π The book lovers thread
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@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
@accalia Meh. Not so much, since it happens very close to the start of the book and I didn't say how they become irrelevant to the plot. (That would have definitely been a spoiler!)
yes! very much spoiler!
Cartman daid he wanted to see fundies getting punched! saying they become irrelevant (they don't) is a total spoiler! not cool!
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@accalia said in π The book lovers thread:
DUDE! SPOILERS!
NOT COOL!Agreed. I mean, just look at this spoiler:
That's one uncool spoiler.
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@raceprouk The bad jokes thread is
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@jarry said in π The book lovers thread:
@cartman82 calibre handles .mobi(the amazon format) so it should be the same.
And it can convert to PDF, so whatever random-ass format you're getting usually isn't a problem.
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@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
or in a Kindle app on your phone.
There's also desktop apps. At least on Windows - haven't looked on Mac.
I love my Kindle (paperwhite). You can even check books out from the library.
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@dcon said in π The book lovers thread:
@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
or in a Kindle app on your phone.
There's also desktop apps. At least on Windows - haven't looked on Mac.
I love my Kindle (paperwhite). You can even check books out from the library.
The only drawback: If you use the iPad version you cannot buy books directly through the iPad Kindle app.
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@accalia said in π The book lovers thread:
Cartman daid he wanted to see fundies getting punched! saying they become irrelevant (they don't) is a total spoiler! not cool!
Must be a matter of definition. To me, anything that happens in the first 1/3 of a book cannot be a spoiler. (Exceptions may apply in the case of sequels, but this is book 1 of a series, so no.)
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@rhywden said in π The book lovers thread:
The only drawback: If you use the iPad version you cannot buy books directly through the iPad Kindle app.
Really?
What kind of iDiot set that up?
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@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
@rhywden said in π The book lovers thread:
The only drawback: If you use the iPad version you cannot buy books directly through the iPad Kindle app.
Really?
What kind of iDiot set that up?
Apple. Because buying an eBook through the app counts as an in-app purchase and thus would be subject to the 30% Apple tax.
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@rhywden said in π The book lovers thread:
@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
@rhywden said in π The book lovers thread:
The only drawback: If you use the iPad version you cannot buy books directly through the iPad Kindle app.
Really?
What kind of iDiot set that up?
Apple. Because buying an eBook through the app counts as an in-app purchase and thus would be subject to the 30% Apple tax.
I was just about to suggest that... Probably also why on Windows it's a real app, not a store one.
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@dcon said in π The book lovers thread:
@rhywden said in π The book lovers thread:
@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
@rhywden said in π The book lovers thread:
The only drawback: If you use the iPad version you cannot buy books directly through the iPad Kindle app.
Really?
What kind of iDiot set that up?
Apple. Because buying an eBook through the app counts as an in-app purchase and thus would be subject to the 30% Apple tax.
I was just about to suggest that... Probably also why on Windows it's a real app, not a store one.
The Windows Phone one at least opens a browser directly to the Amazon page where you can buy the eBook in question. But even that is forbidden by Apple.
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@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
Really?
What kind of iDiot set that up?Apple.
If you use Apple's payment processor you're prohibited (via their terms and conditions) from pricing it differently on any other online store. Since Apple also takes 30% for their own greedy-ass pocket, that also generally means you'd need to raise the price everywhere.
So they don't use it. Sensible on Amazon's part.
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@blakeyrat said in π The book lovers thread:
@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
Really?
What kind of iDiot set that up?Apple.
If you use Apple's payment processor you're prohibited (via their terms and conditions) from pricing it differently on any other online store.
So they don't use it. Sensible on Amazon's part.
Oh, right, there was that part as well.
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@blakeyrat said in π The book lovers thread:
If you use Apple's payment processor you're prohibited (via their terms and conditions) from pricing it differently on any other online store.
How is that even legal? Isn't that pretty much the very definition of "anti-competitive behavior"?
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@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
@blakeyrat said in π The book lovers thread:
If you use Apple's payment processor you're prohibited (via their terms and conditions) from pricing it differently on any other online store.
How is that even legal? Isn't that pretty much the very definition of "anti-competitive behavior"?
have you met Apple?
they have the most highly paid legal team in the world.
they have an entire team of lawyers whose job it is to make sure they never get sued for anti-compete despite doing everything in their powers to be anti-competitive.
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The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
-- Henry VI, William Shakespeare
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@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
-- Henry VI, William ShakespeareWhile that's a nice sentiment the play itself is actually an argument to not kill all lawyers ;)
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@rhywden said in π The book lovers thread:
@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
-- Henry VI, William ShakespeareWhile that's a nice sentiment the play itself is actually an argument to not kill all lawyers ;)
Aww
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@rhywden said in π The book lovers thread:
While that's a nice sentiment the play itself is actually an argument to not kill all lawyers ;)
Not to mention that the word as used by Shakespeare actually meant "legislators," not the modern meaning of "attorney-at-law".
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@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
How is that even legal? Isn't that pretty much the very definition of "anti-competitive behavior"?
I'm sorry, is this your first introduction to Apple post-2010-ish? When they became absolutely garbage?
