So - anyone read any good books lately?
Yep. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan - body swapping, overpowered weaponry, drugs and an artificially intelligent hotel who identifies with Jimi Hendrix. I recommend it to anyone who likes dark sci-fi.
I just finished Funnymen by Ted Heller (Joseph’s son) – the story of a comedy duo (Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis sort of thing) told in the form of interviews with friends and acquaintances. Surprisingly good.
I must recommend the Night’s Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton to people who like schlock sci-fi. The story has been done before, the science is thinner than the intergalactic void, but damn can that man come up with ideas. In fact, most of the book is him coming up with incredibly cool ideas and letting them fight it out.
I finally got Neil Peart’s Ghost Rider for my birthday. Had to be special-ordered, even. Thanks mom! I plan on reading it during my upcoming flight to LA.
Wasn’t he in that band(I forget the name)?
I re-read Greg Egan’s Permutation City recently; quite apart from it being an interesting story, it is a wonderful study on the nature of sentience.
Rush.
It’s a nice bit of old school, EE Doc Smith style space opera, isn’t it. Suitably cheesy happy ending too.
Try Fallen Dragon - it’s lots of fun too.
Yup, the drummer.
Relevance? I understand that things are different out there in the big bad world. Your wisdom and knowledge of worldly ways are both awe-inspiring and humbling. However, I still keep wondering how they do it in Rome…
I did absolutely no such thing. Your constant misrepresentation of facts around here completely undermines your excellent writing and ability to be taken seriously. Your continual refusal to agree on common jargon on this message board compromises the message you intend to communicate, and locks the discussion in a battle of semantics, as the crux of any cogent argument at hand slowly sinks to the bottom with the rest of the whale shit.
Blow.
Hey Munch – stop hijacking our hijack! We be taking this thread to Cuba! Yarr!
I recommend Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, especially if you liked his Sandman work.
I’m in the middle of a really readable story of Hannibal-- not the cannibal, the Cathaginian-- by Ernle Bradford.
you guys are all “members”.
No, I actually **do ** have something in my pocket this time.
is it a tool??
D & R
Sadly, its probably just a wallet.
Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon
Oooh - Cryptonomicon is truly excellent. One of the best reads you can get, IMO.
Seconded!! Fantastic Book. I’d also recommend his other books, especially The Diamond Age. I loved it even better than Cryptonomicon.
Jeff Olsen
My goodness but you love revisionist history. Are you trolling? Are you serious? Are you red and green all over at the same time?
If one checks the “Reverend Mykeru, you are such a fucking tool” thread, and why wouldn’t anyone, being that it is pretty much the best bang for your entertainment buck on the SDMB, you will note…
No, actually, come to think of it, you will not note. You will just restate the wrong stuff, like Ernst Zündel crank calling Simon Wiesenthal at 3 am. But no matter.
What happened is that someone accused me of being a sock puppet. I responded that if I was some SDMB regular that was creating a sock, why did I post to this forum and that forum under this nick and even register a domain and have a website under it going back a number of years. You responded that you doubted I actually owned that site because. I had no email address in my profile on this forum. I replied that you could send an email via my site. If I didn’t own that site I wouldn’t be able to reply. You grinned and shucked and still doubted I owned the site. So I put the Public Notice on the site as a way of saying “Hey, dipshit, if I don’t own the site explain this”.
Then you backpedal, claim you were pulling my chain, until you bring it up the next time. You realize that we have covered this ground three times already? You can put any sort of spin on it you like, but that’s the long and short of it.
Yet, you are not trolling. Nope.
whatami
Yeah. A year. Although it is still sort of high. Problem is the DSL provider has a virtual monopoly. There is also a provider offering cable modem service, but based on their cable TV service I would fear that it would be like running a Commodore 64 with a 2400 baud modem.
Tee
Yeah, but it still can be useful for forum education, used as one of those old Driver’s Ed films like “Blood on the Highway”.
coosa
Insulting? Well, I don’t know. Michael Jackson hasn’t complained. No nasty letters from NASA, the National Zoo or Jesus Christ.
But that’s based on the theory previously floated in this thread by Jeff that silence gives consent.
Maybe it is just me, but it seems that anyone talking about "mature and ethical behavior’ on the SDMB is going to go over like Shere Hite lecturing the Catholic Archdiocese on sex techniques without, of course, mentioning altarboys.
Which I have both addressed problems and ignored posters. I have also commented on a number of things, including the SDMB on my website.
Why? Because I can.
Speaking of looking like an idiot, but if printing something on my website precludes rebuttal, than how is it that you, in the very same post, are rebutting something on my web site.
Besides, there seems to be a double standard here: Apparently posters can comment on my web site, post comments about it here, and even, in the case of UncleBeer, dig up an old post on yet another forum and comment on that, yet I can’t return the favor and comment on my web site?
