derfunkatron

Thanks for the insight and perspective! Motorsports are admittedly not my thing, but I’m pretty sure older dudes buying motorcycles in middle age or retirement is far from a recent trend; it’s a pretty well known stereotype. Hell, Wild Hogs is almost 20 years old at this point. Not that that invalidates what you said about the dangers they pose learning to ride so late.

I’ve seen a lot of younger people in my region riding e-scooters with a seat attachment or electric mopeds.

I have a neighbor that might be entering a mid-life and/or identity crisis phase. A few months back he shows up with a hog and starts tinkering with it in the yard. Pretty soon he has a bunch of motorcycle friends who start showing up to ride and off they go, loudly farting down the street on their bikes.

I’m mostly ambivalent about the entire thing except that he tends to work a late shift, so he doesn’t get started with his hobby riding until 7 or 8 at night. Not late enough to really complain about but also late enough that it can be disruptive. He’s a okay dude and we’ve civilly chatted about the noise before, but I don’t think he thinks his motorcycle counts as noise. I hope he finds what he’s looking for out on the open road.

Good lord, the funniest thing I remember from college German was how easy it was to distract Frau Professorin from her lecture by just mentioning bread.

I’ll take “solutions to non-existent problems” for $500.

I don’t have a snarky term at the ready, but nightmare shades is what comes to mind.

I distrust these companies and the entire ethos surrounding wearable tech so much that I can’t help but imagine that products like AI (or XR) glasses are just the precursor to something even more awful like implantable tech or other cyberpunk-styled body-mods. I wore a smart watch for a while and all it did was teach me to read my texts twice and spam me with notifications. Once I disabled the move/hydrate prompts and the text and email notifications, it became quite useless on its own. With glasses, it will just become another distraction and data harvester.

More than one Silicon Valley tech dude has been outed as a techno-feudalist singularity-obsessed trans-humanist who read speculative sci-fi and came away with the worst possible interpretation. I can’t imagine any way to positively frame these things.

Having dealt with HomeDepot contractors before, the true cost of replacing the door is:

Door + installation + re-installation by some who knows what the fuck they’re doing + materials

Unfriendly? Fuck you. We’re wicked nice.

First time I visited Boston, I was lost somewhere in downtown and walking in circles. Must have passed a postman one too many times because he just briskly walks up to me and, gesturing with a handful of mail, abruptly asks, “whadaya, fuckin lost?”

He then proceeded to give me very clear and accurate directions to where I was going.

No worries and no judgement. I just happen to know how to interpret and decipher the colophon or copyright page.

The name on the spine says Fawcett because that’s the imprint or trade name; you can think of it like a brand. Ballantine bought out Fawcett and chose to keep the Fawcett and Gold Medal Books brands as an imprint for a while (probably because they had a large catalog by that point). Ballantine is the publisher, Fawcett is the imprint, and Random House is the parent company (and all of it is owned by Penguin now).

It isn’t “based on” the first printing or, at least, that’s only partially correct. Editions usually get updated with new formatting, fonts, cover art, commentary, and possibly light editorial revisions for typos or printing mistakes (or in this case introducing printing errors). It’s the same intellectual work, it’s just been rereleased. I don’t think there are any other pre-Ballantine Fawcett editions because they were acquired pretty soon after this particular title was published. In some of my browsing for this title I saw that it was also published by the New English Library company in 1981 in the UK.

The first edition of this from Fawcett is out there, but it’s oddly expensive for a paperback: https://www.lwcurrey.com/pages/books/169068/robert-a-heinlein/the-number-of-the-beast

The hardcover is even more pricey: https://www.alcuinbooks.com/pages/books/024016/robert-a-heinlein/the-number-of-the-beast

The edition information usually doesn’t matter unless you're a bookseller or a cataloger or a nerd. One thing is usually true: first editions usually don’t say they are first editions; they just have a copyright date.

This is a 1982 Ballantine first edition, but not a “real” first edition.

Fawcett and its gold medal books series were acquired by Ballantine in 1982. Fawcett was the original publisher in 1980.

The copyright is 1980. The dates specifying the edition are not copyright dates but rather publication dates. The copyright date didn’t change when Ballantine started printing Fawcett titles. They are just doing their due diligence to let you know which edition you have in your hands.

The Star Wars knockoffs between ANH and ESB are insanely bad. Half of those movies are basically over-greebled models and cheap special effects without much plot or substance. The other half are just formulaic sword and sorcery 80s movies with a spaceship or lightsaber thrown in.

Special effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story. People have a tendency to confuse them as an end to themselves. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing. -George Lucas

Of course, George forgot his own advice later on.

The model is old, but direct-to-video sequels were usually always awful. There are 14 Land Before Time movies. 14. Only the first one got a theatrical release.

You say that and… https://slrpnk.net/post/30233337

Well, when I was a kid my favorite things where always electronics, TV, radio, music, so if I had children I would never deprive my children of electronics, no matter what the “experts” say.

Not electronics, screens. My kid has lots of music and electronic toys, just not a tablet or smartphone to play with independently (yet). And it's not about deprivation, it's about moderation. The screen moratorium is mostly for children under age 3 or 4 as very young children are pure hedonists and they lack emotional regulation and impulse control.

