eledonecirrhosa. Reading

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Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.

history_monk

CNN.com has a report on the Trump Administration's decision to attack Iran. It appears that the idea was to kill off all the senior leadership, so that the next level of people would succeed to power. The Administration hoped those people would be amenable to a change in Iranian policy. Just about all aspects of it.

That has a lot of dubious assumptions in it. It was likely to founder on the lack of popular support for any new government that changes everything after bombardment. Authoritarians tend to assume that everyone else is cowardly and stupid, while being entirely unconscious of their own failings on that front. It may well have been suggested by the Israeli government, which is very keen to destroy Iran, needs the USA's assistance to stand a chance of doing that, and can play Donald Trump like a fiddle.

However, the US plan destroyed itself, because it soon became clear after the initial strikes that the people on whom hope had been placed were also dead. Is this true? I don't know, but it has a horrible plausibility. It implies that the continued attacks are to avoid looking stupid, which seems entirely consistent with Trump's behaviour.

Location Mum's flat

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politics

watervole

I've just finished the first season of 'For All Mankind'. Enjoyed it, but I'm puzzled by the season finale.

How did Ed manage to get upto the Apollo module and down to the moon again? And then up again!

Surely there's no way salvaged fuel could power two lunar take-offs, let alone give the course correction for the Apollo module as well?

and the way lunar landers worked was for the base part to be left on the moon, in any case.

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for all mankind

watervole

Went to see the diabetes nurse today to sort out medication.

I forget how it came up, but apparently iron deficiency can lead to blood sugar readings that look exactly the same as diabetes...

So, now booked in for an iron test, just in case it isn't diabetes at all.

Also, skinny people can sometimes get Type 2 diabetes, so I'm not even sure which kind of diabetes I have... But the treatment is the same either way in the early stages, so what the heck.

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diabetes

ffutures

This is a bundle of material for Age of Ambition, an RPG about a fantasy world trying to modernize and adapt to technology and rapid social and political changes following an alien invasion:

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Ambition

I'm not familiar with the rules system, but it looks reasonably playable and layout is good. If you get the complete bundle you're getting a lot for your money including numerous worldbooks and adventures, and the setting is novel enough that players ought to find it interesting.

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watervole

Absolutely bloody fabulous!

I have the audiobook and have listened to it many times.

I love the science, I love the characters, I love the problems that the characters have to face and the way these are tackled.

I'm not in the least surprised they're making a movie, and I'm going to see it as soon as it opens.

The plot is ingenious and unlike any other I've encountered. Earth's sun is losing energy - which means everyone on Earth will die as the world gets colder and colder. There is a limited time span in which to try and find out what is causing the problem and what, if anything can be done about it.

Everything goes in a single 'Hail Mary' project - the only thing that might, possibly might, find a solution.

If you haven't already read it, buy it. (Unless you read and hated 'The Martian', but I don't know anyone who did...)

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book review

watervole

This book just didn't work for me. I only got part way through before abandoning it.

It's a clever idea, that characters involved on opposing side of a long-running time war start a correspondence, but I found I had little interest in the characters, and little idea of why the time war was being fought.

The descriptive text is very good, but that's not enough to hook me on a book.

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book review

watervole

Heroes is well written, as you'd expect from Stephen Fry, and has some gentle touches of humour.

The problem is that after a while the Greek myths all start to feel the same. You don't want to read them all in a short period of time. They're not exactly in depth stories.

This is a book that I think I will dip into now and then, but having got part way through, I've no urge to finish it all in a few sittings.

3/5

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book review

watervole

It's so nice to read a book involving narrowboats by someone who actually knows what they are writing about!

I remember once reading a romance involving a narrowboat and spending more time mentally nitpicking than getting involved in the romance...

Beecroft knows how a weed hatch works and what you use it for, and likewise for the rest of the waterways equipment.

Does it also work as a novel? Yes, it's a gentle story, made up of different people whom Emily meets and re-meets along the inland waterways. I particularly enjoyed the group of student with their floating party, who keep needing Emily's help due to their general ineptness with narrowboats.

Emily has her own, health-related problems, but there are also other boaters happy to assist her when her pain flares up too badly.

People help her, and she solves problems for them.

There is also romance, but romance with a very Beecroft twist - which happens to work for me :)

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book review

watervole

'Guards Guards' is Pratchett on top form (much though I love his books, some are much better than others...).

It's the first book about Sam Vimes and the Night Watch, and we get to know and love the characters who will make many appearances in later books.

It's got a plot that makes sense, and has some good twists in it.

It's funny, but it also has characters who feel like real people. Sam Vimes the drunk captain of the Watch has pretty much given up on everything, finds there are some things that even he won't give up on.

The various mystical brotherhoods that meet in Ankh Morepork are hilarious.

My favourite character is Lady Sybil Ramkin, breeder of swamp dragons. The kind of person whose family goes back so far that she is perfectly comfortable spending all her days dressed in old clothes and mucking out dragon pens, and feels no need to attend balls and the like.

This is the story where the Librarian (an orangutan, for those who don't already know) gets enlisted into the Guard, and we discover the mysteries of L-space...

Tags:

book review

ffutures

Starting in an hour, Ninja Crusade Bundle featuring "the Third Eye Games RPG of ninja, conspiracies, and high-flying martial arts."

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/NinjaCrusade

The premise here looks rather a bit like last week's Mists of Akuna but without the steampunk elements, and as with that this really isn't a setting that interests me much, I'm just not knowledgeable enough about ninja and martial arts generally to be interested in running games where they're a major part of the background. Parts of it were in a 2016 bundle, and I wasn't really very interested then either. Having said that it's cheap and presentation looks OK., and they don't refer to multiple Ninja as Ninjas which is a friend's pet peeve about most games that use them...

ffutures

0one Campaign Starters presents interactive .PDF maps and floorplans for ready-made tabletop roleplaying campaigns from 0one Games.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/CampaignStarters

This isn't really something I need - I don't really do fantasy, and I prefer to make my own maps as I need them, and keep them as minimal as possible. But if it's something you need it could be a good deal.

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eledonecirrhosa

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Strontium Bitchings

Reading

Performing some traffic maintenance today

Dunning-Kruger really gets ironic sometimes

For All Mankind season 1

Diabetes and iron deficiency....

Another RPG bundle - Age of Ambition

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

This is How you Lose the Time War by Amal el-Mohtar

Mythos /Heroes by Stephen Fry

The Boat of Small Mysteries - Robyn Beecroft

Guards Guards, by Terry Pratchett

Another RPG Bundle - Ninja Crusade

Another RPG bundle - Campaign Starters

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January 2026

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