The Second Expedition by Tao Wong
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have to say this is... decent. It still feels just like a long-running Kung Fu series, with a few enlightenment sequences to give us the true progression feel. The story is simple, with a few side adventures and reversals ending in the sub-arc that was the initial reason for the adventure in the first place.



I want to like this more than I do. It's ... decent. Not that exciting. Just solid. I may return to it sometime, but I keep wondering if it'll get truly interesting soon.

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Defiance of the Fall 17: A LitRPG Adventure by TheFirstDefier
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One caveat before I review this.

I actually enjoy wild, crazy tales that keep trying to one-up the crazy conditions needed to cultivate into ++++++ godhoods among a slew of other gods, while always realizing there's at least three whole grades worth of god civilizations ahead of you to kill as you cultivate.

The fact that this book just happens to be a continuation of a crazy fetch-em ancient dead civilization quest that happens to to suck you into memory-civilizations that you can loot and change to affect the future where you came from is just an added bonus.

Of course, if you're dunked head-first into this and you're unable to quite follow what ever the hell is going on at any moment, this MIGHT seem like a clusterfuck of religious gobbligook mixing Tao and Buddhist and countless void, chaos, life, death IDEA formations harboring massive amounts of iconic and archetypal powers that need to be fixed and fitted into massive soul-formations, then it MIGHT seem a bit... fucked.

BUT some of us like this crazy ass shit. It's pretty fucking creative. BONKERS. But creative. Turning already bonkers cultivation storytelling into OP OP OP bonkers cultivation storytelling.

And mad props to it.

Just consider this a quest for YOU, too.

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The First War by Tao Wong
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I do honestly prefer steady progression in novels like this as compared to pure chaos, I can admit when war and chaos can have its place.

Still, I DO prefer training and cultivation and breaking through personal barriers. I can't wait to get back to that.

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The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Cory Doctorow is pretty much the undisputed champion when it comes to distilling complex tech issues based on many lifetimes of work (nonprofit forums) and his native intelligence.

So what does this mean when it comes to AI and what comes after, let alone whatever a centaur is in relation to it, or wtf a reverse centaur is?

Ah, it's actually beautiful. Once you know.

A centaur in this context is anyone who uses a tech to improve your capability. Be it glasses or binoculars or anything that multiplies force, be it heavy machinery or artificial limbs or a spellchecker on your word processor.

In more hyper-focused context, a reverse centaur is someone who has given over the agency of use over to the tool. That would be like abrogating all your authority over to your glasses. Or to your artificial limb, asking it to tell you whether you ought to pick up a cup of coffee. Or asking your smart toilet whether or not you feel like peeing at any particular moment.

So what the hell does LIFE AFTER AI mean? Like, after AI has become our overlords? After we've Butlerian Jihaded them? In this case, it's after the AI BUBBLE has burst. AI isn't a bad thing. It's a TOOL. You can murder someone with your kitchen chair, but truly, most people just prefer to SIT on them.

So, let's get back to what this book is really about.

It's not a diatribe against AI. It IS a critique of the whole industry that seems hell bent on pushing AI on all the bosses and efficiency experts and CEOs who LOVE the idea that they can just fire all the work force in favor of AI. Or even more specifically, whether we're all being centaurs who use the positive features of AI to improve our ACTUAL work, whatever it is, keeping responsibility for every stage of its use firmly in our own hands, be it the original idea, the workflow, and the final product, or whether we're being forced into a truly shitty situation where the AI dictates the original idea, forcing us to fix its workflow, and forcing us to sign off on its final product.

You know... making us become the slave to the very tool that should have been here to help us.


Of course, my explanation isn't nearly as good as his. I'm barely scratching the surface and I'm not giving any of the great real-world examples of real CEOs running toward this bubble with horse-blinders on. Or rather, reverse-centaur blinders.

Because, let's face it, this massive influx of AI-everything at the very tops of all the techbro's companies is essentially a power-grab that ignores the real-world harm that will befall everyone. It's almost like they gave up thinking two or three steps down the line. Perhaps they gave up thinking altogether. Or perhaps they just asked an AI to do their thinking for them. Like a reverse-centaur. And now they they might be thinking that if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for all of us.

Because, I guess, there aren't any people on the planet who are able to think anymore.

But then, maybe, that's actually true.

I'm remembering a quote from Robert A. Heinlein right now. "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." But then, if you rule out stupidity, all that's left is malice. And malice actually does fit the bill.

Mind you, this is just my own opinion, and isn't Doctorow's. At least, it isn't within this book.

Both he and I do think that AI can be a very good thing if it is used responsibly. If it is used for the betterment of each and every one of us. It is a massive time saver, a tireless worker, and does certain things SO much better than us. But it should not (and I repeat) should not be the one to actually THINK for us.

Every single one of us should take responsibility for our own thoughts. Period. If you give up that responsibility to your thinking-helper, then you've given up responsibility on your own soul. Again, my opinion. But then, why do all these powerful people want exactly that?


Sigh.

Either way, this is a very thought-provoking book and I can't say I disagree with anything in it at all. It's not a doomer book. It's a personal responsibility book. And a shine-the-light-on-the-bad-actors book. It IS a very worthwhile book.

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The First Stop by Tao Wong
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Weirdly enough, I was kinda meh about the first book in this series and so I took a long break. And then I saw that he had other series and seems to still be going pretty strong so I thought... why not give it another chance, maybe the writing got better?

