Only Human

Book Notes kitt decided around 19:37 on 6 December 2018 to publish this:

I really wanted to like this book. I really enjoyed the first one, which made the second one worth reading. If this series were longer than three books, I would call this one the first of two bad books which would cause me to stop reading the series. The book isn't bad bad, but it is merely okay, which would be the first of two consecutive strikes needed for me to stop reading a series.

The book starts nine after the last one ended, with a dead robot left on Earth now working, Americans terrorizing everyone under the guise of "freedom," and our four intrepid heros returning from Esat Ekt. The storyline also folds back to immediately after our four Earth heros landed on Esat Ekt and are not allowed to leave, so we learn their history and why they left when when weren't really allowed to leave.

It's easy to see where Neuval was going with this particular book: he talks about us versus them and repressed populations and people being held against their will, stopped from leaving by a bureaucratic government and power-seeking people. The parallels to modern western culture and its direction are almost punched into the reader's face.

With Kara gone, however, the sass of the conversations are gone, too. Which makes the book less interesting. There isn't discovery and adventure, there's the tedium of life and the mundane. Both of which, sure, exist and are important, but not when I'm reading a young adult science fiction books about aliens and giant robots and the like.

And really, if it is so easy to recreate a person, memories, soul and all, why wasn't Kara xeroxed in this way and updated regularly?

Don't know!

If you're reading the series, read the book, finish the series. If you're not reading the series yet, read the first book at stop.

Conversation

Blog Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 14:43 on 6 December 2018

"I think the problem here is that we have someone on the autism scale, talking with another person also on the autism scale, trying to have a nuanced conversation where neither knows what the other is trying to say."

"Yeah."

Apply branch changes without merging with Git

Snippet Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 11:26 on 6 December 2018

You're working in one branch and you want the changes from another branch (say, you've done a pull request, and want the changes made in that other branch in your current branch), but don't want to merge the changes, you just want them available.

Assuming you want them all in one go, merge without committing, with a squash, then unstage the staged files that will come over with the merge.

If you want specific changes, use git cherrypick -n

git merge --no-commit --squash branch_with_commits
git reset HEAD

Fifteen Years, Two Hours

Blog kitt decided around 18:19 on 3 December 2018 to publish this:

Happy 15 years to Nags!

Good lord, have I changed.

Good f---ing lord, I wish I hadn't.

Good fucking lord, I'm glad I did.

I can think of a lot of mistakes I've made. I wish I hadn't made them, I hope I've learned from them. I'm sorry for the pain I've caused. I'm grateful for the joy I've caused.

Good lord, 15 years.

Here's hoping for another 15.

Fuck.

Reading Goals and Diversity

Blog Written with a loving hand by kitt some time around 12:08 on 2 December 2018

My reading goals for this year are/were:

1. Read 52 books
2. Of the books I read, have at least one third of them be non-fiction.

These are nominally reasonable goals. I've read over fifty-two books a year since my forty book year five years ago, and decided that was too few. Fifty two is one a week and a solid baseline.

I'm at 98 books so far for the year, not including essay books.

I am delighted that I've kept up my one-third non-fiction goal. I've read 35 non-fiction books so far. I might have to read one more non-fiction book this year to keep the ratio.

What surprised me most about my books, however is that in the fiction books, thirteen of them have black protagonists. Also, five are Asian, two books have a balanced ensemble of protagonists of varied races, and three books I don't actually know the protagonists' races.

Pages