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Blindsight was really good but incredibly loving depressing
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Dec 22, 2017 23:23
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 10:02 |
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Reading Road to disunion by William Freehling, about the run-up to the civil war? It's super long and dense but there's some cool bits in there quote:In mid-1845 (Cassius) Clay (Kentuckian abolitionist) crammed the Lexington True American's office with heavier artillery... two four-pound cannon, sundry rifles and lances, and a keg of powder quote:On June 15 at Foxtown, Clay an one Squire Turner, a slaveholder, meet in open debate. Turner treated the crowd to a reading of Clay's inflammatory 1845 True American issue, calling for lower-class revolt. When Clay Denise he was Jacobinical, Cyrus Turner, Squire's son,branded Cassiusa liar and smashed him in the face. quote:(Clay) had at least, he wrote, kept himself off "that long list of tame victims who have been murdered in the South for excercising the liberty of speech" . Slavery, he dclared, "can no more live without the pistol and the Bowie knife than the body without the soul" ncaf
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Dec 24, 2017 02:03
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Epic High Five posted:Echopraxia is pretty great so far, I look forward to following the adventures of a vampire who isn't wholly or partially just a puppet of the ship because human psychology would trust a killer before it trusted a machine. Not quite far enough in yet to render judgement on whether or not people who believe this was a huge letdown from the first one are correct or dumb or not. pls trip report i also just read eifelheim, another first contact story where aliens crashland in fourteenth-century germany. it's probably too catholic to be really cspammy (EHF iirc you didn't like canticle for liebowitz which is a Wrong and Bad opinion but it means you probably wont like it) but its got some good stuff with aliens trying to google translate post-einsteinian physics to guys just figuring out maybe aristotle was wrong about physics
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Dec 31, 2017 19:02
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its about a near-apocalyptic asteroid hit on earth; iirc wasnt it written by slightly nuts libertarians?
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Jan 5, 2018 19:20
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nathan robinson had basically the same take https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/01/notionally-true
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Jan 24, 2018 06:26
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uphold old major thought
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Apr 6, 2018 05:37
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reading wages of destruction rn, up to mid 30s. interesting thing is how it fits with the marxist analysis of fascism as the last defense of capitalism: the book seems to argue that the causation is backwards- fascism rose separately and then the capitalists threw in with it because hey, better them than the commies
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Apr 13, 2018 16:31
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yeah plus there's the whole impersonal forces of historical materialism thing, but it's one of those things where the simplified view is taken by some of its adherents. e: also it seems more like the nazis weren't co-opted by business but that business were collaborators if you see the difference favorite bit of that chapter is how ig farben of zyklon b fame came to ally with the nazis: they'd blown a bunch of money on a syntheic oil scheme right before the texas oil rush, and decided the best way to recoup their losses was to buddy up to hitler on the grounds that he'd raise tariffs on imported oil
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Apr 13, 2018 16:53
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Helsing posted:I've had this one on my shelf for years, might have to finally get around to reading it based on this recommendation. its surprisingly readable, though it does require a little bit of economic theory
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Apr 24, 2018 06:21
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catching up on a bunch of scifi over summer break. read altered carbon which was kinda cool and very eat the rich. now reading book of the new sun and i have no clue whats happening
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May 24, 2018 00:16
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SKULL.GIF posted:if you want 'eat the rich' progress through the trilogy onto the third book, "woken furies" which imo is my favorite, though it's much more character-centric than the other two books probably gonna check it out after botns, either that or china mieville's the city & the city
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May 24, 2018 04:45
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also as a catholic it kinda bugged me that i dont see the problem spinning up murder victims in a synth, but i get that's not the point
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May 24, 2018 04:46
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SKULL.GIF posted:was raised lutheran and currently very atheist but surely a soul going to join god being forcibly brought back to speak for the dead would be viewed as ripping it away from its destiny, no? and even if you don't view it as such and believe that you can't forcibly hold the soul onto a material form, holding a facsimile of the soul and claiming that it can speak for the person's bodily form and experience would be itself kinda idolatric/blasphemous right? well the idea is that the soul is already dead and you're just making a robot think it's a person (a consciousnesses that thinks it's dead would be a cool scene, like the bit in blindsight where bates' brain gets fried and she starts thinking she doesn't exist); kinda ghoulish but acceptable in extraordinary circumstances- also they mention that they can just pluck memories out of a stack so why do you even need to spin them up? still he was trying to make a point about religion as a force of reaction and even as a religious person i cant entirely disagree.
