Here are my two favorite books:

The Darkness that Comes Before by R Scott Bakker. This one is kind of a doorstopper, it's really long, but I found it very engrossing. It's Fantasy set in a huge world and sort of has a vibe of like... A Song of Ice And Fire in that it's about huge factions vying with each other on a global scale, with some lovecraftian cosmic horror scattered in.

Another one that I always recommend is The Name of the Wind by patrick rothfuss. It's also fantasy, But it's more of an adventure type book.

just scanning my shelves now trying to remember anything that I might have called good.

The World War Z book is nothing like the movie, its actually good. It takes place after the whole zombie apocalypse is already finished and society is restructuring, from the perspective of the in universe author interviewing people about their experiences of it. I thought it was pretty interesting and unique when I first read it, but that was a while ago so idk if it still holdsup.

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson is a pretty funny novel that does what it says on the tin. It is also a historical fiction where the Old Man recounts his life and reveals he is indirectly responsible for a lot of the big events of World War 2.

The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan is a novel i had to read for 6th Year english class, and its actually pretty good. An intensely irish story set during the recession, each of the 21 chapters is from the perspective of a different person in a small irish town and each one of them has their own fucked up things happening to them. Very depressing, but its also written in irish vernacular english and slang, which might be fun and interesting to read.

I’ve been reading sci fi recently. Some good ones:

The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell. In the near-ish future an inhabited alien planet is discovered and while the rest of the world is debating what to do the Society of Jesus just send their own mission in secret. Forty years later (only a few for him, due to relativity), the only surviving member of the mission is returned home and hidden away by his fellow Jesuits as they try to get out of him what happened.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers. In the spacefuture a young woman from Mars spends what money she has from her family fortune to change her identity and get away to join the crew of ship that bores the hyperspace tunnels that are used to travel faster than light. The crew is a bunch of different species and backgrounds and Rosemary has to learn a lot to fit in with them as the owner of the ship takes on a risky job.

Hard to Be a God - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. An extremely Soviet sci fi novel where the speculative technology being examined is historial materialism. The main character is a historian, not in that he studies the past but that he studies historical processes on alien planets that have not yet developed into a communist utopia. He is stationed in a medieval society and starts to see what he sees as a growing fascist movement. His superiors dismiss this as that’s impossible. Fascism arises as a reaction to capitalism; it cannot happen in a feudal society. But it is happening.

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guin. A human from Earth is sent to a planet to invite them to join the space UN. The people on Gethen are not sexually dimorphic (bisexual is the term the novel uses, it was written in the sixties) and neither male nor female most of the time. They instead have a monthly cycle where they, for a few days, develop either male or female sexual characteristics, different every month with no particular pattern. He has to navigate the politics of Gethen while finding it difficult to understand its people.

The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin. A physicist was born on an anarchist lunar commune and struggles to pursue his research there due to politicking and his communal obligations that prevent him from working on it. His research attracts attention back on the main planet, a capitalist society, and he travels there to be able to pursue it unhindered, but soon finds himself even more disgusted with that society.

And some fantasy:

The Discworld series as a whole - Terry Pratchett. Just wonderful books. I would say Guards! Guards! is a good starting point.

Other Words for Smoke - Sarah Maria Griffin. A teenage brother and sister are dumped on their aunt for summer, who lives in a big old house. Their aunt, it turns out, is a witch with a talking cat, and the girl (a few years older than the kids) who lives in the other wing of the house is feeding meat to something that lives in the walls called Sweet James in exchange for visits to a hidden world. Sweet James starts asking for bits of the kids.

The Earthsea books - Ursula Le Guin again. Each book follows a different plot but the series pivots around the journeys of a wizard named Ged. Or Duny. Or Sparrowhawk. Or Hawk. Names are important in this series and most characters have several. Ged is only really the protagonist of the first novel, A Wizard of Earthsea that goes from his childhood to going to a school for wizards, where he fucks up massively and has to spend the rest of the novel dealing with the consequences of. I particularly love the second and fourth novels, The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu, which focus on Tenar, a girl who was raised to be the high priestess of a death cult, and who was very certain of her place in the world and of who and what she was as that priestess until Ged shows up.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata is a japanese novel about a woman whos worked at a convenience store for 19 years and how shes a little fucked up. Its not that long so it might be good for trying to break back into this ' Words ' shit.

All Tomorrows by C M Koseman is a 'speculative evolution' science fiction genre book about how different species of humans evolved after aliens came in and messed with them genetically, its a little bit ooey gooey icky but with a hopeful tone of the Indomitability of The Human Spirit. Its also written in the perspective of a sort of historical account.

I havent actually read it but, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski sounds like a very cool surreal story that plays with the formatting of the book. Though this does require you to get a physical real copy to experience the full effect. Typing that last sentence i just remembered the existence of 'The Library', making getting a real copy a lot easier than i implied it to be. Im too ebookpilled

the furry community would be devastated in all senses of the word

I think it would be cool if it only lasted a set amount of time after which it disappeared magically. Like a retention policy.

We should implement that.

People would make more

I think a lot of people would be very relieved that their pics are finally scrubbed from the internet, and then a lot of people who make money from porn would carry on as normal since they just continuously create that stuff

Go to some swampy ass place. Jet fuel can't burn well hydrated tree trunks.

chicago is on my list actually

Chicago....

i would turn into a puddle

Minnesota is good, it only gets smoky from the west coast fires like, one day out of five years.

i like cooler latitudes

I was going to say Atlanta but nvm

It just seems easier to spin up a wordpress blog instead of having to maintain software on your end just to do the same thing. But if you want penny sheets or xeroxed zines you could probably just print out a couple of copies of your writing and nail them to the front door of your local Alamo Drafthouse for something just as satisfying

So apparently zillion people agree with you since it is a very popular way of running a website. My hesitation about it is that it might be a bit too heavy for my purposes. My project is such that I could go full web 1.0 and full on just write html+css+javascript in a text editor. I could go that route, but I like some modern conveniences such as tags, archives ordered by date and so on.

With the risk of being pretentious, I'm thinking of Samuel Johnson style affair back when he published short essays as two penny sheets. Or something more contemporary like a xeroxed zine.

In the end I think I will research it and Jekyll and see which one I prefer.

The onlt issue with it being ugly is that my CSS skills are limited. But the static site is pure HTML, CSS, and a teensy bit of JavaScript (for rendering LaTeX).

I'd write pure HTML but I just get in a flow better with Markdown

Yeah it's the ugliness thing that makes me wary of following in your footsteps. That said it would be nice if I could turn my blog in to a ebook, like, instantly.

If you want to go the self-hosted route, there are a number of static-site generators out there with many themes available. As mentioned in this thread, Jekyll is one of them!

I can't recommend one because I ended up making one my own (just a script that uses pandoc to convert markdown to html) but it's ugly lol.

my friend uses dreamwidth for her book review blog and i think as a user you can create communities that act as separate blogs?

if you go the self hosted route i like jekyll for this purpose. you can host entirely on github pages which is where i host teatimer.site (although i don't use jekyll for that, it's too simple to need jekyll)

What about WordPress? It seems customisable and independent enough that you don't have to fuck around with likes and reblogs etc.

P.S. to see a first hand example of my level of techitude, see my custom styles for jstpst.net - Saturn Valley or something. I use it solely for this site and it imitates the save file and character creation screens of EarthBound. Also, mint green and light blue squares are objectively the most delicious looking background graphic possible. I would sincerely wear a t-shirt based on EarthBound save file and character creations screens!

Omg I just can't wait for Halloween!

thank you dt

me, going outside into 90 degree weather: ah, autumn