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This book is a book that shows how absurd everything is. It starts with Billy Pilgrim, the main character. Billy is clearly not mentally stable. His narration is unreliable. His perspective of war is not to be trusted, is not rational. We’re seeing the war through his traumatized and confused point of view. But isn’t that the point? There is no rational perspective on war. It’s all absurd. War is human absurdism at its most extreme. It swallows up so many people, all at once. It takes away innocence and joy and life itself. And yet... it’s unavoidable, and anyone who thinks otherwise is being unrealistic. We’re supposed to accept the things we can’t change, and war is one of those things. The two ends of the spectrum in Slaughterhouse-Five are: war is absurd and evil and, on the other end, free will doesn’t exist. War, in other words, is unavoidable no matter how many people agree that killing other people should be avoided. The story explores both those ends in a dizzying traversal b...

One line review: Murderbot is an antisocial, depressed security robot who hates its job and wants nothing more than to watch TV shows, but unfortunately it is contractually obliged to save its humans. All Systems Red is funny, interesting and fun to read the whole way through. It’s a story about a security robot named Murderbot who hacked its own operating system and is now a free agent. It doesn’t tell anyone this and instead uses its newfound privileges to download thousands of hours of TV shows. It is rented out to a team of researchers who are exploring a new planet, and it pretty quickly turns out that the team is in danger. Unfortunately for Murderbot that means it has to stop watching TV shows and save its humans. The story itself is pretty bland, especially if you’re expecting an intricately plotted space opera, but that doesn’t detract much from the enjoyment because the point of the story is to get us invested in the plight of this robot who has freedom and now has to figure ...

If you want a one-line review, here it is: House of Suns is like We Are Legion (We Are Bob) ... just way more exciting. House of Suns is technically a hard sci-fi space opera. Technically. But that generic description doesn’t do this galactic murder mystery justice. Let’s start with the premise. Six million years before the story’s main plot, Abigail Gentian created 1000 clones (aka, “shatterlings”) of herself and sent them out across the galaxy. Every once in a while (say, a couple hundred thousand years) the shatterlings reunite and exchange memories from their adventures in space. But at the latest reunion, the Gentian Line is ambushed. Most of the shatterlings are killed. And that’s where House of Suns begins. The book follows two plot lines, one about the shatterlings and how they search out answers and revenge and one about Abigail Gentian and her story up until she cloned herself. Alastair Reynolds did an awesome job balancing action, interesting characters and a mysterious...

File paths show up a lot when you work with computers. The two most common scenarios in which you'll meet them are when you're moving around your computer via a command prompt and when you're linking files while creating web pages. (In this tutorial I'll be discussing how file paths look/work on Unix-based machines like Linux and Mac OS X, but the Windows verity is very, very similar.) File paths are pieces of text that look something like: /User/Ruth/Documents/myTextFile.txt. This particular file path tells me exactly where myTextFile.txt lives on my hard drive. Forward-slashes mean something like "go to" or "look in", and the words in between the slashes are folder names. In this case, "/User" tells me "look in the User folder", then "/Ruth" says "look in the folder named Ruth", then "look in Documents", then, finally, end at the file myTextFile.txt. Notice, the last word/name in a file path can ...

    A long, long time ago in a kingdom far, far away, there lived a king. He was the happiest king that had ever lived, and he had everything he could ever want. The Christmas finally came when, one by one, his friends and family came before him, begging his mercy. “We cannot think of ANYTHING to get for you, Sire! You have everything anyone could ever want!” The king was feeling rather generous that holiday season, so to each of them he waved a hand and forgave them.   But after everyone left he sat alone on his throne and thought about all the things he had and how they all made him happy. His exotic parrot collection made him happy. The shining tapestries that depicted ancient myths and legends that hung in his great hall also made him happy. All the artists whom he paid to create for him and perform for him made him happy. So did his gargantuan underground library full of every book ever written. And, most importantly to him, he had a wife and children who were ...

template - Blogger website | iTunes | Google Play | Spotify | Stitcher | Castro | RadioPublic | Pocket Casts | Overcast | TuneIn You can get to know a person pretty quickly by hearing them share their most embarrassing moments. . . our gear (so far): Blue Microphones Yeti Ultimate USB Microphone - Silver (YETI) + accessories website: https://wasawkwardpod.transistor.fm Twitter: www.twitter.com/wasawkwardpod Instagram: www.instagram.com/wasawkwardpod email: thatwasawkwardsocialpodcast@gmail.com Ruth’s Twitter: www.twitter.com/ruthrootz Ruth’s Instagram: www.instagram.com/ruthrootz

website  |  iTunes  |  Stitcher  |  SoundCloud  |  RadioPublic  |  YouTube  | ListenNotes We think that the fewer constraints and rules are placed on us the more free, productive and happy we'll be. That's not true. And I prove it in this episode. BOOK: Dictionary Stories by Jez Burrows Twitter Instagram Facebook Rootz’s Blog Apple Podcasts RadioPublic Stitcher YouTube SoundCloud email:  rootzmacbwb@gmail.com