Compared to the first two books in Earthsea I was not as excited about The Farthest Shore. Some of the scenes felt — for lack of a better word — a bit trippy, which made the narrative a bit harder to follow. Although I do understand that Earthsea is marketed for a late-teen audience, I may be getting a bit tired of the coming-of-age tropes. “The Farthest Shore” still continues to fill out the world of Earthsea in an interesting and satisfying way.| Davis Haupt's Blog
The second installment of the Earthsea series, I enjoyed this book about as much as A Wizard of Earthsea. Le Guin puts a lot of effort into fleshing out the world of Earthsea, but unlike other fantasy worlds, she’s doing it through the eyes of her characters rather than through exposition or lore dumps. Ged, the protagonist of book one, and Arha, the protagonist of this book, grew up in completely different circumstances. They see the same world and same events through their own differing a...| Davis Haupt's Blog
Until now I’ve only read Le Guin’s science fiction work, and have wanted to give her fantasy series Earthsea a try for a while. I really enjoyed this first installment. The societies that the protagonist ventures through felt lived-in in a way that feels missing from some other high fantasy like the Lord of the Rings. The way that magic and the sorcerers and witches who perform it are weaved into the world was really well done. “Sorcerer” is a vocation like any other, although one tha...| Davis Haupt's Blog
I read many of Le Guin’s more classic entries in her Hainish Cycle back in college and since then have been fascinated with the world she built for novels like The Disposessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. A Fisherman of the Inland Sea is a series of short stories of which only the last three have anything to do with the universe of the Hainish Cycle. These three all revolve around the development of instantaneous, faster than light travel that Le Guin calls “churten theory” — notabl...| Davis Haupt's Blog
Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson (2023)| davi.sh
I really enjoyed this book — its final lines even surpassed The Great Gatsby as my favorite closing lines of a novel. But I couldn’t find myself justifying a rating higher than 4/5 when I broke it down and tried to explain what exactly I enjoyed so much in it. I caught myself after a few minutes, smiled, and realized in some ways that’s what Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was all about. I’m a very analytical person. I think that isn’t particularly surprising considering I...| Davis Haupt's Blog
I listen to both Ezra’s and Derek’s podcasts regularly and was pretty familiar with the outline of “Abundance” the concept from Klein mulling over his thoughts over the past four years on the Ezra Klein Show. I’m broadly sympathetic to the aims of the book but I felt like Abundance fell short of crafting the most convincing argument for “a liberalism that builds.” I don’t know if the felt lack of insight from the book is because I listen to the authors on a weekly basis or if ...| Davis Haupt's Blog
I found Golden Son to be even more of a page-turner than Red Rising. The setting of the book changes pretty significantly and the cast of characters around the protagonist mostly shifts as well, but I was kept interested by how the author continues to build out the world of the series. What brings my review down a star is how Brown moves from relying on themes and ideas from other sci-fi series to borrowing some pretty major plot points. The way that this second book leans more in its influen...| Davis Haupt's Blog
A fun sci-fi novel that brought together a lot of parts of other series and franchises into an interesting world: a solar-system spanning oligarchy with a caste system backed by geenric engineering whose ruling class reveres the ancient Romans more than any enlightenment-era political theorist. Some parts will stick out as a bit derivative: the main setting of the book is a Hunger Games-esque battle royale, and the strategies and political theory the main characters use to win felt very remin...| Davis Haupt's Blog
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (2022)| davi.sh
nix flake update: Updating dependencies of a Nix flake| davi.sh
Run zsh with 'nix develop'| davi.sh
nix-darwin and home-manager| davi.sh
Kill a process that's hogging a port on MacOS| davi.sh
Typescript type for the JSON spec| davi.sh
Ask the Typescript compiler how two types are different| davi.sh
Specify a different viewset serializer for lists| davi.sh
URL routing for content collections| davi.sh
Handle uploads with class-based generic views| davi.sh
