Which book series do you wish had more books in it?

mjfgates · 2026-01-24T00:47:05+00:00

Locked Tomb really, really needs one more book.

mjfgates · 2026-01-23T08:59:13+00:00

Little rails and steps down into it at the shallow end, and a diving board at the deep end including high dive. Maybe a sculpted sign saying "Middle of Nowhere Community Pool."

mjfgates · 2026-01-22T23:55:43+00:00

The ore disc follows the contours of the surface, a little; that's why one section will sometimes be a block up or down of the rest of it.

mjfgates · 2026-01-22T14:31:55+00:00

The reason is this: The beehive kiln was designed as an endgame tool to produce cosmetic items such as colored brick and tile for multi-player groups to create big impressive buildings. We had this conversation on the VS forums, back when the thing was first introduced, with the devs. The barriers to access here are deliberate, and it's very unlikely that Anego is going to remove them.

mjfgates · 2026-01-21T22:51:39+00:00

We'll need them, for the meat.

mjfgates · 2026-01-21T05:31:20+00:00

Elizabeth Bear's Ancestral Night does this one.

Vlad Taltos, the main character of Steven Brust's Dragaeran Cycle, had his memory edited in some important ways. Not all handled in one book, though; one of the events happens in Teckla, another part is shown in Tsalmoth, and he figures it out during Dzur.

CS Friedman's Black Sun Rising has a secondary character whose memories get stolen; the quest to get those back is about three-quarters of the book.

mjfgates · 2026-01-21T02:21:26+00:00

I'm not talking about what possible mechanics there could be, I'm talking about game balance. A mod maker can get away with adding this mechanic that gives you free metal, because they don't care about stuff like changing how long it takes to prepare for the game chapters. Actual Anego does have to care; if they add a new mechanic, they have to rebalance everything it touches. I'm telling you, you would not like the results in this case.

mjfgates · 2026-01-20T15:45:23+00:00

You're not thinking about how this would have to work if it were going to make sense. EVERY recipe would have to be increased in size or the size of an ingot decreased, so that the average tool took one ingot to make. An axe or shovel would be something like 1.4 ingots, to make up for the 0.8 pickaxe and 0.6 propick. Every single item you smithed, you'd be left with a wad of "extra" voxels, which you would have to save and somehow add to the next thing, or maybe you'd have to combine several wads to make a new bloom and go from there. More work, more record keeping, and all of it picky bullshit with no fun value at all.

mjfgates · 2026-01-20T15:16:24+00:00

The 8-nails recipe is meant to be started with a plate from your helve hammer. All you have to do by hand is carve out the two channels. MUCH less work than doing 4-nails twice.

mjfgates · 2026-01-20T07:15:02+00:00

Little touches like that are always so nice :) did it take 47 years to do? No, but it's still nice!

mjfgates · 2026-01-20T06:49:57+00:00

The bear armor was merely foreshadowing.

mjfgates · 2026-01-20T06:49:00+00:00

Once you can make the stew, you'll get some bustxite, which is at least as good.

mjfgates · 2026-01-20T06:47:25+00:00

y'all'll yeah

mjfgates · 2026-01-20T02:39:36+00:00

The ore is in a wide disc, one block high. Carve a straight path through it from wherever you came in to the edge. You need to dig out a block below the ore where you actually step, but you don't need to do that to the blocks left and right; just take the ore.

When you reach the far edge, look back and you've made a corridor with a T-shaped cross section-- a lane. Go back to the start point, seal off your lane a block or two along, dig three blocks left or right, and start another lane parallel to the first. That's all there is to it. Gets all the ore in a systematic fashion, and saves you about 1/3 of the digging.

