Libb

In the same category as 1984: Brave New World and Animal Farm may interest you too, to say the least.

From Bradbury: Martian Chronicles. To me, it’s classic science fiction at its best and even though I loved his Fahrenheit, I much prefer his Chronicles.

Science fiction: like already suggested by gramie: Flowers for Algernon. A true gem.

If you want something more ‘technological’, Asimov’s Robots shorts stories and/or novels (for the novels, start with The Caves of steel). You may also be considering his Foundation series (much, much better than Apple’s adaptation if you have watched it, Asimove was inspired to write Foundation after reading Gibbon’s The Fall of the Roman Empire the novel(s) describe the fall of a galactic empire and how a bright scientist/historian tries to devise a way to preserve knowledge and to shorten the chaos period that must follow the collapse). One of my personal favorite SF author is P.K. Dick (the guy that has inspired almost all cyberpunk blockbusters and so, so many other writers), give a shot at his Ubik or even at Waiting for last year. They’re not long and not difficult read at all, and rather fun. Talking fun, maybe try Frederic Brown’s Martians go home. I have not read it in years so I have no idea how it holds but I have very found memories of it.

Fantastic/Horror stories, it’s easy to recommend Stephen King: he is easy to read while being a great story teller.

War novels? Not a novel but the ‘father’ of all stories written in the West: Homer’s Iliad (contains a lot of violence and some very descriptive scenes, beware) and the Odyssey (Odysseus attempts at getting back after that war, in the Iliad, despite Gods doing their best to prevent him). You have some excellent translation in English but beware it’s poetry written in verses.

Nature… still not a novel but have you considered reading journals written by naturalists or even Thoreau’s journal?

Don’t be afraid ti share what you did not like in the books you have already read, it may help trigger more accurate suggestions.

I almost forgot: welcome :)

Joined, purely out of curiosity I must say as I had no idea such a community existed (in that other place) ;)

So something like that would be great

The Martian Chronicles are quite unlike anythign else (and they’re amazing, imho). You may want to read his other short stories. He wrote quite a few of them. If I had to pick a single one, I’m a fan of ‘All Summer in a Day’. It’s not the best short story he has written but, I don’t know, it works so well.

Not knowing what you liked in the Martian Chronicles (the style, the themes,…), it’s hard to suggest something else that may fit. So, here a few very wide suggestions:

Classical writers, in no order: Richard Matheson. Fritz Leiber. Cordwainer Smith. Isaac Asimov… if you don’t know Asimov already, he wrote a lot (and not just fiction), his most notable SF work would be his Foundation series (the same Foundation Apple butchered in their series adaptation, imho) and his Robots series (that is composed of novels and many, many short stories) he also devised the classical ‘3 laws’ of Robotics. I would suggest you read his Robots short stories. Algernon Blackwood. P.K. Dick (I’m a fan of his novels and short stories, but not all are… work of art so you should be ok with reading some duds next to real true gems). Frederic Brown. Ursula K. Le Guin.

Contemporary writers, I would suggest Paolo Bacigalupi. ‘Pump Six and other stories’ was the very first of his books I read, I was an instant fan. Then there is also Rich Larson, Tade Thompson that are also amazing.

Very personal, I’m a real fan of Robert Reed’s short stories. I stumbled upon him by accident in a French newspaper many, many years ago, as they were publishing a series of SF short stories that summer, and was blown away by his story. So, I started hunting for all he has published ;)

For many years, science fiction prospered as a short story genre, published in the many magazines available (Bradbury also write at that time). So, there is a lot a lot of great work available from that era. Nowadays, a lot of writers keep on publishing great short stories alas there is a lot less magazines to publish them.

If you want to easily find a lot of those great writers (certainly not all of them, but a real good selection that will keep you busy for a while) you may want to get your hands on used copies of the many ‘Year’s Best SF’ anthologies that Gardner Dozois edited from 1984 or so up to his death in 2017, or 2018. There are many more anthologies, mind you but I was never disappointed by his anthologies.

Then, next to SF there are many other genres. Horror for example, a genre that I think thrives in the short story format but is sadly under-appreciated, beside a few mega stars. Stephen King is sure more than worth reading (there is a reason why he is so successful, be it with his very long novels as well as with his short stories) and I enjoy reading him anytime, but there are so, so many more ‘horror’ writers that are worth reading. But since you only mentioned science fiction, and since a few of those authors I consider the most talented can also be quite disturbing to read, I will not go the ‘horror’ road.

