Review: Lucifer Book 3

Lucifer Book 3 resolves the story of what happened in hell after Lucifer abandoned it. We get a glimpse of hell, as well as Lucifer's plan to survive his duel with the angel. At no point do you ever feel like Lucifer is in any danger. The graphic novel is more about how he's going to get there.

After that, we get a resolution of the story of Elaine Belloc's 'soul and the recovery thereof.

The entire story was pretty lackluster. I stopped reading book 4 and never got around to writing this review until I realized that my library book had come due.

In Memoriam: Sweesam Na 1942-2017

My father was born in Gerisek, Malaysia, a kampong (village). He was in a family of 7, and his own father died while he was very young. Stories from that period was that he was so poor he and his brothers shared a pair of shorts. When the older brother met the younger brother on the way home, he'd take off his shorts and give it to the younger sibling to wear to school.

Moving to Singapore in his 20s, he had 3 sons and went from being a laborer to a driver to running his own business. With that, he supported 3 sons. He didn't enjoy being in the US when we immigrated. But he still moved here after he retired to be with his grandkids.

The last few years have been challenging. He survived 2 strokes (both of which were caused by falls), but despite that learned to Snorkel at age 72, and just a few years ago was still carrying Bowen around in a baby carrier.


When I arrived at the house on Sunday, I heard my cousin's littlest baby crying, and so thought everything was going as usual. Then my mom told me that he's choking. My two cousins held him up while I grabbed his belly and heaved. I did so repeatedly and saw something on the floor but nothing more came out. We called 911, and when they arrived I had to lie down because I was exhausted.

They had to lever out the food and used an AED. By the time he hit the ER there'd been irreparable damage because of a heart attack. The ER doctor told us that our dad was dying, and that if it was his parent he would not go for heroic measures to keep him alive as he would never be able to breathe without a ventilator again.

We took him off the ventilator at noon on February 2/27/2017. He passed away at 4:10pm. He is survived by 1 brother, 2 sisters, his wife, 3 sons, 2 grandsons, and 1 grand daughter.

Review: Nemesis Games

Nemesis Games is the 5th book in the Expanse series. It's the first novel in the series that doesn't standalone. You could presumably read any of the previous novels without any of the preceding ones, but this novel would simply have not much impact (or even make much sense) without the context of the preceding novels. Furthermore, the novel doesn't even resolve the situations it sets up, ending on a cliff-hanger for the next novel!

Having said that, this is the first novel that I feels fulfills the promises the authors (yes, James Corey is a pen-name for two authors) made at the start of the series, which is that the Expanse is ultimately the story of humanity's expansion from the solar system to the rest of the galaxy.

The previous novels set the stage: a star gate has opened up to the rest of the galaxy, and the mad land-rush has begun. The barriers to humanity's expansions have fallen, and the alien menace that wiped out the civilization which created the star gate is nowhere to be seen.

With all that in place, of course, humanity will find a way to screw it up and make a mess of things. The crew of the Rocinante has about 6 months to wait for their ship to be repaired and restored, and so each of them (except Holden) outsource the repair job and head out to reconnect with their respective pasts. This is a welcome break, since we've never actually gotten actual character development with everyone other than Holden in previous novels, and the authors take their time to give us a detailed glimpse.

Of course, when all hell breaks loose the crew comes together, but only just in time to set up for the inevitable 6th book in the series.

As far as novels are concerned, it's the first novel in the series that I would consider recommended. Unfortunately, you pretty much have to read all the previous novels to make sense of it.

Review: Pediatrics Grand Rounds (Medical School for Everyone Series)

Parenting books are mostly extremely badly written. But Dr. Roy Benaroch is a real doctor (a practicing pediatrician) and I enjoyed the Emergency Medicine audio lectures so much that I thought this would be a hoot.

