I just finished it today and it's hard to pinpoint exactly what parts I enjoyed.

The rest of the book felt very preachy and a lot of it felt unnecessary. I don't think I liked a single character in the book. They all felt like caricatures and not how people would genuinely act or respond to the events happening in the book. Almost every single action taken by every single character felt forced to fit a narrative.

I cannot fathom why this won a Hugo award other than the fact that it was the first piece of science fiction originally written by a Chinese author in the Chinese language to win. [edit: In terms of novelty. The fact that it was originally written in Chinese has absolutely no bearing on my opinion other than possibly due to the translation the characters seemed to have no depth.]

I listened to the audio book, as I was told the names can be confusing and the audio book helped with it. I kept waiting for it to go somewhere, and when it was over I thought to myself, "that's it?"

Maybe someone can give a different perspective on it, because right now I'm just frustrated I spent money on it.

1. What do you think of popular figures like Noam Chomsky, Jason Hickel, Richard Wolff, David Graeber, and Bernie Sanders?

2. Why does grotesque inequality persist? Will the lot of the downtrodden and the oppressed ever improve?

3. What do you think of Anarchism?

Just looking to learn from the community members here. Thanks.

Hey all!

(If this is the wrong place for this, please feel free to reassign)

During the winter months I can't get out to do much photography, but I love darkroom printing. Last winter I started buying antique photo negatives on ebay to have something to print.

It's been amazing! Many are from the 20's, 30's and 40's, with one set (of glass plates) having been manufactured pre-20th century!

I don't know how many I have, but it must be somewhere around 300-500 negatives. Currently they are stored in their original envelopes from the labs that developed them nearly 90 years ago, but that's not a good long term option. I love history, and I want to do this right, but I feel a bit overwhelmed with the volume.

Data I'd like to keep track of:

• The name of the person on the envelope the negative came from
• The date on the envelope
• The approximate date taken (if known)
• Ideally the specific envelope it came from

I'm going to try and store these in a binder of some sort, though that presents it's own challenges since it won't be possible to find sheets with sleeves that are the right size for the negatives. But that's a problem for me to solve haha. I've never had to index/catalog physical media before, so I'm pretty clueless on where to start.

More than anything it's really important to me to preserve this history in a safe way. For many of the people these pictures may be the only trace on earth that they ever existed, and I want to respect that.

A different conversation caused me to remember how much fun it was while playing Shadow of Mordor, to shoot nests of Morgai Flies dropping them onto the residents of ork fortresses.

Disclaimer, Shadow of Mordor is far from being the best video game I have ever played, but that action in particular was very fun to do and funny to watch.

I've been thinking of this for a while and wanted to see what people here think the greatest TV intro themes of all time are.

I'll start.
Here is my top 10:

1. Succession
2. Full Metal Alchemist (Golden Time Lover)
3. Game of Thrones
4. The Golden Girls
5. X-Files
6. The Boondocks
7. Law and Order
8. The Wire
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Doctor Who

Has anyone been experimenting with that? I recently found some fairly easy tutorials on tiktok. I always thought you need like special coagulates to make tofu, but apparently with many beans you can just boil them or add some acid to make them firm. And yeah, you can make tofu from essentially any beans, peas or lentils.

I tried making some green peas tofu, and so far i'm not too happy with the taste. It has a wierd, a bit caustic, aftertaste. I'm not sure if it's the green pea or my recipe...
I will definitely be trying lentils next!

For example, if I want to add ground flax to a brownie mix or oats to muffins? What if I want to add some extra dried blueberries to boxed blueberry muffin mix? The box instructions usually say 1/4 cup of oil and 1 egg, and I'm wondering if I need to double both or either if I want to add some more dry ingredients. Or is there maybe a max level at which I don't need to add extra oil/eggs, like a quarter cup at most of oats?

I know baking is a science and ratios are important, but still it'd be nice to have a way to make storebought convenience mixes a wee bit more filling or healthier. I'm used to substituting applesauce for oil in brownies, but I'm curious what else I could do with a storebought mix.

I am a huge fan of Prana pants, they are made of synthetic materials, stretchy and comfortable, light and dry quickly, and I have found them perfect for travel, hiking, lounging, etc.

