The month of august, when in India the season of rain is at its best, days start to get cold, and the string of festivals which would end at Diwali will start.

Also, for the last five years, the month when I would start to get hit by cases of cold. This year is no different. As I write this post, my throat is quite sore.

On the other front, college finally started, (they were about to start it back at the June, then shifted to July, and finally started the classes at August first.)

While I do think that I am making friends there, my anti-social nature is kind of getting in the way. Now, I am not that kind of anti-social, who would drive any and all contact away. I just like my personal time, and I prefer that people approach me first, rather than me talking to them first.

What else, my programming class is continuing, now I am at the stage where my teacher is giving me tasks as a test to complete. So far, it is kind of like hit and miss, I want to make it hit and hit.

But during all of that, I really didn’t have any time to either play games, work on my fanfiction, or just to enjoy myself. Now that I got the Saturday free, I am sick.

Imagine my surprise when I came into the monthly chat, to find another Indian like me, and someone who sings Bollywood songs.

@Dark:
Thank you for recommending all those books previous month, I think I like the Dresden files best out of them.

@DarkEagle don't you think in the month of August there're too many power outages? LOL. And where are you from and what college/stream are you pursuing?

"Gaurav, Mrs. dark has read Salvatore's modern fantasy trilogy, woods out back and is going to try some of the Drizzt ones, I'll be interested to see what she thinks of them.

For some of my thoughts on usual fantasy you can check out my review of Raymand Feist's Magician over on fantasybookreview.co.uk.

"Dark eagle, amusing to think of it being cold and rainy this time of year, but hay such is the fun of the southern hemisphere, Lol.

Right now its still bloody hot in Britain, or at least far hotter than it usually is, which is actually proving a major pain.

"Beth I've read a few of Heinlein's books, and Mrs. Dark has read far more. They can vary quite a bit. The red planet was the first braille book i ever read for pleasure and I remember really enjoying Moon is a harsh mistress, on the other hand Fear no evil was pretty terrible. I did do a review of Heinlein's book "the cat who walks through walls", which actually has a lot of imho interesting points about Heinlein, EG he wrote very good sf when not going on long diatribes about how great the world would be if everyone slept with everyone else all the time .

Sorry to hear about the uni and mental health issues, I can sympathise myself, though university was probably the one place  in my life where people were sort of vaguely decent, then again as I now have my phd goodness knows what I'm going to do with my life next.

We should be trying out Amazon today. Amusingly enough, my 3.5 to 3.5 jack, for connecting my senheisa momentum headphones into my pc on along extention cable turned up no problem, however now the bloody headphone cable has gone poof.

I can use the cable with the volume control attachment if I plug it directly into the pc, but not if I plug the extention in (god I hate those little control things, they don't do any good), so once again I am denied the luxury of lounging about on my sofa and using the pc .

Well at least that makes writing easier, and I have a book review to finish, for the aforesaid book The Host all about alien invasion, body bsnatchers and romance.

speaking of aliens, my lady and I are now reading David Brin's uplift trilogy. This is really! awesome, about a galaxy where one species attains sentience by being "uplifted" by another, accept for humans who managed to uplift themselves. Really well written with some exceptional world building and genuinely fascinating conflicts, plus awesomely alien aliens, and as a bonus, you get to see what societies of evolved neochimps and neo dolphins would be like, indeed in one of the previous books of the series Star tide rising, most of the characters are actually neo dolphins.

I'm also watching through season 3 of Angel, the spinoff to buffy the vampire slayer. This is proving pretty fantastic actually. I missed the hole Buffy thing first time around, and the only episode I caught wasn't a good one. after really enjoying Firefly though, it Buffy and Angel were recommended to me, and I've been really liking them since.

I usually watch series like this, getting a series on dvd and doing it through, since I don't have a tv license and I dont tend to watch enough to make a subscription to netflicks worth it. Also oddly enough, its actually cheeper to buy stuff on dvd than stream it most of the time, which is utterly and completely nuts!

So hope everyone else is having a good time.

@Dark: do you think the evolution depicted in science fiction is actually possible? That we can become the beings of higher dimensions somehow? Or we can evolve ourselves to such an extent that we don't need our physical bodies to exist anymore, we can exist in energy or thought form? I've read about such evolution in star trek and many more books but so far they've been only achieved by civilisations which are like million years old.

Well this morning I got an email to say that the webmaster of fantasybookreview.co.uk has already uploaded my review of The Host. the Stephenie Meyer book I mentioned in post one.

