Lowbird

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Lowbird,

As people already said, Disco Elysium for sure.

Baldur’s Gate 3 on the lowest/story difficulty.

The old RPG Arcanum. Great steampunk fantasy setting and story. If you play a persuasive character you can avoid combat and skip entire dungeons. The game has some balance issues (magic tree is fine, but the tech tree is underpowered, and early combat encounters are horrible to dela with). Various fan patches and mods are available, including a balance mod, a bugfix patch, and an HD patch. Since it’s an old game I recommend getting it from gog.com, since sometimes they fix up older games a bit to run properly on new systems.

Dragon Age, since you liked Mass Effect. Though, I personally found the combat more annoying in Dragon Age than Mass Effect. Mileage may vary.

The Outer Wilds (different game than Outer Worlds). It’s a sort of an archeology/space adventure game. It’s not strictly speaking an RPG, but if you want a story game it’s top tier. Please do not look anything up about the game and go in as blind as possible, as the feeling of discovery and exploration are the main draw of the game and once you have something spoiled you can’t un-know it. Also, I recommend getting the dlc immediately with the main game, as it’s a huge expansion that fits into the main story perfectly and affects the ending of the main game.

On TikTok, the war in Gaza is a game (english.elpais.com)

One of the TikTok trends is to show the process of loading a projectile into a tank and firing it. Another is to put trance music to a video, along with the words “2-3, sha-ger.” This is the order that a military drone operator is given to drop a bomb, with the syllables separated so that the message is clear. The trend...

Lowbird,

I think it’s moreso that TikTok’s algorithms, whatever that black box may contain, are far better for discoverability than those of all the other platforms.

It’s guided by what each individual viewer wants to see (or hates to see, if they can’t resist interacting with videos they hate), so small media bubbles are created for better or worse, but Tiktok will hand on-the-ground news reported by Palestinians to people who want to see it without those viewers having to look for it or know it’s there to be looked for.

By contrast, if you go to youtube, you might see whatever shows up in the general “popular” tab, or you might enter a search for Palestinian news (which requires you to be actively looking for it in the first place vs just there and able to be shown it) but you’re likely to get mainly clips from major US news channels, with their framing of the situation, and maybe some Israeli ones. Not the heaps of videos by random individuals that you’ll find on TikTok. Even if that type of video is uploaded, youtube won’t recommend it if it’s from a new channel and doesn’t already clock a bazillion views. But TikTok can make a little video from a random person go from zero to everywhere very quickly.

TikTok in general is just better for finding “man on the street”/“what is it like to be there right now” reports from affected individuals. As well as for finding other own-voices type videos by individuals who aren’t media stars or news reporters or the hosts of big youtube channels, but who are the ones most directly in a situation.

Of course there is bias or outright misinformation on the platform too. It is best approached with caution and media literacy, but one need only look at U.S. media’s coverage of the current situation to see that is the case for mainstream news organizations too.

Lowbird,

They mean the tankies, of whom there is a large population on Lemmy. They indeed do not make sense.

They’re less of them on beehaw than elsewhere. Moreso to be found in lemmygrad and lemmy.ml.

Lowbird,

I won’t argue there aren’t some use cases for it, but it was massively oversold for what it actually is. It’s essentially just shared spreadsheets, but almost always described in a way that make it seem inscrutable to most people (further sinking any propect of mass-adoption) and cool to people who want to feel like they’re intelligent and in-the-know about tech. And it was pushed primarily for things it was unsuited for, like replacing regulated banks with FDIC insurance.

I think it has potential niche uses, though. Not every technology has to be widespread or applied to a wide variety of different things.

Tbh I think the same overselling/over-applying is happening to large language models/LLM “AI” now, though at least LLMs legitimately do have a lot of potential use cases. Just not as many as the everything people are trying to apply it to, and not as overpoweringly as many assume.

Tumblr sheds Post Plus subscriptions as the platform downsizes (www.theverge.com)

TL;DR: Tumblr is discontinuing its Post Plus feature, allowing creators to charge for content, starting December 1st. This decision follows a leaked memo about downsizing due to struggles in meeting usage and revenue targets. Post Plus, introduced in 2021, didn’t meet expectations, leading to its discontinuation. Existing Post...

