Ms Marvel

About a nerdy muslim girl who gains the powers of captain marvel (iirc). It does right all the things you'd hope it does right -- showing the positives and negatives of living in a non-Christian religious family in the USA, being sympathetic and non-judgemental while also showing the problems internal and external; showing a young protagonist coming to terms with unexpected powers and how to keep them secret; beginning to introduce a nemesis.

All the things I thought I wanted. But I'm not that hungry for more -- I felt that even though it was very good, it didn't add a lot I didn't already expect, so it didn't suck me personally in, even though I love it for being a much more modern "introduction to superpowers" story I could recommend to people without apologising for it.

ETA: A friend asks, what's the best way of reading recent mainstream comics digitally?

ETA: And almost all of the books I review, I own in paper format, and am eager to lend to people, whether you're following one of the awards, or come on it years later and say "do you still have..?" I realise, most of the time, it's more hassle than it's worth, but you're very welcome if you'd like!

Chris Hadfield: One people vs zero people

Nakedtoes recently described to me something Chris Hadfield said, that he described people's places in an organisation as an extremely loose approximations: Ones, who contributed a lot; Zeros who were mostly treading water; and Minus Ones who sucked more effort than they produced.

And he said, he found it easy to aim to be a One and almost always end up as a Minus One due to trying too hard and making the wrong mistakes. But if you aim to just do your job reliably, aim to be a Zero, you are much more likely to end up functioning as a One.

I wasn't sure at the time, but that resonated a lot with me. I think I've always suffered from smart-at-school syndrome, that I expect to be exceptional, but find it hard to see my worth if I'm not exceptional. So I'm constantly trying to do things exceptionally, to revamp all the procedures at once, and introduce all the things I think are necessary, and find the amazing magic bullet for a situation -- and that leads to me getting really stressed because every time an idea is shot down it's really hard to say "oh yes, you're right, this idea that I consider a fundamental necessity is stupid and not worth it" and even harder when you'd tied your self worth to being "the guy who introduced distributed source control" or whatever. And I find it hard to motivate myself to do just an ok reliable job, because I find it hard to believe that if I do that, I'm worthwhile, and find it hard to believe I _can_ do that (partly a self-fulfilling prophecy, because I tend to procrastinate a lot on things that don't seem important).

But if I tell myself that just doing the mundane stuff reliably and well will contribute to overall success of the organisation and myself, it gets a lot easier to do, it seems to help. And maybe I shouldn't need to do that, but it seems to help...