Ha! I didn’t even notice that.

Starlink, Starship, Starliner… who can keep them straight?

/s

Jesus Christ, the astronauts aren’t stranded. The first manned flight of a new vehicle and there were some issues on the part that gets jettisoned and burned up, so they can’t inspect it afterwards. They’re trying to analyze it while they have it, and even with the leak they could be to there a month with no issue.

Boeing deserves the bad press they’re getting on the planes lately, but this is crap.

I remember getting out of bed, feeling my lower back was stiff, putting my hand on my hip and kind of stretching with a little groan, and realizing that was something I’d seen my dad do multiple times when I was little.

It’s not at all a surprise that some of the earliest MAGA alarmists were Holocaust survivors

Jesus, is every single Republican lawmaker a complete piece of shit these days? I’ve often felt like the party that is all about tax cuts for the rich and making sure no one gets a handout attracts a disproportionate number of terrible human beings, but once upon a time I felt like a lot of them were decent, wrong-headed people. Now I’m not sure I can name a single Republican who seems like a decent human being. Maybe Liz Chaney is mostly there? So many are like cartoon villains.

I’m old - there’s just so much that has and hasn’t happened…

I didn’t know what they were and had to look it up

The Bell Riots were an event that took place in San Francisco on Earth in September 2024. They led to the end of the Sanctuary Districts and marked the real beginning of Humans working to find a lasting solution that would resolve social problems. This would set humanity on the path to founding the United Federation of Planets.

Hey, the date is coming up.

I got around to reading 17776 today. That was fun, thanks for the recommendation!

No, three if you’re typing like they did

Edit: tipping, not typing, but I’ll leave it

I loved that game. Might be interesting to try again. Man, Myst seemed so revolutionary at the time and I sure loved the concept of there being no instructions, you’re just plunked down in a world and figure out that there’s stuff going on.

I’m not an expert, but it’s a very complex global system with moisture in the atmosphere sometimes falling as rain/snow, collecting in rivers and lakes, going into ground water/aquifers, flowing into the oceans, and sometimes just staying as moist air. If one area isn’t getting it’s usual rainfall, quite often another area is getting more, but it can also be that the moisture is just in other parts of that complex system. A lot is driven by high- and low-pressure systems, air temperature, water temperature, etc.

In my area of southern California, we’ve had some major, extended droughts. But the rising temperature of the Pacific has caused the air to hold more moisture, and we’ve also had some “atmospheric river” storms that drop insane amounts of rain. So even though we get an average of 13 inches of rain a year, we got more than 13 inches in just February, and we’re up to almost 31 inches for the season. It wouldn’t be surprising if we didn’t get anymore until late in the year though.

Some of that rain went into snowpack, some into reservoirs, some into ground water, but we’re close to the coast and all of it will go back to the ocean. Did we get rain that would normally have gone elsewhere, or was it rain that wouldn’t normally have formed? I think it’s likely hard to say, but maybe there are meteorologists or others who know more reading this.

Well that’s… really interesting. I love it when people experiment with new ways of telling a story. That might move this up much higher on my list. Thanks for the link.

I’ve added the Butler books to my list.

Some of these are on the list of books I’ve read in the last year that I posted recently, in case those notes are helpful at all (some I’ve read earlier, and don’t have notes like this). Here’s what I’ve read since that post, which includes some overlap with this list, along with my notes, just for what it’s worth:

Rule 34, Stross Somewhat of a sequel to Halting State, taking place a few years later. Spammers are being killed around the world, many at the same time. Story mostly follows a detective on the case, a psychopath involved, and a flunky who is unwittingly part of things. Interesting, though as with Halting State, the use of second person seems weird.

Consider Phlebas, Banks Both sides in a war raging across the galaxy are trying to get to an advanced artificial intelligence. Mostly told from the POV of a human variant who can change appearance. Banks’s first SF novel - pretty good though I didn’t find the main character especially likable.

The Fifth Season, Jemison Fantasy - first book in the Broken Earth trilogy. Set in an earth where all the land is one big continent that goes through periods of big seismic/volcanic activity such that there’s well-followed lore about how to get through them. There are “orogenes" who have a power to control the seismic activity to varying extents. The story alternates from the perspective of three female orogenes struggling with their respective situations. Very well crafted and structured. Good.

Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro This is an odd book. It’s very slow paced, and not much actually happens. I think it’s best to read it without knowing anything at all, so I’m going to avoid spoilers. It’s a story told first person by a woman who attended a special boarding school. For a quarter of the book, there are barely even hints that there’s anything unusual going on. We don’t get an understanding of it until halfway, and even then not fully. I feel like this might have been better as a novella. That said, it was highly regarded and even made into a movie (that I never saw). The premise is really interesting, and the story moving, but for half the book we’re just reading a woman reminiscing on her school days.

Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory, Wells A short story in the Murderbot series, taking place between Exit Strategy and Fugitive Telemetry (but published well after). This one from the point of view of Dr. Mensah and the after effects of the ordeal in Exit Strategy. Would be good to read in between those books.

The Saint of Bright Doors, CHANDRASEKERA A boy is raised by his mother to kill his father (and others). He has no shadow, and has to work to keep from floating off the ground. He grows up and moves to a big, strange city to escape his mother’s vision for him, but he has a strange destiny. An odd fantasy story, with odd bits of magic, odd characters, and an odd arc. Enjoyable.

The Player of Games, Banks Second in the Culture Wars series, set in the same universe as Consider Phlebas, but otherwise unrelated. A better book than the first. A man who is somewhat famous for his prowess at playing all sorts of games is recruited to go to a recently discovered empire that has a complicated game that’s central to its culture and structure. Banks does well at creating multidimensional characters, and the story is compelling. The main characters in this book and in Phlebas seem to lack truly close relationships, which is odd.

Which sounds most interesting to you?

I’ve read ten of the twenty one. The fact that it was so different than these types of lists tend to be, without being a bunch of fan fiction or whatever, is why I posted it. Just seemed like an interesting list. Of the ones I’ve read, I didn’t dislike any of them, though there are some I certainly wouldn’t have put on an all-time greats list myself.

Flatland is worth reading, though admittedly it was decades ago that I read it (it may even have been high school). It’s clever; written in the late 1800s as a commentary on Victorian society and social classes. It’s from the POV of characters in a 2D universe, with forays about 1D and 3D universes. As a side note, it has a bit about a potential 4D universe, and it was written before Einstein’s relativity theory got people talking about higher dimensions. As I recall, it’s fairly short.

I couldn’t decide if I wanted to add that one to my reading list or not. I hadn’t heard of it before, and I’m not at all a sports guy, but it sounds interesting.

I’ve read quite a number of the books on the list, but hadn’t read that one, so I put it on my list.

I haven’t yet read Parable of the Sower, but I read Never Let Me Go recently. This is what I wrote about it in my notes to myself (no spoilers - certainly less than this article):

This is an odd book. It’s very slow paced, and not much actually happens. I think it’s best to read it without knowing anything at all, so I’m going to avoid spoilers. It’s a story told first person by a woman who attended a special boarding school. For a quarter of the book, there are barely even hints that there’s anything unusual going on. We don’t get an understanding of it until halfway, and even then not fully. I feel like this might have been better as a novella. That said, it was highly regarded and even made into a movie (that I never saw). The premise is really interesting, and the story moving, but for half the book we’re just reading a woman reminiscing on her school days.

I did enjoy it, but it’s not one of those books that I’d comfortably recommend to anyone and everyone. It depends on the kinds of things you like and don’t like.

Thanks for doing that