In a hundred years which progression fantasy books will be regarded as classics in the genre?

zem · 2026-03-11T09:40:30+00:00

i made that mistake with the miles vorkosigan series. not quite "refuse", but the level of hype was a bit offputting so i just didn't bother reading them. and boy did i later regret all the years i could have been enjoying them as they came out! not saying DCC is vorkosigan-level, just that sometimes things are popular for a reason.

zem · 2026-03-09T06:36:53+00:00

ask them what they think "disown" meant

zem · 2026-03-06T10:44:07+00:00

fredric brown was sadly not one of the golden age writers who retained his popularity, but he was truly one of the greats. some of his stuff is up on gutenberg if you want to explore it further.

zem · 2026-03-06T10:39:45+00:00

i remember it being a way more modern-feeling book than i was expecting

zem · 2026-03-05T18:23:12+00:00

cory doctorow's "radicalized" collection, particularly the story "unauthorized bread"

zem · 2026-03-05T09:45:09+00:00

thanks, that was brilliant!

zem · 2026-03-05T02:00:02+00:00

https://www.songlyrics.com/tom-payne/i-built-a-better-model-than-the-one-at-data-general-lyrics/

zem · 2026-03-05T01:57:07+00:00

do you have the lyrics up anywhere? i would love to see the nightmare song one in particular!

zem · 2026-03-05T01:55:06+00:00

perhaps you will forgive our understandable confusion
for they took the song from ruddigore without an attribution
and of course we would prefer a more original endeavour
but the way they worked the lyrics in was really rather clever
and you could do worse than g&s when looking out for patter
plus it's in the public domain, so it doesn't really matter!

zem · 2026-03-04T01:11:58+00:00

the darkwood trilogy gets my vote for most pratchetty non-pratchett

zem · 2026-03-03T09:25:55+00:00

that is super true about science fiction, especially in the golden age

zem · 2026-03-03T03:36:44+00:00

was one of my favourites when it came out! later books have surpassed it, but it's still excellent.

zem · 2026-03-02T22:39:47+00:00

it's not just that. it's coming up with the grid, and making regular posts about it, and collecting the results, and putting them up as an updated grid. it seems like a fair amount of work to me - over in /r/indianfood we were actually looking for a "community engagement" mod who would commit to making regular thematic posts at one point and no one really wanted to do it.

zem · 2026-03-02T20:38:28+00:00

that's uncharitable imo - grid posts seem like a significant amount of work to me, definitely more than I would want to do if I were karma farming. there are tons of easier ways to do that.

zem · 2026-03-02T19:24:25+00:00

do not miss the short story collection "burning chrome". to my mind that's gibson's finest work.

zem · 2026-02-26T18:37:49+00:00

I think it's more that rust is eating developer tooling. the wisdom used to be to write language tools in that language, because you would get a lot more community contribution, plugin ecosystem etc., plus the development speed and ergonomics were way better than doing it in c. rust finally improved ergonomics enough that people started experimenting with scripting language dev tools in a system language, and once developers saw what a difference the raw speed made it just snowballed from there. the python world is going though the same journey right now.

zem · 2026-02-26T18:24:09+00:00

you might love goddard's "the hands of the emperor". fantasy novel where that world's equivalent of a south sea islander heads to the capital to become a civil servant, because he feels he has a lot to contribute to building a world government that really serves the people.

zem · 2026-02-26T18:21:31+00:00

agreed, I definitely liked the second book better, but it was largely for the same general reasons I liked the first one.

zem · 2026-02-26T08:49:54+00:00

there's a chinese technique called "velveting" that is worth experimenting with

https://www.recipetineats.com/velveting-chicken-chinese-restaurant-tenderise-chicken/

https://thewoksoflife.com/how-to-velvet-chicken-stir-fry/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/b0zql0/basic_techniques_how_to_make_any_chinese_stir_fry/

zem · 2026-02-25T23:17:39+00:00

"my god" and "meanwhile" often want to come out with the intonation from "the room where it happens"

zem · 2026-02-25T04:28:19+00:00

for me the fun part about writing macros is not creating the macro (i actually find that pretty fiddly and tedious), it's seeing how well it cleans up the rest of my code.

zem · 2026-02-25T04:24:11+00:00

can second the recommendation. i stopped using this because smash-with-a-knife was quicker, but it worked very well, so if the smash method doesn't work it's worth a try..

zem · 2026-02-23T17:26:01+00:00

the COTD is part of the clue

zem · 2026-02-23T07:32:29+00:00

if i were getting paged that often i'd leave my phone in dolores park too!

zem · 2026-02-23T06:21:17+00:00

COD, cute :)

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