If you want to pay for audiobooks, Libro.FM is a DRM free alternative that allows you to easily download your books without any issues that Libation solves for. It also supports local bookstores in your community while not giving more to Amazon. Only a handful of books aren’t available on Libro but it’s been a seamless transition for us. It’s only going to be difficult if you’re one of those folks who returns/refunds audible credits regularly as it’s not easy to do with Libro.

I mean, words could be said about Kyrsten Sinema but I think this is far more appropriate of a summary of her time as a politician…

Link because the embed didn’t work

I don’t know when I started saying “Pound it” when I would hold my hand out and ask for my dog’s paw, but it’s always fun and elicits a laugh from anyone who doesn’t already know it.

The best part of it too was for Wi-Fi calling, if it was off, couldn’t be turned on since it relied on AT&T’s website/capabilities to approve and authenticate. That was at least my experience as well as my family’s.

So if you hadn’t already enabled it before the outage, you literally couldn’t turn it on.

I thought this article from Vox did a good job laying out how it could fall in Trump’s favor.

Taking Trump out of the equation for a moment, I do find resonance with the argument that a state shouldn’t be able to disqualify someone from a national election and that a decision like that should sit at the federal level. I’ll also echo circularfish in that I don’t trust Republican states to fairly apply this standard. It seems like something Democrat-controlled states might do because they believe in rules/institutions so they’ll only do it when pressured, if even then. Republican-controlled states will do to score points on Fox/OAN against anyone from Joe Manchin and leftwards on the political spectrum.

Upgrade by Blake Crouch put his work on my radar. The premise sounded intriguing and I couldn’t put the book down. It led me to Dark Matter, Recursion, Pines, and Abandon, of which only Abandon I opted to quit reading. He went from essentially nobody to me to “Ooo, there’s a new book coming out!” in the span of this year.

My other surprising hit was getting back into reading comic books and diving into Radiant Black and the associated Massive-Verse stories. It felt like a blend of superhero and Power Rangers style storytelling and parts of it felt very unique and interesting to me (how they handle the main character and where the power of Radiant Black is in the comics releasing now is really cool, trying to avoid spoilers!). It also comes across as a more realistic version of the stories that superhero/PR tell where there’s social media and dialogue that comes across as real speech. I think of it akin to Star Trek vs. The Orville, both great but I see the path of how we get from here to the type of world The Orville embodies but the people on Star Trek don’t feel exactly like real people by today’s standard and it seems that much farther out.

Your comment about who typically likes and doesn’t like this book is really interesting because I loved the book AND love playing games. I hadn’t heard this criticism of the book before.

I think reading your comment in hindsight, yes that DOES strike me as off looking back on it now but I don’t think it stuck out while reading to me outside of one Metal Gear Solid reference that made me quirk an eyebrow and knew it wasn’t right.

I think the flaws of the characters decisions either come from gambles that don’t pay off or there are levels and movements they don’t see happening (and sometimes both). Their failures feel…earned if that makes sense? To be fair, it’s been a few years since I started the series so it can mush all together in my head :)

Alright, we’ve got some overlap here, let’s see…

• The Red Rising Saga. I’m working through book 6 right now as an audiobook and I’m sneaking in a few minutes wherever I can. Definitely expands its scope as the series goes on and while I feel like I’m losing context for some of the new/returning characters at this point, I can follow enough to go along with it. The main character is born into the lowest caste of the society and works to infiltrate the highest caste. It’s a long ride and ebbs and flows from hopelessness to triumph throughout the course of it.
• The Combat Codes Saga. Probably closer to science-fantasy then fiction, but an interesting idea about nations using hand-to-hand combat to settle wars, territory, etc…I have only read the first book so far but I enjoyed it a lot.
• Alex Benedict - I would encourage this more as a filler or inbetween books series. Binging all of the books can make them feel very samey. The core idea is that all of the books except the first one are told from the perspective of a colleague/assistant/“jill of all trades” woman who works with one of the most famous artifact hunters in the far future. Each book is essentially chasing an archeological mystery of some sort.
• The Jubilee Cycle - I found the first book a long time ago at random in one of those discount bookstores and picked it up based on the cover alone. It’s about a future where everything you do costs you money, to the point where political parties debate whether or not autonomic functions like breathing should cost money. The prose is a little dry and the author works as a translator, but I enjoyed the world that he built up as the main character peels back the layers of this society after he gets essentially bankrupted by a mysterious and unknown transaction.
• Teixcalaan - Can’t link the series for some reason. The main character is an ambassador to the ruling empire of the galaxy, trying to figure out who killed her predecessor and a conspiracy surrounding him. It felt very dense when I started it but I enjoyed it a lot!

I thought this was a really interesting dive into some of the problems plaguing Marvel, how Covid derailed things, and the pursuit of money overall. Like, the idea that a film makes less than half a billion dollars is a failure? Yowza.

The sprawl is also real and I think it crystalized some of my own feelings about watching Marvel content more on the spectrum of being closer but not entirely on the side of obligation vs. excitement. It all feels aimless right now. Individual arcs are interesting, but Avengers: Endgame was four years ago.

For some context with the Infinity Saga…

• Phase One: 2008 to 2012 (four years), culminating in an Avengers movie across six movies total.
• Phase Two, 2013 to 2015 (three years), with an Avengers movie basically at the end (and Ant-Man two months later) across six movies.
• Phase Three, 2016 to 2019 (three years), across 11 movies and ended with two Avengers movies and a post-script with Spider-Man. So our average is about six movies to one Avengers.

