I agree on the one hand. On the other at university those who came from the gaming backgrounds often had no idea about the huge amount of math awaiting them and a lot of them really struggled…
I really enjoyed a few early computer games. But my earliest attempts at programming were trying to teach our PC-20 computer to write Haikus in GW Basic…very early “language models”–the results were between hilarious and ethereal. And no I do not have any because I had no idea I would want any of this stuff 30+ years later. I was going to study computer linguistics for a while there… …
PS: these days a trivial exercise for chatgpt
Code flows like a stream,
A programmer’s artistry,
Logic brought to life.
I think that with the book based in Vassagonnia (something about the desert, funny that I remember the name of the country but not the name of the book) they are my favourite Lone Wolf books. Enjoy!
One of the first lectures in the second year of my computing degree had a lot of unfamiliar people at it. They were mostly female, chattering in upper-class voices. They were third-year Library Studies students, who had this lecture series, which was basically about folding, spindling and mutilating data, as a final-year option. It was was compulsory for second year computing, We never saw any of them again. There had been equations: not horrible ones, but involving logarithms and the like.
The first five books are really good. Caverns of Kalte let me a bit down because the first time I read it I somehow got to the end very quickly, I managed to get some sort of shortcut. Chasm of Doom feels very epic, one of the best books for how you feel when you complete it. Then the Magnakai books were still good, but felt a bit below the initial five. Also the change of art half way through that series does not help much either.
I believe that when this was back in the SUSD forums somebody passed me some links to e-formats of the books, but they got lost on my last phone change a year ago…
Also Neil Hopkins is running a game-by-poll on Mastodon under the #LoneWolf tag - the inspiration for my own #FalconGameBooks run. We’re currently in book #3.
Just finished all the birds in the sky. Really enjoyed it. Some great world building but (I don’t know if it’s a consequence of reading slightly longer books recently) I could have done with another 100 pages towards the end. Some of the latter chapters felt like they skipped a few pages transitioning between characters and locations.
Finished The Game Wizards, about Arneson and Gygax and the early years of TSR, up to Gygax’s surprise (to him, at least) expulsion. Great stuff again by Jon Petersen, focussed much more on the business side of things than the game, a book which grew from Petersen’s earlier essay 'The Ambush at Sherdian Springs’, recommended if you liked the essay.
Read Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin today, which was really good! While it probably works best for fans of the comics (which I have not read), other than one character I think anyone who was a fan of the old cartoon or movies (which I was) could pick this up and follow along just fine. Even that one character gets enough explanation so the ignorant reader does not get lost. Recommended for anyone with a bit of TMNT nostalgia.
There was a woman in a bunch my classes when I went back to finish my degree. I figured she was a CS major, or maybe math. Nope. She was doing a history masters, and had one of the arguments in her thesis attacked, and wanted to better present it. That explained the stats class, but real analysis?
She got a job doing forensic accounting and fraud detection for a corporate auditors or something like that.
After finishing Medusa (Jessie Burton) I was looking for a review of it (it’s decent but a bit light and a little bit too on the nose with a modern sensibility) and it turns out there’s another book which is a retelling of the Medusa story called Stone Blind. I decided I wasn’t that interested in going straight into another Medusa so I decided to audio book another by Natalie Haynes called 1000 ships which is a redo of the Trojan War story.
I’m also properly reading a book called Romantic Comedy (Curtis Sittenfield) about a woman who works for a tv show like SNL. It seems to have some cute observations.
I just finished reading Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark series. Westmark, The Kestrel, The Beggar Queen
I fell hard for Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books when assigned to read The High King around age 9. Notably this was within a year of when I’d been introduced to D&D but hadn’t been able to get a copy for myself (see American south in the 1980’s stereotypes).
I’d bounced off this series because I picked up the third book at a book fair as a child and it leans very heavily on the second which leans very heavily on the first.
I was quite impressed. There are a number of the issues with YA characters that ultra-competence comes from narrative focus. However key to this one is that there are no totally bumbling comic figures and every character throughout is a person (even if lightly sketched) trying to get what they want with what they have to hand. Rivalries among protagonists feel the most juvenile but still understandable.
Also of note is that there is no fantastic magic and also no religion. It’s remarkable as a royalist vs nationalist tale that omits religion.
Scenes from violent events develop maturity across the books and the third book foreshadows some of the more moving parts of Night Watch from Terry Pratchet.
The Wikipedia page noting that Alexander was influenced by translating French existentialist literature seems an accurate observation and I was impressed with these and a bit sad I didn’t get them in the correct order when I was younger and it took me this long to fully connect with them.
