#books

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Presenting my lovely partner Tony, the majestic manbeast who finished writing an epic science fiction novel today.

3 years in the writing, 15 countries passed through/lived in. Numerous primal screams into the void only for the void to yodel back. Many many, MANY coffees. Sooo many thumps on the head with a pillow by yours truly (purely for confidence boosting purposes I assure you.) A plethora of space facts inflicted at random intervals... usually over breakfast before caffeine.

I am so freakin' proud right now.

Also, so full of celebratory dinner. We ate all the dinner. So much dinner. Infinite dinner. (Why did I say yes to tiramisu?)

Big Angry Space Rocks will be out some time in the next year or so once edits happen.

Thank you for reading my monologue.

The boring version of this image description is that you're looking at a man sitting across a table, smiling with a glass of wine at his elbow. Okay, now that's out of the way. This man is my lovely partner Tony. Even though he's 46 he looks around 35 or so because he's Dorian Grey and somehow hasn't aged for a decade. He has dark brown soft curly hair, is quite slender with olive skin. He's grinning at the camera in a way that says I caught him just as he was laughing at something, not expecting a picture (I am very quick with my phone). He's wearing dark green framed glasses with fluro yellow highlights at right angles at the tops, bottoms and sides. His T-shirt is white and blue with tentacles all over it. The wine at his elbow is white. You know looking at this picture that this is a person who doesn't mind a tentacle monster. Is willing to baritone belly laugh at ridiculous things and is ridiculously intelligent when it comes to astrophysics to the point where he really should have studied that instead of spending half his career as a high flying engineer doing engineer things. This is a picture of a happy man. You know his book is going to be intelligent and fun and that the photographer adores him and is ridiculously proud. The end.

During the birdsite's heyday, it was a place where we engaged with other people who cared about sending to incarcerated . We followed and retweeted book programs in the US, Canada, UK, and France. We also chatted with many of our volunteers and supporters.

We love Mastodon, but are finding it a bit lonely. We would love to follow other groups that send books to people in . Does anyone have recommendations for whom we should follow?

Boosts welcome.

PSA: The excellent series by Martha Wells is available as a Humble Bundle right now, all 7 books in the series + 7 short stories and other novels. DRM-free epub files. Highly recommended.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/martha-wells-murderbot-and-more-tor-books

"Despite being a powerful and lethal security unit, Murderbot is an extreme introvert. Its primary goal is to be left alone so it can spend its time watching hours of its favorite soap operas and other media. It's highly cynical, sarcastic, and finds human interaction to be awkward and tedious. However, it also finds itself unexpectedly forming bonds with the humans it's supposed to protect, which leads to a lot of internal conflict and reluctant heroism."

Book cover for "The Murderbot Diaries," showing an astronaut (actually a SecUnit, a human-like cyborg) with a in a spacesuit floating in front of a spaceship in deep space.

Time to thin the library of software engineering books that I no longer need or, in the case of the C++ ones, no longer (and never did) bring me joy. I doubt any charity shop will take these and I can’t just put them in recycling. If you would like any of these for the cost of postage (which for some will be sizeable), DM me. UK only, and I am in East Sussex if you wished to collect. Titles and weights in alt text. Please boost for reach and reuse!

Books for disposal. Weights given for postage purposes. “The C++ Programming Language,” 1.8 kg. “The C++ Standard Library,” 1.5 kg. “C++ Coding Standards,” 0.5 kg. “Exceptional C++ Style,” 0.6 kg. “The Design and Evolution of C++,” 0.6 kg. “Design Patterns,” 1.0 kg. “Programming Perl,” 1.1 kg. “Perl Cookbook,” 1.2 kg. “The Standard C Library,” 0.8 kg. “Building Embedded Linux Systems,” 0.7 kg. “Linux Security Cookbook,” 0.6 kg. “SSH: The Secure Shell,” 1.2 kg. “Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment,” 2.2 kg. “TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1: The Protocols,” 1.3 kg. “UNIX Network Programming,” 1.7 kg.