And with the Multiverse Saga…

• Phase Four: 2021 to 2022 (two years). across seven movies and eight seasons of television, ended by Black Panther 2.
• Phase Five: 2023, with currently two movies and two seasons of television (one of which is a Season 2), with one more movie and a second season of What If coming before the end of the year.

Just the movies alone make that ten movies in 2-3 years with no Avengers team-up to tie everyone together.

The shocking thing to me as I confirmed dates/counts on Wikipedia is that I forgot we’re in “Phase Five”. I have all these individually good stories but there’s no buzz about a “big” team-up movie anymore. Heroes are just doing their thing and stopping world-ending events on their own or with minimal assistance.

Maybe they’ll prove everyone wrong about this strategy when they do another Avengers movie in two years after another pile of movies but it feels more like they’re trying to force another Endgame “Assemble” with characters we’re not as connected to when the time comes.

And if you listen at 1.5x speed, does that just burn your 15h faster or can you fit in more time?

It’s an interesting idea, but I think the only way I’d use it is a “try before you buy” and go out to Libro to make the purchase. At least that’s the only way I could realistically see using 15h/month.

If it’s something akin to How I Met Your Father, I could be on board. Not so much in style or tone surely, but taking the same skeleton that worked in the original and applying it to new people (and in this case, to a new location too). I think it would be a bummer to just go back to Dunder Mifflin Scranton and rehash all those characters. Workplace comedy isn’t so far out there, real workplaces have become even more absurd over the last ten years, and if it has light callbacks to the original but can do its own thing too, then I’ll check it out.

That’s the optimist in me. We’ll see how hard he gets bodyslammed when this comes to fruition!

Yes, that has helped out a lot too. It may not work for OP since they’re feeling like these systems are creating a genre just for you, but this works if you’re not looking to jump to something too different from what you already enjoy.

Interestingly, I feel like I’ve found more “new” music using Spotify’s Release Radar playlist instead of their Discover Weekly playlist. I’ll typically (and aggressively) mark things as like/don’t like in those playlists and add what I like to my own “Testing” playlist to see what sticks to me. Release Radar tends to have more likes than Discover Weekly does, despite what the two are named, and it’s providing new artists on top of existing ones I’m already a fan of.

That’s usually good enough for me, though the occasional time I’m listening to the radio or a song comes on over the speakers when I’m out and about gets a quick Shazam from me to know what it was.

Not sure if this van_dam might work for you. I found it randomly searching through my Unraid server’s App store and it seems to be built around 3D printing files. As a note, I haven’t worked with this one personally yet since I haven’t had the time to get Postgres and Redis set up, but I have this pinned to come back to it. Could be worth a look!

If you can test them in person, a magnet on the underside should stick to a pan that will work with induction ranges. That’s how we figured out what pans to keep when we switched to an induction range earlier this year.

I think a cast iron pan will also work, but not entirely sure. We ended up picking a Rachel Ray set we found, so not high end but this might give you some ideas for materials to search for that will be induction ready.

I think term limits really depends. I get why it makes sense in the abstract and I would love to see it implemented but I’ve stopped really advocating for it as a long term fix. It just moves the “institutional knowledge” about how Congress works into the hands of lobbyists instead of Congress. The revolving door just gets worse. It would have to be something like term limits + campaign finance reform to make a meaningful impact. That’s a noble goal but we’ve needed campaign finance reform for a while and no one seems to want to address it.

Age limits seems to be a good balance of making an individual Congress critter’s term long enough to still have some sway/power/authority (instead of lobbyists) while making sure they don’t blue screen on us during a press conference. Given such high profile issues with McConnell and Feinstein I’ll be a little optimistic in hoping for some change.

I’ve been looking for some kind of alternative to io9 over the years and this looks perfect! Not as exhaustive as their list but theirs is also monthly vs. this one appears to be twice a month (September is here)

Since I already skimmed through the io9 one, a few of these were already on my radar to check out this month. Androne, The Circumference of the World, and City of Bones all were interesting to me off this list.

I’m also excited to see Gundog is getting a proper release. I loved listening to the podcast version last year. It felt just like a chapter a week of an exciting mecha audiobook.

For work, it’s really about capturing what my customer(s) are talking about in case I have follow ups myself and some basic CYA in case someone wants to come back and complain.

For my personal life, it’s filing some stuff away for future use, sometimes it’s databases/inventories of my hobbies (like Transformers collecting) or random scratch comparisons when we were looking at daycares for the little one.

I used to have a big Excel spreadsheet with a list of tables but I’ve moved both my work and personal note taking over to notion.so. I’ve got a solid workflow that lets me track to-dos, manage my team, and organize my notes where possible and I’ve come to really like it. At work, we’re also looking into Microsoft Loop for something already built into our Office subscription but it’s still in preview and not as fleshed out like Notion.

Democrats fall in love. Republicans fall in line.

It’s reductive, but look at the Christian Right and Trump. Trump is nowhere close to the picture of a Christian. It’s astounding he can safely cross the threshold of a church. But he promises to make sure abortion is illegal and men can’t pretend to be women to steal kids, so they vote for him. Replace the abortion issue with guns and you get another set of voters who will vote Republican regardless of what they might personally feel.

Meanwhile and to your point on the left, each candidate’s worst flaws are held as some kind of uncrossable line by people who are terminally online (which isn’t helpful) and the Democratic Party does what they can to feed this and make sure they don’t have to enact meaningful change. They just want to maintain the status quo but they get to do it with a pride flag waving behind them. If the Party establishment would just stop putting a thumb on the scale (not just against Bernie but ANYONE remotely progressive/left of the neoliberal center) and let the primary process shake out the most popular candidate, they might actually find themselves winning elections.