Unfortunately they have discontinued my favorite models that looked more “professional” like chinos and thus could double for work, travel, date nights, etc. Their current models, while comfortable, all sort of look like hiking pants and don’t have an aesthetic I appreciate.

With that in mind, I was curious if anyone could provide me with recommendations for professional looking pants with similar attributes as those above that you’ve found to be comfortable and multi purpose. Thank you!

About a week ago i made A post asking people what their favorite BBS board is, so I'd be curious to see what people answer to his question. Personally the only one i remember is emptyclosets, a forum for queer people.
Edit: By drama/story, it doesn't have to be something someone did that pissed people off. You can also include something interesting that happened on there (e.g on a Nirvana forum that used to exist, theres a micro-famous story about a user who went to a prostitute and talked about it on there)

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I'm failing. My usual tricks aren't working and I don't know what to do with my clothes anymore.

One of my ADHD symptoms is that needs to see everything. My "pantry" is open shelves in my kitchen. Everything in the fridge is up near the front of the shelves. I have a giant desk so I can spread out when I'm working. I need to see it all at all times.
So the issue becomes, how do I do that with clothes. My alligator brain wants them all over the floor so I can see everything. That's not gonna work lol. I used to be good with a closet with no doors, but my new apartment isn't laid out in a way I can do that.

Does anyone have any interesting clothes storage advice? The clutter is stressing me out, so I need to figure out whatever my new system is going to be.

Curious to hear what the people of tildes think.

As we close in on 3 years of use with these newer consoles, what are every one’s thoughts? Has “next gen” been what you thought it’d really be or are you kinda just feeling whelmed?

I have a PS5 and I use it every now and then for pretty much the first party games. PC is my main platform but as I think back, I’ve been pretty happy with my PS5 and the games to come so far. I also really enjoy the UI (although custom backgrounds would be great).

I don’t know how the Xbox side is so I’d love to hear your thoughts to!

Thanks for taking the time to read.

I'm curious on how to get started in self hosting. I have computer experience, being an Android Developer, but I hardly have experience in Linux and backend/networking work.

I've been wanting to start up a Plex/Jellyfin server for a while, and I have an old system sitting around with a Ryzen 1700 with a graphics card in there as well that's been begging for attention, and maybe I can throw on a Minecraft server in there as well. Since I travel a bunch, it would be nice too to be able to access my media for when I'm traveling, or to let my parents or friends access some shows if they so desire!

What I'm worried about is exposing my network to the internet basically. I used to run a Minecraft server with port forwarding and such on a personal computer but now I'm realizing that that's probably a bit unsafe lol.

Basically, are there any guides that I can look at, or any of your own experiences that could potentially help me or anyone who's interested?

Edit: I love the films too, but I'm really looking for examples in the text, even if the adaptation does the scene justice, I'm interested in how Tolkien himself wrote it.

I'm on a bit of a JRR Tolkien kick recently and revisiting some of my favorite bits from the books. One thing I really appreciate about Tolkien's writing is the outright poetry of some of the paragraphs and lines. I think the only "wordsmith" who appeals this much to me is Cormac McCarthy (and to some extent GRR Martin) -- but for very different reasons. Anyways, I'll share my favorite section from the Legendarium.

Théoden's charge at Minas Tirith - The Return of the King

To set the stage, the Rohirrim have navigated to Minas Tirith and are greeted by a dying besieged city steeped in darkess and fire. Upon seeing this, we get this line about Théoden:

But the king sat upon Snowmane, motionless, gazing upon the agony of Minas Tirith, as if stricken suddenly by anguish, or by dread. He seemed to shrink down, cowed by age.

Merry utterly loses hope at seeing the city and the reaction of the king. Then as all hope seems lost, we get one of the best sections in the whole trilogy:

At that sound the bent shape of the king sprang suddenly erect. Tall and proud he seemed again; and rising in his stirrups he cried in a loud voice, more clear than any there had ever heard a mortal man achieve before:

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!
spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

With that he seized a great horn from Guthláf his banner-bearer, and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder. And straightway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm upon the plain and a thunder in the mountains.

Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Éomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first éored roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Théoden could not be overtaken. Fey he seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them. And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City.

