It’s been a weird month. As I’m writing this, the weather has very suddenly gone from “80ish degrees and sunny” to “60-something and rainy,” so I’d say that autumn has arrived with a vengeance; there’s already a bit more fall vibes creeping into this playlist. As usual, individual tracks below, full playlist here. Oklahoma Smokeshow – Zach Bryan on Summertime Blues – EP Hotel Bible – Max McNown on Night Diving Medusa – Cameron Whitcomb on Medusa – Single Heartbreaker...| Grey Patterson
Melissa Scott I really enjoyed this one! I think it counts as cyberpunk, but the digital world stuff was a really neat take on evolutionary programming. I’m actually over here wondering how much this was an inspiration for Code Lyoko, the visuals I was imagining felt very similar. The setting is basically that, at some point, software engineers went “screw it, we’ll just evolve software to do what we want instead of trying to write it ourselves.”1 Skip forward a mystery amount of time...| Grey Patterson
John McPhee Truly astonishing that it took me this long to read this book; it’s thoroughly right up my alley.1 To start with, it’s McPhee, and he’s my favorite nonfiction author. And after that, it’s about nuclear weapons, nuclear power, and proliferation… with a solid digression into nuclear rocketry, which has long been an interest of mine.2 Nothing in the rocketry section was new to me—I’ve read up enough on that to the point that everything was familiar, although the persona...| Grey Patterson
Adam Tornhill This was an odd read. I think the core idea—version control systems are a layer of metadata on top of our code, which we seldom use for anything valuable but should—is a good one, but the actual implementation of the book just didn’t work for me. Part of the issue was that it made a terrible ebook—there’s a fair amount of charts, all of which rely on color-coding, and thus become entirely illegible on a grayscale e-ink screen.1 Past that, though, a whole lot of it felt...| Grey Patterson
Categories | Grey Patterson
Ashley Peacock “Pragmatic Express” is an interesting imprint for this, but I suppose it tracks – this is a short book that mostly just introduces Mermaid as a concept, as well as going through a couple use-cases of diagramming in general. I did wind up writing some Mermaid diagrams as I was reading through the book, as it lined up well with some documentation I needed to write. I was a little tempted to figure out a way to inject Mermaid into this site when I saw that it has Sankey diag...| Grey Patterson
There were departures from Portland every 20 minutes from 6:00 AM to 7:00 PM, at which point it dropped to every 30 minutes until midnight. Leaving Vancouver, on the other hand, required a bit more planning—departures were every 40 minutes from 6:45 AM to 11:15 PM. Seven days a week, though on Sunday mornings they didn’t start until 7:40 AM.| Grey Patterson
Month: August 2025| greypatterson.me
Ursula K. Le Guin I know this is one of the classic fantasy novels, but I must admit, it just didn’t click for me. Maybe I’m coming to it too late—too many of the things it did have become norms, part of the standard lexicon of fantasy novels. It did have two things about it that stuck with me, though: The protagonist, and most of the characters, aren’t white. It’s sorta snuck in—benefits of being a completely different world, if there isn’t a history of racism being A Thing, th...| Grey Patterson
Brian Clevinger, Mike Olson, and Scott Wegener A quick follow-on to last week’s review – very much an expansion pack to the game, but one that added a lot of detail to the backstory of Majestic. The idea of The System, a deliberately-obtuse bureaucracy meant to ensure that nobody knows enough of what’s going on to effectively leak things, is a nice touch. Pairs extremely well with the existence of ALAN in the comics. A nice follow-up.| Grey Patterson
Categories | Grey Patterson
Daniel Hardcastle| Grey Patterson
edited by L.D. Lewis & Charles Payseur| Grey Patterson
