Whatcha reading redux.

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Greg
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Re: Whatcha reading redux.

Post by Greg »

Weetabix wrote:
Greg wrote:;) Different David. Weber is very different from Drake, though sometimes the fan bases overlap.
OK. I'm done trying to do authors from memory when I'm reading electronically. :lol:
Heh. I'm terrible with names in general, but some authors I know well.
I sympathize. I greatly enjoyed the series as a whole, but I also skipped giant chunks of 2 of the books.
The skipping doesn't seem to be hurting me anywhere so far.
I skipped disturbingly large parts of the two middle books. I enjoyed the series quite a lot. The two may be related, but I still feel a little guilty for not reading them 'the right way'. :lol:
Maybe we're just jaded, but your villainy is not particularly impressive. -Ennesby

If you know what you're doing, you're not learning anything. -Unknown
Sanity is the process by which you continually adjust your beliefs so they are predictively sound. -esr
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evan price
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Re: Whatcha reading redux.

Post by evan price »

Greg wrote:
Weetabix wrote:David Drake and Tom Kratman's "March to the (destination)" series. First was good. Good character development. Decent story. The second is bogging down in wearisome technical hypothesizing.

"The Mardukans we want to help can cast a fair arquebus but they can't ream the jib sails unless we build a particle accelerator from these old timbers and that barrel hoop."

I'd like to see how Prince Roger turns out before I die. I've begun to skip long passages looking for the story. Sigh.
Uh, no. That series is by John Ringo and David Weber.

Weber is well known for having a bit of a self-indulgent fascination with the nuts-and-bolts details of technology, even fictional technology. His Honorverse books have a self-contained internally-consistent series of technologies (that develop over time!) w.r.t which some of his more 'on the spectrum' fans have developed an almost Rabbinical tradition of textural scholarship, and they obsessively argue over the most minor (fictional) technical points.

I find that aspect of Weber's writing (and his fans) rather tiresome, but it seems to entertain him and sell books, so what do I know?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/sho ... p?t=635193
How David Weber orders a pizza

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Inwardly, Jason breathed a sigh of relief. Tipping was the custom of paying extra -- usually a percentage of the price paid for goods and services rendered -- as a reward for outstanding service on the part of the service provider. At least, this was how the custom had gotten started. In practice, the custom had spread to the point where now a tip was expected even if merely average-quality service was provided. A man who transported a freshly-made pizza from the production facility to the Customer's residence could usually count on receiving 15 percent of the pizza's price as free money he could keep for himself, in addition to the salary paid him by his employer. As a result, employers typically took advantage of this situation and set their deliverers' salaries artificially low. Since, technically, there was no legal requirement for the Customer to pay the tip, Customers who had fallen on hard economic times had been known to simply not pay it, leaving the delivery man barely able to subsist on the paltry wages his employer provided. Jason knew the co-worker who was assigned to delivery duty tonight, Pizza Delivery Person Third Class Alonzo Gomez, and had seen the despondent look on his face more than once when Alonzo had returned after a delivery without a tip in his pocket. But this customer had just given his assurance that he would be tipping, thereby relieving Jason of the worries he harbored for his co-worker and comrade.
RTWT
Last edited by evan price on Tue Feb 24, 2015 7:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
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SoupOrMan
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Re: Whatcha reading redux.

Post by SoupOrMan »

Langenator wrote:I just finished The Forgotten Man by Amity Schlaes. That also completed my project to finish reading all of the books I had started reading but not finished.
How is that? I've wanted to pick it up for nigh onto ten years now.

I'm in the process of finishing Undaunted Courage now. The biggest takeaway I have so far from the book is this: don't have sex with any of the Plains Indians in the 19th century. They have syphilis. The second biggest takeaway I have is don't rely on unproven gear when going into the unknown.
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Weetabix
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Re: Whatcha reading redux.

Post by Weetabix »

evan price wrote:RTWT
I couldn't.

As I began to mentally decipher the letters on the screen presented to me via the technology brought to me by the great hero AlGore, known colloquially as the internet, a heavy but familiar feeling of ennui began to drape over me like a thick coating of Mardukan slime. This feeling, one I had experienced before when wading through the tedium of a self-indulgent author who had not even the merest semblance of courtesy for the attention span common to even the most attentive reader, reminded me all too clearly of the painfully recent, though not-yet-complete experience of March to the Sea. As my mind appreciated the resolution of my screen, I began to review the development of the visual viewing component on my computer from the venerable cathode ray tube, with its electron guns and fluorescent screen in a vacuum, it occurred to me that I could recreate one of those with my current technology. I stepped out to the beach for some sand....

ugh :roll:
Note to self: start reading sig lines. They're actually quite amusing. :D
Langenator
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Re: Whatcha reading redux.

