight under 1.5kg
• Screen size 9-14
• ISO keyboard layout, preferably Swedish layout
• Mouse trackpad, WiFi, USB and external screen connector
• Decent market availability: I should be able to purchase it from Sweden and have consumer protection, warranty, and some hope of getting service parts for the device
• Manufactured and sold by a vendor that is supportive of free software
• Preferably RJ45 connector (for data center visits)
• As little proprietary software as possible, inspired by FSF s Respect Your Freedom
• Able to run a free operating system

My workload for the machine is Emacs, Firefox, Nextcloud client, GNOME, Evolution (mail & calendar), LibreOffice Calc/Writer, compiling software and some podman/qemu for testing. I have used Debian as the main operating system for the entire life of this laptop, but have experimented with PureOS recently. My current X201 is useful enough for this, although support for 4K displays and a faster machine wouldn t hurt. Based on my experience in 2015 that led me to make no decision, I changed perspective. This is a judgement call and I will not be able to fulfil all criteria. I will have to decide on a balance and the final choice will include elements that I really dislike, but still it will hopefully be better than nothing. The conflict for me mainly center around these parts:

• Non-free BIOS. This is software that runs on the main CPU and has full control of everything. I want this to run free software as much as possible. Coreboot is the main project in this area, although I prefer the more freedom-oriented Libreboot.
• Proprietary and software-upgradeable parts of the main CPU. This includes CPU microcode that is not distributed as free software. The Intel Management Engine (AMD and other CPU vendors has similar technology) falls into this category as well, and is problematic because it is an entire non-free operating system running within the CPU, with many security and freedom problems. This aspect is explored in the Libreboot FAQ further. Even if these parts can be disabled (Intel ME) or not utilized (CPU microcode), I believe the mere presence of these components in the design of the CPU is a problem, and I would prefer a CPU without these properties.
• Non-free software in other microprocessors in the laptop. Ultimately, I tend agree with the FSF s secondary processor argument but when it is possible to chose between a secondary processor that runs free software and one that runs proprietary software, I would prefer as many secondary processors as possible to run free software. The libreboot binary blob reduction policy describes a move towards stronger requirements.
• Non-free firmware that has to be loaded during runtime into CPU or secondary processors. Using Linux-libre solves this but can cause some hardware to be unusable.
• WiFi, BlueTooth and physical network interface (NIC/RJ45). This is the most notable example of secondary processor problem with running non-free software and requiring non-free firmware. Sometimes these may even require non-free drivers, although in recent years this has usually been reduced into requiring non-free firmware.

A simple choice for me would be to buy one of the FSF RYF certified laptops. Right now that list only contains the 10+ year old Lenovo series, and I actually already have a X200 with libreboot that I bought earlier for comparison. The reason the X200 didn t work out as a replacement for me was the lack of a mouse trackpad, concerns about non-free EC firmware, Intel ME uncertainty (is it really neutralized?) and non-free CPU microcode (what are the bugs that it fixes?), but primarily that for some reason that I can t fully articulate it feels weird to use a laptop manufactured by Lenovo but modified by third parties to be useful. I believe in market forces to pressure manufacturers into Doing The Right Thing, and feel that there is no incentive for Lenovo to use libreboot in the future when this market niche is already fulfilled by re-sellers modifying Lenovo laptops. So I d be happier buying a laptop from someone who is natively supportive of they way I m computing. I m sure this aspect could be discussed a lot more, and maybe I ll come back to do that, and could even reconsider my thinking (the right-to-repair argument is compelling). I will definitely continue to monitor the list of RYF-certified laptops to see if future entries are more suitable options for me. Eventually I decided to buy the NovaCustom NV41 laptop, and it arrived quickly and I m in the process of setting it up. I hope to write a separate blog about it next.

Wayland First up, I read Antoine Beaupr s Wayland to Sway migration with interest. While he said it s done and dusted or something similar, the post shows there s still quite a ways to go. I wouldn t say it s done or whatever till it s integrated so well that a person installs it and doesn t really need to fiddle with config files as an average user. For specific use-cases you may need to, but that should be outside of a normal user (layperson) experience. I have been using mate for a long long time and truth be told been very happy with it. The only thing I found about Wayland on mate is this discussion or rather this entry. The roadmap on Ubuntu Mate is also quite iffy. The Mate Wayland entry on Debian wiki also perhaps need an updation but dunno much as the latest update it shares is 2019 and it s 2022. One thing to note, at least according to Antoine, things should be better as and when it gets integrated even on legacy hardware. I would be interested to know how it would work on old desktops and laptops rather than new or is there some barrier? I, for one would have liked to see or know about why lightdm didn t work on Wayland and if there s support. From what little I know lightdm is much lighter than gdm3 and doesn t require much memory and from what little I have experienced works very well with mate. I have been using it since 2015/16 although the Debian changelog tells me that it has been present since 2011. I was hoping to see if there was a Wayland specific mailing list, something like debian-wayland but apparently there s not :(. Using mate desktop wayland (tried few other variations on the keywords) but search fails to find any meaningful answer :(. FWIW and I don t know the reason why but Archwiki never fails to amaze me. Interestingly, it just says No for mate. I probably would contact upstream in the coming days to know what their plans are and hopefully they will document what their plans are on integrating Wayland in both short-term and long-term with an update, or if there is something more recent they have documented elsewhere, get that update on the Debian wiki so people know. The other interesting thread I read was Russel Coker s Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 entry. I would be in the market in a few months to find/buy a Thinkpad but probably of AMD rather than Intel because part of recent past history with Intel as well as AMD having a bit of an edge over Intel as far as graphics is concerned. I wonder why Russel was looking into Intel and not AMD. Would be interested to know why Intel and not AMD? Any specific reason ???

