I’ve tried setting up a BSD VM a few times but never managed to get a desktop environment working. I’m sure it was due to user error.

“We have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing”

ANOTHER series I just remembered and highly recommend is the Unincorporated Man series. I think there are 4-5 books in the series. Pretty good IMHO. Similar to The Expanse, it’s the Inners vs the Belters, and explores personal liberty and person hood from the perspective of owning “shares” of yourself like a company.

The conflict is awesome, and two military strategy geniuses duke it out in a Legends of the Galactic Heroes sort of way–one has all the resources and latest tech, the other is scrappy and has to deal with extreme resources shortages. Awesome story.

Wholeheartedly agree. I’ve read the first and second, and liked the first the most. Still planning to read the third eventually.

I also should mention I “read” them on audible, and the narrator was good too.

The only other one I’ve attempted to read by Niel Stephenson has been Cryptonomicon. It seemed to get way, way into the weeds and is over a thousand pages. It was in my 20’s that I attempted it and I only made it half way through.

His work is top tier and highly regarded by many as thoroughly researched.

Going to have to check this one out!

Seveneves is incredible, with the caveat that the last chapter of the book was almost handwavey with regards to the author’s conclusion of where humanity ended up. 10/10 otherwise.

Children of Time series goes over this a little bit, especially in the first book. Colonists end up waking up early due to a malfunction and end up falling into a devolving tribalistic race to the bottom on their journey to the planet.

EDIT: As for “hard” scifi, while I wouldn’t say this series is at the same level as The Martian or maybe The Expanse, it is pretty good with trying to keep things real, especially with regards to the human threads of the story.

Same. I’ve found Minneapolis to be fairly good too, but I only visit occasionally for work.

You say this pocket dimension connects to the internet, a la Matrix? I’d create a game with an in-game currency that looks the same as ours, and give it the same physical properties in-game as the real currency is for the region I’m in. I then would define that I am a billionaire with a bank account to match. I teleport in, withdraw my money in cash one suitcase at a time from the ATM that has an infinite cash supply, and then teleport out.

Be careful. That last one can turn into a nightmare too if it’s the wrong person.

Hey get out of here with all this rational common sense shit

/s

But is it Arch?

Atom was my go-to editor while in school–hard to believe it’s been long enough to be abandoned already. I’m going to have to check Pulsar out.

He will join us or die!

We got death star, we got death star! We got death star, we got death star! We got death star, we got death star!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ij4w7ChpuaM

Another interesting thing of note about Taiwan is that it claims the land of what is currently Mongolia iirc.

I’ve always found it interesting how intransigent some of the East Asian nations are. You have the Nk/Sk conflict that is only in an armistice, no official peace treaty, then you have PRC/Taiwan–also in armistice. Then, there are are hundreds of instances of inflexibility on China’s part with internal minorities or border conflicts with India or Vietnam. Add to the the SCS and the Nine Dash Line. Japan also exhibits some of this inflexibility leading up to and after WW2, and the forced pacifism afterward, which has caused some self-inflicted problems with an armistice with Russia over the Kuril Islands.

I’ve always wondered if the tendency is cultural or something else that was learned over the millennia.

It’s a disaster! Skywalker we’re after!

Thou shalt not be a poo poo head

Thou shalt not hold unbelievers to the moral standards thou agreedest to and that only applyeth to thee

Thou shalt not giveth a shitteth about shitteth that is not thine own

I’m such a carebear. I’ve never played a darkside character because I love the supporting characters too much 😅

KOTOR 1. Taris is cool but let’s be honest. I play that game because I like playing a Jedi. I’ve also played it from start to finish at least 20 times.