Author Archives: smellincoffee

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About smellincoffee

Citizen, librarian, reader with a boundless wonder for the world and a curiosity about all the beings inside it.

A Year of Teasin’

Posted on October 3, 2023 by smellincoffee

On October 3rd, 2022, I decided to revisit an old & abandoned weekly meme, “Teaser Tuesday”, and am happy to say that I have not missed a week of teasin’. Today I’m going to do a double Top Ten Tuesday: … Continue reading →

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The Dispatcher

Posted on October 2, 2023 by smellincoffee

Imagine Zachary Quinto, known as nuSpock or “that quiet guy in Margin Call who tells Jeremy Irons the bad news”, doing an impression of Heath Ledger’s Joker. Got it? Okay, good, because that was my favorite part of this novella. … Continue reading →

Posted in Reviews, science fiction | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

September 2023 in Review

Posted on October 2, 2023 by smellincoffee

September was a quieter month for leisure reading than the last have been, in part because of grad school — I’m constantly reading articles related to information science for class, both the assigned pieces and those I can find connected … Continue reading →

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Chasing ghostly history

Posted on September 30, 2023 by smellincoffee

“Everybody good where you are? Okay. We’re going dark. All lights out.” In the long-abandoned upstairs hallway of King Memorial Hospital, known more recently as Dunn’s Rest Home, a group of ghost-hunters and urban explorers all pocket their cellphones or … Continue reading →

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Starter Villain

Posted on September 28, 2023 by smellincoffee

Charlie is a sacked journalist struggling to get by with a substitute teacher’s salary, and dreams of maybe owning the neighborhood pub one day if he can ever get approval for a loan that uses his father’s house as the … Continue reading →

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The rise of digital cryptography & the dark web

Posted on September 27, 2023 by smellincoffee

Short rounds time! First up, a surprisingly serious and detailed history of digital cryptography from Steven Levy. The previous books I’ve read by Levy have also been tech histories, but How Google Works and his Apple-related titles had a strong … Continue reading →

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Wednesday blogging prompt: beating bad moods

Posted on September 27, 2023 by smellincoffee

Today’s blogging prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “What do you do to shake off a bad mood?” That varies a bit on the mood itself — I need to be around friends to dispel some moods, but I … Continue reading →

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Teaser Tuesday: The digital Knockturn Ally

Posted on September 26, 2023 by smellincoffee

So, is Tor the Dark Web and Dark Web Tor? Absolutely not. Tor is only one network that exists in the Dark Web. There are others, such as Hornet, Freenet, and I2P, which we’ll discuss later on in the book. … Continue reading →

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Inside the Chaotic Rise of YouTube

Posted on September 25, 2023 by smellincoffee

Do you remember the first YouTube video you watched? Mine was a fifteen-second clip of a guy doing a skateboarding trick, embedded in a blog post. The men who initially coded YouTube used Flash, which allowed videos to be played … Continue reading →

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Flags of our Fathers

Posted on September 22, 2023 by smellincoffee

More Marines were killed in the first four days of the Battle of Iwo Jima than perished in Guadacanal over the course of five months, and the battle accounts for over a third of Marine casualties sustained in the entire … Continue reading →

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