I honestly didn’t get the joke and was trying to figure out what was wrong with the. Like, maybe if it was instead of raises or something I’d be pissed, but otherwise looks great.

In case anyone is worried, the worm is named for what it looks like, not where it lives.

Yep, you get it. And it’s really hard to get people to understand the value in learning to do that stuff without the tools.

We do a lot of real-time control software, and just yesterday we were taking about how the newer folks are really good at using available tools and libraries, but they have less understanding of what’s happening underneath and they have problems when those tools don’t/can’t do what we need.

Apparently he wants everything written in COBOL

I bet those guys go home more satisfied than almost any day of their lives.

I got around to reading 17776 today. That was fun, thanks for the recommendation!

That does look like it. Quite a variety of common names:

Fuligo septica is a species of slime mold in the class Myxomycetes. It is commonly known as scrambled egg slime or flowers of tan[2] because of its peculiar yellowish appearance. It is also known as dog vomit slime mold or Jasmine mold and is relatively common with a worldwide distribution, often being found on bark mulch in urban areas after heavy rain or excessive watering.

Maybe if you were going to try to mass produce up there, but the mass of the equipment needed to mine and smelt ore and roll it out into plating would be way more than the mass of the plating for a single vehicle. And that’s not considering capturing an asteroid and bringing it into orbit.

My company worked on the ISS (what’s now my team did the electrical power system software), and there really was more to it than that. The way you word it sounds like they took spent boosters and converted them into habitat modules, but that’s not at all the way it was. Each element was designed to be brought up in the space shuttle bay and assembled in space (it’s the reason for the shuttle’s existence). We know how to assemble stuff in space, it’s just expensive.

That’s seems a lot different from “can’t be.”

“You can’t protect them from galactic radiation using shielding, but as we learn more about renal biology it may be possible to develop technological or pharmaceutical measures to facilitate extended space travel.”

I wonder why

Let’s remember that the first falcon launch didn’t get to the desired orbit because of a fuel leak. The first starship launch had a giant number of problems.

Well that’s… really interesting. I love it when people experiment with new ways of telling a story. That might move this up much higher on my list. Thanks for the link.

There was someone in a thread here once who said when he was young he had severe depression and anger issues, and said he used to do stuff like that. He said it literally was that he was so unhappy that he hated seeing other people happy. He was embarrassed about it now, but couldn’t see past it at the time.

I think there are some downvote bots here like there was on Reddit. Not sure what the point is, but I’ve seen some communities where every post starts at negative 1, and others where every comment seems to get a downvote. Not sure what the reasoning is. I think some people just hate the idea of other people being happy.

I’ve added the Butler books to my list.

Some of these are on the list of books I’ve read in the last year that I posted recently, in case those notes are helpful at all (some I’ve read earlier, and don’t have notes like this). Here’s what I’ve read since that post, which includes some overlap with this list, along with my notes, just for what it’s worth:

Rule 34, Stross Somewhat of a sequel to Halting State, taking place a few years later. Spammers are being killed around the world, many at the same time. Story mostly follows a detective on the case, a psychopath involved, and a flunky who is unwittingly part of things. Interesting, though as with Halting State, the use of second person seems weird.

Consider Phlebas, Banks Both sides in a war raging across the galaxy are trying to get to an advanced artificial intelligence. Mostly told from the POV of a human variant who can change appearance. Banks’s first SF novel - pretty good though I didn’t find the main character especially likable.

The Fifth Season, Jemison Fantasy - first book in the Broken Earth trilogy. Set in an earth where all the land is one big continent that goes through periods of big seismic/volcanic activity such that there’s well-followed lore about how to get through them. There are “orogenes" who have a power to control the seismic activity to varying extents. The story alternates from the perspective of three female orogenes struggling with their respective situations. Very well crafted and structured. Good.

Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro This is an odd book. It’s very slow paced, and not much actually happens. I think it’s best to read it without knowing anything at all, so I’m going to avoid spoilers. It’s a story told first person by a woman who attended a special boarding school. For a quarter of the book, there are barely even hints that there’s anything unusual going on. We don’t get an understanding of it until halfway, and even then not fully. I feel like this might have been better as a novella. That said, it was highly regarded and even made into a movie (that I never saw). The premise is really interesting, and the story moving, but for half the book we’re just reading a woman reminiscing on her school days.

Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory, Wells A short story in the Murderbot series, taking place between Exit Strategy and Fugitive Telemetry (but published well after). This one from the point of view of Dr. Mensah and the after effects of the ordeal in Exit Strategy. Would be good to read in between those books.

The Saint of Bright Doors, CHANDRASEKERA A boy is raised by his mother to kill his father (and others). He has no shadow, and has to work to keep from floating off the ground. He grows up and moves to a big, strange city to escape his mother’s vision for him, but he has a strange destiny. An odd fantasy story, with odd bits of magic, odd characters, and an odd arc. Enjoyable.

The Player of Games, Banks Second in the Culture Wars series, set in the same universe as Consider Phlebas, but otherwise unrelated. A better book than the first. A man who is somewhat famous for his prowess at playing all sorts of games is recruited to go to a recently discovered empire that has a complicated game that’s central to its culture and structure. Banks does well at creating multidimensional characters, and the story is compelling. The main characters in this book and in Phlebas seem to lack truly close relationships, which is odd.

Which sounds most interesting to you?

I’ve read ten of the twenty one. The fact that it was so different than these types of lists tend to be, without being a bunch of fan fiction or whatever, is why I posted it. Just seemed like an interesting list. Of the ones I’ve read, I didn’t dislike any of them, though there are some I certainly wouldn’t have put on an all-time greats list myself.