The way I browse is to look up a newish book I liked on Amazon, then search through the "Customers Also Bought" recommendations (NOT the sponsored list, mind you) and just keep going. That's how I discovered writers like Django Wexler and Brian McClellan.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 14:24 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 04:31 |
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Ornamented Death posted:The way I browse is to look up a newish book I liked on Amazon, then search through the "Customers Also Bought" recommendations (NOT the sponsored list, mind you) and just keep going. That's how I discovered writers like Django Wexler and Brian McClellan. This is an important tool, yes. I also follow Tor's Fiction Affliction, Barnes and Noble's Bookseller's Picks, io9's Bookshelf Injection and Black Gate's New Treasures and Future Treasures lists.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 14:51 |
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I just stopped caring about reading good books and just read anything that looks slightly interesting in genres I enjoy. But then, I have kindle unlimited as well so as long as I keep reading lovely books I'm not really losing any money other than the subscription.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 15:05 |
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Victorkm posted:as long as I keep reading lovely books I'm not really losing any money other than the subscription. As well as your limited time on Earth that you'll never get back.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 15:35 |
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Megazver posted:This is an important tool, yes. I also follow Tor's Fiction Affliction, Barnes and Noble's Bookseller's Picks, io9's Bookshelf Injection and Black Gate's New Treasures and Future Treasures lists. quote:The Complete Orsina—Ursula K. Le Guin (September 6, Library of America) I don't really know how I find out about cool new books to read. Random blogs I followed because they posted something interesting once and never stopped skimming, people on forums, Vox Day's enemies list. I just seem to accumulate piles of bookmarks in my "to read maybe someday" folder. Edit: There is a new Gor book coming out. He's averaged about one a year since 2008. 90s Cringe Rock fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Sep 20, 2016 |
# ? Sep 20, 2016 15:41 |
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chrisoya posted:I don't really know how I find out about cool new books to read. Random blogs I followed because they posted something interesting once and never stopped skimming, people on forums, Vox Day's enemies list. I just seem to accumulate piles of bookmarks in my "to read maybe someday" folder. "Anything Vox Day hates" tends to be a pretty good barometer of quality. The more he rants and fumes about it, the better it generally is.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 15:58 |
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A lot of people 'well I never bought a book just because it won some award' but a lot of the award shortlists are also good recommendations. Not...all, of course, and the Clarke and the Nebula have been better than the Hugo in recent years for er, reasons. The Locus recommended reading lists are also usually interesting. If one wants to sample an author, a lot of writers have short fiction online for free in various venues these days. Like others have mentioned, I get a lot of my recommendations from blogs and such. Authors who write fiction I enjoy often also recommend stuff I like. Strange Horizons and Tor.com do a lot of good reviewing. Scalzi's Big Idea posts are sometimes interesting, though I've had less time to read them lately, and his postings of new ARCs he's received actually lets me know of some things that are being released that I might have missed. Basically I feel immensely spoiled for choice in good fiction to read. I mostly find Goodreads useful for keeping track of stuff I have read (when I remember) rather than seeking out new things. The star ratings are nonsense, as mentioned. I mean, a lot of beloved classics have lower star ratings than self-published fluff, because more people read the classics and therefore have a wider spectrum of opinion than those who know what they're getting. Self-pub authors also pretty much have to solicit their fans to give them reviews to boost their profile on various sites, which again skews the process.
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 17:08 |
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I was browsing urban fantasy last night on amazon and I thought I miss clicked on Romance with all the cover art I was seeing. There also seems to be a lot of "Dresdin Files" clones. Are any of them any good?
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 22:23 |
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NiknudStunod posted:I was browsing urban fantasy last night on amazon and I thought I miss clicked on Romance with all the cover art I was seeing. There also seems to be a lot of "Dresdin Files" clones. Are any of them any good? Get you some Pax Arcana if you haven't checked that series out, that's good stuff. And generally speaking, if the cover has a model-looking dude with a clenched and burning fist, it's probably not good. (I think a ton of indies are going to the same cover designer, or just going to their cover people and saying "copy this other book," there have been a ton of angry-man-with-burny-hand covers lately.)
