Yeah - I don't even really understand how all of that works. I see that people apparently sincerely believe, but I have no idea how - what it is that goes on inside their brains that allows them to make that leap to actually believing.

Digital, no contest.

I'm an old guy and I've been buying and reading books for most of my life. I own thousands of them, filling up shelves and stacked on tables and cluttering everything, and that's even with the bulk of them in boxes in my garage. I love them and I love being surrounded by them, but they're a chore and a burden.

And I have a collection of almost as many ebooks, all in a few GB on a tablet.

So ebooks win on space and convenience.

As far as the actual process of reading goes, they're pretty close to the same, but ebooks have a bit of an edge. I have no issues with a screen, so words on a screen or words on paper are pretty much the same. Physical pages though are bound along one edge and flexible and generally at least subtly curved, while a screen is perfectly flat and evenly lit. Also, on a physical page, I'm stuck with whatever typeface is there, while with an ebook, I can scale it to whatever I want or even change the font or colors or whatever. so ebooks win there too.

And while I'm reading an ebook, I can search the text for any term or character name or phrase, so I can refresh myself on things or find a particular passage or whatever without laboriously thumbing through the pages, and I can switch over to a browser anytime to get background for anything or just look up a word.

And when I finish or drop an ebook, I can just tap the back arrow to go to my shelf, or switch over to an app or browser and go online, and find another one.

So... yeah. I really don't think there's one single thing that physical books do better than ebooks, other than serving as decoration - filling space on shelves.

When I read the thread title, that's what I instantly thought of. I was about the same age and it was about the same situation, and I had the same reaction. And still do.

I never really liked it much - too many assholes, astroturfers and bots - so I was always open to moving somewhere else, as soon as I found somewhere I liked better. And I liked the threadiverse better.

To be fair, the movie was pretty much doomed to fail. Robbins is one of those authors for whom the plot isn't really the point - it's just a sort of framework on which he then hangs... pretty much anything and everything.

You don't read a Robbins novel just for the story - you read it for the experience of him telling a story, and for all of the digressions and diversions along the way.

This'd likely a bit more than inconvenience, but honestly, to the degree that it would be more than that (or more accurately to the people to whom it would be more than that), I just don't give a shit.

Make it literally impossible to knowingly lie. Full stop.

Yes - I know lots of childless genXers, including myself.

I think we were the first generation to see the bullshit fairly clearly, but we weren't even close to being in a position to do anything about it.

The earlier generations generally didn't see it, and the boomers only saw parts of it - they were too easily distracted by their own greed and self-indulgence. Stuck in the shadows as we were, and growing up right in the middle of it - in the world after the Kennedy/King assassinations and Vietnam and Watergate and OPEC and stagflation and Iran/Contra and on and on and on - we couldn't really miss it. But we've never had any real influence (other than our brief but notable time at the vanguard of music, art and fashion), so it mostly just left us sort of cynical and detached. It's fallen to the later generations to get fired up enough to maybe do something about it.

And yeah - my plan too has long been to mostly keep a low profile, try to share a bit of what hopefully amounts to wisdom, then slip off-stage before the inevitable shit hits the inevitable fan.

!manga@kbin.social

It's pretty much a lost cause, at least for now, but I keep posting anyway. And it's not like it's an imposition - I check in on Mangadex a few times a day anyway, to catch up on my follows and maybe browse the new updates, so I just post discussion threads for the stuff I like and would like to discuss.

Years ago, I used to post a lot on the Reddit manga sub. It was always much more active, but my tastes in manga are obscure enough that most of what I was following didn't get posted otherwise. But then the sub grew to the point that there were more enthusiastic posters even posting that, so I stopped.

That's made it sort of awkward on kbin though, since I'm still just posting the sort of obscure stuff I like. In order to grow the community, it would be better to post more popular series, but that just seems sort of dishonest to me. It seems to me that if I'm not even reading a series myself, I have no business posting it.

So it goes...

Any argument for your freedom is an argument for everyone's freedom.

Yeah.

June was glorious. It was like the internet of the 1990s all over again. There wasn't a lot of content, but what there was was posted by actual people who would actually engage in good faith. I had forgotten what that felt like.

But it's been all downhill from there, and at this point, it's starting to feel like Reddit, just on a smaller scale. More all the time, I'm just seeing rage bait that's posted either by a bot or by a person who might as well be a bot, and if I bother to respond to it, it's likely that if I get any response at all, it's just going to be a string of shallowly emotive rhetoric and fallacies that again is either posted by a bot or by a person who might as well be a bot.

I'm cynically unsurprised but still disappointed.

Judging by the community this is in, you're probably thinking of the wrong "subs."

"If I say 'I know,' I stop thinking."

Nobody has ever gotten the reference, and many don't even get it after I explain it.

(It's from Nicholas Roeg's movie Insignificance, and it's said by an Einstein expy just called The Professor, explaining why it is that he's careful to always say that he thinks that ____ or believes that ____ or that the leading theory is that ____.)