I see this completely.

I'm in SC, and while we always vote in every election, I walked into the polling place yesterday feeling like I was doing my part, but that it wouldn't have any effect in SC.

Was very happy to wake up wrong this morning.

I'm partial to the Mars series, as they were my first, but they are a bit dated (in the same way that older science fiction generally is), and are pretty big.

Of the ones I've read / listened to recently 2312 and Aurora are both very future space based, and have lots of advanced tech involved, while New York 2140 is based in NYC and focuses way more on the political and environmental changes after 50' of sea level rise.

I enjoyed all 3 quite a bit, so it's hard to say, but Aurora and NY 2140 are really stand alone reads, while 2312 shares a lot of the themes, tech, and events of the Mars series (but it's not set in the exact same timeline, so you could read it without reading Mars).

Looks like it's still using rice flower, so it will still contain some rice.

Finished New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson last week, and haven't had a chance to start something new.

Have Red Moon by KSR ready to go, but thinking about taking a break (I've read or listened to 3 of his in the last year) and starting Altered Carbon or Leviathan Wakes instead.

Both of these series are on my list, and I was thinking about Altered Carbon next.

I watched the first season of Altered Carbon a long time ago, and liked the premise. I haven't seen the Expanse yet, so figured I might read them before watching the show.

Pretty sure it is as well. Just looks like it wasn't hot enough.

This is a recipe that I have saved from one of the now defunct myrecipe publications. It's no longer available on the web due to the closure / sale of the company.

Red Lentil Soup

Ingredients

1 1/2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 onion, cut into 1/4-inch dice

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 large celery rib, cut into 1/4-inch dice

1 large carrot, cut into 1/4-inch dice

1 (6 ounces) baking potato, peeled and cut into 1-inch dice

1 (8 ounces) rounded cup red lentils

1 1/2 quarts vegetable stock or broth

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/4 teaspoon cayenne

2 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Preparation Steps

In a large saucepan, heat the oil. Add the onion and garlic and cook over moderately high heat until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add the celery and carrot and cook over moderate heat for 5 minutes. Add the potato, lentils and stock; bring to a boil. Cover and simmer until the vegetables are very tender, 40 minutes. Puree the soup in batches and return it to the saucepan. Add the cumin, cayenne and lemon juice and season with salt and pepper. Ladle the soup into bowls and serve.

Also, sorry about the freedumb units.

There are calls we could make to query storage availability, but we can't move forward at this particular point without loading the settings, so we need to wait.

We run on a limited number of devices, and know which manufacturers / devices have slow startups, so it's a little less resource intensive to just wait a few ms on those devices than to continually query storage, or handle the missing storage exceptions in a loop (invoking error handlers is generally pretty expensive, and we don't want to log this particular issue).

This is usually at a device reboot in the middle of the night when no one is working, so even a few seconds at startup isn't the end of the world.

Most couldn't care less, and people like my dad has a rudimentary understanding of how the internet works anyway.

And the issue the US is having with data centers isn't generally with infrastructure like hosting ones, but the mass build out of hyperscale AI data centers with no regard to available power, water, etc.

We have some of this, but it's usually to ensure that some system or hardware is available.

We're a kiosk app on android so get started automatically on boot, and sometimes storage isn't available so we have to delay before loading our config or we get errors.

I'm sure it happens, but in 25 years I've never had a client complain about anything being too fast.

Yea.. my super maga dad is all pissed off about data centers. Don't think it would get him to vote dem, but it did sway his primary vote towards an anti DC candidate.