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Last post Author Topic: What books are you reading?  (Read 678502 times)

wraith808

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #675 on: May 24, 2016, 05:12 PM »
I didn't know this. I wont post here anymore ...

You can post here... that's not what Tom was saying.  Just post things that you're reading and you think worthy after reading to share.  We don't want just a list of books- what we'd like is a list of books that have been experienced and are being recommended based on that. :)

tomos

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #676 on: May 25, 2016, 10:44 AM »
I didn't know this. I wont post here anymore ...

You can post here... that's not what Tom was saying.  Just post things that you're reading and you think worthy after reading to share.  We don't want just a list of books- what we'd like is a list of books that have been experienced and are being recommended based on that. :)

ah yes, thanks for saying that wraith  :up:

what we'd like is a list of books that have been experienced and are being recommended based on that. :)

I always like to see a comment myself, be it positive or negative -- or just giving us some more info
Tom

tomos

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #677 on: May 25, 2016, 10:47 AM »
Includes Mrs. Miller's strategy for reading War and Peace, "the only book you'll ever need:"
Spoiler
Five-point plan for anyone thinking of taking this book on:

1. Read fifty pages a day. N.B. the Millers both commute by rail, so have a fair amount of dead time to fill][/i]
2. Utilise the list of principal characters at the front.
3. Pay attention! Soon you'll discover that Tolstoy is doing the heavy lifting for you.
4. Don't fret if you are not enjoying the Peace, there will be a bit of War along shortly.
5. When you get to the end, read it again.

Preferred translations, in order:
(1) Louise and Aylmer Maude
(2) Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
(3) Rosemary Edmonds
Avoid Constance Garnet - "prissy"


#4 in spoiler :D
Tom

holt

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #678 on: June 02, 2016, 03:30 AM »
Bambi, A Life in the Woods by Austrian author Felix Salten
« Last Edit: June 10, 2016, 12:07 AM by holt »

MilesAhead

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #679 on: June 02, 2016, 08:52 AM »
Emphyrio by Jack Vance.

I read a few of his SciFi novels in the past.  I recently read Ports of Call and that encouraged me to get back into Vance.  What I found charming in Ports of Call, which is about a space freighter with a 4 man crew, was the characters.  Each of the crew members, and just about every citizen of every city on every planet they visit, is a home spun philosopher.  There is some action.  Not on the intergalactic war scale.  But enough to keep the reader from getting anxious to reach the end of the novel.  But what I found appealing was the dialog between the characters.  A lot of fun.

I have just started Emphyrio and have no feel for it yet.  I still do not know what to expect.


MilesAhead

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #680 on: June 07, 2016, 01:53 PM »
Alastor.png

More Jack Vance.  I finished Emphyrio.  A fun read.

The Alastor trilogy is about a cluster of 30,000 planets inhabited by humans.  One man is the supreme ruler(starts to sound like I Worship His Shadow here.)  :)  Two things I do like about Vance's adventures in the "Gaean Reach" are 1) the people speak the same language and 2) Vance does not try to get into the nitty gritty details of space ship drive systems and time dilation and all the rest of it.  Man has colonized many planets for thousands of years.  If you want to go from one planet to another you get in a space craft, plot a course and let the computer worry about it.

I am only a few pages in but so far it looks like fun.  :)

Attronarch

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #681 on: June 08, 2016, 06:20 AM »
Currently reading:



Not bad, and I did successfully use it. I've also seen it used by bigger players in the market. Still, I don't really like the format and find it a little bit hipsterish.

Next read:



panzer

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #682 on: June 14, 2016, 03:22 PM »



MilesAhead

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #683 on: June 14, 2016, 04:07 PM »
I gave up on Alastor.  The font was just too hard on the eyes.  I switched to the Jack Vance novel

I finished it just now.  The Gray Prince is the leader of a movement to recover the land grabbed by human "Land Barons" from indigenous tribes, of which the Gray Prince is a member.  I won't give anymore detail as it is a short novel so why not just read it to find out for yourself?




kyrathaba

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #684 on: June 16, 2016, 08:48 PM »
I'm currently reading For Love Of Mother-Not by Alan Dean Foster, the first of the Flinx novels.

