ASlave2Gravity

Hey just want to say a massive thank you for everything you've done with this project. I've shot so much (short films, music videos, even a TV pilot!) on my pair of 600Ds and ML has given these cams such an extended life.

It’s been a huge blessing!

I couldn't put that book down!

It was suggested that I could take them to small claims, but I've never done anything like that before, and looking into it seems that Amazon makes it rather hard and admin heavy to do.

I've basically written off KDP for all future publications, and most of my current stuff is for sale through all the other book retailers.

It's a real shame as Amazon is the heart of a lot of indie publishing and provides a good service but ultimately they don’t care about the individual.

I have seen stories of slightly bigger indie authors also raising hell on Twitter and getting various other people involved (BSFA in this case) to speak to Amazon. In that case I believe they got paid.

I’m still shocked that Amazon let me pay for ads for a novel that I would never get the sales money for. That hurt more than just being delisted.

Just wanted to chime in here and say that I, too, got banned from KDP, but in a rather sinister way. They initially locked me out of my account totally, only for access to be reinstated after an email to them. I thought, phew, that was lucky! Little did I know I was still banned…

What I hadn’t realised until releasing my next novel was that whilst I was free to publish work to the platform—and free to run and pay for ads—I wasn’t actually able to collect my royalties! It took me a while to realise this as there’s quite a lag between sales and payout. I was livid. After many emails I’m still not able to collect unpaid royalties on the new novel.

Congrats! I find I'm using Marginalia more and more, it's especially great for researching for novel writing, and can’t wait to see what the future holds! Good luck!

Mirrors my experience completely.

The great thing for me at university was that no one forced me to go to the lectures. I was on a computer science course, but was more happy making games in my bedroom or writing fiction, and just skipping everthing course related.

For me, life's best served when there's no one badgering you for your attention or your time. If a friend randomly walks up to my flat and rings the buzzer, there's a good chance I'll use it as an excuse to stop work and go hang.

Even if it takes us like 5 extra years to get that deep knowledge of physics, who really cares? You get there in the end if you have the time and space to actually learn it. The modern world is so focused on optimising for time, it can really hinder some people.

Beautiful! :D Thank you for sharing!

The 'does it not?' breaks the flow of the quote perfectly. It was intentional, I like to believe; it's as if your peace of a flowing sentence is suddenly interupted by the life of a fantastic writer! :D

Elegiac is the perfect word for it!

It's a lovely quote too. I remember reading the novel and thinking, 'Holy shit, he's hit the nail on the head!'

I'd happily run a class on it. Whenever anyone asks for a reading list, it's often on there.

I take the novel as a mystic work, much like Meister Eckhart's works. It's a pendulum swing between the secular and the sacred.

Easily one of my favourite novels. It's riddled with beauty; there is a lens held up to the shepherding of knowledge that made me really appreciate what it means to be a scholar.

It's a wild ride and I think a book people should read.

My fav quote,

"When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.”

I think it boils down to public adoption, right? Like, everyone, even the bell-hop, was telling me to buy. It was beyound insane. But they said that because they all saw the graphs. It made the news, etc. But I rarely meet people who will happily take BTC or what have you. Now, is this because it's still in geeksville, or because it's harder to pay taxes, or because its slow? Where do you draw the line on usability? We know why it was made.

Would you mind sharing more of your thoughts on what might play out if the SEC loses? And then also, if you don't mind, what would happen if the SEC wins?

A good techno-thriller might be some group of hackers nab the Chinese bathymetry database, which then finds its hands in some war hungry US general

I'd agree here for sure. I'm not sure how we even go about dealing with it as every converstation seems to spiral into madness

Nope - good point!

I suppouse I want to see more UN involvement with the Organ Harvesting. It's insanely barbaric and shouldn't be happerning. But I think people like Alex Jones have given it more credit. I don't have enough data to make valid conclusion about it. But the Falun Gong practitioners I have met scared the crap out of me. It felt a lot like Scientology vibes. Does that mean we should harvest their organs? No, clearly. That's insane to like the nth-degree.

e: also, as the wiki states, Ethan Gutmann's investigations are pretty striking. Same as the China Tribunal in London. This has moved on a lot since I last read up on it. Christ.

Have you ever met a Falun Gong practitioner?

Ah, thanks for sharing.

