Found something for my Hugo ballot

Alastair Reynolds has heretofore been the author I read to tide me over between Peter F. Hamilton releases. Reynolds is best known for writing ginormous space operas, like Hamilton, but which are not, in my opinion, quite as good as Hamilton's.

Eversion, though, is cosmic horror and considerably shorter than most of Reynolds's novels. And it is very, very good. Good enough that I'm planning to put it on my Hugo ballot next year.

Unfortunately, it's also the sort of book where one can't enthuse about it in any detail without causing spoilers. So I'll have to leave it at that.

11 months of Chinese to go

I am oscillating between "Oh no! Less than a year!" and "I started with about 20 months to go, so I've still used less than half of my time!".

I am continuing to use both Duolingo and HelloChinese and have hit the point where they're having differences about vocabulary and grammar. Minor ones so far, probably no impediment to making myself understood, but I wonder if they're working from different regional dialects, or one is more about formally correct language and one is more about capturing how people are more likely to actually talk.

This might be answered if I can start understanding actual spoken Chinese. Not having been able to get any specific recommendations, I finally just typed "科幻" (science fiction) into YouTube and started selecting videos at random. As I expected, I can't make any sense of the narrations yet. But supposedly it will help.

One thing that is starting to make a difference is practicing speaking with HelloChinese. Now that I've been doing that for a couple months, I'm finding it getting easier to form unprompted sentences when I'm out for a walk and trying to work in a little practice describing what I see to myself.

I've also started to notice that when watching the ending credits of anime, my eyes have started being drawn more to the kanji, trying to decipher them.