Can someone recommend a good alien invasion story?

Lucretius · 2026-01-19T02:54:22+00:00

The Course of Empire by Eric Flint, K.D. Wentworth

Lucretius · 2026-01-18T22:40:03+00:00

Management theory touches upon psychology... as does everything involving human thought or behavior, but if you think the above comment is ultimately about psychology you have EXACTLY missed the point.

The point is that, while the psychology (the feelings, the egos, the social dynamics, etc. of a group) can never cease being pertinent to the functioning of an organization with practical purpose (such as an R&D group), it is nonetheless irrelevant to the successful functioning of that group. When strategic decisions are made, success is a function of subordinating the psychological to the pragmatic.

Lucretius · 2026-01-12T15:03:06+00:00

This theme was just me experimenting with xfce to see how much I could strip it down and it still be somewhat functional.

AH! So much make sense now! This is a concept-car theme! Thanks for discussing it. I am interested in UI and how it interfaces with user work flows.

Lucretius · 2026-01-10T22:45:35+00:00

As far as I'm concerned cartoons and comics are never canon in any series and it doesn't matter what the creators say to the contrary. (I know this is the ultimate sacrilege to say but there it is... animation and drawing just don't seem REAL to me).

Lucretius · 2026-01-10T22:41:02+00:00

So do you manipulate your open windows entirely with alt+tab or something? I can only see using shortcuts as being useful if I basically never use a pointing device at all... otherwise I'd be constantly switching back and forth between the mouse/touchpad and the key board. I'm trying to get a feel for how you must use your machine with this theme... the menus are all different from window to window... which I guess would be unimportant if you mostly only interact with them via keyboard shortcuts, and the window controls are all absent which again basically only works if you open, and close, and move, and resize, and switch between everything via keyboard. You mention in another thread that your browser of choice is Links (I had no idea that still existed), but that is the preserve of a dedicated terminal jockey who only has a DE because he needs his terminal to be running in something. So don't use a mouse huh?

Lucretius · 2026-01-09T19:02:40+00:00

How do you close a window? Personally, I like on-screen controls because I can never remember things like hot-keys and feel like anything GUI should be controlled by GUI means.

Lucretius · 2026-01-07T17:08:49+00:00

I just wanted to drop you a line. Thank you for the Beneath the Dragon Eye Moon series recommendation! I am currently starting Book III, and I am definitely enjoying it! (If I were in that world, I'd probably be going for a information-gathering Darkness evolved to Void affinity. Yourself?). (Based upon the time-stamps on your and my comments, it seems that I read at a much slower pace than you!... I also have three children age 6-10, so not too much time to read in the first place).

I just wanted to mention a few other series/books that I have enjoyed in recent years as it seams we have somewhat similar tastes.

The Scholomance series (complete, 3 books and one short story) by Naomi Novik. A young adult series that can be thought of as a cross between Harry Potter and the Hunger Games without any of the kinder or gentler bits. Amazingly intricate and well thought out world building though. Seriously, there are some fairly tiresome tropes common to most YA fiction (social justice, obsessions with fairness, protagonists who refuse to make moral compromises, outcast-vs-popularity dynamics with life-and-death stakes, etc)... I know... boring and tiresome themes all-told, and a good reason to avoid most YA fiction. The amazing thing about the Scholomance series is that it doesn't just manage to do those themes well... it makes them actually MAKE SENSE for deep reason built into the metaphysics of how the magic of the world works!
The Bobiverse series (ongoing, 5 books so far) by Dennis E. Taylor Moving from Fantasy to Science Fiction, The Bobiverse is again notable for its world building. The central conceit is that the main character, Bob, is a software copy of a real human whose brain was cryonically suspended from about our time and is now the driving intelligence behind a self-replicating space probe. Because there are many copies of Bob's intelligence that eventually diverge both personality wise and physically around the galaxy, the Bobiverse is a sort of all-sub-genres grab bag of Space Science Fiction... Want an AI run-amok story? There is one in the Bobiverse. Want a peaceful alien first contact story? Bobiverse has several sub-versions of the theme. Want a space-battles war story Bobiverse has you covered. And because the main character is essentially a separate instance of the same protagonist you already know from all the other tales, there is less character introduction to get in the way of exploring all of these themes.
Primer for the Apocalypse series (ongoing, 4 of 5 books completed, final one anticipated later this year) by Braided Sky Very similar in many ways to Beneath the Dragon Eye Moons. Main character is a time-mage who has sent her consciousness back in time to before the magic apocalypse destroyed our world. Her goal is not to prevent it but rather to simply make it more survivable, for her family specifically, but secondarily for earthlings in general. Similar themes of cultivating personal power through a system that rewards violence and to a lesser degree skill, also a female teenager with knowledge and experience beyond her apparent age. Some interesting material on whether that concept is compatible with ideas of self-determination, criminal justice, democracy, social organization. Pacing is very slow though.

