What aspects do you enjoy most about your favorite sci fi or fantasy novels? Obviously it’s a mix of everything but what consistent themes do you find yourself returning to frequently?

To give an example, I tend to like complex and internally consistent magic systems or “hard magic” systems, eg Brandon Sanderson. He basically invents an alternative physics in a given series and there’s a whole set of stories around that.

I also put a lot of weight on complex characters, eg Game of Thrones. You know it’s good writing when someone can push a kid out of a window in the first episode and then somehow kind of make you almost like the guy later on.

If you don’t like sci fi and/or fantasy, what is it about the genre(s) that you dislike? And do you like one but not the other, or both or neither?

Hahaha. Clearly I underestimated the market potential for more STR names.

Alright #hamradio and #nostr users. As some of you know, I have been developing a NOSTR over ham radio client and server application with the hopes of a globally distributed . I am releasing an early alpha by the end of the month god willing. Now I need a name.

I am currently town between 2 names and want some input from the community. The first is accurate, the 2nd is fun and plays off the name as an acronym and hits back at authoritarians in some ways.

1) HAMSTR - Decentralized NOSTR over Ham Radio

This one obviously is perfect, but I am tired of the STR names...

2) COMMIE

This one would have a few possible acronyms for a fun play on the COMMS, Communication and dentralized idea:

Centralized Oppression Mitigated by Independent Exchanges

Collaborative Open Messaging for Independent Entities

Community-Organized Messaging, Media, and Information Exchange

What say the nostriches?

#asknostr

#Amateurradio

#freesom

#unstoppable

At dinner with some (older) family friends who escaped communism…

“Communism taught us to run away from the devil… now we’ve found the devil here as well.”

If you are a “westerner” and have not studied communism, you may find this statement strange… “how can the USA be anything like communism?” you ask.

But this is what people who escaped communism feel, and I promise you they know better than you what communism feels like; they lived it.

Two Tortoises Banging - Galapagos circa 2020

#shotonfilm Canon AE-1, Fuji Superia x-tra 400

#photography #NostrAfterDark

Also a great band. 🤙🏻

Nostr is about replying. Engaging in conversations. Building your social graph.

There is no algo to spoon feed you. Effort is rewarded.

Yes, it’s up to them. I don’t have any authority over their client code. I can only express my opinion as a user of the client and open pull requests to the code base. I value user choice above all else. It’s the client developer’s right to write whatever software they want, but it’s the user’s right to express their opinions about what they want to see or not see. The question is if the client developer values their users’ choices. If not, the user has the choice of using a different client.

The pro-censorship Nostr crowd is getting tiresome. Exactly the same arguments as the regular legacy media. They dislike X, Facebook, etc because it's not them doing the censoring.

Sadly, it's prevalent among the dev types too. It's the hubristic central planner mindset among technicians and scientists. Seems hard to eradicate.

nostr:note1xjvm2caxzrjsn9su85903cgnc96mau9meq2wdpp5udxt5ead2u8stupx0d

I do not fully understand what that plugin is all about and how it is supposed to function but in general I think it’s hard to predict such second order effects.

The crazy thing is that we need filters to perceive reality but every filter is a kind of censorship. So it can’t be about the information flow per se but should focus more on intention and influence.

That’s the underlying philosophical conundrum for me: freedom only works long term if it’s total but total freedom basically leads to entropy. Freedom is destructive but vital at the same time.

What are you going on about? This is not a case of a user curating his own feed.

What we're talking about here is a dev who wrote a client that manipulates the notes of users, without their permission, to make them say something they are not saying, and most like exactly the opposite of what they're saying.

This is clear cut censorship.

I share your view on this. Just one additional thought: If you think that framing is censorship, that would mean that in order to prevent censorship, you have to change everything that in any way frames the original information. This leads to exponential censorship. We should be vigilant against real attacks, and therefore a little more relaxed if it's not a real attack, imo.

You’re grasping, for some reason lol