Lowbird,

People keep saying it’s dead to them but the company’s own statements seem a lot more optimistic, imo. I think they’re just refocusing, and dumping a lot of the extraneous “let’s be an everything platform” features the userbase didn’t want anyway. Tumblr isn’t a giant cash so far as I know, but its userbase is sizable and stable, and recently grown since reddit and twitter took a tumble.

As a platform, there’s a lot to recommend it, I think. It’s one of those situations where the experience you get out of it depends on how you curate it. So like, you can go down fandom rabbitholes, or webcomic rabbitholes, or you can entirely ignore that and just subscribe to ocean science blogs, or to photography blogs, or so on. There can be drama in some parts, but that can also be entirely avoided in your feed if that’s your preference. I like it a lot better these days than I did like 5-10 years ago.

Lowbird,

Also, it’s the type of thing that makes me very worried about the fact that most of the algorithms used in things like police facial recognition software, recidivism calculation software, and suchlike are proprietary black boxes.

There are - guaranteed - biases in those tools, whether in their processors or in the unknown datasets they’re trained on, and neither police nor journalists can actually see the inner workings of the software to know what those biases are, to counterbalance them or to recognize if the software is so biased as to be useless.

Lowbird,

Do they not burn? Ever time I’ve thought of trying wooden utensils with a pan I’ve worried I’d burn them, so I’ve always thought they were just for serving or mixing.

Lowbird,

If you use cast iron, carbon steel, or stainless pans, buy a chainmail scrubber. They are SO GOOD.

Also steel wool ball scrubbies are nice for real cast iron disasters, but they can scratch or get gross if used as a first resort.

Nonstick is not worth it and cast iron is a million times easier to care for than people make it out to be. You can wash it with soap - it was only old school lye soaps that were an issue. You can let food soak in it some. If it rusts or the seasoning is damaged, that’s easy to fix. It’s a hunk of iron - don’t worry about babying it if that’s the thing keeping you from trying it!

I find it does sometimes have food stick more rhan with nonstick, depending on whether I’ve been doing the extra cast iron care things recently or not, but the ability to use steel utensils/spatulas/scrubbies compensates for that very well, imo.

Tldr try cast iron or carbon steel if you haven’t!

Lowbird,

I want an alternative to youtube as much as anyone, but I just don’t see how peertube can be viable in a world where child abuse materials and nazi propaganda exist and can be posted there.

I mean, at least as of when I last looked at peertube, it works sort of like torrenting does, yeah? But it doesn’t require you to whitelist the channels or instances you seed. Therefore: random people are going to end up seeding child abuse materials, revenge porn, hate screed videos, and so on, unknowingly and without intending to.

Lemmy already has had issues with child abuse materials because of federation and poor moderation tools. An image will get posted on one instance, then it automatically gets copied to other instances, and even if the original instances delete the image that doesn’t automatically delete it off other instances. Admins have to manually contact other admins, who then each have go in and painstakingly delete it manually, and that’s if all those different admins see and respond to the message. This is a problem that has been growing as lemmy gets bigger and more popular. And this is just with instance hosts - with peertube, you have individuals seeding/contributing to the hosting.

So it seems to me that peertube as it is involves a degree of moral and legal (since people can and have been deemed legally responsible for seeding torrents before) risk that is just not worth it a compared to the privacy-invading but blessedly safe option of youtube.

And even if individuals decided that risk was fine, advertisers absolutely won’t, which makes the platform a no-go for channels that depend on ads rather than patreon or merch for their livelihoods.

I’ll be happy if there’s a reliable way around this problem that doesn’t completely break the mechanism whereby peertube is supposed to work, but as of now I can’t see one.

Lowbird,

Privacy isn’t normally my primary concern but with VR I find it to be a bigger deal than I usually would, particularly because the headsets can hypothetically gather data about what you’re looking at exactly (especially once eye tracking becomes more of a thing - then it’ll be exact, and that’s kinda terrifying at that point).

And this is Meta/facebook, so. They’ll 100% do it and say they aren’t.

Lowbird,

I wonder if he’s actually just becoming a career scapegoat, taking the fall + a nice severance package(?) for decisions that were made by groups.

Lowbird,

And you seem to be suggesting that Israel should now invade - which will mean slaughtering and displacing and injuring innocents as well as Hamas members - because Hamas slaughtered innocents. People have and will die for things Hamas did that they had nothing to do with. This is a “Hamas did it, therefore it’s fine or even morally right for Israel to do it” argument.

