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  • The Murderbot series is so great, I read them all last year. I don't think I've read any of the others on you list, though Tchaikovsky is quickly becoming one of my favorite all time authors, so I'm sure I'll get to that.

  • Of those, the only one I read was The Fifth Season, which I liked. I read The Saint of Bright Doors by Chandrasekera this year and thought that was great (very much fantasy). Maybe I'll give Rakesfall a try.

  • I started reading The Expanse series (including the short stories) after watching the series. I got through The Churn, which is the short story after book 3, and haven't read further. I didn't decide not to read more, but every time I go to pick the next book from my list, I don't feel motivated to read the next Expanse book. They've all been good - not sure what the issue is for me.

    Have you read The Mistborn series and, if so, do you think it or Stormlight Archive is the better starting place for Sanderson?

  • I read the Martine book and its sequel last year - I agree, they're great.

    I almost put one of the Children of Time sequels on the list, but wanted to keep it to five and had the others I wanted to mention.

  • I know I'm an outlier, but I didn't really care for The Three Body Problem. Characters did too many things that just didn't seem like likely responses, and some of the premise felt unrealistic to me. But I know I'm in the minority.

    The Sprawl trilogy is great. I read it when it was out originally, and reread Neuromancer more recently. Oh, but if you're ever tempted, don't listen to the Neuromancer audiobook narrated by Gibson. Wonderful writer, atrocious reader.

  • I make a pretty good living and my family really loves cheese, so I buy fancy stuff pretty frequently, but I check the prices because some of them are just ridiculous. The ten to twelve dollars I spend on a chunk the size of a deck of cards or two is bad enough, but some are two or three times that price for the same amount and I just can't bring myself to do it. I could do it, but it's just hard to believe we'd enjoy the cheese that much.

  • My wife and I love cheese and often have it for a snack, especially if we're drinking, so I usually keep a few different types to serve with crackers. Our son brought his GF over one time and everyone wanted a snack, so I brought out a cheese platter, and they both loved it, especially the GF, so now they always ask for cheese when they come over.

    Today, Christmas, they came over with a couple who are their best friends. We had a couple others too, so I bought close to $100 worth of different cheeses. We had Wensleydale with blueberries, stilton with lemon and honey, aged white cheddar soaked in red wine, havarti, guda with hatch chili, warmed camembert, and regular aged cheddar. It was pretty fun seeing everyone trying them all and talking about which the liked the best.

  • Okay, I haven't told this story for a long time, and it's Christmas, so here we go:

    When I was dating my first wife, I went to her parents for Thanksgiving dinner. Among the dishes on the table was blackberry jello with grapes in it. Seemed like a 50s kind of dish, but whatever. I took some of everything, and planned to clean my plate. My future MIL was telling a story when I put the first bite of the jello in my mouth, and my brain screamed that something was horribly wrong. I thought there must have been something rancid in the jello or the grapes - the grapes didn't even have the right texture. I was about to spit it out - it was revolting - when I realized it was a taste I'd had before, not something rancid. All this was really just a moment, but it seemed like forever before it clicked: it wasn't grapes, it was green olives. She made blackberry jello was green olives in it.

    I thought for a moment that it was a prank, though that family wasn't the pranking type, because no one else had taken any except the mom, but she had a mound of it and was eating it. I finally said, "It was surprising to bite into a grape and find out that it's an olive," and everyone tittered. Future MIL said that no one else likes it, but she does, so she makes it for herself.

    It should have been a warning.

  • I'm my late teens and early twenties, I had several occurrences of gay guys hitting on me, to the point where I started to worry that there was something about me. It seems funny to me now, but I really did have a period of wondering if I could be and was just repressing it because of my Catholic upbringing. But ultimately I realized that I just didn't find guys attractive at all, and even the thought of kissing a guy was kind of a boner killer. So I get what you're saying, even though on the surface it sounds funny to say you wondered if you could be gay.

    Sometime later I ended up with a couple of close gay friends, and I mentioned it to them. They said it was probably because I put out a very non-judgemental vibe and didn't seem like a homophobe, so it probably didn't seem risky to hit on me.

  • I'm just barely a boomer, but I'm also a software engineer/manager. Sometimes younger folks assume I need help with computers/tech, or are surprised when I'm knowledgeable about them. It's starting to change for me, too, though. I haven't kept up with newer languages, and as a manager I really don't write any code outside of the occasional Excel VBA, so I'm getting pretty stale.