Well, I have to disagree on this one, if I’m dealing with complicated texts where I need to quickly refer to multiple sections then nothing beats being able to crtl + f. Also scrolling is much faster than turning pages. But I guess it can be a personal thing.

I concede that this heavily determined by personal flow and I even noted that point in my original comment. I think both our perspectives on this are valid, but I just wanted to clarify that by "complicated texts," I mean texts where you need to have immediate or quick access to jump back and forth between sections e.g. scholarly editions or books like House of Leaves that are literally "complex text."

Yes you can lend a book from a library, but in my experience libraries never have anything worth reading...

This may be determined by the libraries that you have access to, but where I live I can get almost any in print book from my library. Granted, I can't get it immediately, but through inter-library loan, I get a lot of books that aren't in my local libraries' collections that I would otherwise have to purchase. The main thing is to have a reading queue and place requests in advance which, I admit, is its own skill. My neighborhood is also full of the little free libraries that the original thread is in reference to, which have been a great source of free books (I also give away books to the free libraries, too).

I think you are also greatly exaggerating the technical skills needed to download a book, sometimes even just searching “book name pdf download” is enough to download a book, which can be done on a smartphone that most people already own.

I'm not exaggerating at all. Sure, it is easy at face value, but it really does assume a lot of preexisting digital literacy and technical knowledge. We might be reaching a point where enough people have these skills from youth, but older generations are still lacking a lot basic tech literacy.

...buying a physical book online or lending it from a library also means the book is registered to the reader’s name electronically, in this case tied to the user’s real name and payment details.

Okay, so two things here:

1. I'm not talking about privacy regarding purchasing goods online (good point, but that's a different privacy concern), I'm talking about the privacy ecosystem on the device itself e.g. bloatware infested tablets, proprietary walled-garden e-readers, and apps that exist to collect data and serve ads.
2. All libraries in the United States, at least for now, are very protective of patron data. Some libraries even regularly purge the check-out history. Bullet three of the America Library Association's code of professional ethics even states: "We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted." It's baked into the modern library profession to protect the patron's privacy. I haven't heard of any entity or group hacking (or subpoenaing) public libraries for check-out history other than the Federal government.

Now I actually favor reading on a screen...

You might be a monster. 😂

It's widely accepted among pediatricians and psychologists that you should delay introducing your kids to screens as long as possible. We started reading to our kid when they were a newborn and there is no way in hell that I would be blasting them with a tablet screen (children's ebooks tend to be pdfs because of all the graphics, which also rules out using e-ink readers). Reading to a child is also a pre-bedtime activity in low light where stimuli should be reduced; a tablet or e-reader is far from ideal here.

A lot of children's books in the 0-4 range are also tactile, include lift-the-flaps, have mirrors or noisemakers, and are safe to chew on. The other thing is that in order to teach independence, the kid needs to be able to access and choose books on their own which is something a physical books and a shelf is really good at and an e-reader is really bad at.

One may argue that physical books are expensive, impractical, or whatever, but there are several organizations that send free books monthly to kids (we are subscribed to two of them). Public libraries are really good for exposing kids to books that don't have to be purchased as well as teaching additional skills like:

• patience (can't have a book another kid has, or have to wait until we can go to the library),
• spatial awareness (where the library is, where the children's shelves are), and
• temporary possession of objects (the books have to be returned).

And to your earlier point about physical books being "a novelty of the past," I would counter by saying that physical books and ebooks are not a binary pair and using them to read is not an exclusive or (the exception being children's books).

• Textbooks are great candidates for ebook versions because of their intended use and unintended bulk; there are also enhancements to ebooks that work really well for textbooks and manuals, like search/find.
• Fast-paced novels, especially those in a series, are great candidates for ebooks particularly when the reader knows they will consume multiple books quickly.
• Physical books are preferable when dealing with images or large formats. I can't imagine reading a coffee-table book or art book is as effective on e-reader.
• Physical books are also better options for complicated texts, especially ones that the reader needs to quickly refer to multiple sections of text while reading e.g. indices, appendices, or that chapter where a character is first introduced. I know there's digital analogues, but they don't work for everyone.
• E-books make sense when you want to have hundreds or thousands of books immediately on hand, or don't want to clutter a dwelling with bookshelves.
• Physical books are great for acquiring out-of-print titles. Sure, someone may have created a decent pdf or epub of it, but there are texts that are easier to find used physical copies than a digital version.
• In a complete reversal of what I just wrote, e-books are great for finding out-of-print titles that are prohibitively expensive to acquire. Thanks to that random internet user who created that spectacular pdf.
• Digital versions of manga or comics make a lot of sense, especially when considering the amount of space those collected items require.

At the end of the day, the medium you use to read is a preference and I am a strong advocate for audiobooks, ebooks, and physical books being simultaneously available. What I am not an advocate for, is the dismissal of the print on physical media as if it is not one of the most stable and easily accessible methods for communication. No matter how you argue it, at the end of the day, ebooks and audiobooks still require mediation and energy. Those formats also impose technical and financial barriers to access (you may be savvy enough to access thousands of books for free and maintain your own e-reader that respects your privacy, but the majority of people to whom e-books are marketed to cannot). I can lend or give away a physical book to anyone I meet and they can immediately read it; the same cannot be said for digitally reformatted texts.