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Welcome to Somethings, your weekly dose of highlights, recommendations and notes from my notebook. If you would like to receive this in your inbox every 2 weeks, subscribe now. If you want to support, do checkout the links in the Friends of Somethings Section.
The end of the year is here. Usually people post there year in reviews. I like to wait till January. The year isn’t over until the year it is over. So today you get regular programming.
✍🏼 Somethings I wrote
The Birthday Post
I had my 39th birthday last Sunday. So I wrote a blog post for it. I shared some of my most favorite posts I have written over the years.
🛠️ Somethings to Use
Phone Automation Tools
dI recently discovered “Routines & Modes” on my phone. You can automate certain actions when certain events are triggered. For example, when I connect my headphones, the phone switches to do not disturb mode. My phone is an Android, but iPhones also have a similar feature called Shortcuts, which is more robust.
📕Somethings to read
The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie
I’ve settled a few scores in my time but it only led to more. Vengeance can feel fine, but it’s a luxury. It doesn’t fill your belly, or keep the rain off. To fight my enemies I need friends behind me, and I’m clean out of friends
I have been on fantasy kick lately. I had avoided the works of author Joe Abercrombie for a long while. I was told that he was an “edgelord”, inserting gratuitous violence and sex for no reason into his books. “Grimdark” and other such pejoratives were used.
Compared to others in the genre, the books are bog standard adventure stories. The plots are just straight romps, but with anti-heroes instead of heroes. Really good romps. There is violence and sex. But it never really crossed gratuitous line for me.
It also interweaves late-medieval era politics in with the adventure. Which is the reason it is so intriguing. I’ll probably write a whole blog post on it.
Thank you for joining me this week. If you know some who might enjoy this, please forward this email to them. See you next week.
Mudassir Chapra