when media gets really atavistic and feels vengeance and murder rectifies all wrongs done to the protagonists and is somehow supposed to offer some kind of pathos
see mostly: horror films, as a genre
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
It bothers me that my mom has no tolerance for darker material. Like, if it's not happy or optimistic or, at the very least, on the fence, she dismisses it. She doesn't question the value of it or anything, she just views it as something akin to setting aside time to feeling bad. It took her years to watch TDK because of Heath's death. There are a lot of other fantastic movies she's refused to watch or done so half-heartedly to placate me - which is always worse, because no one wants to watch a movie with someone who's restless and disinterested - but worst of all, a lot of my stories are dark, and she treats them the same. "Why can't you write a nice story? Make a nice story, Wash."
That's my mom. At some point I'm making her watch Dear Zachary. Because I inflict that on everyone.
I set the stupid-curve on my midterm. The lowest grade is: me. God dammit, I need to know how to do this shit. Which means a lot of talking to the prof and being extremely embarrassed. But I will wipe that out with a great grade on the final.
What class?
Grad stats. I hate taking classes again. I just want to work.
I used to really like Palahniuk and then I think he jumped the shark and used "inventive" narrative structure to hide the fact that he can only write in one voice and that most of his shit is just shock-jock lit.
when media gets really atavistic and feels vengeance and murder rectifies all wrongs done to the protagonists and is somehow supposed to offer some kind of pathos
see mostly: horror films, as a genre
Well what are you gonna do to rectify wrongs? something lame like months of difficult recovery?
when media gets really atavistic and feels vengeance and murder rectifies all wrongs done to the protagonists and is somehow supposed to offer some kind of pathos
see mostly: horror films, as a genre
Right, not inviting Pony to my Death Wish Marathon.
when media gets really atavistic and feels vengeance and murder rectifies all wrongs done to the protagonists and is somehow supposed to offer some kind of pathos
see mostly: horror films, as a genre
I don't think a lot of horror really harkens back to atavism as much as it harkens back to self-preservation.
Like, if you don't kill Michael Myers motherfucker is going to kill YOU
when media gets really atavistic and feels vengeance and murder rectifies all wrongs done to the protagonists and is somehow supposed to offer some kind of pathos
see mostly: horror films, as a genre
I dig the revenge sub genre, but I prefer it when it's subverted, such as when the protagonist's need for vengeance leads him toward his own destruction, or when he reaches the point where he can achieve his vengeance but opts not to. It's a genre that, by and large, deals with catharsis - a wrong has been committed and our hero must right it. Something that's never more entertaining than when the hero goes about righting that wrong the wrong way.
I used to really like Palahniuk and then I think he jumped the shark and used "inventive" narrative structure to hide the fact that he can only write in one voice and that most of his shit is just shock-jock lit.
Repetitive isn't the right word, but it's the first that comes to mind.
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Donkey KongPutting Nintendo out of business with AI nipsRegistered Userregular
The applet has been obfuscated by way of minimization, so linking against them doesn't work in any sane way and decompilation results in some shitty source files with no sensible variable or function names. Technically you could use the included javadoc to reconstruct most of the parts but that would be a pain in the ass.
Inside the jar file is the following notice:
Jamel 1.1 (0.1.5.18) beta-test
A Java Agent-based MacroEconomic Laboratory
Jamel is provided 'as is', without warranty of any kind.
Jamel is available for academic and non-commercial personal use.
You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the applet.
I don't think the author really knew what open source meant when he copypasted that bit of english onto his mostly french site.
Donkey Kong on
Thousands of hot, local singles are waiting to play at bubbulon.com.
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SarksusATTACK AND DETHRONE GODRegistered Userregular
I like that blossom still has a career but my crush syxx doesnt. No wait I meant ffffuuuu
I have a standing job offer for Jenna von Oÿ.
It pays really well.
She got the crazy eyes.