You can Read it here

@Beth interesting questions. Moon is a harsh mistress is also an interesting book because its written in a future dialect which misses out almost all all pronouns and definite articles, maybe this was why you were getting grammar errors.

i read an audio version, though as that was quite a long while ago its probably a book i need to reread, particularly as Cat who walks through walls serves almost as a sequel.

I doubt myself colonisation of mars or the moon will occur unless there are some major political and economic changes on earth, as with a hole lot of things, it is not due to lack of resources or even lack of technology, but lack of impitus to perfect the technology or use resources correctly, after all steam engines existed in ancient Rome, but why bother putting time and trouble into building a steam engine when you can just have however many hundred slaves on hand to do the work for you.

Same principle, why bother colonising other planets when the billionaires can make far more money renting off chunks of earth instead.

Capitalism after all works by creating scarcity, be that artificial or not, so why indulge in a project that could create a surplus or much less change things.

On the other hand, I don't personally see the scarcity appocalypse any time soon. People have predicted it back since the fifties from global warming to lack of food, and its increasingly not happened. Earths net population growth these days is actually even dropping, albeit not slowly enough to make an appreciable difference on the environment, and of course remember that rule about scarcity, when the scarcity becomes too great capitalism will just switch to some other source of scarcity, EG when the oil starts getting over priced, Shell and Texico will start pulling out all those electric car patents and alternative power plant construction ideas they've been sitting on since the eighties.

What I do see more of as a problem, is soemthing that is happening now, that is de-alienation and increasingly stratified social structure, or rather, as the gap between rich and poor grows larger and people increasingly have less and less power, the response is far more extreme clinging to a specific set of identities, be those racial, national, religious, gender, sexual orientation etc.

From groups of facebook trolls all brandishing the same axes they've been grinding, to street gangs, pride parades, demonisation of alternative groups going as far as religious persecution and terrorist bombings.

This is the sort of thing I unfortunately see increasing, since the less power people have, and the less meaning that their lives possess outside the prophet machine, the more attractive extremmism is.

So while I wouldn't see a scarcity appocalypse as likely, I do tend to think that unless the world power situation changes, we're likely to see generations of very disallusioned people and increases in violence as the rich wall themselves off more and more, indeed while I suspect over population isn't likely, I could definitely see the rich going to a space station to avoid having to associate with everyone else, and most of earth descending into mob rule.

of course, that is assuming there aren't any major social movements in the future and trends just continue, and it is high time we had a new wave of libertarianism as a counter to matters getting more and more repressive. I thought this was possibly going to happen this decade, what with the new sincerity movement etc, but instead things have just become more polarised, more repressive and a good bit shallower, still, it wouldn't surprise me if we saw something of a true counter culture soon enough, assuming its not killed off by arch conservatives, mega social justice warriors, or just increasing monopolisation and homoginisation of the capitalist system.

Btw, one interesting fact, I did read a paper in course of research for my doctorate which actually noted the simple fact that greater social, and educative freedom actually was a far better way of maximising resources and minimising population growth than rigid social control, that paper was given at a conference on sustainability in 2016 which directly explored population growth and resource allocation.

There are also more acaddemic movements now (including my own work on disability), which show the need for a greater amount of social responsability and a more equal sharing of power, of course whether anyone in ositions of power will actually listen to people who's job it is to consider these sorts of social trends, or will just go on grubbing after political prestige or increasing share prices a little more I don't know.

Wow Dark. That post of yours have given me a new perspective and new things to think about.

Hi.
@dark, interesting that you mension humans turning into mindless slaves due to cybertronic implants.
Let me throw in a question. Isn't the possibility of riches and wellfare a more stable way to turn people into the mindless slaves you want them to be? Sure, they still have their own will and are able to think on their own, but if you keep them hooked by promising them wealth and money, you have, if you do it right, a puppet you can use for your own gain.
Which brings me, if we think about this on a bigger scale, to politics, our politicians and big tech companys.
Since some time I am seriously wondering who actually is rooling our world.
Even though I might sound like a conspiracy theorist, I am convinced that our politicians are puppets of associations, lobbys.
Think of lobbys like the NRA, big companys as Monsanto and the like, they have the active power to block decisions by the congress or any other political party, not only in the US. Sure, the NRA is limited to the united states, but every cuntry has it's fair share of big companys.
But, returning back to a cyberpunk scenario, the theory of robots turning against humanity sounds a bit to absourt to me.
Yes, technology is having a bigger and bigger impact on our lives and sometimes I am asking myself how much we want technological advancements dictate our lifestyle. Although I am seeing the advantages of a technological boom, you always need to look at both sides of the coin and decide on what is best for you.

