"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

The Murderbot Diaries: Rogue Protocol + Exit Strategy

March 20, 2026

I’m not crying: a piece of some murdering bot must have gotten in my eye.

Rogue Protocol is the third novella in the Murderbot Diaries, and deals with the titular character going deep undercover to figure out what happened in the “mining incident” that was scrapped from his memory. In this story, though the concept had been introduced with ART in the previous one, we really get to appreciate the different levels of autonomy, agency and awareness of the different kinds of artificial beings, with a difference between bots (totally artificial) and constructs (artificial + biological, which is what makes things messy in the first place). And when the investigation comes together, with wars between corporations getting more heated and the thing around alien constructs making much more sense, this will be very important.

Exit Strategy, the fourth one, is possibly my favourite so far. An absolute delight, from start to end, in which the relationship with other kinds of bots/constructs develops with nuances, and the comeback of characters from book 1 is constructed with grace, not forced into some Big Overarching Plot that I would not appreciate. Mensah is fairly different from the TV show, but I think there’s space for that character to develop into this one.

I’ll take a break from the series, now. It’s so good I don’t want to finish my supply.

movies and tv

Unveil: Jadewind

Well, I did something unusual: I watched a Chinese TV series that has no English dubbing, just subtitles. Which makes it hard to do it while I work because I have to pay more attention to the subtitles, but I guess it’s useful to hone

April 12, 2026 6:24 pm

books and literature

Fox Friday: The Fox by D.H. Lawrence

The two girls were usually known by their surnames, Banford and March. They had taken the farm together, intending to work it all by themselves: that is, they were going to rear chickens, make a living by poultry, and add to this by keeping a

April 10, 2026 9:00 am

architecture, engineering and construction

Who EIRs the EIR?

There’s a game I’d like to play (queue The Cranberries): take two EIRs from the last month, any project really, and delete project name and phase. Then place them in front of somebody else and ask them to guess. Which kind of project? Is it

April 8, 2026 9:00 am