Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

Valkyr is a young warrior, living on the Gaea space station. Gaea is a small rock, turned habitable by four battleships, embedded with it. It’s populated by the last surviving human soldiers, after Earth was destroyed by an invading alien force. Valkyr is a human tank, genetically modified breed that can crush the aliens with bare hands. However, she’s also a woman and the station is ruled by a patriarchal dictator who isn’t interested in letting women be warriors.

This is the surface-level promise, made by the book in the beginning. It sounds like Ender’s Game, sets the expectation that Valkyr will somehow prove herself and then tank the aliens. But the book isn’t that and is more like Cloud Atlas. The setting is good, the world building solid, except for one major plot hole. It doesn’t become clear if the aliens are strong or weak. Parts of the book indicate they’re extremely OP, so OP that they didn’t need to attack Earth at all. Parts of the book indicate that they’re weak and humans could easily overpower them.

Apart from this inconsistency between the different chapters, the book was enjoyable and I gave it 5/5 on Goodreads. It might be a bit illogical but it is interesting and the characters are complex and good.

PS. This is my first book review this month. Last three books didn’t meet the bar.

Use my AI emails

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

I get marketing emails from OpenAI. The message is clear – AI is going to replace us all but it won’t ever replace the email marketing. How else are we going to convert the users who use something else and are not subscribed?

I checked my inbox. This was not the first product announcement I received but it was the first that looks like a pure marketing email, created by a human email marketer. I hope there’s a real person behind it, not a bot, trained on the junk mail folder.

This is a major improvement to the cluttered product announcements from before, that looked as a conspiracy theory, posted on Reddit.

Best way to battle negative thoughts

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment
Daily writing prompt
What’s the best way to deal with negative thoughts?
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Okay! We all live on a tiny piece of dust next to a very old star that’s eventually going to consume Earth. We’ve not be informed about our purpose but we know we’re all going to die. It’s not easy to deal with all of that and the other reasons to feel bad about the future. Negative thoughts use periods of vulnerability from stress, health, or other misfortunes and just penetrate the walls and take space we can use for, pretty much, anything else. By the time they reach us, it might already be late to act in the most efficient way.

Here’s my short list, listing multiple items that have helped me over the years.

  • Walking. 1h outdoors is like 2h of meditation. Also helps with sleep. I didn’t start the 10k/day to improve my mental health but after doing it for several years, hard to not put it on top of my list.
  • Sleep – the brain just works better when properly rested but it can’t do that if it’s fed with coffee and alcohol, or you’re not physically tired. So…
  • No alcohol or coffee. I’ve experimented in this area and no amount of alcohol or coffee is good.
  • Planning positive events ahead, just placing good things in the calendar. Planting them like seeds to grow in anticipation.
  • Cats (and dogs btw) but cats work for me. Cats don’t care.
  • Religion and spirituality – after all, we need a way to accept defeat.
  • Awareness about thinking errors. Most of our fears are about stuff we have no control over. I think superstitions can be particularly harmful. People are universally afraid of black cats. Why?
  • Reading books, fiction in particular.

None of that counters negative thoughts at the moment, and none of this is a measure against moments of grief and loss. But it helps over the long run.

I re-read some of my old posts in preparation to publish this one. I think they still hold.