Neat, I’ll check that out, thanks!
Edit: Ugh, it looks like all of the book clubs that are tagged as ‘sci-fi’ are actually ‘sci-fi/fantasy’ (or sometimes sci-fi/fantasy/historical/romance, which makes no sense) which is not what I’m looking for. Do you happen to know of any that are pure sci-fi? Preferably ones that focus on big-idea sci-fi like Greg Egan or Peter Watts?
No one gets thanks for being a decent human being, it’s sort of the standard that everyone is expected to hold to.
They could. But you and I both know they won’t because most people don’t care about anything beyond ‘make the magic box work so I can do my job / play my game / etc.’
I think they would. I tried Linux again for the first time in 10+ years and kept running into issues like my sound would randomly die or change to headset, when I tried to update the video driver it hard- locked the system, etc. I just installed Ubuntu the other day and whenever it boots the monitor just goes into standby with no signal. It’s been nothing but trouble, and I have pretty normal hardware. Most people aren’t going to know or care how to deal with those problems. As far as Linux has come, it’s still not ready for widespread adoption by most people on the ‘it just works’ front.
Sorry, Fable? I’m not familiar with that.
LOL, indeed. I grew up in Oklahoma so I recognize that twang. :P I worked for years to get rid of my southern accent.
I fucking love Emperor TTS, that shit was hilarious, I’m gonna have to check out the WoD stuff.
LOL, my best friend’s mom had a little Shih Tzu and one time when we were over there for dinner she had just bought him this HUGE red stuffed bull-thing that was like 4 times his size, but man it didn’t even slow him down, he just went for it right in the middle of the living room floor in front of everyone. Poor pupper kept falling off and having to roll over on him and shit. Friend’s mom was mortified, but the rest of us were laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe there for a minute.
Huh, I had no idea. Totally works for the other video tho, cause that shit cracked me up.
I don’t appreciate that one oligarch is better at lying to us than another one, that kinda makes it worse in my mind. Instead of telling ourselves comforting stories about how generous these societal leeches are we should be telling ourselves stories about how much better everyone else’s lives could be if they didn’t exist.
There’s an estimate floating around that it would cost about $20 billion to end all homelessness in the US. Whether or not that’s an accurate estimate, there is an amount that could do it, and every day that billionaires wake up and choose not to do it they choose evil.
If your standard for ‘a good example’ is being a bit more creative with his tax-dodging PR stunts than other billionaires, that’s a pretty low bar. A better example to set would be to not exploit people to accumulate wealth in the first place. It takes a whole lot of people like you and me staying poor to make Bill Gates that rich.
but I am determined that “he died rich” will not be one of them.
Bill Gates has a net worth of ~$168 billion. Even if this isn’t just PR intended to launder his image, even if he does in fact give away 99% of that, it will still leave him with $1.68 billion dollars. Even if he ups that to 99.99% that’ll still leave him with $16.8 million, which is still rich by anyone’s measure. Bill Gates’ idea of ‘not dying rich’ is radically different than yours or mine; he was never not going to die rich.
Nah, it’s more that the answer to ‘why is <some company> doing this?’ is virtually always ‘because money’. People forget that sometimes.
Hmm, obvious troll is obvious. My apologies for assuming that you were merely confused rather than confused and malicious. I won’t make that mistake again.
Joining a book and 2 movie clubs was one of the best things I’ve done in recent years. The book club sadly fizzled cause people didn’t have time, but we have a bi-weekly movie club where we pick complex, difficult movies and talk about their themes and such, and a monthly kung-fu movie night where we just hang out and watch silly movies, and they’re the highlight of my online week.
You know any discord servers for readers of sci-fi? I’ve looked around a couple times and the ones I’ve found are either tiny and inactive or huge and have way too much going on.
Find a discord server with some folks you share interests with and talk to them. I joined a ~300-person gaming/tabletop community a couple years ago and while I don’t have any really close friends among them, they’re great to chat and hang out and play games with. I’ve taken to spending the last couple hours of most days just hanging out in voice with people and shooting the shit, it’s great.
Meh, fair enough.