>>6955
He's actually reading them now, though.

>>6927
>I'm presently reading What Am I Doing Here thanks to that thread.

I enjoyed the parts on China the most, particularly the section on Emperor Wu-ti and the Heavenly Horses. It's piqued my interest; do you lads have any recommendations for further reading on Ancient China?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eudsYr0iER0

It didn't fill me with trepidation, unlike the Artemis Fowl trailer, so I guess that's a plus.

World Book Day: Parents spend more on outfits than they do on novels

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/world-book-day-parents-outfits-14097200

That doesn't surprise me. Most of the kids I've seen going to school this morning seemed to be dressed as superheroes or Disney princesses.

>>6961
Carpet-bagger.

>>6901
The Quiet American is a very good film. It's based on a work by Graham Greene, who, incidentally, is a superb British novelist.

>>6911
I've only read his Our Man in Havana. Midly amusing and just had some bits I could relate to.

>>6912

The Travels With My Aunt film was decent. I have the book but didn't get around to it yet.

>>6898
Fair points.

Dickens isn't a great example of prime British literature. IIRC, Orwell said that he (Dickens) was out of touch with real life because he'd done nothing but write for a living. So he needed to fill pages with melodrama and conversation in lieu of description, which is what I, and probably plenty of others, dislike about him.

I personally will look at a book by a British author before anything else. Not that there aren't plenty of stinkers out there, but other writers don't ever reach the same level of proficiency with their language. I'd even argue that they exceed the best writers in non-English languages, although of course I'm biased.

>Why haven't we had a smash hit since good ol' Willy Shakespeare?

That would be Harry Potter, whether you want to admit it or not.

I'm no expert but there are two basic routes. Some people work on developing in-depth characters then put them into a situation and sort of write along to see where it goes. The other route is to start with a basic plot idea then start figuring out how that would work, breaking the premise down into component parts; scenes, setting and characters needed to pull it off. It has to follow a basic structure with character motivations and things fleshed out for at least the principle characters to seem real and distinct, with believable behaviours.

Once you've figured that out, you arrange the scenes into order in chapters and the chapters in order of the book itself then keep adding detail to each part, rearranging as you see fit, until you feel confident about putting it into prose. At which point you do that. Then you basically do the whole thing again over and over as you realise what you've done doesn't make sense or is missing a key character arc or that you've made a really stupid amateur writer's error and as it's not a YA novel remarkably similar to any of the most recent best selling novels the year you finish writing it (as opposed to started), nobody wants to publish it because they don't expect to bank on it.

Everyone does a weird mix of the two routes though, nothing's ever "purely" one or the other. You just figure out what you're doing as you go along.

It's best to write it second person, present tense or you'll be setting yourself at a disadvantage from the start, if you ever want it published. Oh, and remember to back it up constantly or you'll definitely lose enough of it at some point that getting back to where you were before it crashed seems insurmountable.

I can recommend pirating Scrivener to use as a word processor; it's pleasant to write into and has a file manager thing that makes it extremely easy to navigate and overview the work as a whole. It has all sorts of other bells and whistles you won't need but the first half hour in its tutorial thing should cover everything you will use.

>second person
Sorry, meant third person.
After you've finished, put the whole thing away without showing anyone and concentrate on other things for a year. Then get it out, re-read it and basically write it all over again, not entirely from scratch but you'll probably be making huge changes.

It helps a lot to be able to print out what you've done, preferably in a different font to the one you were writing in and read it out loud to yourself. It'll make it much easier to spot poor sentences, bad rhythm and flow, then you can fix it.

>>6943
A seditious group being humorously composed entirely of infiltrators does sound like a familiar conceit, I'm afraid.

>>6951
That's not a reason to not write his own version.
Everything's been done, you can't think about that.

>>6952

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/the-six-main-arcs-in-storytelling-identified-by-a-computer/490733/

>>6823

I've read this and it fully left out the best bit. I'm not trying to do spoilers but you know the bit where they're in the garden?