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# ? Sep 20, 2016 22:47 |
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NiknudStunod posted:I was browsing urban fantasy last night on amazon and I thought I miss clicked on Romance with all the cover art I was seeing. There also seems to be a lot of "Dresdin Files" clones. Are any of them any good? I'm reading the first Felix Castor novel by Mike Carey and I'm enjoying it. Carey had a decent run on the Hellblazer comic and there are similar elements between John Constantine and Castor, if you're familiar with that series.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 00:42 |
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Robot Wendigo posted:I'm reading the first Felix Castor novel by Mike Carey and I'm enjoying it. Carey had a decent run on the Hellblazer comic and there are similar elements between John Constantine and Castor, if you're familiar with that series. Carey had a decent run on Hellblazer and fan-loving-tastic run on Lucifer.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 01:13 |
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Funny enough I purchased the first 3 books in the castor series back in 2012 but don't remember reading them. I did pick up "Crimes against magic (The Hellequin chronicles book 1) last night and besides a few spelling issues it has been decent but not great. Enough for me to at least try the second book.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 01:44 |
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less laughter posted:As well as your limited time on Earth that you'll never get back. That's true but I am depressed so its not like I value that. In fantasy news, I'm reading a fun book where dungeon delving and heroing have driven the development of the world economy which is now on the edge of a collapse due to lack of loot in hoards compared to the expected value and a larger number of the so-called evil races becoming non-combatant paper carriers (NPCs) which exempts them from being eligible for heroes to kill for guild points as long as they are gainfully employed. Orconomics: A Satire The economic and Roleplaying game satire are pretty funny.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 05:29 |
chrisoya posted:I completely bounced off Willful Child. Did it get better as it goes on, or was I just missing something? This was a few pages back, but yes I thought it was excellent. In fact, I am a huge Douglas Adams fan and I found it every bit as funny as his books. I can see why some people might not think the same depending on their sense of humor though. Personally, I thought the captain was an incredibly hilarious character. There has to be a word for his type of personality/view on life, but I cannot think of it. I may be the only person who finds this passage funny, especially without context for the characters and the total absurdity of the events in the story, but I lost my poo poo at "Turdians" quote:But sir, there are some strange readings from behind our ship.” “Strange?” Hadrian went to his command chair, plucked away a few feathers, and then sat. “In what way?” The chicken looked up and tilted its head as it muttered, “I feel another episode coming on.” “Well, sir,” said Sin-Dour, studying her screens, “we are being followed by a small vessel, of indeterminate configuration. The propulsion system is very peculiar, as I am detecting trace elements of sulfur and methane.” “Rear view on main screen,” Hadrian commanded.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 07:21 |
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The Nightmare Stacks just felt like one big diversion. How long must we wait until the dead gods rip reality a new one and shower the world in chaos? I feel like the whole series has been building up to that and it's been great, but then we have these amusing but still a bit unsatisfying jaunts into vampire, superhero, and elf land. I mean I liked the story but let's be honest, we all are a bit overdue for some squamous, eldritch poo poo to go down.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 11:09 |
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The big thing in The Nightmare Stacks is the Laundry is now public knowledge, thanks to a gargantuan fuckup, and how does a British government deal with a situation like that? You'll get what you want in The Delirium Brief.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 11:19 |
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Neat, new Jeff Strand book came out. Cyclops Road. I love this guys work. He writes dialogue better than anyone I have ever read. Wolf Hunt is still one of my favorite books of all time.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 11:26 |
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DigitalRaven posted:The big thing in The Nightmare Stacks is the Laundry is now public knowledge, thanks to a gargantuan fuckup, and how does a British government deal with a situation like that? You'll get what you want in The Delirium Brief. Yep, the interesting spanner in the works had to be an event too big and devastating to possibly be kept under wraps, yet not big enough to be an actual existential threat. The elves were super-hosed from the beginning since their whole strategy was based on an impossible victory condition due to their lack of understanding of human society.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 11:51 |
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Rough Lobster posted:The Nightmare Stacks just felt like one big diversion. How long must we wait until the dead gods rip reality a new one and shower the world in chaos? I feel like the whole series has been building up to that and it's been great, but then we have these amusing but still a bit unsatisfying jaunts into vampire, superhero, and elf land. I mean I liked the story but let's be honest, we all are a bit overdue for some squamous, eldritch poo poo to go down. I still like the part where the Basilisk cameras go rogue and murder the poo poo out of a fantasy convention since the software can't distinguish between real pointy ears and fake ones.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 12:00 |
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Drifter posted:Carey had a decent run on Hellblazer and fan-loving-tastic run on Lucifer. He also put out that pretty good "The Last of Us"ish zombie book The Girl with All the Gifts.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 12:41 |
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Cardiac posted:I still like the part where the Basilisk cameras go rogue and murder the poo poo out of a fantasy convention since the software can't distinguish between real pointy ears and fake ones. Is it just me or did Pete and whichever one of Pinky and Brains it was take a massive lethal dose of radiation that had them bleeding from the orifices there toward the end? They didn't die on camera, but they were visibly radiation-sick. Unless magical elf healing magic can fix them, they is toast.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 21:52 |
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D-Pad posted:I may be the only person who finds this passage funny, especially without context for the characters and the total absurdity of the events in the story, but I lost my poo poo at "Turdians" In my head, this is Zapp Brannigan and Kif and now I am tempted to read this book just for that.