Nearly every lecture in this 24 lecture series made me wish I'd audited this series before I became a parent. It answers so many great questions that I'd had and does so in practical, case-study type format that treats each patient complaint as a mystery, some with serious implications and some without:

• How does sleep training work, and how quickly can you do it? (it's turns out the cry it out methods are faster than the alternatives)
• Why are vaccine schedules set the way they are? (turns out that this is driven by medical studies and periods of vulnerability)
• What serious birth defects do existing prenatal screens detect, and which types slip through? 
• Why is folic acid important?
• What's the best way to discipline your kid? How do you properly do a time-out? (It turns out consistency and immediacy is key --- if you can't impose the punishment immediately, it's better to ignore it than to mention it and not follow through)
• Cancer is the leading cause of deaths among children between 1 and 9, but leukemia is surprisingly treatable (80% survival rate).

One might think that listening to this series would cause you to become paranoid and hypochondriac, but in my case I just felt very grateful that all our visits to the hospitals and clinics have been relatively complication free.

This is not to say all the case studies in the series have happy endings. Some of them don't, and one of the episodes might be very distressing if you're sensitive. Dr. Benaroch is very careful in calling it out in case you want to just skip that episode, so I wouldn't let that deter you from listening to the series.

Unlike Emergency Medicine, I didn't manage to get any of the diagnosis correct on the case studies (except 1), so that meant the series taught me something new in every episode!

Highly recommended. And if you're a new parent, contains valuable information about how to interact with your physician and how to make the best use of your time.

Review: Your Best Brain - The Science of Brain Development

I'm a sucker for anything by John Medina, so when I saw that he actually had a Great Courses program called Your Best Brain, I picked it up hoping that it wouldn't be too much of a repeat from say, Brain Rules for Baby.

It turns out not to overlap with the book very much at all, which is great! The major thesis of the program is that your brain is a physical object, and therefore is subject to all the laws of physics and chemistry, along with the rules set by evolution. The net result is that a lot of the times, Medina explains something through the thought experiment of thinking about what man's ancient ancestors on the plains of the Serengeti had to face, and what problems the brain evolved to solve.

The coverage then starts from Neurons and Dendrites, and then moves on to the major areas of the brain. Each lecture ends with practical tips on how to optimize your brain. Most of them are no brainers, like: "get enough sleep! Just a few hours of sleep debt is enough to make you behave like you're drunk!"

Other interesting tips:

• If you need to learn something for a test, try to do the learning in an environment as similar to test conditions as possible.
• Memories work best via repetition, but not cramming. And all nighters (as you would expect from the above) are a no-no.
• Classic teenage rebellious behavior is a Western phenomenon. In most non-Western cultures, you do not get teenage rebellious behavior unless/until the kids in those cultures have been exposed to western media.
• Elizabeth Kuber-Ross's ideas about the stages of grief ("denial//anger/bargaining/depression/acceptance") is BS. For most humans, the response to grief is resilience.
• Get 150 minutes of aerobic activity a week to optimize brain function. Yes, that means Garmin's Vivoactive HR's "intensity minutes" approach is completely correct.

All in all, the course is great, and I can recommend it. Well worth the time.

Review: Lucifer Book 2

In the previous book, Lucifer managed to create an entire new multi-verse out of the current Cosmos. In Lucifer Book 2, the repercussions of it are brought forward as folks race towards the new multiverse to establish a foothold. In this book, Mike Carey reveals that yes, the DC Cosmology is entirely Judeo-Christian based, with the name of the universe's creator being Yahweh.

And this isn't the God of the New Testament, this is the God of the Old Testament. Jealous, petty, and probably appropriate for the age of Trump as president. Not only does he view Lucifer as the adversary, he views disobedience as reason to punish innocents as well as the guilty. We never do get to see Yahweh's face.

There are a few side stories in the book about the new world Lucifer's created, some of which are actually very well done (involving time differentials between the two cosmologies). Lucifer's still a sympathetic character, but it's also very clear that he's entirely self-centered, willing to sacrifice others to achieve his aims.

Comic books are fast, easy reads. This one was available easily on Hoopla. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered making a trip to the library to pick it up. I'm not in a hurry to keep reading on to the rest of the series, however.

Review: Cibola Burn

Cibola Burn is the 4th Expanse novel. In the third novel, James Holden manages to open up the star gate through which other systems can be accessed, and of course, true to American Frontier form, squatters from the outer asteroids immediately zoom through the gate in order to claim land and territory. An official UN science expedition arrives months later, and the squatters resent the presence of official authority enough to start a pre-emptive attack.

