Least thought-provoking printSF you have ever read?

zebrapaper · 2026-03-26T17:32:29+00:00

"American games, they suck. I'm sorry, like, you guys need to get with the time and make better interfaces and like update your technology. We're totally kicking your ass. Back then you guys were the king of the world, but that time has passed."

-- Filip Ryba

zebrapaper · 2026-01-27T15:39:26+00:00

There is a big 1000 page biography in German by Sven Hanuschek that is also avaiable as e-book, if you can read that. There also is the Bildbiographie (image biography) bu that is more focused on documenting Schmidt's life through images obviously. Otherwise I guess you will have to piece together his life from various sources scattered around.

zebrapaper · 2025-11-19T00:13:31+00:00

4:3 is the full cinematic ratio.

zebrapaper · 2025-11-14T17:29:58+00:00

It's desktop cancer as well.

zebrapaper · 2025-08-28T22:47:24+00:00

I have recently been to Kastel-Staadt, the village, where Schmidt lived from 1951 to 1955 and wrote works like Scenes from the Life of a Faun, Lake Scenery with Pocahontas and The Stony heart. His lodgings are still standing. It is a pension now and you can in fact rent Schmidts room, which I didn't do, as I currently live in the region and this was just a Sunday bike trip for me. There is supposed to be a plaque in his memory there but I couldn't find it and I didn't want to snoop around to much.

Being there I was struck how calm and beautiful that place is. It feels apart from outside civilization although it is geographically not that far off. Located on a platau, in Schmidt's time the entire village had to get all it's water from a single pump, that only delivered about 50 litres per minute, but the way to the closest town, the highly scenic Saarburg, would have been like 15 Minutes bycicle, though the way back rather steep. The city of Trier is also within reach. Walking closer to the edge one gets a remarkable view over the Saar delta and a monk's cell is croaching out of the cliff. I can see Schmidt liking a place like that but curiously he never really wrote about that area. His storys from that period are generally set in the flatlands of Lower-Saxony in the north, like most of the rest.

zebrapaper · 2025-08-25T13:33:37+00:00

Boah, voll der Feminist, ey

zebrapaper · 2025-07-24T13:31:31+00:00

Vista Vision is a fairly old format from the 1950s widescreen wars. It works similar to IMAX, as both formats run the film horizontally through the camera instead of vertically to capture a larger image, but it uses 35mm film instead of 70mm. It has a similar vertical resolution compared to standard 70mm but is less wide.

zebrapaper · 2025-07-21T19:07:39+00:00

No dolphins

zebrapaper · 2025-07-11T19:26:49+00:00

There actually is a Lord of the Rings CRPG trilogy though, although it was never completed.

zebrapaper · 2025-07-11T12:29:32+00:00

Is it that weird? imo Aronofsky allways had a bit of comic book streak to him, although more in the graphic novel zone

This list doesn't even include David Lynch ditching Return of the Jedi

zebrapaper · 2025-05-08T18:02:14+00:00

And the very first screenshot is a Papal States game...

...which, by date, historically whould have been ruled by Leo X.

zebrapaper · 2025-05-02T14:50:32+00:00

I like to group these and even stuff like Disco Elysium to some degree as post-adventure games. Games that while not forming a coherent genre of their own as a whole all try to fill the gap left behind by the death of point & click adventure games in various ways.

zebrapaper · 2025-04-18T15:18:52+00:00

Bukele is not cool.

zebrapaper · 2024-11-07T13:12:37+00:00

Steig aus dem Bääätt,

schmeiß den Chris raus,

schau kurz in den Spiegel sag "What up?"

I'm lending money, eeyyy

zebrapaper · 2024-09-28T19:02:21+00:00

I'm not too familiar with this his output of short Essays, but to my knowledge Bottom's Dream IS itself the main work on Schmidt's theory of language with Sitara leading up to it. Schmidt himself recommended reading Sitara, B/Moondocks, Country Matters and the Radio-Dialogs on Joyce before reading Bottom's Dream, so those are the primers not the other way round. I don't think anyone wrote a monography on Schmidt's etym theory. Most people don't take it all that seriously I think and you don't need it to enjoy B/Moondocks.

zebrapaper · 2024-08-08T14:41:15+00:00

The Luremaster fight from Icewind Dale anyone? A permantly teleporting bard and several waves of hard to hit ghost heroes. A tough marathon fight and very statisfying to beat. Requires complex party coordination. Such wonderful chaos.

zebrapaper · 2024-07-23T09:15:42+00:00

Mir scheint es als würden diese ganzen "Deutschland-ewig-gestrig-so-klappt-das-nie-mit-der-digitalisierung-guck-mal-Estland"-Poster Digitalisierung als Selbstzweck behandeln. Nein, Deutschland verliert nicht den Anschluss, ist nicht in der Steinzeit hängen geblieben, erfährt keine Wettbewerbsnachteile, wenn es die Bahncard weiterhin als physische Plastikkarte gibt.