If people’s comments are somehow secret or proprietary, then perhaps a public forum isn’t the best way to keep a low profile.
What, did you take a poll? Are you tapped into the collective consciousness? Or do you, out of inadequacy, immaturity and insecurity, perhaps, always attribute whatever fleeting thoughts go through your head to the great silent majority?
Actually, my only justification is that if people care to comment about my website (even to the point of denying my ownership because they are trolling without trolling), then I get to comment about them on my website.
Your mileage may vary, obviously.
Sort of like a whole post about the ethical ramifications and all sorts of strained conclusions following because I made a couple comments about a couple issues on my site. Hey, kids, if people don’t want to be commented on, don’t want a link made to sheer entertainment like"Reverend Mykeru, you are such a fucking tool" then perhaps the creation of a thread like that and postings to the like isn’t necessarily the best idea.
Doesn’t really matter to me either. My friends like me, my mother loves me, my wife more than puts up with me, my gerbil seems to like me, but that’s only because I give her peanuts and I have generally have had favorable comments on my website.
Considering the assholish way I was immediately attacked and pitted inthe SDMB you will excuse me if I’m not exactly dropping salty tears into my coffee at this moment because some people don’t love me.
jjimm
Nope. Sorry.
Although a web log is often defined as
Weblogs: A History and Perspective.
Blogs tend to be shorter, link driven items, sort of an eposidic online diary. My site lacks the quality of being an online journal. It it mostly a collection of essays. Obviously due to the definitions determining what is and isn’t a blog is like determining what is art, or pornography, for that matter, but if you expand the definition of a blog to include my site, which lacks the online journal quality, then everything is a blog. Then “blog” just becomes a generic term for “webpage”.
Items are chronological on my site. Yeah, but they don’t need to be. You could shift them around. The dating simply serves the purpose of indicating when a new item is up.
Yeah well, as someone of Scottish descent I still haven’t gotten over the Battle of Culloden Moor. I dwell on the past.
You fucking British almost speak English, but then you use the wrong word here and there. It’s confusing.
No, but maybe she just had her shoes pissed on outside the King’s Cross tube station.
Actually, they don’t make me happy, nor do they make me unhappy, they just are in much the same way that having an ulcer doesn’t make someone happy or unhappy, especially if it is an intermittent condition.
The only reason I bothered to comment about it is that I have e-mail correspondence with people that “suffer” from this condition, which is far more common than you think. The essay is an easy way for people to get up to speed. Some people are very thrown by this. I’m not. It’s just a brief physiological response, sort of like suddenly having 20 cups of coffee. It never interferes with anything and I have an unusual Zen-like control over it anyway.
Nope. Knee jerk insults are not a panacea. I’m not all that fond of unpleasantness, but by now, here on the SDMB, I have been on the receiving end of enough crap to make me bristle.
As far as the site goes, well, it’s a fucking web site amd because of the nature of the web some topics are more fun, or entertaining, to go into than others.
I’ll give you an example:
Yesterday I went to the gym. I discovered that one of my gym socks was missing from my locker. I checked the floor, lost and found, but no sock. So I wore an old mis-matched sock I happened to have in the locker.
But I had a pretty good work out. I had a discussion with an older guy who was thinking he’s too old for this and told him that the gym, like Woody Allen said about life, is 90% just showing up. We also talked about whether we wanted to live long enough to get into the drooling adult diapers stage. I increased the plates on all the Cybex machines.
Now, when I go to write about something, should I write about what a good work out I had, or some rant about the alternate universe where socks go?
I mean, who gives a fuck about my time in the gym? Lost socks is something everyone can relate to. What’s more, rather than boring blather about reps to failure, or 2 count up and four count down, I can work in my theory that when you die you can get back all the little things you ever lost: The socks, the Bic pens, the spare change in the couch.
As opposed to what? Self loathing? Although you think there has been too much time and attention dedicated to me, oddly enough, people posting tend to be paying time and attention to themselves, not me.
Just an observation.
kabbes
Doesn’t make a difference in katakana, knock yourself out.
No. Didn’t occur to me. I did notice that Hamlet’s first reply to me in the other thread started with an unnecessary cheap shot.
That must be why she wrote:
Must be nice to have a worldview based on reading the stuff you like and ignoring the rest.
When commenting on my writing and how horrible it is, it might be a good idea to recognize the distinction between the possessive “your” and the contraction “you’re”.
Just a thought.
Do you often spend time commenting on dust?
Gary Kumquat
How dare you speak about my sister like that. You don’t know her. You have no right to call her an asshole.
Especially since she is actually a bitch.
Consider yourself corrected.
Hamlet
Zzzz…snort Oh, where were we?
Who told you about him? That bastard was probably bragging about beating me at checkers again.
Hamlet. please save this post of yours. It’s not really pertinent, but I bet you can recycle it more than one, just change the name it’s addressed to.
Unless, of course, that’s what you have already done.