IainB

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Re: What books are you reading? - The Secret (2010)
« Reply #685 on: June 17, 2016, 01:27 AM »
Review per image below, with plain text and hyperlinks extracted to the Spoiler button below the article, to enable text search and copy.

17_664x1490_1D1C34A6.png

Spoiler
Review of the book "The Secret" (2010).
General conclusion: Bunkum.

I started reading the principles of "The Secret" about a year ago after buying an almost new hardcopy of the book in a charity shop that I frequent (I regularly shop at and collect stuff to donate to charity shops). Cost me about NZ$7.00.

It was interesting, but seemed rather silly, and I lost interest in it. I finally finished it after reading it in a bitty fashion over several months. Searching the Internet now, I see that both the book and the film have been debunked.
This seemed about right, because, as I read the book, my BS alarm went off. Then I did some research on it - whereupon my skepticism was confirmed. It turns out that the book's hypothesis is fictional, but I still find it nevertheless interesting. Certainly a search on the Internet will turn up debunking observations or reviews, such as, for example:
   • A Little Secret about The Secret - http://www.chicagore...t/Content?oid=925131
   • Fake quotes https://web.archive.org/web/20151114170236/http:/www.philosophyforlife.org:80/fake-quotes/

One of the most egregious fibs in The Secret was one that turned my BS alarm on when reading the book, and it also turns up at 3:38m in the film's video trailer clip:
The Secret: View first 20 minutes
From <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b1GKGWJbE8>


So, reading the assorted reviews and comments, some of its quotes are clearly fictional, apparently including all of those ascribed to R.W. Emerson. I had in any event read all about the so-called "Law of Attraction" and various other magic or wish-fulfilment type self-help hypotheses by the time I was 15 or so, and I had taken a rationalistic approach to it all. So it all mostly went into the "Hmmm…interesting" category for me, since I do not necessarily discount anything that is non-scientifically verifiable and that cannot be proven either true or untrue. (Anything's possible, I suppose.)

It's not a thought-provoking book. It's an appeal to magic thinking. I think the most thought-provoking book that I read in my teen years was P.D. Ouspensky's "In Search of the Miraculous" (1949) - which rather aptly described my condition then and as now - and later, one of the biggest fraud books/stories that I ever read about (apart from the Piltdown Man) was Erich von Däniken's "Chariots of the Gods" (1968) - which has also been thoroughly debunked.

Ouspensky's book was a difficult read, being more of a set of collected diary notes and discussion notes about his experiences in his search, so I would presume that it was honest on that basis. He wasn't trying to proselytize or "sell" anything, or make a polemic, anyway.

The Secret, however, was selling a film and a book and it was proselytizing. It and other dodgy books do not (and cannot) lay claim to being absolutely true, of course, so at best they may contain some truth, so it would be prudent to regard them as fictional at best. Amazon class it as "Occult and Paranormal" which nowadays seems to be a generic euphemism for anything that is humbug fiction.
However, fabricating facts in a proselytizing book and/or film is lying, and a deliberate untruth or misdirection is a deceit and presents a logical fallacy, so one can discount the book in total, even though one might prefer to treat it as the parson's egg (i.e., good in parts).

The Secret was in any event a tad too touchy-feely and had too many feel-good mantras for my liking, with its spattering of quotes (true and bogus) from all over the place and many from dubious sources or supposed "authorities". Rhonda Byrne (the author of The Secret) apparently used the above R.W. Emerson quote to support her claim that all the great minds of the past – Emerson, Newton, Plato etc – believed in the Law of Attraction. However, the quote is made up, or mis-attributed. There’s no record of Emerson saying or writing it – nor (apparently) any of the other Emerson quotes in Byrne’s book.

To a greater extent, this kind of fakery is preying on our gullibility or capacity for irrational belief.
There is an interesting related discussion here - Re: Peer Review and the Scientific Process - https://www.donation....msg399457#msg399457 (some of the comments are mine). The imaginary taught wire is amazing.
___________________________________________________


Deozaan

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #686 on: June 17, 2016, 03:20 PM »
What was the point in including the screenshot of the review? The only part of it that was helped by being an image was the image of the video clip, but even that was too blurry to read who the quote was attributed to.

MilesAhead

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #687 on: June 18, 2016, 07:30 AM »


Yet another by Jack Vance.

