The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by andyh2000

I can't remember if it was just in the late 70's or carried on into the early 80's but we used to have a van come down our street selling fresh fish; a big lorry came and sold Corona fizzy soft drinks in returnable bottles; the milkman delivered milk to your doorstep; and a local small supermarket (more a minimarket) would deliver your order in a van. I guess all that died out in the 80's with the rise of supermarkets and private car ownership. And now it's returning. Yay! This was in south west England, where the outskirts of a large town hit the green belt.

Edited to add - not to mention coal delivery. Of course you couldn't order any of these things on the spur of the moment.

Andrew

We didn't have any delivery besides mail in the pre-internet days, at least not in larger towns and cities. You wanted something, you got up off your a$$ and went to fetch it.

[Renate]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Well, I hate cooking passionately and I'm lazy, so I've done it often.

I've sometimes cooked for hours only to be too beat to eat more than a bit and packed the rest in the 'fridge.
Other times, like last night, I've opened a can of peas and eaten it out of the can.

But to return to reading vents...

I want AI to be able to find me the next book to read (not write it).

I read somewhere about the "Royal (British) Reader". I'm not sure that it actually existed, but I could use it.

"Yes, Jeeves. I've just finished this 1000 page history and now I need something light but not fatuous."

"The Brass Check", Upton Sinclair, is edifying, but a slog in places.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Renate

I want AI to be able to find me the next book to read (not write it).

I couldn't imagine anything more horrible than someone (or something) finding my next read for me. No one knows my tastes as well as myself. Usually I just open Calibre and browse all the books there tagged as Next Reads (there are fewer than a thousand of those).

[ownedbycats]

Kobo store's recommendations are hilarious sometimes. "98% match" on something I would only read if paid a bunch of money.

I can't see AI being much better.

[Renate]

Of all the words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these:

Welcome!

Please sign in.

! Library card has expired.

Brooklyn Public Library just gave me the heave-ho.
My one year paid subscription ended.
They had decided months ago that they shouldn't give non-resident cards.

[ownedbycats]

Is unfortunate they don't allow renewals for existing non-resident users.

[Thasaidon]

Originally Posted by Hitch

In the (cough) 50's and 60's, we used to get Charles Chips' (yup, in that big old can, like so: https://ibspot.com/products/charles-...in?taxon_id=60 ) delivered to the door--potato chips, pretzels, all sorts of goodies like that, along with the usual things--milk and the like. I think that all went the way of the DoDo, along with delivered groceries. I mean...the kind that you used to get from the local grocer, not a supermarket. Sigh.

Hitch

In the (cough,cough)early 50's I can remember our milkman delivered loose milk. You had to jug ready for him to pour the milk he measured out from a churn. He came round using a horse and cart. He retired when legislation was passed that said milk must be sold in bottles. Having deliveries of groceries was not a thing because there many grocery stores within 200yds of where we lived. The only other thing we had delivered was coal, loose by the ton. My father was a miner. It was part of his pay.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Renate

We used to get a man with a station wagon that came around.
In the back was a grinding wheel that slid out and he sharpened knives.
That was the late 60's, early 70's.

There's a guy like that at a grocery store parking lot a few blocks away from me twice a month. Presumably he is set up somewhere else on other days.

[j.p.s]

Regarding using tape as a generic verb to mean record, film is still widely used, even by media professionals, to mean record video. So using that would not make a book dated. It should be the same with tape. Of course, whatever one experiences while reading is valid. (And there is also dial.)

[ownedbycats]

I download the first chapter of a fanfic. It was rated T and looked to be some sort of nice slice-of-life stuff.

Then chapter 2 comes out, the rating is suddenly bumped to Explicit and new tags indicating some things I'd rather not read (anyone who remembers my problem with Stardoc can probably guess).

It really annoyed me because it feels like a bait-and-switch.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Then chapter 2 comes out, the rating is suddenly bumped to Explicit and new tags indicating some things I'd rather not read (anyone who remembers my problem with Stardoc can probably guess).

It really annoyed me because it feels like a bait-and-switch.

Yes, like some headlines on some news sites that lead to propaganda.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Yes, like some headlines on some news sites that lead to propaganda.

I recently learned of Betteridge's law of headlines. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

(Rather amusingly, I was then struck with the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon and started seeing references to it everywhere.)

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Regarding using tape as a generic verb to mean record, film is still widely used, even by media professionals, to mean record video. So using that would not make a book dated. It should be the same with tape. Of course, whatever one experiences while reading is valid. (And there is also dial.)

I resisted calling Cinema Films the Movies, for decades, as that seemed too American. But now only one guy in Hollywood uses Film, so now I often call them movies as "video" for me has the connotation of recorded for purely for TV, industrial, education or by consumer. Of course DVDs are often of movies and that has video, though the V was originally to be for Versatile.

I think HD, 4K and larger than 36″ WS HDTV or UHD makes physical cinema obsolete, finally, as was feared by Hollywood when RCA demoed Color TV in 1951. Then there was no mechanism for direct to home video sales/subscription like there is with DVD, BD and streaming now, so physical Cinema buildings are destined to be a niche social activity.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Thasaidon

In the (cough,cough)early 50's I can remember our milkman delivered loose milk. You had to jug ready for him to pour the milk he measured out from a churn. He came round using a horse and cart. He retired when legislation was passed that said milk must be sold in bottles. Having deliveries of groceries was not a thing because there many grocery stores within 200yds of where we lived. The only other thing we had delivered was coal, loose by the ton. My father was a miner. It was part of his pay.

One of my sets of grandparents had the same, jug delivery. :-)

Hitch

[Apache]

My wife's grandparents were poor and her father and siblings would go to the train station to pick up coal, that fell off the trains, and bring it back to cook and heat with.
Apache