Aron 2 Blue

Space empire, anyone? Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy, by Anne Leckie. Imperial Radch series . I picked the first one up for a book club I couldn't attend, and highly recommend it. It explores a number of deep themes, and I can see why it won all three major sci-fi awards. *** Spoilers *** Multiple minds, multiple viewpoints, single consciousness. The main character is a ship and most of it's crew, made up of "ancillaries". These humans are integrated into the ship's consciousness as additional brains/bodies. The author noted the difficulty of portraying a being with many viewpoints available to it, but I think they did an admirable job. Surveillance - what is a relationship like when the ship can sense everything about her crew except their thoughts? Gender - the main language does not have gendered pronouns, so all characters use she/her until specifically proven otherwise, and often the main character forgets. Imperialism - beings are not c...

I'm never sure how these things make it into production - did someone test it? They must have relied solely on automated tests, I guess. I had a FedEx delivery coming, and I wanted to add delivery instructions. There's a link as part of the tracking page, but it makes me set up an account. If I have to, sigh. The delivery instructions page is dead simple - a drop-down for preferred location to leave a package, and a text entry for notes.  However, the "submit" button at the bottom of the page is not enabled, and won't become enabled no matter what I type in the text field. I had to find the "try our new design" checkbox at the top of the page and flip to the new design for it to work. Strike 1: didn't test the old form, which is the default. I tried to type in a front door code for my building, but when I typed #, I got an error "No special characters permitted". Somehow all punctuation is disallowed, including comma, period and apostrophe....