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professed professed @beehaw.org
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Favorite Science Fiction Books
  • “The Dispossessed” by Ursula K. Le Guin is maybe the best political sci-fi book I’ve ever read. Cory Doctorow’s “Walkaway” is also quite good and feels a bit like its spiritual successor.

  • Underrated Science Fiction Movies
  • Not lesser known, but maybe under-appreciated. I rewatched “Oblivion” the other evening and enjoyed it. I perused reviews afterward and they all panned the movie for being too long and plodding at two hours, which makes sense I guess. But, honestly, after the subsequent decade of three- and four-hour blockbuster schlock, “Oblivion” now feels like a taut little thriller.

  • Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout “will pass”
  • Yes! I recently went to a professional conference for the first time since the Twitter debacle and found that while most of the participants were still tweeting, Mastodon felt like a fun secret society within the meeting. We recognized one another, said hello in the hallways, had conversations that felt like secret handshakes. It emphasized for me the difference between having a community and shouting into the void.

    Now, if only I could follow you on Lemmy. lol

  • Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout “will pass”
  • For me the benefit of the various mismanagement crises at Twitter and now reddit is that they push enough people to alternatives to create a critical mass there. Mastodon will likely never be what Twitter was, but enough interesting people and enough of my professional network now have a presence on the latter that it's become a viable alternative for me. Same thing here. Whether or not Lemmy ever reaches reddit's proportions, there are enough interesting links and discussions here to keep me occupied. And if not, I could probably stand to spend a bit less time on social media anyhow.

  • Do you trust FiveThirtyEight without Nate Silver?
  • Agree! This describes my experience exactly. On a related note about format, I thought Jody Avirgan, Five Thirty Eight's podcast producer early on, was a good foil for him, drawing him into conversation and occasionally pushing back on points that sounded wild or tone deaf.

  • Best backup for Linux?
  • I started using Timeshift when it was included with a distro I was using and haven't had reason to shift away from it. Have already used it once to do a full restore.

  • What advice has helped you the most as a writer?
  • I reached the stage of a (non-fiction) writing project where I had tons of notes, but no sense of what an eventual manuscript might look like. I discovered Zettelkasten and it was a revelation, not because I think it's the only way to write, but because it was an answer to my precise problem of how to turn a ton of notes into a manuscript. I'm still a long way from being finished with my project, but I can get my pen moving every day and that in itself has been an enormous relief.