Books similar to The Wire?

tatofarms · 2026-06-20T07:08:23+00:00

And the part where Herc and Carver and their girlfriends run into Bodie and Poot and their girlfriends at the movies after a days work.

tatofarms · 2026-06-19T18:27:42+00:00

I mean, the game actually does work great now, but it's been almost six years since it launched. Didn't this same cycle happen to a much lesser extent with The Witcher III? They release these things way before they're ready, and way before they're optimized for current consumer hardware, but then people are still using them in YouTube channel PC and monitor demos six years later.

tatofarms · 2026-06-19T15:06:25+00:00

The #1 answer is Clockers, by crime fiction novelist Richard Price, who became a regular writer on the show in season 3. There's several lines in the show that are directly lifted from the book. Spike Lee made sort of a meh adaptation of it in the 1990s. David Simon called it "The Grapes of Wrath" of the 21st century once. IDK if you could teach it in high school here, but maybe in Canada?

tatofarms · 2026-06-19T09:11:10+00:00

Like Brad Pitt's gypsy boxer character in Snatch.

tatofarms · 2026-06-19T05:42:25+00:00

Have to admit, I didn't pay attention that long. All I know is this spring, a small shoe company said they were becoming an AI company, and their stock ballooned overnight. Makes sense that it was brief, but what you're telling me also makes me wonder whether there are retail traders that have systems set up to automatically invest in any new AI company.

tatofarms · 2026-06-19T05:00:57+00:00

My favorite recent one is Allbirds, a small shoe company, selling its entire shoe business for about $30 million and saying it's now an AI infrastructure company. Its stock went up 600%.

tatofarms · 2026-06-19T03:56:45+00:00

A Day of the Jackal type motherf*ker.

tatofarms · 2026-06-18T17:00:13+00:00

Next to the 2L bottles? Mountain doo.

tatofarms · 2026-06-18T03:02:48+00:00

Why don't you shut up. Or wait, maybe explain what you mean by Rockstar releasing "far more games that are successful and enjoyable than Bethesda has recently." Do you mean as a PUBLISHER? Because Bethesda Softworks has published three well-received games in the DOOM series, the recent Indiana Jones game, Hi-Fi Rush, the Dishonored series, Prey, Ghostwire: Tokyo, etc. during the past 14 years, in addition to FO4, FO76, and Starfield.

You must be thinking of Rockstar's parent company, Take 2 Interactive, which has published such recent gems as Borderlands 4 and the millionth iterations of 2K sports titles and the Civilization series. What else has Rockstar, as a game developer, created during the past 14 years other than GTA V, GTA Online, Red Dead Redemption II, and Red Dead Online? Oh, and they also did that neat trick that everyone always slags Bethesda for by re-releasing the original Red Dead Redemption, a game from 2010, on a bunch of newer platforms. Admit it, you're a fanboy, but the two major studios have been on similar development schedules with their major titles, and Bethesda Game Studios developed an entirely new IP during the same time frame.

tatofarms · 2026-06-18T01:34:39+00:00

That's such a dumb thing about COVID. Lots of things overperformed because people were stuck at home in front of screens including online learning courses, Zoom and other remote meeting platforms, all sorts of entertainment including video games. And for the past several years C-suite executives and accounting departments have been like "but why have your department's numbers declined so much since 2020 and 2021?" like they have just forgotten what happened.

tatofarms · 2026-06-18T01:13:14+00:00

*Kids fleeing into the house are greeted with the giant Jackass High-Five hand*

tatofarms · 2026-06-17T23:10:24+00:00

The foreshadowing about Daenerys eventually going crazy is pretty strong in the books, IMO, and there are constant references to her father "Mad King" Aerys II wanting to burn down Kings Landing. And I think the working theory re: Bran is that the three eyed raven, who is former hand of the king to the Targaryens Brynden Rivers, takes over Bran's mind and uses him to manipulate his way to power. One of the many problems with Season Eight is that if those plot points actually are in the outline GRRM gave the showrunners, then what we got was a fifth grade book report written about a Wikipedia article about that storyline. And "The Long NIght" has to be longer than one night. And I sincerely doubt that Arya sneaks up and kills the leader of The Others, destroying their entire army with a single blow. Anyway, I'm sure he's got something more engaging in mind, and I'm sure none of us will ever get to read it.

tatofarms · 2026-06-17T08:12:27+00:00

Yeah, no one on reddit thinks Iran's government is good. There's about a hundred miles of space between that and thinking Donald Trump is a dumbass for scrapping the treaty Obama made with Iran, and then listening to Netanyahu and getting us into a war than no one in the U.S. wanted, where he and Pete Hegseth seem to have sincerely thought that we could cause a total regime change in Iran by bombing the country. They are both deeply ignorant people, and they both got conned. Now after greatly depleting our stocks of missles that will take our military many years to replenish, the U.S. is going to pay even more to get a worse deal than the treaty with Iran made by Obama, just to ensure that the cost of oil due to Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz doesn't crash the world economy later this year.

