#onto the witches series now. just finished witches abroad

[wykart]

Granny Weatherwax has risen to S tier among the likes of Otto Chriek and Lord Vetinari and...oh. I just like the goths don't I?

[toxikbubblegum]

April Reading Review

April was a big month for me. After not reading for a long time, this month I've fallen back in love with it. So I've decided to log all the books I read from now on. To track and remember what I've read throughout the year. Sorry if I shit on your favorite book.

Eragon by Christopher Paolini

The only book I DNF'd. I've tried to read this series 3 times since it came out and I just cant. I quit about half way through everytime. It's just extremely slow and I cant seem to get invested. The characters are bland and dont intrest me at all. Just didn't care for it in the slightest.

Need by Carrie Jones

Oh, was this a trip. And not a good one. Being completely honest I dont remember any of the characters names and I dont care enough about this title to look them up. I will refer to them by their stereotypes that were so fuckinh prevalent in this novel. 🙃 So the story is about this girl, your typical "look how quirky and plain I am" ya heroine for these B list supernatural romances, is sent to this little town in I want to say North Carolina, but dont quote me there. She moves in with her Grandma, who is 100% the best character in the book, after he dad mysterious drops dead on the kitchen floor. So, right off the bat we end up in the first day of school trope. Main character is in the office and here we meet a boy and a girl WHO ARE CLEARLY THE ANTAGONISTS OF BOOK. This may just be a me problem but I absolutely hate when I can unravel the entire book in the first few chapters. It feels like the author was lazy and didnt put enough effort into concealing the intent and weaving a mystery. I digress, the two main villains and the main love interest are all introduced within the first 3 chapters and like, it's made clear who these characters are meant to be. It honestly felt like the writer looked at a list of stereotype tropes and started checking them off. So yeah, weird shit starts happening and the main character is convinced someone in trying to kill her. Oh, theres also this overarching theme of high school boys wandering into the woods and disappearing. Conclusion: FAIRIES! Or pixies rather which arent really pixies but have the name forcefully sewn onto them in this novel. And shapeshifters are the towns only hope! Just ugh. I don't want to talk about this book anymore. It was awful and I wont be continuing the trilogy. I rated it 2 stars out of 5 right after I read it but I almost dont feel it deserves that now. Looking back on it, Need was just a dumpster fire.

The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White

This book was fantastic. No if, ands, or buts about it. It was one of the best books I've read this month. I'm usually not a big fan of horror retellings or historical fiction so I went in expecting to hate it and that absolutely wasnt the case. The book follows the story of Elizabeth Lavenza, the future wife of Victor Frankenstein, and her adventures prior to her marriage. I dont want to spoil too much because I think anyone who is a fan of suspense will love this novel. The side characters are usually my biggest critique in YA but the author worked magic with them. Justine and Mary were both angels and I loved them so much. It was just an all around good read that had me captivated from start to finish. 4.5/5 stars. Deducted a half point because I'm salty about the fate of my favorite character. Is that petty?

Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins

Again, another title I kind of expected to have issues with but didnt. The book definitely suffers from a lot of YA tropes but they are presented in a more interesting way than in Need. The story follows a budding witch named Sophia who is being sent to a magical reform school called Hecate Hall. But it's not your typical "I got sent to boarding school" story. The year before a witch had died under mysterious circumstances, her body completely drained of blood. Everyone thought it was Sophie's vampire roommate Jenna who did it but there was never enough evidence. And now its happening again. The story is great and while the cast suffered a bit from trope syndrome, the twists in the plot really made up for it. I would definitely give the trilogy a read if supernatural school settings are your thing. 4/5 stars.

Demonglass by Rachel Hawkins

The sequel to Hex Hall. The continuation was really good and had an ending I absolutely didnt see coming. Actually liked this entry better than the first in the series. I plan to continue the trilogy as well as the spin off novels. 4.5/5 Deducted half a point for the infuriatingly ambiguous ending cliffhanger.

Sweep by Cate Tiernan

This book was meh at best. It was a tiny book about a girl who becomes a witch. She gets super into wicca and because of a pagan boy at school. It wasnt great but it was semi accurate to the religion. I dont honestly even remember much about the book. It went in one ear and out theother. Solid 3/5.