Of course, any human venture into a new frontier would result in massive chaos, huge amounts of selfishness, and eventually our protagonist Jim Holden is asked to show up and mediate between the two sides. Events escalate from there and he and his crew have to deal with the planet trying to kill them, the two sides trying to kill each other, and the mystery that's in Holden's head trying to get him to do what it wants him to do.

From the overall arc of the novel series perspective, the meta-plot and story is advancing at a glacier pace. The novel itself sets up tense situations, but shies away from actually resolving them in a realistic fashion --- the authors treat each scene like a cliff-hanger in which the crew of the Rocinante is expected to survive, thereby draining tension from the novel. There's relatively little character development, and the main villain is horribly unrealistic.

Not recommended.

Review: How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition

How to Listen to and Understand Great Music is misnamed. It really should be labeled: The structure and form of Western Music. I don't really fault Professor Greenberg for this: it's quite clear to him that "Great Music" is restricted to those composed by Dead White People. I'll admit to mostly being a music philistine: I hated my piano lessons as a kid, and rarely understood the point of Mozart. I labelled all instrumental-only music as "classical".

Well, Professor Greenberg taught me a lot:

• "Classical" music is actually a misnomer. There's "Baroque", "Classical", "Romanticism", and "Modernism." These labels apply to various epochs roughly corresponding to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Debussy. Each of these epochs had unique characteristics that were reflected in the music. I was actually surprised that I could learn this because at one point during the program Greenberg played a piece of music and asked the listener to guess what epoch it came from and I actually got it right.
• Beethoven really does sound different from any composers before him. His music, unlike that which came before, actually does represent extra-musical content. I tested this by playing a Beethoven symphony to Bowen, who did promptly ask: "What does this music mean?" Which is not a question that usually comes up with other instrumental music.
• Professor Greenberg is a fan of Opera. Despite his immense enthusiasm, I still can't stand it. Despite his picking what he thinks are great musical pieces to listen to, I'm afraid I agree with one of the characters in John Steakley's fabulous novel: "Opera is for vampires. The living prefer rock and roll."
• Life during the middle ages was tough. One of the composers had 20 children, out of which only 2 survived to adult hood. Many of them died young (Mozart at 35), and even when they were alive had poor health and frequently the medical care hurt them. Greenberg did not shy from providing excellent coverage of the composers' lives, which made them far more interesting as people than I would have thought.
• The piano technology got hugely better from the 1600s to the 1800s. That's why in Mozart's symphonies, whenever the piano played the rest of the orchestra had to pipe down: the piano simply wasn't loud enough to compete with the other instruments in the orchestra. By the time you got to the 1800s the concert grand could hold its own against the orchestra and the symphonies written then didn't have to pipe down the rest of the orchestra as much. I wished Greenberg covered more of this since it would have been interesting to see what other technological changes in instruments affected composition.
• Dance music (waltzes, etc) is not considered "Great Music", so I don't ever have to listen to them even if I was a music snob.

Conclusions that Greenberg didn't mention but that I drew for myself:

• The various forms of music (e.g., Sonata Form) were really designed for music that was written in a pre-recorded era. That's why, for instance, Sonata Expositions frequently feature repeats of the themes. In a pre-recording era, you weren't going to listen to a piece of music repeatedly on demand, so each musical piece would have to repeat its themes during the exposition so the audience could hold it in their heads. This practice doesn't stand up in recorded music, since if you were to listen to the pieces repeatedly (e.g., if you listened to any of the numbered symphonies more than once a week), the expositions quickly become boring and feels like the composer's condescending to your intelligence. Greenberg vehemently demands that repeats be played exactly as written (and there's definitely a purist approach where that's correct), but I can definitely see why these already long pieces can't compete with shorter musical forms (e.g., Rock & Roll), which evolved in an era where recorded music that can be (re)played on-demand is the norm.
• Classical music was used as the catch-all for Western instrumental music forms because it was the pop music of the day. The middle class was starting to happen, which meant that regular people could become amateur musicians and learn to play well enough to demand easy-listening pieces.
• The need to express individuality and originality drove composers from Beethoven onwards to slowly abandon the traditional forms of instrumental music. What makes most modern instrumental composers unbearable to most people (e.g., Schoenberg) was when composers completely abandoned tonality.