Post by Langenator »

SoupOrMan wrote:
Langenator wrote:I just finished The Forgotten Man by Amity Schlaes. That also completed my project to finish reading all of the books I had started reading but not finished.
How is that? I've wanted to pick it up for nigh onto ten years now.
It's well written and well researched, but is not, strictly speaking, an academic history. It's somewhere in between a popular style and academic. It's another (third that I've noticed, anyway) in the vein of re-looking the New Deal and stripping away a lot of the mythologizing of FDR. That said, it's not nearly as straight-up accusatory as, for example, New Deal or Raw Deal.

One thing that I did have a hard time with is that, in some parts, it's kind of the history book version of watching a horror movie: you're inwardly yelling at the protagonist "Don't do that!" "Don't try to keep farm prices/wages/etc up! Don't enact a big tarriff! You're just making things worse!"
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Greg
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Re: Whatcha reading redux.

Post by Greg »

Weetabix wrote:
evan price wrote:RTWT
I couldn't.

As I began to mentally decipher the letters on the screen presented to me via the technology brought to me by the great hero AlGore, known colloquially as the internet, a heavy but familiar feeling of ennui began to drape over me like a thick coating of Mardukan slime. This feeling, one I had experienced before when wading through the tedium of a self-indulgent author who had not even the merest semblance of courtesy for the attention span common to even the most attentive reader, reminded me all too clearly of the painfully recent, though not-yet-complete experience of March to the Sea. As my mind appreciated the resolution of my screen, I began to review the development of the visual viewing component on my computer from the venerable cathode ray tube, with its electron guns and fluorescent screen in a vacuum, it occurred to me that I could recreate one of those with my current technology. I stepped out to the beach for some sand....

ugh :roll:
Some people eat that shit up. Go to the 'Honorverse' or 'BuShips' subsections of Baen's Bar. And be afraid.
Maybe we're just jaded, but your villainy is not particularly impressive. -Ennesby

If you know what you're doing, you're not learning anything. -Unknown
Sanity is the process by which you continually adjust your beliefs so they are predictively sound. -esr
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MiddleAgedKen
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Re: Whatcha reading redux.

Post by MiddleAgedKen »

How David Weber orders a pizza

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Inwardly, Jason breathed a sigh of relief. Tipping was the custom of paying extra -- usually a percentage of the price paid for goods and services rendered -- as a reward for outstanding service on the part of the service provider. At least, this was how the custom had gotten started. In practice, the custom had spread to the point where now a tip was expected even if merely average-quality service was provided. A man who transported a freshly-made pizza from the production facility to the Customer's residence could usually count on receiving 15 percent of the pizza's price as free money he could keep for himself, in addition to the salary paid him by his employer. As a result, employers typically took advantage of this situation and set their deliverers' salaries artificially low. Since, technically, there was no legal requirement for the Customer to pay the tip, Customers who had fallen on hard economic times had been known to simply not pay it, leaving the delivery man barely able to subsist on the paltry wages his employer provided. Jason knew the co-worker who was assigned to delivery duty tonight, Pizza Delivery Person Third Class Alonzo Gomez, and had seen the despondent look on his face more than once when Alonzo had returned after a delivery without a tip in his pocket. But this customer had just given his assurance that he would be tipping, thereby relieving Jason of the worries he harbored for his co-worker and comrade.
RTWT[/quote]

It's Weber for extraneous detail, but Flint for economics. :)
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First Shirt
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Re: Whatcha reading redux.

Post by First Shirt »

Doing my annual re-reading of Starship Troopers.
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JAG2955
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Re: Whatcha reading redux.

Post by JAG2955 »

During my long drive to Texas, I was listening to a podcast called Hardcore History, by Dan Carlin. I had five episodes, each about 3-4 hours in length called "Blueprint for the Apocalypse", which was all about WWI. Extremely well done. Just have one more episode to go. I hope that he has lots more out before my next trip to Houston.
Greg
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Re: Whatcha reading redux.

Post by Greg »

I finished Monster Hunter Nemesis a few days ago. I waited until it came out in paperback.

Beginning a re-read of Goodspeed's The German Wars.
Maybe we're just jaded, but your villainy is not particularly impressive. -Ennesby

If you know what you're doing, you're not learning anything. -Unknown
Sanity is the process by which you continually adjust your beliefs so they are predictively sound. -esr
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