Which is the sort of revenge-first argument that will inevitably just fuel the same argument going back the other direction, and around we all go again, and innocents keep dying the entire time.

There won’t be any stopping the cycle of violence while the root issues that caused it in the first place - the Nakba displacement and slaughter of Palestinians from their homeland, and Israel’s subsequent apartheid government and occupation - is acknowledged and addressed.

However and whenever it stops, there will be people who did evil who will go free. Just like there were low-level Nazis and people who helped put the Nazis in power who went consequence-free when WWII ended. It’s a legistic impossibility to deliver perfect justice to ever evildoer. If we make that the goal and try anyway, then all we get is more evil-doing, more revenge-seeking, more blood, and no real ultimate justice to show for it.

So, in my opinion, achieving peace, an end to systemic injustices, and compensating victims as much as possible (e.g. making sure the families of those lost on both sides have food, shelter, safety and education), should take predecence far above and beyond making sure everyone who deserves punishment is punished.

Especially since history’s previous examples of invading a country to stamp out a terrorist organization (cough cough Afghanistan…) didn’t exactly work to end the target organization, let alone the terrorism and violence and so on in yhe region as a whole.

Lowbird,

This might be a non-food-bearing shelf, like from one of those rolling plastic drawer sets? I think? It’s hard to tell, admittedly.

Lowbird,

I agree with the person who said it’s generally okay to use the dead name in this particular situation. Either by waiting until the friend you’re visiting uses the dead name or by bringing it up yourself with something like “Our friend formerly known as [dead name] is now [new name]”. Just try to do it in a private situation and not, like, in a situation where you’re in front of a bunch of the friend’s coworkers/friends who only know them by the new name.

Or, if you really want to avoid that anyway, you could refer to them in a roundabout way by a recognizable hobby or job or aspect of their appearance, like: “our friend the photographer is now [new name]” or “our friend with the yellow jacket is now [new name]” or similar.

I guarantee you it’d also be safe to ask (if you want to) the mutual friend themself how they’d prefer you do it. They’re very unlikely to be offended by a question like that, and it might even make them happy because your asking shows that you’re thinking about things like this and respecting their new pronouns/name even when they aren’t there.

Lowbird,

Any size group is good! Thanks for the suggestion - sounds good. I’ll give them a try :)

Lowbird,

Will do! Thank you for the suggestion :) I hadn’t heard of them before.

Lowbird,

I do like let’s plays like that too sometimes - I’ll give those channels a try. Thanks! Though I may have to wait til I finish with BG3 myself, which could be a while :p

I mentioned single player games specifically partly because I personally tend to like those games best, and I like to watch let’s plays after playing the game through myself first, then seeing how different people interact with the game differently. I love watching people discover a game I enjoyed (which for me means mostly single player titles) in kind of the same way I might enjoy showing the game to a friend.

And anecdotally, I tend to feel like groups playing a single player game together tend to talk more about the game in a deep-read kind of way, or to talk about their lives, whereas groups playing multiplayer games seem more likely to talk about whatever is currently happening in the game in that instant, or it becomes mostly them joking and trolling each other. This is just my personal experience though, so it could be a function of the particular let’s players and streamers I’m familiar with. I’m sure there are exceptions to this.

Lowbird,

Agreed. It is though an example of a game breaking out into the mainstream from a normally more niche genre (this particular type of dense, top-down, turn-based RPG). I’m curious to see if its subgenre will grow more popular in its wake, too, and by how much.

I find it particularly interesting that it became such a hit because its systems can be rather overwhelming for people who aren’t already familiar with 5e/tabletop rules. The sheer amount of rules to learn, the volume of specific items and text bubbles to read, the fact that some aspects of the interface aren’t really tutorialized well, etc.

Lowbird,

This article is about the “AI chips” Nvidia makes that undergird the major cloud services though, not the cloud services themselves. So I think it’s a hardware issue, more akin to a monopoly of GPU or CPU markets? Especially since Nvidia’s competitors in most spaces seem to be limited to AMD and sometimes Intel.

I can certainly imagine Nvidia having anticompetitive practices with their hardware and/or the software for their hardware, as they have done so many times with GPUs, though this particular article really doesn’t go into any detail.

