I really enjoy lists like this. These days, recommendation systems tend to push the most popular and addictive content, which makes it harder to stumble upon hidden gems.
But I’ve found that older or more obscure novels often carry a different kind of imagination. They’re not following formulas and they’re not tied to movies or franchises. It feels like reading someone’s raw creative mind before it got polished or filtered.
I’m also curious if anyone has a book that barely anyone talks about, but left a lasting impact on you. I’d love to add it to my list.
Judging from your comment, you may find it intriguing to take a peek at the authors and books listed in Appendix N (Inspirational and Educational Reading[0]) from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide (1979). If you have any interest in the fantasy roleplaying sphere, this list should be all the more interesting.
On your latter question, I don't see much discussion surrounding The Magus by John Fowles (1965), which is one of my favorite fiction novels of all time.
Agree. That is why when it comes to movies I still rent discs at a local video store. The owner, Colin, is the ultimate movie recommendation master. The algorithm just can’t compete. If you live in San Francisco, the store is called Video Wave.
The most helpful advice I’ve heard is not to aim for perfection. When you focus too much on structure and technique, the talk often feels stiff. What really connects with people is speaking about something you truly care about.
The first time I gave a talk, I memorized the entire script and completely blanked on stage. Later, I spoke from the heart instead and it worked much better. Instead of trying to impress the audience, it might be more important to ask yourself why this matters to you.
I’ve always felt that self-hosting and self-sovereignty aren’t mutually exclusive. Most people don’t avoid freedom because they don’t want it, but because it’s too much hassle. The real question isn’t who wants control, but whether there’s a simpler way for ordinary people to have this sovereignty without wrestling with a pile of tech.
I don’t think planting trees is only for cooling things down. Sometimes it’s just about helping people feel like they can go outside. In really hot places, even a bit of shade can change your mind about stepping out.
I know someone who had a clear psychotic break and still hasn't fully recovered. The scariest part wasn't when he lost control. It was that he truly believed everything made perfect sense.
The more you tried to care for him, the more he thought you were acting and trying to manipulate him.
My cat does the same thing. Whenever I lie on my side, they slowly roll over to snuggle against the same side every time. If I face the "wrong" way, they fidget and squirm for a while until they settle in.
Reading this study made me realize that cats are actually very good at finding balance.
We keep stressing about not having enough time, and then physicists come along and say, "Well, time might not even exist." It’s like carefully trying to organize a desk that isn’t actually there. Maybe focus is the only real resource.
Nothing about this invalidates any of our assumptions because time does, in fact, exist for us humans.
This sort of science is frustrating for me because we all know exactly what we mean when we reason about time together. Science saying, "time does not exist" doesn't do anything useful for us, because we already intuitively know this statement to be false conventionally.
Not to say I entirely lack learned helplessness, but not everybody with ADHD is the same. With my ADHD I can try to get out of bed and the body will refuse to move. I can try to get something done and I just won't be able to focus long enough for that to happen. Or, I'll do something useless like watching YouTube videos or scrolling Twitter and the entire time I will be screaming at myself trying to do the productive thing that I'm supposed to have been doing the whole time and it just won't happen. It doesn't feel like learned helplessness; I'm not deciding that things are hopeless "because of ADHD". In fact, the only reason I found out I had ADHD is because I posted about constantly being unable to do even things I know I enjoy and someone commented that it could be ADHD and I had apparently never heard of this aspect of that before. Turns out I definitely have ADHD.
Sorry you can't stand my comment. It's genuinely how I feel. I'm sorry if I haven't sufficiently conquered my mental disorder to your standards yet - maybe I should get off the Internet until I do?
It's cool if you don't feel the same way I do. I don't have that privilege yet. Maybe one day I will, but that's no reason I should wait to express myself. This is a genuine struggle I face and I'm not saying ADHD makes everyone helpless but it sure as hell makes me feel helpless.
I never really took time seriously until one of my cron jobs skipped execution because of daylight saving. That was the moment I realized how tricky time actually is.
This article explains it really well. The part about leap seconds especially got me. We literally have to smear time to keep servers from crashing. That’s kind of insane.
The issue with leap seconds is that the BIPM recommends that everyone should use UTC for their "source of truth" fundamental representation for time stamps, so pretty much every software system does that. That's the core mistake.
Everyone should use TAI as their fundamental representation. TAI has no leap seconds. It's way easier to convert from TAI to UTC than vice versa. You can still easily present all your timestamps in UTC when printed as a string.
NTP servers are generally synced up to GPS signals, which already use a version of TAI for their time signals. So an NTP server will take a perfectly good TAI time signal and do a smearing conversion to something that looks more like UTC (but isn't, because a true UTC clock would occasionally have a 61-second minute instead of smearing). Then someone never fails to freak out about the leap seconds because we have this oversimplified time abstraction that encourages you to ignore them. And instead of realizing they made a mistake in recommending UTC as the fundamental representation, BIPM is doubling down and is about to eliminate leap seconds entirely, so UTC will become just a worse version of TAI (because it will still have cause historical discontinuities with most software systems, but also drift away from solar time). I'm kinda pissed about it
I avoid running "daily" cron jobs or other scheduled tasks around 2am for that reason, they might not get run or them might get run twice.
Where practical I schedule them around 12:00 (but I'm sure one day I'll get stung but some odd country who chooses to implement their daylight savings changeover in the middle of the day).
I never really took time seriously until one of my cron jobs skipped execution because of daylight saving. That was the moment I realized how tricky time actually is.
This article explains it really well. The part about leap seconds especially got me. We literally have to smear time to keep servers from crashing. That’s kind of insane.