Greetings Moritz.

@Simba, sorry that was actually my point,though I have added a sentence to my above post.
One of the most frighteningly real time concepts I've heard about is the idea of time production. This is when a company measure how long it takes to do a certain task and delineate their schedule according to those tasks. So for example  a friend of mine who worked briefly in McDonald's said that there was approximately 1.2 seconds to put a burger together three minutes on the grill etc, to the point that people actually had no choice of where to do what in the kitchen, even more frighteningly, employees on the counter were actually told "when customers interact with you they should feel like interacting with a machine"

its actually genuinely disturbing how computers, instead of removing mental drudgery are instead removing creativity from people because  easier for a company to design a production line model to generate prophet and then force their employees into it, than to use people's creative talents to best effect. Heck, 50 years ago being a shop keeper was a deeply skilled job, requiring a lot of mental arithmetic and management skills, indeed I find it interesting looking at what actually keeps people entertained vs, makes people board in terms of a game and engaging tasks and comparing this to how most companies actually structure jobs.

No wonder people are radically clinging to tribal identities.

As regards a huge conspiracy though, that's less likely, in a way I actually wish someone was! in charge,in some way, its just a lot of large companies who are trying  maximise prophet, and since prophet has no moral basis it doesn't matter if companies have to break the law, or go to countries where the laws are less strigent or buy a politician or to to reduce taxis, or funnel their assets through god knows how many off shore accounts so they can pay less tax.

I wouldn't say companies "run" governments, at least in most countries that do not have lobbies, but the problem is they have so much money that they can usually just dictate to governments anyway under threat of economic sanctions, or pulling their business out of the country, that when they aren't directly funding individual politicians ability to stay in power, or still worse, simply buying political offices anyway.

to get less theoretical again, Orko as I've said before I don't have as much issue with windows 10, and I switched from Ie to chrome myself last year when too many websites and other things didn't work with Ie. I'll admit when I tried edge it was pretty  crappy, full of  multiple tabs and random adverts and junk, though I think edge support in Nvda is  improving, I also don't know what the bookmarks management is like, but then again I've now switched to chrome full time anyway and can make the bookmarks system work for me.

I'll also say I've not personally had the problems with windows 10 that others mention, EG adverts etc, or at least what stuff I didn't want such as candy crush and Xbox gaming zone I just uninstalled with C cleaner, but this is no different to what i had to do when getting xp, removing freecell, msm, and microsoft gaming zone and such.

Good luck.

So, today is 15 august, otherwise known as the Independence Day for us Indians.

But I won’t boar you with those details. Instead, I will tell you what exactly happened to me today.

Now, if you have read one of my old posts on this topic, you guys would know that I completely despise going to formal events. This day is no different. Usually, I would spend my day sleeping, or completing whatever work I have, but just two days ago, the principal of my college, (director? I am confused.) Told me that I have to be present in the function today. And since this is my first year on the college, I decided to agree.

Imagine my surprise when he actually told me that I would get to put the flag with the guest of honor. The task is usually done by whatever person of importance has been invited in the function. So, no students are involved in such things. But not only was I involved, the principal told my father yesterday that he is going to push me in to the more events like these.

Now, it was a huge honor for me. After all, I get to do the task which is usually reserved for anyone who is visiting. So I was really happy. But on the top of that, my mother told me, (since I did go with her, can’t go alone now can I?) that I got a huge response from people, but I just couldn’t see it.

This is a large difference from my school life, when I was in the blind boarding school, (I spent my primary school in two of them to be exact.) no matter whether if the guest of honor always choose me for something or not, I was never pushed like that. And when I was enrolled in the normal school, I simply lost the interest. Maybe it is time to go brush up those social skills I have been ignoring?

But all that is good and fine. But the music! God the music. Why couldn’t any event in India take place without the loud music? By the time I was done with the event, I saw myself causing a massacre, which I called noise pollution massacre.

@dark:

I have seen you mention the machine called the profit machine several times on this site. And the sad thing is, the current way we are going I do not think anything will change.

What is more, I can’t seem to find any free time this week, so I could work on my fanfiction, or just enjoy myself. Also, for some reason, I really miss the Courage the Cowardly Dog. I don’t know why, but I do.