#179

Books

This week I read:

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

  This was really good. It covered a lot of different topics, explained them really well, and gradually built up the complexity over the book, with each chapter building on the previous. I knew much of the content at a high level already, and this helped me drill into some known (and unknown) unknowns. I like that each chapter has copious references too: I’ll definitely be following up on those for additional reading material.

• Volumes 2 and 3 of So I’m a Spider, So What? by Okina Baba

  Volume 1 was fun, these were also fun. Volume 3 ends at the same point as episode 12 of the 24-episode anime series, so the rest of the anime probably covers volumes 4, 5, and 6. There are 16 volumes so far (with 13 translated), so there’s still a lot of story to go.

  Translated stuff feels like it goes out of print fairly quickly though, so I’ll buy the other volumes very soon, rather than gradually over the a few years like I tend to do with English series I’m following. That approach bit me with the 20th Century Boys manga: the editions I was buying are now out of print, and the current editions divide up the content differently, making mixing them with the volumes I do have a bit awkward.

• Volume 1 of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime by Fuse

  Unfortunately, this was not so fun. It’s a shame, because I have quite enjoyed the anime for this, but this volume was not very good. It was very fast-paced, moving from event to event to event, without really leaving any time for character development between these. At times, I found myself wondering “Ok, but why do these characters now trust each other? They’ve only just met!” The anime has definitely taken some liberties to re-arrange and expand existing scenes, and to add new ones.

  I compared it with a random volume of Overlord (looking forward to volume 14 of that coming out in a few months), and the difference in writing quality was like night and day.

  Well, I’ve got volumes 2 and 3 on the way. I’ll read those as well to give the series a fair shot—it’s not much of an investment, one light novel volume only takes a few hours to get through—but unless the writing improves I don’t think I’ll continue reading this one.

I did some pruning of my nonfiction, deciding to donate, recycle, or otherwise get rid of, a few books which I’ve had for years, never read, and never will read. I don’t habitually get rid of books (see my perpetual need for more shelf space), but if I’m not going to read something even once, and not even use it for reference material, there’s not much point in keeping it.

Miscellaneous

A whole week off. It passed quickly and slowly at the same time. What did I do with it? I don’t really know.

I read some books.

I slept in a lot.

I upgraded bookdb and bookmarks to Elasticsearch 8 (which was pretty easy: I upgraded the servers to 7.17, then the client libraries to 8.0, then the servers to 8.0 and changed a config option which had a different default value in 8.0; no complex migration or anything needed).

A friend started a new Minecraft server which I’ve been poking around on.

And that’s about all I can remember.

Time has definitely become more fuzzy, but that’s ok. A rigid schedule is overrated: eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, read or play when the mood strikes, and so on.