astreus @ astreus @lemmy.ml

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109

Joined

2 yr. ago

Sometimes monthly, sometimes quarterly, sometimes bi-annually. Depends on the magazine.

People that have never felt at home anywhere tend to write from a very different perspective (the BoJack episode where Diane goes to Vietnam comes to mind) so I really recommend it (even though my family seem to have stuck completely to about a 50 square mile radius in south England for 600 years until I came along and moved overseas).

Can you share some sources of small shops getting looted? During the London riots it was Barclays Bank, PC World, Argos, and Tesco that were looted, not the boutique coffee shop or hand-made jewelry stores. Even the pictures on Wikipedia of the riots are just of these stores.

Though there are some criminals we could never forgive.

Ooo forgot about Uncanny. I've read a few editions, might be time to get the old bank card out.

Nearly all are digital now, but they're the successors to the old pulp magazines. I think Locus is still a print magazine, though :)

CNF = Creative Non-Fiction

Gary Doctorow

Cory, right? I was an avid Boing Boing reader back in the day, but I thought Little Brother was YA and that ain't my genre so hadn't been paying attention! Will go pick up some of his work.

I tried City and the City but struggled with it. Will try another one! Thank you.

If you go back through the links I posted, it includes far more sweeping legislature vetting than what affected her personally. And also exempting people from non-dicrimination law because they have certain ancestory is weird, isn't it?

The power to do what, for example?

To stop people advancing in their career because of the colour of their skin. The power to take dead people's money if they don't have a will. The power to direct the army (the armed forces oaths are to the monarch, not the country or government - this was almost tested in planned coups in 1968 and 1974; both actively planned by King Charles' great-uncle and led to a "military exercise" that Downing Street weren't informed of as a warning to toe the Firm line).

Or how about a ban on police searching their properties for stolen goods? Or exemptions to green bills.

The royal family are like lobbyists on steroids and the idea that has no power is not correct.

The money they receive from the UK taxpayers is tiny.

This is patently false. £100m a year for FIVE PEOPLE (active royals) is by no means a small amount. This is the same as 3096 incomes for the average household in the UK, or 4467.7 nurses with five years experience.

Why do they deserve to get this money if not because it's their "divine right"? How is that not utterly fucked up?

And the "tourism" answer doesn't hold water. Both the Louvre and the Palace of Versailles, both former palaces, receives 50% more visitors than Buckingham Palace.

Please bear in mind that this is all for one family that have done absolutely nothing to earn it. How can we justify £100m a year (much of which ended up in the Panama and Paradise papers) for a single family? And that doesn't even take their net wealth into account.

Like the income of the people mentioned below is actually tiny, but their wealth is huge. About £20 BILLION huge. And all because of "divine rights". But of course, that's only an estimate because the royal family got the law changed so they never have to say how much they actually have (because they have the power to change laws, as mentioned above).

Do you think it’s massively different from the Walton family’s wealth and power, or the Koch family’s wealth and power, or Musk, Gates, Bezos, etc?

Absolutely agree. No one should be able to pass on this amount of wealth through a hereditary line. It just has no moral justification to give people money (and thus power) just for being born. That's why capitalists were nicknamed robber barons.

I just don't agree that having a monarch that is the head of a church can ever be accepted. Plus, the royals do vet many, many bills from the government and change them.. The monarchy also receives the inheritance from anyone that dies on "their" land without a will. And to top it all off, the Queen gained many, many exemptions to racial equality laws.

They have a lot more power than is often let on. And even if they didn't, what is the argument for having a useless bunch, including known paedos, get money from the tax payer just because they were born into a certain family? I can't make it make any kind of moral sense.

Much harder. Which is why the Commonwealth of England only lasted 11 years...and we still have a freaking monarchy ruling by divine rights now...

I love how LeGuin can take concepts and make them as real as capitalism (The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest). Is there any modern speculative authors doing this?

Aren't you comparing apples and oranges:

If the server is private, then you can't search it. If the group is private, then you can't search it.

