AFK BRB Chocolate @ AFKBRBChocolate @lemmy.world

Yet another refugee who washed up on the shore after the great Reddit disas

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I was surprised at how little I liked it given the hype.

I'd love to hear what you think, I enjoyed both quite a lot.

If you end up searching online for that kind of things, "hard science fiction" is the phrase that's usually used for it.

A lot of good recommendations here. Some endorsements and other recommendations:

• Project Hail Mary by Weir is a no brainer choice if you liked The Marian. He gets the science right.
• Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky is amazing, and the first of a trilogy, so more to read.
• The whole Expanse series, by James Corey is good and he does a good job with the science, especially the celestial mechanics.
• The Uplift series (starting with Sundiver) by David Brin is great, and Brin is will known for hard SF. It's from the 80s.
• Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, is great and the first of a series as well.
• Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress, is great, with a good science background, though it's more genetics than engineering. Really cool story though.
• I also agree with the recommendation on Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross. Also the first of a loose series.

On the flip side, I really didn't care for Three Body Problem, and though the Bobiverse books seem fun, I'm not sure I'd call them firmly hard SF.

From your recommendation and others, I'm reading it now. Ten percent in and, yes, it sure has fast pacing.

I like the idea of tits without the commitment of owning, I'll go there.

Machineries of Empires series sounds interesting.

Thanks for the interesting post.

The turntable is there because the microwaves bouncing around inside the unit don't do so completely evenly; there will be spots that don't get heated as much. Moving the food around inside the unit makes it so one of those cold spots isn't consistently in one place in the food.

So with that as a context, if a cold spot is at or near the center of the turntable, it's not going to get moved around in the food when it rotates. So better to put the food away from the center.

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Okay, I finished We Are Legion (Bobiverse book one). It was fun, and I'll probably read the next. Nothing especially deep, but amusing. A few things bugged me a little:

I understand why it looks that way from good reaction, but there was nothing my dad wouldn't have done for my mom. I've never seen two people who loved each other more completely, trusted each other more thoroughly, or gave a bigger priority to each other's happiness. But apparently they had an awful lot of sex.

The problem with that is that if you're someone who comments in a lot of threads, you have to keep switching between the accounts to see if someone responded to you. I made a second account when .World was dealing with all the attacks, but I find I rarely use it for that reason.

Several people have mentioned budgetary restrictions, which is a huge part, but there are practical considerations, regardless of budget. Even with a big budget, it's only recently that they've been able to make convincing non-humanoid aliens that interact with other actors (mostly through CGI). Earlier, there were good examples of movie monsters or aliens that were done with stop motion or puppets, but not in a way that they shared the screen with the human actors in a meaningful way. Can you imagine if, say, the Vulcans on the original Trek series were wildly non-human - how silly it would have looked? The technology just wasn't there to pull it off.

Also, most aliens, even in books, are some variation of earth life. They're reptile-people, big spiders, intelligent bugs, or whatever. I think that's mostly because it's pretty hard to envision something truly novel/new. So lots of books, movies, and shows come up with some rationale for why everything in the galaxy looks like some kind of earth life to excuse that.

I'd say that's more of the excuse/rationale for it. The underlying reason is hot much not expensive it would have been to do otherwise.

Sharing an overly personal story because I think it's funny.

When my first marriage was swirling the drain, and my wife and I hadn't had sex for a number of months, I was visiting my parents, who were in their late 60s at the time. I noticed that my mom kept getting up to go to the bathroom, so I asked my dad if she was okay and he said she had a yeast infection that was bothering her and they didn't know what to do about it. I told him that those were generally pretty easy, she can get a cream that will take care of it in about a week. Not much else to it other than avoid sex for a couple weeks.

My dad looked incredulous. He said "A couple WEEKS? Like two full weeks? No sex at all for TWO WEEKS? If we don't do that, will it go away on its own?" My dad, pushing 70, was having a hard time coming to grips with the thought of going two weeks without sex, while I was in my 20s and hadn't had sex for four or five months.

I remember driving home and thinking, "Well there's something I didn't need to think about."

I've read both of those and agree they're both excellent. Really good books. Very different from each other.

That last bit is interesting and funny. It was really popular in China, too, right?

Yeah, I agree, it's really good. The sequels are both excellent, too.

One of my reading times is before bed, and I find that the routine of it helps me sleep, plus the escapism helps me stop thinking of everything else in my brain, which is a barrier to sleeping for me.

He seems to like exploring different things in the same universe with mostly different characters. The only consistent character in Blue Ant is Bigend. So I wasn't surprised by the different set of characters in Agency - there was actually more overlapping in that one - but I agree that Flynn was the most interesting in The Peripheral.

So many recommendations that I've started reading it already. 20% in. Seems entertaining.