This might be my favorite bit in all of LOTR because we see good king Théoden shed all his fears and doubts and actualize into the man he was meant to be. And to be compared to the Valar Oromë to boot! Wow. I am also a total sucker for any moment in the trilogy when a deed or character gets compared to events or characters of the First Age. Anytime that happens, you know it's a big deal since the First Age was so much "larger than life" than the events of the Third Age. Tolkien does a similar thing when Sam faces off Shelob noting that not even Túrin or Beren with any craft of the elves could have injured her -- yet Sam stood his ground, nonetheless.

I am not a Tolkien scholar, but I know Tolkien was incredibly steeped in medieval and ancient literature (I mean, he was a Professor of English literature) so I know his heart was really in old mythologies in Germanic or Norse traditions (for example Túrin Turambar's story is directly inspired by the Finnish tale of Kullervo, or how almost word-for-word bits of The Wanderer poem end up in Rohan's culture and song). Because of his Christian faith though, I suspect he had qualms with the often-brutal mortality of those tales and the cultures which produced them. This section with Théoden charging bravely against hopelessness and despair I think represents the "merger" of all the positive qualities he found in heroes like Beowulf with his more temperate worldview. It's an idealization of the heroic good-pagan Germanic king.

Hi folks. I am searching for songs that, for lack of a better word, build up via "layers" as the song progresses. For example, Beethoven's 7th Symphony, Second Movement, The Boxer Rebellion's "Soviets", or Dave Matthew's Band's "Dancing Nancies". Do you have any recommendations? Perhaps a musician would be able to tell me what this type of music/structure is called?

EDIT: Thank you so much to everyone who responded. There are some GREAT suggestions! I have a lot of listening to do!

Pretty much the title. We all play all sorts of games, and they generally are all good games. However, every once in a while you start a game that just hits the right notes and you hate putting your controller or device down, and you can't stop thinking about things you want to do when you get back in front of that game. I figure we could post up our current addicting games so others can search them out as well :)

My current addiction is Frostpunk. Got it on a whim from the Steam Summer sale, and my Lord am I addicted. It's a really good (to me) post civilization survival game where you try to establish and rebuild life with a new world around you. Surprisingly challenging and the scenarios are very fun. I bought it 2 weeks ago and have 63 hours into it.

For the last few summers I've tried (and failed) to get a silent disco system working for a small group of friends. The requirements are

1. Anyone should be able to join (locally) with a phone and a pair of bluetooth headphones. With the absence of headphone jacks I've found most people rely on bluetooth headphones.
2. Low enough latency.
3. Decent enough audio fidelity.
4. No weird monetized apps you have to sign in to.

In a post covid age where we all had low latency video calls, it seems crazy there isn't an obvious way to have <10 people connected to one 128kbps audio stream. Here are the shortcomings

• Most silent disco systems (for events) use FM to broadcast to FM receivers. Broadcasting without a license is technically illegal, but easy enough to do. The lack of wired headphones means most phones no longer support receiving FM frequencies, as they used the headphone wire as an antenna. It's not ideal checking up on everyone's phone models to see whether or not they support FM ahead of time.

• Throughout covid we used Discord to listen to music together many miles apart. The trouble is bluetooth does not have enough bandwidth for speakers and a microphone. So - those with wired headphones it worked perfectly, but with bluetooth headphones the audio drops to landline phone quality, far below what's listenable. Discord supports 'Stage' calls where some participants are talking and others are only listening. Unfortunately this doesn't disable the microphone for the audience, and so the audio is still poor.

• Lastly is streaming. This solves everything above but the latency is too high. Using software called 'Stream What You Hear' allowed us to create a webpage with a stream running, but each person could be many seconds ahead or behind depending on when they loaded the stream. Attempts to sync everyone up would fail if someone accidentally locked their phone.

I'm wondering if the solution is going to have to be a bit more technically minded, which I'm open to investigating, but wondered if anyone here had any ideas to bounce.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I tried SnapCast as recommendation by @arch and it seems to do exactly what I was setting out to achieve, and FOSS software too! Thanks to everyone for their suggestions and help, I'm really excited to trial it.

