Settling down for my nightly explorations of other worlds, aka reading, and thinking about how you know a book is a good book when you don’t want to reach the ending.
The Sword of Kaigen by M. L. Wang has been one of those books. Where the 500+ previous pages went I have no idea because they flew by.
i first filed this on #bookwyrm, where it was accepted and thrown away without explanation. which is why i continue to become disenamoured of the platform. but i told @grimalkina i'd share science tidbits from this cat book.
The fear of artificial life is intimately tied up with the word robot itself, which first appeared in the 1921 science fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), written by the Czech author Karel Čapek. In the play, artificial people—robots—are produced in a factory by the Rossum company. Eventually the robots, who can think for themselves, rise up in rebellion and exterminate almost all of humanity.… The word robot was derived from the Czech roboti, which refers to a serf-like forced laborer.
— Gregory Gbur in Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300231298/falling-felines-and-fundamental-physics/
People told me that Neil Gaiman is a good writer. In fact, they said he’s one of the best. But this sentence is a little questionable. also, he’s used the word wall nine times in this exact same paragraph.
This one took me extraordinarily long. Felt like DNF at times, but I always went on in the end. Well worth it. The first half of the 20th century in #Japan from a less frequent perspective.
Ich bin natürlich überall berühmt. Außer in #mainz Da hat sich nur eine Person zur Lesung am 9.5. angemeldet.
Vielleicht kennt ihr noch eine 2. Person? Wenn nicht muss diese eine Person den ganzen Abend zuhören, Aufmerksamkeit simmulieren und kann nicht nebenher am Handy daddeln. Das will doch auch niemand.
Bitte teilt meine Lesungsankündigung.
Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks, often a result of keyword scrapers finding trending topics, and then so-called publishers using AI and cheap ghostwriters to generate books. "If, as they used to say, everyone has a book in them, AI has created a world where tech utopianists dream openly about excising the human part of writing a book — any amount of artistry or craft or even just sheer effort — and replacing it with machine-generated streams of text," writes Vox's Constance Grady. Here's her story about the underbelly of online self-publishing.
The first page of my "Fantasy/Attempted Comedy" story, The Last Philosopher.
I've been rewriting it again, but this first page still has some issues.
The question is would you keep reading? ☺️
Social bookmarking is a novel use case for #ActivityPub and I’m super excited about it. I heckin’ love links and lists! I wanna use them for everything.
Things like #Bookwyrm are cool, but it’s not what I want. I just wanna link the thing. Books, films, podcasts, articles, songs.., they’re all just resource recommendations which can be encapsulated by links.
Thanks to @raffomania and @eb for the indirect prompts leading to this article mixing their ideas with my own.
I think we should slightly rethink how login works on most Fediverse apps (Mastodon, Lemmy, but not only)
A while ago I posted a thread back on the...