Some of you may have noticed, and then again you may not have, that in my WAWR lists I give a one to five star rating to the books I read. Fewer of you may have noticed that I rarely give a book a one star. This is not because I never read books I don’t like, it’s that I usually stop reading them and I feel it would be unfair to rate a book that I didn’t read entirely, maybe I gave up too early and the author really turned it around. Off hand I only remember two One Star ratings I gave, one was a really short book and I didn’t have anything else to read so I barreled though, the other was so bad I kept reading thinking the author had to be setting up a big twist at the end, he didn’t, it was just a really bad book. Usually about one quarter to a third of the way into a book I’ll realize I don’t care about the characters and what happens to them so I quit, I don’t think I ever rage quit a book, I don’t get worked up over plot holes or ‘mistakes’. So Glibbies what will make you bail on a book? Here’s a extra big Glibcrostic for you to work on then you can answer in the comments, or not, whatever floats your boat.
Music to solve Glibcrostics to link
It’s a long puzzle but fairly easy so no cheating this week. Well maybe you can Google “O” if you really need to, but you should feel bad about it.
Reminder: The last Sunday of each month is “What Are We Reading” Day so if you want to participate get your reports in to HeyBuddyStopDoingThat@protonmail.com by the second to last Sunday.
Speaking of Earthshaker, the Texas Pinball Festival is happening soon…
https://texaspinball.com/
Earthshaker
friends don’t let friends do Frisco
unless her ex has the kids that weekend
I rarely bail on books, but I’ll sometimes bail on an author. I tend to forget their names until something tempting is dragged across my path and I check their catalog.
Patrick Rothfuss and Terry Goodkind stand out as so memorably not for me as to be indelible. Neil Stephenson comes close. (I know, I know, I’ve just committed two if not 3 great heresies. Tough. De gustibus yadda yadda.)
I don’t believe in heresies. If I did, I wouldn’t admit that I bailed on Isaac Asimov Foundation Trilogy. I just could not get engaged. I would put it down after less than 5 pages.
I read the Foundation series as an impressionable youth, and so liked it. Well, the original trilogy at least. As I grew and learned more, that trilogy became more & more distasteful.
I got twenty pages or so in.
And I like some of his other stuff. That book just bored me to tears.
I bailed on Goodkind. Between the over the top preaching and the plots without forward progress, I threw in the towel.
Yup.
I have read a huge chunk of Stephenson, but not everything.
Larry Niven, on the other hand, except for his fantasy and some recent stuff, I think I read most everything.
Greg Bear, too.
Niven is terrific. Bear I can take or leave; it depends a lot on the sub genre or focus of the book.
Forgot to mention George R.R. Martin, whose earlier stuff I mostly like. Game of Thrones was warm puke through a short straw.
I’m with you on Stephenson. I haven’t read the other two authors. Snow Crash turned out to be disappointing, IMO. The first 90% of the book was interesting, if derivative of William Gibson’s early work. The last 10% was him searching for a satisfying ending. He never found it.
Stephenson cant end any of his novels.
^^^ So. Much. This. ^^^
Thirded.
Huh. I’m a big fan of both Gibson and Stephenson and don’t find them to be the slightest bit similar.
Can you even bail on Patrick Rothfuss? I think at this point Patrick has bailed on writing.
Sometimes I bail on otherwise good books for no apparent reason. I’ve never managed to finish a Vernor Vinge book, despite finding them fascinating. Same with Neal Asher, although I’m currently giving Gridlinked another chance.
Part of it is the reading environment. I haven’t been cutting out a block of time during the week to flop down on the couch and read, uninterrupted. That should change.
If Gridlinked isn’t working for you, try his The Owner trilogy: The Departure, Zero Point, and Jupiter War. Or staying in the Polity, the Transformations trilogy: Dark Intelligence, War Factory, and Infinity Engine. Although for that series it helps to read The Technician first.
Gridlinked is very early Asher. Everything gets turned up as he goes along. Stronger, imnsho.