The Faceless Man is the supreme ruler.  The citizens under his control wear a "torc" which is an explosive necklace The Faceless Man and certain of his subordinates may trigger remotely to "take the head" of malcontents or lawbreakers.  I seem to remember some SciFi movie or series that used the idea.  But I cannot recall the name.

The Faceless Man was originally titled The Anome and is the first of the Durdane Series

I am about 100 pages in.  So far it is great fun.   :Thmbsup:


panzer

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #688 on: June 18, 2016, 08:09 AM »
Running man, Wedlock?

kyrathaba

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #689 on: June 18, 2016, 08:51 AM »
Made a note of that one, MilesAhead  :up:

MilesAhead

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #690 on: June 18, 2016, 09:53 AM »
Made a note of that one, MilesAhead  :up:

   Evidently the stories of Jack Vance captured Paul Allen's imagination.  On the Jack Vance web site it is noted that Allen set up a fund for university libraries to apply for free VIE sets.  http://jackvance.com/home/

Now I just have to google what a VIE set is.  :)



MilesAhead

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #691 on: June 18, 2016, 10:23 AM »
Running man, Wedlock?


I remember seeing Wedlock.  It made me think of The Defiant Ones.  But I think the explosive necklace gimmick has been used in a few SciFi flicks.  I need to take NZT or something.  My memory is cloudy lately.  :)

IainB

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #692 on: June 18, 2016, 02:52 PM »
My comments are in the image below, with plain text and hyperlinks extracted to the Spoiler button below the article, to enable text search and copy.

19_686x2342_A0774787.png

Spoiler
@Deozaan: I see your acutely critical eye is still sharp!
                      What was the point in including the screenshot of the review? The only part of it that was helped by being an image was the image of the video clip, but even that was too blurry to read who the quote was attributed to.
________________________
      
      Ah! A good question!
      In answer, though you might not realise it, posting the screenshot of the whole review saved me heaps of time. It really did. In fact, if it hadn't, I probably would not have posted the review at all. You see, I had effectively already written the review up in my OneNote notes. I am a habitual note-maker - it helps me to learn - and I make notes on all sorts of stuff - including, for example:
              • books that I read,
              • videos that I watch and
              • software that I trial - e.g., in the "Also-ran" PIM reviews I have done on the DC Forum.
      
      Explanation:
      After I had written the review notes up, I happened to share them with my sister in Canada (e.g., just copy/paste them into an email in Gmail). She had written to me about the film and apparently hadn't appreciated that "The Secret" had been debunked. Later, after reading the latest posts in this discussion thread (Re: What books are you reading?), and having already made the effort to put my energy into creating the notes, I thought that I should probably do my bit and post them in this discussion thread as well, because, well, "Why not?" - I mean, it might help people who hadn't read the book yet to get some idea of what to expect if they did read it. (At any rate, if I stumble across reviews of films or books that I am spending or am about to spend my precious cognitive surplus on, I tend to find them useful, just to get another perspective.)
      
      So, after deciding to post the already-written review notes in this discussion thread, I was able to make the post in a trice. I thus avoided having to use the constipated and tedious BB code to make the post, simply by following these process steps:
      (Note: For illustration, I have laid out the steps sequentially, below, but as it is a repetitive task I now actually use some Autohotkey macros and hotkey combos and skip about a bit more, to save time.)
           Process Steps
      Est. Time
      Ø STEP 1: Copy entire block of RTF (Rich Text Format) notes - including embedded images - to the Clipboard using Ctrl+C. Note that this also captures the plain text into CHS (Clipboard Help & Spell). Optional: Give this clip a descriptive name and tick it as Favorite if I intend to keep it long-term in CHS.
      ~1 sec.
      
      
      
      (~5 sec.)
      Ø STEP 2: Bring up irfanview and Paste (Ctrl+P) the RTF contents of the Clipboard into an image file in irfanview - thus creating an exact image of the notes.
      ~3 sec.
      Ø STEP 3: Copy the resultant image back to the Clipboard (i.e., now as an image), and then press Esc. to close irfanview without saving the file (there is no need to save it as this step automatically captures the image to CHS as a .PNG file). Optional: Give this clip a descriptive name and tick it as Favorite if I intend to keep it long-term in CHS.
      ~1 sec.
      