100%.

They don’t give a crap that only large corps can ‘absorb the cost’ of checking age and/or ID, they just want to control/limit what we say and to whom, and what we can do online. And if that requires to kill small non-corporate-owned web (and make everything subscription-based, in the process), so be it.

When they’re not being dishonest, they’re incompetent and proud of it. The few that are not incompetent (and that are honest) they are not numerous enough to make a difference, which is sad. And not just in the UK. I mean, here in France it’s quite interesting too, we’re following steps to the UK, btw, and, what not a surprise, VPN usage has skyrocketed the second they introduced their own version of that stupid age-verification.

Next step seems obvious: make VPN use illegal for the average user (I mean people like us not, say, journalists, NGOs, lawyers and, obviously, politicians—and their families).

I wish that people would stop using kids for their own gain.

But what use are kids, then? /s

You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.

That’s not true. I just need to click the ‘x’ next to the tab. Why should I be bothered with waiting for some JS to be able to read text?

They are one of several signs of LLM writing. That said if you’ve always used them then you do you

Not the person you replied to but allow me to chime in: I’ve been using em dashes for decades and I will not stop using them because AI has started playing with them—no more than I will stop writing because AI can write too ;)

You lost me at ‘Fuck’. As a potential new member, how could I be willing to engage in a community putting forward rudeness?

I would suggest you may want to consider to calmly explain the issue at hand (my Lemmy feed is tightly curated and I do not think I noticed much of what you mention), without insulting anyone and without using doubtful dirty tricks to grab people’s attention, maybe sharing some real world examples?

If I understand the license correctly: no, if they completely rewrite the code for thei new non-open source version and get rid of any line that were developed using AGPL license.

I will only say that you should probably not date an age, just a person. It’ snot their date of birth we may spend time (maybe eve our live) with , it’s who they are.

Since we’re on the Internet, I should probably make it clear that I mean dating a person of legal age.

edit: typos

Wouldn’t be surprised if it has a flux capacitor somewhere in there too

Wasn’t the last (working) one destroyed in a train accident somewhere in the 80s? Not that I’m old enough to have first seen this movie back when it was released. Absolutely not.

Thx a lot for sharing.

I’m a 50+ non-geek Linux user myself, and selfhosting is the one computer ‘thing’ I would love to be able to setup one day but I’m too afraid to seriously start doing as I’m way too afraid of being that ‘low hanging fruit’ you mentioned in your post.

I said I was not a geek in the sense that, after almost 40 years using only Apple computers, I’ve switched to Linux to use it like I used… my Mac. Sure, I’ve learned to understand a little bit of Linux workings and I would not want to go back to the Mac, no way, I can also write simple bash scripts (with a lot of trials and errors) but that’s about the full extent of my computer ‘expertise’.

So, even though your post is well written and informative, it was still way beyond my limited skills, I’m afraid. I’m not saying that as downer, it was a really interesting read and very informative with all those useful links, but hopefully as away to let you know there are… extremely… odd users like myself that are very much interested in the idea but also are as clueless as an oyster comes the time to buy a pair of sneakers :)

In regards to self-hosting, my conclusion so far is that it’s a much safer choice for someone like me to not do it. The risk is too real to get into some serious issues. And that I’m better off using the few paid services I rely (all in the EU, many of them small companies I can have have direct/human discussion with) as I know by experience I can trust their expertise a lot more than I woudl ever trust my desire to ever become not completely in competent in those fields ;)

I may have missed something, here so to make sure:

1. Do you want a wiki specifically, or are you looking for a tool that would allow you to easily create and manage some worldbuilding bible, be it a wiki or not a wiki?
2. Isn’t LibreOffice able to export to MediaWiki (Wikipedia)? I have not checked, and never used it, but I think it’s there somewhere.

the best thing it can do is just make a document look good,

It can also help you write the actual book, worrying about the document ‘look’ aka its formatting is optional (and if done properly, using Styles, it’s almost 100% automated) ;)

Wouldn’t a word processor do trick? you can add links, images, refs, notes,… and have as many pages as you need (edit: and search them, add a table of content, and so on). LIbreOffice is most certainly already installed on your Linux distro and is also available for Mac and Windows.