Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
3d ago
Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford Simak. Interesting read and I appreciate the additional character added by the zeerust.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
11d ago
Long Live Evil: Time of Iron Book I. It's a fun fish out of water trope where the twist is that the MC is a terminal cancer patient transported into a fantasy realm from books she enjoyed with her sister and where she inhabits the body of a villainess that is to be executed the next day.
I totally agree with this. I know I'm nitpicking in that particular complaint! Also, the detail about Mormons prizing leadership is one I hadn't thought about. Thanks!
Good question! I think from Ender's perspective the answer to that question would be a qualified yes. Explanation follows.
I referenced Xanatos with the trope of the Chessmaster in mind, and the main dramatic conflict of the original Ender's Game, ie the fate of the third invasion, just isn't a good fit for that style of character to begin with. It is true, however, that adults and leaders are repeatedly portrayed as a bunch of Manipulative Bastards shamelessly forging Ender into a weapon capable of defeating the buggers formics. This is absolutely a major theme of Ender's Game, as is his awareness and understanding of that even as he resentfully accepts its necessity. The motivation for this, however, is the survival of humanity itself; the formics are, in the parlance of the sequels, varelse for all intents and purposes. It isn't until the Biggest Reveal of the novel that we learn that
Now I'm going to slag on Ender's Shadow in a little more detail to show more of my overall thinking. One of the major challenges of telling Bean's tale is that the backstory of Ender's Game is a known commodity and so the dramatic tension of the original is absent. Achilles can't hold a candle to the extinction of humanity here. A second challenge to telling Bean's tale is that Bean and Ender share a lot of similarities in their overall character, which I think makes it exceedingly difficult to make Bean's story strong and compelling enough in its own right without diminishing Ender's character arc from the original book. Card fails to thread that particular needle,
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
18d ago
Thanks! I'll keep that in mind if I ever see a cheap copy of it, or if alternately the Kindle version goes on sale.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
18d ago
I completely agree, for me that book diminished the characters of both Bean and especially Ender, gutted the emotional impact of Ender's journey, and twisted the entire narrative of Ender's Game into a lame-assed Xanatos-style manipulation by proxy. Weak.
When I said that I didn't continue the series, I meant the Shadow series, which I've edited my original post to clarify. I appreciated the different direction that the sequels took, even if I found the ending of Xenocide a little ham-handed and the portrayal of OCD a little stilted and one-dimensional. I have not read Ender in Exile, though I'd be open to checking it out if I had a decent reason to do so.
Just finished book 1 of The Villianess is an SS+ Rank Avenurer, and while it's... adequate, I didn't find it compelling enough to want to continue the series.
On the subject of Ender's Shadow, I personally didn't appreciate the liberties it took with the original Ender's Game, and did not continue that the Shadow series either.
Edited for clarity.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
28d ago
Yeah I feel like if you wanted to know about mental health data, my tl;dr would be to allow for around 25-33% GIGO factor.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
28d ago
When I first read that bit it was scary how accurately it mapped to my actual working environment. Like forget about the lower stakes squaring off between the various Queen Bees and their various departments leading to a hilarious plea from the then CEO for staff not to get into public spats on Facebook and mass unfriend work colleagues based on office battle lines. That was amusing, sure, but we actually had a full blown sociopathic power couple in the C-suite doing most of the Deciding for the better part of a decade, then hired another one to replace our outgoing CEO!
Personally, I bounced off of Anathem within several chapters when I first picked it up. Then, quite a few years afterwards, I was able to dive right in and plow through it, enjoying it greatly. Even now, the only difference that I can point to as a possible explanation is that I had devoured a lot more Neal Stephenson in the intervening years.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
1mo ago
Still reading House, by Tracy Kidder, and as I expected Kidder is painting quite the picture of both the people and the process of custom building a home.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
1mo ago
Ahh, memory lane! While I can't remember every single component at this point I do remember just about every single build, starting with buying my roomie's old 486DX2/66, which by that time was slow enough that I quickly upgraded to a DX4/120 and thence to a 5x86/133 that I had been given. That was more than enough for me to run Windows 95 and play Civ 2 until my eyes bled and Duke Nukem 3D when it came out. My first Pentium build came after that, which at some point got upgraded to a Pentium MMX, and which at some point also housed the ATi card which I'm now not so sure was the 4 meg model, but which ran Quake 2 acceptably well. But the next build I remember really well because I started from the ground up and overclocked a Celeron 300A to 450 mhz, threw in the TNT and was gaming to my heart's content and preferring UT over Q3. At some point I tried to repeat my overclocking success with a Celeron 366 but couldn't quite get the 550 overclock to stick reliably, but I know I did get a Pentium 3 733 to 1 Ghz without even needing to juice the voltage, just a simple change in the base clock speed. On the graphics side, meanwhile, I had upgraded every single generation for a while and stayed in the Nvidia camp, going from TNT to TNT2 and thence to the Geforce and on to the Geforce 2. Somewhere along the line, I switched to an Athlon XP, which I ran until the corner of the flip chip sheared right off, then an Athlon 64, and then a 64X2, while GTA 3 blew me away and UT 2004, though still floaty, was finally good enough. On one of these I actually switched over to an ATi card