Oh boy.

>>6814
I think I remember this book.

It's hard to say what makes a book cover a red flag exactly. Ignoring the obvious things like "CLAN VAMPIRE CLASH" being written on it or it being a a stupid steampunk maship, it's something about the quality of the image.

In a lot of the examples here they have that same, cheap looking collage effect:
>>6796
>>6800
>>6801
Or look like a not-quite-professional deviantartist commission:
>>6802
>>6803
I think the biggest tell about >>6808 is the terrible choice of fonts and how they're resized. It's just the whole thing has been obviously done by someone with no idea about design. In the case of >>6817 whoever made and approved the cover having the mental age of a preteen.

>>6918
My mate wont shut the fuck up about it, he doesn't have the attention span for books for some reason. He says it's great.

I find it's good for long walks where I would like to be reading, but obviously can't do that and cross the road safely at the same time. That and for falling asleep to, I have a small speaker that I connect my phone to and usually listen to a chapter in bed to wind down. It seems listening while lying down with my eyes closed in complete darkness is more effective for getting me to sleep than keeping my eyes open reading in bed, which usually turns into me reading a lot longer than I should and missing a sensible bedtime. I haven't cancelled my subscription since I got it but I try to really get the most out of the fee by buying audiobooks that are at least 20 hours or longer. Anything shorter than that and you'll have burned through that month's credit and be left with nothing to listen to.

>>6918

They seem to have a good range and they have a 30 day trial period, I don't see the harm in just trying.

>>6921
> I don't see the harm in just trying.
That's what Big Audiobook want you to think.

There are over 130,000 audiobooks available on Audible. That selection includes a surprisingly small amount of crap, because recording an audiobook to Audible's standards is relatively expensive.

The basic subscription is £7.99 a month, which gives you a credit to download one new audiobook per month. You can keep that audiobook forever and unused credits do roll over to the next month. It's not cheap, but it's reasonably good value. They have a very generous returns policy - if you don't like a book, you can get your credit back and choose another one, no questions asked.

If you're on a very tight budget, you might want to check out your local library. For the benefit of blind people, libraries tend to have a good selection of audiobooks, although you'll need to rip them from CD. Most libraries also have an online collection of e-books and audiobooks that you can borrow using the Libby app, but the selection is usually limited to a small number of popular titles. You just download the app and log in using your library card number.

Or you could just torrent stuff.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.overdrive.mobile.android.libby

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/libby-by-overdrive/id1076402606?mt=8

>>6892

It's a mildly amusing conceit - the book explains complicated bits of science using only the thousand most common words in the English language. It's a spin-off from the "Up-Goer Five" comic. Fine if you like that sort of thing, but I don't imagine it would be particularly illuminating.

https://xkcd.com/1133/

I think you'll probably like The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets . It's mostly average but quite enjoyable.

Genome: the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters was good, though some of the science is dated and the author's awful politics shine through (more pop sci). I really liked Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics and similarly 13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time. Though humour wise I imagine We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe would be better though I haven't read it yet.

A Short History of Nearly Everything and it's unofficial "sequel" An Optimist's Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer "What's Next?" were both good.

I actually really want to read The Code Book by Singh. It's about how they deciphered hieroglyphics.

>>6880
His other book I'll think you'll find it's more complicated than that is also good. It's a collection of his newspaper columns.

>>6893

Reading that comic made me feel like I was being patronised by someone much thicker than me. Sky bag air, indeed.

>>6893
I don't think comic/webcomic illustrators translate well into books. For example, David Squires' weekly comic in The Guardian is brilliant and topical but I've got a couple of his books and it just quite doesn't work as well.

The again, there's plenty of people who don't succeed when they try different formats; Lucy Worsley may be an excellent historian and TV presenter but her books are below par.

>>6878
The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow.

>>6737
Damning with faint praise, I think it's called.

