This was a great book, and the development of the characters was really nice. I did find the resentment between the two good Drow to be a bit too fabricated. I also thought that they weren’t very careful on their making up, which led to their downfall. The fixation on Drizzt by the faceless master was also odd, since it was more of an issue with the family and not with him in particular. Him stoping with knowing what family it was that did the deed struck me as odd, as I expected him to want the details and throw those in the face of the ones involved. I guess it did take him 15 years to find out which family had taken him out. It might be worth reading further in this series, and I’ll try out the next one.
I like the super human part of this, but I didn’t care for the concept of the one ‘real’ city. It made things really confusing in some ways, as the concept of shadows was confusing. The story was good, and the crazy painter character was fantastic. The ‘trumps’ he made seemed like an odd concept, especially if he is the only one to make them. The descriptions of the battles were dry by being too over the top in many ways, and not descriptive enough of the inglorious parts of the battles.
This was an amazingly well done book. I liked much of the writing in that it shows his understanding and at the same time it shows how much he doesn’t understand. I especially like the parts where he is too smart to understand that everyone else isn’t on that level. The ending has some really sad parts, but I liked that he eventually became a really nice guy again.
I didn’t particularly care for this book, especially the resolution. I think the characters in it were very well developed and had interesting stories, I just didn’t like them. That seemed to be part of the point. I’m liking that I can go through some of these classics and read them, but I’m not always liking what I find in them.
I have really enjoyed this series so far, especially the interesting play of humanity, freedom, and civilization, and how many gradations of those concepts there are in the book. I liked this one in particular because of the later reveal to the others that the captain used to be a ship.
After a few minutes I didn’t notice the she pronoun being always used, and imagined amorphous people until they did some action that I considered particularly masculine or feminine. These actions were typically were they being pursued or pursuing when it came to sex.
We had people over to our place for the fourth, since we miraculously got the pool house. I was surprised since the cost of renting the pool house is only $25 for the day, and I checked on July 1 if July 4 was available. The complex was pretty empty so I guess everyone must have been going to visit people elsewhere.
We had a ton of food, and people started arriving with more food. Jeremy brought some amazing paneer kebabs over, and a great tasting asparagus to grill. Amit and Tina brought over some of the best steak I’ve ever had, and Adam brought over some sausages. Lindsay and Kevin brought a few salads, and Riley and Rong got some drinks. We lounged by the pool, and eventually got in. We also got a good bit of soak time in the hot tub. I managed to core a pineapple without breaking through the bottom, and used that as a cup for the second half of the day. It made me really happy that I was able to do that.
We played a few rounds of Hanabi, which is appropriate since the original theme of Hanabi is fireworks. We happened to be playing with a drink themed version.
We split up to clean up, then met up at Amit’s place to head in for the Shoreline fireworks show. We played Hanabi a few more times while waiting for the show to start. Once it did we got a really great view through a window in the trees we were sitting under. Stephanie had picked out just the right spot for the view. We all headed back to the car and went our separate ways after that.
We had a nice long games day at Beachhead with Adam, Tina, Erik, Jeff, and myself. We started off with some general laziness as we felt more like hanging out with each other and not thinking too hard than playing games. We then somehow decided on Tzolk’in as the first game, but Jeff decided to just hang out with us and not play. I did decently well, but Adam won the day with a huge come from behind victory. I was playing as the character that could get any level 4 tech when teching up, and I had used it pretty substantially.
The next game we played was Galaxy Trucker. I got a handicap after winning the first round, so I was at a bit of a disadvantage, especially since the handicap was meteoric inversion. A few times while playing we got the space billiards card, which, when combined with the inversion made me a fantastic target, especially since I was winning. The game went on like that and I managed to keep mostly intact. The first round I took the rift ship, the second round was the toroid, and the third round Tina and I took the missing plans ship. That final round was especially interesting since the missing plans ship ended up being three ships, a large one on the right and two small ones on the left. We both somehow managed to make it back to port with all three ships, despite both me taking out the front half of Tina’s large ship and the constant barrage of inverted meteors taking out the back section of my ships so that I didn’t have any engines at the end.
After sitting around for a while we decided to watch some Archer, try for watching a downloaded version of the Avengers, but it was too low quality, and then ended up watching Ex Machina. The movie was interesting, but not really my kind of movie.
We went to Alexander’s for dinner on Andrew and Haru’s birthday. We had a delicious dinner, with some amazing hamachi shots beforehand. I struggled with the diet Stephanie and I are starting, but the steak was delicious enough to keep me going.
We went to Andrew’s place and had a pretty nice cookout. Debby had made some tofu skewers. We also had some tasty tasty burgers. Steph left after dinner, then Debby, Andrew, Lindsay, Kevin, Adam, and I played some poker. We started with a tournament, that I stayed in about half of the time. It was a $20 buy in, and Andrew ended up winning, unsurprisingly. We then did a cash game where I bought in for $40, the topped up with $20 when I had lost some more. I then got some really lucky breaks against Kevin with A’s over his Q’s pre-flop, as well as hitting the straight on the river. I really enjoyed it, and that is the second game in a row where I ended up.
It's an Exciting World 