Nerd Pride Radio

If I understand things correctly (and I may not)... 1) There seems to be a sense that a big bang is not a full description of how the universe began. It is a simple, easy to digest concept, but is, at a minimum, incomplete. 2) in all of the observable universe, the fabric of space is expanding. Obvi...

The Last Girl on Earth -- Alexandra Blogier I can't even. Seriously. This was so terribly not for me. The Abdelorans came to an Earth ravaged by climate change and decided that humans were inherently cruel and evil and did not deserve this planet. They released "The Bomb" that eventually ...

Does it really just keep calling them perps through 13 whole chapters?

I just can't get over the weird fetishization of weapons and paramilitary bullshit. I see the nods to prayer and religion and guilt. We've met a couple token Amish and might passably be considered to be in "Amish Country", but the whole thing is a bad paint by numbers. I feel like I'm back...

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8jCsoDs/

The UAW has begun their rolling strike. Their position is simple: In 2008 and 2009 during the great recession, American auto companies were in danger of going under. The UAW agreed to concessions that included paycuts and reduction of benefits to help keep things afloat. The companies also took mass...

The Goblin Emperor -- Katherine Addison Read this! It is 400 pages of overblown, high-fantasy court intrigue where everyone has flowery five-syllable names and there's weird made up words for every noble title, every occupation, every item of status, and on and on and on. So much that I couldn't ke...

Amish Country

I understand that Div is our bad guy and that he has kidnapped Jade's sister, but that's six chapters now and I feel like I missed the ransom demands. It's Amish Country Ransom for heck's sake. Mine. Yeah, there's no Amish and no Ransom. I'm guessing "Country" wasn't a sexy enough title. ...

I understand that Div is our bad guy and that he has kidnapped Jade's sister, but that's six chapters now and I feel like I missed the ransom demands. It's Amish Country Ransom for heck's sake. Yeah, there's no Amish and no Ransom. I'm guessing "Country" wasn't a sexy enough title. I think...

"Shit! No cell service! Now what?"

"Good thing one of us remembered to check the Weather Channel before we left. I saw an 80% chance of heavy plot tonight, so I packed these walkie talkies in case we get separated, and this emergency satellite phone, just in case."

Whoof! What a whirlwind of a first chapter. I hope her sister's okay.

Yellowface -- R. F. Kuang Rebecca Kuang wrote one of my favorite books of the year so far... Babel. So I was super-excited to pick up her latest. Yellowface is wildly different from Babel, and also extremely good. But it is one that unsettled me at times, and I feel like I can't judge it properly w...

I do not envy you. We had a couple weeks of 100+ weather, and I'm more than done.

So invested. Good story.

A Memory Called Empire -- Arkady Martine I got this book from my library app because it won a Hugo award and it looked like a meaty space-opera that was the first in a series. Wowza. First- it's not a space opera, but it is sci-fi. Second- this book freaking blew me away. The story involves the new...

And Jimmy Buffet a few days ago.

Even better!

And yeah, nose up that guy's all Kyle.

Jonathan Frakes is the definite leader right now. Good one!

I am surprised this is the first I've heard of Fairphone. The idea is to make a phone that is easily repairable at home, has all the basic parts be cheap and modular and easy to swap, and comes with guaranteed Android updates/support for 8-10 years. It's a forever phone. I haven't read any reviews o...

Matt Rhule is the head football coach of Nebraska. https://i.ibb.co/mbwpbmc/Matt-Rhule-19.png Every picture of him reminds me vaguely of Kyle, as if Rhule is the lovechild of Kyle and _______________. Sometimes that blank is Mark Ruffalo, a couple times Matthew Perry. It varies by picture. I know th...

All Boys Aren't Blue -- George M. Johnson Another one from the banned books lists. This is a coming of age memoir of a queer Black man coming to terms with the various aspects of his identity from kindergarten through college. Friggin fascinating. And the audiobook is read by the author, so while h...

Phoebe wrote: ↑Wed Aug 30, 2023 7:37 pm I wish that man was a pedagogue, lollllll it was wishful thinking manifesting.

HA! Misused that one, didn't I? I have now educated myself, and hopefully I remember next time by connecting pedagogy to pedantry.

The Haunting of Hill House -- Shirley Jackson Damn! Shirley Jackson can write! It's 1959 and a researcher wants to take a group of people for an extended stay in the reportedly haunted Hill House so they can make naturalistic observations and gather evidence (hopefully) of the paranormal. For being...

I'm not a fan of either of the two frontrunners, but one of them instigated and openly supported a violent insurrection in a effort to overturn a legitimate election, even though he was fully aware that there was no election fraud, all of his advisors knew there was no election fraud, and 60 court c...

I don't have daughters so the topic is irrelevant to me.

Reckless Girls -- Rachel Hawkins A cool little thriller that was addictive and entertaining. Several 20-somethings sail to an idyllic deserted island. At first it seems like paradise, but of course not all is as it seems. Everyone has dark secrets including (possibly) the island itself. As days pas...

She did. I only became familiar with her when she became a judge on So You Think You Can Dance a couple years ago. Things I know about her: She got her start on Dance Moms when she was just a kid. She was born in Omaha, Nebraska. She had (at the time I saw her on SYTYCD) recently come out as queer. ...