Hello everyone :)

I write as a hobby and have had an article in my drafts for a long, long time. In essence, I'd like to discuss the "repetitive nature of human tribulations/suffering/life", that is, the fact that regardless of superficial characteristics we all are confronted with extremely similar circumstances throughout our lives.

Whether it's 10 years into our lives or 40, there's joy, heartbreak, loss, a need to belong, some desire for freedom, a need for a purpose, lack of direction, obsession with a newly found direction, etc.

I'd love to come across poets, philosophers, psychologists, etc who have touched upon this subject: we are not defined by our circumstances, as they are, in very broad strokes, largely the same, but by how we are able to adapt and reinvent ourselves amidst those same circumstances.

Looking forward for your answers :)

Thanks!

Hi, I started trialing contact lenses (toric lenses, specifically) about a month ago, and have had a problem with them making my eyes seriously red. I've tried 3 different brands of contacts now, and the issue has persisted across all three. Has anyone else had a similar experience and figure out how to manage it? Thank you!

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

My current round of insurance with TD / Primmum is due up. I have a 2021 Jeep Gladiator (financed) and a 2019 KIA Rio (no loan), house (no mortgage), and 2016 17' travel trailer (no loan) with them. Been with them for many many years. Supposedly have a group plan through my employer Ontario Power Generation. I'm not so sure anymore. While it's just me (47m) right now, my 17 year old son will likely get added Friday when he gets his G2 🤞.

I wonder if anyone could recommend a company that would do good for all, or separate for each. I also have some artwork and camera equipment I would probably tack on.
The letter I got from TD also said if I don't put a tracker on my Jeep (for theft) my premium will go up. They will pay for it, but if they supply it I won't even consider it. I don't want them following me! Giggle does that enough.

Searching "best xxxxx" will always give you sites that make money from the reviewed businesses. I won't trust any of them.

I started the monumental task of tagging all my music for the purpose of organising but also autoplaylist generation. I decided to tag only by genre because it suits my listening behaviour (e.g. I feel like reggae, so I pull up my reggae category and scan through album art till I find something that fits my mood).

I've started tagging and retagging a few times now. I haven't quite figured out a method that works. I started off too specific (many subgenres with few artists in each), then too broad (hundreds of artists per genre). The sweet spot is elusive. I've been doing this work manually, but I've also had the idea of scrapping RYM because I've found this source to be fairly similar to my own judgment. The idea of automated tagging is appealing so I can "let the gods decide" and reduce the mental tax.

Anyways, please share your methods! Im sure someone has "solved" this delimma. TIA

I saw a post on reddit about a guy asking about why his wife changes hobbies so much. He went on to detail her getting super fixated on a hobby, investing a lot of money and learning a lot, and then dropping it. A lot of people were mentioning possibly being adhd.

I remember that being the first thing that clued me in as an adult who was not diagnosed until later in life.

Anyone else care to share?

I want to upgrade my gaming setup, but I want to move towards a desktop replacement laptop for the compact form factor to free up desk space or even get rid of a desk altogether. I also want to try out Pop!_OS since I know it has good Nvidia drivers and that most games are compatible with Linux nowadays.

Has anyone had any experience with switching to Pop!_OS from Windows? What is software compatibility like? Pros and cons?

Also is anyone here using an 18 inch gaming laptop? I'm interested in huge laptops since I'm not really planning on taking it on the go.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Sorry Boardtiddleums, little late with the weekly thread!

Saturday I got in a couple of games of Bus!, securing a comfortable victory in the first and an even more comfortable defeat in the second. Every time I play Bus! I love it it that little bit more: central map with interesting decisions, worker placement where you choose how fast you burn through your workers, ability to lose a victory point to screw everyone else over...what's not to like?

After that we played Stockpile, which is always fun. We were a bit rusty on the rules so didn't play with any expansion material.

Finished up with a game of Cat in the Box, which a fantastic little spin on trick taking games. The deluxe edition that you can currently get is so overproduced, but in the nicest possible way.

So what have you all been busy playing this week?

Good morning ~ This is a thread to discuss new album releases arriving at our doorsteps today (and until next week!). Feel free to comment albums that have caught your eye and interest.

Discussion Points

What are you looking forward to listen to?
Have you listened to any of these releases?
What are your thoughts?
What have you enjoyed from these artists in the past?
Why Friday?

