Blog Posts

Star Trek: Discovery's premiere was its Kobayashi Maru

(No spoilers for the show, btw.) Cater to the diehard fans who have eagerly consumed all the Trek, all the time, for half a century. Rekindle the love of Trek in those fans for whom the latest movies or series were less than stellar. Introduce a whole new generation of…

Racist op-eds need to stop, kthxbai

Another day, another racist article in my local newspaper, The Chronicle Journal. This time it isn't an ignorant letter to the editor, though—it's an ignorant op-ed from a retired judge. I follow a lot of Indigenous people on Twitter, because I want to hear what they have to…

One key fewer

Hey, look, it’s been ten years since I graduated high school. Look at that. Time flies. This post isn’t really about graduation decennials, though. This is about quitting my longest-held job. Eleven years ago I dropped off a resume at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. I was just finishing…

Code fatigue and an amateur dilemma

I believe this is what we call an impasse. My first forays online were in direct proportion to me learning how to code. I crafted my website in HTML, by hand, on GeoCities, for upwards of three years. Then I learned PHP, and MySQL, and from…

I bought a house

Those of you who occasionally pay attention to my posts on Twitter and Goodreads might have noticed I’ve been quieter than usual. May has been a busy month, to the point where it has seriously affected my reading (and that is saying something). I’ve only managed 5 books in May…

Travelling is not my favourite thing

What a week, or to be more precise, three days! Last month my former boss asked my current boss if I could travel to Guelph to present some Office365 training to teachers at a workshop. I don’t like travelling, nor do I think I bring much unique to the table…

Currently Reading

Book Reviews

When Dimple Met Rishi cover image

When Dimple Met Rishi is just plain adorable. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

I picked this up on a whim while at Chapters, because it was in a display of new releases and I’d heard a little but of buzz about it from Twitter. I needed something nice and “light” compared to, say, Walkaway , but obviously didn’t want to go so far as to read a book that didn’t start with W or didn’t have an orange-themed cover. So this was the logical choice.

Sandhya Menon has created what is essentially a very…

Walkaway

Cory Doctorow

Walkaway cover image

Cory Doctorow is Doctorowing it up again, by which I mean writing intense polemics thinly veiled as science-fiction stories that give you a hell of a philosophical rush. Walkaway is about the decline of capitalism after we can print most of the things we need. It’s about people attempting to check out of “default”—but what if default is more like the Hotel California? As with all of Doctorow’s books, this is dense and steeped with big ideas. It’s a great trip. Unlike all his books, though, this one…

Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods: Early Humans and the Origins of Religion cover image

One of the benefits of deciding to request books from NetGalley is that it exposes me to more academic science writing than I might otherwise find. Thanks to Columbia University Press for letting me read this. I’m really fascinated by the study of religion, from a sociological and anthropological perspective. I love to learn about the history of religions, and also about how we know what we know. Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods looks at the origins of gods—in the sense of anthropomorphic beings with…

The Count of Monte Cristo cover image

Second reading, addendum: September 5, 2017

It has, coincidentally, been exactly 3 years since I first read The Count of Monte Cristo. I bought a house this summer; I have my very own deck now. I decided that on my week off I wanted to sit outside and work my way through this classic behemoth during what might be our last nice days before the autumn chill kicks in. I was, for the most part, successful in this goal. Reading this book was every bit as pleasurable, diverting, and moving as it was the…

The Familiar (Animorphs, #41) cover image

Animorphs has become so dark! I feel like a broken record, like I say this every review, but wow. The Familiar opens up, as several other recent books have done, in the middle of a big, chaotic battle. The Animorphs have inflicted damage on the Yeerk troops, but the latter are practically inexhaustible, while the former are six adrenaline-fuelled-but-scared kids. And as the tide of the battle turns against them, they start losing limbs. And guts. It’s shocking for the explicitness of its imagery…

Nascent Shadow (Temporal Armistice #1) cover image

I didn’t really know what to expect from this; I just requested it from NetGalley and Curiosity Quills Press on a whim from its description.

Brooklyn, our first-person protagonist, is cool under fire—literally, for she is a firefighter. She discovers that, courtesy of her estranged father, she isn’t fully human. She’s half-human, half … something else. Something that the uninformed would term “demonic”. It explains a lot about Brooklyn, about her past and her present attitudes. Yet it also opens up…
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