Witch Watch

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13501177-the-witch-watch

I can't remember what I ever reviewed and what I didn't. Did I ever write about Witch Watch before? It's Shamus Young's self-published novel. Shamus is famous for Dm of the Rings, a "what if LOTR was a roleplaying game by an overly-railroading GM" http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612 and his series of posts about growing up, his life, and difficulties with the school system.

Good things about Witch Watch:

* Urban fantasy in victorian london
* Long-suffering protagonist who never wanted to think hard, but is accedentally resurrected by cultists intending to resurrect their necromancer master
* A smattering of effective deadpan humour
* Effective female character who gets on with things
* Thoughtful world-building of magic system, a more traditional, "can only do magic once you do a bunch of prep" system, and plot depending on magic system

Things that bugged me:

* The editing standard is pretty good, I'd say on average better than most first professionally published novels, but there's a few bits that just felt a bit unfinished and really bugged me, viz:
* One or two minor scene connections when a bit more set-up in advance would have made it feel necessary rather than contrived, or clear rather than muddled.
* The overall plot works pretty well, but I felt like one more editing pass could have really made it pop, made it exceptional rather than good.
* The characters occasionally relapse into lamenting how incompressible people are, which I have a lot of sympathy with, and is very Shamus, but sometimes feels out of place for that character.

But I'd really like to read more by him, so I'm drawing people's attention to this one in case it helps :)

git porcelain v s plumbing

It's not that I don't understand the etymology of --porcelain options. Lots of commands are "plumbing", ie. intended to produce output which is consumed by other commands rather than by the user, because git is like that.

So "porcelain" is coined to mean the opposite of that: output which is intended to by read by a person, and include lots of useless twiddles like human-readable column formatting, units, column headers, messages saying "there was nothing found" instead of returning "" etc.

And some commands are often used as user-facing commands, but can also be used by scripts and other commands intended to produce more user-friendly output, and so have a command line option "--porcelain" to mean "produce output which can be parsed by another command".

It's not that I don't know that.

It's that I think it's unnecessarily confusing that:

1. "Porcelain" means not "smooth, unencumbered" but the opposite
2. "--porcelain" means "make the output not porcelain".

Pride and Prejudice and ill-considered auto-translation

State of progress: "Qu'il N'est-ce UNE vérité universally acknowledged, Qu'on UNE single Homme In possession DU UNE Bonne fortune, must s'agir In voulez DU UNE épouse."

No, it's not supposed to be a good translation, it's supposed to be an approximate word-by-word thing for reasons which will become apparent later. I'm pleased it worked AT ALL, as badly-capitalised franglish as it is :)