Viewing profile — MikeBVaughn

> Sometimes the authors themselves invite and regale in this kind of festive chicanery. Sometimes not. But this sort of thing - far more than useful or warranted - does exist. Why …

I feel a bit dense sussing out the relevance of this post to the content of the article. It seems apropos to the title, but the focus on novel-reading cuts orthogonally to the actu…

What does it feel like when (critically, not 'if') it accidentally shines into your eye?

I think there's a bit of overfitting in the output. If you put in a book in the middle of a series, it will sometimes recommend the predecessor.

It turns out you can, but it's not intuitive. You can create an account, rate some books, then request a rec with all of the fields blank. E1: Well, it worked the first time. Now t…

"We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure w…

I'm genuinely curious about this. What about non-granular-carbon filters, like the sub-.5-micron extruded ceramic-and-carbon pump filters from someone like (the non-Microsoft) MSR?…

This conception of 'Great Books' is grim. It is literature denuded of all aesthetics, reading reduced to strip-mining for raw semantic content. For reading philosophical texts, sur…

The replies don't load for me in this one.

I'm curious about the thought process of people who use services like this. If the datacenter operators are being truthful, then posting mycrimes dot txt on the internet seems like…

Anybody who disparages you for liking Butler is being a bit of a dingbat. But, "This is how translations ought to be, in my view - as close to a transliteration as possible without…

Ah! Sorry. I misunderstood the scope of your initial 'I disagree.'

'I have found that modern translations inject a “modernness” into the language that isn’t present in translations from a century or two ago.' I'm completely baffled by this critici…

I found Echopraxia a disappointing follow-up to Blindsight , because the thematic core was much harder to grok, and it felt diffuse and attenuated. It's very hard to write a novel …

"I will say his metaphors can be quite beautiful hut they often make no sense grammatically." Question 1: Example, please? Question 1.5: In what way does the example not make sense…

If there's one thing I know from experience, it's that college students definitely won't turn to explicit piracy. Never happens, don't worry about it.

Does their US pricing model still couple streaming quality to the number of concurrent streams? It drives me batty that I can't get a "4k, but only one stream" plan. Between that a…

"It's obviously a bit in the future, but I look forward to the day when you can just use AI to generate new music, movies, TV shows, etc that are unencumbered so you can watch them…

> If you have to be briefed on what an author is "really saying" outside of the story conveying it, what's the point? What armitron said was, "it's not explicit, you have to synthe…

The only reading I can come up with, and it's really stretching generosity here, is that the works were written smack in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift. Some of the rhymes are…

This is a remarkably facile discussion of an interesting relationship, and I was hoping for more substance than what's here. The conclusion feels like something I might have done i…

I have this exact chair and I've spent the past three months thinking the cheapo wired mouse I bought I was leaking voltage, or that I had a FUBAR HDMI cable. I cannot tell you how…

I don't mean this in a snarky way at all. I'm being completely genuine. I always thought of Pynchon as the Pynchon of sci-fi. If Cryptonomicon is sci-fi, then Gravity's Rainbow def…

Thanks for the recommendation! I actually have a copy of Gnomon sitting on my shelf that I've been meaning to dig into. I'll have to bump it up the queue!

> Are you looking to be delighted by words rather than ideas? Perhaps I'm extrapolating a bit here, Possibly! Prose style is pretty important to me. On the other hand, that's not s…