Hi! Thanks for your reply. I work with databases and I don’t need to correct anything, just thank you for devoting a bit of your time to my question!

Well said… Thanks for spelling it out!

Thanks for these pointers!! Will look into those.

I agree with this message: in fact I am not against doing it by hand. It could be a nice life project. I will look into all the advice that you have given me, thanks everyone!

The Malazan book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson would be my recommendation. Start from Gardens of the Moon and go ahead… It keeps getting better and better!

Your last one is a good question. I don’t have an answer but I was leaning towards some sort of conservation law (e.g. normal stars have magnetic fields, when they get squeezed down to a neutron star those fields must go somewhere and it will be very much “concentrated”). Apparently this is a bit too easy (didn’t expect to be nothing different). Wikipedia provides a reference to a not too recent (2003) survey, namely this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0307133 . I don’t know if it’s the state of the art but it surely is interesting.

How much I do love those fonts. That proper spacing and balancing… It will always a place in my heart and I fear the day that I will fail to recognize it!

I may well be wrong and too naive, but I think the hate is in many cases rooted in the scary idea that they could find them attractive. And so they signal that “it could never happen to them” and that they are doing it to protect other, weaker people.

Same for me. I have been reading Linus (Torvalds) posts since decades and it really seemed out of character to me. I even clicked on the link but I admit that I haven’t yet understood what is going on. I have decided that it’s not for me…

So long, and thanks.

What is an “Analogue pocket” for those of us … Out of the loop?

There is an optional Ocr pass, from what I understand

I hope you will enjoy it :-)

One wonders how they market their services : “come to us, we are the best fake reviewers you can find on the web and these 5-star reviews prove it!”

I think that the best one is Arkham Horror LCG by MJ Newman. It really blends together game mechanics and narrative feeling (ludonarrative harmony, as she describes here fo example: https://www.bewaretheblackcat.com/post/behind-the-curtain-enemies ). In short, you are not simply moving cards or pulling out tokens, but you are really living an adventure.

Then there is War of the Ring, really conveys both for the Free People and the shadow player a super thematic experience, while being a tight and ruthless wargame.

Those two are the peaks (for us). But I can name many other which we enjoy. Among the new ones, there is a very nice pirate game, forbidden Edit: Forgotten waters (sorry, autocorrector). I also enjoy the games by Jerry Hawthorne (mice and mystics, comanauts, stuffed fables, …).

And many, many others (dune conquest, for instance, or star wars: imperial assault, …)

Hi! I play a lot of RPGs (with the exception of DND, for some reasons)… And I mainly enjoy thematic/narrative games (so, no “Germans” for me, even if the distinction is losing meaning day by day!)

Our favourite: Arkham Horror LCG, Hero realms, Lord of the rings Journey in the Middle Earth, seven Wonders duel. We are currently playing Earthborne rangers. I also often propose war of the rings/twilight struggle/ other war games but they are tougher to sell :-)

Great news! And looking forward to take part in some of these new communities.

Of course I do.

I go through several phases: sometimes I am busy reading new books, and other times I am in “reread” mode. This happens for novels and essays as well. I have always been doing that, since I was a kid, and there are books that I have been re-reading since then.

And this is without even mentioning poetry which, in my experience, expects to be read multiple times (in no small part due to the same processes by which we enjoy music - based on repetition and familiarity).

Snow crash was great back in the days! I recall 14 years old-me being upset at the "wrong acronym* but I remember it as great fun. I was coming from the darker novels and short stories by Gibson and Sterling and the lighter touch by Neal Stephenson (and others, like … Rudy Rucker if I am not mistaken) felt nice, while at the same time did not drop the expectations on being engaged on the same kind of reflections/analyses on the human nature like the previous cyberpunk novels.

Those were the times! Plus, I was playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2020 (the tabletop rpg)… :-)