Review: TooHot

Oct. 3rd, 2025 02:55 pm
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Having just finished the leftovers, a few conclusions about TooHot, a new restaurant in Harvard Square:

  • Far as I can tell, it is seriously authentic Szechuan, not something one often comes across in these parts.
  • As a consequence, the name of the restaurant is accurate. The waiter asked whether I wanted it "mild", and I said no, I like spicy, so "medium" maybe? As I suspected, "medium" is somewhere near the top of my spice tolerance: this place really likes its peppers.
  • It's already impressively popular (after being open just a few months), especially with people who are actually Chinese (based on glancing at the crowd) -- at 6pm on a Tuesday, they had to think about whether they could seat three people without reservations.
  • The specialties of the house are also pretty authentic.
  • Authentic Szechuan apparently involves a lot of frog.
  • Frog mostly tastes like chicken, except with a lot more bones.
  • So many bones.
  • Too many bones.

So overall: excellent restaurant, especially if you like spicy food. But I think the frog dishes may be more effort than I'm willing to put in.

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Forgotten again by her family, Joan Greenwood discovers that this time her witch-kin had a legitimate excuse: a potentially existential threat to Greenwood power and privilege.

An Unlikely Coven (Green Witch Cycle, volume 1) by AM Kvita
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A field agent armed with privacy-violating technology searches for Nazi loot--stolen diamonds--on behalf of a South African diamond cartel.

Probe (Search, # 1) by Leslie Stevens & Russ Mayberry

Last night's dream

Oct. 2nd, 2025 08:28 am
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I dreamed I discovered a weapon in Half Life 2 that would generate and hurl at considerable speed empty shipping containers.

Bundle of Holding: The Far Roofs

Oct. 1st, 2025 02:01 pm
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The complete tabletop RPG about the heroic rats of Fortitude

Bundle of Holding: The Far Roofs

October 2025 Patreon Boost

Oct. 1st, 2025 10:59 am
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You too can support James Nicoll Reviews.

October 2025 Patreon Boost
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Akiko's plan to become Japan's foremost manga artist is manifestly reasonable, so why will reality not cooperate?

Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist's Journey„ volume 1 by Akiko Higashimura

September 2025 in Review

Sep. 30th, 2025 12:22 pm
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21 works reviewed. 11 by women (52%), 9 by men (43%), 1 by non-binary authors (5%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 8 by POC (38%).

The chart is breaking formatting. Need to fix or remove it. I do like charts, though.

September 2025 in Review

Bundle of Holding: 5E Treasures

Sep. 29th, 2025 02:01 pm
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A magical hoard for Fifth Edition roleplaying

Bundle of Holding: 5E Treasures

Clarke Award Finalists 2016

Sep. 29th, 2025 12:15 pm
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2016: The Chilcot Inquiry illustrates the meticulous process by which the UK went to war in Iraq, Lord Lucan is declared dead, and the UK’s narrow vote to leave the EU is at worst the second stupidest collective decision made by a Western democracy in 2016.

Pretend I caught that the poll autofilled the wrong question and that it reads "which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read?"

Poll #33672 Clarke Award Finalists 2016
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 52


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
22 (42.3%)

Arcadia by Iain Pears
2 (3.8%)

Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
7 (13.5%)

The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
12 (23.1%)

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
44 (84.6%)

Way Down Dark by James Smythe
0 (0.0%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read??
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Arcadia by Iain Pears
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Way Down Dark by James Smythe

I don't know what to make of this

Sep. 28th, 2025 08:37 pm
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The Cherryh titles I dropped into ngram fell into 3 patterns:

Ones whose titles don't play nicely with ngrams. I dropped those.
Ones where the mentions per year decline fairly steadily year to year.
Cyteen. What's up with Cyteen? Did Jo Walton mention it on tor dot com around 2009?
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Table of Contents

  • Part 0: Introduction (you're reading it)
  • Lots more to come!

Introduction

I started outlining this series months ago, while I was on sabbatical, but never got around to starting the actual words. I've got a new job now (at OnePass, a refreshingly sensible company providing actually-useful services, which is sadly not the norm at the moment) -- work is extremely busy, but I do need to think about things other than that and politics sometimes, so let's get this going!

All year, I've been mulling the problem of Trust Architectures: how do we share information about "trust" online. As I'll discuss under Use Cases (next time), I think it's getting to be Steam Engine Time to take it seriously. Between the AI Slopocalypse spewing nonsense all over the Web, and the social networks succumbing to Advanced Enshittification, it's getting ever-harder to understand who to trust.

