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Use an E-reader with E-Ink at least.
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Feb 26, 2024 16:19
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yeah my kindle is always on airplane mode, the only "screen" feature I use is the clock. Ironically this made it harder to stay off screens while I was reading real paperbacks recently, since I was checking my phone occasionally and having to stop myself from looking at anything but the time
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Feb 26, 2024 16:26
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as long as you don't use the backlight an e-ink screen is just as good as paper
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Feb 26, 2024 16:36
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AARD VARKMAN posted:yeah my kindle is always on airplane mode, the only "screen" feature I use is the clock. Buy a fun little watch that's your exclusive Reading Time Watch.
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Feb 26, 2024 16:53
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I set nightmode on my ipad to reduce blue light and turn on “do not disturb” as well as using dark mode which doesn’t seem to harm my sleep hygiene too bad. Also when the screen goes orange it means time to wind up whatever I was doing and read.AARD VARKMAN posted:yeah my kindle is always on airplane mode, the only "screen" feature I use is the clock. The thing I really miss most when reading paperbacks is being able to look up words just by pressing my finger on them E. this was probably the better way to read BotNS though, cause trying to look everything up woulda been too tempting and it woulda distracted me too much from the story, rather than just letting the unusual words simply vibe Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Feb 26, 2024 |
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Feb 26, 2024 17:21
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zoux posted:I had a huuuuuge bookshelf when I moved probably 15 years ago, I sold them all to Half-Price books and have been 100% digital since. I haven't cracked a paper book in a decade. Though the sleep hygiene strategy of "stay off screens, read a book" is impossible to me now. An e-reader kindle solves that problem, the screen is like reading a book instead of staring at a phone/tv/computer. I put my phone on the charger across the room and lay in bed with a kindle and read for at least 30 minutes before bed.
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Feb 26, 2024 17:28
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Oh dear...Brian Stableford has passed away. https://twitter.com/john_clute/status/1762106061631189310
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Feb 26, 2024 19:22
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Marshal Radisic posted:Oh dear...Brian Stableford has passed away. 
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Feb 26, 2024 19:48
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stableford isn't one i read a lot of, al;though i remember in high school some of my mates who were obsessed with Vampire: The Masquerade (the white wolf one) loving The Empire of Fear where attila the hun and richard the lion heart are all imortal vampires. I was a nerd who played sport and sneaking out to raves, they were pasty goths who wanted to be addressed by their vampire names. i never did get around to reading it, or playing VtM either.
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Feb 26, 2024 21:23
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I appreciate the Lord making me a lil tall so the big pants I wear can easily fit my Kindle in one of the pockets. If I ever get bored? Bam, reading time.
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Feb 26, 2024 21:52
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Mort (Discworld #4) by Terry Pratchett - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W967UQ/ Defiance (Foreigner #22) by CJ Cherryh - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSKLB97H/ Ashes of the Sun (Burningblade and Silvereye #1) by Django Wexler - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZZ25BCX/
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Feb 26, 2024 23:31
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Just finished the collection of Viriconium stories by M. John Harrison. The first one (The Pastel City) was just a delightful old school fantasy adventure, I particularly liked the dwarf character with his Warhammer 40k dreadnought armor. Also a big fan of settings that involve people digging up weird old technology left behind by lost civilizations. The rest of the stories were fun too, but felt more like Fear & Loathing in Viriconium where you follow characters around while they get up to hijinks and misadventures interspersed with absurdist humor. The dude can write though, good excuse to reread Light I suppose.
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Feb 26, 2024 23:31
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Finished Exordia, what an awesome ride. I went looking on Google for any fanart (would love to see takes on Blackbird) but this caught my eye instead. The final gutpunch. (page one Exordia spoilers)  It might be somebody's profile pic, a bunch of other unrelated images that show up from Goodreads are, although I couldn't find it in a quick scroll through the reviews. But why attribute to coincidence that which is adequately explained by malice?
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Feb 27, 2024 04:04
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Ahahahaha! That was my review of Exordia on Goodreads. I’m glad someone appreciated the turtle.
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Feb 27, 2024 05:36
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Mort is among the best Pratchetts, if you're one of the 1.5 people in this thread who doesn't read Pratchett, it's as good place as any to start.
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Feb 27, 2024 05:53
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Mort is among the best Pratchetts, if you're one of the 1.5 people in this thread who doesn't read Pratchett, it's as good place as any to start. It isn't among the very best, but it's a very good book and it's the point where Pratchett began coming into his style. It should be read.
