My favorite is hardcover.app as well, though I also maintain my data on storygraph. (I guess technically I maintain it on Goodreads too, but that’s only because calibre auto updates my reading)

It’s mostly fine… It kind of suffers similar flaws to the second Hunger Games book by being a “let’s do that again”-style rehash of the first. But the series makes a cohesive whole.

I think one of the reasons Broken works fairly well for me is it doesn’t feel the need to tie off every loose thread by the end. I still end up wanting to return to the world without the story being anti-climactic.

Yep. It takes a certain amount of skill to be able to ramp up the power and abilities of your protagonist without the story getting away from you.  That’s kind of why I described what I could recommend as series because there’s a few where the first few work well HWFWM being one of them but after that, there’s a pretty significant drop off in quality of the overall narrative.

And even one of those that I’d say that I recommend (Ready Player One/Two) works pretty well but more so for a subset of readers that I just happen to be part of (those whose main cultural media experiences were between the 70s and the 90s.) and while the series works moderately well it’s definitely written to a specific subset of readers.

As an aside because I already mentioned two of the three I recommended in the original comment, I should probably also recognize the third just for posterity. It’s the four book trilogy, This Trilogy is Broken by JP Valentine.

Magician by Raymond E Feist (later broken into Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master and the split works even better)

Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings.

Both are pretty cliché by modern views, but both are pretty well written otherwise. Good world building.

But ooo-boy, if one is the type of person that has trouble mentally separating the very problematic writer from their works (like JK Rowling or Marion Zimmerman Bradley), Eddings probably isn’t the best to read.

Wizard of Earthsea is part of the 3 books that showed me I loved Fantasy.

I’ve been tempted to give a few a go again. They were my jam in middle school.

I’m plowing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl books, I’m currently on book 4. Book 1 was for bingo, the rest are just to boost my numbers for my annual reading goal :).

LitRPG can wildly fluctuate in quality, but if LitRPG interests you at all, this is one of the top 3 series I’d recommend.

Makes sense. That thing was op, they tried limiting it with only holding one shot, but it was an auto kill if you hit with it. Throwing knives was much more fun.

If you can manufacture a multi-trillion dollars advertisement strategy for single payer, go right ahead, otherwise we can wish things were different until we are blue in the face or work with the current environment as it exists.

I could be wrong, but maybe the political and media environment in the 1940s is different than today making it an inaccurate comparison.

That’s exactly it. They don’t like it but they view any alternative, especially one forced on them, as worse. If you want to fix the problem, you unfortunately have to coddle the morons and let them voluntarily change when they find out it’s better.

City government is better than state government is better than federal government until they do something republicans don’t like than larger entities should stop them.

Correct. They are clear in that link as well that BlueSky themselves will not do anything to harvest and/or monetize data for AI. But there’s really no way to stop bad faith actors from crawling any perceivable content for malicious purposes.

Some of this is more just a generic overview of differences in perspective.

• It was inspired by this piece by someone who is now on the board that manages it. Yes they have a CEO, but there is a bigger board collaborating on direction decisions
• They have an explicit policy opposing sharing data for AI usage.
• It was initially the place for a bunch of frequently targeted minorities and the leadership implemented a bunch of changes that — in combination with a attitude of “block don’t engage” because many people aren’t rational actors — significantly make the space safer for users and less susceptible to dog piling and harassment.
• Moderation is handled far better that any other large social media platform in my experience.
• It was created as open source and as an open protocol from the start so in the event of a takeover, it’s relatively easy to spin off a clone (see protocols link).
• They allow more openness to 3rd party moderation tools in a more integrated manner.
• They have been open about discussing funding planning in the future and red lines that are unacceptable to them.
• There is no algorithm in your main feed. You see only what those you follow share. There is a discover feed, but if you hide that it has no impact on your future experience.

That would have been better in hindsight.

We as a society put too much shame on certain book choices. A reader is better than a non-reader* and what you enjoy is valid.

I’m glad you found something you enjoy!

*-for various definitions of reader, including audiobooks

Nah, one of my kids are vegetarian and I cook to support them. I have no issues with vegans. I see how it came across that way though.

I suspect you must have missed the .ml vegan community drama a couple months ago. Take every bad stereotype about vegans and ramp it to 11. Everything was in bad faith. It bled into a couple different communities.

Your comment has been removed for including carnist hate words. We don’t use words that glorify murder like the “b” word.

Pretty enjoyable and a quick read. It’s pretty standard LitRPG fare so far. The humor doesn’t seem forced like it can with some others.

Took me longer to finish Lud-in-the-Mist than I hoped. I don’t know that I enjoyed it, but I appreciate having read it.

On to Dungeon Crawler Carl and I’m about halfway through it already.