Gears of War: The Rise of Raam by Kurtis J. Wiebe My rating: 3 of 5 stars This comic compilation was fine.  In the game, I don't recall really getting a ton of the backstory for the locusts given that the entirety of the story gets told from the human perspective. As such, I found it a little hard to care a ton about the story in this collection.  Interesting,

Gears of War Omnibus, Vol. 2 by Karen Traviss My rating: 4 of 5 stars I enjoyed both volumes of the Gears of War omnibuses.  The first omnibus bridges the gap between Gears of War 1 and 2, followingMarcus Fenix and Delta Squad in the battle against the Locusts! Find out what happened after the Lightmass Bombing and how the Locusts will react to this devastating

iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It by Steve Wozniak My rating: 5 of 5 stars I rather enjoyed this book. Not knowing a lot about Woz, it was fun to discover a seemingly curious down-to-earth maker and tinkerer.  The practical jokester side did surprise me a bit. I would have liked to

The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack on Democracy by Brian Klaas My rating: 5 of 5 stars Well, we all knew that Donald Drumph was a huge piece of 💩, but every book that examines his pre-presidency and presidency just adds confirmatory evidence. It blows my mind that he's just announced that  he's interested in running for the 2024 presidential election

The Missing Cryptoqueen: The Billion Dollar Cryptocurrency Con and the Woman Who Got Away with It by Jamie Bartlett My rating: 5 of 5 stars I came across this book recently, which apparently is based on a BBC podcast.  I don't know how I missed it originally, but I guess it's expected since I have treated anything blockchain, crypto, and NFT-related to be one giant scam. 

The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election by Malcolm W. Nance My rating: 4 of 5 stars Enlightening investigative piece.  It tied a few things that were happening in the background that seemed separate, but where not. I was kind of hoping that the timeline of the book proceeded past the election of 2016, but

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am not always a fan of Cal's writing, but after a friend recommended this (Brian?), I decided to pick it up. It's a quick read (comparative to other books anyway) and it's filled with good advice (some of which I stumbled upon through my own social media use...so

Hellsing, Vol. 10 by Kohta Hirano My rating: 3 of 5 stars Well... this was an anticlimactic ending. 🙄. I was first introduced to Hellsing in Anime form in 2001.  The original ending of having "Incognito" as the big bad made little sense, but then I read somewhere on the web that the manga was not complete at that point, so the animators needed to modify the

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff My rating: 5 of 5 stars I would say that this is a "must-read" book. It reminded me a lot of the original aspirations and "promise" of connected technologies and "smart" devices, which was to serve people for the purpose of improving our lives.  Instead, what

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein My rating: 3 of 5 stars Not a bad book.  Having just finished "The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone" which only deals with the development of the iPhone, this book was both shorter and covered both Apple and Google.  As such, I think this book plays a bit