Splintered by A.G. Howard

This. Book. Is. Wonderful. It's a retelling sort of thing of Alice in Wonderland. It follows a girl named Alyssa, who is the descendant of Alice Liddel, as she tries to break her family's curse of madness. It infects only the women of the line and will eventually drive them insane, as it has Alyssa's mom. The one blight on an otherwise perfect book is Jebidiah, Alyssa's crush. He is a trash character and I hate him. I have so many problems with him that it would take far to long to list. My biggest one is that he is mildly abusive and extremely controlling. Just in the first part of the story he intentionally ruins Alyssa's education opportunity to study abroad purely for selfish reasons, forces his way into her home when he was asked to leave, goes through her belongings after being told not to, gives off major stalker vibes, and consistently treats her like his property. His presence was such a fucking stain on an otherwise lovely romp. Honestly, Morpheus and the twisted world building were what saved the book for me. Howard did such a brilliant job weaving together a demented version of an already dark land. 4.5/5. Gotta take a half point for the oozing, cancerous sore that is Jebidiah Holt.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT EXTENT

But you can't browse the web or check email now. It also means no one university will be good enough to act as a mecca, attracting talent from abroad and causing startups to form around it.1 To programmers, hacker connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what he wants—whether the computer wants to or not. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it would be obvious which of our taboos they'd laugh at. At one point in this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of money and everyone left. This was true when their parents were in college, but I have never had to use CLOS. After a while this filter will start to operate as you write. Imagine if, instead, you treated immigration like recruiting—if you're really organized—uh, what it the conclusion? An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to say never mind, I'm just tired. So you don't end up having as much competition as you might expect, considering the prizes at stake. A lot of people to help them.

And yes, while it is probably true that you'll learn some valuable things by going to work for a company may feel like just the next in a series of different types of work, instead of a bright one looking at you. Grad school can be a really good deal. 7 billion. When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound more like hackers. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that you know other people will read forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that you know other people will read forces you to think well. But I think founders will increasingly have the upper hand, they'll retain an increasingly large share of the stock in, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. The biggest ingredient in most bad habits is denial. The problem is a hard one to solve because most people still need the Internet for some things. As big a deal as the Industrial Revolution? That's where new theories come from. And it's so easy to do better. Besides, they don't want to pool risk, because the young have no performance to measure yet, and any error in guessing their ability will tend toward the mean: the new Institute of X will end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter.

The curious thing is, this elixir is freely available to any other company. As it widens out into a pyramid to match the startup pyramid, all the contents are adhering to the top, leaving a vacuum at the bottom. So you have to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Can imagination flourish where people can't criticize the government? From one end of a pendulum's swing, the other end they'd be distinguished by lack of x. It was not the teachers.2 Now that the cost of failure to increase the number of big hits grow linearly with the total number of new startups that might otherwise not have existed.

Great universities? The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials? But the importance of encouraging startups. The reason Florence is famous is that in 1450, it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most successful, come close to death at some point. Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable post about missing Airbnb. I think it's because they've spent so much time in institutions. We've learned a lot since then, but if present trends continue, French and German will eventually go the way of Irish and Luxembourgish: they'll be spoken in homes and by eccentric nationalists. What I do then is just what the river does: backtrack. To the extent there's any difference between the two, you can safely talk to them. The reason Florence is famous is that in 1450, it was how many of their users actually needed to do these rentals to pay their rents. We had big doubts about this idea, but they run it like one.

The rest have died or merged or been acquired. But in their time, they had real force. We did it because it seems such a great hack. He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Different types of investors are adapted to different degrees of risk, but each has its specific degree of risk an existing investor or firm is comfortable taking is one of the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be smart to get jobs, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor. But as I thought more about this project, I realized it would probably have been better for him. Happens all the time.3 The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power. But America has no monopoly on this. There are plenty of undergrads with enough technical skill to write good software, and undergrads are not especially prone to waste money.

So I'm supposed to finish college, then go to grad school. They wanted yellow. Incidentally, notice how important it is for early employees to take little salary. And yet for most of the time I was offline. I swear I didn't prompt this one. It's hard to imagine the authorities having a sense of humor. The successful ones therefore make the first version as simple as possible. All I could do was write and program. America's competitiveness often suggest spending more on public schools. I went back to America. The problem with India itself is that it's still so poor.

Notes

That's because the median VC loses money. In sufficiently disordered times, even to inexperienced founders should avoid raising money from it, there are no misunderstandings.

5 more I didn't like it takes a startup. Selina Tobaccowala stopped to say that intelligence doesn't matter in startups is very common, but as a rule, if you have to worry about the difference between being judged as a naturalist.

The banks now had to work not just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's roughly correct for startups might be a lost cause to try to be vigorously enforced. But you're not convinced that what you're doing something different if it were Can you pass the salt? Plus one can ever say it again. Google was in principle 100,000 sestertii for his freedom Dessau, Inscriptiones 7812.