Hahaha that proper made me laugh

I tried buckie once! Drank a whole bottle, later that night had some sort of weird seizure while trying to go for a piss. Mashed my face against the skirting board, looked like I’d been in a fight the next day.

Buckfast. Just say no.

OK for the Xeelee series (by Stephen Baxter), you’re really spoiled for choice… the author designed all the books to be standalone, doesn’t really do ‘cliffhangers’. But he has a suggested reading order:

Vacuum Diagrams (collection of short stories which will set out the overal story of the universe)

Timelike Infinity / Ring (tells the story of a character integral to the series, Michael Poole)

Raft and Flux (incidents amongst the wider background)

Destiny’s Children (three-parter in the same universe, exploring different evolutions of humanity)

Then whatever else you like the sound of.

As an example of the sorts of timescales he writes over, ‘Xeelee: Redemption’ is set between the years 4060 and 5,000,000,000! Personally I prefer long books over short stories, which to me always feel like they end just as they get going. So while Vacuum Diagrams is excellent, if the same is true for you, maybe jump in with Timelike Infinity. It’s a shame all my stuff is in storage atm as I could post you some of these. Hopefully you can find them at your local library.

For Banks, there’s an excellent reading order here: https://www.howtoread.me/the-culture-reading-order/

Have you read much by Iain M. Banks? It’s classed as ‘hard’ scifi, but I think that’s just because he refers to actual known physics quite a lot. Really really really cool worldbuilding, especially in the Culture series. The Xeelee series is also fantastic and there’s a ton of books there!

Hopefully S02 Severance will be out this year. Obviously there was a big break because of the writers strike, they’re currently filming right now and from the sounds of the statement I read, seem really keen to have it out ASAP.

And yes the Altered Carbon books are amazing! I feel like it’s almost always best to watch the TV show / film first before the books, it’s often a little disappointing the other way around as we’ve built our own internal universe of how characters look and sound. Plus the books by the nature usually have much more detail.

Yeah, this was the exact reason why I was so tentative about Foundation at first. After seeing how Altered Carbon S02 floated like a lead balloon, it became quite apparent that audiences, along with a sense of progression, want a sense of continuity. Audiences don’t seem to gel with TV shows that have a different lead every season, so Altered Carbon really struggled as the audience had spent a previous season connecting to an actor who then disappeared at the start of S02. Of course, anyone who’d ever read the books was well prepared for this, but the ‘average viewer’ was not and sadly it was cancelled.

I assumed the same would be true of Foundation, where in the books you’ve got a different lead in practically every chapter! So that probably also played a hand in the changes.

And hell fuckin’ YEAH Severance was incredible. Super weird. I love TV shows that create an inexplicable universe then go about slowly revealing it. Season 2 is a go, so I can’t wait to find out how Mark reacts to the knowledge he gained in the finale.

Tbh I did strongly expect massive changes to the Asimov books. They were written quite some time ago in a different social climate… I read the entire Asimov collection over lockdown and while he’s an excellent writer (reading other authors after a year of Asimov was like wading through treacle!), with massive inventive potential, I remember thinking to myself reading a lot of the stories “Well. That wouldn’t wash in this century”. Mostly casual sexism.

I imagine the showrunners read the source material and thought “Oh no, there’s no lead women characters. That’s not going to go down very well” and then the changes cascaded from there. Still a very enjoyable show, just have to try and disengage from the OG source material.

Fingers crossed for 3BP season 2! The bit with the ship and the military nanofibers was gruesome as fuck, I can get why the Augie character would’ve been very unhappy about that haha. But yeah I also found her character a bit annoying.

Yeah they’d have to do a LOT of R&D to make sure the Shrike looks suitably terrifying. The speed of it wouldn’t be a problem, they could get all the people who worked on The Flash!

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with TV versions of late. I didn’t watch Foundation until S02 dropped, I just saw no way they could do a show set over aeons. They’ve taken a lot of artistic license and I’ve heard from many who loved the books saying they’re unhappy with that, but I really enjoyed it. Three Body Problem season one was also fantastic, so fingers crossed that gets a second season (apparently it was very expensive to make so S01 may be all we get unfortunately).

For some reason, I only got the alert for your reply today!

I adore the Hyperion Cantos, it’s one of my favourite scifi book series ever, and I hope one day it gets the TV treatment it deserves. Always felt it would make an amazing show.