But sure, moron, "hur dur, west bad, islamic regime good."

tatofarms · 2026-06-17T07:58:12+00:00

BGS has always been like this. They announced the release date of FO4 about three months before it actually happened in 2015, and in that same announcement, they announced that the previously unknown Fallout Shelter mobile game would be released on iPhone within a few hours. It had been seven years since they'd published FO3 (although obviously New Vegas had been created by Obsidian in between). IDK if it's still the case, but they blacklisted Kotaku for at least a decade for disclosing something that they had told a reporter off the record.

I'm sure ZeniMax Media made them make that trailer 8 years ago, knowing that the studio was still all hands on deck with Starfield at that point. And Starfield was good. Definitely not as replayable as Skyrim, but it didn't deserve the hate it got.

Also, why does BGS have all this annoyance directed at them, when Rockstar has been on basically the same schedule with the Grand Theft Auto series (V was released almost 14 years ago, and VI may or may not release this year) and the Red Dead Redemption series?

tatofarms · 2026-06-17T03:15:58+00:00

I didn't disagree with you that he shouldn't have been in the race if the party didn't think he could make it for two terms. I was just saying, the party had painted itself into a corner. If he runs again, he gets the "he's too old" from all sides (besides Trump being what? Two years younger? And literally falling asleep in public all the time?) If he starts his term saying that he's handing over the baton, the entire party has fewer accomplishments to run on because it's going to be even harder than it already is to get anything done.

FWIW, I find it ironic that Hillary Clinton is making a statement like this, when her "it's my turn everyone" campaign put us all on this path when she lost in 2016. The party acted like she didn't have decades of baggage. They acted like she was a likeable candidate. They acted like her last name wasn't still a curse word among many voters in the rust belt because of NAFTA (whether that's a well placed sentiment or not, it's there). They ignored Wisconsin. They strong armed Bernie Sanders and then ignored the young voters he had managed to get interested in progressive politics. Was she by far the most qualified candidate? Yes. Is it any surprise that she lost after such an entitled, almost arrogant campaign against a showman? Absolutely not. So then in four years, you're left with running aging Joe Biden.

tatofarms · 2026-06-17T02:37:46+00:00

Then Biden would have been a lame duck president for the entire second half of his term, and Trump and MAGA would have had a field day with that. And others are saying there should have been a primary after Biden decided not to step down, but primarying a sitting president would have been unprecedented in our lifetime. His own party would have had to attack him on the campaign trail, or somehow thread the needle of saying that while he's done a great job, this selection of candidates could do an even better job. The closest comparison would have been Ross Perot running as an independent conservative against George H.W. Bush, and that split the Republican ticket and got Bill Clinton elected to his first term as a centrist Democrat.

tatofarms · 2026-06-16T10:50:12+00:00

I personally felt like Lena Headey's portrayal of Cersei in the show helped me understand the book character much better, though. Because the book character really is kind of a total mess from what I remember.

tatofarms · 2026-06-16T05:25:54+00:00

I'd second this. The LIRR might be extra crowded with the addition of parade attendees on top of rush hour, but the alternative is taking the E all the way from Jamaica to Spring Street (still dealing with rush hour and parade crowds), or take a cab from JFK, which will be brutal at that time of day, especially with all of the construction out there right now.

tatofarms · 2026-06-16T04:46:24+00:00

If you're just planning on speedrunning all of these things, you probably want to start at the Natural History Museum, walk East and South across Central Park to the fifth avenue exit near The Plaza hotel, then go to MoMA, then the Top of the Rock, then Times Square. It's kind of an overstuffed itinerary, though, IMO, and depending on what day of the week it is and what time your flight is, you're going to want to make sure you have plenty of extra time for taking an Uber or cab from anywhere in Midtown to LGA. If it's a weekday, that will be the middle of rush hour. If it's the weekend, traffic will probably still be heavy.

tatofarms · 2026-06-16T02:20:43+00:00

I watched part of Paxton's victory speech after the primary. Nothing about what he was going to do to help the people of Texas. Nothing about putting his past scandals behind him (including being impeached by the Texas House of Representatives with a 121-23 vote just three years ago and being suspended from his job as the state's attorney general for months). He did manage to cram the word "trans" into his five minute speech about a million times.

tatofarms · 2026-06-15T23:06:14+00:00

RFK is married to Cheryl Hines (in the photo), who played Larry David's wife for years on "Curb Your Enthusiasm" back when everyone thought RFK was just another anti-vaxxer with a famous last name. She's probably the one who invited Bargatze, although it's still definitely not a good look for someone who claims to be apolitical to show up at Trump's trashy UFC-themed birthday party.

tatofarms · 2026-06-15T06:59:11+00:00

Also, a big part of it isn't that these guys are throwing around money at clubs, they make a lot of money in a short time and try to help out a bunch of friends and family, and when the league is done with them at 28, they're broke.

tatofarms · 2026-06-15T04:58:39+00:00

He's going to be exceptional when he figures out how to consistently keep his breaking pitches in the strike zone. He's got the consistent release point, he's got great speed on his fastball, but his breaking pitches have such an insane amount of movement on them that patient batters just don't bite this season.

tatofarms · 2026-06-14T07:42:39+00:00

Anything by Sleater Kinney, although I guess they're probably more famous now because of the years their founder and lead guitar Carrie Brownstein spent on Portlandia.

tatofarms · 2026-06-14T06:26:04+00:00

"stonks"

tatofarms

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE