I have to rank Children of the Mind as one of the just plain weirdest books I’ve ever read. Just when I thought it couldn’t get weirder, Orson Scott Card manages to throw something else at you. After I finished Children of the Mind, I decided at that point I was going to move onto some other book series.
I’ll still recommend Ender’s Game as that’s a classic, but I wouldn’t bother with the sequels.
That sounds like a problem with whatever edition you read. I had to read it a long time ago for school and the version we read was more like a short novel and I found it an interesting read.
Naw, the best software they’ve ever produced is 6502 BASIC.
Though Flight Simulator does get an honorable mention.
The supreme court left it kind of vague in their ruling. The courts are supposed to decide, but for something like this no matter what the lower courts decide, any ruling would almost certainly get appealed up all the way up to the supreme court. So what is or isn’t an official act is basically boils to whatever the supreme court decides it to be.
Personally, I didn’t really mind Wesley in the later seasons and a few of the Wesley-centric episodes were pretty good. It’s really the first season, and even more so the first few episodes of the first season where he was annoying as all hell. Oh look, boy wonder saves the ship, yet again. Unfortunately that kind of seems to have stuck with the character, despite the show toning down his antics significantly after that.
If you think that’s fun, just wait until you get to the verbs of motion.
Maybe the bumpers on some of the Ram trucks?
Any of the decorative chrome bits have been cheap plasti-chrome for something like 30 years now.
Junk also tend to accumulate in rivers and lakes. Once it’s in there it’s out of sight, out of mind - and even if you know it’s there it is often difficult to remove.
When it finally gets cleaned up by bringing in the magnet or a barge to dredge it up or whatever, you’re seeing years if not decades of stuff that’s getting pulled out all at once.
With David Brin’s Uplift books, I’d just start with Startide Rising. It’s not so much a sequel to Sundiver, but another standalone book set in the same universe. There’s a couple of very minor references to Sundiver, but you’re not really missing anything if you haven’t read it going into Startide Rising.
While Startide Rising is fantastic and is probably one of my favorite sci-fi books, I found Sundiver just wasn’t that good. It’s not really bad per se, but it was David Brin’s first novel and that really shows and has some issues with pacing, an unreliable narrator, and things like that (IMHO). It’s also more of a mystery/detective novel set in space whereas Startide Rising is space opera, so the whole feel of the two books is very different and can just boil down to what sort of books you like.
I actually had read Startide Rising twice without even knowing Sundiver existed before looking it up online and realizing it was the second book in a series. I’ll probably pick up Startide Rising for another re-read sometime in the future, but for Sundiver once is probably enough.
The third book The Uplift War, is also quite good, and similar to the other two it’s more of another standalone book that’s set in the same universe, with some minor references to the previous two. I wasn’t as much of a fan of the last three books - they are a trilogy more than a standalone books, and you’d probably want to have read the previous three books before tackling them (or at the very least, Startide Rising) because things aren’t going to make a lot of sense if you just jump right in. I found them a long read and they got really weird at the end. Like Sundiver I’d say once is enough for books 4-6 too.
I have an old film scanner (was pricy back in its day) that doesn’t have drivers for 64 bit Windows, and anything newer than Vista. So I have an old XP box that can talk to it.
That’s all I use that computer for, so it’s otherwise fine with its circa 2009 configuration. Haven’t had to do any fixes or workarounds.
We actually moved from JIRA to Azure DevOps. Part of it was that Atlassian dropped the server version of JIRA and we weren’t too keen on moving to the crappier cloud version.
I’d say it’s different. Some things JIRA does better, some things Azure DevOps does better. You eliminate some pain points, and end up with some new ones.
DuckDuckGo is not Bing, though they get most of their results from Bing so they end up pretty similar.
And yes, I would say it’s better. Not that Bing is particularly good and their search results have also taken a nosedive. But they are still way better than the garbage results I get out of Google.
Next year should be 100% Linux for me. Steam is dropping support for Windows 7 at the end of this year, and I don’t have any other newer Windows PC to run Steam on.
The worst one I remember was having to read Great Expectations in high school. Maybe I might appreciate the book more today, but at the time I found it incredibly boring and it just seemed to drag on and on and on. It really felt like a written soap opera from the 1800’s, which it kind of was as it was originally published a serial where the reader got a small part of it every week. Which probably accounted for how slowly the plot seemed to move.
Perhaps an honorable mention would go to “Triton”, as that’s the first book I remember where I started reading and actually got a decent way into it before putting it down as it was absolutely boring me out of my mind. Though I was a teen at the time, and one of my main sources of reading material was whatever I could find at garage sales for cheap. But nevertheless, almost always if I thought a book was interesting enough to buy it was also interesting enough for at least one read through, but that one stood out as an exception. Though I have to wonder if I tried reading it again today if I might manage to get through it this time.