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blog/other-stuff.md
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title: Other things you may like
description: A nonexhaustive list of... content/media... which I like and which you may also be interested in as a visitor of my site.
created: 11/06/2020
updated: 11/05/2024
updated: 15/07/2024
slug: otherstuff
---
I'm excluding music from this because music preferences seem to be even more varied between the people I interact with than other stuff.
@ -32,11 +32,11 @@ Obviously this is just stuff *I* like; you might not like it, which isn't really
* [Message in a Bottle](https://www.fimfiction.net/story/368986/message-in-a-bottle) - vaguely similar, I think. I forgot what actually happens in it.
* [Good Omens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens) by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, a "comedy about the birth of the son of Satan and the coming of the End Times" as Wikipedia puts it. You might think it would be hard to make a comedy out of it, but they manage very well.
* [The Expanse](https://www.goodreads.com/series/56399-the-expanse) by James S. A. Corey, a near-future-ish scifi series in space which actually bothers with some level of realism. Also a TV series now if you prefer those.
* [Three Parts Dead](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13539191-three-parts-dead) by Max Gladstone, a very neat fantasy book (part of the "Craft Sequence"; I have also read "Two Serpents Rise" now) with a fairly modern-but-different world built on "Craft" (essentially, human emulations of the gods' powers: this caused some conflict in the backstory) and applied theology.
* [Three Parts Dead](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13539191-three-parts-dead) by Max Gladstone, a very neat fantasy book (part of the "Craft Sequence"; I have also read "Two Serpents Rise" now) with a fairly modern-but-different world built on "Craftsperson" battle-lawyers and deities. Good characterization.
* [We Are Legion (We Are Bob)](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32109569-we-are-legion-we-are-bob) by Dennis E. Taylor, a story of von Neumann probes managed by uploaded human intelligences.
* [IO.SYS](https://www.datapacrat.com/IO.SYS.html) is a short story with a somewhat similar concept but significantly darker.
* [The Combat Codes](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27790093-the-combat-codes) by Alexander Darwin. Vaguely like Ender's Game but hand-to-hand combat and an exotic-feeling sort of science fantasy world. I think they're doing a rerelease with edited versions ~~soon~~ now, so it might be hard to find.
* [Schlock Mercenary](https://www.schlockmercenary.com/), a *very* long-running space opera webcomic. It's been running for something like 20 years, and the art and such improve over time. Now finished (for now).
* [Schlock Mercenary](https://www.schlockmercenary.com/), a very long-running space opera webcomic which explores a lot of cool ideas. It's been running for something like 20 years, and the art and such improve over time. Now finished (for now).
* [Freefall](http://freefall.purrsia.com/), a hard-science-fiction webcomic.
* [Mage Errant](https://www.goodreads.com/series/252085-mage-errant) - a moderately-long-by-now fantasy series with a very vibrant world, and which actually considers the geopolitical implications of there being beings around ("Great Powers") able to act as one-man armies. Now complete ~~(I haven't read the last two books though)~~ though I do not like the last book as much in some ways.
* [Void Star](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29939057-void-star) - somewhat weird and good. The prose is very... poetic is probably the best word (it contains phrases like "isoclines of commitment and dread", "concentric and innumerable" and "high empyrean")... which I enjoyed, but it is polarizing. The setting seems like a generally reasonable extrapolation of a bunch of ongoing trends into the future, although it's unclear exactly *when* it is (some of the book implies 2150 or so, but this seems implausible). Its most interesting characteristic is that it absolutely does not tell you what's going on ever: an interview I read said it was written out of order, and that makes sense (another fun quirk of it is that the chapters are generally very short). I think I know most of what happens now, but it has taken a while.
@ -44,12 +44,12 @@ Obviously this is just stuff *I* like; you might not like it, which isn't really
* [Endeavour](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22701594-endeavour) and the sequel, Erebus, are apparently science fiction I liked. I don't actually remember much about them, but empirically my fiction preferences are pretty consistent across time.
* [12 Miles Below](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/42367/12-miles-below/) - ongoing webserial (I am not fully caught up or close to it yet) with intelligent and well-written characters. It has more grammar/spelling errors than I would like (I would like none) but most people care about this less than me.
* [Branches on the Tree of Time](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9658524/1/Branches-on-the-Tree-of-Time) - Terminator fanfiction which manages to make Terminator make sense (somewhat).
* [The Daily Grind](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/15925/the-daily-grind) - ongoing (I think? I got distracted from following it at some point and it's now really very long) webserial about relentlessly and realistically exploiting a dungeon in the modern world.