Hearing Aids I finally bought hearing aids about a couple of weeks back and have been practicing using them. I was able to have quite a few conversations although music is still I m not able to listen clearly but it is still a far cry from before and for the better. I am able to have conversations with people and also reply and they do not have to make that extra effort that they needed to. Make things easier for everybody. The one I bought is at the starting range although the hearing aids go all the way to 8 lakhs for a pair (INR 800,000), the more expensive ones having WiFi, Bluetooth and more channels, it all depends on how much can one afford. And AFAIK there is not a single Indian manufacturer who is known in this business.

One thing I did notice is while the hearing aids are remarkably sturdy if they fall down as they are small, yet you have to be careful of both dust and water . That does makes life a bit difficult as my house and city both gets sand quite a bit everyday. I don t think they made any India-specific changes, if they had, would probably make things better. I haven t yet looked at it, but it may be possible to hack it remotely. There may or may not be security issues involved, probably would try once I ve bit more time am bit more comfortable to try and see what I can find out. If I had bought it before, maybe I would have applied for the Debian event happening in Kerala, if nothing else, would have been to document what happened there in detail. I probably would have to get a new motherboard for my desktop probably in a year or two as quite a few motherboards also have WiFi (WiFi 6 ?) think on the southbridge. I at least would have a look in new year and know more as to what s been happening. For last at least 2-3 years there has been a rumor which has been confirmed time and again that the Tata Group has been in talks with multiple vendors to set chip fabrication and testing business but to date they haven t been able to find one. They do keep on giving press conferences about the same but that s all they do :(. Just shared the latest one above.

The Long War Terry Pratchett, Stephen Braxter Long Earth Terry Pratchett, Stephen Braxter ISBN13: 9780062067777 Last month there was also a seconds books sale where I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Long War. But before I share about the book itself, I had a discussion with another of my friends and had to re-share part of that conversation. While the gentleman was adamant that non-fiction books are great, my point as always is both are equal. As I shared perhaps on this blog itself, perhaps multiple times, that I had seen a YT video in which a professor shared multiple textbooks of physics and shared how they are wrong and have been wrong and kept them in a specific corner. He took the latest book which he honestly said doesn t have any mistakes as far as he know and yet still kept in that same corner denoting that it is highly possible that future understanding will make the knowledge or understanding we know different. An example of physics in the nano world and how that is different and basically turns our understanding than what we know. Now as far as the book is concerned, remember Michael Crichton s Timeline. Now that book was originally written in the 1960 s while this one was written by both the honorable gentleman in 2013. So almost 50+ years difference between the two books, and that even shows how they think about things. In this book, you no longer need a big machine, but have something called a stepper machine which is say similar to a cellphone, that size and that frame, thickness etc. In this one, the idea of multiverse is also there but done a tad differently. In this, we do not have other humans or copy humans but have multiple earths that may have same or different geography as how evolution happened. None of the multiverse earths have humans but have different species depending on the evolution that happened there. There are something called as trolls but they have a much different meaning and way about them about how most fantasy authors portray trolls. While they are big in this as well, they are as gentle as bears or rabbits. So the whole thing is about real estate and how humans have spread out on multiple earths and the politics therein. Interestingly, the story was trashed or given negative reviews on Goodreads. The sad part is/was that it was written and published in 2013 when perhaps the possibility of war or anything like that was very remote especially in the States, but now we are now in 2022 and just had an insurrection happen and whole lot of Americans are radicalized, whether you see the left or the right depending on your ideology. An American did share few weeks ago how some shares are looking at Proportional Representation and that should make both parties come more towards the center and be a bit more transparent. What was interesting to me is the fact that states have much more rights to do elections and electioneering the way they want rather than a set model which everyone has common which is what happens in India. This also does poke holes into the whole Donald Trump stolen democracy drama but that s a different story altogether. One of the more interesting things I came to know about is that there are 4 books in the long series and this was the second book in itself. I do not want to dwell on the characters themselves as frankly speaking I haven t read all the four books and it would be gross injustice on my part to talk about the characters themselves. Did I enjoy reading the book, for sure. What was interesting and very true of human nature is that even if we have the ability or had the ability to have whole worlds to ourselves, we are bound to mess it up. And in that aspect, I don t think he is too far off the mark. If I had a whole world, wouldn t I try to exploit it to the best or worse of my ability. One of the more interesting topics in the book is the barter system they have thought of that is called as favors. If you are in multiple worlds, then having a currency, even fiat money is of no use and they have to find ways and means to trade with one another. The book also touches a bit on slavery but only just and doesn t really explore it as much as it could have.

