(Thread IKs:
Platystemon)
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Cryptonomicon predicted how annoying blockchain nerds would be before Bitcoin was even invented
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Nov 16, 2019 04:42
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 05:24 |
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snow crash never seemed creepy to me but I read it as a teen so the teenage sex scene was mostly just funny (she knocks out the big buff tall dark and handsome antagonist by complete accident) thinking about it 15 years later is, jesus why was that even in there
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Nov 16, 2019 05:25
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men writers writing women characters are always the horniest fuckers
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Nov 16, 2019 05:50
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I read it as a teenager too and i remember there being some overly long section that was just tediously explaining neurolinguistics that almost made me tap out of the book except I thought the cyberpunk swordplay was sick so I persisted I bet if I opened the book again I'd see that section was only like 20 pages but it felt like 200 at the time
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Nov 16, 2019 06:13
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Nov 16, 2019 06:26
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ah, orlando PD?
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Nov 16, 2019 06:46
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System Metternich posted:sorry for the double post, but lol I remember a few years ago there was one of those "tech support stories" threads somewhere on the forms (ask/tell maybe) and one of the anecdotes that came up was that a guy was helping his grandma set up her computer and she kept putting on nice clothes (basically church clothes) to go online because she thought everyone would see her and she wanted to look her best, and she was sad to learn that they actually couldn't
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Nov 16, 2019 06:48
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The Baroque Cycle is really good.
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Nov 16, 2019 07:46
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Larry Parrish posted:snow crash never seemed creepy to me but I read it as a teen so the teenage sex scene was mostly just funny (she knocks out the big buff tall dark and handsome antagonist by complete accident) I read the book and I don't even remember it happening. All I remember is the incredibly poorly researched and dumb poo poo about glossolalia (literally never has a language pattern or strays from the penta's known language sounds etc), the first chapter, some snark about gov jobs and emails, the metaverse predicting the worst parts of the internet, and Reason with a bit of the fight at the end.
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Nov 16, 2019 07:48
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Armadillo Tank posted:I read the book and I don't even remember it happening. All I remember is the incredibly poorly researched and dumb poo poo about glossolalia (literally never has a language pattern or strays from the penta's known language sounds etc), the first chapter, some snark about gov jobs and emails, the metaverse predicting the worst parts of the internet, and Reason with a bit of the fight at the end. its maybe half a page long. the only thing notable about it is the protagonist involved being a 16 year old girl, and her having a hypodermic dentata loaded with knockout juice (how this is supposed to be a rape deterrent is never really explored). but as i said the funny part is that she forgot about that, and was just into the tall dark and handsome dude
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Nov 16, 2019 11:11
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MonsieurChoc posted:The Baroque Cycle is really good. You must have forgotten the scene where the protaganists study a used tampon.
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Nov 16, 2019 12:43
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Stephenson does great world building, but he also writes like a direct feed from a libertarian teenager's horny brain. The world building in Seveneves is some of my favorite stuff he's written, especially halfway through, where it just goes "5000 YEARS LATER", which is so silly and dumb that it just works.
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Nov 16, 2019 13:08
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KozmoNaut posted:The world building in Seveneves is some of my favorite stuff he's written, especially halfway through, where it just goes "5000 YEARS LATER", which is so silly and dumb that it just works. yeah that's about where he lost me
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Nov 16, 2019 13:21
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It's the best that he has done, not the best ever by anyone, and it's perfectly understandable to be put off by him, he has a certain naive libertarian view of the world. I can ignore that for the most part (and the silly techbro worship, especially the Elon Musk expy nobly sacrificing himself to save everyone), but it does jump out a bit. To switch gears a bit, I'm reading through Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun at the moment, and kicking myself for putting it off. It can be a little hard to get into, but the use of archaic language is used extremely well to really make you feel like someone learning about a deeply foreign world. It's one of the best books I've read in a long time. KozmoNaut has issued a correction as of 13:34 on Nov 16, 2019 |
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Nov 16, 2019 13:31
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book of the new sun is truly incredible and love the way he uses words. like how he uses desterrier to specifically mean a kind of raptor thing people ride. it's a fancy word for warhorse but theres no confusion in your mind, because of how naturally it just gets tossed in there. whereas most fantasy writers would just straight up call it a lizard or give it a name that looks like someone just mashed the keyboard
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Nov 16, 2019 15:32
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the timeskip in seveneves is where the book totally falls apart. i was loving just about every bit of it right up until then. space survival stuff is pretty cool, but the 5000 years later poo poo was loving stupid. if the book ended halfway in it would have been great
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Nov 16, 2019 15:56
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Serf posted:the timeskip in seveneves is where the book totally falls apart. i was loving just about every bit of it right up until then. space survival stuff is pretty cool, but the 5000 years later poo poo was loving stupid. if the book ended halfway in it would have been great I disagree completely. I loved seeing the extrapolation forward to what society became.
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Nov 16, 2019 16:11
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The Book of the New Sun is extremely overrated and how Wolfe treats the women he writes is awful
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Nov 16, 2019 16:56
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Day Man posted:I disagree completely. I loved seeing the extrapolation forward to what society became. Uh you mean the extrapolation where basically nothing has changed, everyone still speaks the same language, and the hints of anything interesting like the sea people are barely explored because Stephenson had passed his page count quota by that point? Read Reamde instead, that one is great even if is more of a present-day fiction than speculative sci-fi.