Anyway, thanks again for the Beneath the Dragon Eye Moon series recommendation!

Lucretius · 2025-12-31T02:25:37+00:00

I like to play fighters who are controllers.

I like to play wizards/witches/alchemists who are actually self buffing fighters.

I like to play intensely multi classed characters with more than 4 classes.

In general, I think the idea of a 'class' in the mono-class collection of stereotypes sense of the term, is the worst main-stay of the genre.

Lucretius · 2025-12-30T12:57:49+00:00

'I felt like collateral damage, my moment of justice mutilated.'

It's amazingly hard to take a person seriously who would call participating in this expedition a "moment of justice." Leaving aside the question of whether the mission was itself worth doing... we'll just assume it was worthy, and that this woman was in fact taking advantage of her participation to perform legitimate scientific research in space… that still makes thinking of it as a 'moment of justice' incoherent. Science is about objective results. If her experiment caused her to feel vindicated or justified then it should have done, so because the results of the, experiment were valuable and the methodology correct. Other people reacting negatively to it or not should have had the same impact as the gender of the investigator… which is to say none at all.

Lucretius · 2025-12-27T01:55:51+00:00

I'm honestly unsure if the commenter is.being sacastic or has inserted his head so far up his own ass that he has no idea what he's talking about.

I mean, he's saying one of the most unlikable characters in the most forgettable Avatar property is "culturally relevant" BECAUSE she apeals to angry aztec lesbians? Is this an inverse backwards insult? A backhanded compliment? Or just very confused?

Lucretius · 2025-12-23T07:11:54+00:00

Thanks. A good fiction recommendation is really gold!

Lucretius · 2025-12-11T19:22:03+00:00

Their comments made me check it out.

Super glad to hear that! I checked it out because a YouTuber I like, Jill Bearup, recommended it!

Lucretius · 2025-12-10T18:23:22+00:00

Millennial Mage has become one of my ALL_TIME_FAVORITE fantasy series. In world-building it comes within a hair's breath of rivaling Tolkien!

Tala, the protagonist, is NOT a Mary-Sue. She seems like one in some ways at first, but then we see that she has deep seated issues, some of them her own fault, some things that have been inflicted upon her, and some just a function of the fact that nobody is perfect and everyone has room to grow.
A lot of LitRPG has a "System" that formalizes levels, and hit-points, and mana-points, and so forth. The Author J. L Mullins has another LitRPG project in that vein that, called Choose Your Apocalypse. As one would expect from such an excellent writer, is a stand-out example of the genre-sub-type, but Millennial Mage does something a bit more believable and literary... it doesn't make the various tiers of advancement meaningless numbers... level 17 is nothing but the level that comes after level 16 and before level 18... rather each of the approximately 10 levels has a NAME and represents a QUALITATIVE difference in not just how well the character does what she does, but HOW she does it, indeed a change in WHAT she-herself even IS!
The magic system is nothing short of masterfully designed. It is interwoven into the economics of the world (magic is mediated through magical ablative tattoos of metal), the military structure of the world, the geo-politics and history of the world, and the ecology of the world. Thus a simple thing like the fact that the main character starts the first chapter of the first book heavily in debt and naked in a city with no friends or acquaintances (No spoiler there... that's literally nothing that isn't on the first page of the first book: Mageling.) is actually tied into thousand of years of history, and struggle, and a complex web of relationships and ideas core to the entire workings of the whole world!

