The problem is that this is not real life, but fiction. Therefore it would go however the writer wanted it to go.

In real life, they probably wouldn't be killing each other either way. Most people are gregarious, and they have an incentive to cooperate in order to procure food and shelter. (As long as there's enough food to be obtained, of course. Otherwise things will get ugly).

> If people have to slow down, back up, and read through several times

Ok, but what "people"? Because what's very difficult for a reader may not be difficult at all for a different reader.

Yes, a genre is just a collection of tropes and conventions that allow readers to find books that are similar to other books they have liked. As fashions come and go, new genres and subgenres appear. For example, within fantasy, we have relatively recent subgenres like litRPG, progression fantasy, "cozy" fantasy (like "Legends & Lattes")....

To each their own, I guess.

You'll always have The Simpsons.

You can only do this with books that have been reviewed/analyzed a lot, though. Otherwise the AI will not have enough training data to talk about it in a useful manner.

Thanks for this. I have read Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, and I intend to read more of his books. This is the kind of post that should be getting thousands of upvotes here.

I try to avoid unfinished series, but it's not just for the risk of them not being finished, but also because I tend to forget a lot of the details if I have to wait, let's say, a year between books. Authors/publishers could help by including a summary of the story so far at the beginning, but they seldom do.

I was going to say this one. Seasons 1 to 9 is one of the best comedies ever. The rest can be easily forgotten.

I'm not very familiar with Dr. Who (I just watched season 1 of the reboot and did not continue), but I can talk about TNG because I have watched the whole show (and I really like it). It's a long show (178 episodes over 7 seasons). Being episodic, each episode is a different story and there are stronger and weaker ones.

Yes, if you don't want to devote much time to it, you can watch the best episodes following whatever guide you want. The episodes are quite standalone, barring the occasional double episode, so you'll be fine sampling the highlights of the show that way.

However, there is something you will miss, because part of the charm of a long, episodic, ensemble show like this is the feeling of living with those characters day to day, so that they become almost members of the family, and following their character arcs. Even weak and campy episodes are enjoyable for me because of that. But, if you don't want to spend all that time, that's a reasonable trade-off you can make.

One thing you should know about TNG is that season 1 and, to a lesser extent, season 2, are considered weaker by most fans. Have you heard the expression "jump the shark" to refer to the moment when a show stops being good? It's an expression that was taken from an incident in the sitcom Happy Days. Well, the opposite expression is "grow a beard", to refer to the moment when a show starts being good. That expression was born from TNG, because during season 2 the character Riker grows a beard that he keeps for the rest of the show, and that's where fans say that the show started being good.

Personally, I also like season 1, although I agree that it has more weak episodes than other seasons.

This is a watch/skip guide. Just somebody's opinion, and I would personally recommend watching more episodes than this list suggests, but you could give it a go if you don’t want to watch many episodes: https://wordmerc.medium.com/star-trek-the-next-generation-watch-skip-guide-e489377bfd9

You could also look the the TNG re-watch at tor.com, and watch only the episodes that are given a 5 or more rating, for example (you can see the rating at the end of the write-up for each episode, just go directly there to avoid the spoilers in the rest of the write-up). It has the advantage that, having a rating, you can set the bar as high or as low as you want. Again, it's just somebody's opinion, and I often don't agree with his ratings, but that's a given when it's something subjective like this: https://www.tor.com/series/star-trek-the-next-generation-rewatch/

It's not the same as Harry Potter. You probably won't get the same emotional connection with the story being told, but it's fun and enjoyable.

I use it for keeping track of the books I have and the ones I read, and also my opinions about them.

The recommendations by the site are useless to me, and the opinions of other readers are more hit than miss. Often the most voted ones are full of emoticons and memes, or do not say anything useful about the book but are upvoted because the reviewer is popular or something. A lot of reviewers have not even read the book, and are mad at the writer because of some Twitter controversy or things like that.

Lists are also extremely useless, same as the newsletter.

I stopped watching after a few episodes. It wasn't awful, but I was not finding it worthwhile. Perhaps as a kid I would have liked it more.

Actually, you can't. The first law prevents robots from hurting any humans. It would take something like the 0th law to allow a robot to kill people in order to save more people.

Once you accept something like the 0th law, you have carte blanche to commit all kinds of atrocities, in the name of a nebulous "greater good".

It probably doesn't, to be honest. People who say it gets better probably liked the show from the beginning, or at least didn't dislike it.

1. Remove DRM using Calibre.

2. Install @Voice Aloud Reader, or a similar app to read your books Aloud (this app also lets you use the Google voices).

Better not. I have nothing against that in principle, but in practice it's one more excuse for these people to get outraged if more men are nominated or whatever. It's exhausting.

Yes, I love the Harry Potter series, but quidditch is badly designed. In her attempt to give Harry a good opportunity to shine, Rowling made all players almost irrelevant except for one player in each team. I think Rowling belatedly realized this, and made an effort to show a match where the seeker doesn't win the game (even though that requires the rest of the teams to be ridiculously mismatched, so that a huge difference in goals can be accumulated).

The fact that a match can last from a few seconds to months is also a bad thing. Imagine paying to see the World Cup final and it's over in ten seconds. Or imagine paying to see it and having to leave because it just doesn't end and you have a life and work to go back to.

The previous problems could have been avoided with some slight tinkering with the rules. But there's another, more philosophical problem: quidditch is basically two different games going on at the same time: the chasers and goalkeepers playing one game, and the seekers playing a different one. That's not how a good team sport is designed: you want to have all your team cooperating and working together, not just a couple of them doing their own thing.

Calibre is software for Windows/Mac/Linux. You download the ebook file, use calibre to remove any DRM and convert it to your preferred format, and then you can save your copy wherever you like. I always keep a copy of my books in my PC and another in the cloud. You can also use Calibre to send the ebooks you want to your (preferably eInk) device.

Physical books are more durable than an ebook device. But the ebook device can be replaced without losing your ebooks, and it takes much less room. Also, it lets you use the font size you prefer.

Regarding licensing vs ownership, to hell with that. If I buy an ebook, I own it. The first thing I do is remove DRM with Calibre and save my own copy.

Actually, sport fiction is very enjoyable. At least I find it so.

If you have a kid who likes baseball I'd recommend Six Innings, by James Preller.

It's just the story of a baseball match between two children's teams, a little league final. It's basically a play by play description of the game, from the point of view of the players of one of the teams.

That may sound awful, I know, but it's written with so much passion for the game, and with such a heart-felt examination of the characters, their motivations, their hopes and fears, that it's more entertaining and moving than it has any right to be. It's a book about baseball, of course, but also about friendship, and the joys and sorrows of team sports.

If you have no familiarity at all with baseball you can get a bit lost in the technicalities, but the passion still comes through.

The point of calling it a prequel is that they hope a good part of the audience of Yellowstone will also watch 1883. They say that some of the characters of the new show are ancestors of the characters in Yellowstone and that way they can call it a prequel.

That's a good point. The first books are children books, but the series gradually becomes YA. I'd say that by book 5 it's YA already. The end of book 4 could also be upsetting for little children.

That discrepancy in tone causes some problems, like for example Hagrid giving Dudley a pig tail. That worked great with the dark but whimsical style of book 1, a style which reminds me of Roald Dahl's children stories. However, when you look back at that action from a grittier, more realistic point of view like the one the latter books have, it seems abusive of Hagrid to do that.

Wait, an epub file created ten years ago (with no DRM) is not readable now? That doesn't seem right....