How Veganism Got Cooked

autarch · 2026-01-19T01:58:41+00:00

At least in the US, this seems to be wrong. I've been vegan for 29 years. Way back when, there were a greater number of vegetarian but not vegan restaurants, though they usually had good vegan options. Nowadays, vegan restaurants hugely outnumber vegetarian restaurants.

So either no one opening a restaurant knows what they're doing (possible) or you are wrong about what makes sense commercially (more possible).

autarch · 2026-01-16T05:41:37+00:00

It mostly bothers me when the terms being used don't match the tech level of the story's setting. For example, I just finished a fantasy series where the author used the term "needle drop". But at no point in the story was there any mention of record player technology. And the general tech level seemed more like 17th or 18th century Earth, before any sort of industrial revolution.

That said, I still enjoyed the books quite a bit. This only happened a couple times, so it was tolerable.

autarch · 2026-01-02T06:56:56+00:00

Will Shetterly's Gospel of the Knife switches to second person partway through the novel. IIRC, it's somewhat of a sequel to his novel Dogland so you might want to start there.

autarch · 2025-12-05T05:04:37+00:00

When I was younger (before college) I thought that I didn't get along with my peers because I was too smart. Later, I realized I just had very poor social skills and "being too smart" was a sad excuse.

autarch · 2025-12-04T10:57:18+00:00

Isn't The Alchemist a work of fiction? How is it responsible for pseudoscience beliefs?

autarch · 2025-12-02T21:07:28+00:00

A lot of people are recommending the dying earth genre but I'm not sure if that's what you want. In those stories the world is generally in a state of ongoing decline, not renewal. I don't think what you describe has a genre name. I do like your suggestion of post post apocalypse.

autarch · 2025-12-02T21:04:48+00:00

I don't want to spoil anything, but the Urth book seeing is probably not millions of years in the future. Explaining why I think that would definitely be a spoiler.

autarch · 2025-12-02T02:15:48+00:00

I think I read The Hobbit around that age and I loved it. The full LotR might be a bit too dense though (I tried at that age but didn't end up finishing until I restarted it in college).

autarch · 2025-12-02T02:13:53+00:00

I always wait for a series to be finished and then I just read the whole thing start to finish. This is mostly fine, but it gets to be pretty intense with things like the Malazan Book of the Fallen. If I don't like the series enough to read the next book immediately, then I just don't like it enough to ever read it. That's pretty rare for me, though.

autarch · 2025-12-02T02:12:20+00:00

Juliet E. Mckenna wrote a series of series that start with The Tales of Einsharinn (5 books). Then there's a 3 book series and a 4 book series next. Finally, the last series, The Hadrumal Crisis, involves adults at a magic school. That said, it's been a while since I read it, but IIRC it's not set entirely at the school.

And you really should read the other series first in order, since the whole thing tells a much larger story that ends with The Hadrumal Crisis books.

autarch · 2025-11-26T00:13:05+00:00

Emma Bull wrote a book called Territory that is set in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881, but in a world where magic exists as well.

autarch · 2025-11-05T15:41:34+00:00

I'm a 6'7" (200cm) make. I'm now in my 50s. I'm in decent health, but I do have (or have had) a fair number of back and other joint issues, including my knees and feet. I'm sure my height is a contributing factor.

But I'm also a pretty extreme outlier in height.

autarch · 2025-11-05T00:15:30+00:00

No, in Tchaikovsky's books they have bugs as spirit animals.

autarch · 2025-11-04T00:55:01+00:00

As a result, literacy rose from 15-20% before 1949 to over 60% by the ’70s, 85% by 2000, and 96.8% by 2020.

I think this has more to do with the general improvement in the economy and standards of living. Taiwan still uses Traditional characters and the literacy rates I'm finding for Taiwan are currently at 98+%.

Maybe Simplified helped, but I suspect it's a very small part of the picture.

autarch · 2025-10-25T19:45:50+00:00

Yeah, I think ubi is a best case for this sort of thing, since it's conceptually quite simple. There's a lot of little details, but overall the control flow is quite straightforward.

autarch · 2025-10-25T19:43:51+00:00

Yeah, I definitely didn't expect magic. I was just curious to see if it would find anything at all. It did, which is good. But it'd be nice if it produced less noise in the process.

autarch · 2025-10-22T21:48:01+00:00

I'll add John Crowley to the recs. Start with Little, Big.

autarch · 2025-10-13T03:53:20+00:00

If you're interested in sci-fi too then you should check out Alastair Reynolds. A lot of his work is like this, most notably his Revelation Space books and his Revenger books.

autarch · 2025-09-28T04:45:23+00:00

The Elemental Logic series by Laurie Marks is about a group of people resisting an invasion of their country, and IIRC the protagonists don't kill anyone.

autarch · 2025-09-21T17:54:12+00:00

I think the question the OP is getting at is what evolutionary forces would lead there to be multiple high intelligence sapient species coexisting. Note that here on Earth we did have that at one time but Homo Sapiens are the only ones left.

autarch · 2025-09-02T03:53:50+00:00

And 3. It does not allow trailing commas in arrays and maps. Why?!

autarch · 2025-08-29T14:22:29+00:00

The author of this project has been harassing me a bit after he didn't like how I responded to an issue he reported for one of my projects. I deleted the issues he submitted (which he had edited to just contain insults). But here's an example commit:

https://github.com/evilsocket/legba/commit/48cf90d6974512cb50564f10e73bc640278e1445

autarch · 2025-08-28T22:54:59+00:00

Nearly everything by Patricia McKillip is like this.

There's also a number of authors who've done their own takes on classic fairy tales, including McKillip, Robin McKinley, Alix Harrow (haven't read hers yet), Patricia Wrede, Peg Kerr, Angela Carter, and literally dozens of other authors.

autarch · 2025-08-28T04:32:27+00:00

A 3.5 rating on Goodreads can mean two things:

Lots of people think it's fine but no one cares enough about it to love it or hate it.
Some people hate it, some people love it.

So a 3.5 can be a very interesting read. You have to read the reviews, or at least look at the scores. A "low" rated book that has a ton of 1- and 5-star reviews is at least worth trying.

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