What did you just read?

Arbitrary

Arbitrary

Tranny Chaser
33,292
97,587
Crazy shit.

Anyway I just finished

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Minute by minute account of a hypothetical nuclear war that begins with a "bolt out of the blue" ICBM launch by North Korea combined with some pretty extensive research and citations. It's a very tight package with the audiobook clocking in at under twelve hours and it's very good. It's a little pants-shittingly terrifying at a few points as an additional wrinkle of nuclear war gets explained that I hadn't previous considered the full ramifications of and that wrinkle is another apocalypse on a growing stack of them but that's what I signed up for.

Having seen A House of Dynamite it's pretty obvious theft but that movie is cheap trash. It ends before the NK strike even happens and this goes all the way to a cascading nuclear war involving errybody.
 
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F

FancyLad

5
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Im about halfway through this. Good read so far, she was a journalist embedded in OpenAi in 2022 and has good insights into the key players.

There's not much technical detail here, it's primarily about the leaders and buisness dealings. The meteoric rise of these companies is crazy... huge amounts of capital invesment and a lot of very cult-like behaviors percolate through the organizations as it becomes clear which way the winds are blowing.

Paints a colorful picture of Sam Altman and Elon Musk. The infighting and plays for power are juicy. Highly recommend.
 
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Kajiimagi

Kajiimagi

<Aristocrat╭ರ_•́>
4,517
8,429
Finally finished the Hyperion Cantos, which was a omnibus of the 4 Hyperion books.

They are

Hyperion - This is the classic featuring our favorite bad? guy The Shrike! A 10' tall 4 armed blade covered Lord of Pain. Told in the style of stories of people making a trek to the time tombs.

The Fall of Hyperion - This felt like the end of the series to me. Not sure I need to spoiler a book written in 1990 but
after the humans nuked the farcaster network and basically brought the cyber people to an end
I thought this was at an end.

These 1st two books were really good and I do not regret re-reading them.

I didn't realize until I started that I'd never read these last 2, and they are a total retcon of the start of the series. I cannot count how many times I read 'You were told xyz, but that was a lie, and we will explain it when the time is right just trust me.'

Frankly when I was still 1000+ pages from the end of the last book and nothing was happening (just pages and pages and pages of descriptions of locations and people at meetings , I DNF'd and read the wiki summary.

Endymion

The Rise of Endymion

First 2 are some of the greatest sci-fi of modern times, right up there with Dune (IMO) but the last 2 sucked.
 
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Arbitrary

Arbitrary

Tranny Chaser
33,292
97,587
Hey, Dan Simmons. I just finished Carrion Comfort last week.

A secretive cabal of psychic vampires pull strings behind the scenes. Our main characters are a group of people that had their lives upended from one of the little games these elite like to play. With "The Ability" they can make anyone do anything including reducing a person to a mindless automaton. Use of this power also extends their life.

It's on the long side of things and very good. I'd read The Terror (good) and Summer of Night (ass) from Simmons before so this was kind of the rubber match. This and Summer of Night both
kill of a main character halfway through that we spent a ton of page time on with
which I do not get at all but it was not as detrimental here as it was with Summer of Night.
 
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