If it is public you can on either platform but must participate on the platform. That's what made Reddit unique: lurking was real easy and didn't require an account.

Aha good spot

With all my knowledge intact? Hell yes! I'd keep all that bitcoin instead of spending tens of thousands of it (about £100) on Silk Road in uni.

My wife is an author and I was trying to explain this to her the other day. Pirated copies aren't "lost customers" but were statistically unlikely to ever be customers in the first place.

I get what you're saying, though I can't recommend Ender's Game because your money goes to supporting gay conversion therapy. Plus, once you get into the second book, the similarities with Ender's Game becomes a lot more dubious, and by the third book disappears entirely.

However, "Opinion is all you’re going to get" and "objectively bad" is kinda oxymoronic 😉 Are there objectively bad books? God yes, I have read enough hopeful author's in my life to say that basic cause & effect or the notion of "story" as something apart from "series of events" are not always understood. However, I think you're right that this is a case of opinions based on style.

TBP (the trilogy, not just the first book) is a lot more to do with societal responsibility than a single hero (though individual failings are also a theme, though usually in how they impact society/humanity as a whole). It focuses on our place in the universe from a cultural point of view starkly different to the rugged individualism of the West (most Chinese SFF doesn't have a single protagonist), and TBP requires an enjoyment of playing with theoretical physics and geopolitics that is rather different from how they are used in contemporary Western sci-fi. So I 100% get it.

It definitely isn't for everyone, and Chinese fiction in particular can cause a lot of headaches because of this difference in how the world is perceived between Western and Eastern cultures (Legend of the Condor Heroes - another Chinese series I love - is a great example of this), so it really isn't your "fault" (I hesitate to use that word) for it not being your cup of tea!

I don't really read books digitally (my poor eyes now I'm in my 30s...) or listen to audio books. However, I do have multiple copies of the same book. I have four editions of The Hobbit, for example.

This is something I find interesting because it brings up the question: are books art in their own right, not simply a format for the story? My answer is YES! I love the look and feel of my Folio society edition, I love the smell and memories of my grandfather's worn copy, I love the annotations in the second hand copy I got from a closing down sale (like the last reader was sharing the experience with me). And I love having a copy I'm willing to give/lend to friends and family that won't break my heart if it's lost.

This is the first year where I've decided not to have any reading goals. It isn't work, it's pleasure. I don't have video game goals, or cloud watching goals, so why book goals? This year, I will read when I feel like reading!

Right!?! I even found my own writing spiraling into "and everybody dies" endings recently, so Becky Chambers was a breath of fresh air!

Not patronising, not naive, but utterly hopeful.

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it. I, personally, did (as did many, many other people). I thought the second book in particular was fantastic. I enjoy a lot of Chinese SFF, but I do get that it isn't for everyone.

Maybe phrasing an opinion as a fact, and then backing it up with other people's opinions, isn't the best way to dissuade someone from their own opinion

EDIT: had to go back and check my original comment. I do mention that it is a bit of a slog to read. However, the ideas and presentation were worth it for me.

I'm on book 6 of the Expanse and love it! My suggestions:

The Culture series - Iain M Banks. Space opera that gave us luxury gay space communism. You can pick up any book as a starting point - they're set in the same universe spanning millennia and have very little interconnection. Explores themes of humanity in an AI world (choice, war, deceit, love, etc)

Revelation Space series - Alastair Reynolds. Closest in terms of style and sweeping scope to The Expanse. Same dry humour that can get a bit much at times.

Three Body Problem trilogy - Liu Cixin. Leans a lot heavier into the Science of sci-fi and can be very dense, but one of my favourite trilogies. What happens when you finally get a signal back from space?

Monk & Robot series (novellas) - Becky Chambers. Pure hope punk and absolutely delightful (without any of the incredibly distateful and harmful tropes found in Midnight Library). There are only two out so far, and you'll be able to read them in a day. Of all of the recommendations I've listed, I implore you to read this one.