My neck, my back, my FUPA and my crack.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Okay, @BeNarwhal, here we go! This list is neither fair nor comprehensive but I feel like you deserve more than just random names and titles. I tried to touch on several different styles and subgenres.
Isaac Asimov - my favorite classic sci-fi author. Like many others, he got his start in the pulp magazines, so his stories tend to be short and efficient and often lacking in physical description and characterization. He makes up for it, though, with entertaining plots, memorable situations, and his overall warm, humane world-view (many sci-fi authors are misanthropes who if they weren't writing would probably have spent their days building ham radios and stockpiling guns).
The Caves of Steel and The Robots of Dawn - two linked novels that take place in a future where Earth is an overcrowded, polluted megalopolis whose residents chafe at the restrictions placed on them by the more advanced and civilized "Spacer" colonies - luxurious places where robots do most of the work. Into this milieu step NYPD detective Elijah Bailey, who has to reluctantly team up with a new partner, R. Daneel Olivaw, an android built by a Spacer scientist to look an act like a human. They have to overcome prejudice and suspicion to work together and solve crimes that will ultimately affect humanity's entire future. I'm really fond of these books; the characters are vividly drawn (unusually so for classic sci-fi) and the mysteries are clever and thoughtfully-plotted.
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) - Asimov's magnum opus, and one of the towering classics of the genre that has influenced countless works since, these three novels, or rather collections of novellas, tell the story of the end of the Galactic Empire. After 12,000 years of prosperous civilization, a social scientist discovers that the Empire's decline and collapse will be followed by a dark age of 30,000 years of barbarism and war. To prevent this, he creates the Foundation, a hidden enclave at the edge of the galaxy devoted to preserving science, art and culture. Over the course of the trilogy, the pacifist scientists of the Foundation have to face down barbaric warlords, internal corruption, the decayed but still-powerful remnants of the Empire itself, and the mysterious and possibly sinister group called the Second Foundation.
William Gibson - one of my other favorite authors. His stories, rather than being about space and the future of humanity, are much more down-to-earth; he is credited with creating the cyberpunk genre, but at this late date I prefer to avoid that term since it has a bunch of baggage that doesn't really relate to Gibson's stuff at all. Suffice to say that his novels are exciting and literate stories of criminals, outcasts and lowlifes struggling to get by (usually illegally) in a neon-lit, high-tech future. His writing is characterized by hard-edged, crystal-clear prose, a consciousness about fashion and music (and their importance) that is often missing in sci-fi, and a Romantic sensibility - Byronic protagonists, lost loves, and a sense of aching beauty.
Burning Chrome - a collection of the short stories that put Gibson on the map. "Johnny Mnemonic" is about a guy who makes his living using his computer-enhanced brain to "remember" his clients' important and illicit data, though his conscious mind knows nothing about it, and what happens when one of his clients decides the data would be even safer if they killed him. "Dogfight" is a nasty, vicious little story about a punk kid who takes an experimental amphetamine to beat a crippled dude at an arcade game. The title story is about two rival hackers and a prostitute who team up to heist millions from a crimelord.
Neuromancer - one of the most important books in the genre, it's the book that has defined William Gibson for thirty years. Case, a former hacker who has washed up and turned to drug dealing and petty crime in Tokyo after ruining his nervous system on a job gone wrong, is given a second chance; a mysterious benefactor is putting together an international team of criminal pros to pull off a dangerous heist, stealing a data file that could change history from a private orbital space station owned by a family of crazed billionaires. Complications ensue. It's a beautifully-written book, packed with interesting characters and incidents, and full of little details that will stick in your mind forever.
Pattern Recognition - The present has basically caught up with Gibson's vision, so he's switched to writing about the present. In this book, hailed as his comeback, a young woman who "cool-hunts" (finds interesting trends) for advertising agencies is hired in the aftermath of 9/11 to track down the mysterious creator of a series of anonymous videos that have gone viral on the internet. The search leads her from London to Hong Kong to the former USSR and ends up being, of course, a lot more epic than anticipated. This might be my favorite book of the last decade.
Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama - like many of the godfathers of science fiction, Clarke is more memorable for his great ideas than his memorable characters or scintillating prose, but Rama is considered classic SF because it really plays to his strengths. A mysterious cylindrical object, 30 miles long, has entered the solar system; astronauts land on it and discover that it is hollow, containing an entire ecosystem; seemingly-abandoned cities, hills, fields, and even an ocean. With only a few days before the object exits the solar system again, the explorers race through the object, trying to discover who made it and for what purpose. Clarke has a gift for physical description and it really comes out here, painting a vivid picture of this place, and that's what sticks with you, along with the marvelous twist ending.
Frank Herbert, Dune - As a fantasy reader, I think this might be up your alley. Dune is one of the genuine epics of sci-fi, with a vast scope and one of the first sf novels to really world-build in the detail that you have probably come to expect from fantasy. The future of Dune feels like the future of the whole human race, with a government that echoes the Holy Roman Empire and Persia, religions based on Zen and Sunni and Sufism, language and terminology derived from Arabic - it really stands in stark contrast to all the science fiction futures that feel like 50's Dad in Space. The actual story is about two warring noble dynasties and their struggle to control a planet that supplies the most important resource in the universe, but what will stick with you is how widescreen and cinematic it all is; every character is larger-than-life, every situation is life-or-death. They've made two movie and several game adaptations but nothing can ever live up to the sheer spectacle that unreels in your head as you read it.
Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Liebowitz - one of the great postapocalyptic stories, this follows the history of a tiny Catholic monastery in the American southwest for a thousand years after a devastating nuclear war, as the monks try to preserve technology and human dignity across the centuries. It's a beautiful and sad story and I can't think of many things that feel like it.
Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun - Wolfe is one of my favorite sci-fi writers and this is his epic. In a fantasy world of magic and enchantment, an apprentice torturer commits the crime of showing mercy to a "client" and is exiled, sent on a journey to a distant city. What we don't realize at first is that the world of "Urth" isn't a fantasy world - it just takes place so far in the future that instead of geologic layers, the strata in the rocks trace the ruins of civilizations; the rainbow-colored sand on the beaches is the crushed glass of millions of years of cities; the monsters are aliens, the "wizards" are people who command advanced science, and the Sun itself is bloated and red with age, so the Urth needs a new sun. Wolfe's writing is both difficult, full of archaic English words and elaborate sentence constructions, and very beautiful. The plot is complicated; the torturer is our narrator and claims to have perfect memory, but is very unreliable, and part of the fun is piecing together the truth of his story. The result is something you will visit and revisit and revisit and gain new insight every time.
Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide - Swanwick is a disciple of Wolfe and has a similar command of the language, but puts it to a very different use with a fantastic and underrated book that combines elements of space opera, cyberpunk, and mystery. The watery, humid planet Miranda is about to experience a tidal shift that will drown its islands and continents; while the human government organizes an evacuation, the residents spend their last nights in frenzied partying. Into this milieu comes The Bureaucrat, dispatched to Miranda from the head office to investigate a cult leader called Gregorian, who claims to have magic powers and is offering to transform anyone who can pay into an aquatic creature capable of surviving the deluge. Is Gregorian a fraud, swindling people out of their money, or is he employing forbidden off-world technology? The Bureaucrat's job is to find out, but he may be out of his depth (so to speak) as his businesslike personality clashes with the drunken, high, and horny natives, and Gregorian's cultists stalk his every move. Written in the early 90s, this book has gained new and obvious relevance after Katrina, but is gripping and masterful in its own right.
Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games - UK writer Banks is lesser-known on this side of the pond, and we are the suckier for it. His Culture series of novels deals with a spaceborne utopian society - The Culture - of humans and AIs who have solved the problem of scarcity and generally hang out in left-wing, free-loving, communal bliss across space stations, terraformed planets, and giant sentient ships. Of course, communal bliss isn't that exciting, so the novels tend to deal with what happens when the Culture encounters other societies and things outside its experience. The Player of Games is the best intro to the Culture and a terrific story on its own; it's about a bored, decadent games master, a celebrity in the Culture, who is dragooned into service and sent to a distant, brutally fascist alien society whose political system awards power to whoever can master an incredibly complicated political board game.
Lois McMaster Bujold, the Miles Vorkosigan series - I like adventure and action, but the problem in science fiction is that a lot of the writers who do that stuff tend to be kind of creepy and right-wing, all about heroic space marines fighting evil space commies and bitching about how those liberal politicians won't let them win Space Vietnam. This is different - you get the excitement, but none of the shittiness. They take place in a space-opera milieu, where humanity has colonized many planets and split up into different governments and factions. On his patriarchal, backward planet, young noble Miles Vorkosigan is treated like a freak; thanks to a failed assassination attempt on his parents, he was born with dwarfism and brittle-bone disease, but is determined to live up to his noble father's reputation, solving problems and winning battles using his wits and empathy instead of physical prowess, while also trying to avoid meddling relatives and get laid. The Vorkosigan books aren't literary classics, but they're really well-made entertainments - funny and adventuresome, with a big cast of genuinely likable characters. It'd make a great TV show; the individual stories (there are ten or so books and several short stories) cover a bunch of different genres, as Miles fights space battles, solves murders, uncovers political corruption, battles his evil twin brother, and falls in love. They're short, fun, easy reads but they stick with you more than most popcorn reading.
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle - Dick was a troubled dude whose amphetamine-fueled writing was highly variable, but this is generally agreed to be one of his best. It's a deceptively simple alternate history story; in a world where the Axis won World War II and 1960s America is divided between Japan and Germany, a group of ordinary Californians are drawn into a quest to discover the mysterious author of a popular underground novel, an alternate history about a fictional world where the US won World War II.
Dan Simmons, Hyperion - A thousand years in the future, humanity and its artificial-intelligence partners have spread across much of the galaxy and created a prosperous and peaceful society. But despite this, seven people from seven completely different walks of life are tormented by apocalyptic visions about the extinction of the human race, so one by one they undertake a pilgrimage to the mysterious planet Hyperion, where an abandoned necropolis city moves backward in time from the future, guarded by a giant metal monster called the Shrike. It's said that if seven people undertake the journey, six will die and one will be granted a wish; as they travel, the pilgrims each share a story of how they came to be there, and each story is told in the style of a different type of science fiction. Simmons used to be a horror writer, and what really fuels Hyperion - aside from the fantastic ideas that it's chock-full of - is the vivid, nightmarish imagery. It's considered one of the best works in the field, and with good reason.
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Podlyyou unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered Userregular
Since DK and Kakos are here
What's a decent resource for learning C/C# for someone who knows logic?
Posts
my friends and I have not stopped quoting those videos for years
YA GAY YA GAY
If a dude gets fucked over it is incredibly gratifying when they pull something over whoever fucked them that ruins their life
Like, if the problems get fixed or someone gets revenge on someone I can dig it
I'm happy to see the attention to detail with the changes, and aging the old cast and such.
Authors to avoid:
Brett Easton Ellis
Cormac McCarthy
But I think that's because I view TV and Film as ways to relax or unwind, as my "thought-provoking" media tend to be music and text.
I have
"So don't consume that media" is pretty much the answer
That said I didn't find it dark so much as I found it hilarious
remember that time Blossom was a very special episode
OH WAIT THAT WAS EVERY EPISODE
when media gets really atavistic and feels vengeance and murder rectifies all wrongs done to the protagonists and is somehow supposed to offer some kind of pathos
see mostly: horror films, as a genre
That's my mom. At some point I'm making her watch Dear Zachary. Because I inflict that on everyone.
