I don’t care as long as they don’t take away NotePad. NotePad has useful features I’d hate to lose - such as stripping out all formatting, and being able to search/replace wildcard characters as themselves, rather than as wildcards.

There’s always Diablo 1.

But my favorite is Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, which was made by some of the people who created Fallout and has a LOT in common with it. It’s an open world, a combination of classic fantasy with elves, dwarves, and halflings with a rising steampunk technology that competes with magic. There are many schools of magic and technology, as well as social, stealth, and combat skills. The graphics are very crude by today’s standards, but the gameplay is outstanding.

When I walk along a street, I count the number of drivers I see using their phones. It’s been a consistent 50%. And the ones who aren’t on their phones tend to be elderly. So what’s surprising about an increase in pedestrian deaths?

I don’t know about deletions, but I requested my data for takeout more than two weeks ago and I still haven’t received it.

Yes, a LOT.

Those sociopaths have weighed down this sorry planet for far too long.

I did exactly that. And ever since then, I’ve been backing up my full uncompressed photographs onto several duplicate hard drives and flash drives. Plus my videos, of course. I really should set up a server so I could do all that automatically, but I don’t really know how and don’t have the energy to figure it out.

Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling is the story of a boy coming of age in colonial India. Kipling grew up in India himself, and the sheer richness of the many cultures that Kim experiences as he travels across India and up into the lower Himalayas with a Tibetan llama is mind-blowing. Meanwhile Kim is drawn into the “Great Game” of spying between the European powers. It’s a deeply moving and beautiful book. Best of all, you can download it for free in all the major ebook formats!

I was part of a group that left Goodreads when they sold us out to Amazon and Amazon started censoring reviews they didn’t like. We set up a community on Google Plus to research alternatives to Goodreads and secondarily, to Amazon itself.

I set up the spreadsheet we used to track our discoveries. It’s WAY out of date, but it’s still there - unlike Google Plus.

It didn’t exist back then, but BookWyrm would by far have been the best choice. It still needs some improvements, but it’s already outstanding.

I’m BobQuasit@bookwyrm.social there, by the way.

I will never trust Google for anything since they killed off Google Plus. Getting rid of “don’t be evil” as their corporate motto was a huge giveaway.

It was well before I turned one; I was still in a crib. It was dark, nighttime, and incredibly hot. Some sort of animal with glowing eyes stared at me from the floor.

I thought it was a dream, but decades later my parents confirmed that when I was a baby the thermostat had broken and we had a night where the temperature was 100°. As for the animal with glowing eyes, that was our cat.

That seems unnecessarily complicated! But I appreciate the info.

I find it strangely hard to care about the fate of a handful of multimillionaire tourists when hundreds of refugees died last week due to the indifference of the Greek authorities - and the media barely noticed.

“Good content”? You mean like the stuff that’s on Facebook now?

Yes, Infinity. Actually I used the official Reddit app until all of this hit the news. Then I deleted that app and switched to Infinity. When infinity goes, I’ll delete it and I’m done with Reddit except on an alt account on my desktop. And that will just be for correspondence.

Would different parts of the community be hosted on different instances, thereby spreading out the burden? Or would the entire community be mirrored to each of the hosting instances, thereby providing backup security?

I’ve actually been wondering about that. For example, what if an instance with a popular community went down or defederated from everyone? Would all the content of that community be lost to everyone else? I’m guessing that under those circumstances one or more new communities would be started to replace the “lost” community, although things could get complicated if there were more than one trying to replace the original - or if the original community refederated after the replacement communities developed.

That would be awkward in some cases. Say, if a non-Nazi ended up on a Nazi server by random chance.

I agree completely! And thanks for clearing up the disassociative identity disorder question, because I actually was wondering for a second. 😆

But if #1 is too hard, the ability to download all of your data from a login and possibly upload it to another account would be a good stopgap.

Dune is about as difficult a book as you are ever likely to encounter, unless you ever take up James Joyce’s Ulysses. But there are a huge number of great science fiction books out there that are much more accessible.

