Bob Weir 10/16/1947 - 01/01/2026

Not just another Saturday night listening to the Grateful Dead. Kicked back in the recliner, some live Dead show playing on Youtube as usual, scrolling through my various feeds I saw the news that Grateful Dead founding member Bob Weir had passed.

Grateful Dead - Help On The Way / Slipknot / Franklin's Tower / The Music Never Stopped (1976)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEA5zgNk0ec&list=RDeEA5zgNk0ec&start_radio=1

#RIP #BobWeir #GratefulDead

2025 Reading Recap

These are the books that I read (or attempted to read) during 2025 for enjoyment. I mostly read on one of several devices such as phone, tablet or dedicated e-reader rather than physical book.

I appreciate the convenience, flexibility and functionality of reading e-books over physical books. As a former bookseller (from a different century) I have a great fondness and respect for the physical book, and have amassed a modest library over the years, so I am certainly not against them at all. As for the books on this list, I have purchased several of them in physical form to add to the bookshelves.

The local library has been a truly amazing resource for providing access to all sorts of media and services and I try to take advantage of it as often as possible. That means that the majority of the books listed here were all provided via the Libby App and my library. Some books were read on the Libby app directly, but most were read via Amazon's Kindle app or on my Kindle Paperwhite directly.

Jan

The year started off with the "Monk and Robot" series from Becky Chambers. There are two novellas in this short series: "A Psalm for the Wild-Built" followed by "A Prayer for the Crown-Shy." I would describe these as cozy solar-punk. A story about a robot that is as opposite from "Murderbot" as can be. Light, easy reads; rather enjoyable and left me wanting a third story. | Rating: 9/10

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Feb

I attempted to read Hank Green’s "A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor" (the sequel to his "An Absolutely Remarkable Thing" which I really enjoyed reading last year). The timing apparently wasn’t right and I only got through a couple of chapters before putting it down. (Spoiler: I did pick it up later in the year and finished it. Details further down the list!) | Rating: */10

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Mar

After a very long hiatus (and multiple, yearly viewings of the Peter Jackson movies) I decided to re-read J.R.R. Tolkien’s "The Lord of the Rings" starting with "The Fellowship of the Ring". It had been so long since I read these, there were whole plot lines that I had forgotten thanks to the movie re-writes and omissions. After all these years, it still holds up as one of my all time favorites and this read-through was almost like reading it for the first time all over again. | Rating: 10/10

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Sep

After a bit of a reading dry-spell during the summer, September found me reading Octavia Butler’s "Parable of the Sower" A surprising post-apocalyptic story written in 1993 about life in 2024/2025. Intense in parts, there was a bit more violence than I expected. Written with a very approachable writing style that drew me into the story almost immediately and made it hard to put down. I can see why she is considered one of the greats among the Science Fiction elites. | Rating: 9/10

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Oct

I found a Cory Doctorow novel that I hadn’t read called "The Lost Cause" If you like Doctorow’s other writings, this is more of the same (in a good way!) Pretty heavy-handed from the social-political side of things as I've come to expect from him. Still, a decent story but the romantic scenes were a bit uncomfortable and cringey. | Rating: 7/10

Edward Ashton’s "Mickey7" and its sequel "Antimatter Blues" rounded out the month of October. Good, reasonably solid sci-fi about a carving out a new life on a new planet where everyone has a job to do, including Mickey. He gets the worst of the worst assignments, mostly because his body can be recycled and regenerated if and when things go sideways (which they usually do). The storyline moved along well enough to keep me interested and overall, these two books were an enjoyable read. | Rating: 7/10

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Nov

Finally found time to focus on reading Hank Green’s "A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor" (as mentioned above) I am quite glad I went back to this one. Picks up just after the end of "An Absolutely Remarkable Thing" and continues the story in quite an unexpected yet compelling direction. Fun and satisfying conclusion to the story. | Rating: 8/10

I tried reading John Green’s "The Anthropocene Reviewed" but struggled to stay interested after a few chapters. I may try a re-read of this one in the future. | Rating: */10

Started re-reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s "The Two Towers" I’m about a third of the way through and pick it up in between other books and hoping to finish sometime early next year so that I can finish the trilogy before next year comes to a close. | Rating: 10/10

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Dec

After a year of reading mostly fiction (fantasy/sci-fi) this past year, I thought it might be time to try something from the non-fiction side of the TBR Shelf. Sarah Kendzior is a St. Louis based political author so I thought a home-town connection would help keep my interest with her book "The Last American Road Trip" This one was not for me. I managed to get through a little over half of the book before putting it down. For me, it contained way too much political / conspiracy / behind the scenes intrigue, and not nearly enough road tripping. I mostly blame my preconceived notions and hopes for an "On the Road" style story more than the contents of this book. Others may find it fascinating, but it didn’t do it for me. | Rating: 3/10

Travis Baldree’s "Brigands & Breadknives" follows the success of his previous two novels: "Legends & Lattes" and "Bookshops & Bonedust" These are pretty much the genre-defining novels for Cozy Fantasy. Lots of fun, with great world-building and character development. This one took off in a different and unexpected direction, filled with more action and adventure than the previous two novels. and a bit less on the cozy side. I would categorize this as a not-so-guilty "Guilty Pleasure" and I'm gonna need Mr. Baldree to crank out a few more books in this universe!| Rating: 8/10