Fleshmarket Close 2004)
The Naming of the Dead (2006)
Exit Music (2007)
Standing in Another Man's Grave (2012)
Saints of the Shadow Bible (2013)
The Complaints (2009) - Malcolm Fox
The Impossible Dead (2011) - Malcolm Fox
Even Dogs in the Wild (2015)
Rather Be the Devil (2016)

I finished the remaining Rebus novels, as well as the two Fox ones which took place in the chronicity. Malcolm Fox seems like a pointless character, Siobhan is more interesting but rarely develops in any particular fashion. Fox is particularly annoying as he supposedly sticks to the rules and does things by the book as all the other characters are keen to remind him in conversation except he really doesn't, every now and then he'll go against his orders in the most pointless way and achieve nothing at all by it.
The Naming of the Dead stuck out in particular as of all the books it had the most life to it, Rankin seemed energised by the G8 protests and how much he hates Bono. Exit Music and Even Dogs in the Wild had some particularly melancholy moments which I enjoyed.
As the stories progress into the later books (16+) it seems like someone was teaching Rankin about actual organised crime, so they begin to be a bit convoluted in a dull way all to do with buying property and banking investments. Once or twice this is done well but the rest of the time I wasn't terribly impressed. One case in particular was a retrospective thing about how all the gangsters invested in the land around the Scottish Parliament in the pre-2000 referendum and the fallout from that, then later there's a book where they're investing again in the land for the more recent referendum, but when that fails the next book ignores it.
Some odd things in the chronology; Rebus seems to forget his father was dead in one book, and the biography of Big Ger written at the end of one book has been totally forgotten by everyone involved a few books later when someone else proposes writing one.
I'm amused that the early cases sometimes take weeks and months with years in between, then the more recent ones all seem to happen in a matter of days, something that Rankin started doing presumably when he realised Rebus was about to reach the age of retirement and is now getting very old, but wanting to keep writing more books.

Message too long. Click here to view the full text.

While I am usually a fan of the memoirs and autobiographies of the users, the junkies, the alcoholics, life's general riff-raff that end up laid up at the lower stratas of society, this one left me not just unfulfilled but also fairly sad that I'd bothered to read it all.

If we can all agree that there is no point in reading (or writing, for that matter) something that you, or at least someone else, can’t learn anything from then we have no choice but to conclude that this is a useless book written by a useless person.

For there is nothing to learn here at all. No musings on the causes, mechanisms, whys, or wherefores of addiction or the visceral drive towards self destruction; about the deepest this book gets (and I paraphrase) is "and then I spent a few years letting gross men I didn't know bundle me into nightclub toilets and give me cocaine before later pulling me onto their laps in taxis while unzipping their fly, but you know how it is, right girls?!?!?".

Even Sarah Hepola's snooze-fest Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget or Burroughs Junior's ungainly, lurching memoir Speed have a comparative ocean of insight and a lot less "My dad was distant and my mother hated me and Kurt Cobain died, and here's a vague description of how I did a lot of dumb shit despite being born with a silver spoon in my mouth without even an attempt at self-contemplation about why I might have done so" when compared to this.

tl;dr - A pointless book by a pointless person, even her beauty columns had more to say about life than this and I'm a heterosexual male whose idea of looking after myself is trying to remember to get my hair cut more than once a year.

I've just killed an hour reading a short story from Frederick Forsyth about some poor sod who got blackmailed by a prozzie. Money with Menaces it's called, I think.

I smelt something was up when the protagonist of the story talked back to his blackmailers, even more so when he mounted a shopping run for some components too ordinary to be left without attention.

The moment with the photo he'd removed from his flat before he got visited by a copper is still kind of brilliant.

I'd forgotten how much I enjoy the works of Sir Terry. You can tell that Pratchett and Gaiman were challenging themselves to make the other laugh when they were writing it; it's the most fun I've had reading a book in quite some time.

Can the federation replicate latinum or do the space jews somehow make it un-replicatable?

