Notices by Steven Sandoval (baltakatei@twit.social), page 2

Now that #amazon has ended downloading offline copies of their ebooks, I buy DRM-free EPUBs from ebooks.com. Not all books are DRM-free, but they have a dedicated section.
https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/drm-free/

Examples:

The Wandering Earth (2017) by Cixin Liu
https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/210185098/the-wandering-earth/cixin-liu/

All Systems Red (2017) by Martha Wells
https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/95651192/all-systems-red/martha-wells/

Mistborn: The Final Empire (2006) by Brandon Sanderson
https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/630871/mistborn-trilogy/brandon-sanderson/

The Terraformers (2023) by Annalee Newitz
https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/210542637/the-terraformers/annalee-newitz/

#bookstodon

@tk Greed is self-executing. Logic requires an interpreter.

@AkaSci If there's one thing I learned from Chinese history, it is that bureaucracy run by literate scribes who take exams to prove their competence is what supported their century-long runs of stability.

The small-government ethos of Maga reeks of anti-intellectualism: their children are often excluded from civil service due to lack of education; those that do get an education tend not to join Maga unless they honestly support table-flipping fascism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination

Boring thought: wealth only trickles down in supply-side economics if you constantly relocate and build your profession to accommodate the investment decisions of those who got the tax breaks.

@sun @bajax @anemone Reminds me of I'm Quitting Heroing where the immortal hero brainwashed into saving the world became so antsy about world peace that kept occuring that they helped rebuild and organize the demon lord army so there'd be a villain he could slay to satisfy his predator instinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Quitting_Heroing

I beat #FactorioSpaceAge, the sequel to #Factorio. I ended up making the boring cylinder from Rendezvous with Rama (1973), but I'm satisfied.

@Unixbigot “We have interstellar trade so relativistic effects mean there's no centralized canonical epoch anymore. Therefore, all timestamps are branches reticulated on a gravity-velocity spline tree rooted...”

“Let me guess: Earth, January 1st, 1970?”

“Yup.”

@tk I hope you feel better and can find a balance that works for you again. 😔

Huh. The original Box-Car Chidlren book is on @gutenberg_org https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42796 . It has a lot more details than the version I remember reading in school. (e.g. it explicitly says their father died of alcohol poisoning) #publicdomain #projectgutenberg #bookstodon

@tk @rra Looks like the Encyclopedia Libre Universal fork occurred back in 2002, with Wales's desire to create a for-profit encyclopedia being satisfied by his establishment of Wikicities (later renamed Wikia, then Fandom) in 2004.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_Libre_Universal_en_Espa%C3%B1ol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fandom_(website)

@cstross Reminds me of how the Rick and Morty characters had to add the mental therapist character to explicitly point out the flaws in the main characters.

@w7voa Doesn't a US Presidential pardon nullify their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination? If so, shouldn't it be open season for prosecutors to question them about their co-conspirators and then charge them with perjury if they fail to testify?

Kastigar v. United States, 406 U.S. 441 (1972)
United States v. Wong, 431 U.S. 174 (1977)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kastigar_v._United_States

Hatsune Miku run of Ocarina of Time by #zfg #zelda https://www.youtube.com/live/YM4qf2rS2cQ

@tenteni sed -e 's/tiktok/facebook/g' <<< "$PREVIOUS"

@tk @glitter TGIF

@tk DX

#Calendar trivia: there are only 7×2=14 possible calendars. That figure is determined by the weekday the year starts on and whether or not a leap year occurs (i.e. common year or leap year).

2025 is a common year Wednesday calendar as were those of 1975, 1986, 1997, 2003, and 2014. So, if you have an old calendar from any of those years, you can bring it out and use it again!

@signalapp Thank you for maintaining it! I'm linking your donation page so others can thank you with money as well. https://signal.org/donate/

James Cameron needs to make a #Terminator sequel in which cyborg assassins try to kill fossil fuel CEOs while Terminators protect CEOs.

The cyborgs are from a future where some machines and humans get along but fossil fuel plutocrats caused global warming leading to billions of deaths from heat waves anyway.

#climatechange #globalwarming

@doctormo @Triffen As a Debian/Ubuntu user, I already always remap caps lock to left control to relieve pinky strain and facilitate Emacs usage (which makes heavy use of control keys). So, the physical caps lock key is one of my most heavily used keys already.