It took a bit but by the end it had grown on me. I agree it's technically not great but maybe I'm just used to that from reading sci-fi, most of which feels technically bad. That said my reaction to the first quarter was mostly "uhh?". Big disagree on N.K. Jemisin though, I enjoyed reading those. Books 2 and 3 of the three body problem series feel like what you're describing to me. Never got why those were popular, the first one had the interesting cultural revolution flashback element but the sequels did almost nothing for me.

Filling-in-the-gaps-books wise, it's hard to do better than Earthsea in my mind. They're quite short books, yet I found myself far more engrossed in the world and the goings-on than some thousand page Sanderson tomb I snoozed through.

> interesting cultural revolution flashback element

Interestingly this section either appeared in the beginning or somewhere in the middle depending on the translation/version (I forget how the distinction was made) due to it being so different from the rest of the book.

It was in the beginning when I read it years ago and I think it took a bit for its context to make sense but I also read many lost interest during it.

I enjoyed all the books. (spoilers incoming) I actually enjoyed the love story elements, how a star given to someone would play such an important role later. How he survived in the end and communicated the three fairy tales, and enjoyed each in turn. I've never seen a story span such a vast amount of time nor remember one that took us literally to the end.

I already felt pretty annoyed with the first Three Body Problem book.

But a big part of the problem is that after looking into space colonisation etc a bit, the aliens in most alien invasion stories feel utterly stupid to me.

I can still live with 'War of the worlds': their aliens only come from Mars not from the stars, and I can suspend my disbelief over eg its theory of how the planets formed: it's just a fantasy world where outer planets formed earlier and are older.

But the Three Body Problem tries to be current-ish with modern technology. And its aliens have enough technology to just build orbitals or terraform Mars or so. Or just kill off all the humans from space with an orbital bombardment or a killer virus. Instead of whatever clunky and ineffective methods they use in the book.

I did like the start though, when things were still kept behind the curtain. Also the Cultural Revolution flashbacks, too.

War of the Worlds never lifts that curtain for sure. Everything stays fairly mysterious, and the narrative only gives us some limited speculation from the narrator who clearly has also only a limited view on things.

Having rented in Seattle for 6+ years at essentially the lowest non-subsidized price point, these existed before, along with a variety of other problems.

I don’t have the formal education or know how to get hired as a developer, and make 35k a year in Seattle doing non-developer stuff. $5k would be pretty neat. It does remind me of the height of the flash game period though (where I started programming!)

Now that is a neat idea. I was thinking about making a film scanner that can auto scan + cut rolls of 120 and 35 but this is way neater. Thank you for sharing!

I was thinking about this yesterday while looking for resources on building a board to read data from a modern sensor from something like an a7 (turns out its way over my head). The issue you’d run into with the pi hq camera module assuming you can get the focal plane right and everything to fit is that the sensor is way smaller than 35 film so you’ll have a rather large crop factor.

The Seattle Police Department has both their badge numbers, as well as name tags. As you said, neither is particularly easy to read in the best of circumstances. Of course it’s made even more difficult by the officers covering the badge numbers (and in less frequent cases, their name tags) with tape. I’ve seen both in person during the last week. The official explanation for covering badge numbers is weak, and the mayor’s response to protestor requests that badges are left uncovered was even weaker. Of course this pales in comparison to the turning-off body cam before attacking policy.

This is further a problem because Seattle has at least one current badge design the puts the number in the middle of the badge. Many other agencies avoid this as they either have a traditional badge with large numbers at the bottom like many NYPD badges, or they understand that mourning bands are a thing and avoid placing the badge number where the band may cover up.

As a forward looking policy, agencies should generally prohibit obscuring the agency and officer identification for uniformed officers and design those things to enhance their readability and prevent common practices like mourning bands from obscuring them.

As for the body camera policy, Seattle has a history of using video surveillance during protests to identify protesters for later prosecution, in particular this happened during the WTO protests and Iraq War protests.

A common call from protesters has been that journalists and photographers documenting the protest avoid publishing clear photos that would allow the police and other parties the ability to identify protesters, so there are conflicting calls on that particular policy.

I think the long term solution to that is a legal disincentive for police departments to prosecute protesters and a trust in the police and judiciary that they can take such recordings and use them for accountability rather than prosecutions.

I think a few fellow scientists at his institution (University of Washington) would argue against calling him a prominent climate scientist, or perhaps a climate scientist at all. He's a meteorologist, as stated on his faculty website (https://environment.uw.edu/faculty/clifford-mass/).