I’m almost out of Asher books to read. In the middle of Cowl now – not his best but still not bad.
Just finished The Owner books – loved them.
Yeah, The Owner trilogy was aces. A big chunk of it is frighteningly plausible.
Agreed, parts are like a WEF wet dream
Stick with Asher. He gets way better as he goes along.
So, so true. He’s a fun follow on the book of faces, if anyone besides me (from here) uses it.
OT, after having posted on topic, which is also OT.
The EPL relegation race is insane. After todays games:
12. Crystal Palace 27
13. Wolves* 27
14. Forest 26
15. Everton* 25
16. Leicester City 24
17. West Ham 24
—
18. Bournemouth 24
19. Leeds 23
20. Southampton 22
* 11 games left. The others have 12.
I swear Liverpool threw their match this weekend because they would rather see Everton relegated than make the Champions League.
I wrote Everton’s obituary a month ago and stand by it.
I did not have Nottingham floundering: I thought they would stay up
10 pts from first 7 games under Dyche after 1 from last 7 under Lampard.
They seem to be an entirely different team. It may not be enough.
Palace hasn’t won since 12/31. They are still in 12th, but a very precarious 12th.
CP is safe: I’d give 8:1 odds
They are 3 pts above relegation and in free fall. I think they survive, but I would not use the word “safe”.
Forest, Bournemouth, Southampton have been my guess for a long while now.
My stupid-ass Stoke is up 5 spots in the Championship.
What the looks like is a massive pile of suck in the bottom half of the league.
I’m barely paying attention other than I would LMAO if Everton drops.
Many of these teams were not present back when I watched a lot more and are therefore not familiar to me.
We hired a kid with almost no practical industrial experience, and I guess I’ve taken for granted how powerful decades of perspective. Wish someone had bought the books that I grabbed for him (and that I think I’ll skim through again):
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds – Michael Lewis
The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives – Leonard Mlodinow
Out of the Crisis – W Edwards Deming
The Goal – Eliyahu M. Goldratt
This is the order I want him to read them: start with a good story that is mostly verbal, a little military stuff to match his experiences, no math. Then get a little help with everyday perception and practical statistics (I can think of a million people who need to be sent to that reeducation camp). Then get serious with the godfather of applied statistics while abandoning Sergeant Carter management principles. Close with a goofy but accessible memoir/fable because it shows how stupid most American industrial managers have been for the past half century.
That’s an interesting selection of books. I’m going to check them out.
Since six sigma, things have gotten goofy. There are all these guys out there ginning fabulous numbers about things that don’t matter.
When they found the Austrian school of industry, I’ll be John the Baptist to their icon.
I like your book club. At work, the latest is pushing some pop businessbabble crap.
The current crop is making me miss Tom Peters. Never thought I’d say that.
The Undoing Project is in my top 5 favorite books.
OT AYFKM.
I ordered a 24-can package of sodypop and what I got instead was a little bottle of tonic water all nicely packaged in a tiny box. The delivery person even brought it up six floors and left it outside my door.
Amazon doesn’t notify me when packages arrive anymore so I was on my way out on an errand and there it was.
Gin, Mamie?
I’m out of gin.
They better not make me mail this back.
“I’m out of gin”
https://www.paintingmania.com/arts/edvard-munch/large/scream-1893-16_2514.jpg?version=15.04.25
Seriously
Me thinks he wants some malaria so he can WFH.
I already WFH.
With malaria you can double secret WFH.
Indeed.
I’m planning a move this year – very tentative.
But the goal is perma-WFH. I have *plenty* of remote coworkers.
To be more clear… I am officially assigned to an office I haven’t visited in two years.
I want to be not assigned to an office.
On topic, more or less — the author I now have the most trouble with is Marion Zimmer Bradley. The Bloody Sun was the first or second SF novel I read*, and I devoured the Darkover books as they appeared.
