Can you elaborate a little, please? I've read all Mieville and before I venture into this monster, I'd like to read your thoughts. How does it compare to his other works?
I'm 30% of the way through and really enjoying it.
It's definitely Miéville, but the weird doesn't cut in immediately.
The first 100 or so pages is about a young single British woman (Maur) in the 1970s/1980s. She brings up a son who becomes increasingly remote, joins the army, and then something happens to him, which is when the weird elements begin to appear (involving the disturbingly unpleasant lingering spirits of the dead). The second plot strand concerns a Brit soldier (Allardyce) whose unit participates in various weird events (also somewhat disturbing) set against British-empire post-colonial / cold war shenanigans in the 50s and 60s, although the two plot strands eventually connect.
One reviewer I saw described the first bit (which is 'mundane', in the non-fantasy sense) as a masterclass in how to present a character's interiority, and I'm inclined to agree. As with any Miéville, it helps to have access to a good dictionary. I'm a Brit who grew up at approximately the same time as Maur, which helped me understand some of the allusions (e.g. to 'the election', which is Thatcher's). But I had to read into the darker sides of British colonial disengagement to fully understand Allardyce's experiences. E.g. the so-called Malayan Emergency, a particularly brutal little war of independence in the 1950s.
In a way, it reminded me of Kraken, where Miéville throws in lots of references to real-world weirdness to better sneak his own inventions into the story world.
In italian high schools you learn to hate a lot of what you do, just because you're a student and can't be bothered to enjoy an analysis of some themes - then when you're a bit older you start to appreciate what you hated much more
I just finished rereading Lonesome Dove, again. Don't let the western theme fool you. It's quite possibly one of the best novels ever written. Every word, every character, every like of dialogue is crafted to perfection. It will leave you with a book hangover like nothing else.
Great to see CF sponsoring Ladybird! One of the most important projects out there right now.
I run vanilla arch/i3, so not super interested in Omarchy itself - but am curious to know how polished of a distro they can come up with. I may give it a try soon.
I kind of wish that Servo would get similar attention to get over the hump itself as well... afaik, Ladybird and Servo are both at a similar level in terms of standards support. Though Servo also really needs a full browser project around it, since it's an engine alone.
One thing I think that would be nice to see would be self-oriented browser config syncing using one of a few different cloud file sync backends, even evil ones (google drive, one-drive, dropbox, etc).
I was running hyprland with my own dotfiles and using omarchy was quite painless except the only gripe I had were quickly fixed and the other gripe that I have is that it doesn't have nm-applet manager to manage wifi etc. and has a terminal.
So it turned out that my wifi adapter wasn't connected properly and I was giving a test and submission date was near and the wifi had died mid way and I couldn't connect to other wifi because I felt as if the terminal wasn't working and not the adapter...
Definitely give me a bit of a pain. really wish that they can use nm-applet as well... Optionally support terminal wifi too but definitely give atleast an option to get gui wifi.
Also I feel like omarchy focused quite much on bash and I used to use zsh with my custom dot filess which were really lovely.
I had semi invented fish in zsh but it was my zsh and it was snappy.
Now I tried to have one ble.sh in bash and it stutters like it turned 80 lol. I definitely love zsh over bash and wish omarchy supported that too...
Luckily I have everything backed up so I will try to move away from bash I think,
One thing that I like is that omarchy has its own aur-ish thing where I found things like bun which isn't arch extra and aur definitely felt clunky. Using the omarchy repo to install bun was kinda nice actually.
I gave it a try because my system was bloated and I hadn't configured it properly in teh sense that my 100 gig was split into 40 40 and 8 swap and uh that 40 of home really got bloated somehow and I couldn't even update my pc using pacman and felt like a massive deal actually.
So I just actually picked my dotfiles and moved on. Might recommend it, it seems that omarchy also has backup support using btrfs by default which I didn't have in my ext4 arch
I think it's pretty cool that I have something I can send to someone who uses a macbook and wants to try out linux. I use a custom Nix config that I've built up over the last 5 years; it's not exactly something I can recommend.
I currently recommend Bluefin... but this might be good for an _even_ easier (though less stable) setup, that has all the tiling bling.
I use a zsa moonlander and a Kensington trackball, separately.
Just to be clear, I don't think ergo/split keyboards will necessarily help you type faster. They've been life-changing for me to help deal with nerve damage pain in my hands.
Although I do type noticably faster now, but that could just be due to reduced pain.
Haven't listened to Librivox in years and years, but I still fork over the annual $2.99 because I feel I owe it.
It's horizon-broadening. Lots and lots of interesting reads/listens I never would've picked up otherwise. 1800s ghost stories, darkly racist novels like The Leopard's Spots (good luck getting through the first 10 pages). My favorite is Havelock the Dane: A Tale of Old Grimsby, first written circa the 14th century but thought to be much older. When you listen to it, it is apparent that the author and the intended audience know 100x more about nautical things than you do. It's also charmingly simplistic; the main character is sort of like Conan the Barbarian. He'll do things like "lift a stone the weight of an ox and throw it the length of two men." You imagine the audience being like, "Oh my fucking god.... that's amazing."
