boatswain

I think they tend to be more interesting too, yeah.

I'd rate them about the same, personally. Though Brooks is at least just derivative and juvenile; Goodkind gets increasingly self indulgent.

Darknet Diaries. Full of fascinating cybersecurity stories and interviews, with both whitehats and blackhats.

First time I ever saw in-car GPS was arrive 2003 when I was hitchhiking in Japan. Heading the car just give directions was mind-blowing; it was like being in a William Gibson novel.

Bottlescrews and turnbuckles both have one end threaded in each direction.

Forged in the Dark games are great; I haven't gotten to play Blades, but I've run some Scum & Villainy (which is a space opera setting: think Star Wars meets Firefly), and it's probably my new favorite system

MorkBorg is fun for the aesthetic, but the combat always seems to just drag on, with round after round of damage getting blocked by armor. On the up side, the rounds go really quick.

What you're asking about there seems like it's really: "Is something being knowledge vs belief subjective or objective?"

The answer, just like for "is cereal soup?", is that it's all semantics. It's not like there's some Authority who's created the Platonic Form of Knowledge that Beliefs cannot partake of, and there's a clear delineation between Knowledge and Belief. We're just using these weird shapes, sounds, hand gestures, or whatever else to try to do telepathy and get our thoughts into someone else's head. Like all semantic questions, what this comes down to is: have you chosen the right word to convey your thought? If people seem to not be getting it, try the other one.

I'm confused here: Hasn't Red Dead Redemption been on Steam for years?

There are lawsuits: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/02/crowdstrike-faces-onslaught-of-legal-action-from-faulty-software-update/

These things will probably take years to play out.

Where do you put your SSDs, though? If it's not off-site, it's not a backup.

Halting State was great. It actually took me a couple of chapters to realize it was all 2nd person. That's the book that got me into Stross.

I really enjoyed the first three: they were pretty obviously just a bunch of short stories set in the same universe. The later books where he tried to write actual novels were not great though. He could do great short stories, but IMO wasn't much of a novelist.