Lowbird,

A lot of people in rural areas find themselves in situations like being 10 minutes from a walmart and an hour from any other option. So then anything besides walmart costs gas and time, on top of the product cost difference to begin with.

Nobody wants to drive extra after 8 hours of shitty minimum wage work and/or taking care of children.

Not like other grocery stores are any good for workers, either.

Lowbird,

RedReader still works. If you’re gonna look at reddit, I recommend it. You can even turn off all the interaction buttons, so it’s like a “look, don’t touch” museum.

I uninstalled it though. Reddit is in too terrible a state to bother with any longer, except sometimes as a search result, imo.

Edit: I’m speaking of android though. Idk if redreader has an ios version or not.

Lowbird,

This may add a longer pause than is wanted in some situations, like in the middle of what’s supposed to be a speech or a breathless ramble. I think sometimes uninterrupted paragraphs of dialogue are warranted.

But otherwise, yeah, action beats with the dialogue is a good tool to have in the box, and to use often.

It’s also handy for people who don’t want to write “said” all the time, since you can indicate who is speaking with an action beat followed immediately by otherwise unmarked dialogue, or by context alone (e.g. there are only two people in the convo and they’re taking turns.) It can add variety to your sentence structures.

Attempted example:

He sat back and sighed. “That’s quite a story. But I can’t say it’s an especially believable one.”

“Well,” she said, pulling a sheaf of papers out of her purse. “Have a look at this.”

He took the papers and shuffled through them slowly, frowning. Halfway through the pile, he paused. Reread something. He looked up and met her eyes.

She held his gaze, then nodded. “I think you can see why this might be a problem for both of us.”

It’s important that the action means something besides just the pause, imo. You can use actions like that to show something about the character or how they’re feeling - like, in OP’s example, a character leaning back and looking up like that would imply they are relaxed and casual. If you had them in a different situation or wanted to show a different personality, you might have them do a similar but different thing, like leaning forward and steepling their fingers, or fiddling with a knife (will there be stabbing?!), or taking a slow sip of water, or interrupting themself to make a comment about the food, or clearing their throat. It can be a way to multitask and show something about the character even while they’re having a conversation about something else. Whereas not thinking of it as anything but a pause in dialogue might lead to accidentally implying something about the charactee you don’t intend to, like making them appear relaxed when they’re supposed to be tense, or interested in a conversation when they’re supposed to be bored or distracted.

Lowbird,

I also wonder if they controlled for the fact younger people are online more often in the first place.

‘Call of Duty’ Doesn’t Just Depict Bad History—It’s Pro-War Propaganda (progressive.org)

I just started playing COD Black Ops Cold War because I got it through my PlayStation Plus subscription and wanted to try it out. I’ve previously played some others like Modern Warfare (1 and 2) and WWII. While it always felt a bit over the top and propaganda-ish, I really liked it for the blockbuster feeling and just turning...

Lowbird,

Oh no, someone is having a thought you’ve already had before. The world ends. 🙄

Lowbird,

Yeah. In a world where lawyers cost money, corporations can and will squash small artists without hesitation, with cease and desists, DMCA takedowns via youtube and similar platforms, and by threatening lawsuits they won’t even have to persue because most people can’t afford to fight it.

Even companies often can’t afford to fight bigger companies. Like, the makers of Kimba the White Lion had a very clear case that Disney plagiarized them in making The Lion King (if you go on youtube you can find shot-for-shot scene comparisons, it’s bonkers) but couldn’t afford to fight it at all. And that was a company - individual artists have no chance vs disney & etc.

Lowbird,

It’s kinda wild that Paint apparently made it all the way to 2023 without supporting layers.

Whole Foods argues it can ban BLM masks because the Supreme Court let a Christian business owner refuse same-sex couples (fortune.com)

Amazon.com’s Whole Foods Market doesn’t want to be forced to let workers wear “Black Lives Matter” masks and is pointing to the recent US Supreme Court ruling permitting a business owner to refuse services to same-sex couples to get federal regulators to back off....

Lowbird,

This feels very similar to me to businesses freaking out and trying to prevent their employees from wearing rainbow flag or pronoun pins. Or rainbow masks, for that matter.

I think employee uniform requirements should be just enough to make employees identifiable so they can do their jobs (e.g. answer customer questions about where the lettuce is or whatever). Just a mandatory hat or shirt is enough to do that. Beyond that, they’re humans. Let them be fucking humans.