The Twilight World -- Werner Herzog This is the story of Hiroo Onoda, the last Japanese soldier of WWII to finally surrender in 1974. It is a surprisingly straightforward story for Herzog. And I've read and heard about Onoda's story many times before. As such, it was certainly interesting but witho...

Thornhedge -- T. Kingfisher Did I not just tell you that T. Kingfisher is a master of fantasy? Thornhedge is fucking brilliant. It's beautiful and sublime and melancholy and I adore it. The overall feels of it gave me the same sort of emotional vibes I got from This is How You Lose the Time War. Th...

A House with Good Bones -- T. Kingfisher T. Kingfisher is a treasure! I fell in love with her writing through the short story "The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society", and recognized her name here. I did a quick search of this site to find the name of that story and found Kyle...

The Recovery Agent -- Janet Evanovich I read a lot of sci-fi, and a fair bit of YA fiction (which is most often also sci-fi), so I've been.trying to break it up just a little. Janet Evanovich is best known for her Stephanie Plum novels about an awkward unemployed woman who becomes a bounty hunter a...

Phoebe wrote: ↑Mon Aug 21, 2023 1:59 pm I need to get a hold of a copy of that Dinner book.

Yes you do. You and I have very different tastes sometimes, but I feel like this is a book for you.

Also:
A Knife in the Sky
Book by Marie-Célie Agnant

As in... you also need to get this book, or... also, you have read this book?

Yeah, even a year ago, I was still on board with the idea that this was all part of some master plan. Even though it looked to all appearances as if he was destroying his $40 billion investment, there MUST be some hidden benefit to him. And now I think the nation as a whole is starting to get over t...

Elon bought Twitter by leveraging his incredibly overvalued stake in Tesla. Now that many other companies are doing all-electric vehicles (and some are doing it both better and cheaper than Tesla), his stake in Tesla is quickly becoming worth less than the $40+ billion he borrowed to buy Twitter. He...

Do Not Disturb -- Frieda McFadden No! I did not enjoy this. Not for me. It's a mystery/thriller that teases some possible horror or supernatural elements but then discards them. It has some complex plotting, but very shallow characterizations. It is very melodramatic, and constantly has the charact...

The Dinner -- Herman Koch Whoa... that was messed up! Read Kyle's review. This book is good! This is the story of two couples having dinner, and throughout a much greater and darker story revealed. And the darkness runs deep. It is very much a critical examination of wealth and privilege--and more ...

The Original -- Brandon Sanderson & Mary Robinette Kowel I've heard weird things about Brandon Sanderson and his compulsive writing and his obsessed fans and his early biases that he seems to be honestly working on. I want to sample some of his writing, but everything he writes is "Book 7 ...

Out of Darkness -- Ashley Hope Pérez I'm spent! This one required some serious emotional work. On the list of most banned books for at least the last two years, Out of Darkness takes the real life tragedy of the 1937 New London School explosion in New London, Texas, still billed as the deadliest sc...

Assholes.

Looking for Alaska -- John Green John Green's first novel. If you are familiar with Paper Towns, you will recognize the many similar elements contained in this story. Our hero is 16 and something of a loser. But then he finds his manic pixie dream girl and his life becomes way more interesting. But...

Good movie. We went with our youngest son and all three of us had a blast. Genuinely funny with so much of the humor aimed at adults. The end was 15 minutes too long... the drawn out heartfelt wrap-up being incongruous with the tone of the rest of the movie. But it didn't dampen my enthusiasm for th...

Time Squared -- Lesley Krueger So strange! It opens as a historical romance set in England, centered on Eleanor in 1811, whose wealthy aunt is trying to arrange a beneficial marriage for her. There is much social machination going on, but Eleanor ends up falling for a Captain who is shipping out so...

The Galaxy and the Ground Within -- Becky Chambers Damn. I think I have now read all of Becky Chamber's novels. Worth the ride. This is the fourth and final book of the Wayfarers series that started with Angry Planet. This story is unique in the series for it's lack of humans. The planet Gordon is ...

If I understand correctly, the indictments make him more likely to win nomination and less likely to win the presidency. I don't know if the same holds for convictions. I assume he's running with the hope of implementing a successful coup this time and then pardoning himself and implementing the 202...

Calypso -- David Sedaris A humorous and poignant memoir from David Sedaris, exploring his family dynamic and reflecting on his sister's suicide, his mother's alcoholism, and his elderly father's impending mortality. But the humor is also there as he talks about trying to feed his excised tumor to a...

From Wikipedia: Vivek Ramaswamy was born in Cincinnati to Indian immigrant parents. He graduated from Harvard College with a bachelor's in biology and later earned a J.D. from Yale Law School. In 2014, Ramaswamy founded the biotech company, Roivant Sciences after working as an investment partner at ...

Poll averages from 538 as of today:
Trump 52.4%
DeSantis 15.5%
Ramaswamy 6.8%
Pence 4.6%
Haley 3.1%
Scott 2.9%
Christie 2.4%

We are from the American South. We have confederate soldiers in the mix, and we have official records of one slaveholder who owned three slaves whose names we know. There were probably more. We have one ancestor who wrote the definitive text (at that time) of indigenous American cultures and who als...

The Long Mars -- Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter Don't need to describe this anymore. If you are a fan of sci-fi, you should read the first book and it'll suck you in too. I do have to say though that there are aspects (yet again) that are problematic. It is pretty Anglo-centric, and most of the...

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