Most (but not all) new LPs release on a Friday, as labels want to give the release a full week of sales before entering the charts.

~~ Feedback on the format welcome!

I'm looking at starting to do a PC build and I'm a bit lost on which way to go CPU wise.

Proposed use case: linux, some gaming (usually older games), possibly trying to learn home lab/self hosting types of things probably in a VM but nothing really heavy. I do want to run Starfield when it comes out and maybe be able to try VR some time in the future.

I'd like to have a bit of a future proof system while getting value for my money, as in I'd like to spend less but I will spend more if it matters. This is where I'm sort of getting lost.

I tend to lean towards Intel because VM's and multitasking should work better (I think) but people seem to believe that AMD is better bang for the buck?

I feel like I'm likely not going to swap CPU's, but RAM, GPU, and storage are easy to swap so I'm not to worried.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

About 3 or 4 times a year I will get pretty powerful manic episodes. Usually for a few days I'll stay at the office until late at night, I'm in an amazing mood, I'm always excited and have trouble sleeping. My focus is so powerful, If I could be this version of me all of the time I genuinely believe I could do anything.

It's like a totally different person from my usual self who is easily fatigued, slow to start, and generally lethargic.

Knowing this side of me exists is exciting but also kind of depressing given my awareness of its fleeting nature. How have you dealt with this? Any reading you could recomend?

I’ve always been a bit nervous of bleach. My white counters in the kitchen have been picking up stains, so I bought some bleach and have left it to sit. Hooray, the stains are gone!

BUT. Then I googled some bleach tips and discovered that you absolutely shouldn’t use undiluted bleach on your counters because it can ruin them 🤦🏻‍♀️

I didn’t pick up a lot of cleaning knowledge from my parents, and it’s been a lot of trial and error (so much error) figuring out how to keep everything clean enough. Now I have schedules and products and I do a pretty good job of it, but I moved out of home at 18 and I’m now 36 so it’s been literally half my life getting to this point.

So… what cleaning tips and tricks do you have? What product (remember to specify which country you’re in!) can you absolutely not do without? What products can be used for something unusual? Let’s hear it!

I tried finding other alternatives to reddit, which is what got me here. I still love the content of the subs that I followed and am not wanting to really step away. I'd like to as a matter of my own principles... but I still want it. So much knowledge has been amassed on that platform.

Do you guys still mess with reddit regularly? If not, how?

I'm looking for weird or obscure music that few folks have given a listen. To keep things interesting, I'll try and post stuff I've stumbled upon and liked rather than cruising newly uploaded stuff. The 20K plays limit is a soft limit and is not cumulative, so just check the numbers one platform like Spotify, YouTube Music or whatever. If it's obscure on one platform, it's probably, though not necessarily, obscure elsewhere too. I'll just be using YT Music numbers.

• Depois do Escuro - Kalouv at 377 views. Brazilian post-rock band. Not well known at least in my music circles. This song just slaps hard. It deserves more attention.

• The Search - Dougie MacLean at 8.9K views. Scottish folk artist. Some of his stuff is much better known: one of his tracks for the inspiration for the Last of the Mohicans theme). This whole album was made the Loch Ness Monster Exhibition and is much better than it has any right to be for a tourist attraction.

• Sólin Mun Skína - Rökkurró at 9.3K views. Icelandic pop and rock band. I like the lead vocal artist a lot. Edit: Their VEVO channel puts this one at 41K views, so it breaks my rules a bit. Oh well.

• Modulus - Marcus Fjellström at 733 views. Swedish composer and artist who did mostly moody and surreal dreamscapes and ambient music. Sadly he passed away in 2017 after composing the score for the tv show The Terror (one of the few excellent survival horror shows). Not really "easy listening" but I'm really impressed with his work and wanted to share it.

• Misery Needs Company - Lovedrug at 2.1K views. Indie/alt band. Great song. Simple as that.

• The Lunar Effect - Kebu at 19K views. Kebu, a Finnish keyboardist and composer, does lots of old-school synth and electronic work like you'd find in the tradition of Jean Michel Jarre. Edit: The live performance of this song has like 300K views... so I really shouldn't include it here.

