@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

nitpicking

@nitpicking@mstdn.party

So I've been a science teacher, museum guide, freelance writer, software dev, software product manager, network admin, and for a long time now a business trainer. And I run SFF conventions.
Member: #tootfinder.

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jdnicoll, to random
@jdnicoll@wandering.shop avatar

A Pride of Monsters by James H. Schmitz

Five answers to "What's eating you?"

https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/scratching-through-the-wall

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

1/3
@jdnicoll

Nice review. My comment was blocked from your site due to "Security policy", so I'll post it here (later in thread).

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

2/3

@jdnicoll
I think Schmitz was the most feminist of the Golden Age writers. His most popular character, Telzey Amberdon, is a teenage girl. She gets in trouble, but you could never call her a damsel in distress. Unless his most popular work was the Witches of Karres series, in which the protagonist was male but the titular witches are mostly female and, again, have full agency and are developed characters. They aren't walking, talking rewards like women in Christopher Anvil's early work.

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

3/3 @jdnicoll

(I was amazed on rereading Anvil decades later how many of his early stories had no female characters at all.)

Consider also Trigger Argee and Nyles Etland. I'd say he was a specialist in strong, female lead characters.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

So, after putting it down for many years, I'm back to trying to read HG Wells' corpus. Interesting thing: all of his famous, lasting, books were published between 1895-1899, when he was aged 29 to 33. There are other novels, lots of philosophical and political thought, but so far I would say none of it comes close to that first few years.

Having read lots of it my feeling is that he was very smart but used up his original ideas quickly and his political thought verged on silly.

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@ZachWeinersmith I find Wells to be hard to read, even his best stuff (according to others). I can read his contemporaries (e. g. Twain) with no problems, it must be some stylistic thing that bugs me, but I can't tell what.

nitpicking, to random
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

Well, that's brain-dead. I just booked a flight to Scotland from New York. Delta's site, as you might expect, tries to sell me a hotel. Cool, except it is trying to sell me a hotel room in New York, where I live, not the UK, where I am going. Software developers: How can you make that mistake?

blondoid, to random
@blondoid@mastodon.social avatar

Oh. Of course now we have clear sky. Couldn’t have clear sky last night, though. I’d have actually been able to see the Northern Lights. I am, however, enjoying the pictures from folks who did get to see them!

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@blondoid I hear the solar storm isn't over. I plan to find a dark place tonight, if the sky stays clear.

elithebearded, to random
@elithebearded@fed.qaz.red avatar

"I like capers."

Later clarification after the robbery:

"I like those salty green things sold as capers on my pasta."

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@elithebearded [Dallman, or maybe Groucho]How the caper salesman got on my pasta, I'll never know![/Dallman]

nitpicking, to random
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

Holy shit, they can cure genetic deafness now.

https://wapo.st/4duUgbx
Paywall lowered.

typingmonkey, to random
@typingmonkey@mastodon.social avatar

Just remembered that I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a car accident. It was relatively far away and I just went back to sleep, so I have no idea what happened. I do remember very specifically that I could hear pieces of the car hitting the ground, so I think it was probably pretty bad.

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@typingmonkey There is a non-zero chance that it was a dream, of course.

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Hey literature people--

So, I was reading HG Wells and I noticed something I hadn't thought about. He writes in a style that's very weird, and but for the Victorian/Edwardian language might even be considered experimental now? Like, in The War in the Air, it regularly alternates between goofy comedic scenes and scenes of horror and violence. And in between THAT there are digressions about economics and engineering technology. (1/n)

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@ZachWeinersmith

I don't read that much fiction these days, but I happen to be reading a story by Steven Brust right now, and he definitely does this. Then again, Steve is deliberately aping older writers. This novel is partly a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan's stuff ... which was itself satire. Brust's themes are things like class warfare, the breakup of a marriage leaving the protagonist devastated, and redemption for a character who was, a few novels ago, an unrepentant psychopath.

jdnicoll, to random
@jdnicoll@wandering.shop avatar

Another week, another round of Nebula finalists. This set is from the 1982 Nebula Awards.

✓ for read, * for intend to read, ! for never heard of it, and # for "what the fuck, SFWA voters?" Or whatever amuses you.

#nebula

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@jdnicoll I enjoyed "The Saturn Game". I don't care about awards, so that didn't affect me much.

