Thalfon

In terms of automated suggestions, I've had some luck with Storygraph. It has better recommendations than Goodreads, as it actually tries to go by your reading history and recent reads, and allows you to filter by factors like mood, pacing, genre, page count, etc.

It's not perfect by any stretch, but it has found me stuff that I wouldn't have otherwise spotted.

Asking a local librarian is also an option. They're usually happy to offer suggestions, and I've seen it in some cases where the library's website has means to send a request for recommendations online.

Mary Simon, a Canadian citizen and an indigenous person (Inuk on her mother's side) who was chosen by Queen Elizabeth for the role on the advice of then prime minister Trudeau.

While the role has formal diplomatic ties to the monarchy, it is a Canadian who holds it and the prime minister who really selects them (in the guise of advising the crown on who to select).

Of course the monarchy has diplomatic power here (all the rich and powerful do) but the governor general isn't really an example of the crown being able to issue us orders or the like.

I sorta remember Earth: 2025 and Utopia being a bit like that. You'd generate turns over time and login once or twice a day to spend the turns. Not sure if that's exactly what you meant by BBS though, and the only ones I know offhand I think were all late 90s starts.

If anything it's more of a language thing that stuck when translated. Japanese uses their word for confession (kokuhaku) both for confessing to a crime and professing one's love/attraction. The latter is also often how people are asked out (think "I really like you, do you want to go for dinner" -- the "I really like you" bit is the "confession").

It could've been localised as asking out instead, but the more literal translation was used often enough to become normalized. So now we see "he confessed to her" instead of "he asked her out" in translations a lot when the former is a fairly typical Japanese way of saying the latter.

"It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men."

• Red Sister, Mark Lawrence.

Good book if you want something a bit like Harry Potter but aimed at a more mature audience and not funding the stripping away of human rights.

A little over a decade back, I had a laptop that came with Windows 8 but didn't actually meet the specs for it. I installed Ubuntu back then to get the thing to run reliably, and it performed really well that way.

On my home computers I kept using Windows, but with the trend toward less ability to control your system, more ads and AI nonsense being baked in, and just general bloat, when they announced the end of life for Win 10, I decided I'd switch to dual booting Linux Mint at the start of the summer. (I'm a teacher, and it seemed like the best time was when I could deal with my computer being on the fritz for a while if I messed it up.)

I set it up as dual boot because I figured here and there I'd still need to go back to Windows for some specific reason or other but that was back in early July and I've yet to encounter a reason why I really need Windows, so I genuinely haven't booted to Windows even once since the time I originally setup the dual boot and made sure it was working.

Honestly, so much of what we do these days takes place in browser windows that it barely feels different, other than it runs a little smoother and I occasionally have to run an old windows app through Lutris. (Had it installed anyway for games from GOG, and it turns out it works just as well for non-gaming apps.)

A redemption arc this late would've had to have been quietly making a great game, no big announcements in advance until it was done or nearly so and playable, and then letting it speak for itself.

The baffling thing to me is that it was LinkedIn. Like, I'm sure Sam went with whoever was offering the most, but LinkedIn thinks the Dropout audience is a good target demographic for them? That at least feels unlikely, though perhaps the price tag was simply very small compared to what they normally work with. (Or maybe there's one or two people at LinkedIn who are into Dropout and managed to pitch it lol.)

Then again, I'm probably way out of the loop out that site. Or on how advertising works effectively.

For anyone who's not aware, letters to your MP (and certain other members of the federal government) are postage free, so you don't need a stamp.

https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/support/articles/government-mail-free-of-postage/overview.page

Note this doesn't apply to provincial positions, so you'd have to stamp a letter to an MLA.

Gastronauts has done a casting call for season 2 already, and I think the loss of PIBE had less to do with other shows taking its spot, and is more just on its own merits. It either wasn't successful enough on Dropout (where so much of the marketing is things like insta/yt shorts/etc.), or Zach and Jess are prioritizing other things, or some combination of both. I don't think anyone official has really said. (I'm not even sure we officially know there won't eventually be a season 3.)

I definitely miss PIBE personally. I thought season 1 was pretty decent even though it got pretty badly panned in general, and season 2 was incredible. For what it's worth Zach and Jess did a 300 episode podcast called "Off Book" which is similar vibes.

I don't go in person to the library super often any more, but when I did I got in the habit of grabbing one book semi at random off the shelf. I say "semi at random" because it's probably from a section I enjoy (likely fantasy) and I'll quickly vet it as something I would at least possibly enjoy. But otherwise, just grab a random thing.

Pair that with a willingness to stop reading a book if you're not really into it, and sometimes you find gold where you'd normally not have thought to go looking. (A willingness to not be stuck with a book can go a long way toward making it easier to start one, in my experience.)