What’s mildy infuriating is your attempt to advertise your app here. I have ad blockers, but I kind of suspect this site has ads on it somewhere.

After being mostly disappointed by Artemis and The Martian I was quite wary of this one. Perhaps my expectations were more reasonable this time around, but I think it was also a better book. Considering how those other books were trying their hardest to stay within a reasonable level of scientific accuracy and plausibility I was completely surprised that there turned out to be an alien in this one. An intelligent sentient species no less. He also just kind of showed up out of nowhere and I was in disbelief that that was the direction the story was going for a bit.

Like someone else mentioned I did find the book to be a bit too much “for all ages” kind of thing. Like it was intentionally written so that it could some day be a PG movie for both kids and adults. There is nothing wrong with this of course it is just not my usual thing. I did find it a bit eye rolling at times how great this supposed average teacher was at any kind of science and alien communication. Rocky was clearly the best character in my opinion. If he wasn’t there to offset the whole lone savior idea like The Martian I don’t think I would have enjoyed this book.

The science bits were a bit too sciencey and not enough fictiony for my tastes, but I don’t think it is Weir’s style to try and make up his own fictional science. Almost all of the science was just real science and math. I think the only thing that was pretty much entirely made up was the idea that something like astrophage and its neutrino harvesting amoeba could exist. I did like the details given for everything Ryland and Rocky were doing.

I kind of wish he actually managed to get back to Earth. It felt like a bit of a cop out for us to never fully see the impact to Earth. We know that at least somebody survived, but I wanted to see the scale of the damage. Anyway I liked this book more than I expected and I’ll more than likely read whatever book Weir publishes next.

I see. If someone is yelling obscenities at you then its probably ok to yell at them too although I wouldn’t bother personally. I don’t think this poll can mean anything though as I imagine everyone has different understandings of what a “speaker” is and is doing.

What does it mean to “Shout down a speaker”? What are they speaking about and what is the purpose of shouting at them?

What kind of moderation tools could help with this?

Everyone seems to be micro blogging there own stuff. There are probably people reading various things, but nobody cares enough to respond. I think Twitter fed on drama which got people upset enough to respond. I think Mastodon is still sorting itself out. People will catch on eventually to how it all works.

How is this not illegal, but sending spam emails is? What a messed up world.

They are good and interesting in my opinion. I haven’t finished all of the short stories yet though, but I can’t imagine the rest of them would be bad.

I have a book called Sinopticon which primarily consists of science fiction stories by woman from China. So far they have been very different from anything else I’ve read as they often completely abandon any kind of tropes.

It’s a toss up. There are a lot of people on Mastodon and I wouldn’t want to somehow get drama on my personal blog that is not really meant to be seen by the wider world. It’s harmless content to be sure, but the internet is a weird place. I would potentially want to keep it isolated and just use Mastodon when I want to.

Fascinating. I actually just started a self hosted wordpress and might try this. Maybe… Getting mastodon people in the comments might not be a positive thing. 🤔

You can make a community on a Lemmy instance and set it only allow moderators to post.

Infancy. There is no guarantee it will catch on.

Edit: I find it strange that this image is implying that as soon as you stop implementing features you start dying. This is how you get needless bloat and turning solid software into something its original design never intended. A lot of software companies fall prey to this plan of endless expansion which eventually turns off the primary userbase of their software.

Lemmy doesn’t need infinite features to continue surviving, but we definitely aren’t there yet.

That all sounds pretty cool. I could have sworn they mentioned all those devices they were producing were “personal aura” devices thus being a shield, but that could have just been Day not being aware of what they were. Perhaps the technology of a personal aura but used differently can become a teleporting device.

It’s also possible Hari didn’t even need to sneak anything to Demerzel. I think merely mentioning that the prime radiant is right there and that she could understand it was enough for her to be curious. I can’t recall if she actually took it? I suppose they could have snuck it out with her.

It looked like Day was crying after that brutal insult she gave him. Knowing how petty Day can be at even the slightest offense it seems like he is incapable of harming her or even talking back.

I don’t think so, but I can’t tell. I don’t think OP is the author of the book being mentioned in this article which confuses me as to why the post title is what it is.

At any rate, self promotion is against the rules so if so please avoid doing so.

I’m hoping for a good episode tonight. I’ll have to get to it in a bit. I’m actually looking forward to it after that last one.

Not a huge deal, but if you see this message would you be able to put a spoiler around the book title? 👽

I dream of an ad free future.