Cormac McCarthy does love him some darkness. When Goths think you might need to lighten up....
Grad stats. I hate taking classes again. I just want to work.
Wasted an hour downloading that shit on my saturated internet.
Well, I can't find the source code easily, but if you need the jars to link against, I can give you those:
http://p.seppecher.free.fr/jamel/lib/jfreechart-1.0.12.jar
http://p.seppecher.free.fr/jamel/lib/jcommon-1.0.15.jar
http://p.seppecher.free.fr/jamel/lib/jamel-0.1.5.18.jar
I'll search a bit more for the source.
I have a standing job offer for Jenna von Oÿ.
It pays really well.
Well what are you gonna do to rectify wrongs? something lame like months of difficult recovery?
Right, not inviting Pony to my Death Wish Marathon.
I don't think a lot of horror really harkens back to atavism as much as it harkens back to self-preservation.
Like, if you don't kill Michael Myers motherfucker is going to kill YOU
woo
I dig the revenge sub genre, but I prefer it when it's subverted, such as when the protagonist's need for vengeance leads him toward his own destruction, or when he reaches the point where he can achieve his vengeance but opts not to. It's a genre that, by and large, deals with catharsis - a wrong has been committed and our hero must right it. Something that's never more entertaining than when the hero goes about righting that wrong the wrong way.
Except for, like, a handful of cases
Repetitive isn't the right word, but it's the first that comes to mind.
The applet has been obfuscated by way of minimization, so linking against them doesn't work in any sane way and decompilation results in some shitty source files with no sensible variable or function names. Technically you could use the included javadoc to reconstruct most of the parts but that would be a pain in the ass.
Inside the jar file is the following notice:
I don't think the author really knew what open source meant when he copypasted that bit of english onto his mostly french site.
Do you know whether if the Legend of Korra is going to stand by itself or if it's required that you watch the original series?
wait, you hit 1,100?
congrats cass, i knew you had it in you
:^: :^: :^:
:c
Not sure why you wouldn't watched the original. But it seems to be pretty stand alone as far as I can tell.
She got the crazy eyes.
Isaac Asimov - my favorite classic sci-fi author. Like many others, he got his start in the pulp magazines, so his stories tend to be short and efficient and often lacking in physical description and characterization. He makes up for it, though, with entertaining plots, memorable situations, and his overall warm, humane world-view (many sci-fi authors are misanthropes who if they weren't writing would probably have spent their days building ham radios and stockpiling guns).
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) - Asimov's magnum opus, and one of the towering classics of the genre that has influenced countless works since, these three novels, or rather collections of novellas, tell the story of the end of the Galactic Empire. After 12,000 years of prosperous civilization, a social scientist discovers that the Empire's decline and collapse will be followed by a dark age of 30,000 years of barbarism and war. To prevent this, he creates the Foundation, a hidden enclave at the edge of the galaxy devoted to preserving science, art and culture. Over the course of the trilogy, the pacifist scientists of the Foundation have to face down barbaric warlords, internal corruption, the decayed but still-powerful remnants of the Empire itself, and the mysterious and possibly sinister group called the Second Foundation.
William Gibson - one of my other favorite authors. His stories, rather than being about space and the future of humanity, are much more down-to-earth; he is credited with creating the cyberpunk genre, but at this late date I prefer to avoid that term since it has a bunch of baggage that doesn't really relate to Gibson's stuff at all. Suffice to say that his novels are exciting and literate stories of criminals, outcasts and lowlifes struggling to get by (usually illegally) in a neon-lit, high-tech future. His writing is characterized by hard-edged, crystal-clear prose, a consciousness about fashion and music (and their importance) that is often missing in sci-fi, and a Romantic sensibility - Byronic protagonists, lost loves, and a sense of aching beauty.
