POG PUB 2025: About damn time. For a lot of things. But not everything.
Happy New Year, everyone.
I'll let you all mentally fill in the categories in the title.
Dude. I am SO sorry for all your interactions with younger me. Fml. I didn’t know, man.
i thought statistically speaking men on average preferred younger women?
♥
Damn, send him over to DOGE!
And the obvious question... Who lost 100 million?
Damn, send him over to DOGE!
And the obvious question... Who lost 100 million?
I never wanted to hear anything about Tony G ever again but my first guess would be Nik Airball.
Shout out to Ozempic as well
I watched a movie! Dune 2. Pretty sure the last movie I watched was Dune 1. I love Dune so much I'll watch a movie about it.
On a scale from 1-10 imma have to give it a Major ****ing Awesome. Homeboy knows how to make a goddamn movie. Some of the most gorgeous hyperfascist imagery I have seen in my life. At the na-Baron Feyd's birthday he had goth fireworks that looked like exploding death ectoplasm.
Couple slow parts where nothing was blowing up or looking like Darth Hugo Boss but overall superhuman testosterone levels.
My first experience with Dune was the David Lynch movie. An older man, who I only recently realized was grooming me, took me to see it when it opened. I had absolutely no idea what was happening but it was fascinating and I got to reading.
I have read each of the first four books at least four times each. Not a huge fan of much of the other material. Love is God, fear is the mind-killer.
I read the book pre-Lynch. Had a druggie friend who'd point me toward hip science fiction. It was so cool that I could barely stand it. Same guy told me about Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, also good.
But mainly I just wanted to say: Been there, Dune that.
Checked off on my Oscar Best Picture list:
Dune 2 (Yeah good movie!)
The Substance (This movie is a Black mirror episode! And WTF is that last 1/3)
Wicked (A 2 hour, 40 minute movie!!! And I find out it's only PART ONE!!! 😮)
Of the ones I have seen so far:
Dune 2 (very good, though I liked the first one better)
Conclave (very good)
Wicked (not good)
Emilia Perez (possibly the worst movie I've ever seen)
The Substance (WTF)
I read Stranger in a Strange Land three or four times as well. Just looking at the GoodReads list of top sci-fi novels:
1. Dune - Greatest sci-fi novel and one of the greatest novels period
2. Ender's Game - I reread this and Speaker for the Dead many many times
3. Hitchhiker's Guide - Read whole series multiple multiple times
4. 1984 - Such a great book, maybe not for the same reasons as other ppl
5. Farenheit 451 - I don't lke Ray Bradbury and I think this book sucks
6. Foundation - Never made it through once. I mostly read Asimov's non-fiction
7. Brave New World - A mess. Second half of this book goes completely off the rails. Wildly overrated. Read it back to back with 1984 once, not close.
8. Hyperion - I have read about half of it. I liked it, just got distracted. Will finish.
9. Androids Dream Electric Sheep - I'm way more interested in the stuff he wrote about going insane.
10. The Martian - Yeah it's fine
11. 2001 - This was a weird novelization of the movie and I have no idea how it ranks so high.
12. I, Robot - After his non-fiction, the thing I read the most was robot stories.
13. Slaughterhouse-Five - Not as good as Cat's Cradle. Stopped reading Vonnegut twenty years ago.
14. Ready Player One - Hear it's trash, never read it.
15. Foundation Trilogy - blech
16. Stranger in a Strange Land - I read this one and Time Enough for Love the most.
17. The Hunger Games - I really like this book! Excellent Battle Royale.
18. Neuromancer - I like Gibson's ideas more than his actual writing.
19. Left Hand of Darkness - I think I was too young to get this book when I read it.
20. Childhood's End - Fine I guess
Looking down the list for anything criminally underrated, not really seeing much other than Cat's Cradle and God Emperor of Dune is a personal favorite. Scifi really drops off after the great stuff.
I loved the Foundation books when I read them in high school. Couldn't make it 100 pages when I tried again last year.
I haven't read Dune in almost as long, but remember loving it. I might revisit it again. Why work down the TBR pile when I can go back to favourites?
I read the original 3 Foundation books as a teenager on a family car trip to California, liked em then but yeah, tried a reread recently and that wasn't happened.
I always loved the idea (and ideas) of scifi but found a lot of the writing impenetrable. One guy I discovered just a few years ago was Robert Silverberg. His best novels are very readable and contain a lot of rich ideas.
Tower of Glass - zomg this is fantastic
The Book of Skulls - incredible
The Man in the Maze
The Stochastic Man
Nightwings
Dying Inside
He's mostly known now for some pretty tepid fantasy that he wrote later to make some money, Lord Valentine's Castle and 2 sequels. Those I don't recommend.
I like Silverberg. Hadn't thought of him in ages, but going through a random box of crap of gmas and something had Book of Skulls and a page number written on it, which brought him back to mind. Especially Book of Skulls had an impact on high school me. I don't remember anything about it, but I do remember it definitely made an impression. I'll go back and read that one soon. Heinlein was a pretty big player for high school me too. Friday was the first of his I read after stumbling across it in a used bookstore (cover had a lot of cleavage) and of course all his sexual references were just what a high school boy wanted.
my favorite sci Fi is the expanse series. it's basically just trashy distraction, but good trashy distraction!
GPT and I be having some WILD conversations
goated list of scifi books - had this bookmarked since college, if you peruse the pirate bay you'll find a 4 part series of all of them in order on audiobooks
ha. clicked the link and I already had it bookmarked somewhere.
Dune is the greatest sci-fi novel.
Foundation trilogy is the best sci-fi series; I read it at least once a year.
Dune 2 was a very good movie, but it wasn't good Dune.
monica barbaro(who read the miss pog thread) is nominated for best actress