• Summoning Lesser Demons - Ivar Tryti at 10.1K views. Ivar is a regular on the synthesizer discord which is how I found his stuff. He's a wizard with Elektron synths/samplers and gear so I keep up with his releases.

If you're having trouble finding stuff <20K (I know I did when searching my history!) then increase the threshold to say 100K. If anybody has a good way to find rarer stuff, ideas are welcome. :)

I'm in the market for a 3 monitor setup. I've got a huge desk and about $2k to spend. Ideally, I'd like three matching monitors, but here's the catch. I want the middle "main" monitor to be my gaming monitor (120-144hz) while the side monitors can be 60hz. It'd be awesome if there was a brand that sold the same form factor (same base, bezel, etc).

Thoughts?

I know medium has an RSS feed that can be accessed by adding /feed/ before the username/publication name but it's truncated if the publication has a paywall. I've been looking for a way to get the full-text feed but could not find a solution, it looks like it adds a parameter to the link in the rss feed, similar to ?source=rss-d00bc5bb7954------2 but I can't figure out how to remove it. any ideas ?

So, in the past, I have been able to find new poems I enjoy by reading a critical essay about poetry and taking the referenced poem and author and typing the information into Google search. It used to be that that technique turned up a copy of the text of the poem and typically more poems by the author 95 percent of the time for me.

This year, when I try that same technique, Google gives me general reference articles about the life of the poet, or news about celebrities with similar names (not the same name at all), or just no search results. Does anyone know what happened? Can anyone help me use the internet to find new poems again?

Thanks very much

Are you planning on working until you're 60+?

Or maybe selling it all and living in a rural area?

Buying stocks or ETFs?

Or something else?

So what's your retirement plan? At what age do you want to retire and how are you working towards this goal?

I've been following tildes the past couple of weeks, and am really enjoying the friendlier, more thought out discussion, when compared to reddit. The one thing I miss is r/flying, which was a pretty decent community of pilots without too much low-effort content.

I'm curious if any other pilots have migrated here (hobby pilots, or professionals)? Are we anywhere near critical mass to support discussions around it?

To keep this valuable to the community at large, just a bit about flying as a hobby. At-least in the US, we still have one of the most active General Aviation communities in the world. It's a lot more expensive than it used to be, but for around $10k you can earn your Private Pilot rating. With that you can fly to nearly any airport, over nearly any area, see beautiful views, experience all sorts of weather and locations. At that point you're looking at ~$100-200/hr depending where in the US you're located, and what sort of club or rental you use.

It's expensive to be sure, but compared to what people manage to spend on boating, cars, even golfing, it can be fairly reasonable. And it's really a unique experience, if you love it there's nothing like it.

It's one of those highly praised series that I've been waiting to read for years. When I finally did (I bought the full set of used and slightly wearied paper books), I bounced off quick. I tried reading it in 2019, so my memory of that book ("The Shadow of the Torturer") is foggy, but I wrote down some notes at the time.

I dropped the book somewhere around the Botanical Gardens, mostly because of very annoying female characters, all of whom were the protagonists so-called love interests. It seemed like every attractive woman he met would fall for him and it was so unnatural. I don't even have a problem with the idea per se, for example I'm buying into how macho-men are getting women in Wilbur Smith's adventure books because it feels organic, in Wolfe's book it was like a teenage boy fantasy.

I don't actually remember it well, but here's an excerpt from what I noted at the time:

I don't understand Severian's actions - he is challenged to a duel using the flower of vengeance - neither he nor the reader knows what's going on. At the same time, he is tasked with reaching Thrax and assuming the position of local executioner there. He interrupts his journey and decides to take up the challenge, of course, with a girl he has just met in some inn. He is convicted and instead of serving his sentence, he engages in some foolishness. I wanted the girl to disappear from the pages of the novel. Then a second woman appears and I feel that there will also be something between her and Severian.

The Polish edition which I read is 326 pages long, I dropped off at page 245, I just couldn't bear it anymore. I occasionally see those books, either on my shelf (I have not given them away) or in stores and keep thinking that maybe I misunderstood it or didn't see their greatness and wondering if it would click if I tried again.

Maybe it is just me?