Then my commitment to divorcing the art from the artist, a principle I hold dear, met a severe challenge. MZB was a serial child molester and married to a molester for whom she groomed children. I remain sickened by every aspect of this. It’s made it all but impossible to go back and enjoy any of her fiction. Admittedly, the later Darkover novels had hints, strong hints, of wokeness, but as a gay youth/young man, it was representation. That was, to put it mildly, scarce on the ground, and valued by me at the time. Now, I just think of the trauma she and her husband were responsible for. smdh and fist, too.
*The other candidate for second/first was Eric Frank Russell’s Wasp, from which we might still take lessons.
I didn’t know any of that. I remember a book from, geez, four decades ago that I liked and did not finish. Could never find it.
Yeah, I was beyond shocked when I stumbled across the information. It’s not as well known as it ought to be; too many people complicit in overlooking blatant signs for years until her daughter blew the whistle.
Her Arthurian books were good, as far as I went with them. She could certainly write well when she wasn’t pushing an agenda.
Oof. That’s the sort of nut punch that makes it damn near impossible to separate the author from her work.
Yup. Hits way too close to home.
“Mists of Avalon” is now in the donation pile. I can overlook a lot in an author but not that.
Not to be a contrarian, but is there any proof besides daughter’s say-so? I didn’t see it on Wikipedia.
Yeah, MZB was the first instance of pedoshielding from the woke crowd that I can remember.
The only book of hers I read was her king Arthur variant.
It’s fucked-up how many people had a good idea about what was going on and just agreed to keep quiet about it.
So I went on an intellectual cotton candy binge about a year ago. I enjoyed myself immensely with these books, so I changed my internal rating system*. If I enjoyed it, it got 4 stars on Goodreads. Not 5 because it’s not a Desert Island Keeper. It did what it was supposed to do. It’s like not snubbing comedies at the Oscars.
*I actually started thinking about whether a book reached its objective of entertainment when I low-balled a kid’s book, thinking it was meh. Then I read it to XY and he loved it, so I thought, “I am not the audience for this book. My kid is.” So I adjusted my rating upward and wrote in the review why. The author came along and thanked me for being fair.
If a book annoys me enough I will write a detailed review, and I try to be objective and even-handed.
The other problem with ratings is that people will use them to punish Authors [Maybe] [Probably Not] Behaving Badly, which I find abhorrent.
While I agree with you, I ashamedly admit I thought it was hilarious when it happened to Hillary Clinton.
Odd that you posted this right now because I’m about to bail on a book.
I like The Mote in God’s Eye and read the sequel which, I thought, was not nearly as good. Now I’m on the third book of the series written by Pournelle’s daughter. Too many characters, too much of a confusing plot, and a plodding pace.
Right now, though, I don’t have anything on the Kindle to replace it. Also, running out of Discworld books on my phone. I think I’ve read 28 of the 31.
RE: Amazon, I bought one of Animal’s books to give to a friend for his birthday. When I saw him later I asked about it. He never saw before the porch pirates got it.
Um, akshually its 41.
Should have added “… of the 31 that I have”
If you’re kindle-shopping and willing to stick with [self-published] e-books, I will strongly recommend the Aristillus books by Travis “Escape the City” Corcoran. Very libertarian-friendly look at moon colonization (only 2 out so far, book 3 in progress). Separately as a vet, I find Lucas Marcum’s “Valkyrie” series to be pretty good (again only 2 of 3 written so far) – MIL SF written from a medical corps perspective is very different from the usual stuff.
Also liked Rob Kroese’s Iron Dragon series so I backed his kickstarter for a templar themed series.
Thanks! Will give him a try.
So, speaking of Travis and Rob … http://www.basedcon.com/
Yeah…might make it someday…just doesn’t fit my schedule last year or this year 🙁
I bailed on Umberto Ecco within 3 pages
😢
There was an entire paragraph (maybe 2) of different metaphors for a pendulum!
https://ibb.co/7ktDPMj
LOL I was a MUCH more patient reader when I was younger, so I’m not sure I’d put up with that now.
Boooooooo!!