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Feb 27, 2024 10:25
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pradmer posted:
From the Amazon summary: posted:
If you told me this was book four’s synopsis I don’t think I’d have any reason to doubt it. I enjoyed the however many books I read in the series, but even at book five or six when I stopped the overall plot beats were getting pretty repetitive. It’s honestly amazing that Cherryh has been able to continue the series as she has given the fickle attention span of genre fiction readers. Not my cup of tea (tea ceremonies being mandatory), but clearly there’s a niche there. Does it morph into something more like Becky Chambers where it’s mostly comfort food with familiar/well characterized people dealing with low stakes problems?
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Feb 27, 2024 15:27
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The third book is not holding my attention like the second one did. There's like some kind of pov style change that I can't put my finger on but don't like. It feels slow and boring.
thotsky fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Feb 27, 2024 |
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Feb 27, 2024 15:33
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Velius posted:If you told me this was book four’s synopsis I don’t think I’d have any reason to doubt it. I enjoyed the however many books I read in the series, but even at book five or six when I stopped the overall plot beats were getting pretty repetitive. It’s honestly amazing that Cherryh has been able to continue the series as she has given the fickle attention span of genre fiction readers. Not my cup of tea (tea ceremonies being mandatory), but clearly there’s a niche there. Does it morph into something more like Becky Chambers where it’s mostly comfort food with familiar/well characterized people dealing with low stakes problems? Yes. Books 1-6 are the usual frantic, tense Cherryh with high stakes and suffering pov dude, and while the rest of the books don't instantly become chill, they morph that way. 7-onwards go between cozy small scale stuff to larger stakes, but are overall way more relaxed. I read them as comfort food. (Compare book 1 "bren might be tea poisoned in high stakes negotiations" vs book.... 8? 9? "oh no the pet monkey has escaped while new pov dude was decorating his apartment") And I mean it: read 1-6, get off 7+ if you don't like what it's doing as it's incredibly "Cherryh wants to explore her setting in lavish detail"
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Feb 27, 2024 16:21
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To elaborate on this before I walk my dog: I don't mean in the "lol wacky a monkey" sense, I mean in the sense that Cherryh is, in her later years, writing the most indulgent form of fiction: the kind where you get to explore every nook and cranny of a world you've made. She did this in short form with Chanur's Legacy, the comedy-adventure sequel to the tense as hell trilogy. She did this in extended form with the Fortress series, where books 2-onwards are "so what now?" after the final battle, complete with a "x years later epilogue" thing at the end. Foreigner slows way the hell down, focuses on the minutiae of the days and minutes around an event, and you're reading it endlessly charmed because Bren is navigating the regional differences between atevi while trying to be on a boat holiday, and around him the Big Plot Beats are continuing at a realistic pace, which is to say slow as hell at this speed. If Downbelow Station was ruthlessly cut so that nothing relevant was on the table, Foreigner is the deepest opposite of that, where nothing is cut, you will learn how atevi braid their hair, drink some tea and chill. It's fantastic! I want her to write a dozen more of these! I.... still wish in my heart of hearts that she had done this to the Chanur setting instead as I find it more interesting, but fuckit, I love the atevi.
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Feb 27, 2024 16:31
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I still can't read a new book yet. But I looked back and I'm very proud that my first Exordia highlight was "I am not going to be part of this story you’re telling each other."
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Feb 27, 2024 17:52
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StrixNebulosa posted:If Downbelow Station was ruthlessly cut so that nothing relevant was on the table, Foreigner is the deepest opposite of that, where nothing is cut, you will learn how atevi braid their hair, drink some tea and chill. It's fantastic! I want her to write a dozen more of these! I.... still wish in my heart of hearts that she had done this to the Chanur setting instead as I find it more interesting, but fuckit, I love the atevi. Extremely the same. Also, while Foreigner mellows out and slows down a lot after the second trilogy, it's not like it's spinning its wheels either; you've got the atevi coup and temporary ousting of Tabini, civil war in the Assassin's Guild, a double handful of political fallout from those things, the habitation crisis on the station, second contact with the Kyo, the first steps towards resumed contact with Earth Company, and, my personal favourite, Bren finally gets to throw down with the Committee on Linguistics back on Mospheira.
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Feb 27, 2024 21:00
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gently caress yeah I bet they prepare for and conduct some hardcore meetings about that last one
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Feb 27, 2024 21:16
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sebmojo posted:gently caress yeah I bet they prepare for and conduct some hardcore meetings about that last one They absolutely do and I am 100% here for it.
