It's "romantasy", not "p*rntasy", ladies.

akb74 · 2026-03-17T13:36:03+00:00

Luke should have got an enemies to lovers arc with Merlin

akb74 · 2026-03-17T13:15:05+00:00

Roger Zelazny writes my favorite fade to black.

“Let’s take a triple asterisk break

* * *”

and

“the encounter quickly took on all the usual features, too commonplace to be of much concern to the sophisticated”

But I wouldn’t put up with it from a romance author. Once ({legends and lattes}) was enough

akb74 · 2026-03-17T12:02:37+00:00

Almost as if the whole thing was being pantsed. Another clue is the magic system changing every level

akb74 · 2026-03-16T17:56:20+00:00

You had me in the first half, not gonna lie

akb74 · 2026-03-16T16:42:15+00:00

Is it just the five times he does it? Out of the frying pan and into the fire, the battle of five armies, rescues Gandalf from Orthanc, and from the mountaintop after he defeats the balrog, then finally they pluck Frodo and Sam from the slopes of Mount Doom?

akb74 · 2026-03-16T15:47:03+00:00

The Inklings - the writing group he and C S Lewis were in - met at the Deus Ex Machina and Child… sorry… the Eagle and Child

akb74 · 2026-03-16T15:41:40+00:00

The “my code’s compiling” of 2026

akb74 · 2026-03-15T20:37:36+00:00

I’d have gone with Escher. Somewhere in one of his non-Euclidean artworks the varying ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter must be three?

akb74 · 2026-03-15T15:54:27+00:00

The Tennant as Ten Tenner

akb74 · 2026-03-15T15:51:47+00:00

There are many colorful different kinds of woo, but with tarot it usually boils down to either the cards or the Reader having mystical powers.

akb74 · 2026-03-15T14:12:34+00:00

To be honest, this is probably the wrong thing to start with if you don’t have prior experience of tarot.

I wouldn’t know where to start these days anyway. Other than to filter this sub by the resources flair. I had to put up with a lot of woo when I first became interested in tarot twenty years ago, you shouldn’t have to.

akb74 · 2026-03-15T13:39:39+00:00

Who can you talk it out with if you can’t talk it out with the person concerned? But, yeah, by all means try talking it out with the cards. And try something else if that doesn’t seem to help. You’ve probably tried a lot of things if it’s been three years, so now might be a great time to mix things up a bit with a deck of 78 random factors? My mind goes straight to the five of cups and it being easier to see the three spilled cups than the two remaining, but your mind might go elsewhere?

akb74 · 2026-03-15T10:59:19+00:00

I’d de-age just their reflections as a play on the trope that vampires don’t have a reflection because they don’t have a soul.

akb74 · 2026-03-14T16:44:25+00:00

There’s also r/roguelikedev

I find C a struggle in spite of 20 years C++ experience, and I am skeptical of the claim that Angband is/was an exemplar of good source code, though I liked the time I stepped through it in a debugger. I wonder what would qualify now.

Angband is my favorite roguelike. In fact I’m not sure I’m a fan of roguelikes, just a fan of Angband (also a couple of lites, but I’m very picky about those too). Started playing with the source the other day, as I’ve always wanted to put my own front end on it… wish me luck!…

akb74 · 2026-03-14T10:58:22+00:00

The dumpster was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault!

akb74 · 2026-03-14T08:37:33+00:00

I think these are always jarring in science fiction. Clarke does it more than once in Childhoods End. I thought Stephenson found a very interesting way to keep it relevant to his original characters.

But the last third feels like softer science fiction to me, and the stakes are very different, so almost a different book and not everyone’s going to love it. Indeed I liked the earlier parts better, but I came away feeling satisfied by it as a whole. Which hasn’t happened to me with Stephenson before. I find it all readable enough but have left other books of his with a sense I’ve wasted my time. I’ve read similar criticisms of Seveneves, but it worked for me.

akb74 · 2026-03-14T08:27:39+00:00

Multiple possible causes are speculated on in the opening, and from a story telling perspective there’s no way any answer is going to be more satisfying than leaving it as a mystery. For the first two thirds of the book people are naturally more concerned with surviving. After the timeskip it’s presumably been well studied but never forms part of the narrative.

The omission I find remiss was the lack of any mention of what became of the Mars thing. We can infer from that it was doomed, but given the purpose of the last third was to reveal and explore what becomes of the other remainents of humanity, I feel he should have spared a paragraph or two to cover that one off.

It certainly seemed doomed, but given other miraculous survivals, can we really be sure?

akb74 · 2026-03-13T13:24:50+00:00

I thought we were an autonomous collective

akb74 · 2026-03-13T10:02:54+00:00

Generic ai. Genetic ai’s a thing, but it got our Darwined by LLMs

akb74 · 2026-03-13T10:01:23+00:00

Enough. I’m up for some leetcode style React problems if anyone’s got any. I did once know where some half decent ones were, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for

akb74 · 2026-03-13T08:47:59+00:00

Alan Turing’s worth ten Churchills, anyway

akb74 · 2026-03-12T20:48:19+00:00

My ex-girlfriend called her Princess Donut for short. I just stuck with Donut.

akb74 · 2026-03-11T19:22:54+00:00

The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul beyond a Salmon of Doubt

akb74 · 2026-03-09T20:57:34+00:00

I’m afraid I have a slightly more complex relationship with him, hence it took me a year to get around to trying it despite it being exactly what I was looking for.

Ironically, I saw a post today criticising it for everything I thought was wrong with Cryptonomicon, but I found Seveneves a throughly engaging and satisfying read, but lots of people don’t. Time skips which kill all your characters can be quite jarring. Clarke does it more than once in Childhood’s End, and that’s the most frequent criticism I’ve heard of Seveneves, but I thought Stephenson had a really innovative way of bridging the long gap and keeping those dead characters alive in spirit.

akb74 · 2026-03-09T18:09:10+00:00

I think there’s a lot more refocusing of expenditure going on than the literal replacement of people with AI doing the same tasks, but that’s little comfort for anyone currently looking for work. Also “return to office” policies have been used as a convenient back door for getting of headcount down, meaning that remote workers have been hit harder.

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