I learned a surprising amount over the 42-lecture listen. The biographies of Beethoven, Listz, Tchaikovsky, and other composers were fun and added a lot of life to people behind the music. There were several pieces that I'd never heard before that I made notes to hunt down to listen to, and of course, I discovered that I'm a Beethoven fan and not a Mozart fan.

Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that Great Music should be restricted to those instrumental pieces constructed in the past. Certainly for today's "repeated listening" environments, I think many popular music genres out-compete the so-called classics for good reason. Nevertheless, if you have the time, I'd definitely consider Professor Greenberg's lecture series well worth a listen.

Review: Lucifer Book 1

Lucifer is a spin-off off of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. In that book, Lucifer gives up his reign in hell and decides to retire to Earth to enjoy his days. Of course, life is never that simple, and in this volume 1 we get to see what happens when heaven comes calling and asks him to do something in exchange for a passage.

Writing Lucifer couldn't have been easy: in this incarnation he's not really evil, but he effectively has to have unlimited power in this book. As a result, author Mike Carey contrives repeatedly to put him into situations where he's not the most powerful being alive, but has to trick his way into winning (which again, is not a problem for the former Archangel).

DC Universe's cosmology is a mish-mash of everything at best, and incoherent at worse. This allows Carey to get away with all sorts of situations where he essentially gets to make up the rules as he goes along, playing with your sympathies for the devil, so to speak. You also do get to feel sympathy for his subjects and the secondary characters in the book, since the blow-back from the main plot really affects them the most.

All in all, it's entertaining enough. It doesn't quite rise to the level of the Sandman, but I'm guessing if that's your standard you should read Fables and then stop.

Review: The Undoing Project

The Undoing Project is a biography of the relationship between Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky,  Kahneman, of course, was the Nobel Prize winner (and author of Thinking Fast and Slow), who together with Amos Tversky, pioneered prospect theory and many other pieces of behavioral economics. Their collaboration created a revolution in the future, and they were rightly feted with all sorts of prizes.

What's interesting about this book is that it doesn't just cover their theory, which you can do better by reading Kahneman's book. It mostly covers their relationship, the context their friendship started and was sustained by, and the eventual falling apart of their friendship, which was described by their spouses as being much worse than a divorce. The context of their lives turned out to be extremely important to their theories and the eventual persons they would become, and a shift in environment later led to their falling apart.

Academia (like any other organization, including large corporations) have a hard time with true partnership and collaboration. As a result there was a tendency in academia to favor Tversky (the more extroverted of the two) over Kahneman. A natural assumption would be that envy was what destroyed the men's partnership, the book makes a convincing case against such a simplistic view.

The subjects of the book are treated with respect, and I'm very impressed that Michael Lewis didn't try to draw any generalization from their unusually intimate collaboration. I came away from the book with much better insight into what drove them. As a bonus, the book also features Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, so you get to see what the legacy of Tversky and Kahneman are in today's world.

All in all, the book was captivating and insightful. It's the best book I've read so far this year and I highly recommend it.

Review: Abaddon's Gate

I think I've figured out how to read The Expanse series of novels, of which Abaddon's Gate is the third novel. It is also clearly an original intended "end" of the trilogy, though like any modern author, when you get success in a series, you'll just churn out as many follow up novels as your readers can stand. The series works if you stop pretending that it's science fiction, but instead consider it to be space fantasy. Most of the mysteries and items of interest bend or break the laws of physics, and probably will never be explained to the satisfaction of an Alastair Reynolds or Stephen Baxter novel.

Taken from that perspective, the first two Expanse novels were readable, but not great, since their characters weren't developed well enough, but the "space opera" aspects were sufficiently well done that the ending of the second novel compelled me to put a hold on the third novel. In this novel, the mystery is that of the direct consequences of the first novel have taken fruition and now takes the form of a space station known as "The Ring."

