Didn't get as much reading in as I thought I would, so I'm still on The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. So far I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, but it doesn't really feel like my cup of tea.

I wonder: how many water molecules I've drank were Hitler's piss once?

Ah, Sierra. I played Return to Krondor back in the day, and it's a great game. Unfortunately, and if I remember correctly, the installer was kind of bugged. See, when you installed the game, it created a Sierra folder in your desired destination folder. But when you uninstalled it, it removed everything in the folder that contained the Sierra folder. I luckily installed it in my Games folder and only lost some games in the process. If you installed the game in to the root of you C drive and then uninstalled it... Well, you were in for a fun evening.

Thanks Sierra. I'm glad you're dead.

I struggle to see the point. I think reading is fundamentally an effort to find human connection and understanding. I read to look at things from someone else's point of view, and in that I gain insight in to myself and fellow humans. LLMs have no understanding, they are not human, they are not sentient. They can only collate what actual humans have said, with no real thought behind the sentences they produce. They are just probabilistic algorithms. I don't want to hear what they have to say, because they are very literally meaningless.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd just really rather read what actual humans have to say. All art is about human connection.

This is not my call of course, but I'd at least like to know which users are bots so I can ignore them.

I can see that. Despite the slow pacing of the books, the last fight felt rushed. But more than that, it's possible such a metaphysical fight can never truly be expressed in words; we don't have the language for it. It will by necessity feel underwhelming, since the writing has to be done from a human perspective for us to understand and relate to it. As writers and readers we are imprisoned by our humanity and very limited perspective. This is why tackling such huge cosmic issues is difficult to do in a truly satisfying manner. Everything always sounds too human and not grand enough, because that is what we have to anchor it to. Like, say, I like reading sci-fi books about truly alien intelligences, but those are always creations of human minds, playing with human tropes. In the end, writing something outside human experience is impossible for us, lest what is written becomes entirely unintelligible.

I may be missing the mark here, but sometimes I have thoughts and they take flight. I just wanted to say that I can understand expecting more, even if I personally enjoyed the ending well enough.

I have The Passion by Jeanette Winterson and Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell set aside to read next.

I'm guessing this might be a conflict with packman repos. Maybe look into removing packman as a repository, if you have it enabled? I'm pretty sure I read packman might be shutting down anyway.

No matter how I look at it, this will only hurt their user base. Where are they going to get new users? I'm no tech billionaire, but I struggle to see how this benefits the site in the long term. Even if they revert later, the damage will already be done and the site will lose any relevance it once may have had.

I'm not interested in Reddit per se, just curious why they'd think this is a good idea.

I finished Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time today, a bit shy of two years after I started it. Well, I actually started the series in the nineties, but this time I managed to finish it.

OP asked me for my opinion on the ending, but at this point I'm sort of unsure myself. It's such a long series with so many concepts and characters that it's hard to summarize my thoughts in writing. I don't have that Talent. I do find myself satisfied with how the series ended, though. There's some Christian philosophy woven in to the conclusion that I don't really agree with, but it makes sense and works within the world the story takes place in. Brandon Sanderson was a great choice for writing the final books.

Yes, it is a good series, but one I can't really recommend to most people, and it frustrated me at many points. Heck, I think half the books should have been slashed. Don't have your spouse for an editor I suppose.

I'm glad it's done.

I also read Guy Delisle's comic book Hostage. It's the true story of a kidnapped NGO administrator who was kidnapped in 1997 in the Caucasus. Very interesting read and a daring story to adapt to a comic book, since it's mostly one man alone hand cuffed to a radiator. It must have been a harrowing experience for the hostage though.

Next up I think I'll read Остров Сахалин by Eduard Verkin. It's a sci-fi book I picked up from the library.

Such an amazing performance. We will see him in a little while, in a place where no shadows fall.

He was amazing as Alfred Bester. Sleep well, Walter.

Holding big books is uncomfortable for my hands. So, painfully I guess.

Just remember: You are under no obligation to finish a book. Take it a chapter at a time.

Monte Cristo is pretty good, but it really didn't have to be that long.