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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • I reluctantly started reading ebooks years ago for a very practical reason: owning some few thousand physical books, I pretty much ran out of room in the shelves in my small apartment. So nowadays I only buy physical art books and the like. Having said this, I actually easily grew to like ebooks, for their ubiquitous availability and, of course, not taking up precious shelf space.

    Have to read them in an ereader for a proper experience, though. Tablet/smartphone displays tire my eyes a lot if I read for any meaningful period of time.


  • Growing old is mandatory. Growing up is optional.

    So much this!

    I see myself a bit in all those stages, but i don’t think i ever really ever (temporarily) outgrew “childish” things. Always liked cartoons, always read comics, always played games, and always told those that chided me for not growing up to fuck off. Now entering my 50s, the biggest difference is that people don’t have the courage to bother me about it anymore (and in the rare occasions when they do they don’t argue back after being told off :P )





  • I have read them all, and find them all excellent. I wouldn’t recommend Use of Weapons as an introductory book for a new reader, though. It is rather dark, and it may put off some people. I think The Player of Games would work better, and give a new reader a better introduction of what the ethos of the Culture is, and what to expect (to some extent…) from the other books.

    Unlike others, I did’t like Consider Phlebas that much, when compared with other (IMO) stronger Culture books.




  • I say a variation of this to my kids almost every week. It boggles the mind how, with such an easy access to all the information in the world, they don’t know something and just shrug it off instead of searching for information (90% of times a simple google search would do). I imagine myself at their age with such resources at my disposal: I’d have been a much happier (and knowledgeable) kid!





  • I know this isn’t popular nor what most people would agree on, but to me retro is pretty much synonym with 8 bits (maybe some early 16bit) and the arcades that were around at the time. May have to do with me being old, but I think it is more because I felt a shift in look & feel, from sprites, pixel art, side scrolling, moving room to room, etc. to a more “modern” feel, with 3d models, etc. of course now we have a bajillion more polygons, shaders, ray tracing, but it is just a change in degree of the same thing.

    Of course you still get games nowadays that look retro, but it is done out of artistic choice, not necessity. The constraints of the old platforms led to truly inventive solutions.