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@blakeyrat said in π The book lovers thread:
@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
How is that even legal? Isn't that pretty much the very definition of "anti-competitive behavior"?
I'm sorry, is this your first introduction to Apple post-2010-ish? When they became absolutely garbage?
thye still make good kit......
if you're willing to deal with the fact that their "repair" services are now exclusively "Pay us 750-1250$ and we'll chuck the old one on a fire and hand you a new one. If you're lucky we'll even swap the hard drive for the one that has your data on it instead of throwing it on the fire too, but we're not making any promises about that."
okay, that's a sliiiiicht exxageration, but they do go out of their way to make it as close to impossible as possible to get third party repairs on their products and the first party repairs consist of two tiers:
- The expensive "Replace the MLB" Tier
and - The fucking ludicrously expensive "Replace the entire unit" Tier
.... okay fair that's not true either, they also have the "you unit has suffered water damage, no warrantee work for you" tier.
- The expensive "Replace the MLB" Tier
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@cartman82 said in π The book lovers thread:
@weng said in π The book lovers thread:
Did any of you suggest The Bobiverse?
Ok I want to buy this book.
But.... HOW!?
The only place where I can find it is some stupid "kindle" thing on Amazon.
I don't know what's kindle and I don't care. I just want to pay somewhere to be able to download a PDF copy of the book. Is that too much to ask!?
Audible/Amazon Kindle exclusive for a period before wider dissemination (including paper). Apparently Amazon offered him truckloads of money, so I can't even begrudge it.
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@accalia said in π The book lovers thread:
@accalia Meh. Not so much, since it happens very close to the start of the book and I didn't say how they become irrelevant to the plot. (That would have definitely been a spoiler!)
yes! very much spoiler!
Cartman daid he wanted to see fundies getting punched! saying they become irrelevant (they don't) is a total spoiler! not cool!Spoiler for the first half of the book.
Fuck you @masonwheeler .
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Is anyone here an expert in crime novels? I have been reading classic stuff like Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's but I need something more intense!
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@harryelfing said in π The book lovers thread:
Is anyone here an expert in crime novels? I have been reading classic stuff like Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's but I need something more intense!
John le CarrΓ©?
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@harryelfing said in π The book lovers thread:
Is anyone here an expert in crime novels? I have been reading classic stuff like Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's but I need something more intense!
Jo NesbΓΈ maybe? The protagonist is a smart detective who also happens to be an alcoholic. The Bat is the first book in the series
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@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
a Kindle app on your phone. It's actually pretty well done.
Yes, except it manages to use hundreds of MB of disk data for no discernible reason. I mean, War and Peace should take less than 1 MB, so it's not the books themselves that take that much space. What other data does it need to store???
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@remi Also, if you move it to an SD card it becomes so slow as to be unusable. Or is that just my shitty slow SD card?
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@remi said in π The book lovers thread:
What other data does it need to store???
All the book covers you will ever need
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@homobalkanus AKA "shit I'll never need and that will only bring closer the day my phone becomes unusable because it decided that 500 MB free space wasn't enough to handle updating, saving, transferring... apps that are 5 MB each". Good job Android.
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@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
Must be a matter of definition. To me, anything that happens in the first 1/3 of a book cannot be a spoiler.
Yes, that's still probably a spoiler in my definition, though it would depend on the details of what was revealed. Saying that something becomes irrelevant sounds like a spoiler no matter where it occurs.
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@cartman82 said in π The book lovers thread:
Epubs that I can add to Calibre would also work, but I guess they won't let you download that either.
Whatever, I pirated it. I'll buy it if I end up reading it.
Fuck you Amazon.Paid.
I am def reading it. I want to see Bob kick some fundie ass.I've finished all 3 Bobiverse books.
Unfortunately, the rest of the series was a downhill slope.
The author did a great job setting up the universe and opening up 100s of possibilities for all sorts of interesting stories to tell. Then he told 2-3 proper stories, and kind of half-assed the rest.
Third book was especially bad about this. For example...
(SPOILERS BELOW)
... the storyline with a rebellion at the ocean planet. Human protagonists were completely forgettable, but we at least had some. Who were the villains, though? A few names were thrown, but we never really saw any of them "live" or got any idea about their goals. All the action was done "off-screen", zero tension. I never felt any of the characters were in any danger. There was not even the definitive conclusion, the whole storyline just kind of petered out.
The storyline of the original Bob on the tribal alien planet was stretched beyond belief. All the little episodes with Bob going in disguised and infighting with the second tribe were boring and pointless. It took pages and pages, but none of it ended up mattering, or tying into the bigger picture at all. This whole plotline should have ended with Book 2.
The worst missed opportunity was the migration of the lemur-like sentient race ahead of the Others' genocide. What a fantastic setup, a chance to play with flying saucer mythology, apocalypse, doomsday clock, emotions through the roof, pitting human vs alien psychology under stress, etc. But the author somehow managed to avoid all that, and ended up telling the most dull lifeless version of this plot possible. He made the bare bones of a story, but somehow forgot to put any "meat" on top of it.