I think it shows one of Anderson's strengths (vivid, poetic language) and perhaps a weakness (plot logic).

mitchw, to random
@mitchw@mastodon.social avatar

“Hazel,” a self-described “tab hoarder,” kept 7,500 tabs open for two years. Then Firefox refused to restore the session. [techspot.com] https://www.techspot.com/news/102871-zero-regrets-firefox-power-user-kept-7500-tabs.html

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@mitchw I apparently had enough tabs open earlier today to crash Xorg (the windowing system on top of Linux). Not just Firefox, but the underlying graphical subsystem. I think there's a memory leak in Firefox for Linux that loses some memory irretrievably every time you open a tab, even if you later close the tab. I haven't tested this.

mitchw, to random
@mitchw@mastodon.social avatar

Dinosaur Beach Keith Laumer 1971 (cover by Kelly Freas)
[reddit.com] https://reddit.com/r/CoolSciFiCovers/comments/1ckctmm/dinosaur_beach_keith_laumer_1971_cover_by_kelly/

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@mitchw I most certainly read that, and I met Keith Laumer in 1978. I remember Mr. Laumer, but the novel left no impression.

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@mitchw When I met Laumer, he was a cranky old man in constant pain who didn't really want to be around us college students. (I met him at a college con run by my club.)

nitpicking, to random
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

Retiring Columbia professor arrested by NYPD for standing outside his house, video-recording them.

If this happened as described in the article, some NYPD leadership needs to be fired. Not street officers, necessarily, but the people who led them to do this. It is not illegal to record cops, period end of sentence.

https://news.yahoo.com/columbia-professor-wanted-document-history-091227222.html

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Our 10-year-old Greek mythology enthusiast, just now after she said an inch worm was going to bite us and we said it wouldn't:

"I feel like I'm a CASSANDRA here"

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@ZachWeinersmith

The fact that mom is actually a zoologist is irrelevant, of course. Cassandra knows better.

Tell her you had her name legally changed to Cassandra, just as she requested. She said she felt like a "Cassandra", right?

w7voa, to random
@w7voa@journa.host avatar

Singaporean diplomat suspended from duty for filming a boy in a Tokyo bathhouse. https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/mfa-officer-suspended-from-duty-after-secretly-filming-boy-in-tokyo-bathhouse

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@jimluther @w7voa Multi-Factor Authentication. Using a phone app in addition to a password, for one example.

mitchw, to random
@mitchw@mastodon.social avatar

I brought five Lightning cables and one USB-C cable. My brain thinks it’s 2014 I guess.

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@mitchw I own lots of devices, and it would take me years to need 6 cables just for myself.

mitchw, to random
@mitchw@mastodon.social avatar
nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@mitchw I'm tempted to PhotoShop that to read "Never Loose Hoop", because that typo drives me crazy.

Nincowpoop, to DuckDuckGo
@Nincowpoop@mastodon.online avatar

I know that I am not the first to bring this up, but #DuckDuckGo is getting more useless by the day. I really try hard to not support fascist billionaires where I can, but the % of times I get useless responses from DDG and have to use Google is now close to 80%.

#search #duckduckgo

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@Nincowpoop

This is not my experience, but in any case: there are other alternatives out there.

I hadn't heard that Brin and Page are Fascists. That's Elon. I don't like Google's policies and I use Google products as little as possible, but I don't know that Fascist is the right word.

guyjantic, to DuckDuckGo
@guyjantic@c.im avatar

Feature suggestion for or other engines: let me downvote results.

There is just so fucking much utter garbage, and the people pushing it have (apparently) effective SEO. Let me click a button saying "never allow this domain in my search results ever again."

nitpicking, (edited )
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@guyjantic
Hmmm ... should we approach the Wikimedia Foundation with a proposal for "WikiSearch"? That is in no way a joke, and I am a regular donor to Wikimedia and would support the project. You could build it using Stract code.

eric_ma, to DuckDuckGo
@eric_ma@techhub.social avatar

Here is one thing that it is happening lately when I search for something in : Apart from the results linked to my query I am also getting some results(links) from the place where I live. How is this possible? This was not happening before with #

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@MoiraEve @eric_ma

There is a difference between "knowing" and "tracking" your location. They obviously have to "know" our search terms, but they promise they don't track them, or associate them with us personally.

alb_004, to DuckDuckGo
@alb_004@mstdn.party avatar

Do anybody know this already?

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/try-duckduckgos-new-ai-feature-duckassist-now-for-free/

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@alb_004 Yep. You can turn it off on the settings.

typingmonkey, to random
@typingmonkey@mastodon.social avatar

Last night’s sunset was spectacular.

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@typingmonkey That Whole Foods looks remarkably like a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop.

gorskon, to random
@gorskon@med-mastodon.com avatar

Antivax transphobe Toby Rogers got the bright idea that many of the central tenets of progressivism are actually autistic traits. So vaccines cause progressivism...and Trumpism, too? WTF?

https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2024/04/27/vaccines-cause-autism-which-leads-to-progressivism-andtrumpism/

nitpicking,
@nitpicking@mstdn.party avatar

@gorskon In other news, antivax transphobes are not big on making any sense.

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