All the stories on the FP are about labor relations and corporate shenanigans. So anyway, do you like Star Trek or Star Wars better? Anybody still ike to read old school sci fi, for example I really love Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic League stories - the swashbuckling adventures of intersteller trador Nicholas van Rijn and his Solar Spice and Liquors company, David Falkayne, et al. Good old basic space opera.
Poul Anderson mentioned 🗣️ 🗣️🗣️
He and H.Beam Piper are my favorite SF writers, be sure to check Three Hearts and Three Lions, the book where the hero solves fantasy problems with Science™.
Back in the days of Star trek the next generation, Voyager and Deep Space 9, I Would say Star Wars is not really Science Fiction but Science Fantasy.
But unfortunately that’s become true for Star Trek too.As Science Fiction I clearly prefer old school Star Trek, but as Science Fantasy Star Wars does it way better IMO.
I hadn’t heard about Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic League stories before, they look very interesting, I’ll bookmark that for when I feel like some old school SciFi. 👍 😀
‘War Of The Wing-Men’ is a good one to start with.
Thanks. I just found the entire series, 😋 but with some odd numbering?:
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - 01 - The Trouble Twisters
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - 02 - War Of The Wing-Men
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - 03 - Trader To The Stars
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - 04 - Satan’s World
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - 05 - Mirkheim
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - 06 - The Earth Book Of Stormgate
Anderson, Poul - Polesotechnic League - People in the WindCompletely different numbering than for instance the recommended here?
https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/polesotechnic-league/
Which would you recommend?
By publication date or chronological story line?
DS9 > TNG > BSG
What boggles my mind is that there have been about fifty movies based on Philip K. Dick and zero based on Poul Anderson.
Anderson has galactic empires, roguish heroes, dozens of alien species, strong females, etc etc.
I think that it because Dick could write short stories that could get made into movies. A lot more of the sprawling book series are only done justice with multi movie series or TV series.
PKD is special somehow. He’s the one author where, I think, the movies are better than the books pretty consistently. Maybe it’s luck or my flawed opinion.
I think Dick was writing to be read in a particular time and place. Take Dashiell Hammett. ‘Red Harvest’ works a century later. there are some references that are dated [wearing a red tie] but overall you can give the novel to a modern person without a great deal of explanation needed. ‘The Thin Man’ requires a ton of annotation to be understood.
imho.
Agreed. Partly because the movies have actual endings…
I have just read one Poul Anderson (when I was a teenager) and the most important thing I remember was people fucking each other all the time.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
iirc, it was in "War Of The Wing Men’ where a princess has been traveling through the galaxy looking for a human male to sire her child. She ends up picking a fat, boorish space trader over the hero-type because the trader actually knows how to get things done.
I have a soft spot for star wars but only the first 3, probably because I was young and it was so breathtaking.
So now I roll with star trek, especially the older ones.
But back on track, Where are the robots? The DIY? The fun stuff. Where are posts about a new ESP32? Some portable 3D printer (probably garbage, lets have a flame war!), how to use phone chargers to get 20 vilts to your led strip, funky homelab setups and deals, better network stuff, even retro computing I’d say.
Yeah, block all the boardroom chatter and bring back real tech!
Everything I needed to learn about SciFi I learned from watching Prisoners Of Gravity on TVO. The host Rick Green was always interesting to listen to. I learned there was far more scifi than just TrekWars
IMHO, this community should be about technology. Novel inventions. Interesting or creative applications. Discoveries. Dangers, advances, impacts, experiments, tutorials, etc.
Instead, it’s overrun with stock market and business news having no more to do with technology than CEOs of wood pulp factories have to do with literature.
I wish Rule 2 was phrased in a way that clearly excludes the latter, and enforced.
Technology cannot be disentangled from society and the economics that create and develop it. Technology is social process, it is not a technical matter.
The idea that technology is a thing on its own, maybe even with its own agency, is an ideological stance pushed first and foremost by the people you don’t want to hear about exactly for the purpose of obscuring their role in the whole deal.
no more to do with technology than CEOs of wood pulp factories have to do with literature.
