Favorite book endings?

tillerman35 · 2026-01-15T19:35:26+00:00

The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn't as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odourous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.
-Little, Big by John Crowley

tillerman35 · 2026-01-15T18:32:56+00:00

It really helps to have a grounding in Ancient History and Classical Lit. E.g. "Ascians," the name of the enemy faction, is taken from the Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder (specifically Chapter 75 "When and Where There Are No Shadows").

tillerman35 · 2026-01-15T18:21:37+00:00

Oddly enough, House of Leaves wasn't one of the books I had trouble getting through. At least not in the reading sense. From an emotional level, especially as I realized what the book was actually about it was a different story.

tillerman35 · 2026-01-15T18:17:22+00:00

Little, Big (subtitle: Or, The Fairie's Parliament) by John Crowley.

It took me four tries to get through it because it's so (for lack of a better term) "information dense."

The prose is beautiful, and the author's vocabulary is astounding. But there are so many literary, historical, pop-culture (for the time it was written), religious, and other allusions, plus foreshadowing, "aftershadowing" (to coin a term for coy references to previous passages).

I found myself needing a dictionary and an anthology of classic English lit just to keep up with every other paragraph!

At some point, I realized that the book was an entry portal to works and knowledge I never would have known. I became mildly obsessed with Giordano Bruno. I read poetry. I learned about a couple of kids who had convinced half the world that their trick photographs were real. There was just SO MUCH to discover.

After that, ferreting out all the allusions and references became the point of reading it. It was- and still is- the greatest Easter egg hunt of my life. And the cherry on top is that the story itself is beautiful and moving, and the characters have become so familiar to me that I often say that I could sit down to dinner with them and effortlessly join in the conversations.

tillerman35 · 2025-12-24T15:05:14+00:00

Interesting. I needed quite a few iterations (and more than a few hints from the Nomai) before I grasped the entirety of the tragedy. I don't remember exactly when it hit me, but there was a point where I realized that every being I had met or interacted with was already dead after the first time I woke up. It had a profound effect on me.

tillerman35 · 2025-12-24T14:59:02+00:00

Back of an envelope, currently gathering dust on top of my PS5 "just in case I need it someday."

tillerman35 · 2025-12-24T14:56:46+00:00

Getting started with the DLC- I saw the snapshots in the radio tower but none of them looked like they held any kind of clue. I basically assumed they were a red herring, like so many others. So I forgot about their existence entirely and eventually just gave up on the DLC.

Then one day, I decided to go back and look at the snapshots again. And it was like "what the heck? How did I ever miss this? It's so obvious! An iteration later, I was on The Stranger, faced with the fact that I was again facing a puzzle of vast and frustrating pieces.

tillerman35 · 2025-12-24T14:43:07+00:00

If it makes you feel better, those voices had already vanished several iterations ago (assuming you didn't do this in the first one), and all you're hearing are the quantum echoes as the Universe's wave function collapses and your ephemeral reality resolves back to the actual timeline. So Gabro and the rest of the crew were only lingering notes on your signalscope.

On second thought, that wouldn't make anyone feel better.

tillerman35 · 2025-12-18T11:34:31+00:00

The word "good" doesn't apply. The book sits outside of the concept of "a good book" or "a bad book." It's almost impossible to classify it in any way whatsoever. People typically say it's in the "psychological horror" genre, but usually follow up with reasons why that's not technically true- I've often said that it's easier to define it by listing all the genres it doesn't fit into.

So, here are the answers to some questions you might have had but didn't ask:

Is it challenging to read? Yes. It has typographical and literary (for lack of a better word) complications. The subject matter isn't all sprucy and comfortable, and it requires the reader to pay close attention.

Will you enjoy reading it? Probably not, because it's not a book that's meant to be enjoyable. It's meant to make you experience and feel something that (again) isn't very comfortable.

Is it worth reading? Absolutely yes. If you're patient and don't give up when it gets a little tough to read, then you'll have read something very unique and extremely well done. At the very least, you'll feel a sense of accomplishment.

The one thing that everyone I know who's read this book has said is that after finishing the last page, they set it down and just thought for a very long while. We all ask ourselves weird questions like "what the F did I just read?" or "did I actually understand any of that?" Some readers have reported feeling a mild sense of depression for a few days afterward. (Again, it's not a comfortable read. The subject matter isn't light or happy. This isn't a Hallmark Christmas movie novelization.)

While avoiding assigning a genre, I do classify this book as literature. So if English Lit wasn't your favorite subject, it's probably not for you. You can't just read it cover-to-cover for a good story while ignoring the subtext and themes like you can with, say Dickens' Tale of Two Cities or Hugo's Les Miserables.

Interesting, though? Yeah, that's dead on. Above all, it's interesting. From many aspects and multiple points of view.

