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kcaryths
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(Quote) I have not read anything else by Brooks but this seems to be pretty on point, at least for this book. The book fell into a wierd "not quite YA but not quite NOT YA" area for me. I thought the writing was just fine and given that th…
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Oddly, it never felt like the train HAD to run, but rather they kept choosing to do so because people needed a faster way to get somewhere, and also people wanted to have this tourism experience alongside the "wilderness". I never really u…
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Not a great ending. Oversimplified and sort of left us with the feeling that it "all worked out" in the end. Mentioned this is another thread. It didn't feel like a very realistic handling of how a situation would have went.
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In some ways it's good that the book was set in an older time when there may not have been enough technology to really hold back the Wastelands forever. The only surprise to me was that it took as long as it did to "break out". In a more m…
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(Quote) I enjoyed the book but I would have to agree that this mostly sums it up.
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I'm not sure I can think of more dichotomies offhand. I think there were mostly there to create some extra tension to the story. They worked "okay" but I wouldn't say they were a theme really aside from the main division of the Wastelands …
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I felt like most of the decisions being made were mostly selfish and done at the expense of relationships with others. The one with the highest stakes was I guess Weiwei and Elena, and her hiding Elena made little sense to me given the story. I felt…
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Not too much to add that hasn't already been said. I didn't read too much into the names personally, but maybe on a second reading I would have caught more of it.
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I touched on this on another thread, and this only came to me while away on vacation, but the entire third class which seems to have to quietly exist only to allow the wealthier individuals the chance to experience the Wastelands on their own terms …
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I wasn't quite sure what the Wastelands were supposed to be a metaphor of, if anything specifically. The Wastelands gave me a touch of Roadside Picnic feeling with this weird area where the rules don't quite make sense and while it wasn't aliens tha…
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Plutoshine looks quite good. I am surprised it's not more readily available!
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Trying to track down Plutoshine. My typical indie bookstore and library don't carry it!
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I just wrapped it up.
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Would be perfect. Looking forward to a slow read through of this book.
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Would an AI that is not limited to a phsyical constraint, but would also have to deal with it's ultimate end due to the heat death of the universe, have an existential crisis if it really began to dwell on that? While human life is so short, there …
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The therapist part was really bad, agreed.
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I far prefer to read physical books but I listened to quite a bit of audiobooks as well. The narrator matters a ton, along with the type of book. Gone With the Wind had an amazing narrator and was a super easy book to listen to. Perfect for audioboo…
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I'm no expert on LLMs work so can't speak too much to that, but Sawyer's version of AI is what I believe the end goal would be. Direct copies that could be iterated on. Imagine a world in which we could "spin up" a direct copy of a person'…
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Ahh, see that's some fun Toronto specific stuff I never would have known about!
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(Quote) This is why it bothered me that the others were able to wander out into the wider world so easily. It would have been very simple to isolate them and yet they didn't. I get that it was a plot device but I didn't like it.
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I tend to like flavour text like that. It adds a little something extra to the experience.
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I thought the guilty party was made pretty clear by the way he kept trying to get the reader to only suspect the other two. I thought it was him the entire time.
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I got pretty annoyed by the fact that instantly there was a leap to "Well that's a soul!" from those who were involved in the project. There were all kinds of other intermediary steps that I would have expected from individuals in that fie…
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It felt 90s technoptimistic, which isn't really a criticism but an observation. I thought the idea of simply uploading 3 copies of human "consciousness" with very little regard for the actual storage space required and then having no co…
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The Canadiana in it felt familiar, but it definitely could have been plunked in almost any other North American city without a lot of changes to the way the book read. It definitely didn't feel like the setting mattered a whole lot.
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I thought it was a largely enjoyable, if not overly challenging book. What I would consider a good "beach" read in a Crichton sort of way. These are the kinds of books that I like to read in between other more challenging reads because the…
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This would be a highly challenging world to try and base a game in but in the right hands would be really really interesting. More interesting that the book in my view!
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Jeez, @BarnerCobblewood this is so good. Like, I didn't catch any of that and never possibly could have. Such a shame. I thought the "Unchosen" support group was great and it made me wonder about all of the other things that were going on…
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I loved the Doors and I wish they were explored a bit more. The group researching the doors and trying to find ways to "fool" them into opening was really interesting to me. The devils confused me a bit as at times they felt like they didn…
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It's very possible I have an incorrect idea of what magical realism is so I may have to do more research on the topic. I thought it slid into that category. I found the structure a bit difficult to manage at times, but moreso in how it sort of mean…