My first son was one week old and we were living in the Bronx. It was nothing in the end, but at the time it was damn scary considering what happened in the Bronx the previous time.

Shit’s about to hit the fan from multiple directions and all at once. There is nothing you can do to stop it, but instead focus on how to handle it. In a more healthy way.

He comes in the night.

I saw them at the Fillmore in mid 1999. They were great live.

But what really knocked me out was half way through the second set the singer (sorry don’t remember his name) walked up to the mic and said “this song has been in our heads all week and now we’re gonna put it in yours.”

…And proceeded to play a flawless cover of Hit Me Baby One More Time. The lead singer even did some of Brittny’s moves from the video.

I agree with all the posters here that one does not need to baby a hunk of metal. Just keep it dry and clean.

That having been said …I believe in the Cast Iron Spirits. Do not anger them. Two years ago I had my 25+ years old Lodge in the oven making a pizza, and when I went to take it out of the oven, the handle broke cleanly, perfectly off, spilling my pizza on the floor and my arm, giving me a nasty burn.

So um, yeah; don’t make the spirits angry. Maybe sacrifice a drumstick to them once in a while or something.

1984 and it’s spiritual prequel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas .

These books opened up my teen mind to the fact that we are always, individually and as a society, creating, editing, and manipulating consensual reality.

Unfortunately the bad guys are way ahead of us on the manipulation bit, and with LLMs/Gen-AI I fear a total collapse of consensual reality. But if we have enough Hunter S’s in the world, we may still be in the fight.

Not OP but yes an actual scientist would like it. It’s more about the ways in which cultures over time turn to the supernatural to explain something that has a scientific explanation.

It like a lot of Big Science books (Guns, Germs, and Steel, Sapiens), has more than a few “just so” stories, but i you look past that, it’s a very valuable book teaching you to look at things you don’t understand critically and why we as a society, often fail at this.

Getting Uni flashbacks…

My hand made for me chef’s knife.

I believe this deep in my soul.

That fight is in the appendices, but not the Hobbit itself.

Bookmarking this, some very helpful answers here.

By your initial definition, the Culture series would certainly qualify!

Yeah, I’m afraid your understanding of what the “hard” part of hard SciFi is not correct.

Most people who use the term refer to SciFi that does not exceed the bounds of what we know to be physically possible, e.g., no FTL, not sapient AIs, etc.

Although I can see how you might misinterpret it to indicate anything that might be possible.

I love this book and all his stuff, but this is not hard sci-fi at all.

Just so if anyone takes the recommendation they know what they are getting into :)

Wow ok I have two. The first is long.

I moved to the Netherlands in 1991, and in the spring of 1992 my parents asked me to come home for a visit because my grandmother was dying. Which sucked.

Anyway I think I’m going to be the cool kid and smuggle some of this sweet Dutch weed back to the States. But how? Checked luggage, no control. Something on my person but not obvious? Yeah, that’s the ticket, so I stuffed my longest glove finger full of dank weed and put in my overcoat pocket thinking I could drop it without notice if things looked bad.

I land at Hartsfield and go to get my checked luggage, my weed infested glove in my overcoat pocket thrown over the back of the luggage trolly. There is this cute girl in a uniform with a beagle on a leash. The dogs starts walking toward the luggage trolly, and I’m getting nervous. He has a big old sniff and the cute girl gives him a treat. She walks up to me and says, “Sir, do you have any …fruit?”

I’m trying very hard to play it cool, but I’m sure I was not. My then girlfriend now wife had put a banana in the other overcoat pocket so I’d “eat healthy.” I answered yes, I have a banana and she says, “Then you’ll have to go to Agricultural Customs.”

Which at that time was in the basement of Hartsfield. There is only one counter with two official dudes behind it and my hand to god, two dudes with a fucking goat. These four have a very long back and forth until one of the dudes makes a call, and this other dude comes down and starts speaking French to the Two Men and a Goat. All’s well, the dudes and their goat are free to go.

[The entire time about 50m away there were constant patrols with the actual drug dogs, the german Shepards walking past me while I’m thinking fuck they are going to catch me, put me in a hole and sodomize me.]

I walk up to the two dudes at the counter and they ask me what I have. I pull out the banana which is pretty banged up at this point. They asked if I wanted to eat it, and I said no, so they directed me to a trash can behind them told me to throw it away and be on my way.

The great irony is when I finally got home to SC my mom had scored what turned out to the best weed any of us had ever smoked, and my nearly-failed career as a drug mule was all for naught.

The second one happened recently. I was going to my company’s office party at their HQ in Cyprus, flying out of Schiphol (Amsterdam). My bag goes through the scanner, gets sent down the “we gonna open this son” track. The dude points at my suitcase and asks what is on this side of it. I open it and show him one full half of the suitcase is filled with this https://www.oetker.nl/recepten/r/gevulde-speculaas which are rectangular stuffed pastry things we eat around the feast of St Nicolas (eve).

He pointed at them and looked at me somberly and said, “This is bad, very bad.” I said, Ummm, they are just treats for my coworkers." He looked at me, back down, and said “This is forbidden, you are in trouble.” Then he said nothing and I said nothing and then he busted into laughter.

He said, “I’m just fucking with you man. Under the scanner those look exactly like C-4.”

So for any Dutch traveling around xmas, many don’t bring those with you.

Check out Paradisio in Amsterdam.

But we still miss him. I think at this point we can forgive him.

Have a look here, Einstein has you covered: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Einsteins-famous-train-example-a-When-light-is-emitted-from-two-distinct-points_fig3_270830434

If healthcare were decoupled from employment, Americans could protest in much larger number and for a longer period of time.

A general strike would become viable.