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But what if I’ve read them? :)

That is an interesting thing to try! I’m not sure I own 100 books I haven’t read (that aren’t currently in storage or are otherwise unavailable) and I tend to do about 90% of my reading from the library. I think the main thing I’d miss would be from Kindle daily deals, but it’s no great loss...

Read Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour by Kate Beaton, which is a nice short read because (unlike most things Beaton is known for) it’s not a graphic novel but a transcript of a talk she gave recently. It’s mainly about the culture and history of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where she was born and...

Just sticking to Netflix for no good reason we have quite a rich crop of modern anime, such as: - Apothecary Diaries: As noted above. Maomao is a young apothecary and poison obsessive who ends up being central to many palace intrigue stories as an expert and investigator. It’s not really clear...

Looks cool, and I must get D+ back so we can watch the whole run. But I suspect it’s a stunt reincarnation like the return of 10 - Piper might get a Christmas special and even a couple of episodes but she’ll then step aside for whoever is next. I’m hoping for an Asian woman. (Option 2 - at some...

An interesting recent entry to this rather limited pool is Our Stormy Present, which is aimed most at narratively emulating Final Fantasy games. There are certain genre assumptions: there is always an Empire and it is always terrible; there is always a Resistance and it generally contains or...

Looks pretty great, count me in.

Yes, that sounds right. Freeland puts much stock by the Treaty of Detroit in 1950, which she marks as the end of the first gilded age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuther%27s_Treaty_of_Detroit

I think the problem is that capitalism is so deeply embedded in the global economy that it’s hard to replace it with anything without some sort of cataclysm (which is basically what WW2 did - capitalism wasn’t replaced, of course, but was significantly reformed and worked better for many people...

She has some pretty useful insights, such as about how this gilded age is different from the last one (it’s international rather than mainly in the US and many of the factors which curtailed the last one may not ever apply; also a reminder that the last one lasted about 80 years, it basically...

Just finished Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland. The book doesn’t really live up to the banger title, for the simple and predictable reason that Freeland loves billionaires. You can tell when she’s being quite personal and...

Just finished When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi, which I enjoyed more than his last two books, which were fun but light reading. Moon is rather more interesting because it’s a series of vignettes, about what would happen if our moon was replaced by cheese* one day, and some of the...

Sure enough! As mentioned above, I’d be quite happy to see an Abrams ST style reboot of the original trilogy (but not with Abrams). I think there’s a lot you could do with it. Of course, it will probably never happen while George still breathes.

IIRC the blaster is also part of a set that can be modified for carbine or rifle configuration, but Han didn’t get those parts. Would have been handy sometimes but really not part of the gunslinger vibe he was going for. I really liked Solo and wish we’d seen more of Ehrenreich as Han (not to...

Just read Once Was Willem by M R Carey, which was pointed out to me by this thread, and I’m grateful. It’s a remarkable piece of work, in my opinion - a superhero story set in 12th century England (during the Anarchy) and told using the tropes of English folklore and gnostic mysticism rather...

Weirdly that reminds me of another favourite Quark episode, Business as Usual, which is all about Quark crossing the line and crossing it right back as hard as possible. “28 million dead? Can’t we just wound some of them?” Also, wild to see Steven Berkoff in a Trek episode.

All signs seem to point to some version of the Hickman Avengers run where overlapping realities result in the destruction of one or the other. I’d really hate it if they really did that, because that was some really stupid hard men making hard choices bullcrap crossed with (hey, we’re an elf...

Ooh, interesting.

Not sure whom you mean here so I’m going to speculate in spoilers:

I mean LLM in the sense described in the article of ChatGPT and similar LLMs getting into unexpected and recursive patterns that are convincing (even pathologically convincing) to human users. Like so many things, I don’t think we’re prepared for it. From my work (as a doctor) I’m pretty clear...