Rúnar
An fresh take on the Iliad told in first person from the point of view of Patroclus. Takes a lot of creative license, which is good, but I feel she could have done more with it. It's a little horny for my taste in parts. The pacing really drags in the second half. They spend ten years in camp at Troy and I really felt like I spent ten years reading that part. The ending was beautiful.
This was pretty good. It's a selection of true stories about venture capital in Silicon Valley, each chosen to highlight some lesson learned or sea change in the business. It could have been a boring series of anecdotes and name drops, but Mallaby makes sure we know that each story has a point and he connects it to the larger meaning.The main idea in this book is that venture capital is a potent force for good, that it has virtue. Individual investors or funds may make mistakes, come and go, but the venture capital network learns and adapts, corrects errors, and liberates entrepreneurs to work on their ideas. Venture capital has done more to “emancipate the worker” than any union or program of brotherhood and shared sacrifice.I find that there may be a connection here with the notion of genotype networks from [b:The Origins of Evolutionary Innovations: A Theory of Transformative Change in Living Systems 13073820 The Origins of Evolutionary Innovations A Theory of Transformative Change in Living Systems Andreas Wagner https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347756384l/13073820.SX50.jpg 18240451]. A genotype network enables evolvability by discovering new phenotypes on the network that enable innovations or new metabolic pathways. This is analogous to how the venture capital network learns, adapting to market conditions and creating new markets.The parts about China were very interesting to me. I had no idea that the whole Chinese tech miracle was fueled by venture capital from Silicon Valley. The VC network did a beautiful hack on top of loopholes in Chinese law to make it possible to get Chinese entrepreneurs funded.There are a couple of things in this book that don't make a lot of sense. One example is how Mallaby talks about Y Combinator as if it were the world's first startup incubator. Notably, the first incubator in Silicon Valley was probably Catalyst Technologies which was started by Nolan Bushnell from Atari. Bushnell is a prominent figure in the early part of this book but there's no mention at all of Catalyst.In the epilogue, Mallaby puts forth good evidence for how VC has succeeded where government programs or public funding has largely failed, and gives compelling reasons for why this would be the case. He defends VC, as a system, from its most common criticisms. One such criticism though is that VC doesn't address certain social issues, to which Mallaby responds that they should be addressed through taxes and public programs. He seems oblivious to the fact that his same arguments apply, which he put forth just a few paragraphs earlier, about the reasons why government programs fail and public funding ends up getting largely wasted.A minor nitpick is that I find Mallaby's prose style somewhat grating. He uses alliteration (“they had to be mindful of managing the founders' many mood swings”) altogether too much, and the whole work is littered with the sort of overuse of the thesaurus that's so common (and annoying) in American academic writing. Please just say what you mean, plainly and simply.Overall a fun read, and an important work. Recommended.
This is a horrible and malevolent tale.
A beautiful fish with scales of every color is envied by all the other fish. So they demand that he literally remove his scales and pass them out to the other fish. He refuses, so he gets ostracised. He visits a “wise octopus” who tells him that he has to do what they say in order to be happy. So in the end he removes all his scales but one, and lives happily ever after.
The message is clear: don't be special. Don't celebrate what's unique and amazing about yourself. Destroy it and sacrifice it to those who envy you, so you can be happy. Don't seek out friends who appreciate you as you are. Bribe people to be your friends instead!
I will not be reading this to my children.
This was underwhelming. A couple of giggles in places, but mostly getting through this (very short) comic felt like a chore. The story is incoherent and doesn't seem to have a point. There is no plot to speak of.
This is a half-baked adventure at best. Picking up where Hoard of the Dragon Queen left off (another terrible adventure), this one takes you through a series of encounters with dragons and cultists, punctuated by political manoeuvring.
The last dungeon of the previous adventure was an ice cave featuring a white dragon. The first dungeon of this adventure is an ice cave featuring a white dragon. Two white dragons in a row is too many.
The MacGuffin in that dungeon is “the Draakhorn”, but it is no longer there. This leaves the players feeling a bit cheated. But then the next two MacGuffins are also wild goose chases. The PCs are supposed to find some “dragon masks”, but one of them is missing and the other one is a fake.
This module is full of setups without payoffs and payoffs without setups. As an example of the latter, one of the leaders of the cult of the dragon turns out to be the son of one of the minor NPCs. This is supposed to be a huge reveal. But it's an NPC the players don't care about at all, so it falls totally flat.
The overall adventure is structured in such a way that every chapter begins and ends with a Council Session, where the players try to gain the favour of an overwhelming number of NPCs. The idea is that for each NPC they get on the good side of, they get that NPC's faction to help in the final battle against Tiamat. But the last chapter is only something like 4 pages long, and there's no discussion of the exact in-game effects of having a faction on your side. Like if you get the good giants to join the fight, they engage the evil giants at the end. But if they don't, what happens? The final battle is incredibly scant on detail like this.
Several of the chapters are also just totally uninspired. There's a mission to Thay to gain an alliance with that country, but that chapter is very short and has almost no detail. Players will have no fun at all playing through that chapter. It's paper thin.
The character artwork in this book is also ugly. I can't show this stuff to my players and expect them to take this seriously.
All in all, this feels like reading somebody's half-baked campaign notes that they wrote while fully baked and high AF.