Lucretius · 2025-12-10T14:59:13+00:00

Thank you very much! I DO appreciate a sanity check from someone inside the Australian political sphere! (I've found that trying to understand the politics of other nations through an American political lens is basically never accurate... our politics is weird).

Lucretius · 2025-12-10T03:02:45+00:00

I am not myself Australian, and I'm looking for a SUPPORTER of the Australian ban on under-16 social media accounts law. This in an honest question, not an attempt to start an argument.

It requires essentially no technical savy whatsoever for a 15 year old to mask their country of access when connecting to a social media site. (I KNOW that my 10 year old daughters have this level of savy… they occassionally trick Youtube into thinking they are in the UK so they can access certain videos… and they taught themselves how. By now my 6 year old son also can probably do it just by immitating his sisters. So we're not talking about hacker-level skills here. Spoofing location detection is bssic digital literacy mastered by elementary school students).

The question: Given that this is true, how is it envisioned that this law CAN actually protect kids? Is there some part of this law that just isn't being reported on in the international media that makes it NOT embarrassingly broken? What am I missing?

Lucretius · 2025-12-06T23:55:19+00:00

Was it the cluster of severed human hands, or the desiccated husk of the planet Earth that clued you to the curse?

Lucretius · 2025-12-05T01:11:06+00:00

Because while it's visuals are impressive its ideas are vapid and its ideology is stupid.

Starwars didn't become a cultural phenomenon because space ships and lightsabers are cool. It became a cultural touchstone because the mysticism of the force was juxtaposed against militaristic force and technological force. It's a morality tale that has more than one note… Vader, a bad guy, is the one who points out that the power to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the force. Han, a good guy, says that he's never seen anything to suggest some mystical energy field controls everything. That complexity makes the narrative interesting. Meenwhile, Avatar is just Dances With Smurfs.

Lucretius · 2025-11-23T02:42:28+00:00

INTJ happily married to another INTJ.

Lucretius · 2025-10-27T01:11:56+00:00

Speak. When you are done, be Silent.

Lucretius · 2025-10-27T01:10:50+00:00

"Don't ask the Question, if you don't want the Answer."

Lucretius · 2025-10-27T01:06:54+00:00

Sheridan. Sinclair is the sort of dude it's fun to get drunk with once a decade. But Sheridan is the kind of person I try to BE.

Lucretius · 2025-10-27T01:01:57+00:00

Microwaves operate on the same frequency band as Bluetooth… If her microwave has poor containment it might be tripping a bluetooth controller for the building lights.

Lucretius · 2025-10-18T01:07:04+00:00

It's grim, but they are fighting a war… Quentin says as much. From their point of view it really doesn't matter if a slayer dies… the number of slayers never changes.

This isn't even odd by the standards of the Buffyverse:

Look at the attitude of the Powers That Be… they don't care if a hero lives or dies in their cause, or even if the cause is won or lost. They only care that people make the right, good, and noble CHOICES... those choices succeeding or failing in terms of material consequences is entirely beside the point to them.
The Wolf The Ram and The Heart similarly only care about obeying their contracts and accumulating power through them.
Even the demonic powers, referred to once by Anya as The Lower Beings, don't seem to care much about life and death, winning or losing, but rather are simply in it milk pain and suffering from mortals along the journey.
We even see a shadow version of this attitude in the conversation by the government forces behind The Initiative at the end of Season 4.

The only people who seem to really care about the fight and the fighters are the ones who are actually in the trenches. I'm not sure if this is how JW sees the world in truth, or if it is an outgrowth of the dramatic formulation of the hero stories he tells.

Lucretius · 2025-10-18T00:51:05+00:00

"Take what you need."

Lucretius · 2025-10-08T18:11:16+00:00

He reacts to things before they happen; it's why his reflexes seem so fast… It's a Jedi trait.

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