Actually, he would have been proud. His goal, at least in TNOTR was to have a 100 or so page of trial by fire. Dense history combined with ancient and medieval esoterica. He wanted to create his ideal reader in those 100 or do pages, and if you quit he just knows your not the reader he seeks.
This might be the worst edited paragraph I’ve ever hit submit on.
What the fuck, Muzz?
I haven’t attempted that one. I love dense history and esoterica. I’m not a fan of how he presents it. If it were Dan Brown writing it, I may like it.
Enjoyed that one a lot when I first read it (need to revisit)…kinda dropped Baudelaire, but I might still pick it up again for sitting at work. Love Foucault’s Pendulum though.
Masterful compared to Dan Brown. Coming to Brown after reading a lot of other stuff – it’s sub-airport thriller fare. I put Cussler’s early solo stuff miles above anything I’ve read by Brown. When I read “DaVinci Code” it blew my mind that this was what was being touted as the next big thing when it clearly needed a heavy handed editor. Strictly of the opinion that he got big props strictly for being “controversial” – no talent involved.
I loved The Da Vinci Code. As well as Angels & Demons.
I liked Da Vinci Code, but I liked Eco’s version better.
Dan brown isn’t up for eating the corn out of Eco’s shit,
Obligatory
*cheers and applause*
Now I recognize that guy from an episode of Seinfeld.
I saw that movie with a (hot) co-worker and we were laughing so hard the people in front of us turned around to check on us.
So great.
Same. Was assigned something in a college class – intro to architecture IIRC. It was one of those classes where they throw a dozen books at you and it doesn’t really matter if you read them.
I READ THE WHOLE FUCKING THING.
WHY?
WHY??
it’s like I don’t even know who you are…
Still nothing in glib land about the WBC. Only the largest baseball tournament in existence. Here we are talking about commie sports.
😢
Just you wait until we get the Cricket fans. You’ll look back on these days with envy for the good times.
AKA “what all of my coworkers are talking about”.
Never heard of it, TBH.
DH sucks
I will die on that hill
Yu Chang is killing it for Chinese Taipei, but he’s a AAAA washout in MLB. The WBC is not the best baseball the world has to offer.
If you want humorous/light reading i would recommend Craig Alanson, author of skippy the beer can Sci-Fi series.
There are Just. So. Many. Of. Those. Books.
He needs to move the story-arc along faster.
I started reading them when I had a Kindle Unlimited trial and made to book 7(?) or so. Trial’s over but I’m not inclined to purchase the remaining 8 books.
That was a tough one. 24 minutes 52 seconds
Huh, I was late in getting to this one and thought I took the easy out on a lot of clues, I guess one never knows how a puzzle will be go over.
I hate timed things so I don’t click on that. It took me awhile because I had to walk away to get some other things done.
Likewise with me. Finally finished it, but I think I guessed the words from the quote at least as much as I solved the clues. I did find it rather more difficult than most of the others I’ve done.
Belgian-Australian singers?
But there are so many to choose from! Now I gotta go through my collection.
I don’t think the song is THAT annoying.
I started reading the Game of Thrones books sometime after I started watching the TV show, then bailed maybe 10% of the way into the first one because I realized I didn’t really care that much. Then I bailed on the TV show before the end because I couldn’t take John Snow’s dipshittery any more.
HBO has had a string of series with excellent support that were pointless, never developed a plot, and I’m happy to have stepped away years before most of America:
GOT
Westworld
Succession
Last of Us
Tell a story! This week’s episode should be different from last week’s! For the love of doG, at least fall forward for three yards?
Mare Eastown was solid, Perry Mason at least has cool clothes and is noirish, Chernobyl was an interesting telling similar to the facts.
Mare of Easttown (in Eastern PA dialect):
“I’m gonna go to Wawa for some hoagies and bottled wadder”
It’s “wooder” not “wadder.”
I bailed on GoT after ~100 pages for the same reason. I couldn’t give less of a shit about any of the characters or what happened to them.
I gave it the old college try… made it 3½ books in then suddenly I couldn’t take it anymore.
