Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
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Of course, there has to be a book about zombie vampires.
I’ve been reading books about zombies, necromancers, and undead creatures the whole year. I picked the Blood of Eden series by Julie Kagawa because I was at a book signing and this series looked pretty. I had no idea it’s about zombie vampires but here we are. My undead books year continues.
The world ended because a virus turned most people into immortal zombie vampires. Durable but not very smart. Allison will try to survive in this hostile environment and preserve a friend here or there. She’ll get herself into a conspiracy of some kind that we will probably uncover in book 3.
The zombie dynamic is about as realistic as the zombie fungus in “The Girl with All the Gifts”. Zombies roam outside of the walled cities, hunting for people. People almost never go out to be eaten. I believe the zombies in a world like that could not last for a hundred years with no humans to renew their ranks and would just die out from hunger. The same applies to the non-zombie vampires, the math doesn’t add up. The vampire lords are very carnivorous and kill so many people that the human race should’ve ended long before the zombies.
Overall, the book is not plausible – if a zombie apocalypse happens, it won’t happen this way. Maybe some other way. Despite that, I liked it and read it quickly. Looking forward to reading the next part. I’d say it was a solid 4*/5.
I had the chance to get autographs from Brandon Sanderson and Julie Kagawa, and I may soon have the opportunity to see Adrian Tchaikovsky as well. He’s coming to Bulgaria for a book signing on September 8th. His most acclaimed work, Children of Time, is on my to-read list, and I might give it priority so I can at least start it before the signing.
So far, I’ve found that the event will be on September 8th at 7 p.m., at Club Grapmophone, Budapesta Street 6. It feels like this has to be correct because the numbers line up so well: 9/8, 7, Budapesta 6. The source, however, isn’t the publisher, so we’ll have to wait for confirmation.
It’s a hot August and the ducks like to be in the shade.
I tried it in an 8h coding session. It performs worse than Claude 4 for me, and it’s slower. It made me wait for 10 minutes at a time. Eventually, I gave up, used my brain to understand the problem properly, and hand held Claude to a solution, which took about 1h. I think I lost most of my time with GPT-5 in loops where it fixes one thing at the expense of another while the general approach looked sufficiently sound to fool me but not sufficiently sound to eventually work in all cases.
This might be due to high traffic and not because the model is worse. I’ll give it another chance when the hype fades.
Veselin.blog 