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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I just got back to the states, we also went to that museum but didn’t get the amount of time I’d have liked for the visit. It was family vacation; I was negotiating with like seven other people for what we saw and for how long. Next year, I’ll be back in the UK for about a week (sadly, it’ll be mostly just London) and have already carved out plans for a day trip out to York just for the Railway Museum.





  • I don’t want to hype it up too much, but the Expanse show is really great… IMHO some of the best sci-fi television in decades. I’d say it’s easily up there with “Battlestar Galactica” (the RDM or “re-imagined” series) and “Farscape” as a triumph of what I’d guess you would call “post-9/11” science fiction story telling. Most fans of the books would tell you to read them first, but I think either is fine because both are great (I read them as the show was airing and it was awesome all the same). My favorite character in both the books and TV series is hands down Amos Burton… Wes Chatham is the actor that plays him; he has said in interviews that he read the books before filming season 1, fell in love with the character, and it really effing shows. From the writers and show runners to the actors, costuming, and set design… they took great care to be loyal to the books while creating something new at the same time.


  • Haven’t seen these mentioned here, but the “Old Man’s War” series by John Scalzi is great as are “The Expanse” books by James SA Corey. I’d highly recommend those to anyone, but especially those looking for grounded and hard-ish sci-fi that doesn’t lose the reader or become overly technical.

    I highly highly recommend Old Man’s War to anyone looking to get into sci-fi novels for the first time, Scalzi really takes care of his reader and his writing is a delight. The Expanse books are awesome whether or not you’ve seen the TV series… the show runners really took care with the source material and, ask any fan of the books, it is a great adaptation. The show hits the same plot points of the books while getting there in new and interesting ways. Further, the show created a new character in Kamina Drummer who immediately became a fan favorite of both show and book lovers (she’s an amalgamation of a couple of book characters and becomes her own thing that really adds SO much to the story and world building).













  • The automotive manufacturers General Motors and Chrysler were partially nationalized in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis as were several banks… these were less a full government takeover and more of a government guided restructuring, but the government owned large stakes in these companies. Before that, the only full nationalization of anything substantial was the bankruptcy of the Penn Central Railroad and subsequent establishment of Consolidated Rail (branded as ConRail) the US’s only national freight rail company.

    Conrail was later privatized into what is now the private companies CSX and Norfolk Southern. The collapse of Penn Central was the largest bankruptcy in history until Enron in the 1990’s. Amtrak, our national passenger rail corporation, is also a nationalized entity created around the same time as ConRail, for similar reasons, and is still nationalized (although the Trump admin wants to privatize it).