This isn't even remotely a new problem, mind -- it was a pretty old topic when we explored adding this sort of thing to Trenza way back in 2001. But it's rarely been taken really seriously, and most of the better attempts have wound up buried inside proprietary walled gardens that don't necessarily have the human user's best interests at heart.

There appears to be a lot of relatively recent literature on the topic, some of it possibly even good (I'm cautiously intrigued by the OpenRank project). But much of it is obsessively focused on Blockchain, which I'm rather skeptical about (I still consider it to be 90% a solution in search of problems), and most appears to have a lot of assumptions baked in.

So let's step back, and tease this apart. I'm going to intentionally go in a bit naively, so as not to be too biased by everyone else's assumptions, and explore the topic from first principles, winding up with a very high-level sketch of how things might work. Once I have straight what I think are the interesting use cases, requirements, and architectural parameters, we can take a properly critical look at what's already out there.

I expect this to take at least 6-7 installments, likely more like 10 before I'm done -- it's a big, chewy problem with a lot of facets. As I add parts, I'll add them to the Table of Contents at the top of the Dreamwidth version of this post. I'll likely edit some of these posts as we go and folks point out additional nuances; I'll try to be good about crediting folks who point stuff out, so call me on it if you feel like you haven't been acknowledged properly.

This is not fully-baked yet: I'm going to be thinking out loud. That's why this is "towards" -- I'm seeking to make progress here, and we'll see where it winds up. It's possible that we'll find that the One True Trust Architecture already exists, and we should be lobbying for everyone to adopt it. It's also entirely possible that we'll conclude that the problem is insoluble in principle, and give up. (Hopefully not.) The goal is to come to a better shared understanding of the topic, and ideally some actionable ideas about how to deal with the problem.

I hope you'll join in. While I'm going to do a lot of talking over the next couple of months, it's going to be a lot more productive if you chime in with your thoughts and ideas to add to that.

I'm intentionally posting this on Dreamwidth because despite (or maybe because of) its antiquity and old-fashioned UX, it's still the best place for posting and discussing complex, long-form topics, free from the AIs and enshittification consuming most other places.

So I'm planning to post primarily to Dreamwidth, mirror to Medium and LinkedIn since some of the technical crowd mainly knows me there, and link from Mastodon and Bluesky. (But not Facebook, which I've mostly given up on, or Xitter, which I've entirely abandoned.) On platforms that have tagging, I'll be using #TrustArch as the tag for this series.

Comments are welcome at all of those places -- I'm curious to see where I get good conversations -- but the authoritative copy of these posts will be Dreamwidth, and that's the copy that will get edited and updated as this evolves.

That said, a couple of ground rules. I don't want to see comments saying that if it's not 100% perfect, it's not worth trying. (I'm reasonably certain that it's impossible to make this perfect, but I'm moderately confident we could create something helpful.) And I'll be downright scornful of naive claims that we should just leave this for AI to deal with -- while I think it's likely to get quite powerful over the next decade, I'm not at all sanguine that it's going to be trustworthy to that degree any time in the foreseeable future.

But aside from that sort of thing, I'd love to get some serious conversation going. So come along, share your thoughts, and let's tease apart this important problem!

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Six works new to me: four fantasy, one mystery, one non-fiction (from an unexpected source)... unless you count the fantasy-mystery as mystery, in which case it's three fantasy and two mysteries. At least two are series. I don't know why publishers are so averse to labelling series.

Books Received, September 20 — September 26

Poll #33662 Books Received, September 20 — September 26
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

An Ordinary Sort of Evil by Kelley Armstrong
12 (27.9%)

Sea of Charms by Sarah Beth Durst (July 2026)
12 (27.9%)

Following My Nose by Alexei Panshin (December 2024)
11 (25.6%)

The Fake Divination Offense by Sara Raasch (May 2026)
7 (16.3%)

The Harvey Girl by Dana Stabenow (February 2026)
8 (18.6%)

Scarlet Morning by ND Stevenson (September 2025)
17 (39.5%)

Some other option (see comments)
1 (2.3%)

Cats!
32 (74.4%)

Bound Feet by Kelsea Yu

Sep. 26th, 2025 09:17 am
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A grieving mother and her best friend break into a ghost museum to conduct illicit but surely harmless Ghost Day celebrations. Revelations await.

Bound Feet by Kelsea Yu
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More stories should dig into the chemistry, biology, and physics of falling in love.

On Writing Romance as Hard Science Fiction

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