Reviews Tagged “100daysToOffload”

In May 2026, I started a challenge to write 100 new blog posts or pages on my website over the following year.

• Always Coming Home ★★★★★ Ursula K. Le Guin
  Not a novel, not quite a short story/poetry collection, but a fascinating, thorough exploration of an imagined post-apocalyptic rural utopia in a far-future Napa Valley.
• Del Cerro Park ★★★★☆ Incredible views of the Pacific Ocean, Catalina Island, and the coastal hills and canyons from the top of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Calm and quiet, usually breezy.
• Forbidden Solitaire ★★★★⯪ Framed as a lost (and cursed) CD-ROM game from the 1990s, and it nails the 90s gore look for the dungeon. The playing mechanic is fun, and the framing story around it is suitably creepy.
• Hidden Swing Trail ★★★★☆ A hike along the coastal hillside, with views of Bluff Cove, intermittent trees, and yes, a homemade swing. Some steep parts, eroded, tree roots. Upper end in the hills, lower end at PV Drive. Bring water, and watch for the fork.
• Insignia Refrigerator ★★★☆☆ Nothing fancy. Does its job keeping food cold or frozen. Downsides: Shelves are awkward, drawers are shallow, the freezer pops open too easily, and sometimes it makes sounds like a dying moose.
• Legends of Amberland ★★★★☆ A fun throwback to the early Might and Magic and Bard’s Tale fantasy games of the 1980s and 1990s. Grid- and turn-based, with old-style pixelated graphics and LOTS of side quests.
• Murderbot Season 1 ★★★★★ A pitch-perfect adaptation of All Systems Red. Alexander Skarsgård is dead on as the socially-anxious security cyborg who just wants to be left alone to watch its shows, but has to protect its humans from alien creatures, their own naivete, and rival corporations willing to kill.
• PineTab2 ★★★⯪☆ The PineTab2 is not a great computer. But it’s a hyper-mobile Linux tablet that can run desktop and command-line apps natively, with a touchscreen and an optional physical keyboard, for a budget price.
• Samsung Chromebook 3 ★☆☆☆☆ I bought this in the late 2010s as a spare laptop. It was terrible from the start, and even when I replaced ChromeOS with mainstream Linux, the hardware was still bad enough no one wanted to use it including me.
• Tehanu ★★★★★ Ursula K. Le Guin
  A character-driven look at the lives of ordinary people in a world of magic, especially the women and children (and not a few men) caught underfoot when wizards, heroes and villains fight. And (of course) dragons.

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