Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 39

It’s been ages since I read any Discworld, but it seems appropriate that I came back to it with a time travel story involving a rebellion and barricades. [1]

It’s an interesting mix of serious and silly, sometimes both at once, often treating serious things as comedy and vice versa. The situation is messy, with good cops, bad cops, really bad cops, time cops monks, and a rebellion that today’s Sam Vimes knows won’t accomplish what it hopes to, even if it nominally succeeds. There’s plenty of comedy in Vimes mentoring his younger self and trying to clean up the “old” watch just enough to keep history on track, how the ordinary citizens handle the rebellion [2], and yet it can still manage to punch you in the gut when you finally find out what the lilac sprigs in the present are all about.

Night Watch is in the middle of the City Watch series, but it takes enough time to establish the now that while I still spent a good chunk of the book wondering who I was supposed to already recognize, I had a good sense of what had changed over the years and the future Vimes is fighting to protect – and how hard it is to put it aside so he can focus on the job in front of him.

Definitely recommended even if you haven’t read the other Watch books!

Takes the pain out of setting up and running SSB. Unfortunately it doesn’t overcome SSB’s inherent challenges of discovery, data size or multiple devices. (So far?)

Simple to-do list that works great with a Nextcloud server or local storage on your phone. It’s a bit of a challenge to set up the separate sync app, DAVx⁵, but once that’s done, you don’t really have to touch it unless you add or remove entire lists. Update: Nextcloud handles recurring tasks now, which was the only thing I missed before.

Very useful for looking up crafting recipes and other reference while playing the game on my PC. Updated quickly when the game adds new features.

Well-designed, runs smoothly, great for ordering items to pick up in-store or for shipping. Cart syncs with the website, so you can do some of your shopping on a bigger screen and some of it on your phone. They really refined curbside pickup during the early part of the pandemic, and it’s able to handle complex situations like picking up different parts of your order at different locations, or picking up two orders at once at the same store.