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May 24, 2018 04:52
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gave up on trying to figure out what gene wolfe is writing about (ill come back to it later) and read china mieville's the city and the city, which was pretty good
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Jun 10, 2018 19:03
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Epic High Five posted:Working through Abaddon's Gate and lmao, how is there still 250 pages left, it's been loving nonstop the whole time im watching the show, which is up to that book, and also reading solaris at the same time
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Jun 20, 2018 05:15
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couldn't find any dorothy day at the library so i got richard morgan instead. same thing, right?
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Aug 1, 2018 18:04
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finished woken furies. is harlans' world a deliberate reference to the harlan county war?
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Aug 16, 2018 00:00
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Epic High Five posted:almost done with The Dark Forest, followup to The Three Body Problem, and it's been fun and entertaining but the twist at the end was insanely obvious and a lot of the twists were as well Would u reccommend those books because I know someone tjat really likes them but the video game premise looked kinda dumb
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Aug 20, 2018 02:59
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Should I finish peridido street station or puck up the general in his labyrinth
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Aug 26, 2018 06:11
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Its OK, I wouldn't call it bad but I have a bad feeling its not really anytging listeners don't know and it might be a little too injokey for normal people. E:getfiscal is pretty much on the money
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Aug 27, 2018 22:42
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The authors kinda conservative but I liked Eifelheim about a spaceship crashing in fourteenth century Germany and the medieval villagers trying to figure out what to do with them
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Aug 29, 2018 13:44
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Also when I say the author is conservative and you look at the title dont worry its not the Michael Flynn you're thinking of
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Aug 29, 2018 13:51
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stay safe sky-watching ghost
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Aug 31, 2018 16:58
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just finished reading the general in his labyrinth about the death of simon bolivar, it requires a passing knowledge of bolivar's career but it was pretty good. starting the three body problem, decent although i have an irrational hate of videogames as plot device
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Sep 26, 2018 02:49
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You are gonna trick me into watching an anime. And yeah its generally pretty good, paradoxically it kinda makes me wanna check out player of games next
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Sep 26, 2018 02:53
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the dang bible
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Oct 15, 2018 14:43
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I finished three body problem, the writing and pacing were weird (Idk if its translation). Was gonna read the sequels on the plane for fall break but I forgot the second one lol. Did read seeing like a state which was prerty interesting
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Oct 15, 2018 14:46
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Anyone read Neuromancer? Does it hold up?
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Dec 16, 2018 06:36
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finished neuromancer. a lot of the setting details are obviously old hat by now and its got a bit of the ol cyberpunk exploitation poo poo (although i read richard morgan who's way worse so can't throw stones) but its still pretty good overall. trying to decide what to get out of the library next, might actually give dune a shot E also I now get @turing_police's username StashAugustine has issued a correction as of 21:05 on Dec 17, 2018 |
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Dec 17, 2018 19:56
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ya the dispossessed rules. tangentially the bit at the end always make me lol a little at the line in the guilliotine "we got hella people, they got helicopters."
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Dec 18, 2018 02:20
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ooh yeah ive been meaning to read man in the high castle. should i get that, dune, or another gibson?
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Dec 18, 2018 22:18
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i mostly remember the war nerd fascist sci fi episode where dolan raves about it
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Dec 18, 2018 22:30
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crossposting from book barn thread: neuromancer was okay, liked it overall, still on a cyberpunk kick so i checked out the sequel count zero and it loving rocks. really great thriller and it goes into the eldritch horror aspects of cyberpunk internet. (also i couldn't help laughing a little whenever i heard anyone mention a fax or cassette tape)
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Dec 20, 2018 07:13
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finished man in the high castle. pretty good, too bad dick never wrote a sequel. is the tv show worth checking out?
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Dec 22, 2018 21:31
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the althist stuff and the stuff examining the effects of conquest and colonialism from defeated america were cool, and then it has a kinda neat thing hinting at alternate reality, and then it ends and he never worked up the effort to write a sequel Idia posted:Just the first 2 seasons, but it veers into a different direction than from the story. so it gets bad later? pity
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Dec 22, 2018 22:12
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Road to Disunion about antebellum southern politics is the book that made me realize why people wanted guilliotines
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Jan 7, 2019 02:30
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3bp always has weird stilted writing and if you're actually a Maoist you probably wont like it although the lady whose dad was killed gets so angry at communism she basically becomes a supervillian. It does have some interesting ideas so if say put up with it a bit longer
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Jan 11, 2019 22:23
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Epic High Five posted:It's gonna have as Asimovian ending where they get a confession to a murder but then just never do anything to the murderer because they're good folk and really the victim was a jerk If u think about it the financial crisis was basically the mudrer on tje orient express
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Feb 6, 2019 15:44
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I started reading Pattern Recognition and it's a book about supermechagodzilla posts
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Feb 17, 2019 21:03
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 10:02 |
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A Colder War owns yeah
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Feb 17, 2019 23:47
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