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Mat Linnett
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PostPosted: 03-21-2011 03:04 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Therac-25, after you reminding me about this series, I've started reading The Dark Tower, and am now up to book 5, The Wolves of Calla.
It's an excellent series, and a far cry from standard fantasy fare.
So thankee sai :)
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obsidian
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PostPosted: 03-21-2011 07:40 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


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Dark Metal
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PostPosted: 03-21-2011 08:21 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


obsidian is my black friend.



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Kenrohan
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PostPosted: 05-17-2011 06:37 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


My friend gave me an interesting book called Drylor The First Artifact since he didn't really care for it (he said it just wasn't for him). I read the first few chapters in a single sitting and I must say I think it's a pretty cool book so far. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a Fantasy fix.

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werldhed
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PostPosted: 05-17-2011 06:52 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Ah yes... books. I always forget to bump this thread. Then again, nobody really cares wtf you read.

Whatever.

Currently reading:
The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. meh. Kind of sucks. Dawkins is a pretty crappy arguer.

Also reading a bunch of students' reports that I need to grade by the end of the week.
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Therac-25
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PostPosted: 05-18-2011 02:29 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Currently reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It's a rewrite of Harry Potter by Yudkowsky, illustrating his various ideas about rationality. It's a bit of a slow start, but hilarious in it's own way.

(If you click on the author link there, it takes you to a page with an .epub file if that's how you roll).

Quote:
So not only is the wizarding economy almost completely decoupled from the Muggle economy, no one here has ever heard of arbitrage. The larger Muggle economy had a fluctuating trading range of gold to silver, so every time the Muggle gold-to-silver ratio got more than 5% away from the weight of seventeen Sickles to one Galleon, either gold or silver should have drained from the wizarding economy until it became impossible to maintain the exchange rate. Bring in a ton of silver, change to Sickles (and pay 5%), change the Sickles for Galleons, take the gold to the Muggle world, exchange it for more silver than you started with, and repeat.

Wasn't the Muggle gold to silver ratio somewhere around fifty to one? Harry didn't think it was seventeen, anyway. And it looked like the silver coins were actually smaller than the gold coins.

Then again, Harry was standing in a bank that literally stored your money in vaults full of gold coins guarded by dragons, where you had to go in and take out coins out of your vault whenever you wanted to spend money. The finer points of arbitraging away market inefficiencies might well be lost on them. He'd been tempted to make some sort of snide remark about the crudity of their financial system...
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Don Carlos
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PostPosted: 05-18-2011 03:03 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Keith Richards - Life
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Wabbit
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PostPosted: 05-18-2011 08:10 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


The Constant Art of Being a Writer - N.M. Kelby

Writing Down the Bones - Natalie Goldberg

The collected works of William Shakespeare (more referencing than straight reading).

Just finished the last of the Earthsea books by Ursula K. Le Guin.
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seremtan
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PostPosted: 05-18-2011 09:02 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Living in the End Times - Slavoj Zizek
The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
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Scourge
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PostPosted: 05-20-2011 08:23 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Dragonworld - Byron Priess, Micheal Reaves. I read it years ago and enjoyed it. I thought it was well written. Decided to give it a second run.
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xer0s
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PostPosted: 02-07-2012 04:39 PM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


I'm almost done with this. Pretty good so far. Some of the dialoge isn't very believable, but I can look past that. And we're fuct if we ever get EMPed...

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Tsakali
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PostPosted: 02-07-2012 04:42 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


lmao, was that under sum kind fox recommendation list?
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seremtan
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PostPosted: 02-07-2012 04:49 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


William Gibson - Distrust that Particular Flavor
Domenico Losurdo - Liberalism: A Counter History
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra

yeah i read more than one book at a time. u jelly?
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xer0s
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PostPosted: 02-07-2012 05:23 PM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Tsakali wrote:
lmao, was that under sum kind fox recommendation list?


Not that I know of. And from the text alone, I can't see a reason why it would be...
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EtUL
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PostPosted: 02-07-2012 11:11 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


all hail sagan
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Unisaw
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PostPosted: 02-08-2012 02:31 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Steve Jobs - just finished and I recommend it. You won't like him but it's a good read.
Unbroken:A WWII Story of Survival
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U4EA
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PostPosted: 02-08-2012 04:56 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Dan Simmons' Endymion [sequel to Hyperion & The Fall of Hyperion]:

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xer0s
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PostPosted: 02-08-2012 04:59 PM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Whoa! I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but that looks fucking awesome!
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EtUL
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PostPosted: 02-08-2012 10:04 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


lol came here expecting xeros to post the bible but it was better than I expected

reading the authoritarians now
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xer0s
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PostPosted: 02-09-2012 11:30 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