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Feb 27, 2024 22:04
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ToxicFrog posted:second contact with the Kyo, the first steps towards resumed contact with Earth Company oh yeah, this was the biggest shock in the series
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Feb 27, 2024 22:42
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Doktor Avalanche posted:oh yeah, this was the biggest shock in the series I'll admit that, as much as I love her books and specifically the Foreigner series, I'd been flagging in my enthusiasm for them after about eighteen years. Finding out that the alien race the Kyo were fighting on the far side of their territory was Earth yanked me right back in.
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Feb 28, 2024 01:03
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Are the Baru Cormorant books hopelessly bleak, or just regular bleak? I can handle bleakness, I like Malazan for example, but I have my limits at stuff like R. Scott Bakker (I got through the first book, liked it, but realized that was my limit and it wasn't gonna get any better). I feel a lot of the buzz around it makes it feel miserable to read, but that may just be me not knowing.
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Feb 28, 2024 02:10
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I would say they are hopefully bleak, though Baru does go through points where she loses sight of that. There's nothing as graphically brutal as the harsher parts of Malazan.
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Feb 28, 2024 02:54
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Most of the stuff people find the queasiest is stuff America has done in the twentieth century. I don't know if that makes it better or worse though.
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Feb 28, 2024 02:57
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General Battuta posted:Most of the stuff people find the queasiest is stuff America has done in the twentieth century. I don't know if that makes it better or worse though. Worse, absolutely worse. I honestly have been unable to read Baru due to how uh, relevantly upsetting it is. (This is not a mark against the trilogy, just that I am easily queased)
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Feb 28, 2024 02:59
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Hiro Protagonist posted:Are the Baru Cormorant books hopelessly bleak, or just regular bleak? I can handle bleakness, I like Malazan for example, but I have my limits at stuff like R. Scott Bakker (I got through the first book, liked it, but realized that was my limit and it wasn't gonna get any better). I feel a lot of the buzz around it makes it feel miserable to read, but that may just be me not knowing. Regular bleak, with a leavening of hope, usually crushed but always returning like cancer.
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Feb 28, 2024 03:35
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I wouldn't call the Baru books bleak but I think my barometer for darkness/bleakness etc. is calibrated wrong. 
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Feb 28, 2024 08:04
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I have only read the first one, but I would definitely call the setting bleak. It's a very bad place to live E: by the way, were they meant to be a series from the beginning? or was the first book meant to be a standalone story Yaoi Gagarin fucked around with this message at 09:49 on Feb 28, 2024 |
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Feb 28, 2024 09:45
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:barumeter
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Feb 28, 2024 13:00
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I wouldn't call the Baru books bleak but I think my barometer for darkness/bleakness etc. is calibrated wrong. I come to Baru Cormorant, not to praise her.
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Feb 28, 2024 13:17
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Yaoi Gagarin posted:I have only read the first one, but I would definitely call the setting bleak. It's a very bad place to live I always push back on this because there's this implication that saying "some people get it really bad and they want to change that" is bleakness. It's not bleak that colonialism disfigured the world. It's just true. Bleakness would be Baru being just fine with it, or completely resigned to it, or defying it and being destroyed utterly. Like 'it's a very bad place to live' is really dependent on who you are. It's a great place to live if you're part of the colonial core! (like most of us) It's not a great place to live if you're an islander girl targeted by the residential school system. So the motion to say "oh, it's so bleak, so terrible" is really saying "oh, the lives of these particular subaltern people, so bleak, so terrible." And implicit in that is the idea that their stories have been rendered untellable and discomforting and even morally impure by the colonial process—colonialism did bad things, so the colonized are now bad to read about. A story about some gifted girl in Falcrest doing cozy accounting while oblivious to the crimes of her government and corporation would not be 'bleak' even though it's in the same world. So what's really bleak? The fact that Baru confronts some awful poo poo? Or the fact that a story which completely ignores all that awful poo poo would be some cozy competence porn no one would ever call bleak, despite living in the same world? Jedit posted:I come to Baru Cormorant, not to praise her. ??????
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Feb 28, 2024 14:35
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General Battuta posted:?????? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends,_Romans,_countrymen,_lend_me_your_ears
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Feb 28, 2024 14:37
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Yes, just—
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Feb 28, 2024 14:42
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I got the reference but that sentence can be read in an extremely unfortunate way
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Feb 28, 2024 14:43
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I finished Exordia. I just loved the whole thing. Just loving loved it. I would love a sequel, it sucks to be pinioned.
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Feb 28, 2024 14:54
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