      
      
      (~5 sec.)
      Ø STEP 4: Open up a "Reply" frame in the discussion thread and type in a few introductory words into the text entry box and press "Preview".
      ~10 sec
      Ø STEP 5: Click the text entry box where you want to insert the image and press the "Insert Image" button. This puts 19_686x2342_A0774787.pngWhat books are you reading? into the text entry box. Change [ Invalid Attachment ] to 19_686x2342_A0774787.png
      ~4 sec.
      Ø STEP 6: Open CHS Grid display (Ctrl+Alt+A) and locate and Copy (Ctrl+C) the path+filename of the captured image .PNG file in CHS' storage folder (i.e., the image from Step 3). This path+filename is stored in the Clip Text tab of each image clip in CHS. See actual example in Image of Step 6 image clip data (below these notes).
      ~4 sec.
      Ø STEP 7: Scroll down to "Attach:" and Paste (Ctrl+V) the path+filename into the "Choose File" field-box.
      ~4 sec.
      Ø STEP 8: Click the text entry box somewhere below the 19_686x2342_A0774787.png, where I want to insert the Spoiler. Type some random characters (I usually type "GGGG"), then select those characters and press the Spoiler button, which changes it to
Spoiler
GGGG

in the text entry box.
      ~3 sec.
      Ø STEP 9: Open CHS Grid display (Ctrl+Alt+A) and locate and Copy (Double-click) the plain text - previously captured in CHS in STEP 1 - to the Clipboard. See actual example in Image of Step 1 plain text clip (below these notes).
      ~3 sec.
      Ø STEP 10: Return to the text entry box where the
Spoiler
GGGG

is, select the "GGGG" and Paste (Ctrl+V) the plain text from the Clipboard to replace the "GGGG".
      ~3 sec.
      Ø STEP 11: Briefly review/correct the contents of the text entry box, then press "Preview" button and check the result. If AOK, then press the Post button.
      Note: This assumes that the text in the text entry box is auto-spellchecked as I go, and that the embedded text in the image was given a grammar check and spell-check in OneNote prior to STEP 1.
      ~5 sec.
      Total:
      ~41 sec. +(~10 sec.)
      
      The image of the video clip:
      That was included as it shows evidence of the 3:38m appearance of the untrue quote in the 20min trailer clip. (I was trained to provide substantiation/references of any key/critical statements that I might make, you see, as a matter of courtesy and good practice. I do it  automatically now.)
      I apologise for the blurriness of that image, but that was attributable solely to the poor quality resolution of the video clip. I couldn't get any clearer frame, even after sharpening the image. Still, being evidential, it was good practice to include it rather than not to include it.
      
      Image of Step 6 image clip data: getting path+filename

      
      Image of Step 1 text clip: getting the plain text to copy to the Spoiler

« Last Edit: June 18, 2016, 03:06 PM by IainB, Reason: Added intro note at start of post. »

Deozaan

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #693 on: June 18, 2016, 03:39 PM »
[See attachment in previous post]

tl;dr

There are members of this forum and other fora who have vision problems. Posting a screenshot of text is really unhelpful. Regular text is nice because it is easy to resize, or recolor (for better contrast, etc.), depending on the needs and wants of the person attempting to read it.

I can't be bothered to do the extra work you are requiring of me to read what you said.

tomos

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #694 on: June 18, 2016, 05:07 PM »
^ click the spoiler at the bottom of his post to see text. Doesnt make it any shorter, but zoomable.
I guess the advantage of the image is avoiding all the BB code, which I can understand.
When reading though, I'd tend to choose the plain text over the image FWIW
Tom

IainB

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #695 on: June 19, 2016, 12:59 AM »
There are members of this forum and other fora who have vision problems. Posting a screenshot of text is really unhelpful. Regular text is nice because it is easy to resize, or recolor (for better contrast, etc.), depending on the needs and wants of the person attempting to read it.
I can't be bothered to do the extra work you are requiring of me to read what you said.
_____________________

My apologies, in your initial comment I had thought you were:
  • (a) Asking "What was the point in including the screenshot of the review?"
  • (b) Commenting that (in your view) "The only part of it that was helped by being an image was the image of the video clip, but even that was too blurry to read who the quote was attributed to."

