Faster please. They’re teaching it in public school in Korea now. I teach English here, and I get people telling me they expect me to teach it, too. Never mind I try to explain it’s intellectual property theft. They never much cared about that sort of thing here.

No speculative fiction recommendation thread is complete without mention of Peter Watts’ Blindsight. Truly alien aliens, and some very interesting exploration of the nature of consciousness.

There’s a lot of religion in the books. People are always praying for this and that. Biblical names. Some thinly veiled biblical references. Any character who expresses agnosticism or atheism is eventually proved bad or wrong in some manner. There are some very angelic-like beings that pop up later. Some fallen ones as well. Every single woman character pines over the guys at some point and really just wants to settle down and pop out kids. Oh, and everything is wrapped up neatly in the last book when the very obvious Jesus figure confronts God on top of a tower, sacrifices himself, is subsequently resurrected, and they fly in on a literal airplane and save everyone in the 11th hour. It’s trite and disaffecting and pretty much assured I won’t be reading anything from Weeks ever again.

Yeah, the manga is eminently worth reading. Especially if you enjoy the movie at all (it’s my favorite of Miyazaki’s.) The manga somehow manages to be even better.

Glen Cook’s Black Company novels come close for me. They’re smaller scale, but they’ve got some heft. Erikson has said the series was a huge influence on him, too.

If you continue with the series, just about every character carries over. Malazan is crazy intricate and complex. I’ve read the ten-book main series a few times and notice new connections every time through.

I’ll add that I hated the Lightbringer series. It starts out alright, gets progressively worse, and ends with a big fat literal deus ex machina. Weeks is a flaming Mormon, and if you know anything about the faith, you can see its stink everywhere.

I did like his Night Angel trilogy.

Cradle is pretty amazing.

Yes and no? The treatment of women gets less cringey, but the books get more-and-more convoluted. That said, I just read the recently released 18th book, and I’m still enjoying them enough to not drop the series.

Some Korean traditional music (I have no idea what they were singing about since they use some pretty archaic Korean and mine isn’t the best) for a cherry blossom festival over the weekend. Unfortunately some eager organizers jumped the gun and there were very few blossoms.

The biggest change for me was losing Lemm.ee. That was a blow. I had probably the most thriving (not by much) synthesizer community. I haven’t had the heart to try and start it back up elsewhere.

I use Naver maps because I’m in Korea and they’ve kept out the competition until now. They already introduced ads some time back. It’s infuriating.

The only thing keeping me with Windows are some short-sighted VST makers that don’t support Linux. Audio in Linux on general has served me enough jank over the years to have me wary as well, though it has definitely gotten better. I do use Linux on my work PC where I don’t need to run a DAW.

FLCL is great, but it is pretty damned weird and better with knowledge of the material it parodies.

Cowboy Bebop is the entry point to anime. It’s mostly episodic so there’s no need for a huge time investment. You’ll know if you’re going to like it or not after an episode or two. The only problem is that it’s so damned good, it’s only downhill from there.

That’s because almost everything that Treasure does (did) is gold. Gunstar Heroes, Dynamite Headdy, Alien Soldier, Radiant Silvergun, Bangai O, Sin and Punishment, Ikaruga. I think more than any other developer their games are just pure, no-frills fun. No collectibles, no grind, just rewarding and complex action gameplay.

They already do this in Korea. I don’t know if they are actually changing prices moment-to-moment, but they are using e-ink price tags that are impossible to distinguish from their printed, paper brethren. I saw one glitch out one day, and that was the only way I could tell. I mean, I guess I might be able to tell if I hunched down and inspected one closely, but it seriously looked identical to the same old printed ones at a glance.

I only got into Rush as an adult, but I spent probably 1-2 years listening to almost nothing but Rush. Hemispheres definitely came out my favorite in the end, but I really enjoy most of it ( Though I could take-or-leave some of their later stuff, especially Presto which is just produced weird and tinny.)

Whuut? I had no idea that even existed. Wild! Thanks!

John Wyndham also wrote The Kraken Wakes in which aliens try and wipe out humanity via environmental collapse. It’s kinda eerily prescient, only we’re doing it to ourselves instead of aliens. Great author!

Haha! I remember loving the shit out of Cabin Boy when I first saw it years and years ago. I tried to give it another watch a little while back and gave up. It’s awful!