Consequences of the events of the first novel also put Jim Holden's ship in jeopardy, and we get a situation in which Jim, haunted by the ghost of the other protagonist in that novel, on a collision course with The Ring. The characters by this time are well established, and no longer the caricature that they mostly were in the first two novels. Holden no longer comes across as a pure ideologue through the plot device by which his natural tendencies are favored instead of being idiotic.

As an action/adventure/suspense novel the story works well enough that I found myself enjoying the novel. The plot is unfortunately still predictable, but would make for good TV.

Recommended as an airplane novel.

Video Game Reviews

• Gears of War 4 (PC)
• Enemy Unknown Plus (PS Vita)
• Tearaway Unfolded (PS4)
• Skyforce Anniversary (PS4, PS3, PS Vita)
• Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (PS4)
• Batman: The Telltale Series (PS4)
• Nex Machina (PS4)
• XCOM 2 (PS4)
• Life is Strange (PS4)
• Batman Arkham VR (PSVR)
• Spider-man (PS4 Pro)
• The City That Never Sleeps (PS4 Pro)
• Monsters 2 (PS4)

Review: Seveneves

Seveneves is Neal Stephenson's book about planetary disaster. The premise behind the book is that an unknown agent bursts the moon into the 8 fragments, and the resultant collisions between the fragments eventually comes down on earth as "hard rain," resulting in ecosystem wide destruction and loss of atmosphere and water.

The first part of the book feels a lot like traditional, Heinlein like science fiction, tales of technological feats, derring do. Elon Musk even makes an appearance in the form of an analog. Of course, the events of the past year have probably convinced you that even in the face of impending total disaster and destruction, humans would never behave as nicely as those in a Heinlein novel, and to Stephenson's credit, they don't. Politics abound, intermixed with technical heroics, and humanity is reduced in size as a result of self-serving actions until its not clear that there's going to be humanity left by the end of the book.

This is a typical Neal Stephenson novel: you're going to get massive multi-page info dumps in the middle of a story to explain the technical details behind the technology, which may or may not be interesting to you. If you don't like Stephenson, this novel is not going to change your mind, and in many ways, it's nowhere as interesting as Snow Crash. Characters are caricatures, and the last third of the book is incredibly unbelievable, as we're asked to believe that the remnants of the first part of the book are capable of rebuilding civilization without being at each others' throats over past behaviors.

So: bad science (at least, if the moon were to blow up in such as a way as to kill the Earth, it's unlikely we'd have time to launch any sort of crash survival program!), unbelievable plots, and pretty stereotyped characters. But it's still the most readable Stephenon since Cryptonomicon. Mildly recommended.

Review: Packable Handy Hiking Backpack

When I travel, I frequently have to tote along my CPAP machine in a shoulder bag. On top of that, sometimes I have to tote along a child in a kid carrier, which means that I have no room left for a backpack. The solution is to grab a packable backpack.

While I've looked at various packable bags in the past, none of them have folded into their own pocket as elegant as the Handy Backpack.  When on sale, it goes for $9, which makes it very cost effective. It's not waterproof, nor does it have a hydration bladder port, but does have side pockets that fit a full size water bottle, which is very useful.

I can see this easily becoming a staple of my travel kit. Recommended.

Review: Batman - Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?

For whatever reason, I missed Neil Gaiman's What Happened to the Caped Crusader when it first came out. Turns out I didn't miss much. The cover story is essentially a series of what-if stories about a funeral for Batman, exploring alternate world explanations for Batman's life. It's a little fun read, but compared to the really good Batman stories? It's not even close.

The rest of the book features some fairly inspid stories that have nothing to do with Batman. I'd give this a pass, despite the pedigree of Neil Gaiman.

Review: The Gene - An Intimate History

Every so often you'll read something about how genome sequencing has gotten cheaper, or how genetic engineering has led to a breakthrough in certain agricultural products. But then you'll think to yourself: "The Human Genome Project" was done at least a decade ago. How come we haven't gotten anything interesting out of it? Has there really been zero progress? Where are the gene-engineered babies and super-athletes that's going to make doping obsolete?