It’s a wonder I hadn’t read Ursula K. LeGuin’s "A Wizard of Earthsea" until now. This series shows up on nearly every "Great books of Epic Fantasy" list and hits on pretty much all of my "books I want to read" trigger: Wizards, Dragons, Magic. By all accounts, I should've read this book a long time ago. It's not like I didn't know about them; I've been aware of her novels for most of my adult life. For some reason I never managed to actually pick any of them up and read a single one. Definitely glad I finally decided that the time was right to pick this one up and give it a shot. It is great coming of age kind of story that is worth the read (even if the ending is modestly predictable) | Rating: 8/10

This year, it seemed like everyone was reading Matt Dinniman’s "Dungeon Crawler Carl" so I had to see what all the fuss was about. Light-hearted and a bit on the crude side, its a fun read about a man and his ex’s now talking cat named Princess Donut as they become inadvertent adventurers through a series of dungeon levels complete with a heads up display of their stats. It’s sort of a “Survivor” tv series meets “Ready Player One” meets “Dungeons and Dragons”. So of course I enjoyed it and now have book two on reserve from the library. | Rating: 7/10

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In Progress

In addition to Tolkien’s "The Two Towers" I’m also currently reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s "Service Model" about a robot valet that murders its owner. I’m only about 15% into the story… still need to see where it’s gonna go, but so far it’s piqued my curiosity.

Also, I've just started reading Daniel Quinn’s "Ishmael". A couple of my kids have read it and have enjoyed it thoroughly, but refuse to talk about it to anyone who hasn’t read it. So I’m giving it a shot as well as we head into the new year.

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TBR

If you've read this far, what would you recommend I put on the list for next year? Maybe I should publish my "To Be Read" list?

If you are so inclined, please direct discussions, comments, etc to me via Mastodon: @jpickell

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It would seem that the various social media platforms are all over the place as of late in terms of features, content, value, etc... I've tried to keep my options open by maintaining an account on several of the latest contenders such as Threads, Bluesky, X and others.

I spent the last week or revisting each one and reviewing a bunch of their pros and cons. And the results? I've decided that (at least for the near term) all of my accounts will go dormant, except for my Mastodon account.

My thinking is that if I just focus on one, I could build it up to become as useful and entertaining as the old Twitter days. And just like those old days, it will take time and effort to grow and curate the feed to my tastes.

There's a whole slew of great content out there (and did I mention that Mastodon has actual, working hashtags?) and some not so great stuff as well. In addition to being able to follow the aforementioned hashtags along with the ability to create filters to block out that which I'm not interested in, I would like to think that it could be reasonable informative.

Other platforms still excel in areas of hyper-local news like weather reports, mostly because that's where the general population has been for the last decade or more.

The downside of putting some energy into curating that particular feed is that it takes away from other activities such as this blog. Perhaps rationing social media screen time will still allow me to post more frequently here.

On a more somber note: Ozzy Osbourne 12/03/1948 - 07/22/2025

In the meantime here are a few links that stood out to me this past week that you may find entertaining and/or educational. Enjoy!

Notable Links

• I'm Done With Social Media, or why I have a blog now by Caroline Crampton
• Privacy and Security on Mastodon at PrivacyGuides.org
• Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy a new novelette in the MurderBot universe by Martha Wells

Baby steps... writing this entry on my local machine and transferring it to the blog, rather than editing it in the web interface. It will take a few iterations until I get this where I want it to be.

In other news, the Missouri River 340 race is currently under way! Noted as the "World's longest non-stop river race" I think we're going to find a place along the river where we can watch some of the paddlers and cheer them on this year. Maybe a pipe-dream, but I think this would be a great way to spend a few days on the river!

It's been a bit since I've taken the time to do a bit of hand-coding of html/php/css and I think I missed it actually. The blog (and the overall site) is still a bit disjointed, and I'm continually tweaking the CSS, but so far, it's been rather fun.

Still lots to do. At some point I may bring over all the old posts from across the years... but then again, maybe a fresh clean start is in order.

Testing a different format along with an attachment. This seems to work using a subfolder for the attachment.

The next question is do I write each entry in HTML with the appropriate tags, or figure out a way to use Markdown and some javascript converter?

I'll be doing things manually for the time being and slowly automating and updating as I go those things that get in the way or that do not provide a good experience for blogging here

Todo:

• Add timestamps for those days that have multiple updates (the one above was manually added)
• At one point, I had a comments function. I might rebuild that at some time in the future
• Back-end automation. I don't want to be hindered with logging into a web-interface every time I want to create a post. SFTP/SSH/Git or some such would be way better

A second entry. Brand new. Still doing it by hand. Contemplating the better ways of managing the entries.. as single files/db entries... much work still to be done.

A snippet from my first ever blog post: (links courtesy of the Wayback Machine):

Hmmm.... well what do we have here? another journal? Oh boy. Well, after following the adventures of some friends of mine, I thought I might as well give this a try and see just what I would have to say on a day to day basis.

Ah yes, before I forget:

'Beware the tablespoon my son'