Hi! Thanks for your reply. I work with databases and I don’t need to correct anything, just thank you for devoting a bit of your time to my question!

Well said… Thanks for spelling it out!

Thanks for these pointers!! Will look into those.

I agree with this message: in fact I am not against doing it by hand. It could be a nice life project. I will look into all the advice that you have given me, thanks everyone!

The Malazan book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson would be my recommendation. Start from Gardens of the Moon and go ahead… It keeps getting better and better!

Your last one is a good question. I don’t have an answer but I was leaning towards some sort of conservation law (e.g. normal stars have magnetic fields, when they get squeezed down to a neutron star those fields must go somewhere and it will be very much “concentrated”). Apparently this is a bit too easy (didn’t expect to be nothing different). Wikipedia provides a reference to a not too recent (2003) survey, namely this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0307133 . I don’t know if it’s the state of the art but it surely is interesting.

How much I do love those fonts. That proper spacing and balancing… It will always a place in my heart and I fear the day that I will fail to recognize it!

I may well be wrong and too naive, but I think the hate is in many cases rooted in the scary idea that they could find them attractive. And so they signal that “it could never happen to them” and that they are doing it to protect other, weaker people.

Same for me. I have been reading Linus (Torvalds) posts since decades and it really seemed out of character to me. I even clicked on the link but I admit that I haven’t yet understood what is going on. I have decided that it’s not for me…

So long, and thanks.

What is an “Analogue pocket” for those of us … Out of the loop?

There is an optional Ocr pass, from what I understand

One wonders how they market their services : “come to us, we are the best fake reviewers you can find on the web and these 5-star reviews prove it!”

Of course I do.

I go through several phases: sometimes I am busy reading new books, and other times I am in “reread” mode. This happens for novels and essays as well. I have always been doing that, since I was a kid, and there are books that I have been re-reading since then.

And this is without even mentioning poetry which, in my experience, expects to be read multiple times (in no small part due to the same processes by which we enjoy music - based on repetition and familiarity).

I hope to be able to see it in a theatre. Nolan is one of my favourite directors and this is a movie I have been expecting since I first heard of it.

Several of my bookshelves are devoted to a single (Italian) publisher, namely Adelphi. They have a strong esthetic coherence (Google them and you will see what I mean) and within that publisher I sort by series and then by number.

Otherwise I sort by genre/category (e.g. Tolkien, scifi, photography, fiction, history,…) And within it alphabetically (by author and then by title). When I have some other cases like Adelphi (e.g. Sellerio with its blue books or Penguin classics paperbacks) I strive to achieve adjacency.

Any other approach is clearly madness and nonsense! (I move books around every few weeks :-P )

Snow crash was great back in the days! I recall 14 years old-me being upset at the "wrong acronym* but I remember it as great fun. I was coming from the darker novels and short stories by Gibson and Sterling and the lighter touch by Neal Stephenson (and others, like … Rudy Rucker if I am not mistaken) felt nice, while at the same time did not drop the expectations on being engaged on the same kind of reflections/analyses on the human nature like the previous cyberpunk novels.

Those were the times! Plus, I was playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2020 (the tabletop rpg)… :-)

Hi! Nice to hear that :-) Malazan is capturing me so much that I am worried of rushing it! I deliberately take the time to enjoy it at as many levels as I am capable of (e.g. writing style, choice of words etc).

For Iain M. Banks, you can’t go wrong. Use of weapons is an incredible book, but maybe I would think it’s better to start from Consider Phlebas. UoW punches… And punches hard.

I wake up very early in the morning and cannot catch sleep. So I read there, in the bed. Also during commute and at night. Quitting Facebook and the like was crucial, one day I noticed how much time I was wasting by scrolling forever and … That was it.

I just completed The Terror by Dan Simmons and I am currently reading the second book in the Malazan series by Erikson, Deadhouse Gates.

Malazan is amazing.

I found quite difficult to assess the Terror. It was quite a long read for the first 700 pages, then I really enjoyed the last 2 hundreds. But in retrospect I appreciate this slow pace so … I am not sure about my judgement. In the end I am glad to have read it. I also learned a lot about people and cultures of the Artic circle.

After the Malazan novel I will probably follow upon the third one, but I could also switch back to (re) reading Iain M. Banks or reading Peake’s Ghormenghast for the first time.