zsh

I finally switched from bash to zsh, and it was totally worth it.

I was paranoid about how much time it was going to take, but it turns out the trick is to do as little as possible, and most of your bash customizations will still work. It basically went like:

• Refactor your dotfiles to just isolate any bash-specific stuff that's in there. .bash_profile should consist of source ~/.bashrc; .bashrc should have your little handful of bash-specific configurations followed by source ~/.profile; and .profile should have all the aliases and simple functions that will work in both.
• Install oh-my-zsh and assemble a really simple .zshrc file. At the bottom, put source ~/.profile to catch all your old bash aliases and functions.
• Look through the list of themes on the wiki and find something that looks familiar enough that you won't feel weird. I went with muse.
• Maybe make one or two edits to that theme and save it as a custom one. I looked through lib/git.zsh and figured out how to add an indicator that my git branch is ahead or behind.

In the end, I got pretty much all I needed out of the box and only had to make about a four-line edit to the muse theme. Better tab completion, and I can spend about 90% less time running git status at work.

I realize this is of limited interest to this blog but oh well.

Books: The Jugger, a new Link story, Woodson, and Nix

Richard Stark -- The Jugger

Nov. 15, 2014

There are probably a fair amount of Parker novels that are odd for a Parker novel (there's a bazillion of the things), but this is the oddest one I've read so far. There's no heist, about a quarter of the book is an extended flashback that has nothing to do with Parker, and he ends the book in a much worse position than he started in, after a clever getaway plan collapses for reasons he had no control over.

The grim joke about how the hole in the basement got used was pretty great. But overall, I'd say read some other Parker book instead.

Books I Stopped Reading: My True Love Gave to Me (Various)

Dec. 2014

An anthology of popular YA writers doing "holiday stories" seems like a bizarre artifact to me, but it probably shouldn't. That is a perfectly sensible thing to publish.

There were probably some other good stories in here, but look, I'm sorry, I just checked it out for the uncollected Kelly Link story, "The Fox and the Lady." (Which was excellent, and probably the only Tam Lin retelling/adaptation I've seen that just nailed it with no caveats needed. This is now the one I'll point to if anyone asks me what's up with Tam Lin. Not that this ever happens, but still.)

I meant to read some of the other stories, but then the book was due back at the library, so bye.

Jacqueline Woodson -- Brown Girl Dreaming

Dec. 8, 2014

I guess this just won a National Book Award! So there's an endorsement.

I enjoyed this autobiography quite a bit. In some ways it's a very straightforward book, and in other ways it's incredibly odd.

The whole thing is done as a series of poems, which I still think is a strange choice for what's essentially a continuous narrative work. (Or, uh... strange for a modern narrative work meant to be read and archived rather than sung and orally preserved.) I keep wondering why she did it that way; it works, to be sure, but it's weird. The best I've got for now is that it has something to do with memory being a fragmentary and disjointed experience.

Garth Nix -- Lirael and Abhorsen

Aug 24, 2014

After I finished re-reading Sabriel, I finally got around to its sequel, which has been waiting on my shelf since like '07. Lirael/Abhorsen is basically one book -- the series does that duology-published-as-trilogy thing, where Sabriel stands fine by itself and is followed by a more sprawling second story with a largely new cast and a significant time gap.

I'll probably read Sabriel again someday, but I doubt I'll come back to this one; it was decent enough, but I didn't love it.

Things I liked: this is a fantasy story partly centered around a believable loving family going through a believable rough patch. I feel like that's pretty unusual! And I eventually got quite into the rhythm of Lirael's magic unschooling plotline. It wasn't what I expected at all after Sabriel, but it was interesting and well done.

Things I wasn't really into: most of the sections involving Sameth and Nicholas Sayre. Bluh, it just wasn't any fun to read. And the villain sucked! Kerrigor from Sabriel was twisted and unpredictable and fun, but the Destroyer just kind of plows forward like a shitty wind-up toy. And Chlorr and Hedge could have been interesting if they'd actually acted according to their personalities and ambitions, but since their will is just completely subsumed by the Destroyer, they suck too. So the overarching plot and conflict of the book is just kind of uninteresting. There's some cool stuff in the heroes' interactions and self-reflection, but the framework is bland.

Also... I didn't like how it explained everything that was left mysterious in Sabriel. There were a few payoffs that I thought were fantastic: I really enjoyed seeing the final regions of Death, for example. But a big part of the magic of Sabriel's wordbuilding was how much it left unsaid, and this book lacked any of that restraint.