Interesting Links for 04-01-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Don't like the way some sites fill up your Google searches? Here's a browser addon that fixes that.

(tags:browser search )

2. Online security and privacy tune-up suggestions for 2024!

(tags:security advice )

3. One Life (2023) and thoughts on asylum

(tags:asylum immigration history )

4. Italy divided over new pineapple pizza

(tags:pizza fruit )

5. Which Hugo Winners Have You Read: the poll! (I've read 33)

(tags:hugo awards poll )

Comments

[calimac]

2) The prospect of doing any of this stuff fills me with a profound sense of ennui.

3) Much the same could be said of Schindler's List. I'm ill at ease with any sort of manipulation to make people express their private emotions in public (down to public proposals of marriage: there's a whole genre of YouTube videos of recipients declining the proposal: gruesomely fascinating).

5) There's no option for "began to read but gave up on it," which would be by far the largest category of response from me.

[andrewducker]

I certainly should have given up on a couple of them!

[naath]

5- 32, unles I lost count, somewhat deliberate/y

[channelpenguin]

5. More than I thought, but only 12. None more recent than The City and the City. Dystopia and climate disaster don't appeal - and those seem sometimes like the only themes in SF in recent years :-(

[poshmerchant]

None of the Nebula winners I've read since City and the City are about climate change.

2021's Network Effect by Martha Wells is a fun action-packed space opera

2019's Calculating Stars is an alternate history space program. No climate change unless you consider asteroid impacts climate change

2015's The Three Body Program was bad, but nothing to do with climate change

2014's Ancillary Justice is a far future space opera. The sequels tends towards far future cozy mystery

2013's Redshirts is a fun Star Trek pastiche

2010's co-winner The Windup Girl is a climate change book, I suppose

[channelpenguin]

Interesting. Clearly I have the wrong impression!

Sigh. The older I get, the more I enjoy (in both books and films), the world-building (usually the start) but find the trials and crises and whathaveyou that heroes go through either boring or unpleasant - maybe reminds me too much of some of the much more minor "adventures" and accidents have had (I did a lot of offshore sailing, and have been seriously injured in a motorbike crash, for example). I like exploration type of adventure, puzzle or problem solving without "disaster movie" trimmings. I guess hard to find even in factual writing!

[poshmerchant]

Have you tried Andy Weir's books? The Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary are all puzzle and problem solving, though some of the stakes are life and death

I think you'd enjoy The Spare Man, which is a space cruise liner murder mystery from Mary Robinette Koval. She won the 2019 prize for Calculating Stars, but I think The Spare Man is a much lighter read

Another fun sci-fi mystery with relatively low stakes is Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty. High concept, low stakes, fun

[andrewducker]

Long Way to a Small Angry Planet might work too

[channelpenguin]

Thank you very kindly for the ideas!

[movingfinger]

1. Thank you! I hope that, if this isn't available for mobile, it will be soon.

4. I would personally prefer this pizza with the pineapple cut in chunks, for ease of eating and better distribution. (I can see why he isn't doing that, but.) The overall effect is going to be like cheese and chutney---very good!

[bearshorty]

I have been deliberately reading 5 Hugo winning books a year every year for a while now. I think I have 4 years left or so. So I read a lot. Some I loved, some were ok and some were puzzling.

[greenwoodside]

Re: Hugos. Have read 12 though nothing before The Vor Game in 1991. My modest ambition is eventually to read enough Hugo nominees per year to be justified in having an opinion on the outcomes.

Re: pineapple pizza. I'm all for pineapple on pizza and elsewhere though I'm not keen on the look of Sorbillo's new offering. I'm vegan, but even prior to being vegan never much liked cheese except for goats cheese and sheep cheese. But I'd be happy to eat a Pizza Marinara con Ananas any time, even if all the fruit on fruit acidity gives me heartburn. It's be worth it.

[greenwoodside]

Thank you also for the link to magister's comments on One Life and asylum.

[mdlbear]

4: looks tasty! Wish I could find it here in the US

5: 28 (only one published in this century)

Pineapple on pizza

[channelpenguin]

Hmm, doesn't the acidity plus the specific protein-digesting enzyme in pineapple "curdle" the cheese and thus ruin the nice melty texture? I seem to recall this issue...

[hairyears]

5: 37. Good grief: and very few of them inthe current century.

3. One Life (2023) and thoughts on asylum

[jack]

I remember that sadly I'd never heard of the kindertransport until I was an adult, as it's the sort of background common knowledge that everyone might know, but not that EVERYONE knows. But that that meant I experienced learning about it in a weird sequence.

I picked up the vibe of it being commonly seen as a great humanitarian triumph, rescuing children from Nazi Germany, arranging transport, getting them out of German-ruled countries. But that gave me the impression of the British government sponsoring this effort, rather than mostly *permitting* it.

It gave me the impression of riding in and rescuing orphans who didn't have any parents, whereas in fact, one of the unique things about the effort was the unusual generosity of British policy in allowing a large but limited number of children in at all, provided they left any parents behind to die. And provided that volunteer groups provided enough funding that the children wouldn't be a burden on the country.

I think anyone who knows anything much about history at all would expect that, but that I (and maybe many people) who only picked up random bits and pieces, imagined that a high point of refugee tolerance in the lead up to the holocaust would have been higher than that. And I don't know why, but each time I'm reminded how much worse the world was than I thought, is one of the few terrible things that happens to moves me to tears.

And that none of that is that surprising, I just hadn't thought about it enough :( And that "children threatened by genocide are automatically welcome, as refugees" is something that might be policy *always*, not only once. But, if I'm right, isn't.

Re: 3. One Life (2023) and thoughts on asylum

[andrewducker]

Yeah, the fact that we wouldn't take adults is horrifying, amongst many other horrifying things.

5. Which Hugo Winners Have You Read: the poll! (I've read 33)

[jack]

I think I got up to about 42! There was a decade or so when I followed the Hugos because I'd been to worldcon and knew a lot of friends would be reading the nominees, and usually ended up reading enough of the nominees I'd read the winners. And I've fallen out of the habit, but still often reading sufficiently notable new releases. And a lot of the winners from the 80s and 90s and early 00s were ones from famous series I devoured at some point (O S Card, Bujold, Rowling), or books that seemed like prominent classics (J Strange and Mr Norrel, Yiddish Policeman's Union, Deepness in the Sky, quite a few more), or both (Zelazny, Stephenson, Asimov...). And a few of the older novels are classics I read at some point, or not-very-niche classics I happened on.

Re: 5. Which Hugo Winners Have You Read: the poll! (I've read 33)

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I'm definitely better read with the modern ones because of encountering fandom in the early 2000s, going to the Glasgow Worldcon, etc.