Tag: blog

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.

Moustache

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I’m pretty sure I’ve featured this cat before.

The day sent me off the usual tracks. Sofia was closed for a bike parade or something like that. The bus I took to get out of my neighborhood sent me to another neighborhood that was further out of the center than my starting point. Nothing unfamiliar. In my steps journeys, I have the tendency to try slightly different routes every time, expanding my internal map. So, this was a cat I’ve seen before but who knows if I blogged about her. Hard to say 🙂

EV Show in Sofia

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I accidentally visited an EV car show in Sofia. Hundreds of Chinese cars lined up on the square, ready to be tested and purchased. Pretty cars, cheap cars, big cars, very big cars. I was impressed by the amount of marketing money invested to show all these cars.

Here are the vehicles that won my attention:

A 50-year-old trolleybus and a retro-sci-fi single-seater EV sports car that looked as if it was built in someone’s basement to be a bat mobile.

The other cars kind of explained a lot to me why people still drive their 20-year-old petrol cars.

Oh, and of course, here are some electric scooters.