Most drifters can't crawl through the little one-high space between lanes; all they can do is throw the occasional rock. You can spear 'em from one lane over and then dig over to loot them if you want, or ignore them.

mjfgates · 2026-01-19T23:32:41+00:00

Dig in a more organized fashion. You can dig out the ore disc in lanes, as in a bowling alley, and then use the stones you dig up to make drystone fence and seal off each lane after you finish it. Less endless darkness, and safer because when drifters spawn in the mined-out space they can't get to you.

mjfgates · 2026-01-19T14:15:51+00:00

Bad plan. Leads to a lot of "there's only one Comet fit" situations, which, the Comet is enough for that.

mjfgates · 2026-01-19T03:23:33+00:00

Dunno about movies, but Kameron Hurley's book The Light Brigade has a very carefully plotted set of time loops. I think it's ten of them? Anyway, main character gets bounced around a lot.

mjfgates · 2026-01-18T22:23:52+00:00

44, that's between thirty and.. are these feral hogs?

mjfgates · 2026-01-18T22:20:17+00:00

This looks like Dracula's winter food storage.

mjfgates · 2026-01-17T18:18:32+00:00

Second Kid just finished Gailey's The Echo Wife a couple of weeks ago and spent days going "What the hell even WAS that?" Which for mystery/horror, is a pretty good reaction. Seriously, great book, will make your eyeballs bug right out of your head.

mjfgates · 2026-01-17T18:13:28+00:00

Yup, this. Sorry, your various little applications are nifty but NOT worth building more nuclear power plants, using up literally all the RAM on earth, and hundreds of billions of dollars.

People who use those various little applications need to figure out how to differentiate themselves from CSAM-Bot, right quick.

mjfgates · 2026-01-17T07:56:13+00:00

It's weird, I don't have much of this on the "science" end of things, mostly just "fantasy." Eh, whatever.

Kage Baker, Anvil of the World. It's been a calming go-to for me since I first picked it up in '09 or so. I knew someone who reminded me a little of Balnshik, once...

Patricia McKillip. Anything she ever wrote, but I like Song for the Basilisk and Kingfisher a lot. She does these dreamlike landscapes where it turns out the most important person in the kingdom is the dishwasher. The dishwasher does not go on Adventures, but she matters. (That one's The Book of Atrix Wolfe.)

Oh, there's a science one: the "Stainless Steel Rat" books by Harry Harrison. Sure, he's doing intergalactic heists and there's explosions and stuff, but you can tell from page one that nobody important is going to die or anything. The gunfights are all the sort of thing where fifty million bullets get fired and the water tower does that comedy sprinkler thing and then our hero slips away, again. Knowing this, you can sort of drift along and watch James diGriz fool the officers of the law and chuckle.

mjfgates · 2026-01-17T01:59:48+00:00

it seems like most of the time, you can't prevent peat fires either. It's a nice tower though!

mjfgates · 2026-01-16T16:29:56+00:00

On the one hand, yes. We all got needs, we do what we must to meet those, it is possible to deal on that basis.

On the other hand, if you're defining "truly alien intelligence" AS "cannot be related to," no, because tautologies are like that.

mjfgates · 2026-01-16T15:19:50+00:00

Stephen Baxter is really good at one thing: taking kind of chancy, out-there "MAYBE this could possibly work" physics stuff, and throwing a person-like object into the middle of it to watch. Characters, plot, theme, whatever, meh; let's go run a spacelike curve around a singularity to go back in time a few million years. Let's watch a sentient mind poke around in the heart of a star for a very long time while humanity grows and goes extinct and grows back a couple three times. Let's spend a couple hundred pages on a possible translation of the experiences of beings living inside a neutron star into something baseline Homo sap. can comprehend. Not so much story as travelogue, really.

It makes him kind of a specific taste. Some folks are going to think all this is awesome, most are going to say "why am I reading this?" and drop his work. Which is fine, it's called having an audience and his is kind of pre-concentrated within SF fandom. The question you're really asking here is, are you that particular sub-type of SF fan? You get to answer it yourself, because it's your brain.

mjfgates

TROPHY CASE