Thinking about good adventure books

Instead of working on a Substack post right now I’m just listening to the WAN show and drinking a glass of water. That is how this day is starting off. I spent a few minutes looking up all time great adventure books to find a good one. Most of the time I read non-fiction books so I have not really gotten that far into many other books. Recently, I read the entire The Expanse series which is the first modern series I have consumed outside of the derivative Dune books beyond the original series. So many books are getting published right now that it is hard to know what to read next. So many people read that Ready Player One book a few years back that I picked it up and thought it was great. A lot of people recommended The Expanse series so I gave it a shot and it turned out to be delightful in terms of being a space opera with reasonable technology. Obviously, I would have preferred that many novels be devoted to extending the Firefly universe, but you cannot always get the things you want. 

To just be clear about my point here, I’m thinking about good adventure books. Trying to figure out what audiobook to read next is a bit of a time consuming thing. To be clear I don’t mind paying the audiobook price where the royalty goes to the publisher and author. They did some work and I plan to enjoy listening to it or sometimes reading it. I’m just not in favor of buying audiobooks that are disappointing. Most of the time I’ll be listening to a podcast and they will recommend some books to read. I’ll open up Google Books and buy the audiobook to listen to in that hour before bed. The vast majority of those books are basically modern history. Finding really good science fiction series has been a bit harder.

I’m open to recommendations for a good read. Generally, I prefer epic space journeys.

The day after watching the Royals play baseball

Today was a travel day. We drove from Kansas City to Denver. It was the day after watching the Kansas City Royals play baseball against the Cleveland Guardians. While we had a wonderful time at the old ball game the performance on the field was questionable. They lost 13 to 1 on a hot summer day during a Saturday afternoon home game. The box office receipts were for 17, 024 tickets. Things at the stadium did not feel 45% full.

The Royals game from July 9th

Planning to write and writing about plans

We watched “Thor: Love and Thunder” (2022) on an IMAX screen yesterday. That theater had not changed in a number of years. It was a throwback to the times of yore. Ok, I just wanted to use yore in a sentence. Those very seats could have been in that theater a decade ago the last time I visited. A lot of the larger format screen theaters now have reclining seats that are a bit bigger and a lot more comfortable. These seats could have been from the original installation of the IMAX screen. You won’t find any spoilers here about the movie or a review really. My expectations were for the movie quality to be inline with the previous Thor films. It was within the envelope of expedited Thor adventures. For the most part in the dozens of Marvel based films very few terrible ones exist. They are a window into that world and they provide that adventure. It’s pretty consistent. That is probably one of the reasons the films have done so well at the box office since the original Iron Max (2008) film was released. 

I’m starting to wake up now which took just a few minutes to achieve today. For some reason I’m running a little slower than usual as the day is starting to pick up steam. The sun is rising and the weather seems to be lining up well enough for the back part of this trip to Kansas City. Taking a bit of time to think deeply about where exactly you are in the writing journey is good. Maybe you have a detailed writing plan with a list of upcoming things to work on like an extra awesome backlog of pending adventures. You can certainly extrapolate that out to a map looking set of expectations and plot yourself as a location defining where you are in terms of that journey. That would be one way to go about and it would be interesting. My research trajectory and writing plan are well documented. Somebody else could pick up my work and keep moving along if for some reason I faltered. 

We have now spent the morning considering Thor films and visualizing the writing journey. For the most part this week  I have been working on a bunch of different content related to machine learning. The production quality on weeks 80 to 104 needs to be tip top to make sure the end of the last section of this year’s physical publication of “The Lindahl Letter” is really high quality. Based on my writing plan I’m going to pivot to writing academic style articles after that point in the writing journey with  snippets of that output ending up being published on an online basis. Generally, that will change my writing output to shift from a series of Substack posts being combined into a final collection at the end of the year to a more complex content production process. Academic articles can certainly be broken into sections and that will allow me to publish them in parts along the way. It will create a scenario where I’m sharing content on the same topic for several weeks in a row. Given that I won’t know the exact duration of a topic in that format the forward looking guidance will really be on the next 5 topics, but the coverage of those topics could very well end up taking months. It should be an interesting turn of events in the evaluation of my Substack style writing.

Testing Windows 11 Pro out

Yesterday things were looking bleak for my #Windows11Release adventures, but the @windowsinsider program account saved the day. While the very scary “This PC can’t run Windows 11” warning came up on the next reboot it installed anyway. My Intel i7-7800X chip not withstanding…

To my complete surprise the Pro Tools application I use for recording guitar launched and was perfectly happy running on Windows 11 Pro right after the upgrade. I’m still getting used to the Taskbar being at the bottom center of the screen. I’m one of the few people that used it across the top. I no longer have the date and time in my peripheral vision. That is something that will probably take a little bit to get used to throughout the day.