It’s something that really winds me up about scifi shows, and I know there are always budget restrictions… but it just feels really lazy to me, for aliens to be simply humans with plasticine on their foreheads.

I’m reading one of Iain M. Banks’ ‘Culture’ series of hard scifi books, the depth and variety of not just alien species but ‘post-human’ modification is breathtaking. ‘The Culture’ is a far-flung hyper-technological society, no money, all wants and needs provided for, there are no drugs because everyone has their own drug gland. If you decide you want to try changing sex, off you go, the nanosuite will take care of it within a matter of days. Sick of being a humaniform? No problem, now you’re the bush-like bundle of tendrils of your dreams. Bored with being a bush? Maybe you want to download your consciousness into a drone, or the solar sail drive of a starship? Again, no problemo!

Borg for me.

I wonder if there’s any psychology behind responses to this question… While I genuinely love the idea of becoming a cyborg, the thought of becoming part of a collective that thinks as one is kinda horrifying to me as someone who works in a creative field.

Well this doesn’t sound appealing! And this just speaks to what I was trying to explain to the person at the start of this thread… Linux may be growing rapidly but there’s still giant holes in the driverset etc for many tasks.

I think prob the best solution will be to perform a hard reset / clean on the laptop, remove any bloatware, keep it offline once I’ve installed necessary updates / plugins, and only have live PA software installed.

This is interesting and concerning… I don’t need a lot of plugins for live stuff, but I was definitely planning to use my Maschine!

So is that confirmed completely inoperable in Linux? No idea how I’d trigger parts without it.

Yep I definitely took it wrong, one of the problems with text only communication… No body language or audio cues! No worries.

The devs of my audio interface have definitely been asked a fair bit about Linux compatibility… But considering they’ve not even bothered bringing their new DAW to PC, it seems they’re strongly focussed on mac ecosystems only for the foreseeable.

Personally I think compatibility should be a two way street pun not intended! But unfortunately companies tend to vote with our wallets, so until Linux becomes even more established I doubt they will dedicate much if any resources to making their devices work on it. Shame.

I bought a new audio interface for live work a few months back, went for an audient id24 partly because it’s Linux compatible (although no native drivers). So I will get stuck in at some point. I started using PCs back when floppy disks were actually floppy so I’m not afraid of command line stuff!

None of the main adobe suite works on Linux either, so let’s not pretend my use case is so narrow. Literally none of the programs I use to work (Cubase, Audition, After Effects, Illustrator, Premiere, yes I can install a virtual windows machine but that completely defeats the purpose) works with Linux. And from what I gather last time I researched this, hardly any audio interfaces are Linux compatible. Most of the games I want to play also are not Linux-compatible.

Fact of the matter is, despite the large dedicated userbase (which I appreciate), it still has a giant gap where many prosumers and casual users cannot utilise it. It’s no good saying “ahhh well YOU’RE not compatible with US! No u!”. I’d love to switch and tbh am strongly considering a setup for live PA that’s Linux based, in the hope that it brings greater stability. But it’s going to be a large investment of time, and I’ll have to buy a different audio interface if I have a hope of making it work.

Linux doesn’t support my DAW or audio interface. I’m not throwing away thousands of pounds of software and equipment to use Linux.

I would happily give it a go if cubase / uad interfaces were supported.

Russia just cannot be trusted. Over and over and over again, they show this to the world.

Countries need to stop giving Russia ‘one more chance’. Treat the Russian government like the fraudulent, evil pariahs that they reveal themselves to be.

He even looks like a cartoon. His moustache looks like it’s made of sausages

Whenever I release music myself, I actively block it in Russia, because they relentlessly steal my trance / freeform releases and upload them in warez sites.

Of course geoblocking can be circumvented by a determined pirate but it helps to not be on their radar in first place as a lesser known artist.

As an example, once I released a freeform album. Freeform is a very niche, small scene. It was on Russian forums within a couple of days. Fortunately one of my fans notified me, I had a Russian friend contact the site on my behalf to explain that I’m a poor struggling artist, and they’re literally taking money out of my pocket; to my surprise they agreed to take the links down.

I hoped he wouldn’t, but at the point where he was massing troops at the border it was surely a sign of what was coming.

“We’re not planning on invading, just putting all our troops here for shits and giggles!”