>>6844
That energy has to come from somewhere, it's probably a net loss to replicate it.

>>6844

In my headcanon replicators can't replicate any elements heavier than iron, since anything heavier than that requires more energy to fuse than is released by its fusion. That's why it's possible to replicate food, but not, say, entire starships. Starships utilise heavier elements.

>>6846

Chakotay replicates Janeway a Pocket Watch for her birthday in the End of Time special and she chastises him for wasting power. It can be done, it's just greedy on the dilithium and at that time they were on rations which I think he saved up and spunked all at once.

What is interesting is that you can recycle replicated items, but I don't know what the loss conversion is. There will be a loss, that much is obvious. The Star Trek Encyclopaedia would probably know.

>>6846

The gold in gold-pressed latinum is frequently referred to as "worthless" in DS9, so replicators are clearly capable of producing heavy elements economically. I assume that there's some kind of quantum handwaving that makes latinum uniquely difficult to replicate.

>>6847

Voyager is a bit of an edge case, because they're stranded light years from Federation territory. Within the Federation (even on the outer edges), it seems that most things are negligibly cheap - in Explorers (DS9 S03E22), Sisko and Jake built a Runabout-sized starship for shits and giggles.

>>6788
If you've written a book and want to show it off fine, but he honest about the fact you're advertising it.

>>6790
At least he's not trying to crypto mine us...

>>6791 Not that we can see, anyway...
Just pondering - I can't immediately find anyone who's written a miner in native postscript or pdf, rather than just crashing out of the reader and running it locally. Surely someone's done it, just because?

Also, yes, OP - I downloaded your work. Sorry, but I'm clearly not the target audience. Washed straight over me in a wave of slightly annoyed indifference.

>>6792
People have managed to stick miners in favicons, and some browsers have been dumb enough to execute them.

>>6792

Postscript is definitely possible, PDF less so. That said, Adobe Reader handles embedded Postscript Type 3 fonts just fine meaning that you can happily embed any Postscript program you choose into a single character of your PDF.*

Obviously this is assuming you don't want to just be lazy and run the miner in embedded Javascript.

* I'm sure Arnold Rimmer would be chuffed.

>>6785
EP Thompson's Making of The English Working Class is the place to start. Very good overview, similar to Zinn, and will likely prompt you to research particular figures/groups (in my case it was William Cobbett, Bronterre O'Brien and Owenism).

You'll want to look into the Chartist movement - Dorothy Thompson is highly respected there. Related to that is Jonathan Rose's The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, which has been recommended to me several times but I've yet to read.

I don't have a clue re: 20th century really though, sorry.

>>6775
I'm reading a steampunk novel atm called Steal The Sky, if you like Sci-fi? The protag is basically Han Solo and I get a lot of outer rim vibes from it, but it's still good.

>I also seem to recall a book being mentioned on here years ago involving near misses with nukes which sounded interesting.

That might have been Command and Control by Robert Schlosser.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Command-Control-Eric-Schlosser/dp/0141037911/

>>6776
I read a fair bit of sci-fi, although steampunk has never appealed to me.

>>6777
It wasn't that one. It was something like accounts of several near misses down to sheer human ineptitude.

Thanks, anyway.

>>6777
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/brain-wave-books

A week left on this. One of the books in the 75p tier is 'Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters'.

I am enjoying this very much. Marshall was the US Army's chief
of staff during World War 2 and went on to create the European Recovery Act also known as the Marshall Plan. He is highlighted as one of these very successful people who eschewed promotions and never sought the limelight.

This wasn't bad: "Race to Dakar" by Charley Boorman, the rich, obnoxious twat who accompanied Ewan McGregor on his motorbike trip in "Long Way Round". The book chronicles his attempt to run the Dakar Rally with a small support team and a cameraman, with the idea of making a TV series about it later.

