Notices by Birds Books and Bullshit (nanobookreview@zirk.us)

Just a lil guy I made

#Patches #Embroidery #Sewing #Art

JFC trying to learn anything about conventional gardening is a nightmare in AI slop. Do any of you know of a good resource where I can learn about my damn peppers? Ideally one with tables and pictures and very little prose?

#Gardening #Peppers #Food #Farming #Backyard #Fruit #Websites #AI #Slop #MakeItStop

@Fragglemuppet I meant like, the story that the sequel told, yeah. A lot of times I find unjustified sequels are "fully realized character has no more character flaws, so we just have to put them in whacky situations in order to generate a plot."

I'm glad it's good.

@Fragglemuppet Did the in-story motivation for a sequel make sense? That's always my hangup with sequels that weren't planned from the beginning.

Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

A detestable man dies. In doing so, he becomes a much better person, eventually. I stayed up late to finish this book, so that's the summary you're getting. Worth the read, if you like mostly ordinary ghosts.

#Books #BookReview #Fiction #Novel #Ghosts #Life #Death

Birds.

#Birds #Nature #Wildlife #Photography

The church next door put in digital signage. I'm sure they think it looks great.

Putting on the brakes.

#Birds #Nature #Photography #Wildlife

How to Steal a Galaxy by Beth Revis

I could see some people totally loving this book. Some romance, mystery, humor, a little adventure... You get the idea. It's very well written, with only one or two lines that pulled me out (a few obvious commentaries on modern America and capitalism). But....I dunno, it felt a little thin, like it was trying to be too cute. The protagonist was a little too... Perfect? For me? It was okay. I'll probably still read the sequel, coming out in April.

#BookReview

Who calls the shots? We call the shots.

#Starbucks #Union #Strike #Labor #Coffee

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sB_Rws3MGYM

@sand you're in luck! They've figured it out!

https://www.verywellhealth.com/reason-mosquitoes-bite-some-people-more-others-4858811

The chronic stress that accompanies poverty can be detected at the cellular level. One study found that up to 5500 premature deaths that occurred in New York City, from 2008 to 2012, could have been prevented if the city's minimum wage had been $15/h during that time instead of just over $7/h.

A higher minimum wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid, a stress reliever.

–Poverty, by America

#MinimumWage #Stress #Poverty #NYC #USA

@mekkaokereke Those Chinese cars are *extremely* subsidized and very low quality. People with access to both "Western" and Chinese cars are favoring the western cars, despite being more expensive because the Chinese ones just plain aren't very good. Hopefully they'll get better with time, like a lot of Chinese products have, but their auto industry is still ridiculously subsided. Like, those cars cost roughly the same to make as any other car, and they're losing money selling them.

@freemo @RL_Dane They're having their baby teeth put back in.

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

A guy joins the army on a whim and becomes an infantryman. Eventually he also signs up to be an officer in a similarly spontaneous fashion. They fight space bugs and we hear multiple lectures about psychology and society that are clearly just the author preaching to his captive audience. Good writing, but the story doesn't really go anywhere.

#BookReview #Books #Fiction #SciFi #Military #Aliens #Space

Turns out Starship Troopers was originally a book, so that's pretty neat. I'm starting in on it right now. I've never watched the movie, but it's my understanding that it's somewhat of a comedy? This book certainly isn't. I guess I'll have to watch the movie after I'm done with the book. Pretty decent book so far. Not amazing, but worth it at this point.

#Books #Comedy #Action #Fiction #SciFi #Military #Future

@csolisr @feditips Just to clarify, the people who run Lemmygrad are the same people who develop Lemmy?

I'm trying to decide if using, say, Beehaw counts as supporting Lemmygrad. If anything it's less in support of the developers than using Reddit was, given that Reddit routinely lets hate speech fester until advertisers find out about it.

In that case they're in direct control of the platform, while the developer of Lemmy has much less control over Beehaw.

@f00fc7c8 The further I get into this essay, the further that aside really shows itself as just one of his cultural blind spots. He happily admits later on that every individual and culture has these "failures" and then continues to advocate for things that really should have caused him to rethink that culturalization idea

I'm sure 200 years from now some internet historian is going to marvel at my own contradictory practices, despite my attempts to be otherwise.

Well, were I notable, anyhow.

Well, I guess all you have to do is wait a little while and John Stewart Mill brings up my own point about different eras having different assumptions.

"Ages are no more infallible than individuals, every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false, but absurd. And, it is a certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many once general are rejected by the present."

#Books #Hypocrisy #SelfAwareness #Culture #History