the original match 3

Shariki and Bejeweled would like a word.

I don’t have much of a memory of Crossroads so maybe it was a slog too. Probably. I do remember Knife of Dreams being a sudden change of pace that moved along fairly briskly, because Jordan was dying at the time. It was a welcome change, but it honestly pissed me off that this joker had been faffing around for 3,000+ pages on purpose and could have written a better story anytime he wanted. That still pisses me off, actually. If Sanderson hadn’t provided a brisk and serviceable trilogy to end the series I doubt I would have finished it.

Ooff, that one is a doozy. I haven’t read all of his, but that one was the hardest to read, I think. And in true Cormac McCarthy form, absolutely brilliant, both ugly and beautiful at the same time…

For fiction, I’ve been working my way through the Inspector Rutledge murder mystery series by the mother/son duo that wrote as Charles Todd. I really haven’t liked this series, to be honest, I’m only reading it because I like the genre and the setting, and a family member is into them so we can talk about them when I see them. But I really don’t care for the protagonist and the pseudo-schizophrenic voice in his head is a gimmick that got old really fast.

For non-fiction, I’m reading Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry by Austin Frerick, and holy cow (pun not intended) is it an eye-opener. You know how some non-fiction books will make you see the world differently, and also piss you off? Yeah, it’s one of those. But told well enough that the rage isn’t too bad. I’m actually enjoying it, in a “holy shit” sort of way. (And shit is a big portion of the book, since that’s the by-product from pig farming enclosures that has poisoned the majority of the rivers in Iowa and portions in other states.)

I’d agree, Winters Heart is when he started moving the plot again after close to 2,000 pages of dithering. Something actually happens! It definitely has its flaws, but it’s an improvement over Swords/Daggers.

Pure poetry from AndyJHawk:

Like the Honda e before it, it’s a vehicle too tiny for America’s truck-shaped digestive system.

I really liked Lara Croft GO. It’s better than Hitman GO or other GO games.

I don’t play Stardew Valley that often or that much, but what I do play is delightful. It’s a pretty versatile game.

Ha! I love it, this needs to happen!

If you want to dig deeper on how the company Fervo works, the CEO did an interview with David Roberts of Volts last year which was pretty interesting. This stuff isn’t hypothetical, it’s working right now, and apparently it’s profitable. I know huge portions of electricity demand can be addressed through wind and solar, perhaps at lower cost than enhanced geothermal for now, but the ability of enhanced geothermal to keep producing energy when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine is really key.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/enhanced-geothermal-power-is-finally

A frustratingly empty article. Why are they struggling to “make ends meet”? What ends? If it’s housing, this is a housing story. If it’s high auto loan debt, that’s a mother matter. If it’s not housing and it’s accrued consumer debt, that’s a different matter.

They never say, so there isn’t much to conclude from this piece.

Beato is a great musician, and some of his interviews are pretty cool. I think he’s off base on this, hwoever.

Enshittification is how platforms die. To go back to the original article/post by Cory Doctorow that coined the phrase:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Beato isn’t wrong that the music industry is well into the cycle of enshittification, he just doesn’t identify the actual reasons why. The music industry abused its artists for decades in a way that initially benefitted music consumers, but then the studios/labels/publishers cranked up the prices on consumers too, and then the industry started devouring a lot of the publishers and studios and labels themselves as Spotify and Amazon and others started eating their lunch.

I do think there is a link between music industry enshittification and some negative trends in music. Cory Doctorow and his co-author Rebecca Giblin point out in their book Chokepoint Capitalism that platforms like Spotify prioritize mass production of cheap-to-license “background” music that all blends together in a mush, because they prioritize total volume of listening rather than any particular listening experience.

I’ll have to give that one a try!

omg YES. Nothing I have found since then has quite scratched the same itch of flying around with a friend on some random dude’s server. So much fun!

Glad I’m not the only one having trouble, my LMDE is less than 90 days from end-of-support, and the mintupgrade tool isn’t working for me. At my skill level, I’ve resigned myself to doing a fresh install, but it’s very frustrating. I typically use Mint because I don’t want to have to do that level of configuration and legwork, and it’s a bit off-putting.

Finally got around to Talos Principle (the first one) and it’s as good as people said.

I also started playing some space battles in Empire at War on “Star Wars Day” (May the Fourth) and find that level of not-very-challenging RTS kind of soothing, so I’m back to playing that for a bit.