The Gene: An Intimate History goes a long way towards explaining what's going on in the field. It's biggest problem is that it's a layman's book. So in addition to having to suffer through the personal stories of the author and his family (yes, it's relevant, and if you're an English major you might find it interesting as it adds personal color, but I just rolled my eyes and skimmed it as quickly as I could), you have to suffer through the pedantic explanation of the discovery of genes through Darwin, Mendel, and various other folks like Galton. There's also significant coverage of the eugenics movement and the horrors of world war 2. If you're a reasonably well-read engineer this is all old hat and you can zip through as quickly as you can read.

The story gets interesting only when you get to Watson, Crick, Wilkins and Franklin. From then on, the exposition gets far more interesting as we start to explore the current knowledge about DNA, it's relationship to RNA, the relationship to epigenetic markers (which I didn't realize were real markers with chemical traces) and why progress in gene-engineering has been so slow.

Part of the problem is that the number of genes in the human genome is surprisingly small (19,000-20,000). You might think that this is good news, as that means that there are fewer genes to study and make sense of. That's not correct. Genes in the DNA are activated and de-activated as needed, and used to generate proteins. The problem with a much smaller than expected set of genes is that it means that the genes are probably used in multiple places in surprising ways with complex interaction between them. In other words, you'd much rather read 100,000 lines of well-structured code than 20,000 lines of spaghetti code, some of which modifies itself (or is used to generate code that then generates more code!). For instance, the human immune system has to have generic approaches to creating and reacting to anti-bodies, since at the start it cannot know which types of viruses or bacterial infection it has to respond to.

The other problem is that gene expression is not 100% all the time. The biological term for this is "penetrance." In other words, if a gene's presence causes a disease only 50% of the time, it's not enough to detect for the presence or absence of the gene. You also have to understand the environmental triggers that cause the disease in the presence of the gene. That's a problem even for single-gene diseases where a distinct gene can be tracked down that causes say, Huntington's disease, or certain forms of breast cancer. It's an even bigger problem for multi-variate factors like intelligence, where multiple genes from all over the genome might contribute. In other words, unlike genes for hair color and eye color, most genetic determinants of attributes we care about cannot be tracked down to a single gene, which makes everything much harder to develop.

Then there's the editing problem. Until relatively recently, there's been no easy ways to edit a gene sequence. So even if you did know the changes you want to make to a genome, you'd have no way to edit precisely the change you wanted to make. The barrier to this is slowly falling as new techniques are developed, but even with the new techniques the delivery mechanism to an adult human is full of danger: previous gene therapies have been tried which have killed the patient.

Finally, there's no complete model of the human genome as it interacts with the environment. This is a severe problem, so editing a gene could have unintended side effects and consequences. It boggles my mind that there isn't a project to provide a computer model of the human genome from the DNA up. You would want there to be a "virtual human" the way there's a "virtual machine" that lets you experiment when you build a new operating system or to see the changes you make. (Or at least, maybe there is such a project but the author of the book didn't see fit to mention it) Until that kind of technology is available to at least predict what your changes are going to end up doing, gene engineering seems kinda dangerous, like writing code on a machine with no process isolation --- any mistake could end up killing the patient!

All in all, this was a decently comprehensive book, and does a great job of explaining why we don't have super-intelligent engineered babies or super-athletes that don't need doping to win. Recommended.

Review: Gears of War 4 (PC)

Over the last few years, Microsoft's been increasingly making rational business decisions. One of the less seemingly rational ones, however, is the introduction of XBox Play Anywhere. The idea is that if you bought an XBox game, you'd be able to play it on both an XBox and a Windows 10 PC (well, a PC that had a decent graphics card, at least). In theory, this is a nice perk for folks who've bought completely into the Microsoft eco-system. Except that I don't know why you'd have both a high-end graphics card PC system and an XBox.

There are several problems with this: first of all, if you have a capable PC, this definitely means you won't buy an XBox. Maybe Microsoft doesn't care, or maybe it's just a side effect. The second issue is that the PC ecosystem is still wonky. Some games, (e.g., Quantum Break), may or may not play on your system.