Reddit Activity Plummeted After The Protests - by Adam Bumas (www.garbageday.email)

Last month marked the official end of the Reddit protests. Any subreddit that had changed its rules or gone dark — or forced its users to post exclusively about John Oliver — has now gone back to normal. On the surface, it seems like a complete victory for Reddit, but things aren’t so simple when a major element of that...

Lowbird,

I wonder how many people, like me, ended up drastically reducing their social media use altogether, at long last. I still pop in here now and again, but I’m not spending anything like the amount of time I spent on reddit.

Lowbird,

It’s like they looked at Wizards of the Coast’s fuck-up with the D&D license and decided to copy it. What the hell?

Does anyone know of any kid-friendly "horror" games out there for children ~7 years old?

My son loves the adrenaline rush of getting scared, particularly with jump scares, however, I have a lot of difficulty finding a game or show which is appropriate for him. He is prone to nightmares, and more adult-oriented “kid horror” is too much (Poppy’s Playtime, Cartoon Cat?) And others like Siren Head. His peers...

Lowbird,

If he’s a precocious reader, Sunless Sea is a horror game with a similar sort of theme. The content is much weirder and more horrifying than Dredge, but it’s 99.9% delivered via text, so the impact may feel more tolerable regardless.

But again it’s very text-heavy, possibly too much so depending on the kid. Probably too difficult, too.

Great game though.

Lowbird,

Maybe the Costume Quest games? They’re not scary at all, but Halloween themed.

Lowbird,

If it’s otherwise Chrome or bust, I’d honestly suggest considering Edge. It’s not like internet explorer used to be. It’s also not anywhere near as good for privacy as vivaldi or firefox, but it might be better than chrome - I don’t really know. But some people really like it now.

If you’re some who’s tried firefox in the past already, I’ll note it’s change quite a bit over the years. I used to dislike it but I like it now (on desktop).

What are some commonly known facts that are too bizarre for you to believe to be true?

For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some ‘organic element’ since I couldn’t accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.

Lowbird,

You’re close. Not the tilt of its axis, but its rotation around its axis (day) is slower than its rotation around the sun (year).

Earth’s axis is tilted at about 23 degrees, which causes the seasons. Venus, by contrast, is tilted only about 2.6 degrees, and thus basically doesn’t have seasons in a comparable way.

Earth’s axis does very slowly wobble around (precession). Over long enough time scales, this affects the seasons, and it means the North Star has not always been aligned with Earth’s North - once, North pointed at a patch of black sky and the North Star was just another star appearing to rotate around that arbitrary point.

I’d imagine Venus’s axis might also wobble at least somewhat, but I haven’t actually looked into this at all.

Thinking about this sent me down a rabbit hole because the day and year lengths are so extremely close to each other, and Venus rotates around its axis clockwise (unlike the other planets) while spinning around the sun clockwise, and its tilt is so slight… so as it spins around the sun, it rotates just enough to keep one side facing the sun almost all the time. I ended up googling whether it was tidally locked, like the moon is to Earth (such that we only ever see one side and it never changes) - and apparently it would be, but its atmosphere is so wild that it prevents tidal locking. But it almost is. It kinda has a dark side, and a light side, like the moon, but there’s just enough mismatch between the yearly rotation the axial rotation that the side facing the sun changes slowly. This is the first article I found.

From that article, it seems like the daylight hours you’d experience standing on the surface of Venus would be 117 Earth days of light, before it got dark again. So the sun would rise, and then you’d have about half a Venus year (aka about half a Venus day, too) of daylight before you’d see night again. And then it’d be night for the rest of the year. But still scorching hot because atmosphere.

Anyway this is blowing my mind a bit. I feel like I should have known this - I used to be obsessed with astronomy when I was little. Maybe I knew it once and forgot. I don’t know. But dayum. Planets are cool.

Lowbird,

Years upon years of being told this cannot make me not taste metal from stainless steel cups/canteens and forks, even brand new and/or freshly scrubbed to hell and back. I can’t use stainless steel tumblers because of this - even if I keep my tongue well away from it, and it’s the cleanest dish in the world, it makes the drink taste metallic. No amount of youtubers just insisting I don’t/can’t taste a thing can actually compete with a lifetime of experiencing this problem. And I have, multiple times, tried all the things they say to do to fix the “real” problem - but no. Steel tastes like steel, always.

