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Links That Burn - New Website

I've made a new website! Links That Burn is a directory of useful, fun, and/or informative websites. It's available in English and German, and will be available in other languages as I am able to find translators. ----- From the About page: The internet used to be a bunch of links to other places, with cool stuff on each website. Then we spent a couple of decades with search engines that worked, and people stopped needing to know where to find each niche website they were going to only use a couple of times a year. Now things are broken again, and people often don't know where those sites are, or are trying to see if generative AI will do it instead. The truth is, it won't work, or it'll be worse, and either way -- please don't use the plagiarism machine.  Links that Burn is a catalog of niche websites that do one or two things, do them very well, and are easy to use. They're free, they don't make you sign in anywhere to use them, and if they have a pai...

Visser by K. A. Applegate

Visser by K. A. Applegate has to balance two competing ideas: Hatred for a main enemy of the Animorphs, with some sympathy for her. The explanations are moving and the story is very good but we are not endeared to her. It also sets up the history of the Yeerk invasion on Earth.

It's a very good explanation of how we arrived at this point, but even Visser One's explanation of her own actions are not enough to make her host care about her. Parts of it are things that we might accept from a human as reasons for her actions, but if they were really her motiviation then it wouldn't have made sense for her to call the Yeerk Empire to Earth in the first place. There's something interesting there, both in how the cognitive dissonance is portrayed, and in how each step makes sense with the steps before and after. Even with this, the path of her actions meanders wildly between something understandable to (and even approved of by) her fellow Yeerks, and something that is very, very, human.

A blue centaur-like alien (and Andalite) stands in front of a field of stars

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