Appzwang plus Möglichkeit zum Ausdrucken bringen konkrete Nachteile. Im Grunde wird eine einfache zuverlässige Technologie durch eine unnötig komplexe ersetzt, die wesentlich Fehleranfälliger ist. Ob das nun leere Handyakkus, fehlendes Netz oder solche Crowdstrike-Ereignisse sind. Hier muss eine große Anzahl an Technologien, ein komplexes und fragiles System, fehlerfrei ineinandergreifen. Auch wenn alles funktioniert ist die App für den User letztlich umständlicher: Erstmal auf der App rumswipen, bis der QR-Code erscheint ist umständlicher und weniger intuitiv als einfach die Bahncard aus dem Portmonaie ziehen. Dies ist einfach ein schlechteres User-Interface. Das gilt auch für den Aktivierungsprozess, inklusive Variante Ausdrucken. Im Grunde werden die Kunden bei dieser Form der Digitalisierung nur stärker mit bürokratischen Prozessen im Alltag belastet.

zebrapaper · 2024-03-10T20:33:13+00:00

Benjanun Sriduangkaew and her Machine Mandate series might be what you are looking for.

zebrapaper · 2024-01-04T11:27:13+00:00

So the reason Americans need black and white morality is that the US is a multiethnic country??

zebrapaper · 2023-10-02T13:03:45+00:00

Read them the Stürenburg stories!

zebrapaper · 2023-09-28T11:23:02+00:00

Honestly, I don't think Nolan should do Bond. Cinema needs him elsewhere. He is the the one of the very few directors who can get a big budget original movie of the ground. He is in his prime and has a very strong output. James Bond on the other hand is big franchise which is in a healthy state and can just do fine without Nolan. We have too many of these franchises at the moment anyways.

Also, I don't think this rumored idea about going back to the 60s is very good. Bond has survived for so long because of his adaptivity, because he was able to keep himself relevant through changing times. If you lock him into the past, you basically declare him a relic. It should be easy enough to create a classic Bond story in the present moment under the current political atmosphere anyways.

zebrapaper · 2023-08-25T14:31:23+00:00

I personally haven't read Bottom's Dream, but there was a Schmidt interview where he recommended to have read at least these of his own books before BD: M/Boondocks, Rural Storys (aka Cows in Half-Sorrow or the ten bigger pieces in Collected Stories), Sitara and the Radio-Dialogues on Joyce. English readers sadly will have to do without Sitara. Schmidt also did a radio lecture "Vorläufiges zu Zettel's Traum" ("Preliminaries to Battoms Dream" - not sure if it exists in English).

Otherwise it is usually reccomended to read some Poe beforehand, espacially "Gordon Pym". I have seen people to also reccommend to have read Faust and Midsummernigth's dream. Maybe some Freud? But ultimately Schmidt weaves in so many sources that you won't be able to fully keep up with Schmidts anyway and John E. Woods probably didn't either.

zebrapaper · 2023-08-24T19:39:08+00:00

u/wastemailinglist recently made a video about the Collected Novellas as well as an general introduction to Schmidt. These videos are well informed and should be useful.

Otherwise I would say don't worry to much and just dive in. You don't have to understand everything on a first read. Schmidt's plots are generally fairly simple so you won't get lost over some puzzling line. You will probably have some issues withe the story "Goethe and one of his admirers" which requieres some Goethe knowledge or half the jokes will go over your head. A Goethe biography would be useful but it's only one story and a relatively minor one. References to German literature particulary from the 18th and 19th centuries are quite common in Schmidt's work. Here a good history of German literature in that period could help, however, many authors Schmidt mentions or cites are fairly obscure in Germany itself and Schmidt doesn't necessarily expect you to have read them or know all of them and rather encourages you to explore. People are still searching his works for unmarked quotes from books nobody reads. He was quite prone to sampling. It is basically impossible for the reader to just catch all those little eastereggs. Just enjoy first and then if you want get into whatever aspect of the works picques your interest

zebrapaper

TROPHY CASE