Jack Reacher books

author is Lee Child (not his real name). If you look the website, you discover that pub-date order is NOT character-chrono order. I wish publishers would fix that on the covers. I also wish they would in general put series order number on books. These have neither.

After the second movie of Jack Reacher with Tom Cruise, I decided I would read a couple. Got the first one and the last one for xmas.

They remind me of John D Macdonald's Travis McGee. And Tom Cruise looks nothing like Reacher in the books. Reacher in the books is 6-5, weighs 220-250. That's nearly a foot taller than Cruise, and probably 50-75 pounds heavier. A guy that size is going to be physically imposing no matter what.

As of this writing, I've read the first three published. Went to the used bookstore last weekend and got a couple of all the ones they had; have subsequently ordered the remainder via abebooks.com (better prices than Amazon was showing for used copies).

[Later: read a few more. Reading order seems irrelevant. They are mostly better plotted than Macdonald; "Echo Burning" felt exactly like a McGee book. McGee was essentially a "personal avenger", and Reacher is having a similar feel. Child avoids the issue of recurring characters by having Reacher constantly on the move around the country. Macdonald avoided it simply by not having them, as though anyone's life is like that; McGee lived on a houseboat but never really went anywhere in it.]

The stories move pretty fast. Good excitement, action. Not perfect, but good.

By not perfect I mean: if you're an author, and you're going to write about real places, you need to be present at those places at the time of year you write about before you say anything about the weather.

Book #3 takes place briefly in two places I lived, and makes mistakes about both. Dallas and Honolulu are the places. It's June. Author says something like "temp in Dallas was it's usual hundred degrees". Nope. Sorry. Not in June. Not Dallas. Lived there a decade. 100 degrees doesn't start until mid-July or so. Not June. And then Reacher flies to Honolulu, whereupon author says the humidity in Honolulu was just like Dallas. Nope. Sorry. Not ever. Honolulu is going to have much higher humidity, given that, well, you know, the largest body of water on the planet is one of the boundaries of Honolulu. Depending on the wind, if there is any (leeward side of Oahu, so not nearly as much as Kailua, where I lived), the temp is likely 90+, but not 100--the humidity is probably 90+ as well. But in Dallas? in June? The humidity is at its highest at ~6am, and that amount is 75%, and it's not 100 degrees F. In the afternoon, when the temp is highest, the humidity is 25%. Seriously dry. (Not the hottest place I've been, that was Tucson, summer, it was 110. Bone dry, too. Ouch.) I live in Virginia now, outside DC; it is readily possible for the weather to be 98 and 98, and *that* is uncomfortable. DC is like that. So no, the humidity in Dallas is NEVER like the humidity in Honolulu.

But yeah, please visit, or talk to a resident about this stuff...mistakes like that make you the author look lazy. And these statements are in no way critical to the plot, just throwaway lines. Still...lazy.

[Later: Number 5, "Echo Burning", is a really weak/stupid plot. That one really feels like Travis McGee. #6 is back to a better plot.]

#4 has some people getting in effect drowned in a bathtub of paint. He writes that after what is a day or two "the paint will have a skin depth of 1-1.5 inches. Clearly he didn't test this--24 hours of paint open-air in a bathtub and you might have 1/16" someplace that was really dry. I'm not sure how long 1 whole inch would take, but probably weeks to months. I've had paint remnants in cans out open to dry so I could dump them in the trash can, it seemed to take forever for that last little bit to harden.

A couple of them have really stupid plots. Then there's the several where there's a predictable "showdown at the deserted farmhouse" conclusion.

[Later later: I've read about 2/3 of them. The ones that have good plots are good stories, but none are "Where Eagles Dare", and REALLY not "The Bourne Identity". There are some very good ideas in here, but they're still small. I don't remember Travis McGee too well, but these all feel better than that, but not as good as Maclean, Ludlum, etc]

[Also: why I could never be a writer: one of them has two movie quotes. I couldn't write a novel without having A LOT of movie quotes--I can't hardly have a conversation without using movie quotes, so there's no way I could write a book without them.]

Number 200.

Blog number 200. And it's a game blog :) (ok, technically I've only *released* 196; four drafts are pending, perhaps forever, not clear they are topics that can really be discussed)

Witcher 3.

These guys love their mo-cap and their cutscenes. Much of which leads to things I don't like.