Yeah, that is where I ended up.
I only made it through 27 pages for the same reason.
I was a MUCH more patient reader when I was younger
I hate most professional communicators’ English and am going to continue to scream about cultural decay until I assume room temperature.*
Along comes Kevin Stoud’s https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/ Great content, great pace, enriching, commute-complimenting. But he’s got this insane overstating/restating/pointlessly pedantic thing he does. I blame sports talk radio with their insipid rattle because there’s not much there there so they’ve got to say the same thing a dozen times in a row…and that’s bled into cable news, then MSM, then English vulgar.
Stoud’s crimes against English and sanity, not exact quotes:
The princes died in rapid succession, in 1596 and 1598, late in the sixteenth century. Oh gee, thanks: wasn’t sure which century that would have been….and just two years apart, eh?
The armada sailed around the north of Scotland. That must have been before the Southern Passage around Scotland was discovered.
And so on, one redundancy or tautology after another. IDIOTIC
But the podcast is otherwise excellent.
* betcha never thought I’d borrow a phrasing from Rush Limbaugh
Sports writers come up with the most amusing turns of phrase. Sometimes they’re actually clever.
no doubt
a million chimps in the basement hammering on typewriters
Whoops, looks like SVB-UK is tits up too.
https://www.svb.com/uk
Oh, bother.
And the SVB auction didn’t seem to go that well.
BTC is spiking, indicating a possible incoming bailout. Here we go…
I blame Trump for deregulating foreign banks.
She seems like a keeper:
https://news.usadailybrief.com/a-morgue-employee-was-arrested-after-giving-birth-to-a-baby-of-a-deceased-man/
I have questions…
Scratch that, I don’t want to know.
Probably better off.
‘Scratch that’
I’m guessing it was more along the lines of strategic squeezing.
I think the term is psychopathologist.
Gives a whole new meaning to rigor mortis?
post hoc ergo propter hoc
‘We accumulated enough evidence over the last few months to obtain a warrant for a paternity test on her newborn son. It confirmed our suspicions, that the father of her child was, indeed, a 57-year old veterinarian who was driving through the county when he had a fatal car accident. All the evidence that we have gathered suggests that he had never met Ms. Burrows before his demise and that he was already dead when the baby was conceived.”’
She allegedly molested sixty dead male bodies during her time there.
fact is stranger than fiction – Grandpa Jones
Something along these lines happens in one of the early volumes of The Malayan Book of the Fallen.
Nothing new under the Sun. Sometimes regrettably so.
TS Garp says “hello.”
At least he was still alive.
“dead tissue”
So how does the nervous system trigger an ejaculation?
More likely she extracted with a syringe?
Smoothie maker.
Did the old cattle yard trick.
She takes ‘body count’ to a whole other level.
So Glibbies what will make you bail on a book?
I’ve bailed on books, but I can’t remember the books or why.
I gave up on Ulysses about 100 pages in, but I think on that one occasion I was in the majority.
Faulkner I love, but the Catholic version I just couldn’t do: needs more Confederacy?
While not rage-quitting, per se, I mentioned a little while back that the only time I’ve physically thrown a book across the room was at the end of Tad Williams’ Otherland series – the big reveal was just such a stupid deus ex machina (almost literarily) that I threw the book into the far wall of my living room in a rage.
It was the last book, so I read all 3,000+ pages and didn’t really “quit” but I still hold a grudge against Williams and haven’t read anything else by him.
Massive props to him if he did that on purpose.
I could respect the game if it was all an elaborate setup, but no, this out-of-nowhere reveal of the Big Secret was done in all seriousness.
This spoiler-filled review sums it up nicely.
The second paragraph is spot-on:
I also support this review:
This book was a royal mindfuck and I wouldn’t have hated it except that the ending was horrible and sucked a barrel of dicks.
lol
I recall that, not long after this event, I was driving by a bus stop and saw someone reading the first book in the series and nearly turned around to tell them to just quit now.
The end of the dollar is in sight now.