This has me envisioning a literature community filled with stories like “Random House and Penguin merging” (I know, old news), “Layoffs at PRH”, etc.
Yeah I prefer a post about coffee_drudge version 0.12 being released than what we have now.
I completely agree with all the people regarding more “Technology” news, like MIT stacking more transistors onto chips breakthrough.
When I was looking for a tech community to subscribe to, I wasn’t expecting this… 🙈
Y’know, I was just browsing earlier and thinking that there wasn’t even any technology stuff in my feed anymore, it’d all been subsumed by the political churn…
Anyhow, to answer properly: I like Star Wars’ aesthetic better, but Star Trek also had some incredible stuff. I’ve also been increasingly burned out on Star Wars since the Disney takeover, to the point I barely follow it anymore. Back in the day I was neck-deep in the community of nerds who loved analyzing how the technology in the setting worked!
But the real love of my science-fiction life is Babylon 5. Something about how they planned the show’s myth arc out over multiple seasons leading to huge payoffs for both characters and the overall story.
Disney is really milking it, but I loved Andor.
I only watched a few episodes of Babylon 5 when it was new, but recently started at the beginning and I think it’s a great show now.
+1 for an actual tech focused community. I think it has to be focused on software or hardware as a rule. News about stocks, CEOs, rebranding etc should not be allowed. Maybe put them in tech_news or something.
I want to read about what new feature the openbsd folks are working on or innovations by the quebes os team or a new RISC based laptop or the raspberry pi 420 that can play half life 3.
I think it has to be focused on software or hardware as a rule.
I don’t. Those fields are but small slivers in the realm of technology, and they’re not even particularly novel any more. A community dedicated to one or both of them might make sense, but there’s no reason to let them dominate the technology community.
News about stocks, CEOs, rebranding etc should not be allowed.
I agree with you there.
“Business” also exists. If it’s news about the business, not the technology, it should go to Business.
It might be too technical for some, but Linux Weekly News (lwn.net) has been a long-running source of articles dating back to the 1990s, if memory serves aright, that’s kind of in that ballpark.
EDIT: Hmm. It looks like at some point, some of their articles went subscriber-only, though.
I see a valid point for posting topics in the category “technology & society” etc. However, nowadays this is a field of its own, so why not start a hardcore tech community?
Why should we give up the “technology” name?
We don’t have to…
I’ve kind of felt the same way, would rather have a somewhat-stronger focus on technology in this community.
The current top few pages of posts are pretty much all just talking about drama at social media companies, which frankly isn’t really what I think of as technology.
That being said, “technology” kind of runs the gamut in various news sources. I’ve often seen “technology news” basically amount to promoting new consumer gadgets, which isn’t exactly what I’d like to see from the thing, either. I don’t really want to see leaked photos of whatever the latest Android tablet from Lenovo or whatever is either.
I’d be more interested in reading about technological advances and changes.
I suppose that if someone wants to start a more-focused community, I’d also be willing to join that, give it a shot.
EDIT: I’d note that the current content here kind of mirrors what’s on Reddit at /r/Technology, which is also basically drama at social media companies. I suppose that there’s probably interest from some in that. It’s just not really what I’m primarily looking for.
I made !antisocialmedia@piefed.social for all the drama at social media companies
Hah, clever name!
I like turtles
TMNT never made enough sense to me.
Better?
Neither, baratna. I am of The Expanse.
Or you could start posting about the technology related things you expect to see here?
Why tho? Politics and social issues are clearly what people want here - and that’s fine, my objection is just calling the community “Technology” when that’s not at all the dominant theme. Maybe “Tech-Adjacent” would be better.
Some of us do, but that doesn’t remove the unending flood of business news and corporate drama that we don’t want in our feeds, so it doesn’t solve the problem.
I would quite literally rather piss into the wind. At least then I’d be doing something outdoors.