Neuromancer - one of the most important books in the genre, it's the book that has defined William Gibson for thirty years. Case, a former hacker who has washed up and turned to drug dealing and petty crime in Tokyo after ruining his nervous system on a job gone wrong, is given a second chance; a mysterious benefactor is putting together an international team of criminal pros to pull off a dangerous heist, stealing a data file that could change history from a private orbital space station owned by a family of crazed billionaires. Complications ensue. It's a beautifully-written book, packed with interesting characters and incidents, and full of little details that will stick in your mind forever.
Pattern Recognition - The present has basically caught up with Gibson's vision, so he's switched to writing about the present. In this book, hailed as his comeback, a young woman who "cool-hunts" (finds interesting trends) for advertising agencies is hired in the aftermath of 9/11 to track down the mysterious creator of a series of anonymous videos that have gone viral on the internet. The search leads her from London to Hong Kong to the former USSR and ends up being, of course, a lot more epic than anticipated. This might be my favorite book of the last decade.
Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama - like many of the godfathers of science fiction, Clarke is more memorable for his great ideas than his memorable characters or scintillating prose, but Rama is considered classic SF because it really plays to his strengths. A mysterious cylindrical object, 30 miles long, has entered the solar system; astronauts land on it and discover that it is hollow, containing an entire ecosystem; seemingly-abandoned cities, hills, fields, and even an ocean. With only a few days before the object exits the solar system again, the explorers race through the object, trying to discover who made it and for what purpose. Clarke has a gift for physical description and it really comes out here, painting a vivid picture of this place, and that's what sticks with you, along with the marvelous twist ending.
Frank Herbert, Dune - As a fantasy reader, I think this might be up your alley. Dune is one of the genuine epics of sci-fi, with a vast scope and one of the first sf novels to really world-build in the detail that you have probably come to expect from fantasy. The future of Dune feels like the future of the whole human race, with a government that echoes the Holy Roman Empire and Persia, religions based on Zen and Sunni and Sufism, language and terminology derived from Arabic - it really stands in stark contrast to all the science fiction futures that feel like 50's Dad in Space. The actual story is about two warring noble dynasties and their struggle to control a planet that supplies the most important resource in the universe, but what will stick with you is how widescreen and cinematic it all is; every character is larger-than-life, every situation is life-or-death. They've made two movie and several game adaptations but nothing can ever live up to the sheer spectacle that unreels in your head as you read it.
Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Liebowitz - one of the great postapocalyptic stories, this follows the history of a tiny Catholic monastery in the American southwest for a thousand years after a devastating nuclear war, as the monks try to preserve technology and human dignity across the centuries. It's a beautiful and sad story and I can't think of many things that feel like it.
Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun - Wolfe is one of my favorite sci-fi writers and this is his epic. In a fantasy world of magic and enchantment, an apprentice torturer commits the crime of showing mercy to a "client" and is exiled, sent on a journey to a distant city. What we don't realize at first is that the world of "Urth" isn't a fantasy world - it just takes place so far in the future that instead of geologic layers, the strata in the rocks trace the ruins of civilizations; the rainbow-colored sand on the beaches is the crushed glass of millions of years of cities; the monsters are aliens, the "wizards" are people who command advanced science, and the Sun itself is bloated and red with age, so the Urth needs a new sun. Wolfe's writing is both difficult, full of archaic English words and elaborate sentence constructions, and very beautiful. The plot is complicated; the torturer is our narrator and claims to have perfect memory, but is very unreliable, and part of the fun is piecing together the truth of his story. The result is something you will visit and revisit and revisit and gain new insight every time.
Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide - Swanwick is a disciple of Wolfe and has a similar command of the language, but puts it to a very different use with a fantastic and underrated book that combines elements of space opera, cyberpunk, and mystery. The watery, humid planet Miranda is about to experience a tidal shift that will drown its islands and continents; while the human government organizes an evacuation, the residents spend their last nights in frenzied partying. Into this milieu comes The Bureaucrat, dispatched to Miranda from the head office to investigate a cult leader called Gregorian, who claims to have magic powers and is offering to transform anyone who can pay into an aquatic creature capable of surviving the deluge. Is Gregorian a fraud, swindling people out of their money, or is he employing forbidden off-world technology? The Bureaucrat's job is to find out, but he may be out of his depth (so to speak) as his businesslike personality clashes with the drunken, high, and horny natives, and Gregorian's cultists stalk his every move. Written in the early 90s, this book has gained new and obvious relevance after Katrina, but is gripping and masterful in its own right.
Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games - UK writer Banks is lesser-known on this side of the pond, and we are the suckier for it. His Culture series of novels deals with a spaceborne utopian society - The Culture - of humans and AIs who have solved the problem of scarcity and generally hang out in left-wing, free-loving, communal bliss across space stations, terraformed planets, and giant sentient ships. Of course, communal bliss isn't that exciting, so the novels tend to deal with what happens when the Culture encounters other societies and things outside its experience. The Player of Games is the best intro to the Culture and a terrific story on its own; it's about a bored, decadent games master, a celebrity in the Culture, who is dragooned into service and sent to a distant, brutally fascist alien society whose political system awards power to whoever can master an incredibly complicated political board game.
Lois McMaster Bujold, the Miles Vorkosigan series - I like adventure and action, but the problem in science fiction is that a lot of the writers who do that stuff tend to be kind of creepy and right-wing, all about heroic space marines fighting evil space commies and bitching about how those liberal politicians won't let them win Space Vietnam. This is different - you get the excitement, but none of the shittiness. They take place in a space-opera milieu, where humanity has colonized many planets and split up into different governments and factions. On his patriarchal, backward planet, young noble Miles Vorkosigan is treated like a freak; thanks to a failed assassination attempt on his parents, he was born with dwarfism and brittle-bone disease, but is determined to live up to his noble father's reputation, solving problems and winning battles using his wits and empathy instead of physical prowess, while also trying to avoid meddling relatives and get laid. The Vorkosigan books aren't literary classics, but they're really well-made entertainments - funny and adventuresome, with a big cast of genuinely likable characters. It'd make a great TV show; the individual stories (there are ten or so books and several short stories) cover a bunch of different genres, as Miles fights space battles, solves murders, uncovers political corruption, battles his evil twin brother, and falls in love. They're short, fun, easy reads but they stick with you more than most popcorn reading.
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle - Dick was a troubled dude whose amphetamine-fueled writing was highly variable, but this is generally agreed to be one of his best. It's a deceptively simple alternate history story; in a world where the Axis won World War II and 1960s America is divided between Japan and Germany, a group of ordinary Californians are drawn into a quest to discover the mysterious author of a popular underground novel, an alternate history about a fictional world where the US won World War II.
Dan Simmons, Hyperion - A thousand years in the future, humanity and its artificial-intelligence partners have spread across much of the galaxy and created a prosperous and peaceful society. But despite this, seven people from seven completely different walks of life are tormented by apocalyptic visions about the extinction of the human race, so one by one they undertake a pilgrimage to the mysterious planet Hyperion, where an abandoned necropolis city moves backward in time from the future, guarded by a giant metal monster called the Shrike. It's said that if seven people undertake the journey, six will die and one will be granted a wish; as they travel, the pilgrims each share a story of how they came to be there, and each story is told in the style of a different type of science fiction. Simmons used to be a horror writer, and what really fuels Hyperion - aside from the fantastic ideas that it's chock-full of - is the vivid, nightmarish imagery. It's considered one of the best works in the field, and with good reason.
What's a decent resource for learning C/C# for someone who knows logic?
Preferably free...
Because it's long and the new series is coming out soon!
Although I guess I watched most of season one so there's just two seasons left...