* [The Daily Grind](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/15925/the-daily-grind) - ongoing (I think? I got distracted from following it at some point and it's now really very long) webserial about relentlessly and realistically exploring and exploiting a dungeon in the modern world.
* [CORDYCEPS: Too clever for their own good](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6178036/chapters/14154868) - good short horror/mystery; I will not spoil it further.
* [Schild's Ladder](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156780.Schild_s_Ladder) - essentially just Greg Egan showing off cool physics ideas, but I quite like that. Egan also manages to pull off an actually-futuristic future society and world.
* Egan has short story anthologies which I have also read and recommend.
* [Stories of Your Life and Others](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223380.Stories_of_Your_Life_and_Others) - just very good short stories. Chiang has written a sequel, [Exhalation](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41160292-exhalation), which I also entirely recommend.
* He also write [Arrival](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32200035-arrival). I like this but not the movie, since the movie's scriptwriters clearly did not understand what was going on.
* He also write [Arrival](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32200035-arrival). I like this but not (as much) the movie, since the movie's scriptwriters clearly did not understand what was going on.
* [A Hero's War](https://fictionpress.com/s/3238329/1/A-Hero-s-War) - bootstrapping industrialization in a setting with magic. Unfortunately, unfinished and seems likely to remain that way.
* [Snow Crash](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40651883-snow-crash) - a fun action story even though I don't take the tangents into Sumerian mythology (?) very seriously.
* Since this list was written, I think it became notorious for introducing the "metaverse" as pushed by Facebook now. This is very silly. Everyone who is paying attention knows that the real metaverse is Roblox.
@ -71,15 +71,24 @@ Obviously this is just stuff *I* like; you might not like it, which isn't really
* [Accelerando](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html) - the best fictional depiction of the posthuman technocapital singularity I'm aware of.
* [The Quantum Thief](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7562764-the-quantum-thief) - moved out of my infinitely long queue to actually be read on recommendation from [Gwern](https://gwern.net/review/quantum-thief), it's very good. The cool kind of hard scifi which almost never explains itself but which is nevertheless (as far as I can tell) constantly scientifically correct.
* [Systema Delenda Est](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/83315/systema-delenda-est) - hard-SF deconstruction of LitRPG (suddenly switching the world over to [magic](/magic/) and "only the strong survive" is actually bad).
* [Chasing Sunlight](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/73475/chasing-sunlight) by the same author - a fascinatingly ominous setting and amoral-but-cleverly-written main character. I am still trying to puzzle out the metaphysics.
* [House of Suns](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1126719.House_of_Suns) - I actually read this some time ago and forgot to move it to the mainlist. I have not read much else of Alastair Reynolds' work, but this was a great standalone work which explores the (some possible) consequences of sublight-only colonization. I liked the prose.
* "house of suns is really very good, you should read" - baidicoot/Aidan, creator of the world-renowned [Emu War](/emu-war) game
* [Person of Interest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)) - somewhat bad initially (basically a police procedural), but actually pretty smart later on. They actually have some idea of what superintelligence *means*, and unlike in our world (where the machine god will probably be visualized with a few loss curves and ugly CLI output) they have great graphic design.
* [Travelers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series)) - a novel (to me, at least) take on time travel. The ending seems to have been rushed due to unexpected cancellation, but I like most of it.
* [Theft of Fire](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199142773-theft-of-fire) - I am very conflicted on this, but I did like it enough to fast-track it and read it in two days, so I am including it. Expanding on this might deserve an entire blog post, but it would be a short blog post, and this would create odd incentives unless I expand all other entries to blog posts, which I won't.
* "Hard scifi" in the sense of The Expanse (moderately recently) and lots of older fiction (it's been compared to Heinlein, who I haven't actually read much) - spacefaring technology and a few peripheral areas advance substantially, and most other technologies are unchanged, as opposed to e.g. The Quantum Thief where everything is radically overhauled to the limits of known physical laws. I can generally accept this as a setting conceit like I accept fantasy worlds, but it feels strange to be 200 years in the future and have neural interfaces but only used for primitive AR, computers nominally thousands of times more powerful but with capabilities slightly worse than 2024's state of the art[^3], and spaceships maintained with modern-era manually-operated machine tools. This does, at least, make the problem-solving more relatable to us modern people. It portrays spaceflight under the constraints of astrodynamics and having to not pulp your human crew very well.
* The governance of the (off-Earth parts of the) setting is apparently anarchocapitalist, which is a minor detail I bring up because it caused me to discover that there's a [Libertarian Futurist Society](https://www.lfs.org/) with a very 90s-but-in-a-good-way website.
