This week's type 2 fun reading is really dragging on.

"An engineering communication theory is just like a very proper and discreet girl accepting your telegram."

Atreyu and the childlike empress await annihilation by the polar vortex at the end of the world.

Whew, cancelled the netflix subscription with two days to spare.

It took a while because I was only playing intermittently, but finally beat a game of civ 6. Although truth be told, I'm not sure how I won. I clicked next turn, and baboom, cultural victory. Whatever that is. Next step: honknet world domination.

Thoughts and prayers for a fellow honker.

https://www.inquirer.com/health/avian-bird-flu-philadelphia-snow-goose-symptoms-20250122.html

It's about ethics in game grinding.

https://kotaku.com/elon-musk-poe2-diablo-4-paid-boosting-fake-controversy-1851743670

wild to hear tarpits recommended as a "solution" when people complain about ai crawlers DDOSing their website. vermin broke into my cellar and ate all of my food so i decided to buy heaps of special super tasty food that's going to give cancer to the vermin in like 5-10 years. anyway i still dont have any food for me and the vermin are having a fucking rave party downstairs

Look at this cheap imitation polar vortex comic.

https://www.notllocal.com/columns/cartoon-of-the-day/cartoon-of-the-day-polar-vortex-10111660

A terrified populace looks up as a drone swarm emerges from the polar vortex.

Limited edition bonus illustration.

Sub-Zero finishes Gritty in the battle to be king of the ice and control the polar vortex.

"Announcing The Stargate Project"

Real torment nexus vibes.

Two books.

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. I hadn't heard of this before because I exist entirely outside the loop, but it looked cool on the goodwill shelf. I liked the story, setting, characters. I did not like that it's the first of a required trilogy. I have to divide my score by three because I only received a third of a book. I'm pretty over series at this point. I want to read a story, then maybe later pick up a sequel that's actually a sequel, not the rest of the story.

As an aside, there's some discussion questions at the end, like which of the four clans would you like to join? Except only one clan features in the book, one has a passing mention, and the others are just names in a list. How can anyone answer this? Who writes these questions? Anyway, still a good book if you're interested.

Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. Heist mystery sci-fi. Also the first of a trilogy, but the story here is complete. Also liked this one.

Nearly all post singularity fiction devolves into word salad as it tries to describe incomprehensible AI superbeings, but I think it's moderated well here. Not as good as Fire upon the deep, which is the best exemplar, but it didn't annoy me. At times things are poorly explained because the author is trying to avoid info dumps, but this means a certain amount of confusion.

(#bookreview)

Yukon guy realizes he's fucked after the polar vortex knocks a clump of snow onto his fire.

If you're looking for some jolly reading today, here's a thread of bad secret santa stories I posted three years ago.

https://honk.tedunangst.com/u/tedu/h/W7nD2SGLK5w7lmZFTq

Confession time: I booked a hotel room at boomer favorite Hampton Inn instead of the Hilton Tru that appeals to younger tech savvy travelers.

After extensive braining, I've concluded that the signs on this bus are in Haitian Creole (in addition to English and Spanish).

Who's hyped for MLK day freedomball?

Under cover of the polar vortex, Sub-Zero launches a sneak attack across the Delaware.

The photo seems to show quite some other buildings intact as well?

If the TikTok ban prevents a European living in the US from deleting their profile, is that a GDPR violation?

Who's more ethical, your outie or your innie?

How good are chatbots at removing phonetic dialects from novels?

Welcome to fedi! To finish your application, please differentiate between circles, groups, lists, and aspects. Your usage license should be available shortly after approval.

Given that the ERA was ratified five years ago, why are we only this instant trying to get the archivist to print it out? I remember the exciting college years of having a paper due at 5:00pm and discovering at 4:55pm that your stupid inkjet printer was out of ink (because oops, all the ink dried up was the default state for stupid inkjet printers), and professors were generally not amused by the delay.

Today's hard hitting man on the street journalism features people who use laptops to buy plane tickets. It's worth reading this meandering mess of an article only to count how frequently it contradicts itself. Who'd win in a fight, actual data from the airline or an anecdotal tweet from some rando?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2025/01/17/flight-booking-phone-vs-computer/

Haha, found a bug. Honk hotkeys are qwerty only, they didn't switch to dvorak. Then again it's easier for me to find them by sight this way.

Recent fiction.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. 3.5 honks. A misfit crew with a heart of gold undertakes a perilous mission and hilarity ensues. I thought it was fun, but leans a little too heavily into I'm not like the other crew energy. I was fine with it, but the story telling is also pretty episodic. Each chapter is a new planet in which a new secret about a different crew remember is revealed and explored, and then it's okay, we still love you.

The Beggars in Spain. 5 honks. What if some people never sleep, and get super smart, and then everyone else resents them for their success? And what if the sleepless turn evil because of the resentment, but maybe some still try to be good? This echoed Atlas Shrugged far more than I expected, but not so obnoxious, a little less certain of its position. The story structure reminded me of Schismatrix.

The Black Cloud. 4.5 honks. A combination first contact and apocalypse story that asks wouldn't scientific despotism be the best government? Written by an astronomer, so lots of wavelength talk. I read Day of the Triffids earlier, and this shares a very sort of English righto chap end of the world voice.

Ossian's Ride. 3 honks. Not really sci-fi. A fairly mediocre spy thriller romp.

Amazon short stories. There's ten in total, but I really enjoyed these. The far reaches: how it unfolds, the long game, slow time between stars. Also, randomize by Andy Weir.

A Memory Called Empire. 4.5 stars. The Roman Empire, but in space, and also with memory machines so you can talk to your predecessor, with lots of political intrigue. So just like Dune, but also completely different. This was a random goodwill find, and I'm really happy with it.

Neuromancer. 4 honks. Spice alert. I think people love this book because they've decided they're supposed to love it. It's fun, but it's nonsense. Watching the Black Mirror Christmas special would be more relevant.

When Gravity Fails. 3.5 honks. Neuromancer in Islam, but more about a murder mystery. A bit weird that half the characters are trans, or sex changes as the author calls them, where it's mostly irrelevant to the story, and presented without judgement, just a lot of words for no apparent purpose. Not clear what the author was trying to do.

(#bookreview)

Last week tried and failed to read The Terraformers. Among other things, it's supposed to be an allegory about a hypercapitalist society that owns everyone and an unjust classification system, on a world being terraformed to resemble a pristine earth. I thought the premise had potential, but alas, it reads like something that won honorable mention in the local young marxist club's fiction contest. The eager author enthusiastically applied their insightful teacher's wise advice to reliably insert descriptive adjectives and exciting adverbs.

By coincidence, the next book I read was Solar Lottery, which turns out to have many of the same themes, but set in a very different plot. My complaints here would be that there's a lot of smoking (every scene is punctuated with the lighting or puffing of a cigarette, which feels anachronistic, both from a story and story telling perspective) and the usual Dick weirdness and ambiguity. There's a B plot which isn't really resolved.

I did like the original terraforming premise, I think there's potential here, so I might use it for a writing exercise. Going to write my very own very bad short story about the corpoverlords.

(#bookreview)