Identity Now this has many meanings to it. Couple of weeks ago, saw a transgender meet. For the uninitiated or rather people like me, basically it is about people who are born in one gender but do not identify with it but the other and they express it first through their clothes and expression and the end of the journey perhaps is with having the organs but this may or may not be feasible, as such surgery is expensive and also not available everywhere. After section 377 was repealed few years ago, we do have a third gender on forms as well as have something called a Transgender Act but how much the needle has moved in society is still a question. They were doing a roadshow near my house hence I was able to talk with them with my new hearing aids and while there was lot of traffic was able to understand some of their issues. For e.g. they find it difficult to get houses on rent, but then it is similar for bachelor guys or girls also. One could argue to what degree it is, and that perhaps maybe. Also, there is a myth that they are somehow promiscuous but that I believe is neither here or there. Osho said an average person thinks about the opposite sex every few seconds or a minute. I am sure even Freud would have similar ideas. So, if you look in that way everybody is promiscuous as far as thought is concerned. The other part being opportunity but that again is function of so many other things. Some people are able to attract a lot of people, others might not. And then whether they chose to act on that opportunity or not is another thing altogether. Another word that is or was used is called gender fluid, but that too is iffy as gender fluid may or may not mean transgender. Also, while watching some nature documentary few days/weeks back had come to know that trees have something like 18 odd genders. That just blows me out of the mind and does re-question this whole idea of sexuality and identity to only two which seems somewhat regressive at least to me. If we think humans are part of nature, then we need to be open up perhaps a bit more. But identity as I shared above has more than one meaning. For e.g. citizenship, that one is born in India is even messier to know, understand and define. I had come across this article about couple of months back. Now think about this. Now, there have been studies and surveys about citizenship and it says something like 60% birth registrations are done in metro cities. Now Metro cities are 10 as defined by Indian state. But there are roughly an odd 4k cities in India and probably twice the number of villages and those are conservative numbers as we still don t record things meticulously, maybe due to the Indian oral tradition or just being lazy or both, one part is also that if you document people and villages and towns, then you are also obligated to give them some things as a state and that perhaps is not what the Indian state wants. A small village in India could be anywhere from few hundreds of people to a few thousand. And all the new interventions whether it is PAN, Aadhar has just made holes rather than making things better. They are not inclusive but exclusive. And none of this takes into account Indian character and the way things are done in India. In most households, excluding the celebs (they are in a world of pain altogether when it comes to baby names but then it s big business but that s an entire different saga altogether, so not going to touch that.) I would use or say my individual case as that is and seems to be something which is regular even today. I was given a nickname when I was 3 years old and given a name when I was 5-6 when I was put in school. I also came to know in school few kids who didn t like their names and couple of them cajoled and actually changed their names while they were kids, most of us just stayed with what we got. I do remember sharing about nakushi or something similar a name given to few girls in Maharashtra by their parents and the state intervened and changed their names. But that too is another story in itself. What I find most problematic is that the state seems to be blind, and this seems to be by design rather than a mistake. Couple of years back, Assam did something called NRC (National Register of Citizens) and by the Govt s own account it was a failure of massive proportions. And they still want to bring in CAA, screwing up Assam more. And this is the same Govt. went shown how incorrect it was, blamed it all on the High Court and it s the same Govt. that shopped around for judges to put somebody called Mr. Saibaba (an invalid 90 year adivasi) against whom the Govt. hasn t even a single proof as of date. Apparently, they went to 6 judges who couldn t give what the decision the Govt. wanted. All this info. is in public domain. So the current party ruling, i.e. BJP just wants to make more divisions rather than taking people along as they don t have answers either on economy, inflation or issues that people are facing. One bright light has been Rahul Gandhi who has been doing a padhyatra (walking) from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and has had tremendous success although mainstream media has showed almost nothing what he is doing or why he is doing that. Not only he had people following him, there are and were many who took his example and using the same values of inclusiveness are walking where they can. And this is not to do with just a political party but more with a political thought of inclusiveness, that we are one irrespective of what I believe, eat, wear etc. And that gentleman has been giving press conferences while our dear P.M. even after 8 years doesn t have the guts to do a single press conference. Before closing, I do want to take another aspect, Rahul Gandhi s mother is an Italian or was from Italy before she married. But for BJP she is still Italian. Rishi Sunak, who has become the UK Prime Minister they think of him as Indian and yet he has sworn using the Queen s name. And the same goes for Canada Kumar (Akshay Kumar) and many others. How the right is able to blind and deaf to what it thinks is beyond me. All these people have taken an oath in the name of the Queen and they have to be loyal to her or rather now King Charles III. The disconnect continues.