Book finished

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest

This probably counts as my first steampunk read, since I don't really count the Girl Genius novelizations of the graphic novel.

I liked this pretty well, I'm alternating between 3 and 4 stars. It took me a long time to read but that's mainly because for the last month I've been not getting to bed until hours after my preferred bedtime and some days I can only read for 5 minutes before falling asleep.

I bought this from Amazon, but the formatting on the purchased copy was really poor, so I wound up reading a pirated copy which was much nicer. It's pretty poor when the proper commercial version is worse than the pirated one, but surprisingly I find that often. I've seen purchased copies of ebooks with everything from just very lackluster formatting and no graphics (the case with this one) to books that are obviously just quick OCR jobs with zero proofreading (I felt cheated paying for that one - especially since it was from a dead author so I wasn't even paying the creator).

I decided to read this because it was on my list anyway and it was last month's Sword and Laser book. I stopped listening to their podcast until I finished this, and it now appears that I'm a whole 'nother book behind, and I have other books I really want to get to before then so I may have to just permanently stop listening to the podcast, or just give up and take the spoilers. Or maybe only listen to the weeks when they're not discussing the book of the month.

The only thing that really bothered me about this book is that it's inconceivable to me that the people living inside the city haven't organized and killed off all the zombies. Seriously, there's no way that wouldn't happen.

Another broken spoke

I guess it's official, Giant has no idea how to build wheels.

This is on my Giant Seek 0, which I like pretty well otherwise.

270 miles, 2nd broken spoke. I don't know how long ago it broke, I was just doing my pre-work week mechanical check and found it.

(viewing from the drive side, proceeding clockwise from the valve)
The first broken spoke was #12
The second broken spoke is #8
both drive side, of course. Not a big deal with an IGH, there's just a plastic ring that snaps off to get spokes in and out.

My previous Giant bike broke 12 spokes in about 1200 miles, at which point I gave up and bought a double walled rim and some butted Wheelsmith spokes and built my own rear wheel. That was my first ever wheel build and it ran for 15,000 miles without even going out of true a millimeter.

Given this experience, when the first spoke broke on the new Giant, I just bought a whole 50 pack assuming that I was going to need them.