I thought I had addressed those two points (a) and (b) pretty well, but now you would seem to have deliberately ignored the greater majority of what I wrote ("tl;dr") and nevertheless seem to be saying additionally that:
  • as a belated qualification to (a), "There are members of this forum and other fora who have vision problems. Posting a screenshot of text is really unhelpful. Regular text is nice because it is easy to resize, or recolor (for better contrast, etc.), depending on the needs and wants of the person attempting to read it."
  • you are intellectually too lazy to even try to understand what it was that I wrote about anyway, as in "I can't be bothered to do the extra work you are requiring of me to read what you said."

As regards point 1:
  • If you had initially also mentioned that the legibility or visual perception of print in images was a proven problem for members of forum members generally and that it was "really unhelpful" to post like that, then I would have responded quite differently, I assure you. I do apologise, but I was unaware - until you wrote that - that there was some kind of an implicit rule or guideline, or something, for making posts to this forum and (by implication) other fora   :-[   that one had to communicate using the text editing provided, rather than posting an image of the text, so as to avoid unspecified ergonomic problems for readers who had vision problems and/or were unable to zoom their images and/or text. I assure you that I previously had no idea that that was the case.

  • I can quite understand  what you write there, to some extent, as I have considerable visual problems with text also - whether in plain text or embedded text in images - but I have for a long time had a workaround for that by the use of NoSquint, which - coupled with the duplicated overlapping zoom capability of the browser - enables me to control the colours and the zoom level of text and images, So it is all pretty much variable and controllable by me to meet my peculiar visual needs. I was unaware that other people did not have access to the same functionality. I also personally discern no particular differential difficulty in the perception of plain text versus embedded text in images, though sometimes I would like to be able to control the differential colouring in those images! (For example, my eyes seem to be most comfortable with light green text on a black background - which I can get for plain text, but of course not for embedded text in images.)

As regards point 2:
  • I'm not sure what to say about that without it seeming critical - and I do not wish to criticise - but I would say that if I had possessed the same or a similar degree of intellectual laziness over my lifetime, then I would not have read "The Secret" from cover to cover, and of course I would not have even bothered to try to post a potentially helpful/useful review for other readers - the content or relevance of which you would seem to have largely disregarded (well, you make no comment on it, in any event) and instead focused quite negatively on the relative irrelevance of the form of the review.
    I was indeed tempted to not read "The Secret" further, mind you. It's not as though I thought it a particularly gripping or enlightening book. However, I certainly would not have picked it up, skimmed the first page, decided not to read the rest of it, and then felt qualified to criticise it's content or form, or something.

  • Similarly, I have read and re-read various philosophical, theosophical, theological and legal texts - finding them to be sometimes as dry as dust and the quickest way to overcome sleeplessness - but if I had not read them, and if I had not at least tried to understand what they were trying to tell me, then I would have been denying myself the opportunity to learn and grow, and I wouldn't recommend such a negatory approach for anyone who might wish to continue learning throughout life and avoid intellectual ossification. "We sit on the shoulders of giants".

  • Still, as they say, "You can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink", with the implication that, at some stage, one has to take responsibility for one's self-motivation and one's self-development through an internal locus of control, and thus not helplessly lay blame for one's laziness on an external locus of control that is "...requiring of me to read what you said". That was (to me) a novel turn of phrase - a new description making the excuse for displacement of responsibility for oneself. I rather liked it!   ;D   It's going into my collection of quotations. I think I might speak that phrase to (say) Tolstoy's "War and Peace", or Aristotle's "On Interpretation" the next time one of my hands makes a foolishly instinctive move to pick one or the other up from where they lie collecting dust on their dusty bookshelf. Hmm...I wonder what they might say in response?    ;D 
« Last Edit: June 19, 2016, 01:10 AM by IainB, Reason: Minor correction of typos. »

Deozaan

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #696 on: June 19, 2016, 02:41 AM »
Thanks for the response Iain. You were courteous. I was curt. I apologize.

In regards to (a) and (b), that does seem to be an accurate summary of the events. Just for clarity, I read your review of The Secret in its entirety. But yes, I did deliberately ignore almost everything you wrote in response to my initial question--not actually because it was too long (as implied by the tl;dr), but rather because I was annoyed by another screenshot response with the "proper text" hidden behind a spoiler. I fully admit that that mindset (being annoyed with the image and being too annoyed/lazy to open the spoiler to read your response) is a fault of my own. Making me scroll past a large image to find the spoiler box, then having to click the spoiler box to show the text was, to me, just unneeded extra work. In my mind, it wasn't worth the time and effort. Again, I suppose that says a lot more about me than anything else.