They want you to play the game their way, which is not how I want to play these games.

If you want that, to the point that you are going to force me into it, just make a cutscene I can watch without participating. Better still, say so up front so I can skip the game entirely.


Things I like about this game:

It's gorgeous. Probably the best-looking game I've played. Elder Scrolls 6 will look at least this good.

Saves are right. Lotta folks fail on this one.


Things that annoyed me about this game:

The need for mo-cap everywhere, and the idea (like in the Batman games) that what I want to look at most is the mo-cap, and that hyper-realistic is the goal of games. Mo-cap is not the be-all/end-all in games.

The cutscenes that go on forever.

The large amount of pointless profanity.

All the apparent prostitution--was there really that much of it in the past? Walk through Novigrad and count the various prostitutes--it's a lot.

The movement that is scripted. The problems I had over and over about UI control over what I was doing--most of the times I got killed were keystroke failures because I felt my ability to control Geralt was constrained. I use a wireless mouse and keyboard. They are slightly laggy, this causes trouble. Example: you are too close to an opponent, you automatically go into a crouch and slow down--no, I want to run, not creep.

Being unable to use a real bow and arrow. That little crossbow you have is just about pointless.

Having to play as Ciri once in a while without having much practice at it, and her controls are for completely different abilities. And her only health recovery is to run around out of reach. And when the movement controls force those crouches...and she has no armor...and she has no food/etc for health recovery...

The fact that combat does nothing for your Level-up advancement, only quest completion does that.

The fact that quests need to be worked on when you're near the same skill level, else they aren't worth much in XP points. You wait too long and their value drops to one single XP.

You can't drop a quest. Several times where that was really the better solution, esp once the XP had dropped to be worthless.

All the quests that are about finding diagrams for better gear are a waste of time--the gear isn't better. Even the master-crafted stuff; when you finish with Hattori, he makes a freebie for you. It was 3 levels behind what I was already using. Boring--it should scale exactly to where I am.

The 40-mph wind that never stops.

Potions are incomprehensible. And look largely useless. I have yet to use one.

Magic that is relatively useless, and way to weak to do much for you. Part of the story in this game is that some large-ish faction is trying to eliminate all of it. OK by me.

The local "economy", which is pretty feeble. Why is that this is so common in games? All the Bethesda stuff has this problem until the mods get made that fix it. (Remember Morrowind? That was the worst. You could easily find Daedric items that were so high-priced no one could buy them from you. Even after I found several mods that boosted merchants and made more of them, it was still possible to come back from a dungeon crawl with so much stuff that you'd have to drop a bunch on the ground, where it would sit forever. You want the merchant to have cash again? Sleep 24 hours. How many times are you going to do that when they have 5000 gold and you have 150,000 of items?)

Post election blues.

It went about as I expected. I could tell at 8pm that Hillary was going to lose. Except that she didn't. But she did. (What was the final vote/point spread? About 2%, wasn't it? Just about what I called it for months ago)

What happens in Presidential elections?

The thing to understand there is that polling fails to tell the correct story. It just tells a story, probably a little closer to being the story pollsters want told.

What really happens: Look at who was elected President since WW2. What's the common thread to (nearly) all of them?

We do NOT elect "Washington insiders" to be President. Except Johnson, who was elected in 64 really as a continuation of JFK as a sympathy vote. And Nixon. And we all know how that ended. Otherwise: Truman. Eisenhower. JFK. Carter. Reagan. GHWB. Ok, GHWB was kinda insider, really got elected on being Reagan 2.0. Bill Clinton. GWB. Obama.

Really, mostly those guys are "outsiders". We don't elect "insider" presidents. So on that measurement Hillary wasn't ever going to win--she's as "insider" as it is possible to get. And sure as hell Trump is as far from being an insider as anyone could get.

Look at who the losers were. Mostly Washington insiders.

And now the Republicans are four state legislatures away from achieving absolute and permanent control of the country. That could happen in 2017, and then Obergefell will fall. Roe v Wade will fall. Etc.

Blogger and cookies

Appy polly loggies to folks who are now getting the "popup" warning about cookies at the top of the page. EU laws require this. Blogger here does it for me automatically, which is good for me, and bad since it's annoying for you.

If I could control it, there'd be zero cookies. But it's automatic blogger stuff, esp since Google now owns blogger, for advertising reasons.

Gad.