The occasional scrivener

I must confess I really haven’t read up much about the current situation in Ukraine, but through the magic of coincidence and the Internet, the following three items came to my attention yesterday:

• Masha Lipman in the New Yorker, Will Ukraine Break Apart?
• Interesting couple of Reddit comments via Reddit’s excellent DepthHub
• Timothy Snyder in The New York Review of Books, Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine

Neither piece offers the whole story, but read together they show the many facets of this complicated story.

John Gruber:

File Edit View Special

When I see those four words, they evoke not a thought but a feeling. Poetry, in the form of a menu bar.

I mention this in chat, and literally seconds later @varjag writes

< varjagg> roses are red
< varjagg> violets are blue
< varjagg> you are my special
< varjagg> as file edit view

Not that many pics this month, unfortunately.

Technically this is October but I didn’t have anything else from GC…

New iPhone 5S.

If I hadn’t already read World War Z I’d probably enjoy this book a lot more. However, the parallells between the two books are so close it’s not really funny. While Robopocalypse starts up well and has some chilling early chapters, it soon becomes clear that Wilson lacks the energy or the imagination to draw the conclusions about the world he’s created that Brooks does in WWZ.

This is the first novel by Baxter I’ve read and I was impressed by it. It’s classic sensawunda SF but is also well-written and gripping. There’s also a refreshingly view of future realpolitik that is both plausible and chilling. Recommended.

This tree has since been cut down and the trunk left on the ground as a home for beetles and fungi.