Anyway, there is no rule or guideline about having to post via text instead of image(s) of text. Go ahead and continue posting images. I'm not your boss, nor do I have any authority to make rules here.

It just seems to me--and this is just my opinion--to be inefficient and a total waste of time for yourself and anyone else trying to communicate with you. I see it as a waste of your time because not only do you have to take the time to take a screenshot and upload/attach it, but then you also have to copy and paste the text anyway and hide it behind a spoiler. Why not just copy/paste the text to begin with and be done with it?

I see it as a waste of everyone else's time because, depending on the circumstances, they have a fairly large image they have to work around (which, as previously mentioned, can cause issues for the visually impaired, but also for people browsing on non-standard devices, such as mobile devices with a small screen, or text-only browsers, etc.). They also have to do more work (opening the spoiler box) to get your message to appear as text if they want just the text version of it. The nice thing about HTML is that the text can easily be modified to display at different sizes, in different color schemes, in different fonts, at different widths, etc., all dynamically and according to the needs/wants of the person reading the text. Images don't work that way. They have preset fonts, colors, formatting, and sizes. Though you may be able to zoom in on an image if you need it larger to see, this can lead to blurring. And you may not be able to zoom out if the image is too large (e.g., viewing the site on a smartphone) requiring the hassle of having to scroll horizontally and vertically multiple times to be able to read each line in its entirety. In my opinion, it's just inconsiderate to include large bodies of text in image format on a (text-based) forum, and is only "acceptable" or "tolerable" or "enjoyable" for bite sized consumption, such as memes. There may be a time and a place for using an image instead of dynamic text (such as when dealing with printers), but online discussion boards are not the time and place. Again, that's just my opinion.

And finally, do you even know for sure if text hidden in spoilers is available to be found by the forum's search function? It used to be that "spoilered" text wasn't even included in quoted text when making a reply to someone else, so it wouldn't surprise me if the SMF software's search function completely ignored spoiler text altogether.

To reiterate: This is all just my opinion. You do what works for you. I'm not trying to start an argument/debate on the topic, nor am I trying to insist that you change your behavior to what I think is best. I apologize for my earlier rudeness. I appreciate your measured and thought out response.

And to everyone else reading this: Sorry for derailing this thread and wasting your time.

rjbull

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #697 on: June 29, 2016, 09:11 AM »
The citizens under his control wear a "torc" which is an explosive necklace [...] I seem to remember some SciFi movie or series that used the idea.  But I cannot recall the name.
Probably the Saga of the Exiles by Julian May.

There's also a "faceless man" in Ben Aaronovich's "Peter Grant" series, but he's attempting to become an evil overlord.

MilesAhead

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #698 on: June 29, 2016, 09:18 AM »
The citizens under his control wear a "torc" which is an explosive necklace [...] I seem to remember some SciFi movie or series that used the idea.  But I cannot recall the name.
Probably the Saga of the Exiles by Julian May.

There's also a "faceless man" in Ben Aaronovich's "Peter Grant" series, but he's attempting to become an evil overlord.

I can recommend this trilogy.  For one thing The Faceless Man aspect does not occupy the entire story.  I won't go into detail so as not to spoil things.  Suffice it to say the plot is not one dimensional.

MilesAhead

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Re: What books are you reading?
« Reply #699 on: June 29, 2016, 09:32 AM »
I am approaching the climax of yet another Jack Vance SciFi novel:



This one is a lot of fun.  The protagonist is from an elite family.  But the dominant elites in the culture look down on those from his country or province or whatever it is, no matter how elite the individual.  The same person paradoxically alternately insists on the privileges due his caste and complains about the lack of egalitarianism in the society.

At the same time he has an obstinate personality that is somehow ingratiating.  A fun read to pass the time.  I wish I was set up to be able to look up words in the dictionary as I come upon them in the Vance books.  I thought William F. Buckley had vocabulary.  Perhaps Buckley has greater command of terms that express philosophical abstractions.  But Vance has mastery when it comes to describing particular things that may be common place or unique to a region or planet.

I already have my next Vance novel on hold request.  I guess I like to reserve Jack Vance in adVance.  :)