Great point! They do vary wildly by style and subject matter, while all being masterful IMHO. Incredible talent.

I mean, fair. All great books!

The Culture by Ian M. Banks. It's a little difficult to approach, but an incredible exploration of Sci-Fi, humanity, AI, and life in general. Unlike a lot of other great Sci-Fi (like The Expanse, which I also highly recommend) it's gritty, but overall The Culture is a hopeful and optimistic take on the progress of humanity and technology.

The best books are The Player of Games, Look to Windward, and Excession.

Depending on how you're feeling, I think you can skip The State of the Art, Matter, and Inversions, though they're worth an eventual read. They're just less connected to the main Culture story.

It's a series that truly changed me and my perspective on life.

I can promise you it isn't the engineers fucking up Boeing. It's the old macdonald-douglas management / exec team.

Which might make an even better comedy honestly.

Different caller, same question.

The BSDs I've used are extremely well documented and cohesive. No basic tools or functions are missing and everything works very simply and together as a whole. The tooling they put forward in the 2000s like DTrace, ZFS, jails, bhyve, were simply unmatched for their capabilities at the time. Having all those tools on a simple and fast OS at the time felt like living in the future.

At the same time, BSD is severely lacking in gaming, graphics performance, compatibility with modern ecosystems, ease of use for less technical users, and generally seems to have stagnated in the last 10-15 or so years. Some chalk that up to leadership, some to the license / corporate interests largely moving to Linux, who knows. But these days I use Linux and while I miss the halcyon days of BSD, I wouldn't switch back.

I stand with my (forever) baby hippo Fiona.

No, I appreciate it! Couldn't find a complete gif that didn't look thoroughly nuked.

I like it being an elected position, rather than the police or local government appointing someone. That way if someone is egregiously against the grain of their community the community can act.

However, like so many elected positions, there should be real minimum qualifications to get on the ballot, like a 4 year degree or equivalent experience in a related field, a neutral third party psych eval, etc.

Max, what's wrong? You've hardly touched your jar.

Not here in Minnesota. Thanks Mr. Walz!

Nah, just finding new ways to fuck the LGBTQ+ community.