This is the latest issue, so I’m finally caught up! I mean, I’ve got a whole stack of old issues I bought the other year, but I’ve caught up with the more recent ones.
I’ve been reading this over the past couple weeks…
It’s an unusually topical issue, but slyly so.
The interview with Hanif Kureshi was fun. I’ve read only one of his books, The Buddha of Suburbia, and that was back in the days, and I’m not really tempted to read any more of his stuff. But he gives good interview.
Abdulah Sidran’s story about how his father got caught up in Tito’s anti-Cominform purges (by mistake) is also very topical.
This is the seventeenth book in the Vlad Taltos series which has been going since the early 80s, so… 40 years? I think that’s pretty unique — I mean, there’s been many fantasy book series that have gone on for decades, but not quite this coherently. It’s basically the story of one single guy over a couple handfuls of years, and it’s basically the same now as when it started.
Which means that this is yet another book about a wise-ass hyper-competent guy trying to work himself out of some problem or another, while keeping the repartee going.
And it’s still fun, after all these years. There are other older fantasy/science fiction authors that are still publishing, and I’m picking up their books and not expecting much, but the Dreaded Brain Rot has not set in with Brust. And there’s only two more books to go before he wraps up the series, so *crosses fingers*.
That said, while this book was a really enjoyable read, it felt a bit like Brust was purposefully using this book as a kind of breathing space before (presumably) kicking things into high gear for the last two novels, where things are going to become highly apocalyptic, by the looks of things. I don’t think it’s by chance that Brust has Vlad Taltos take a large number of naps in this book.
Oh, I didn’t mention what this one was about? It’s about Vlad Taltos hiding out in a theatre while they’re rehearsing a play, I mean a musical. So we also get all these lyrics to what sounds like the best written musical ever!
And looks what happens when I plug it in. Exactly! Apparently nothing! There are no LEDs! Do you know how rare it is to find a product, any product, that doesn’t have any LED lights these days?
It works without any drivers — it’s a normal USB HID device. And it’s got mechanical keys, so it’s satisfyingly clicky. Just listen:
cdhlcgkbjfai3333311111166622565
So the keys are mapped to a-l because why not, and the knobs are 1/3 and 4/6 because why not, and you can even click the knobs, and that gives you 2/5.
What am I using this wonder of engineering for, you’re asking? I’m thinking of building an alarm clock, and they keypad is convenient for setting the alarm (you hit 9 RET for 9 in the morning and 1450 RET for ten to three in the afternoon. For someone like me who rarely gets up at the same time two days in a row, I find that this is, by far, the most efficient way to set an alarm clock (and I’ve been using that for decades, but with a different numpad setup).
And the knobs? Having one of them would be really convenient for adjusting the music volume, and to pause/unpause the music. The other knob? Er… Well, lights on/off? I’m not sure. I guess I could use them to dim the lights, just for fun, but I’m not really into dimming lights.
So I’m thinking of building a box with a little 4″ screen and then mounting this keypad in the top, and then putting a Raspberry Pi W Zero inside, or something.
Tee hee. I surmise from the other reviews that there’s a QR code that leads you to some Windows software for remapping the keys? And that’s full of viruses?
It’s a normal USB HID device, surely you can remap that on any OS without any special software?
Anyway!
This is the first time I’ve bought something, ever, that has no annoyances.
For instance, the first numpad I bought when I started thinking about this project was this:
It’s USB HID, and it works fine… but IT BEEPS LOUDLY and there are LEDS THAT SHINE BRIGHTER THAN THE SUN and they NEVER TURN OFF.
So… I guess that’s perfect for what it’s intended to be used for (a door calling system or something), but not for this thing I’m doing here, and they seldom mention details like that on the web site.
Or this thing, which I was considering for a related little project… it was described as being USB HID, but it’s not — it requires a Windows driver.
I don’t read reviews of book I might read, but I’ve seen some mutterings about this book — well, first of all, that’s it’s not as good as Outline, but then again, very few things are. So I was approaching this with some trepidation.
Front-loading books with the most “difficult” material seems to be a common technique with authors. For instance, I attempted to read Gravity’s Rainbow when I was like 21, and struggled through the first 50 pages before I gave up. Then I tried again a couple years later, and started anew, and it turns out that after the first er 70 pages, the rest of the book is a breeze. Well, comparatively. It’s like the author is going “well, now that the wimps are gone, I’m bringing out the tea and ginger snap cookies”.
This is kinda like that? This is allegedly a novel, but it’s four stories, and the first one is definitely the most abstract one, while the remaining three are totes gripping.
I quite enjoyed Block’s later Bernie Rhodenbarr books — they were repetetive, but well-written and amusing. So I went ahead and bought all of his earlier Tanner books, and this is the second of those I’ve read.
And as before, he’s got the patter going, and it’s amusingly written.
But the book has the structure of suet pudding. Tanner meets one person, then flees the location, then meets another person, then flees the location, and that’s how it goes.
And that can be fine! It’s like a road movie kind of structure. But this one just wasn’t any fun. I got to page 150 and decided I didn’t give a fuck and put the book down, even if there were just 50 pages to go.
I sort of lost interest toward the end and stopped caring.
Which leaves me with the problem of what to do with all the other Tanner books I bought. Should I just drop them without even giving them a go? Hm… yeah, that other Tanner book I read was also pretty dire, so out they go.
