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Posts posted by Hellraiser97
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Audiobooks
in Books
I'm curious about that as well. I can listen to an audiobook while I'm doing something else, like driving or folding laundry, and I feel like I retain it pretty well, but if I try to just sit down and listen to one, my mind will wander and I'll barely pay attention, much less retain anything. For non-fiction books, if it's something I have a really strong interest in, I can listen and retain. Like for instance, I listed to a book about Narcissim while going through a divorce. That held my attention really well as it got me thinking about a lot of things. However, I've tried some self-help or professinal development books, and I just can't pay attention or retain it.
I will say on the fiction, if it's a really complex book with a ton of characters (and those characters disappear for large portions at a time), I sometimes have difficulty. I just finished the Stormlight series and in the later books I was constantly confusing which character was which.
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Hell yeah! Can't wait to watch it!
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I'm on episode 5. I'm enjoying it, but I get what some of you said about not caring about any of the characters. It's basically just easy entertainment while I'm on the exercise bike.
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My brother suggested DCC to me a while back and I added it to my audiobook queue. Just finished it last week. Absolutely brilliant! The voice actin on the audiobook really takes it to the next level. Need to get the next book.
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Audiobooks
in Books
Lol, my brain is so mush I totally forgot about that thread!
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Audiobooks
in Books
I'm about 99% on audibooks, especially due to my weekly commute to Dallas from Austin. I have trouble focusing when it's non-fiction, though occassionaly one has kept my attention. I've posted most of what I've listened to in the Scifi/Fantasy thread, but I'll post some of them here later.
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Haven't seen that one, I'll check it out!
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It also restarted the whole Zombie genre. There hadn't been anything, at least mainstream, since the 70's. I didn't see it when it came out, only watched it a few weeks ago. Agree the lo-fi was a bit tough, but still enjoyed it.
I neither love nor hate 28 years later. I was ok with the heavy human drama aspect, but the more out there stuff the director did (which I know is his style) and the tone shift at the end, didn't sit well with me.
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16 hours ago, Elvis said:
Any recommendations for "hard" sci-fi books? I read a book a long time ago that was in that catagory. I can't remember the name though. It was very nerdy. I liked the complex explanations of the physics that seamed close enough to reasonable.
I just grabbed Carbide Tipped Pens based on no information other than: it's an anthology, about 13 hours long, and reviews had some good hard sci-fi things to say.
https://www.amazon.com/Carbide-Tipped-Pens-Seventeen-Science/dp/0765334313
Hard science fiction is the literature of change, rigorously examining the impact-both beneficial and dangerous-of science and technology on humanity, the future, and the cosmos. As science advances, expanding our knowledge of the universe, astounding new frontiers in storytelling open up as well.
In Carbide Tipped Pens, over a dozen of today's most creative imaginations explore these frontiers, carrying on the grand tradition of such legendary masters as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and John W. Campbell, while bringing hard science fiction into the 21st century by extrapolating from the latest scientific developments and discoveries. Ranging from ancient China to the outer reaches of the solar system, this outstanding collection of original stories, written by an international roster of authors, finds wonder, terror, and gripping human drama in topics as diverse as space exploration, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate change, alternate history, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, interplanetary war, and even the future of baseball.
From tattoos that treat allergies to hazardous missions to Mars and beyond, from the end of the world to the farthest limits of human invention, Carbide Tipped Pens turns startling new ideas into state-of-the art science fiction.
Includes short stories by Ben Bova, Gregory Benford, Robert Reed, Aliette de Bodard, Jack McDevitt, Howard Hendrix, Daniel H. Wilson, and many others!I think pretty much anything by Adrian Tchaikovsky falls into that category. I know specifically that the Children of Time series was considered Hard Sci-Fi.
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Just finished book 1 of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Absolutely hilarious. As usual, I'm listening to it rather than reading, and the narrator is just top notch. Really makes it even funnier.
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On 7/2/2025 at 5:12 PM, Rimbo said:
I'm struggling to finish the first one.
Yeah, I struggled with it too. WAY too much setup for me.
On 7/2/2025 at 5:19 PM, Chewbacca said:I really enjoyed the first 3. The 4th dragged on in spots and the 5th was a struggle to get through.
I enjoyed Books 2 and 3 a lot. I think I actually may have skipped booked 4. I have it on Audible, and it says finished, but I think I might have accidentally marked it finsihed. There was a lot going on in Book 5 that I didn't remember.
On 7/2/2025 at 6:00 PM, Chewbacca said:Reading these books with a due date would be tough indeed.
I read the Game of Thrones books largely that way. I ended up getting Calibre and stripping the DRM from the checked out books so I could finish them.
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Looks like a good old style action movie. IN
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Pumped for this. I am curious to see how they handle Ryland's resistance to the mission. It seems from the preview it will be different than the book, but maybe I'm not remembering it well.
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4 minutes ago, Zeus said:
Bring it back
Wingo and Baxter with Gibson at FB
The time to bring it back was 1996. Rickey, Shon and Priest in the backfield with James Brown at QB.
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12 minutes ago, linux said:
TFA until recently, TFA was widely praised on release but I came out of the theater angry I got sold essentially the same product.
Gilroy has made an open case against memberberries, directly telling modern writers that the Star Wars toybox is not something they should abuse, I hope they learn.
Thanks for the explanation! I enjoyed TFA, but I quickly realized it was a total rehash of ANH. My brother absolutely loved it and we had many debates about whether they should have done somethng original.
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The streaming era really is a difficult thing to quantify and compare over periods.
Side note, what doe the "memberberry era" mean? I vaguely remember the South Park episode, and I googled it quickly, but didn't get the relationship to Star Wars.
