mdhughes

Overlord, if you're lucky you'll just be ruled over by monsters that treat Humans as "sheep" to be bred, sheared, & slaughtered. If not, you'll be genocided by a cute little Elf, hee hee. Only hope is to find some way to be useful, and get converted into a monster.

Sasuga Ainz-sama is justice.

Alan Dean Foster's Splinter of the Mind's Eye was the original sequel, before they had budget. The Brian Daley Han Solo books, L. Neil Smith's Lando Calrissian books, and Mike Stackpole's X-Wing books, are all pretty good. Daniel Keys Moran of The Long Run and more recently AI War/Time War fame, wrote a few short stories.

Almost everything else I ever even read a couple pages of was so awful I threw it down. These were all written long before Disney got hold of it, and nobody really cared much about canon. Modern stuff would be corporate pablum.

Rereading Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné, so I can read the new book, The Citadel of Forgotten Myths. Been a few moments since I did a full reread.

I have Greg Egan's Scale and John Shirley's Stormland next on the tsundoku.

• The Black Swan (1942)
• Inspector General (1949), Court Jester (1955)
• Yojimbo (1961), Sanjuro (1962)
• The Count of Monte-Cristo (1975), The Man in the Iron Mask (1977)
• Le Pacte des Loups (2001)
• 13 Assassins (2010)

We should bring back codpieces and flamboyant colored pantaloons, frills, and velvet jackets, at least in winter. Summer thong & codpiece would be fine.

1. Videos should be landscape, 4:3 preferably, not portrait.
2. When I turn on a computer, it should be ready (and pref say READY) in a few seconds, not minutes and need Internet access.
3. Email should be fully punctuated, have correct grammar and a premise, argument, and conclusions.
4. I'm tolerant on short SMS or pager texts, but if it's used as immediate mail, all texts, IM, and social media messages should also be like #3.

cocktothorpe

Depends on the casualness of the group.

Pick-up games, almost nobody knows the rules. Don't use complex games with them, use tiny little indie games instead. Get an OSR game like Knave, and it's almost impossible to not understand the game.

Longer-term groups, I do expect everyone to read the rules, and using more complex games is fine. Someone who won't, and especially if they picked a more complex class or skills, needs to read the book, change characters, or go to another group.

But you can still get the original Car Wars and all the supplements from SJG. Pocket Box contains all the original rules, I think they have printed Deluxe sets.

Seems reasonable to me. I'm in the upper end of that range, center GenX (yes I know you don't remember us). I vary between wanting it to be 1970-2000. 1990 was nice, good industrial music, many of the old blues musicians were still alive & playing, computers were still fun, BBS's, the early non-shitty Internet, pagers and car phones if you wanted to be reachable that much, but you could just NOT be. Go out for cigarettes and never come back.

Anyone who thinks this panopticon hellscape we live in is better, is nuts.

The UI's a little janky, search doesn't always produce clickable links (mostly federated subs).

Finding subs relies on lemmyverse, when it should be integrated into the sites.

Similar subs should federate together, not be siloed. More USENET, less phpbb.

Kbin has a strange division of threads and "magazines", which means clicking thru multiple places to read anything, Lemmy & Beehaw seem simpler.

• The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andrew Hunt & David Thomas: How to not suck at programming.
• Algorithms, by Robert Sedgewick: Stick to the early C or Pascal editions, later ones are full of language-specific Java, etc. distractions.
• Programming Pearls, by Jon Bentley: Short snippets of how to design & optimize.
• SICP: Just do every exercise, take it seriously, you'll learn super powers. Watching the lecture videos alongside is helpful, but the book and problem sets are mandatory.
• BASIC Computer Games, by David H. Ahl: The type-in listings are fairly hard to read & understand to newbies now, I suspect, but it's still the master class in how to decompose gameplay problems into low-level programming.

Videos and podcasts won't help you, they're pleasant noise but you learn to program by programming, by taking a problem and solving it.