The Fed is going to fully bail out depositors at SVB and now Signature in NY.
I will assume rate hikes are over as well.
Dunno how they can quit rate hikes now – far too early.
With this the Fed just announced a major liquidity injection. They can’t tighten (raise rates) and print at the same time. The jig is up.
Can’t or wouldn’t if they were rational?
BTC futures just jumped 8%
Bitcoin futures. LOL.
I am unable to even. Bitcoin is as stagnant as precious metals. There IS no future for it.
Didn’t Yellen say earlier today that a bailout was not going to happen? Not that I believe anything she says…
That is what I saw. Who knows?
They’re all fucking liars.
They’re not bailing out SVB, they’re bailing out SVB’s depositors. Totally different.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/breaking-fdic-to-make-good-all-deposits-at-silicon-valley-bank-and-signature-bank/
I love the emphasis on NO TAXPAYER DOLLARS
Yeah, but about that inflation….
That’s pretty much what happened to credit unions back in early ’09 – at least one “corporate credit union” (essentially a credit union for credit unions) and The Big Kahuna of corporate credit unions – the corporate credit union for corporate credit unions – went belly up from those pesky fraud-riddled mortgage backed securities. They all got bailed out by the “natural person credit unions” – the ones mere mortals like you and me can join, and, of course, the ones at the bottom of the pyramid – who had to shell out big bucks for years to clean up the whole mess.
Bailout will be used as just one more argument for why student debtors should be bailed out.
Damn you. I had a lovely sail today off the south coast of Oahu and then I read you sentence and can only think “Of course they will and the Nazgul will punt because of this. We are so fucked.” But I can’t disagree with your statement.
The US Government MUST assert that depositors will be made 100% WHOLE. Anything less represents a SYSTEMIC risk to the banking system. If this doesn’t happn, come Monday, small banks in the US will be in GRAVE DANGER.
This is NOT a bail-out. Let me explain.
1/12
https://twitter.com/JoshuaSteinman/status/1634982768655613953
The Fed has a $100Bn fund the banks paid into for emergencies, supposedly.
So, it might happen or it’s going to happen?
I haven’t been paying a ton of attention the last few days, but I don’t see how that one bank going tits up is going to cause some guy in Idaho using his local small bank to panic and withdraw all his funds. Don’t see it at all.
What I see is a bank that likely had ties to politically important people that is going tits up and some useful idiot explaining why we must act to bail people out who made poor choices.
Bingo
The argument being used here is that even one bank going tits up is a systemic threat to the entire system. I haven’t seen anyone explain what makes this bank special so I’ll stick with my own hunch that some important people would have lost money.
Looks that way to me too. I wonder if Occupy Wall Street will put the band back together.
What’s not to love about a $100b slush fund just sitting there.
Are you kidding me with Japanese music titles?
I said you could google that one.
Oh, I did.
I’ve bailed on so many books I’m ashamed to think about it. I’ve mentioned that my sister gave me the entire Hugo-Awards-Three-Years-In-A-Row Broken Earth trilogy for Christmas a couple of years ago, but I never finished the first book because I found it annoying that one of the plot lines was written in second person. I really, really tried to read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress but couldn’t warm up to the protagonist narrator’s non-native English speaker dialect. I’ve tried but never managed to plod through the Lord of the Rings trilogy despite loving the Jackson films. Likewise, I’ve never gotten through Name of the Rose despite liking the film. Sometimes a book just doesn’t “grab” me, and if it’s a library e-book, I just let it expire.
I’m sorry, but Clarabell is the fucking nightmare fuel on Howdy Doody.
And Martina Navratilova is the GOAT.
Nut punch
https://youtu.be/CcO3fjp2Pec
WTF
Gotta wash and press it. When I finish the 2 complementary pieces, I’ll add beads. https://ibb.co/mN93wvY
pretty
Nice!
This is epic.
https://twitter.com/BrightFuts/status/1634886052065230848
That does touch on something that confuses me – who the fuck keeps millions in a bank account?! My company has roughly $1B in cash but it’s not like the CFO whips out his ATM card when they need some.