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# ? Sep 21, 2016 21:59 |
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I'm currently reading a book called Mechanical Failure by Joe Zieja, since we're talking about comedy milsci space books, and it reads more like Idiocracy more than Hitchhiker's Guide or Pratchett, and it's actually pretty funny. I'm a third of the way through and I'm looking forward to finishing it up tonight. Kinda lucky finding a fun, no-name author's work. Drifter fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Sep 21, 2016 |
# ? Sep 21, 2016 23:29 |
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NiknudStunod posted:I was browsing urban fantasy last night on amazon and I thought I miss clicked on Romance with all the cover art I was seeing. There also seems to be a lot of "Dresdin Files" clones. Are any of them any good? There's also the Daniel Faust series by Craig Schaefer, which is pretty great if you're looking for something with a somewhat darker (but not unrelentingly dark, that's for his high fantasy series) tone.
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# ? Sep 22, 2016 02:59 |
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If you guys haven't read California Bones by Greg Eekhout then you're missing out. Such a neat world.
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# ? Sep 22, 2016 04:25 |
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Death's End (Book three in the Three Body Trilogy) just came out in English a few days ago and I've now finished the series. My spoiler-free impressions of book 3: I liked this book about as much as book 2, which is quite a bit more than I liked book 1. I do think book 2 was slightly better though. There were a number of things that happened in this story that you almost have to view through a surreal filter (similar to many things in book 2) or it can just make you groan. Taking one look at the "timeline" in the front of the book, you're going to already get a sense of the time scales that are covered in this book. In book two, having Luo Ji constantly jumping through time via hibernation made sense, but in this one I didn't really buy Cheng Xin--and especially not 艾 AA as a sidekick--as protagonists. It makes sense in a narrative to just have the events of the book take place from a more "fixed" POV of someone from the "common era" (our time), and it worked for me in book 2 still. In book 3, the "common era" characters all over the place in important roles started to get to be a bit much for me. Book 3 and the whole trilogy still do a really nice job of doing the thing that a lot of good sci-fi books do, which is taking random physics ideas and building compelling narratives and mysteries around them. I think "truly great" sci-fi leans much further toward the human experience, and probably focuses deeper on one single idea than this trilogy does, but the whole idea of the "Dark Forest" is a pretty cool answer to the Fermi Paradox. I think some of the implications toward the end of book three are bad for the characterization and the narrative though, and the end of the book starts to feel more like an appendix than an actual story you still care about. The structure of the story--which you'll notice right away from chapter headings--helps a bit to alleviate this problem and tie into the ending while also foreshadowing it, but it's not quite enough to me. I'd have preferred a more human emotion ending and less "......and here's some more cool ideas I thought of!" Some of the ideas toward the end of the book were actually cool enough to have a whole trilogy based on them, but they were just kind of tossed into the end here after I didn't really care any more about the characters. I mentioned a lot of negative stuff but the whole trilogy is very good and 100% worth reading. I actually really dug the idea that interstellar warfare is what broke down physics and caused the speed of light to be what it is, and also that it's the reason that there are only three spacial dimensions. The 4d stuff that happened was pretty cool, but I don't think the big climax of the whole solar system getting flattened to 2d-space was very good. It dragged on too long, and even though it was written well enough, it didn't have the weight it should have. I don't think the stuff with Yu Tianming and the fairytales really justified their space either. The last 70% of the story or so could probably have stood to be tigther and really do something to make me care more about Cheng Xin while hinting at the idea of the laws of physics being used as weapons rather than basically expo-dumping it via the galactic human and Trisolaran plot-device robot who just happen to have figured it all out off screen.