There were plenty of decent plot threads too (eg. the final Others invasion wasn't bad), but in general, I feel the author didn't manage to fulfill the promise his initial universe building had made.
Book1: 4.5/5
Book2: 4/5
Book3: 3/5
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@carrievs said in π The book lovers thread:
"It's surprisingly difficult to find somebody to run over a hard drive with a steamroller.
Um β¦ why? Finding someone with a steam roller shouldnβt be too hard (there must be clubs for them), so all you do is hire one and tell them to roll it over this here hard drive, Shirley?
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I just finished The Flaw In All Magic, by Ben Dobson, and found it a fun read.
Tane Carver was once considered one of the brightest up-and-coming young wizards at the magical university, before he was expelled for embarrassing the faculty by revealing that it had all been tricks; he has no magical ability.
But magic requires more than simply an inborn gift; it works by "making a request of the Astra," the source of magical energy, which then responds exactly as requested. A magical language has been developed, designed to be extremely precise and unambiguous, to reduce the chances of stating something incorrectly, but it can still happen if the mage is careless.
Magic, in other words, is treated as programming, and it frequently contains bugs and exploits.
Since his expulsion, Tane has been eking out a meager living as a magical consultant, helping mages debug their spellcraft, until a request brings him back to the University grounds: a student has been murdered, under conditions that should have been impossible, and no one is better at figuring out what's wrong with magic than him.
As he tries to investigate, Tane finds himself drawn into a big mess of political intrigue, and all he has to guide himself by are his wits, and his principle that "the flaw in all magic is the mage. Outsmart the mage, and you outsmart the spell."
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@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
Magic, in other words, is treated as programming, and it frequently contains bugs and exploits.
You might like this series:
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@antiquarian Yes, in fact, I did enjoy it. :P
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@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
I just finished The Flaw In All Magic, by Ben Dobson, and found it a fun read.
Tane Carver was once considered one of the brightest up-and-coming young wizards at the magical university, before he was expelled for embarrassing the faculty by revealing that it had all been tricks; he has no magical ability.
But magic requires more than simply an inborn gift; it works by "making a request of the Astra," the source of magical energy, which then responds exactly as requested. A magical language has been developed, designed to be extremely precise and unambiguous, to reduce the chances of stating something incorrectly, but it can still happen if the mage is careless.
Magic, in other words, is treated as programming, and it frequently contains bugs and exploits.
Since his expulsion, Tane has been eking out a meager living as a magical consultant, helping mages debug their spellcraft, until a request brings him back to the University grounds: a student has been murdered, under conditions that should have been impossible, and no one is better at figuring out what's wrong with magic than him.
As he tries to investigate, Tane finds himself drawn into a big mess of political intrigue, and all he has to guide himself by are his wits, and his principle that "the flaw in all magic is the mage. Outsmart the mage, and you outsmart the spell."
Nice worldbuilding, but the plot was a little short (even for 200 pages).
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@pie_flavor Yeah, I was a bit surprised at how quickly it all went. It's supposed to be Book 1, though, and it was done well enough that I'm looking forward to the next one...
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Orconomics was a fun story that lampooned the tropes of high fantasy by mixing them with high finance, introducing us to a world in which adventuring parties fund their quests by selling shares on the kingdom's stock market.
In the sequel, Son of a Liche, the author takes aim at the other half of that pairing. When prominent investment firms with delightfully unsubtle names like Goldson Baggs, Lamia Sisters, J. P. Gorgon, and Stearn's (which is run by a were-bear,) get involved in the thriving market for Collateralized Threat Obligations--a pseudo-insurance investment that only pays out in the highly unlikely event of civilization being harmed by the forces of evil--right on the eve of an unprecedented invasion of the kingdom by a horde of undead, the reader can see the basic shape of what's about to happen from a mile off, but that doesn't make watching the details unfold any less amusing. And our ridiculously dysfunctional party from the first book is caught right in the middle of the whole mess, trying to find some way to turn the tide...
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@masonwheeler said in π The book lovers thread:
Magic, in other words, is treated as programming, and it frequently contains bugs and exploits.
What if magic was programming?
Martin Banks is just a normal guy who has made an abnormal discovery: he can manipulate reality, thanks to reality being nothing more than a computer program. With every use of this ability, though, Martin finds his little βtweaksβ have not escaped notice. Rather than face prosecution, he decides instead to travel back in time to the Middle Ages and pose as a wizard.
What could possibly go wrong?
An American hacker in King Arthur's court, Martin must now train to become a full-fledged master of his powers, discover the truth behind the ancient wizard Merlinβ¦and not, y'know, die or anything.
I read through three of the four books in this series, and found them pretty entertaining. The author also used to run a comic strip called Basic Instructions.
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@dcoder Yeah, that's a fun series too!
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Just finished Bad Blood by John Carreyrou.
Holy shit! This is a book that needs to be made into a movie asap. Fantastic material from start to end.
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Just finished Devil's Diary.
Already read pretty much everything* worth reading about Hitler, so I switched to other prominent nazis.
Next up: Diaries of Goebbels.
*Except Bullock.