Sam King's Verbose Letters

Since a lot of folks are spending more time working from home these days and suffering from poor ergonomics, I wanted to share some tips on what your set up should be like:

Alcatraz is a teenager who grew up in the United States.  The US, along with the rest of the Americas, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, are the Hushlands, a region of the world controlled by evil librarians.  The rest of the world, the Free Kingdoms, knows about all sorts of advanced technologies, including magic glasses.

I couldn't get Johnny Cash out of my head, so I decided to see Logan.  I thought it was so-so.

For the first half of the movie, I felt like I was missing stuff because I hadn't seen all of the previous X-Men movies.  But no, it just felt that way because things went unexplained and because the movie didn't clue the audience in that they were supposed to be unexplained.

It was fairly slow for an action movie.  The action that was there wasn't stunning, and most of the movie wasn't action oriented.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a book/play about Harry's son.  In case you're confused, it says "parts one and two" because it's two plays.

The characters are angsty and melodramatic.  The book/play adaptation is a bit awkward.  The plot doesn't make any sense.  The writing leaves something to be desired.  So, it's not a masterpiece.

In an interview, Brandon Sanderson mentioned that the inspiration behind The Rithmatist was, "What would it be like to be a muggle in Hogwarts?"

Under slavery, millions of people were uprooted from their families, discriminated against, denied basic rights, and killed.  Then slavery was outlawed, and under Jim Crow, millions of people were uprooted from their families, discriminated against, denied basic rights, and killed.  Then overt race-based discrimination was outlawed, and now with the US criminal justice system, millions of people are uprooted from their families, discriminated against, denied basic rights, and killed.  Absent cultural change, laws against discrimination don't end discrimination.  They just change its form.

At one point in Americanah, the protagonist criticizes someone for asking what a book was about because that question oversimplifies complicated narratives and people's interactions with those narratives.  In the protagonist's mind, books are about a lot of things.

The Parable of the Sower is set in a dystopian future where climate change has made food, water, and energy prohibitively expensive and has worsened poverty and wealth imbalances.  The protagonist grew up in a tenuously middle class gated community and the book features her struggle to survive.

The Fifth Season is a smart, well-written fantasy novel with interesting characters and world building.

In the series, the world ends a lot.  The planet regularly has extreme weather events, called fifth seasons, where there might not be sunlight for years, and even in good times, there are frequent earthquakes and minor events.  The magic users in the book, orogenes, can control seismic activity to stop all that from happening -- or to make it worse.

I get a lot of postal spam.  Some of it is grocery ads.  Some of it is Comcast or Verizon ads.  In general, though, I don't want it, and it makes me feel bad about the environment, so I try to unsubscribe when I get something.