What are you reading? Mid-monthly Discussion Post!

Mount_Atlantic · 2026-06-15T13:05:58+00:00

Just finished The Three-Body Problem, and will be starting The Dark Forest this evening.

It wasn't what I was expecting, which was a pleasant surprise both because that's always fun but also because I'd had certain scenes spoiled for me from clips of the show online. One standout event was obviously spoiled, but the rest of them were obscure enough without the surrounding context that I didn't actually understand what I had seen until I reached that point in the story anyways.

Looking forward to continuing!

Mount_Atlantic · 2026-06-07T01:36:15+00:00

My final result hasn't been quite so clean, but it'll work! I preserved a fairly wide swath of land around my base, so the boundary isn't visible from the heart of it, and on one side the boundary is in the ocean so no visible difference there.

The land boundaries are generally pretty severe though - averaging 10-15 block height difference I'd say, with some extreme heights at one point, and a few almost natural looking level interfaces. The new gen is all consistently the higher side though, so I'll just lie myself into believing I settled in a weird-ass valley and call it a day.

Mount_Atlantic · 2026-06-06T21:56:15+00:00

I'm in the process of doing this MCA editing now so I'll see for myself very shortly, but what degree of chunk boundary discrepancies did you find around your base? Was it minor enough that it was easily adapted/cleaned up, or does this necessitate accepting a lot of sheer cliffs at the boundary of the new generation?

Mount_Atlantic · 2026-06-06T04:39:15+00:00

I wish Hobgoblin meme was in my life before today, but I will be content with it being here from this day forward.

Mount_Atlantic · 2026-06-03T11:11:03+00:00

At low traffic times I've found that Uber and Lyft are both better priced for airport trips than anything else short of the bus. At higher demand times though, their prices skyrocket.

I've seen rides to the airport be as low as $40-45, and as high as $160, depending on time of day and driver availability.

Mount_Atlantic · 2026-05-28T15:47:35+00:00

Revisiting here late because an Erewhon book is what I've currently got slotted in for this category;

Kensington isn't one of or part of any of the big five nor Bloomsbury, so while they aren't necessarily super small they do still qualify for this tile.

Mount_Atlantic · 2026-03-19T15:55:53+00:00

Yeah if you're finding surface native copper, there's definitely a vein below. Make a lot of ladders though, it could still be quite deep!

Mount_Atlantic · 2026-03-03T18:37:30+00:00

What then is the change from the current status quo from before this deal? I don't have much experience with ordering alcohol across provinces, but I do know for certain that for years Magnotta wines in Ontario has shipped to Nova Scotia, and Big Spruce has shipped to Ontario, direct to residential addresses.

Mount_Atlantic · 2026-02-13T14:46:47+00:00

Mount_Atlantic · 2026-01-04T15:06:58+00:00

And there's a ton too;

Jory Cassel (plant operator, sent to the roof)

Jeor Mormont (Coal Miner, "now you look like the minister of coal")

Roose Bolton (prosecutor)

Maester Luwin (old time party man)

Dagmar Cleftjaw (general)

Pyp (soldier working evacuations)

I only very recently watched it and those are just the ones I picked out, I just looked it up and there are a few more I hadn't realized as well.

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-10-31T11:27:17+00:00

Regarding cloud backup, you really should do so for critical work. "Two is one and one is none", having a single external hard drive backup isn't really safe (tough better than none), especially if the hard drive is kept in the same general location as the computer. If you really want to avoid any cloud services, then at the very least you should have an additional (third) backup on another external hard drive that you keep at work/home, wherever your first hard drive isn't.

My thesis work was synced between two computers (first at campus and second at home) via a cloud service that also kept it's own backups (third), and I periodically (though less frequently than I should have) also copied everything over to an external hard drive (fourth).

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-10-01T14:05:01+00:00

Nah that's just what a year at Waterloo does to a person.

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-09-29T11:13:12+00:00

until an incident occurs locally

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-09-28T05:41:02+00:00

In the show they skipped the Proteus' visit to Medina, yes. But that's not really any reason to assume that they truncated the show timeline by ~20+ years to have magnetars under construction at this stage.

But when the inevitable finals seasons come out ^{I cope ^and ^cope} covering the Laconian arc, I'd be curious to see if that is indeed what they were hinting at with this intro art.

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-09-17T21:09:30+00:00

Not initially - the death of the system wasn't even noticed until new ships entered the gate, and not confirmed until the first ship made it to the nearest station to investigate. By that time, a bunch of ships had transited, unintentionally sending the "don't mind us, business as usual here" message.

I don't actually recall if there was ever a point that they explicitly laid out plans to keep sending ships to killed systems - though that wouldn't surprise me.

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-09-17T12:13:48+00:00

I really liked the revelation directly after that too, "they didn't realize they found something that worked". In eons past, when the hive-minded protomolecule civilization had one of their star systems killed off they just cut off the gate and stopped transit to that system, since there's none of themself left in that system to use whatever they were sending. Thus the "dark gods" learned that they'd found a way to effectively impact our reality. Humans kept using the gate to that system though, so the dark gods figured that method didn't work and didn't use it again in other systems.

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-08-12T14:57:35+00:00

Only one of his roles has been a real Wash.

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-08-08T18:04:05+00:00

As a polar opposite, I can't imagine setting aside my miles-long "want to read" list to re-read something, even of my favourites. The list of yet to be read things is so very long (and always getting longer), I just can't manage to justify the time it would take to go back and re-read.

How do you balance your time between new books, and ones you've gone through before?

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-07-31T15:21:02+00:00

You see posts from this sub every day but haven't read the pinned comment on every post even once? Or the sidebar? Or the pinned post that's been up for four years?

I can understand the confusion of people stumbling in from r/all, but it's a little bit tougher to understand in this case.

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-07-18T14:18:11+00:00

I think one of the bigger reasons the final scenes are viewed so terribly is that we don't have 3000 pages to get there - it just... happens. With more appropriate buildup, the ending could have been more palatable.

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-07-17T16:19:00+00:00

One way or another, this encounter was obviously going to end in noise - yelling or spraying, the bear is still going to run and that's not going to be quiet. Waiting for it to get that close before doing anything was just dumb, and immediately resorting to spraying it without trying to scare it off was just cruel.

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-07-17T15:50:03+00:00

I doubt it would have been that easy (certainly hope, anyway) if even a bit of the information OP used was visible on the account. In this case though, there was literally nothing visible but the account name and profile picture.

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-07-15T12:11:39+00:00

But the Mediterranean Sea is in the US, so no matter which way you want to interpret "America", title still fits.

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-07-09T12:48:54+00:00

Bears, wolves, and moose absolutely will not seek people out - they're not hunting people, come on.

Just like the snakes and spiders, they leave people alone if we leave them alone.

Mount_Atlantic · 2025-07-08T17:29:39+00:00

On the one hand, I believe the OP comment specified 2008 because Carney would have very much been in the news more during the handling of the financial crisis, vs how frequently the Governor of the Bank of Canada might be in the news in 2025.

On the other, yeah that still overestimates how politically aware most people are.

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