I've always enjoyed watching the Rally, but details about the rules, day-to-day life, etc. are hard to come by. The book gives more of an inside perspective that you don't see on Eurosport or the Youtube channel. I was worried that Boorman's cuntishness would ruin it, but this doesn't really come through in the book.

>>6741

Is Boorman that bad? I enjoyed some of Long Way Round.

>>6742
Mate, he's rich. That means he's practically Satan.

>>6742

The "rich and obnoxious" part is by his own admission. He actually comes across as pretty chill and interesting.

>>6699

> I'm not sure why everyone like to suck Gibson's dick for Neuromancer (1984), considering Blade Runner and Tron (1982).
> Gibson didn't innovate anything in particular, he just got lucky and was made into a symbol.

What Gibson really achieved with the sprawl trilogy, far beyond his unrealistic imaginings of cyberspace or his prediction of the Internet of Things was capturing the hearts and minds of an entire subculture of teenage hackers and phreaks. Gibson was able to capture both the thrill of hacking and drive and desire to hack incredibly well, while also fueling the fires of many a teenage fantasy that they could one day be a "cyberspace cowboy" or a "digital samurai" selling their hacking talents to the highest bidder (which, to be fair, most of us actually are).

Essentially the "cyberpunk dystopia" setting was entirely arbitrary and interchangable; other than the silly bit where the AIs merge and become the matrix, Case and Bobby's stories could have been transplanted into any setting with technology advanced enough for Gibson's mumbo jumbo to pass muster and the trilogy would still have had the same success.

>>6701
> Snowcrash a couple of years ago I thought they were just simply bad. Terrible pacing, trite characterisation... just badly written in general.

Did Stephenson ever really write any sincere cyberpunk fiction? Snowcrash was an on-point lampoon of cyberpunk for the most part, with every character, idea and scenario stereotyped and turned up to 11 for (admittedly negligible) comedic effect (Hiro Protagonist? Come on).

>>6699
I liked those movies, although the Sprawl novels are much longer and have a lot more details. I might check out Judge Dredd again, it was very similar to Gibson's world but didn't take itself as seriously IIRC.

The '60s novels are not bad. One I enjoyed was "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut. He is not as imaginative as William Gibson, but his characters are a lot better, except for the poor people. You can tell that he was a little too bourgeois to let his imagination run wild, or get into the heads of real poor people. I also enjoyed seeing a novel from over 50 years ago deal with the "robots will steal our jobs" nonsense.

>>6701
I enjoyed the first half of Snow Crash. Neuromancer, Altered Carbon, most of the cyberpunk canon just seem a bit gay. I'm interested in Seveneves by Stephenson, if anybody has an opinion to provide.

My favourite sci-fi novel is Ender's Game. I've tried two other Orson Scott Card books from the "Enderverse" and they're utter shite.

>>6723
> I enjoyed the first half of Snow Crash. Neuromancer, Altered Carbon

What stopped you from reading the second halves, or were the second halves magically universally shit?

>>6724

He wouldn't know, would he?

Skim the bits with little useful information, read the useful bits more slowly and take copious, well-organised notes. Learn about concepts like the forgetting curve, spaced repetition and chunking.

1. When I start a book, I read the first chapter, and if I'm not hooked by the end of it I skip the whole book.

2. If I'm still reading after the first chapter and get to a boring patch, I read the first sentence of every page until it gets interesting again.

3. If it's clear that the author is padding out his work, or intentionally obfuscating it to hide its meaning from the plebs (Edward Bernays, Daniel Kahneman, etc.), I read the last paragraph of the whole work.

Every so often, I'll pick up a book I skipped before and try it again. As I have gotten older, some books have started making more sense to me while others have lost their appeal.

>>6683
I FOR ONE DO NOT OWN A TELEVSION

>>6679

TL: DR

>>6695

FUCKING MARXIST BBC SHIT TAX

TV LICENCE = COMMUNIST POLL TAX

TELL THEM TO FUCK OFF STUPID CUNTS