In any case, I wouldn't normally pay the absurd prices digital vendors ask for consumables such as video games. But over the holidays, Microsoft ran a series of Microsoft Reward specials that enabled me to convert Microsoft Rewards points to cash for the Microsoft App store. Since I had 20,000+ points, I took full advantage and ended up with a large app store bonus. The Microsoft app store, sadly is lacking in useful programs, so I picked up Gears of War 4.

Gears of War 4 belongs to my favorite genre of shooter games: the 3rd person cover-shooter. Gears of War has the reputation for being the series that introduced this genre to the world, so I downloaded the multi-gigabyte download to my D drive and started up the app. PC gaming has a reputation for being very complex, requiring lots of tweaking and tuning in order to maximize image quality while still retaining a high enough frame rate to be acceptable. To my surprise, out of the box, the app detected my system settings and picked a compromise that I could not casually improve in about 10 minutes of playing with the dials and sliders available in the settings screen. That made me feel like Microsoft had really done its homework.

Then, when I started up the game, upon the opening titles starting up, the game crashed. Not only did it crash, it crashed without a dialog box, without a log file for me to look at, or even any indication that there was anything wrong. The system snapped back to the desktop as though I'd quit using a keyboard short-cut. Not cool. I searched around for a solution but couldn't find an answer. I eventually stumbled upon this: a Universal Windows Program (UWP) game cannot be installed onto any drive other than C in order to run. What's this? Did we regress to the mid-1990s, where everything had to be installed into the C drive? Wow.

Other than that, the program had been mostly stable. In the last act of the single player campaign I ran into hard system crashes, but then again, my 8 year old PC is starting to get flakey in general, so maybe that's to be expected. In any case, once I figured out the C drive issue I could play, but I can certainly understand how the PC gaming ecosystem got its reputation as being unfriendly or even user-hostile, on top of being expensive and bulky.

The game itself is fun. Here you have to split your understanding between "fun as a game" and "fun as a movie experience." Games nowadays have movies driving a plot in between playable parts. Games like Uncharted 4, The Last of Us, or Batman Arkham Asylum have excellent plots, fantastic pacing, and a nice balance between game play and movie watching so you're never bored and have a good experience. A game like Rise of Tomb Raider might have better game play (including more complex but satisfying resource management systems), but much worse writing and plotting. Gears of War pretty much says, "Forget the story --- it's just an excuse to dump you into the Game Play loop."

Gears of War's game play loop, however is pretty bland! There are no resource management issues: you fundamentally have to pick up ammo or switch weapons. Sometimes the weapons left for you on the battlefield are a hint as to what's coming up. Several times, you have to play a "hold the line" scenario, in which you can deploy fortifications which can help you hold the line and even carry over resources from one wave of enemies to another. These are particularly fun and can withstand repeated play. But that's it. Now it's been a while since I got a cover shooter to play, so I had a lot of fun, but there's no way you would pick up an XBox just for this game, nor would you even bother paying money for it, since it's something other games do a much better job on. Nevertheless, as a freebie, it's a game that doesn't waste a lot of time, jumps straight into what it does best, and gives you loads to do.

There are a few mechanical niceties. First of all, the game always gives you at least one companion character at all times to play. Those companion characters can even take care of themselves and each other, as well as saving you if you get hurt badly (you can also crawl back to one of them to get "rescued."). Then I noticed the enemies doing the same, so the mechanics apply to them as well. Very sweet. The game is much less lonely than a Batman game or a Tomb Raider game as a result, which is a very good thing.

The story and characters aren't much to go by, though some of the banter is great at making fun of the game itself. The boss fights are fair, and the game never overstays its gimmicks. In short, this is competent, polished work. Just not inspired. If you have an XBox One (or a gaming capable PC) anyway, a sale might make this worth picking up. And it is one of the few games where configuring the graphics settings isn't an exercise in frustration. As such, I can recommend it if you enjoy 3rd person cover shooters.

Review: Laser Maze Jr Logic Game

Laser Maze Jr is a puzzle game (like Rush Hour) that features a laser built into the board, 3 obstacles, 2 rocket ship targets, 5 satellite mirrors, and 1 splitter. Unlike Rush Hour, Laser Maze Jr is deliberately not compatible with the adult version of the same game. The reason behind this is that the adult version allows you to pick up and move the laser, which would be dangerous for a little kid to do since the kid might shine the laser into somebody else's or his own eyes.