Yes, I'd agree on all counts. As I said in another comment, we need to be so careful with what we are saying. I just get really upset when the anti-China-goverment narrative spills into an anti-China-people one.

Yes - I bring up Taiwan a lot and I think Taiwan should be it's own thing. Same with HK. My cloest friend often has to deal with Han peeps hating on Hong Kongers - dinners can be quite hard sometimes. We're all trying to make peace and make bridges, not walls.

And yes, a very good point. It's imporant to split the govemerment from the people. I need to be more careful :)

This isn't satire. I knew I was gonna get a lot of flak. I'm sorry to have so many dissagree with me :(. I have no idea what the CPCs plans are. Much like I have no idea what my own goverments (UK) plans are. But what I do see is this kinda news creates a hatered, and that hatered finds it's ways into the culture at large, and I don't think that's a good thing.

e: and yes, I honestly belive that in China things work so diffrently to the West, that a sample of the people can actually give you a good read on what the powers are thinking / doing. Maybe cos they are all brain-washed ;) who really knows. All I'm saying is, let's try and be civil!

I'm gonna get a lot of flak for this, but I think there's a massive anti-China narrative on HN. I see so much talk that's based off of people's view from an entirely Western media-centred POV. There's so much more to what's going on. There's a lot of pot calling the kettle black too. There's a lot of good stuff in the TLS from a few weeks back.

Han is the cultural race/ethnicity in mainland China. [0] It's about 92% of the population. So that's a lot of people. Is China trying to sure up its borders? Yes. Is China out for world domination, I really don't think so. Every single one of my Chinese friends is about as sweet as they come. China is the new mystery to the West, and I don't think people in the West really understand them. The amount of growth in China is outrageous. We've outsourced so much there, and then have a go at them for stuff we don't really understand.

I think GP is right in ways. I think there are some nefarious actors in China running the same plays from the playbook written by the Anglosphere war powers, but to lump it all in a say 'China bad' is, in my very under-read / under-experienced, opinion, a terrible thing.

他们很好 - Hope I've got my characters right! Tāmen hěn hǎo

Even the language isn't like ours. It's more direct and blunt.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese

Great hack, both! :)

If prints don't work... Christ, I don't know what I'd do. Great post.

What if we actually got paid for the data collection? Like UBI through the tech giants. Maybe then you have an issue where it's like the more you use the more cash you get, or maybe it's just a flat payment i.e. if you have even a single facebook account and they've used your data in some way, you get the payment?

God, this is when the lawyers get involved! YUCK!

Blimey, that's super interesting. The ad model needs to die IMHO. We need regulation from a super-national level if you ask me. Bitcoin should pay the way for a paid-for internet. Anything to get ads off the web.

Very true. We need to show the world how to do that! Got any ideas!?

That's why we need to educate people on digital etiquette. The script kiddies stealing stuff are just that, bored shitless kids.

Universities are failing and we've got bored, super smart kids running around 'hacking' and scaring the shit out of everyone.

The recent twitter hack wasn't impressive, it was stupid.

Just wish I could tip my postman! He has been looking real sleepy, man.

I've only completed a few projects with Steam/Open VR and the Vive, and found it a little harder to deal with. It's mostly wrapping input APIs, and different friends / invite systems.

But Vive don't have anything on the quest to the best of my knowledge. We ship a lot of stuff on Quests and dev on them is really quite nice (with Unity).

The worst part was having to make a workspace Facebook account or whatever that thing was called, right as the Quest was just coming out. All the docs were hosted behind a login. Nightmare.

I don't know if Oculus could have done it without Facebook money though. It seems to me the world at large wasn't giving VR enough attention. We're finally seeing proper B2B adoption now and shit like this with Facebook accounts is going to make things a lot harder. It's kinda tricky sometimes getting hardware into banks or the NHS or any place that has funky or strict hardware procurement. This is just another barrier for all that.

I've not read the dev emails that have come from Oculus yet. But Oculus are meant to be rolling out their new 'Business' backend for remote deployments soon. Hopefully this isn't B2B side too.

Aye, same here. It's really good!

What struck me most with this book was the rats!

Most humans die due to a virus and cities are left 99% empty. There reaches a point where all the rats flee the city (having eaten all the food they can) and arrive in endless waves at the protagonist's home.