Hypothesis: this is one of those things some people can taste and others can’t, like how there’s a whole group of “cilantro tastes like soap” people and everyone else is like ???

Lowbird,

Your link doesn’t seem to support your statement. Do you mean the part that advocates “turn on by default” tools to amplify factual information over disinformation? Because “turn on by default” implies an off switch.

It’s not possible for search engines to make zero decisions about what to prioritize in results, anyway. How would you prefer they sort the absurd quantity of results? Especially now SEO listicles try to drown everything else out?

Lowbird,

You can multi-select items and mark them all as wares at once, just only for one character at a time. I agree all wares should be pooled between characters though, or we should have the option at least.

Recommendations for short, dialogue-heavy/description-light audiobooks with lively narrators?

I have a lot of time to fill with audio, but audiobooks are challenging for me because I have trouble paying attention consistently enough and processing physical descriptions fast enough to keep up with the narrator. I end up losing my place or having to rewind a lot. Slowing down playback doesn’t help/introduces other...

Lowbird,

Hey, I realize this is aaaages after you replied (sorry), but I did eventually dig up that fan-read The Hobbit version and holy crap is it ever something. I’m blown away by it. Thank you!

I’m going to give the Thrawn trilogy a go soon via audiobook, too. :)

Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun?

Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.

Lowbird,

Trying to get into those as a newbie is miserable dor all those reasons and also because, unless maybe if you get in right when the game first comes out, your competitors will be far more comfortable with the mechanics and have memorized the maps and so on. It’s especially bad if you’re a newbie to multiplayer shooters a whole, even if you’re good at single player shooters. It becomes and exercise in: spawn, die, respawn, die… Super frustrating to begin with. And then people insult you. Noooot something I find worth bothering with for a thing that’s supposed to be enjoyable in my free time.

Why do I only see 19 posts in this community?

Eternity says that there are 569 posts in this community. When I access it through my sh.itjust.works account I see so much more posts (only old ones though). I don’t even see the admin’s post! I also see much less comments on those 19 posts than how many Eternity is saying there are. Just in general, I feel like I see so...

Lowbird,

THANK YOU. I thought lemmy had just lost a shitload of users! I’ve been missing so many posts and I had no idea. >.<

For others who use apps: check your profile settings on the website, not only in your app of choice.

Lowbird,

If you are willing to venture into fanfiction, there are some tags on archiveofourown.org - like “humans are space orcs”, " earth is a deathworld", “earth is space australia” - for fics that feature overpowered humans relative to the aliens. Most of these are so AU that you don’t need any knowledge of the ostensible source material. The trope seems popular particularly with My Hero Academia and Minecraft youtuber fandoms, for whatever reason.

Generally, the scifi worldbuilding is usually really light, including names “made alien” by adding apostrophes and that kind of thing - but they scratch and itch that almost nothing else does. And they’re free! So maybe worth a try at least. Just make sure to filter by kudos.

Lowbird,

The Young Wizards series by Diane Duane if middle grade is okay.

Spellwright also seems promising but I haven’t finished it myself.

Lowbird, (edited )

Mother of Learning by Nobody103 - free webnovel, complete now I think. Wizard student gets stuck in a time loop and uses this opportunity to become OP and solve the mystery.

Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series, if middle grade is okay.

I second Earthsea.

Spellwright seems like it might be good but I haven’t got far in it yet.

The Black Magician trilogy by Trudi Canavan. It’s been a long time since I read this, but Canavan is one of those authors who’s popular and has a lot of books out but is weirdly never mentioned online.

Also try L.E. Modesitt Jr. If you haven’t. Either the order mage series, or Imager maybe. Most anything by him will have a lot of studying. They’re very good if you like his specific flavor of writing.

Edit: Vita Nostra being described as just “magic school” is very funny to me, although I do see where it comes from lol.

Edit 2: I remember the Charlie Bone books being good, but again those are middle grade and it’s been ages since I read them. No idea if they hold up.

Lowbird,

I recommend Ken Liu’s translated Chinese scifi short story anthologies, which include some stori3s by Liu Cixin. The books are called “Invisible Planets” and “Broken Stars”.

Lowbird,

Primarily, library receipts!

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