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Those numbers are pretty surprising, though it certainly confirms what you said in many ways.
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4 hours ago, mdmost said:
Who is she going to tell the plans to that would make any difference on a prison planet that's had bolstered security after the previous breakout? All we know is she went from the interrogation room to the jail cell in ISB HQ to the prison. After the Death Star comes online in Rogue One, nothing matters about who knows because the Empire then wants everyone to know and fear them. Maybe she's on the team making widgets for Death Star 2.0.
She knows a lot of stuff outside of the Death Star plans. It's a prison and prisons always have corruption. Part of the manifesto is about how hard it is for the Empire to control everything. It's a pointless risk to let her live, much less be around anyone else.
2 hours ago, Captainant said:I gotta disagree hard on that. Cassian knew he would not be able to leave Bix, and that he had work yet to be done. They were both committed to the mission. All in.
In many ways, the people that Cassian lost is what defined and fueled him. It's what makes him get up and fight the Empire and dare to hope. Between his sister, Marva, Brasso, B-2, and now Bix - Cassian has lost everything.
Cassian had just said he was going to walk away when she left. He had a right to know about the baby.
1 hour ago, Rimbo said:And how is that information going to be (1) believed and (2) escape, when for almost everyone on Narkina it's a death sentence? She is too busy building pieces of the Death Star (the second one by that point) to discuss things. She's as good as dead from the Empire's POV, and her health and obedience are being put to good service.
(And likely, given her personality, WHY would she snitch? In her mind, she is wronged for letting information get out; in her own mind, telling people things NOW would no longer make her imprisonment unjust? Granted, that's not the Empire's concern, it's hers.)
Said it above, but it's just a pointless risk. She knows a lot of stuff that isn't about the Death Star too. As for her motivation, she's been burned by the Empire. She feels she did nothing wrong. That's all the more reason to snitch.
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9 minutes ago, mdmost said:
I'm sure there were backup plans but Galen only knew of the ones on Scariff. I'm sure there are plans in the Emperor's tower on Coruscant.
And the Dedra ending was what Gilroy wanted to her to have which was the begining and end her story in an Imperial block. She was raised in a kinderblock and she'll probably die in their prison. It's a better fate than just showing her gunned down on screen and he already had that for Partigas. We know how hard the imperial prison life can be and how it breaks people. Also, it helped to keep her alive because her still being alive after Krennic pushed on her head and then threw her in jail led to Kleya being hunted and almost captured. And let's be honest the real bastard of the Empire is Tarkin. He's the one who does not hesitate to blow up or murder people. Krennic only did that when it was necessary. And as we saw, he runs a leaky ship as did a lot of the ISB.
If she was in solitary, it would make more sense I think. I can see the punishment of imprisonment being worse than death, and a good bookend to her story, but she's clearly an intelligence risk with everything she knows just outside of the Death Star.
Going to have to disagree on Krennic. He doesn't hesitate to murder Erso's engineers. Tarkin is certainly even more ruthless, but Krennic is keen to immediately blow up a full planet, not just Jedda city.
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1 hour ago, Murfdogg21 said:
Agreed that it's unbelievable the Empire would send Dedra to prison where she will get more enraged and has valuable intel she could dispel to anyone. It would've been nearly impossible to imprison every employee on Scariff and was easier to just nuke them all and the evidence.
[Rogue One criticism] I find it hard to believe the Empire kept no backup copies of project plans anywhere else. Later on they enacted several of those, like cloning/resurrecting Palpatine and the tracking ships at light speed. Scariff may have been the easiest place for the rebels to get the Death Star plans in a surprise attack, but the plans had to exist elsewhere. Hell, they started building its replacement immediately.
They actually were already building the second one before the first was completed IIRC. And it must use different power sources/fuel since they made such a big deal of needing all that stuff for the first one and not being able to find enough.
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12 hours ago, MagicSoccerSpray said:
There was a deleted scene that explains it all. Basically Perrin always knew what Mon was up to, and covered for her to the ISB. Sculden owned a broadcast channel that, when ordered, refused to cut the feed to Mothma's speech to the senate, which is why the imperials were scrambling to cut power to the senate chamber. Perrin and Sculden's wife both lost their spouses to the rebellion, which better explains them being together later.
There are videos and interviews on yt and the net, from the episode writer, and Gilroy, talking about it. Some were linked a couple of pages back in this thread.Thanks. That definitely explains that part of it, but it still seems that Perrin would have been in jail. It's not like the Empire is known for leniency.
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Yes it was but she deserved it.
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I'll go the other direction, audiobooks where the narrator makes it worse.
1) Jefferson Mays on the Expanse and Capitve's War. Some may like it, but the way he draws out certain words, the whole cadence, drives me nuts. I largely still listened to the expanse but I nearly turned off The Mercy of Gods. I'll be reading the next one.
2) Dick Hill - the Acacia trilogy. I read somewhere one some list that this was a really great series, so I decided to give it a try. I don't know where Hill is actually from, but he reads it in what seems like an over exaggerated attempt at a middle ages English accent. It killed me. Maybe I'll read the remaining two books, but I barely mnmade it through the first one.
3) Scott Brick - The Shannara Chronicles - dude just gets WAY too excited and over emphasizes things. I enjoyed the first book, bit desipe having bought a couple of them, I haven't been able to listen to anymore.
Murderbot -AppleTV
in Movies and TV
Posted
Yeah, I find it frustrating to wait now (spoiled) but at the same time, when I do binge, either because they release a season all at once or I just wait to watch it, I miss the banter with friends the following week (and online) about the latest episode like I used to have with Lost, Battlestar Galactica, etc.