I was gonna read the Bible, but started Dune instead...:paranoid:

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4days
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PostPosted: 02-09-2012 12:38 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


xer0s wrote:
I was gonna read the Bible, but started Dune instead...:paranoid:

good man. the sequels are increasingly meh, but the first one is fantastic stuff.

currently re-reading 'a confederacy of dunces' after having learned a bit about the author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kennedy_Toole
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xer0s
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PostPosted: 02-09-2012 02:40 PM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Hey 4days, got a question. In the Contents at the front of my book, it says:

Book I: Dune
Book II: Muad'dib
Book III: The Prophet

Are books two and three sequals? Or is Dune simply three different books printed as one? Bit confused on that...
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Mat Linnett
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PostPosted: 02-09-2012 02:56 PM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


That's referring to the 3 parts of the book as a whole xer0s. And 4days is right, the first one's fantastic, but the rest get progressively worse.
I still think Herbert's best and most prescient work was "The White Plague". Very dark, but very good.

Me, I'm currently reading "Ender's Shadow", a re-telling of the events of "Ender's Game" from the perspective of another character, Bean, and it's pretty damn good.
Card gets a lot of flack for his religion and politics, but he writes a damn good yarn. Well worth a read.

I also recently finished "The Ware Tetralogy" by Rudy Rucker, a fantastic psychedelic cyberpunk / post-humanist tale that stumbles in a drug-fuelled haze through 4 books and is utterly ace. I'd never read any Rucker before, and was more than pleasantly surprised. He has some incredibly unique ideas that he explores through the course of these books, while maintaining a firm grasp on the seedier side of things.
Brilliant stuff and completely out of left field.
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seremtan
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PostPosted: 02-09-2012 04:55 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Mat Linnett wrote:
... the first one's fantastic, but the rest get progressively worse...


most of SF is 'worse' than Dune. the other 5 books in the series are pretty good, especially Children of Dune, but not so much God Emperor of Dune, in which not enough really happens until the end

the Dune books to *really* avoid like the plague are Brian Herbert's (Frank's son) stab at completing Dune 7 (which existed as 1000 pages of notes): Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune; utter pieces of shit, poorly written and the guy makes up a pisspoor excuse to resurrect all the original Dune characters but lack's Frank Herbert's skillz

likewise, avoid all the satellite works by Brian Herbert, the Butlerian Jihad etc. the guy is a talentless hack with the prose style of a mills and boon writer
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menkent
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PostPosted: 02-09-2012 08:22 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Just started the second novel of a series about the Saxon kings of England. It's really not great... somewhere between pure history and pure fiction and manages the worst of both. Subject is interesting enough to me that I'll keep it up through this book at least.
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MKJ
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PostPosted: 02-10-2012 02:51 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


what were those first sequels written by Brian again? Harkonnen I think ?
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Captain
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PostPosted: 02-10-2012 12:15 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


House Harkonnen?
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MKJ
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PostPosted: 02-12-2012 03:29 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


indeed
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seremtan
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PostPosted: 02-12-2012 08:15 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


bet they were shite
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Deathshroud
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PostPosted: 02-13-2012 06:42 PM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Image

Great series, by a great author.
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plained
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PostPosted: 02-17-2012 08:45 AM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


finished the david bowie bio, yea it was interesting.

now i'm on the duff duff mckagans book

so far so good



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seremtan
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PostPosted: 02-17-2012 01:48 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Deathshroud wrote:
Image

Great series, by a great author.


finished his diamond age and snow crash recently (really enjoyed), about to start cryptonomicon

might also give gibson's last trilogy (the hubertus bigend/blue ant thing) a go too

annoyingly, very few of stephenson's - or indeed anyone's - books are available for Kindle. seems to be heavily weighted toward out-of-copyright stuff

in fact, as a platform, e-books and e-book readers have a lot of maturing to do
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4days
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PostPosted: 02-17-2012 01:59 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


baroque cycle is a great read too - can't recommend his stuff highly enough (except anathem, that's pretty damn awful - hopefully he'll re-emerge from his arse for his next novel).

got into reading books/stories on my phone a while back and glad it was mainly out-of-copyright stuff, ended up reading a lot of things that i might've missed otherwise (chesterton, blackwood, lovecraft etc,.). assumed that they'd have caught up with print by now but maybe they haven't.
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Bacon
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PostPosted: 02-17-2012 04:24 PM           Profile Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


i'm currently reading this topic



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MKJ
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PostPosted: 02-18-2012 12:43 AM           Profile   Send private message  E-mail  Edit post Reply with quote


Im actually not reading this topic, only the last reply.
If only to get rid of the red icon in front of it, which bugs my ocd.
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