“The Terror” by Dan Simmons. I already watched the show and enjoyed it, so I picked up the book and am only a few chapters in, but I’m liking it a good bit. There seems to be a good bit of historical facts thrown in, which I personally enjoy.

For those unfamiliar, it is based on the real life Franklin Expedition that disappeared while searching for a way to traverse the Northwest Passage in the Canadian arctic. The story follows the known facts regarding the fates of the expedition crew members, but it tells a paranormal horror story to fill in the blanks.

I volunteered at a thrift store years ago, and I was in charge of looking at the condition and prices of books that were donated. One person dropped off about 10 boxes filled to the brim with Playboy cartoons. They weren’t worth anything and couldn’t be put out on the floor anyway, so they were thrown out. I also remember that someone donated a biography of Benjamin Franklin from 1835. The cover was coming apart, but the pages were in wonderful condition. We sent that to a bigger thrift store in the area that ended up auctioning it for about $350.

Plenty of great advice here, but one more thing to think about is how such a large win for Republicans can be used against them a bit in the future. They won the Presidency and have majorities in the Senate, likely the House, the Supreme Court, and governorships. They have free reign to do what they want, which is scary, but it also means that they can’t blame the Democrats for any bad things that may happen in the next 2 years until the midterms.

Any law that passes with bad outcomes is solely their fault. If the economy gets worse, it’s all on them. If the deficit increases, they are the only ones to blame. If they don’t fulfill their campaign promises, it’s because they chose not to. If there is a government shutdown, it’s because they couldn’t agree on a budget. If bills aren’t being passed, they are arguing too much. They can’t even fall back on blaming the Democrats in the Senate because they have enough votes that they could cancel the filibuster while they are in office and reinstate it before they leave.

This means that you, and everyone else, can point out anything the government does that has a negative impact and say definitively that it is entirely the fault of the Republicans. If this is done frequently enough and loud enough, there may be enough frustrated voters to change the outcome the next time around. They will definitely do things that annoy almost every voter, whether they are going too far or not far enough in their agenda, and they can’t hide that it was only them that made those decisions.

I don’t think it is very well known, but I thought Scavengers Reign was very good. It was a bit slow, but I thought it gave time to see the weird alien world.

If you are on the fence about it, the show is a followup to this short and has some similarities in its world building.

I second The Terror (never saw season 2 though). It was a slow burn horror for much of it, which I really appreciated. I liked the historical aspects and thought they conveyed the isolation well. I need to get around to reading the book at some point.

I really enjoyed Halt and Catch Fire, and I see so few people talk about it. The only issue I had with it was that each season felt like it was almost a reset point rather than a straight continuation of the plot. I wish they would have left a few more open plot points at the end of each season that flowed into the next. I felt the same way with Silicon Valley, even though I enjoyed that one as well.

Recently, Linux removed several people from their organization that have Russian email addresses. Linus made a statement that confirmed this was done intentionally. I believe that there was some mention of following sanctions on Russia due to the war. I haven’t looked into the details of it all, so take my analysis with a grain of salt. From what I understand, it sounded like it was only Russian maintainers that were removed and normal users submitting code from Russia can still contribute. Maintainers have elevated permissions and can control what code gets accepted into a project, meaning that a bad actor could allow some malicious code to sneak past. This may have also contributed to the decision since this type of attack has happened before and Russia seems like a likely culprit. The reactions to this change have been varied. Some people feel it is somewhat justified or reasonable, some people think that it means it is no longer open source, and some people think it is unfairly punishing Russian civilians (it is worth noting that that is part of the point of sanctions).

I haven’t used it often, but the few times I have asked it very specific programming questions, it has usually been pretty good. For example, I am not very good with regex, but I can usually ask Copilot to create regex that does something like verifying a string matches a certain pattern, and it performs pretty well. I don’t use regex enough to spend a lot of time learning it, and I could easily find a few examples online that can be combined to make my answer, but Copilot is much quicker and easier for me. That said, I don’t think I would trust it past answering questions about how to implement a small code snippet.

I have two that flip for my favorite depending on my mood at any given time: “There Will Be Blood” and “Blade Runner 2049”. They are both kinda slow and require attention to really appreciate, so probably my favorite movie to turn my brain off and have fun is “Mad Max: Fury Road”.

User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I’m talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.