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# ? Sep 22, 2016 07:29 |
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I'm reading "The Obelisk Gate", and read about Tonkee's family's collection of artifacts, including 'En', Seih's pet sun from "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms" Are there any other items like that which anyone else has noticed?
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# ? Sep 22, 2016 17:51 |
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muscles like this? posted:He also put out that pretty good "The Last of Us"ish zombie book The Girl with All the Gifts. Haven't read the book but I saw the film last week and the look of it is 100% Last of Us, but London. In a good way. And the zombies move like clickers too. I guess the inspiration was pretty obvious in the book too?
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# ? Sep 22, 2016 18:37 |
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angel opportunity posted:Death's End (Book three in the Three Body Trilogy) just came out in English a few days ago ] I adored the first one, the second i was close to setting it aside at about a quarter in when something suddenly changed and I couldn't put it down. I've only just finished the 2 short beginning chapters and I'm very annoyed I have to get back to work.
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# ? Sep 22, 2016 20:03 |
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Ceebees posted:E - You know what, i feel like i've said that before. So instead, how about i ask an actual question. I, personal taste, absolutely hated the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. The relevant threads seem to be a-flutter about The Fifth Season, so... is it different? I disliked the 100kK and enjoyed The Fifth Season very much, as well as the Dreamblood duology.
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# ? Sep 22, 2016 21:57 |
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So apparently Peter Watts is having some kind of a health emergency and the doctors are baffled, so he's reaching out to his fans to help with theories. Where's House when you need him?
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# ? Sep 22, 2016 22:38 |
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Megazver posted:So apparently Peter Watts is having some kind of a health emergency and the doctors are baffled, so he's reaching out to his fans to help with theories. Megazver posted:Where's House when you need him? I glad he's keeping a sense of humor in the comments: quote:Thanks everybody. This is really helpful. A lot of stuff in here I hadn’t considered, including the possibility that I could be dying of MS or ALS. This is what I get for being a optimist. Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Sep 22, 2016 |
# ? Sep 22, 2016 23:47 |
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Peter Watts and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Life
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# ? Sep 23, 2016 00:35 |
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Junkenstein posted:Haven't read the book but I saw the film last week and the look of it is 100% Last of Us, but London. In a good way. And the zombies move like clickers too. I guess the inspiration was pretty obvious in the book too? Yeah, pretty much. I'd assume the movie is kind of close to the book seeing as he wrote the movie too.
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# ? Sep 23, 2016 02:57 |
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FFS. Why will life not allow Peter Watts to write books?! This is absurd.
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# ? Sep 23, 2016 03:42 |
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What else has happened to him so far? The main ones I can think of: Get banned from ever entering the US again Get flesh eating bacteria on the leg Have your major tie-in book for a popular TV series get cancelled for a really loving stupid reason Get MS(?)
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# ? Sep 23, 2016 04:00 |
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Peter Watts is like the guy from the Futurama "Scary Door" bit with the dude's eyes falling out.
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# ? Sep 23, 2016 04:02 |
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Without sliding back to the previous discussion I still want to point out I'm watching a number of youtube videos by women reading "genre" and I'm still persuaded my view wasn't that wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2WS4Z5LsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqxaaMxJsrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC5IRl9vLOw Yes, it seems plausible to me a majority of the reading public might be female, and that today this includes and healthy amount of genre readers too. But no, I don't think they statistically read in equal amount to male readers traditional "sci-fi" or, like, "epic fantasy". They seem to be reading an equal amount, if not a majority of female writers that helps them empathizing and identifying, same as a guy might read traditional epic fantasy written by another guy. And they make inroads in what the genre used to represent and its canon. They don't simply read genre, they transform it into something better suited to their taste. And I'm not being judgmental about any of this. I'm just observing what they like to read and talk about without following any agenda, and while it all fits within "genre", there seems very little that fits in the traditional fantasy and sci-fi category as we use to know it in its male-dominated form. In the same way I'm not judgmental about myself having a mostly male library, I'm also not judgmental about the girl in the second video listing 10 or so of her favorite books, and notice they are all female writers. That's totally fine. But that also means I'm not noticing, at least at this level, any manifestation of sexism in the publishing industry. Only different audiences and marketing strategies.
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# ? Sep 23, 2016 10:44 |
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holy poo poo shut the gently caress UP
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# ? Sep 23, 2016 10:50 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 04:31 |
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You're like a markov generator of bad arguments. Go away.
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# ? Sep 23, 2016 11:32 |