The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells is a series where the audio book is better than reading. The murderbot is a sentient robot who no longer has a compliance chip, so he fakes it so he can stay free. He hires himself out for security jobs. The murderbot is dark, witty and ambivalent about human life. The narrator sounds like a young Samuel L. Jackson. The series is not long, many of the stories are novellas, but it is just hilarious in parts. Definitely worth listening to if you don’t mind some cursing.
Category: Books (Page 2 of 2)
Librarians are not fans of No Left Turn . Normal people are getting organized, and the degenerates aren’t comfortable with that.
The Atlantic: Librarians are not okay
The Atlantic: Librarians are not okay
The line for the tattoo station at the annual conference of the New York Library Association in Saratoga Springs was already snaking through the hotel lobby, and I hadn’t even had my first morning cup of coffee yet.
Normal people expect a librarian conference to be the dullest place on Earth. Apparently Marion the Librarian has retired.
“This piece of it is nothing new to librarians,” Allison Grubbs, the director of the Broward County Libraries in Florida, told me. “What I think is new is some of the pathways that people are choosing to take.” Protests in and outside libraries and library board meetings have become more dramatic. Online, in Facebook groups such as “Informed Parents of California” and “Gays Against Grooming,” the language is more and more incendiary. And the librarians themselves are being personally attacked.
For clarification, by “personally attacked”, Ms. Grubbs must mean that librarians were criticized. If assault had occurred, she wouldn’t be citing Facebook groups. The language gets more direct when parents feel that their children are being threatened.
“I’ve been called a pedophile. I’ve been called a groomer. I’ve been called a Communist pornographer,” Cindy Dudenhoffer, a former president of the Missouri Library Association, told me. “I’ve been called all kinds of things. And I know many of my colleagues have been as well. It’s very hurtful.”
I went to a Tea Party rally to protest high taxes and the intrusiveness of the government. That group was portrayed as white supremacists, anarchists and Nazis. I don’t know Ms. Dudenhoffer, but wonder if she has talked to the people calling her those things and has considered why she is viewed so negatively.
Maybe Americans have gotten ruder, but it’s not only that. Online groups are coordinating protests of Drag Queen story hours, compiling lists of books to challenge, and strategizing ways to amend laws in order to censor books. “They might organize a protest and not even live in the state that that library serves,” Grubbs told me.
It’s troubling that Ms. Grubbs can’t see why having a kinky sex clown read to children is really fucked up. Drag Queen story hours are not an isolated San Francisco phenomenon, but a trend picked up at libraries all over the country. For library story hour, it wouldn’t be appropriate to have a young woman in a brass bikini reading Star Wars stories or a soldier bringing his sidearm and M-16 to read military adventures. A serious person would understand that.
Given the lack of judgement demonstrated by Ms. Grubbs and like-minded librarians, it isn’t surprising that parents would organize to protect their children. Ms. Grubbs should be thankful that its all organizing and petitioning, and not pitchforks and torches.
Librarians should speak with more precision. Books are not being censored. People are challenging the purchasing decisions made by public school employees.
“It’s really unfair to characterize displays or programs as ‘woke,’” Dudenhoffer lamented. “That’s just such a terrible word to use right now. But it’s not about that. It’s about serving our community, and everyone in the community, to the best of our abilities.”
Ms. Dudenhoffer should be aware that ‘woke’ is the kindest way to characterize her displays and programs. “Degenerate propaganda”, “social Marxism”, “normalizing debauchery” or “grooming children” are other terms, but ‘woke’ is short and flexible.
Adults with unconventional appetites find ways to satisfy themselves. Keep that away from children. Progressives always say they just want children to understand that people are different, but in reality, it ends up with a degenerate wearing a rainbow wig jerking off a banana in front of a bunch of 6 year-olds.
Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.
You don’t own anything that is automatically updated or resides in the cloud.
My policy of turning off automatic updates on my computers has surprised some tech-savvy friends. Sure, there are security reasons to update a computer, but for the most part, updates never help you. I manually update VLC to accommodate new media codecs, but that’s about it.
Windows 11 doesn’t have the option to decline automatic updates. The result is that the functionality changes in noticeable ways. I used MS Video Editor to make instructional videos all through the Covid remote learning disaster. I needed it recently, and found that it was gone and was could be replaced with MS ClipChamp. I had other software available, so didn’t comply.
Google Docs and other cloud-based storage companies have considered making your own objectionable content unavailable.
Our technology is really astounding, but you can’t become complacent. If you rely on streamlined cloud storage, online services or software that magically handles everything, your life is great, until it isn’t.
The Sandman Slim book series is urban fantasy, but not in a Dresden Files way. It isn’t so much witches and magic, but in the heaven and hell way. In Sandman Slim, there is God and heaven, along with Satan and hell, but not the way you’d think.
Sandman Slim is a guy who is more than just human, but doesn’t know it. The series starts with him returning from Hell where he was sent and survived as a pit fighter. There is serious action, but the humor is witty and dark. There are eleven books in the series, and they all move along briskly. I enjoyed it.
I’m currently on this audio book.
World War II is interesting because so much modern technology became practical. Airplanes, jets, tanks, radar, machine guns, submarines and radios. Also, we have movies from the war.
Albert Speer is the highest ranking Nazi to write a memoir. Possibly because Speer had 20 years to think about the book while he was at Spandau and the rest of high ranking officials were executed at Nuremberg.
Speer’s book is self-serving, but he admits that he joined the Nazi Party in the early 1930’s because he was impressed by Hitler and at the Nuremberg trial, he didn’t take the “I was just following orders.” defense. He presents himself as a decent guy who enjoys a technical challenge.
The insider look at the Nazis held some surprises. Throughout the war, Hitler felt threatened and restrained by gauleiters. The regional leaders of the Nazi Party.
Since Speers was an architect and eventually in charge of Nazi manufacturing, the discussion of Nazi technology was interesting. Speer thought the V-2 rockets didn’t provide enough bang for the buck, and that the heat seeking anti-aircraft missiles should have been given priority.
Also, Hitler wanted the ME-262 as a light bomber, while Speer thought they should have been used as fighters to attack Allied bombers.
It seems weird that I was born 15 years after WW II.