The game is set up like Rush Hour: you get a bunch of cards that tell you how to set up each puzzle, and the goal is to make all the target rockets on the board light up using the pieces that you're allowed to use. There are several problems with the components. First of all, the laser is very low powered and subtle. In fact, in a room with windows and bright sunlight, you cannot tell whether the targets are lit up! You'll have to draw the curtains to make it obvious.

Secondly, and much more importantly, the components are small and easy to lose, and Thinkfun's policy is $5 per part. Fortunately, the lossage occured within Amazon's window (in fact, the game could have arrived with one of the mirrors missing). With such an unfriendly policy it was a no brainer to return the entire game to Amazon. One way to have mitigated the lossage problem would have been to have a decent carry bag bundled in the box, or some way to lock unused pieces to the board, but neither of those features were available.

With all the design defects with the product and the extremely , I would not recommend this puzzle to parents. Wait until the kids are old enough not to lose pieces.

Review: Batman and Psychology - A Dark and Stormy Knight

There was an audible 2-for-1 promotion that included Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight.If anyone's going to have psychological issues, it's gotta be Batman, so this sounded like a fun read (or in this case, listen).

In practice, it's pretty boring. No, Batman isn't insane (despite dressing up as a bat). Neither does he suffer from PTSD, multiple personality disorder, or any of the alphabet soup of problems he should have. Given what he is, what he does, and the world he lives in, he truly is the best possible person he could be. That's pretty boring.

The analysis of his rogue's gallery proves to be more interesting: what are the aspects of his personality that his villains reflect? What about his femme fatales? His relationship with the father figures in his life? And the relationships with the various Robins? How to reconcile all of the "what-if" stories that have been written over the years? How about the campy TV series, the Tim Burton movies and the Christopher Nolan movies?

The author, Travis Langley has an excellent command of the source material, and uses them to good effect (though I noticed that he quotes much more from the Chris Nolan movies than the other movie materials). He's conducted several interviews and/or been in comic book convention panels with various Batman writers. I certainly couldn't remember even half the Batman trivia the book provides, though I suspect Tom Galloway would probably be able to top it and correct any typos in the quotations.

Overall, the book does do a good job of dispensing with the various myths propagated by years of comic book stories. "No, the Joker would not get away with the insanity defense, nor would any of the other comic book villains." Multiple personality disorder cannot consistently recur with a blow to the head. The book even cursorily covers parenting styles!

But despite all that, the book never really captured me, despite what should be fascinating subject matter. Maybe because the psychology of a character that's been through multiple authors just can't be that consistent, or that I'm much more interested in Batman's role as a symbol and place in popular culture than in the psychology of what actually makes Bruce Wayne tick. I found myself switching between this and other audio books to give the grim subject matter a break.

Thus: not recommended even if you're a Batman fan.

Review: Rush Hour Jr

I saw a copy of Rush Hour Jr for sale during the holidays and grabbed it, having had fun memories of the original, adult version. The game is essentially a "slide puzzle", but with restricted direction of movements for the "cars and trucks" and a goal of getting the key piece out.

The game components are better than the adult version: the toy vehicles aren't any better made, but the game comes with a carry bag, and the vehicles are kid-themed: buses, fire trucks, police cars, and of course, the ice cream truck "key" piece.

I expected Bowen to have to struggle with the puzzle, but he actually got to puzzle #26 before getting stuck! The best thing about this puzzle game is that if/when he runs out of the puzzles in the base piece, the expansion card decks are fully compatible with the adult versions of the game, so more curated puzzles are available. Whenever Bowen got frustrated, he'd put away the game for a few days and then come back and start all over at Puzzle #1. I'm rediscovering that kids just don't get bored of repetition the way adults do.

There are Android app versions of the game, but I discovered that they were all geared for adults and the puzzles are a bit too hard for Bowen. Curation is really what you're paying for, and of course, there's something satisfying about pushing the plastic pieces on a board versus swiping away at a phone.

To the extent that your child likes puzzles, this is a cool, easily portable kit that can actually engage your child for a good afternoon at a time. Recommended.