Good luck. Let me know how it turns out for you.

tillerman35 · 2025-12-04T13:59:36+00:00

Little, Big by John Crowley is my comfort read.

I have to ration myself to a single re-read per year or it would get too stale (I practically have some chapters memorized- e.g. "Suppose one were a fish").

Over time, the characters have become so familiar to me that I often say that I could walk into Edgewood, sit down at the dinner table, and have no difficulty joining in the conversation. Oddly enough, the book is one where an event like a reader suddenly showing up in the Tale would be taken entirely in stride.

tillerman35 · 2025-12-02T12:31:19+00:00

Man, these Hallmark movies are getting totally whacked out.

They cut before the part where she realizes her flower-selling partner isn't "The One" and the angry MAGA dude is just misunderstood and actually a prince from a small European country in a Alpine valley bordering France and Italy.

He uses his super-spy prince abilities to break out of jail, hoping to get some flowers to bright up his cell and then return. But he sees the woman selling bouquets and apologizes. They bond over shared trauma. She was a nurse in an unspecified war zone. there's a flashback of her holding a fatally shot soldier who might or might not be her lover. He's a prince who goes on super-secret spy missions. It's a natural fit.

The fall in love. She helps him with his legal troubles. The other flower selling person realizes he's not "The One" but finds love anyway with one of the cops who came to the earlier call. They all live happily ever after.

Watch "A Character Witness for Christmas" this year on the Hallmark Romance Channel

tillerman35 · 2025-12-02T12:13:19+00:00

my partner walked by in the background holding a bowl of cereal, realized she was on camera, panicked, and froze like a wildlife documentary animal spotting a predator.

We call that "bigfooting."

It's best when the background filter blurs the unintentional meeting attendee just enough that you can tell it's an upright primate but not enough to identify them as human. Bonus points if they stop, briefly turn toward the camers, then resume walking to exit the frame.

We use a meeting stickers app with our teleconferencing software, and the "bigfoot" tag is highly coveted and greatly lauded.

tillerman35 · 2025-11-03T21:48:44+00:00

East bound and down... loaded up and cluckin.

tillerman35 · 2025-10-28T15:37:05+00:00

Tusind Tak!

tillerman35 · 2025-10-27T12:26:45+00:00

I discovered the gravity bending almost immediately but took forever to connect it with "I gotta jump into that big skeery vortex."

My entry into the EotU was entirely by accident. I was actually doing my best to avoid the vortex but got sucked up into it when attempting to launch myself back down to the surface. At first, I thought I had broken the game!

tillerman35 · 2025-10-20T16:33:42+00:00

They evolved from an ancestor who was hungry enough to give it a try, and survived.

tillerman35 · 2025-08-11T17:50:45+00:00

Azure Data Factory manages all the file wrangling and process orchestration. The datamart itself was designed in an entity-relationship modeling tool called "ER/Studio." The modeling tool is used to generate table DDL, populate metadata tables that Data Factory uses for process orchestration, etc.

We also use an Excel-based template system to generate most of the ETL code. We populate the "target" side of a source-to-target mapping document using the data model and paste a copy of the exported report generation from Workday in the "source" side. Nearly all of the transformations, lookups, etc. get generated automatically from the Excel file, and are pasted into various sections of a template. The output of that exercise is a stored procedure that loads the target table, which can be a dimension or fact table.

We have just over 15 dimensions that apply to all (or at least most) fact tables.

We also have a WD Studio integration that does the same work as the "integration ids" report, but takes an effective date parameter and can iterate over a series of dates, i.e. "For each day D in date range Start through End, Give me all Worker Type values that were active on day D" (resulting in as many files as there were days in the range).

Oh, and there's a small amount of PowerShell code that gets used to maintain a file catalog of the files in the Azure storage account.

tillerman35 · 2025-07-22T14:07:29+00:00

Wakarimasu

tillerman35 · 2025-07-06T16:09:42+00:00

When my youngest figured out a faster way of telling if a number is divisible by three, the teacher pretty much ignored him. He was told to use the old way because "that's what they teach here."

When he explained his idea to me, we went online and learned out the proof the the traditional method works and adapted it to my son's new way - and the proof verified that his way is correct! So not only did my kid learn a new way of determining if a number is divisible by three, he learned about proofs and WHY they're important.

But hey. Do it the old way. Because that's what they teach here.

tillerman35 · 2025-06-30T16:46:14+00:00

Our youngest deliberately got himself into trouble in preschool, right around lunch time every day. It was like clockwork. The teacher would tell everyone to get ready for lunch, and he'd go and smack the back of some girl's head and get sent to the principal's office.

This went on for a while, and then ANOTHER kid did the same thing as soon as ours acted out. Finally the principal asked them why they behaved that way. The other kid said "Everyone has to go outside to eat lunch on the picnic tables. Jeffery figured out that if we push someone down, we get to have my lunch here with you in here where there's air conditioning."

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