on the graphics side as they actually held the performance crown for a bit at the time and Oblivion looked pretty indeed on that silicon. After that, it was all Intel and Nvidia again, from a Core 2 duo and and the new Borderlands sensation (which was nice after the gorgeous but otherwise decidedly mixed bag that was UT3) to an i5-2600 which I remember pairing with a Geforce 660. After that, an SSD was the next big performance boost but processor improvements at that point were clearly on the wane and I didn't upgrade again until Skylake, going with a i7-6700k and a Geforce 970. At some point I upgraded the card to a 1080ti and then the processor to an i9-9900kf. Ironically, I started playing 7 Days To Die on the Skylake system and was still going strong through all of its iterations on the Coffee Lake system and the last upgrade I had been contemplating was to either a 3080 or a 3090 (whichever I could get my hands on) when hard mode midlife came for me en flagrante delicto. Suddenly, building and gaming plummeted in importance and the PC that I write this on is one of those wee little Beelink SER5 units sporting a Ryzen 5k mobile processor and ironically runs all of the old games that I love so much without batting an eye. Meanwhile, my poor forlorn former gaming rig still collects dust in the basement waiting for me to log back in to Steam and return but IDK if that's ever realistically gonna happen, even though that old part of me likes to daydream about building out a high-end Zen based system with a matching Nvidia card and monster power supply to boot. Sadly, though, I don't think there'd be anything to play that would be worth the money and in truth I often have more fun actually making old games run in Wine or Dosbox than I do playing half of them. Even so, that's a good quarter of a century that I spent building and gaming. Wow.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
1mo ago
and being an Nvidia customer for life (Riva 128 gang represent)
Respect! Although I'm ancient enough to have had Trident-based SVGA cards, my first Nvidia based board sported a TNT. IIRC, the 128 came and went pretty fast so by the time I was ready to move on from my 4 MB ATi card, it made more sense to me at the time to grab a single TNT rather than a Voodoo 2 (I judged 2 Voodoos to be too much of a splurge) plus recycling the current card or getting a Matrox or something. Even though by today's standards a lot of that tech was really just getting off the ground at that point, it's striking to me how rich the home computing ecosystem was and how fast things were changing compared to the relatively static niche market that it is today.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
1mo ago
It’s literally hormonal, men in middle age who have low t often get weepy before being prescribed hormones, so do mtf after being on them. I would reserve judgment until you get old and experience it for yourself.
Listen, sonny, those heartstring-tugging commercials pack a wallop when you've dealt with the subject matter like serious illness, having a parent with dementia, etc. $REASONS. Kindly remove yourself from my lawn! Now if you'll excuse me, that cloud over there is asking for a piece of my mind...
Mumbles under his breath about how nickels used to be called bees
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
1mo ago
House by Tracy Kidder. Yes, This Inevitable Ruin: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 7 delivered the goods, just as previous installments did IMO.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
1mo ago
About halfway through This Inevitable Ruin: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 7. It's been a ton of fun so far!
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
1mo ago
Just finished Dawn Razed and have moved on to This Inevitable Ruin: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 7.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
1mo ago
Yeah that sounds a lot like where I'm at now. TBH, I strongly suspect that my own autism natural wiring played a large part in how I previously experienced my desire for sex, and that made the idea of going a year without sexual activity and orgasm to seem immensely unrealistic to younger me, like fairy tale levels of unrealistic.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
1mo ago
No, yes, and no, and believe me, I know--I'm a dopamine addict through and through, and sex was my primary delivery mechanism for that. Ironically, I always identified with St. Augustine's whole, "Odin, grant me celibacy, but not yet," shtick. It still feels downright eerie sometimes to have a desire for sex that comes and goes as opposed to just building in intensity over time as it used to do, but to be frank, my life has been much richer, especially emotionally, since that switch flipped, and I'm glad that it did.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
1mo ago
Erm, I don't want to be that corvus but, well, having been in your shoes and then having gone without orgasm, sex, sexual activity, masturbation, etc. for over a year myself along with quite a few stretches of several months, I can say that in my case it was kinda like a mental and emotional switch that flipped inside my head. What was once the biological imperative is now a potentially interesting, but also potentially entangling option that I can choose to pursue, or, y'know, not.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
1mo ago
So my old-timer boss grew up in Northern Virginia, but this goes far enough back (like sixties and seventies) and my understanding is that the entire area was largely rural but even then was growing as DC was growing. Fast-forward a generation and the area had become largely suburban and purple. Fast-forward to today and move further away from DC and the pattern has pretty much repeated, with more of the Virginia boonies becoming suburban and shifting from red to purple while Northern Virginia has become more urban and shifted from purple to blue.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
1mo ago
This has been my take as well, although I worry that I've developed diamond hands WRT NVDA and that this is just a cope on my part.
Muninn
"Dick Laurant is dead."
2mo ago
Just started Dawn Razed, book 4 of the Ethereal Earth series.
Oooh, I haven't read City yet but it's a comment much like yours that got me to check out Time is the Simplest Thing in the first place. I'll have to check it out next time I get a chance!
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