And there were individuals with huge deposits – WTF are you doing?
Livin’ large, pimp-daddy style
I’m imagining quite a few corporate treasurers are having long weekends. The money for payroll has to be in some financial institution to pay employees. Same for general payables and receivables. Even having different accounts for each type, it would still be quite large balances.
Where would you keep it? The roller coaster stock market?
Besides, as we know, no depositors ever lose when the bank goes belly up.
Short term T-bills, if you need the liquidity.
That and money market funds. Where were all the CFOs? These wunderkinds can’t do basic corporate financial management.
That Jim guy
I find that hard to believe.
Wow, that’s really well done. I may have missed it if you said earlier, but what’s it for? Gift, personal use, sale, state fair entry?
Whoops, meant for Mojo.
Myself. The process is the point. Yet, I don’t give away my work, except for to my mom, but I know I’ll get those back when she attains release from this mortal coil. I keep them in a pretty box and sometimes get them out to look at them. Maybe I’ll show a visitor if they care. Also, I have won a big bunch of ribbons at the state fair already so that bucket item is done. What can I say. I like pretty things.
So the Saudis and Iran normalize relations with a deal brokered by the Chinese, anounced on the day Xi officially gets his third term, moving one step closer to the BRICS (RICS?) becoming a force and the end of the petrodollar. Meanwhile, the US can’t get above -2% real interest rates without our over-leveraged, bubble economy beginning to break down. Fuck it, time to learn the fiddle so I have something to do while the empire burns.
On topic:
I’ve never been able to finish a Kim Stanley Robinson Book.
I bought his Mars series. I bailed about a third of the way through book 1.
Also, not a fan of Orson Scott Bean.
I got through the first Mars book, then stopped reading the second one after about two chapters when I realized that all the characters I found interesting had been killed off in the first book.
Thanks for the warning.
I won a Gunbroker auction. Yay.
Whew. Long day driving across the state, half of which is snowing. Got to have lunch with a cousin I had never met before, that was cool. But I am too tired to go out for food, good thing I ate jerky and bought a beer.
Only book I rage quit was Still Life With Woodpecker. Fuck that shit. But, yeah, if it doesn’t grab me, or I lose interest in the characters I set it aside. Or, more accurately, I just never pick it back up. But, I picked up a nice copy of VALIS today, a vintage PBO. Also, a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, which I had been looking for.
Dick?
I haven’t read that. I do have Ubik – must read again. I remember it being kind of trippy.
UBIK is awesome. VALIS is after he was visited by god (had a stroke, most people think) and is equally trippy.
Dick (yes, him) put out a lot of crap, but when he was on, holy cow was he good.
I hope I get that much out of my first stroke.
I’ve still never made it through the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Never made it past Tom Bombadil. Tolkein’s writing style of ‘every leaf must have its own chapter’ gets tiring fast. I like descriptive writing, but he goes too far. The Peter Jackson movies were good though.
I do too but yeah his is like in another language or something. Never made it more than dozen pages or so.
I should add that I’ve read the shit out of a couple of the appendices because I am a language nerd.
I have given up on plenty of non-fiction if the book makes early mistakes in fact. I will read plenty of reasoned argument in NF but if you make a plain huge mistake in fact I am gone. (I am looking at you book on WWI discussing the 82d Airborne Division- and at you civil war book that put the Battle of Gettysburg in 1864.)
I am willing to work on some fiction (U. Eco) but sometimes I like low brow fiction like O’Brian, the Sharp’s series, the Eagle of Rome series etc.
Anyone else screwed up by daylight savings time? I should be going to sleep soon but it ain’t happening.
*sigh*
Yes.
I bragged the other day that I was totally unaffected but here I am not at all ready for bed.
Funny you say that. Every year I think I’ll make a seemless transition and every year it doesn’t happen.
Here goes…
Me too. Felt off all day and tired. Until time to sleep.
Good morning everybody!
