The book that actually triggered a love of reading in me was the Dark Elf trilogy in the Dungeons and Dragons world.

The book that then grabbed me for serious reading was 1984.

I have both. The deck is not going to be great for anything PC. It’ll be great for optimized gaming. Period.

I have actually had a few Beelinks. I immediately put linux on them, as I can’t stand using windows. For linux, they work great. Mine is my main rig / torrent server / Jellyfin server. It works great for all of those.

There are different Beelinks, they do not all perform as well as others. I went the AMD route, as they play nicely with linux. The intergrated AMD gpu + cpu are also supposed to have a synergy (not sure the industry term for this) that intel + nvidia do not.

The Beelink, when not taxed, can spool down to less than 10 watts, which is incredible. The fan is not loud, even when taxed. I honestly don’t even notice it ever, even a foot away.

I found the Ser5 wasn’t capable of running even simple games well. The ser6 most certainly does. I tried both Windows and Linux, and the 6 was better. IF you can afford the Ser7, I’d say go for that. There is also the pricey GTR series, which is their premiums.

Also, consider Minisforum. They’ve got the best specs of any miniPCs, but pricey as fuck.

As a mod on a few garden and science subs at that time, they were pernacious and ethically inept. They would associate anything anti-pesticide or GMO with being an anti science quack. And they would dog pile on poor individuals expressing concern.

I had several debates with them, often reported them for brigading, and ultimately had to ban them.

There’s really no perfect standard for length in any format. I read on my phone so one page to you may be 5 pages to me.

I could see the word standard itself being the only reliable format. Like Standard Ebook uses as a measure for book length, but it may be hard to adopt generally.

“I read 567,000 words last month,” may come off oddly. But certainly not unreasonable.

“Let’s do a 200,000 word/month challenge!”

I like the idea of having one big book to read in a year. I have done that with East of Eden and the Glass Bead Game. Both of which are meaty epic books. I tackled them initially as a rebellion against the short attention span world we live in. Even in reading niches, I all too often see reading challenges that set # of book goals. I think it’s absurd to claim that someone has read 20 books in a year that are short, verses one long book. The former is often applauded while the latter is not.

Karamazov has been one that I’ve been wanting to read all my life, so maybe I’ll attempt it in 2024 myself.

Non linear writing is a struggle for me, but I try to challenge myself with it. I’m currently reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf which is incredibly abstract but beautiful. I assume Gravity’s Rainbow to be similar. But it’s a thick book too.

Understood.

I’m simply trying to highlight that what happened to the native Americans is not simply “an aside,” or a footnote in history but that it should take a sharp focus to what the US is or has been. This isn’t about competing special interest group atrocities, but a fundamental question that is at the core of representative democracy. Too often liberal democracy is simply another way to exploit others, and disallow “other” groups from participating.

From a native perspective, living on a reservation in the US currently, it wouldn’t matter much if it was run by republicans or democrats, as they both simply ignore treaties and obligations. From your perspective, it’s a dire existential crises, but to those who have been swept aside both in the past and the present, it doesn’t matter much at all.

I don’t know how you can separate the idea of colonialism from the formation of the US. Seems arbitrary and without any philosophical basis.

As it stands currently, black Americans have better standards of living, in almost all developmental indices, than native Americans. So by any scientific inquiry, native Americans have had it and still have it much harder than black Americans.

Not to be contrarian, but the original sin of the US is the genocide of the indigenous populations.

And it’s THE thing that few people want to confront.

I just got one of these and it works quiet nicely.

Fargin iceholes.

They’re the 52nd state, right behind the UK.

No love for removable batteries?

“Blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”

How easily it is to normalize hate and violence to almost any human.

You can set up a jellyfin client on the Dell and control it from anything else. Jellyfin has clients for Linux Windows and Android. Once set up you can output anything from anywhere and control any of them from each other.

Recently,

Infinity Pool by David Cronenburg

and

Psycho Goreman. It’s everything it should be and more, but doesn’t pretend to be anything that it isn’t.

Don’t forget about dorks, geeks, and spazs. We’re an inclusive community.

It’s an emergent environment ideal. We consume so many living organisms, the least we can do, is to leave some in the chute and extract everything from it before expelling it. Otherwise, we’re just a pipeline of ecological destruction.

/s

Along with what others have said, I consult the list of Noble and Pulitzer prize winners. Not all of them are great, as to be expected, but many of the best books I’ve ever read are on them.

That almost every alien species is bipedal and hominoid in shape.