After reading the second book, I can't tell if the writing is better, but my tolerance for straight cultivation, Wuxia-style seems to be recharged nicely.

I had a pretty good time with this. School arc. A few expeditions. Relatively good progression. It's comfortable.

I can't say it's brilliant, but it IS comfortable. Like taking a long soak in an old-time kung fu movie, or rather, a full series. So, not bad at all.

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Shades of Forever by Chris Kluwe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have a lot of things to say about this book, and most of them are good. It does, however, require a bit of mental adjustment, at least with me, before I get to the core of WHAT this book is and what it's trying to accomplish.

Without that adjustment, I'd mostly be trying to figure out what I just read. For example, it starts out like a post-post-apocalyptic story with lovecraftian under and overtones, firmly SF, but then it feels like I just stepped into a pretty good LitRPG, complete with an understated system to level up various skills and main levels, and THEN it becomes a hard SF complete with spaceflight and fleets complete with existential threats to reality, and THEN it becomes a tight little humorous, adventurous core of a novel circling and encircling health, healing, love, sanctuary, and being decent despite everything.

That's a lot to unpack.

And approaching it AS a story that's wild and genre-hopping and very aware of all the things it borrows while never losing track of its emotional healing core is ABSOLUTELY necessary.

No, this isn't a LitRPG although I was really excited in the direction it took with it. No, it's not a space opera, although I thought it was right on par with Sanderson's SF. No, it's not a YA lovecraftian humor, although I was rocking it when it ran with it.

But it was all of these things. And it was healing, too.

Ambitious? Perhaps perfectly in line with our current world and everything our nerdy sensibilities need? Very self-aware and damn well crafted?

Yes, to all the above.


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The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an amazingly clear, coherent, and even better, a SHORT examination of the problems and solutions revolving big tech in the internet.

What it is: a deeply detailed and reality-based distillation of decades of conferences and forums trying to combat the enshittification of the internet.

What it isn't: a glorified wah-wah bemoaning our state.

That's right. It's intelligent, no-nonsense, and frankly revolutionary. And this should come as no surprise to ANYONE if you know the author. The same author of Enshittification. Or the great novel Little Brother.


So, what's so big in this nonfiction work? What's so important? I'd invite you to read it yourself, but I'll give you a few examples.

How about Interoperability? Any time a company blocks third-parties from innovating a time-and-money feature as an add-on to an existing product, often burying said product, company, or inventor in legal shit for the purpose to said company's fear of losing their bottom line, that's a direct attack on interoperability.

Remember MS Office not working with ANY other kind of computer or software package in the market until Apple reverse engineered the BS just so people could USE it on their own systems? That is an example of fighting back against monopolies. Of course, when Apple outright prevents Android users from getting messages through to Apple's Iphone users, that's ALSO a monopolistic tactic. Preventing interoperability. And why? For profit. Force people to USE THEIR HARDWARE, or software, or ideological setup, or whatever-the-fuck-reason, despite the fact that computers are inherently INTEROPERABLE.

More examples include printer ink cartridge racket. Bricked cars. Worldwide stifled innovation stuck behind the inherent harassment of EULAS.

Who is it protecting? The company. Not the user. Not the repairman. Not anyone except the monopoly. AT&T is a huge example. But so is Intel, MS, Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon, and all the usual suspects. They are too big to fail. Why? Because the people regulating them are deeply in bed with the ones who run it. There are no third-party regulators. Impartial judges. And let's be real here. It's not a matter of being a subject that is too complicated to understand for laymen.

If that were really the case, then we'd never have laws to protect food or water sources, chemical safety, munitions safety, or child safety in the internet.

The trick is to actually allow third-party judges, or regulators, be able to perform their jobs of separating the wolves from the sheep pens instead of hiring yet more wolves to wring the last drop of blood from all the sheep.

Make it unlawful to lawsuit good-faith innovators, and if necessary, use a third-party commission to see if it IS a harassment suit.

Allow any kind of equipment or software to be repaired on the open market and not held to ransom by the original dealership/monolith/extortioner.

The argument that a company is too big to fail is just a smokescreen for the fact that it has undergone regulatory capture. It has either bought the lawmakers or it has many people over the barrel with really shitty strong-arm tactics.

Sound familiar?

Change the rules. Fight the monopolies by fighting the connective thread. This isn't a strong-arm approach. It's a change of mindset.

We allow Facebook enshittify our lives precisely because of the network effect. We're forced to stick with an abusive company like Amazon because we don't have any good alternatives. But if we de-fang the anti-regulation rules, making it easier to leave, en-masse, without losing all our friends and family members IN the move, then all of a sudden, we're free to use other services that don't sell off all our information or pen us into algorithmic echo chambers. Right, Meta? It's fairly simple, after all. You just need to throw out harassment lawsuits. Let the monopolies lose. I'm not saying let bad-actors run roughshod, either.

I'm talking about having someone with true impartiality JUDGE the cases. You know, in the idealistic, original-use way that courts were DESIGNED upon.

Ahem. If there's a conflict of interest, then REMOVE the conflict of interest.

Of course, this little problem is QUITE a large problem in our reality. And that also can be fixed by a change of mindset. If we all said ENOUGH OF THIS instead of shrugging yet again, and work toward actually making it better, maybe it won't end in pitchforks. But then, I guess the Pitchfork Emporium also dreams of being a monopoly.


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