I absolutely love Bandcamp. When I want an album and it’s on Bandcamp, I buy it there. I’ve discovered amazing artists there as well. Unfortunately, I don’t know to what extent Bandcamp has a future. It’s been bought by Epic, then bought again by Songtradr, then half the employees were fired. Bandcamp is fighting a war against the streaming model, about culture as a commodity. It’s an uphill battle. I think this sort of model needs to be supported by some sort of coop or non profit or something. The goal needs to be to bring change, help out and break even, not to profit the stockholders.
As for experiences: Used Inventaire a few years back, metadata was a nightmare, it was trying to pull data from Wikidata (nice in theory) but did not check if e.g. the author already existed, so there were five of them with varying degrees of data. No fun.
Bookwyrm is pretty cool, made the mistake to go to a small instance that was plagued by technical server problems, tried to export the books I had already put in and import it to a bigger instance, didn’t work (and was somehow not supposed to, I was later told 🤷♀️ Though that’s a feature that is apparently worked on). Other then that it’s petty nice, pulls data from Openlibrary, which works very well and you can also add metadata to OL if it’s not there. And the whole social thing with following people and writing reviews, good stuff.
Occasionally I’ll log on to look at what books are similar to something I’ve enjoyed, but that’s it. It’s owned by Amazon so I know the reviews are shit.
I only use Goodreads anymore to track my book collection or when trying to find books for high school students at the library where I work when looking for similar books to recommend to ones they’ve already read and enjoyed.
I use it for tracking my own books because I can add a plug-in into Calibre, which automatically takes care of it, but I’ve also started using StoryGraph and hardcover.app which is a more manual process, but hopefully can get automated soon as Hardcover at least has a public API.
I’d be interested if anybody wants to share links to their own on those services. I’d like more people to follow, my links available in my bio on Lemmy
I’ve read 3 books by Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, Demons and The Brothers Karamazov. TBK’s my favourite. When I first read C&P, I read the Constance Garnett translation. I found the book to be OK but a little slow. Later when I read the P&V translation, I some how found it to be a faster read. I guess the translation that you try (provided you are not reading the original Russian) matters as far as reading enjoyment goes. I would say C&P is a faster read (as far as I remember) compared to TBK. I think it can be a good starting point for trying out Dostoevsky. And yes, The Master And Margarita is definitely amazing.
You have a stronger will than I, being able to read all that and (presumably) not go insane in the process. Was there anything in particular that you learned that stuck out to you?
climate change projections are really a CYOA depending on how optimistic or pessimistic you want to be, and there is zero agreement on what remedies should be undertaken as a part of resolving it
virtually all of the reporting you’ve probably ever heard about Columbine is polluted by some degree of mistruth, miscommunication, or lies from the media, the police, or relevant parties with their own agendas
if there’s any justice in the world, Pacific Gas & Electric executives will all be sent to the 9th circle of hell
socialists got pretty wacky when they were allowed to take power throughout the mountain West during the heyday of the Socialist Party of America, and communists even moreso during their brief period of relevance in the eastern corner of Montana
a lot of conservative Americans are very clearly best described as “stupid fascists”, which is to say they are essentially fascist politically but so politically propaganized against that term, politically ignorant, or just plainly stupid that they don’t realize they are essentially fascist. this is probably and currently saving us from an even more developed fascist movement than already exists, but how long it’ll hold is not clear
That sent me on a !!fun!! Wikipedia trip. My favorite was a sniper attack on a substation that DHS alleged might have been an inside job. Also that’s a lot of fires.
I love history books, so a long history of the Targaryan dynasty written as a history book just really, really hit with me, though I wish he’d write a novella spelling out Saera Targaryan’s story in full.
commentary for a few of these: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
i… very much do not like I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, and i feel like i only need this particular passage to illustrate why. what i can appreciate about it is really limited to keeping this serial killer from recessing into history and getting away with his crimes. as an actual book, and as actual text on page, i have a lot of issues with this one! i don’t really like how it’s written so casually; i dislike how it’s presented and the jumbled order of things; i really did not appreciate[^1] the gratuitous detail of how many of the Golden State Killer’s rapes were committed, leading to such just. unbelievable paragraphs as:
Common sense, and any cop, will tell you that the no-pants rapist is an unsophisticated teenage peeper who just graduated from misdemeanor to crudely conceived felony. The punk doing the no-pants dance suffers from poor impulse control and will be arrested swiftly.
i think in general, the book reads like a jumble of blogs—and that would be fine if not for the fact that it’s a book and not a jumble of blogs. it’s a book that has been edited, and if this is what they salvaged in editing it, then… yeah. probably should have been kept in drafts overall. this solidified my general dislike of true crime
[^1]: for reasons both publicly decent and personal
For nonfiction, I’d have to say How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair. It’s a memoir of a woman who grew up in a strict Rastafari household in Jamaica. Safiya is a poet and she has a beautiful command of language that makes her descriptions lyrical, haunting, or painful as needs be. However, if you generally need content warnings I would highly recommend looking them up for this book because she does not pull any punches.
For fiction, my favorite would probably be Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett (Storygraph went down in the middle of me writing this lol, will edit the link in later). It’s a lovely fantasy novel set in an alternate Earth where fae are real. You follow a Dryadologist as she works on documenting a rare type of fae while she works on her encyclopaedia of faeries (hence the title lol). I enjoyed being in Emily’s head as she worked through the problems presented to her, and as she interacted with her colleague.
You’ve got some moderately highbrow and transhumanist stuff in there; have you tried Greg Egan? The two starting places I like to recommend are the Clockwork Rocket books (natives of a universe with alternate physics explore it and figure out what’s going on, kind of Flatland turned up to 11… and then up to 121…), and Permutation City which I think will meet your “some very interesting ideas” and then keep accelerating.
I see a number of things on your list I also enjoy (and some I haven’t seen so thanks for the recs!).
I’ve got a pretty long list, but I think only the first three are scifi in the space faring long run series sense. Including some others in the genre more broadly, in case any look interesting too:
Have you tried CJ Cherryh, particularly the Alliance-Union universe? If you'd like to start with a longer novel, I'd suggest Downbelow Station or perhaps Cyteen (though DS is one of my favorites) if you'd like a faster and less deep introduction, I'd suggest Merchanter's Luck or The Pride of Chanur.
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