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Nov 16, 2019 17:12
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im on the net me boys posted:The Book of the New Sun is extremely overrated and how Wolfe treats the women he writes is awful i love Book but yeah gene wolf really doesnt think much of women, i'm not interested in reading his other books b/c of it. him writing a protagonist with so many complexes w/r/t women is mind bogglingly ironic.
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Nov 16, 2019 18:09
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MonsieurChoc posted:The Baroque Cycle is really good. I listened an audio version Quicksilver and they explicitly cut a huge amount of content. There's even sections where the narrator jumps in and outright summarizes whole chapters, like, "Here's a bunch of poo poo half-cock jack did long after he stopped being relevant to the story..."
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Nov 16, 2019 18:17
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Nov 16, 2019 18:50
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Leviathan Song posted:You must have forgotten the scene where the protaganists study a used tampon. I don't remember that, but I remember the scene where a character wakes up in the middle of getting operated for a kidney stone. Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:I listened an audio version Quicksilver and they explicitly cut a huge amount of content. There's even sections where the narrator jumps in and outright summarizes whole chapters, like, "Here's a bunch of poo poo half-cock jack did long after he stopped being relevant to the story..." That's part of the appeal, like those huge 19th century novels that were published in newspapers.
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Nov 16, 2019 19:15
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when i worked at walmart and we got all of our patriotic crap in for memorial day/4th of july i noticed that there was just a shitload of patriotic disney crap which confused me at first but really, it makes a lot of sense. oh and we had cowboy hats that looked like they were woven from bud and bud lite labels which was just hilarious
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Nov 16, 2019 19:39
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Day Man posted:I disagree completely. I loved seeing the extrapolation forward to what society became. i just couldn't get into it. the near-future struggle to survive in space was really interesting in the way that stephenson roots his fiction in real world science. but the timeskip just blows all that up and throws tons of incomprehensible garbage at you SaTaMaS posted:Read Reamde instead, that one is great even if is more of a present-day fiction than speculative sci-fi. reamde is a trash book, but its enjoyable, highly readable trash
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Nov 16, 2019 19:47
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BUSH 2112 posted:when i worked at walmart and we got all of our patriotic crap in for memorial day/4th of july i noticed that there was just a shitload of patriotic disney crap which confused me at first Yeah, it's kinda obvious. Conservatism is all about trying to force the world into line with the misconceptions of your youth while trying to stop the progression of history, and Disney has been weaseling its way into childhoods around the world for over 80 years and regularly tries to use the legal system as a weapon against people. Really, what's more surprising is that Disney would allow somebody to use its branding without explicit permission, and hasn't demanded that these people remove their branded flesh.
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Nov 16, 2019 20:07
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SlothfulCobra posted:Yeah, it's kinda obvious. Conservatism is all about trying to force the world into line with the misconceptions of your youth while trying to stop the progression of history, and Disney has been weaseling its way into childhoods around the world for over 80 years and regularly tries to use the legal system as a weapon against people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnk9lCfEozk
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Nov 16, 2019 20:31
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(stolen from the happy thread) https://twitter.com/mooncult/status/1195424622813966336 this is the cyberpunk future I was promised
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Nov 16, 2019 20:51
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is cryptonomicon the one that starts with the stemlord protagonist owning a strawman sjw cuck in an argument about poststructuralism or w/e
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Nov 16, 2019 21:32
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https://twitter.com/dw_business/status/1195351949337616386?s=21 you can close the thread now
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Nov 16, 2019 21:41
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Taintrunner posted:https://twitter.com/dw_business/status/1195351949337616386?s=21 it was a good run
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Nov 16, 2019 21:56
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Taintrunner posted:https://twitter.com/dw_business/status/1195351949337616386?s=21 billy's chin is completely out of control also great example of "create a problem, sell the solution"
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Nov 16, 2019 21:56
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https://twitter.com/mashable/status/1193088083492630528?s=21
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Nov 16, 2019 21:56
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Thank god for these cans of air in my desk.
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Nov 16, 2019 21:59
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the kWoof Blitzer posted:Thank god for these cans of air in my desk. the keyboard duster tastes almost as bitter as I am
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Nov 16, 2019 22:01
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https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1195744018275000320
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Nov 16, 2019 22:01
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https://twitter.com/zoeSaintBernard/status/1195371081881784320quote:When a venture capitalist invited Jane Dinh, an entrepreneur in San Francisco, out for a second date a couple years ago, he had an unusual question for her. Would she be interested in pretending to be homeless with him for a night? article behind a paywall, can't read it though
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Nov 16, 2019 22:01
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:real talk, the American people's response to school shootings basically cemented my greater psychological scope theory that MAD is bullshit, and at some point in the next decade a nuclear state is going to drop the bomb on a rival country's city, it won't cause the end of the world, and everyone is just going to grow to accept a new reality where every six to eight months a city just gets deleted somewhere on the planet because nobody is willing to actually stop it might be sooner than that with the tromp state department trying to handle kashmir. i can't imagine them doing any better with that than any of their other spectacular failures.
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Nov 16, 2019 22:06
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Peanut Butler posted:
that's ok neither could stephenson. I've quit reading for months or years at a time every time I hit the loving brick wall of a stephenson book at 120mph. I bet pre-edit it's something like 100,000 words exactly and he just instantly saves it and mails it in. had to quit reading him entirely after diamond age because i didn't want to give up reading itself entirely.
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Nov 16, 2019 22:19
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 05:24 |
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Diamond Age is the best Neal Stephenson book. Oh.
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Nov 16, 2019 22:30
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