* It is very character-driven, in the sense that the main characters being silly drives most of the plot.
* Some of the characterization is odd. The author clearly wants to distinguish the "space roughneck" main character Marcus from "space princess" Miranda, but this is done oddly. I cannot believe that he simultaneously knows what Dirac monopoles are, has read enough Lewis Carroll to say "typical Lewis Carroll" in first-person internal monologue, and was apparently a childhood scifi fan, but doesn't know what "Fibonacci" and "anthropomorphizing" mean. Miranda is described as very intelligent, and while the author doesn't quite make this completely meaningless as some might, she still makes very bad decisions inconsistent with this.
* Overall, I guess I can call it good at what it is but not groundbreaking.
* [A Practical Guide to Sorcery](https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/a-practical-guide-to-sorcery-mage-punk-progression-fantasy.866065/#post-68660854) - read on the recommendation of [this comment](/magic/#com2081). Has a smart and competent (they make silly mistakes sometimes but in reasonable ways they notice later) protagonist, flexible and interestingly constrained magic system, and a lot of interesting mysteries in the setting.
Special mentions (i.e. "I haven't gotten around to reading these but they are well-reviewed and sound interesting") to:
* [Children of Time](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-time) by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
* [The Murderbot Diaries](https://www.goodreads.com/series/191900-the-murderbot-diaries) by Martha Wells.
* [Codex Alera](https://www.goodreads.com/series/45545-codex-alera) by Jim Butcher.
* [Digitesque](https://www.goodreads.com/series/183319-digitesque) by Guerric Haché.
* [This Is How You Lose The Time War](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43352954-this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war) by Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone.
* [The Books of Babel](https://www.goodreads.com/series/127130-the-books-of-babel) by Josiah Bancroft.
* [Singularity Sky](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81992.Singularity_Sky) by Charlie Stross.
* [Zones of Thought](https://www.goodreads.com/series/52585-zones-of-thought) by Vernor Vinge.
@ -91,4 +100,6 @@ You can suggest other possibly-good stuff in the comments and I may add it to an
[^1]: Not really.
[^2]: <div><blockquote>Think of normal spacetime, said the author/illustrator, as a hypersurface. Each point on that surface had a tangent space associated with it. The tangent space could be considered a linearization of the area around the point, with extraneous information knifed away. Anyone stuck in the region of a threshold winnower’s effect was painfully affected by the linearization.</blockquote>That is not at all how that works. Also some parts on cryptography. I can only assume reviewers generally ignored this because they studied English.</div>
[^2]: <div><blockquote>Think of normal spacetime, said the author/illustrator, as a hypersurface. Each point on that surface had a tangent space associated with it. The tangent space could be considered a linearization of the area around the point, with extraneous information knifed away. Anyone stuck in the region of a threshold winnower’s effect was painfully affected by the linearization.</blockquote>That is not at all how that works. Also some parts on cryptography. I can only assume reviewers generally ignored this because they studied English.</div>
[^3]: I think [DeepMind's](https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/capture-the-flag-the-emergence-of-complex-cooperative-agents/) [agents](https://danijar.com/project/dreamerv3/) [work](https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphastar-mastering-the-real-time-strategy-game-starcraft-ii/) is more than sufficient to build massively superhuman space pilot/combat automation without further fundamental advances or faster computers.

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@ -80,6 +80,7 @@ RSAPI has a wide range of functions, having grown from a short Flask application
* Key/value storage backend for PotatOS, due to the shutdown of the random free API it used before.
* Internal LLM-based [Threat Updates](https://r.osmarks.net/threat-update) system[^8], to replace the archive of historical ones and Twitter scraper. I was too lazy to work out how to draw nicely line-wrapped text in images in Python, so this actually invokes a ComputerCraft emulator, runs the Threat Update implementation on that, dumps its virtual screen, and renders that to an image.
* The new comments system, replacing [Isso](https://github.com/isso-comments/isso). It supports ominous AI faces (from StyleGAN2, thanks to [StyleGANCpp](https://github.com/podgorskiy/StyleGANCpp/)[^7]), leftvotes/rightvotes for greater user expression, SSO integration, better threading, and lower client resource use.
* Lighting control orchestration.
I'm especially proud of the ComputerCraft to Prometheus metrics bridge. While it's only about 20 lines of code (plus the ComputerCraft side), it does allow me to feel cool about being able to monitor meaninglessly large numbers in great detail. There are similar Factorio mods, which I'll probably use next time I play.