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leraje
joined 1 week ago
It's difficult to convey to non Brits just how strong and deep the urge to place all citizens under total surveillance runs in the political classes. Its beyond party politics - all parties want it and have for decades. We have (I think) the largest CCTV system in Europe, possibly the world and the police use facial recognition as a matter of course and encourage private businesses to use facial recognition too.
Sundial by Catriona Ward. No spoilers but its a very dark psychological horror. I'm not far into it but I'm already hooked.
Excession and Player of Games are my two favourite Culture novels.
If you don't want to listen (which is cool, audio isn't for everyone) you can download the transcript - head to the archive/resources page and you can grab the PDF from there :)
It wasn't my first time reading it (its one of my favourite books!) but it was for my two comrades so the discussion was pretty far ranging, on both the surface level of the book and the subtext too.
Hate is too strong a word I think - I nothing them - but they produce the sort of soulless indie/pop ballad that you know will end up in the soundtrack of Hollywood paint-by-numbers romcom that would've gone straight to DVD a decade or so ago. The unending radio play rotation would force the song (and we could be talking about any and all Coldplay songs here) into your brain and then five years later you'd find yourself humming it as you suddenly realised a longe bar version of it is playing in the lift (elevator USians) you're in.
The threadiverse tech is better (Lemmy/Piefed/MBin etc) and it is a great feeling to know I'm not getting tracked and profiled by big tech or inundated by ads, or force fed ragebait via an algorithm I neither want nor need. The users are better, mostly, although I have noticed an uptick over the last 3 or 4 months of reddit-style dickheads being dickheads - but I can just block them.
Niche content will come I think. If the threadiverse can resist the self-defeating drive to 'grow at all costs' and just let it organically grow, more people will come but a lot more slowly. But of course that will bring a change in the user culture too. Its quite nice being somewhere with low to no tolerance for right-wing shit.
As for Reddit, I don't have an account any more. My main of almost Digg migration antiquity was deleted when Spez shit the bed over the API thing but I'd been on Lemmy prior to that anyway off an on. My alt got deleted about 6 months ago when I realised I hadn't used it for months. If I absolutely have to visit a sub I use a front end.
Not to pour cold water onto any sort of activism but this has zero chance. We all know what the OSA is really for and the kids/terrorism thing is a front for spying on us but the gen population are totally bought into the kids/terrorism thing and there's not a single MP with any sort of political ambition who'll take the chance on looking like they hate kids and support terrorists.
God cared for Adam until he cast him out of Eden. Adam and Eve were punished by god which is an abandonment of sorts. A turning away at the very least.
When the Shelleys (and others) were writing it was the time of the Enlightenment (and Revolution) and writers and political thinkers from across Europe and the US were using god and satan in a new way - less as supernatural beings of unlimited power and more as allegories - god was superstition/tradition/the ruling class and satan was science/progress/revolution. For anyone interested, the academic Peter Schock wrote about this in his Romantic Satanism book and Per Faxneld of Stockholm University wrote an excellent paper on Milton's Satan as a political rebel.
I think they're both pretty monstrous but in different ways. We can empathise with the plight of a creature that has no purpose other than to (essentially) satisfy the ego of its maker and still be appalled at its actions. Victor is monstrous in his inability to take responsibility and not consider what he's doing.
There's an argument that Mary Shelley was putting Frankenstein in the role of God and the monster as Adam as a commentary on religion. She, like her parents and her husband, was inspired by the Satan of Paradise Lost (the monsters reading primer!) in which Milton had his Satan question what right god had to 'rule' just because he'd created. And just like god did to another of his first creations, Lilith, Frankenstein cast away the 'bride' of 'Adam'.
It's a truly excellent read, however you look at it.
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As I get older ebooks are simply better. I can adjust font, font size, line height, kerning, leading, margins, backlight warmth on a device that can carry all the thousands of books I have and which weighs ounces.