Quick #review: For We Are Many, by Dennis E. Taylor

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Okay, I can get this written. I think.

I promised that once the second Bobiverse book, For We Are Many, showed up I’d get it read quickly so I could follow up on whether there were any women in this one. Good news and bad news: the first time a woman speaks is a hundred pages in. She has one line, it is about her son, and she disappears for a while afterwards. But one of the more important secondary characters is female! In fact, she’s kind of important to one of the bigger themes of the book. Now, unfortunately, we’re nowhere near passing the Bechdel test or anything like that— to the best of my recollection there isn’t a scene with more than one woman talking at all, much less to each other— but this book represents an improvement, if not a huge one, over the first.

It is still good in all of the ways that the first one was good, and frankly it’s genuinely getting more interesting, so I’m kind of hoping that as time moves on a lot of the male secondary characters all have daughters and we can interact with them some more. All of the Bobs, of course, are immortal so long as they aren’t killed, so I would expect the secondary cast to change a lot.

Book Three comes out in the fancy new edition in March; I might cave and read it digitally before that. We’ll see.

Not tonight

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My brain is full of violence and I have spent too much time on this website to be healthy today.

Yep, it’s cold

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We haven’t gotten any substantial snow yet, but I think the idea is it’s supposed to mostly roll in tomorrow and Sunday, so we’ll see what happens. My classes went fine today; turns out that if you tell kids you’ll give them extra credit if they show their pets (or any nearby object they’re willing to pretend is a pet) on camera, they show up for Meets, and then they even stick around afterwards.

There’s a fairly high risk of school being cancelled Monday as well, depending on how shit the next couple of days go; I’m really hoping if that happens they just cancel school and add a day to the end of the year. Today went well but I feel like two synchronous days on either side of a weekend are not both going to go well. We’ll see, I suppose?

After a big traffic spike for the last few months of 2025, including a lot of traffic from China and Singapore (but also elevated traffic from the US) I’ve been struggling to hit 100 page views lately. I’ve finally got access to Google Analytics– which, weirdly, happened the same day the traffic fell through the floor– and I’m struggling to understand what I’m looking at, to be honest. Like, right now, Google is telling me I’ve had 9 “active users” in the last half hour, but my hits on WordPress Stats haven’t moved? Ultimately I’m aware that none of this matters since the site isn’t monetized at all, but just for my own shits and giggles I’d like to know how these things overlap and intersect, y’know? Analytics isn’t super forthcoming with definitions, unfortunately.

Also, I thought I was supposed to be able to see what search terms were leading people my way, and what referrers, and so far I haven’t been able to dig that information out. I feel like it should be have been simple. Like, what the hell does this mean?

Sixteen thousand “engaged sessions,” of zero seconds of engagement time each, but … less than a hundred “page views”?

Somebody just download this shit into my brain so I don’t have to work to understand it. I’m tired, dammit.

In accordance with prophecy

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No school tomorrow, anywhere, basically— I’d bet close to 100% of the state’s districts will be closed tomorrow. I’m expecting to be snowed in all weekend and we’ll see what happens Monday.

I got all my prep for online learning done at work, so I’m trying to claw through Lord Of Chaos tonight. Everybody behave, mmmk?

Duckery

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This is going to be another short post tonight, as I had a lengthy meeting after work, went to the comic shop, ate dinner, prepped for class tomorrow, and given that I still have to write this post it’s way too close to bedtime for comfort. I am Experimenting with my computer; after literal decades of brand loyalty I’ve switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo, and I discovered along the way that they have a browser, too, so I’m typing this in that. On my home computer I mostly use Safari, and I use Chrome at work, at least partially to keep my work account and personal accounts a little bit more separate. I’m not sure where a DuckDuckGo browser would slot into that but we’ll see if I end up liking it any more than Google’s offerings.

Also potentially in the pipeline: I own all of my email domains, and if I can find a host that isn’t going to pollute my email with AI I might switch email hosts away from Gmail as well. That’s much more of an undertaking than playing with a new browser and a new Web search thingamabooper, though, so I’m going to wait until I have both time and patience before I attempt to make that switch. Especially since that would involve changing things on my phone, too, now that I think about it.

Tomorrow will be my second day at work this week and also my last day at work this week, as everyone is 100% certain that there’s no way we’ll have in-person school on Friday. I have told my kids that nothing short of the literal end of the world is preventing them from having a quiz on Friday; they can expect that if they don’t have internet I’m going to show up at their houses with a paper copy of the thing and then stand there impatiently while they take it. I thought at first we were only expected to get the hell-cold; I saw a map earlier that had us with another sixteen inches of snow, which is unacceptable. This storm is for the Southrons, damn it; I have cleared my driveway enough times for January. I can take the cold but God and I will have words if we get another foot of snow. And those words will be cross.

Sawdusty fun

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Spent the evening at a local makerspace, one we’ve been to a few times now, learning how to use a bunch of woodworking tools. This was supposedly the safety class, and my wife, who works with OSHA regulations and compliance for a living, spent most of the evening twitching and visibly musing to herself about insurance rates. I just drilled holes in things and played with saws; I still have all my fingers so we’re good.

That said, it managed to be a long day despite being another snow day (cold as fuck outside; we’re going to have another one on Friday, watch) and so I’m going to cut this short and go curl up in a chair with a cat.

Possibly after changing my shirt.

Natty dread

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I’m not watching. I’ve not watched an IU football game this year– in fact, I doubt I’ve watched an IU football game since I graduated(*)– and if I decide to start now, they’ll lose. In fact, I’m going to do my best to ignore the internet during the game so that I don’t even get any accidental score updates. Hell, it’s been years since I watched an IU basketball game, and it’s more than a little shocking to me that I can name IU football’s quarterback and coach and am no longer able to name the coach or even a single player on the basketball team.

Sadly, my lifelong dedication to being superstitious about sports is not the only reason to pay no attention to this game. I am deeply pissed at IU right now, and while it’s genuinely upsetting to be cutting ties with the university I graduated from and that I’ve loved for literally my entire life, the way IU has been conducting itself recently has been beyond the pale and I can’t accept it any longer. I’m going to start telling people I graduated from Purdue. It’s that bad.

On top of that, the more I’ve learned how college sports works now, and particularly how college football works now, the less I want to do with any of it. We basically have a good football team now because Mark Cuban bought us one. Seeing video of Fernando Mendoza showing off his new diamond Rolex earlier today was literally disgusting. I’d rather suck, frankly.

I dunno. This sort of feels like Old Man Yells at Cloud to some extent, but I’ve not been a sports guy for decades if I ever really was, and ignoring a national championship run has got to be the last of a really large number of nails in that coffin. This hasn’t been fun for a long time, and now it’s actively repulsive, and I’m out.

(*) Not true, apparently, as WordPress dug up a post from last year where I talk about watching IU play Notre Dame in the football playoffs, a game I have no recollection of at all and which we, of course, lost.

It’s cold outside so I’m reading

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It’s cold as fuck outside and I’ve got an upset stomach, so I read all 700 pages of this today. I’m not sure that it’s a good book in an objective sort of sense but it was absolutely what I was looking for.

Now I have to read a Wheel of Time book, so I’m going to be miserable for a few days.