A young boy walking with his hands in his pockets in a cardigan and hat like an old man, with a lollipop in his mouth. Black and white
This was a lucky shot, turned and snapped it one handed because he looked so funny. But in B&W he looks like he's in decadent-era Paris or something
"Personal record dinosaurs bottom" ๐คญ
Screenshot of Strava showing that I ran 5.5km
Another run yesterday without apparent injury. Knees are a bit sore but not too bad
When our 4.5yo sees a black metal band logo he says "oh look daddy it says 'wolves in the throne room!'" ๐ญ๐๐ค๐ฟ
A sentence I never thought I'd say, to my wife just now: sorry, coming to bed, got distracted reading about peptides
A photo taken at Crystal Palace Park by the lower lake showing a crocodile-like dinosaur rearing up from the water, surrounded by scaffolding. The transmission tower is in the background
The cultists of the Crystal Palace Park Trust are performing a ritual to awaken this Leviathan from its millions-year slumber in lightless watery caverns deep beneath the earth AND NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT IT. Verily, even now it readies itself for an assault on the very tower itself
Great thread breaking down those Palantir mofos' The Technology Republic wrt democracy
Blaming it all on AI is something that cannot be proven and cannot be disproven. Perfect! Isn't that the kind of thing we detest in others??
Something I've learned from being on Bluesky is if a service is down then people blame it on what they want to believe is to blame. Everything has outages. For all kinds of reasons. I've caused many myself, momentarily being an idiot is my most common cause and surely we can all relate to that
Skymogged again
All birds board meeting minutes:
Secretary: "Next: ideas to boost our flagging sales?"
CTO: "Hear me out, what if we stopped making shoes and instead became an AI infra company? Bob from IT has a prototype control plane he built with Claude on the weekend"
www.theguardian.com/business/202...
Screenshot of BBC news article titled "Google to punish sites that trap people in with back button tricks"
OMG yes please
Thinking about that "go back in time and change history so Hitler never existed" thing but with JD Vance
The person who writes the annals, the company history, is the POV of the book. Not sure it's even a word but it's normal to me after 11 books ๐๐
Photo of a hardcover copy of Lies Weeping by Glen Cook, the latest novel in The Black Company series
New paper book started: Lies Weeping by Glen Cook. The latest Black Company novel, out last year.
Off to a fun start, there are 2 annalists, bickering sisters from the last book. And Croaker in his new form, kinda.
The way Cook switches up the anallists is what keeps the series fresh.
Because it's SF?
In summary, it's okay. Not the best. Worth it for the lore and the cool new Taken Mischievous Rain, but not going to change your life. Looking forward to seeing how much of this was required for Lies Weeping. If not then it's kinda pointless.
Cook's writing has always been a bit odd. It can be very clumsy, and it can only partially be explained by the anallist POV. It feels worse in this book. Some sentences I honestly don't know wtf he's trying to say. But we don't read The Black Company for high prose, it's basically Sword & Sorcery.
Lots of Senjak and Dominator lore is learned in this book. Those old times flashbacks feel a bit like Cook's other series, Dread Empire. Very much in the vein of Fritz Leiber, who Cook cites as his main influence. It's fun. There's an incestuous, paedo, necrophiliac necromancer, what's not to love?
Speaking of decimation, there is very little threat or tension in this book. The Company with their Taken allies are always victorious. This lends weight to my theory that this book is either a plot hole fixup or is anachronistically planting seeds for Lies Weeping.
Mischievous Rain is a cool Taken. She's powerful (the other Taken take orders from her) but she's nice, she's human. Together with her little sidekicks they decimate the rebels and (mild spoiler) resurrectionists.
There are some emotional moments, rare for Croaker and Cook, mostly around his domestic life with Mischievous Rain, and his realisation of what he's about to lose at the end when he won't be permitted to remember these events. Can't really say more, but these are genuine high points.
If you don't mind spoilers, or you already know, go translate this out of rot13:
Pebnxre unf gjb puvyqera jvgu bar bs gur gnxra, Zvfpuvribhf Enva. Vg unccrarq ng gur Gbjre nanpuebavfgvpnyyl naq zlfgrevbhfyl. Ur qbrfa'g erzrzore vg, abe qbrf fur. Naq Zvfpuvribhf Enva znl or Gur Ynql
This book is hard to discuss without spoilers. Something of great personal import happens to Croaker that would be impossible for him to forget without a magical memory-wipe, which is exactly what happens. This feels lazy. I am keen to read Lies Weeping to see why this was necessary.
Croaker not knowing what's going on serves the narrative, lest he blurt out spoilers that kill the narrative. But knowing the Croaker of the later books, his revelling in his ignorance is jarring and irritating.
The book is narrated by Croaker, company anallist at the time. In later books Croaker leads the Company and is a brilliant general. In this book he's a whiney bitch repeatedly referring to himself as "mushroom man". It gets old. Maybe this is just first-trilogy-era Croaker and I forgot.
A photo of the prologue of Port of Shadows by Glen Cook
This book appears now because the annals of the events they document were rediscovered, delivered redacted from the Tower at Charm. My cynical guess is that this is a plot hole fixup that needed to precede Lies Weeping, or some preparative & retrospective world-building for the same. Could be wrong.
I've read all the previously published black company novels, via audiobook. I've not read the newest book yet, Lies Weeping (2025). I read this book in paper form, so it took me months. This pace no doubt influenced my experience.
Cover of Port of Shadows by Glen Cook.
Here's my review of Glen Cook's Port of Shadows, published in 2018. It is an interquel between The Black Company and Shadows Linger (books 1&2).