jack

I didn't fall in love with it, but it managed at least some of the important things for a super hero film, some humour, some tension, and some reason for everyone other than superman to matter.

I enjoyed the little character moments like the Superman and Batman moments, the lasso of truth mishaps, and superman and flash racing each other. And Batman playing reluctant leader.

My basic prescription is, "like that, but more so".

Although I still find it hard to adjust to continuities where superman punches someone and then there's "more fight, but they're driven backwards into the ground" not "there's a comedy superman-shaped-fist"

( Spoilers )

OK, right, yes, that episode where the fairly significant turn from the previous episode is amplified a lot. Many feelings.

Spoilers (this may still be interesting if you haven't watched the show at all, but probably don't read if you're mid-way through the first season)

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Oh gosh, I knew this was going to be addictive for me and it was. You're crashed on an alien planet and need to build enough smelting, industry, power etc to eventually launch a rocket. But most of the game is about the layout of stuff, about getting a million conveyor belts getting the right components to the right machines without bumping into each other, and about layout out pipes between lakes, oil refineries, factories etc without getting into a giant knot.

I knew it would be but it's *really* *really* like software engineering. Like, you can *see* exactly what spaghetti code is: when you lay things out neatly and can see where everything is, it's easy to change things, but when you grow your conveyor belt layout organically, you can add *one* line fairly easily just fitting it in here and there, but if you do that often, everything ends up an unchangeable mess and you can't do anything with it without breaking half the existing stuff.

Somewhere in the middle you get useful tools like grabbers which can be programmed in unlimited ways, so you can turn things on only when you need the outputs, and even construction bots which can duplicate large sections of your factory.

Introspection and perfectionism

And you realise things. My instincts are always to build exactly the right amount of intermediates that the outputs need. But that doesn't actually work most of the time. Intermediates you always need for a specific product, and don't need LOTS of, it's often sensible to build a "manufacture the intermediates and final product" block with the assemblers all next to each other. Intermediates you need all over the place it's usually sensible to just manufacture lots of. But then you need to say -- you don't want to process ALL your iron into cogs, or you'll run out of iron for everything else. But you do need a *lot* of cogs. Is it better to just make cogs, and rely on that when you have "enough" cogs and the conveyor belt backs up, the cog machines stop taking iron? But then if you build too many further machines that need cogs, they'll never be satiated and everything that needs iron will start shutting down. Is it better to split the incoming iron 50/50 or some other proportion between iron and the basic iron intermediates like cogs and steel? But then what if that ratio's not correct. Or is it better to adjust depending on which important final products are running short?

My instinct is that there should be a perfect "right" way. But because you need to add new final products and change proportions and cope with raw fuels temporarily running dry, that's basically impossible, it's better to segregate the various stages, and turn on the earlier stages as needed (I haven't actually done that yet but I can see the benefit).

Specific parallels

And likewise, duplicating a section of your factory once you have the right construction bots, and once you manufacture enough of all the buildings etc needed, is just a push of a button and a short wait. But it takes ages to make all the edges line up right so the new conveyors get the right input etc.

Or, a thought occurred to me driving to work, you know construction sites always seem to be "nothing, nothing, nothing, suddenly a building"? Well, software development often *is* like that, and I know exactly why even though I don't like believing it: because there's an awful lot of work in getting things working together, so the actual working on things is comparatively scattered. (And you can either frontload it, and then have years of technical debt and trying to bodge things together, or build everything right but it's ages before you get things working. And wisdom is knowing the right balance :) )

It also gives insight into firefighting vs planning. You need a certain amount of "fixing up" things, at some point ore runs low and you need to lay out dozens of smelters and stuff on a new ore field, there's no way of avoiding that. And often, *something* will back up, or run out, or get mixed between two belts or something, for completely deterministic reasons that you *could* have forseen, and you need to take care of it. But if you spend *all* your time doing that you'll never make any progress. And conversely, sometimes it's easier to take a shortcut, like loading an assembler with the appropriate inputs manually, if you expect it to be a while before you run out -- but even if you do, it's useful to think through where you would put the proper conveyor belt feeds, e.g. by having an inserter that grabs from a chest, but you can replace with a belt when you need. That, "do the simple thing, but leave the connectors in place for replacing it with a polished version when you need" is often a very useful approach.