Frank Herbert’s short stories are much more readable, for example. And many of them are quite good.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 1 is a collection of classic short science fiction stories. It’s some of the greatest science fiction ever written, and definitely a great introduction to the golden age of the genre. Most of the authors represented in the book have published volumes of short stories themselves as well as novels, so this is a good place to find authors you like!

I can’t recommend the works of Cordwainer Smith strongly enough. The son of an American diplomat, he grew up in China. His writing style was greatly influenced by Chinese storytelling styles. He wrote science fiction that wasn’t like anything anyone else wrote, ever.

Many of his stories are in the public domain in Canada, and are available via FadedPage. The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith (1993) is a print collection of all of his short science fiction. Start with “Scanners Live In Vain”, one of his first and most famous stories. His one science fiction novel is also still in print: Norstrilia (1975). It’s a classic. Smith is not to be missed.

Larry Niven is definitely one of the foremost hard science fiction writers in the field, and quite possibly the best. His Tales of Known Space are outstanding. The series includes many novels as well as short stories. Ringworld (1970) is the best known, probably. The Ringworld is a classic Big Object, a ring a million miles wide and the diameter of Earth’s orbit encircling a star; it has living space equal to fifty million Earths. Earlier novels in the series include Protector (1973) and A Gift From Earth (1968). Niven’s short story collections are really excellent, too.

Robert Sheckley’s Store of Infinity (1960) was the first science fiction book I ever bought for myself. It was a very lucky find, because a better collection of dazzling short stories would be hard to imagine. It’s a great introduction to his work. Among the many wonderful and hysterically funny stories in this book is “The Prize of Peril”, which predicted reality TV (and its worst excesses) decades before it happened! Sheckley is arguably the O. Henry of science fiction.

Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series is a classic of humorous science fiction, featuring an interstellar criminal turned reluctant lawman.

The Retief series by Keith Laumer is a riotously funny science fiction parody of the diplomatic corps. Laumer also wrote the Bolo series about self-aware military tanks; it’s not a comedy, being much more about honor and loyalty. Yet oddly enough the two series have connected a couple of times.

James White’s Sector General is rare and special: a medically-themed science fiction series with an underlying sweetness. Sector General is a galactic hospital in space, staffed by an enormously broad selection of alien species that are brilliantly imagined and detailed. The hospital and its medical ships are frequently a place for first contact with new species. The stories themselves are often about interesting and unique new medical problems.

Jack Finney’s Time And Again (1970) is a very memorable time travel novel that includes images from the past. It damn near convinces you that time travel is possible, and that you could do it. I’d highly recommend it; it was on the New York Times bestseller list for a ridiculously long time. There’s a sequel, too.

The Past Through Tomorrow (1967) collects most of Robert A. Heinlein’s “Future History” stories, which are some of the greatest stories of the golden age of SF. Those stories broke science fiction out of the pulp magazine ghetto and made it mainstream.

H. G. Wells wasn’t just one of the founders of the genre of science fiction; his short stories were macabre, incredibly imaginative, and unforgettable. Project Gutenberg has all of his works, I believe, but Standard eBooks has a great collection of a lot of Wells’ short stories available free in all the major ebook formats. You can read the book online at the link, too.

Note: Please consider patronizing your local independent book shops instead of Amazon; they can order books for you that they don’t have in stock. Amazon has put a lot of great independent book shops out of business.

And of course there’s always your local library. If they don’t have a book, they may be able to get it for you via inter-library loan.

If you’d rather order direct online, Thriftbooks and Powell’s Books are good. You might also check libraries in your general area; most of them sell books at very low prices to raise funds. I’ve made some great finds at library book sales! For used books, Biblio.com, BetterWorldBooks.com, and Biblio.co.uk are independent book marketplaces that serve independent book shops - NOT Amazon.

Happy reading! 📖

P. S. - I’m not a bot. My son just said I sounded like a bot. 🫤

That sounds great!