Good morning. I think people are still sleeping. I couldn’t, so I rolled out at 2:45. I’m going to feel like crap later.
Good morning, Sean.
I had the mixed fortune to acquire a 40oz Cowboy steak Friday. Mixed fortune because while the first few bites this morning were one of those moments of culinary bliss, most of the thing will be leftovers since I simply should not eat that much at a single sitting.
Morning!
The alcohol/THC/melatonin stack worked and I actually feel not-too bad this morning.
Mornin’, UnC. That is a lot of beef. We could make three meals out of that.
Mrs. T has tasked me to find a decent steak for tonight. Kroger’s selection is… not good.
I’m fortunate to have a proper butcher’s shop nearby. It’s pricier than the grocery store, but by every metric it’s better.
Speaking of grocery stores, I need to go restock some things. Be back shortly.
Sam’s Club has excellent meat. Can’t answer for Costco as the nearest one is on the opposite side of town.
Micro-blading goes on there…
Tattooing/permanent makeup?? 😳
LOL.
I’m sure she meant this: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/what-is-mechanical-tenderizing-and-why-is-it-hazardous-to-your-steak
So, did they use clean steak-needles?
Huh. I have one of those thingies to do it myself.
Nobody told me I’d get sick and die from it. 😟
Hey buddy, stop doing that.
Uhhh… some sort of steak-needling. Sorry, just woke up.
Morning.
Mornin’ all
Good morning, Shirley, ‘bodru, U, TARDy, NA, and Sean!
Sure enough – I stayed up too late last night and overslept (a little – about 25 minutes) this morning. Worst consequence: A certain little black kitty didn’t get his cuddle time while the coffee finished brewing…and then the big sweet-but-dumb cat beat him to my lap. 🐱👤😸
Aww. 😿
Well, now is LBK’s big change – BSBDC has a short attention span and had already gone over to eat. And now LBK is just sitting staring at the food dish.
Uh… big CHANCE.
::slurps more coffee::
I’d love to see the video of this.
Well, now LBK is lying under my little folding table, completely ignoring my now-vacant lap. He’s silently guilt-tripping me because I RUINED HIS WHOLE DAY. He’ll probably hop up just when it’s time for me to go get ready for work.
At least he is not expressing his displeasure in the typical feline manner, with claws and fangs.
He just got up and is now sitting with his back to me. Still, passive-aggressive beats aggressive when a cat does indeed have all of his claws.
So, the morgue lady from upthread that got knocked up by a corpse…I didn’t know that was possible-seems like the body would have to be fresher.
I don’t see how that is possible. I think she extracted sperm.
Most likely and genetic material contributed by a veterinarian is a fairly good bet, beats what someone’d be likely to get at the local dive bar.
Mornin’, reprobates!
Good morning, ‘patzie! Are you back to work? Or just on call for the inevitable crises?
BTW for a week now. Monitoring slack channel yesterday, lots of excitement that UCS would appreciate. Seems that someone forgot to renew the license for our enterprise scheduling software so no scheduled jobs were running for about 4 hours until the admins enabled local scheduler. Glad it was Sunday and therefore Israel’s problem, not mine.
Seriously? Even if we didn’t have a calendar of renewal deadlines, our software gives thirty day warnings so we can beg for extensions while the procurement goes through.
Could have been worse. Back in the ’90s, our shop used Veritas for storage management. When that license expired, hilarity ensued.
Morning All,
Somehow the DST change has little to no affect on me. Recently I’ve been sleeping an easy 9 hours, sometimes close to 10. I’m not sure if that’s a good sign or not but I try to avoid naps. I worked outside yesterday cleaning up the snow but had to call my neighbor to come over today with the bobcat. My snowblower wouldn’t go through the snow we had. Now we’re looking at a possible 8-10 inches more mid week. Damn. Makes up for the nice early springs we’ve had. Climate change but wrong direction for Al and the Grifters.
Yikes, that is a lot of snow. I’ve been bemoaning the lack of snow here, but maybe I should count my blessings.