Aesthetics

It's pretty atmospheric. The background sounds vary according to what's on the screen, so you can *hear* radars blipping and furnaces roaring. I played on peaceful because I didn't want the pressure of fighting off alien wildlife at the same time, but those are pretty beautiful in a monstrous way. And when things are humming along perfectly it's really impressive. It reminds me, how much I love making complicated elegant mechanisms, and I need to do more programming where I design a thing as well as learn a new thing.

Prepare for rant! There's quite a lot I liked, but quite a lot I objected to.

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Welcome to more random ebook reviews. This is by someone who also wrote a couple of books which were a bit more male-geek-wishfulfilment-y become-powerful-mage-by-munchkin'ing have lots of women throwing themselves at you, where I enjoyed some of the ideas, but cringed a lot at some of the bits. This had some of the downsides, but a lot of interesting stuff.

Alice is fitting in poorly in the orphanage in an authoritarian get-back-to-nature world. Her body is extensively enhanced beyond human with various implausibly space-opera-ish enhancements, but most have not grown in properly without the right nutrients, which no-one has been giving her. She escapes just ahead of some brainwashing (which might expose, well, if her brain is not-exactly-traditional-human either) and ends up eventually hitching a ride on an independent merchant ship and getting into many further scrapes from there.

I enjoy the "protagonist has all the awesome superpowers" thing but there's a reasonable amount of "does she learn to leverage her advantages well" which is what I enjoy even more. Nice although not super memorable secondary characters and overall plot. Some reasonable resolved mysteries.

What I found interesting was the physics -- the premise is several layers of hyperspace, in each of which a position corresponds to a known position in our space, but in which distance is progressively smaller. Each has its own variant of physics based on the same principles, but possibly with different universal constants or initial distribution of matter. Alpha layer is normal-ish. Beta is mostly anti-matter (which is ok in deep space, the space opera deflector shields are quite good). Gamma is used for travel by ships which aren't powerful enough to manage the final transition. Delta has reversed gravity and is full of plasma because matter never formed. There are also several *sub* layers where distances are *longer*, which are studied but not usually used. Spaceship tactics include managing layer transitions.

And the society too. Super-human (level 5+), human equivalent (level 4), and intelligent-but-more-limited-than-human AI (level 3) exist in various combinations (human brains uploaded or transplanted into mechanical or biological android bodies, or AIs in that variety of body, etc). Human-equivalent AI have the same rights as humans in many places but are not always treated that way. Level 3 are treated as an underclass most places (the protagonist is not ok with this!) Level 2 are treated like animals or machines (which seems about right). Level 5 are banned after a bunch of wars about it. People expect it to be possible to make ever-more-powerful AIs but no-one has yet. But all this just exists, putting much more weight behind moral questions about the subject than many books which obsensibly tackle the subjects more head on.

I missed when Yoon Ha Lee's Raven Stratagem actually came out, but I read it and really enjoyed it, I still found it quite confusing to come to a clear opinion on anything, but I felt like I had a much clearer picture than after the first novel. I also read at least one of the short stories and want to binge all of them at some point. If you liked Ninefox Gambit, it's a very worthy sequel.

I also read Wrong Stars (Tim Pratt). I'd previous read his urban fantasy, which I enjoyed but didn't stick with. It's an interesting universe, with humanity colonising much of the solar system and a number of other worlds, and one alien race known, the Liars, who have been a source of some more advanced technology, but distressingly uncommunicative about the history of the galaxy. And the protagonists stumble onto previously-unknown alien tech that leads to a mad scramble of finding stuff out.