Fork them.

FLAC is good, but not necessary for background listening. At 192k the average song is ~ 5Mb. 100k x 5 = 0.5 TB.

With a long, varied list of select internet radio stations, you can choose what genre (or special weekly show) you want to listen to at the moment. Picked by people, not algorithms. Keep a playlist of the stations you like best, startup your player (like VLC) with the list, and pick the one you’re in the mood for.

Or you could just collect mp3s locally for choosier days, dump a bunch of them into VLC, listen to them in album or random order. In either case, at no cost.

There’s a lot to like about Atril (native to MATE).

I’d say that a vacant home - any place (lots of them) where the homeless are dying in the streets of hypothermia - is owned by a garbage human.

IMO owning an unoccupied house thats off-market, or prohibitively-priced is probably a gambling chip.

IF there are ANY families in the same county that are homeless, it should begin being taxed as a gambling-chip. Sell-it very soon or it may used for a free shelter for however it remains unoccupied by the owner.

An apartment-building owner WHO LIVES IN the building year-around might be in accord. (My own GG-ma ran a boarding-home for income after her husband died.)

Needs discussion. I’m more concerned for kids -never being able- to buy a home. “Owner-built”, no problem.

It’s my opinion that housing is so basic a need that no house should be allowed to use for a gambling chip.

The ‘housing market’ needs to be broken in favor of individual ownership. (For many, speculation has driven ownership out of reach.)

Only individuals may purchase individual homes, and must agree to occupy them as their primary and only residences until they sell and vacate them. (Live-in landlords included, e.g. boarders.)

As part of the deal, they must first find another individual buyer (under the same terms) for their present home.

(Futher stipluations needed, but none that permit violation of the above principle. )

If you’ve not dipped into William Gibson (Neuromancer) and several trilogies since), I’ve enjoyed all that I’ve gotten to so far. (Wanna ‘re-read’ the ‘Bridge Series’ in audiobook.)

(I’m also a fan of Stephenson, Dan Simmons, Charles Stross, and that ilk.)

Dinty Moore still comes in cans … and is better than ever (esp. compared to most of today’s canned “food”.

Strange to see people blaming their fellow citizens, when it was a certain beloved King that started off his reign by hugely cutting the tax-rate of corporations, leaving them with the ‘trickle-down’.

Somehow rulers manage to keep the people divided by keeping them blaming each other rather the root-cause.

One of the rare examples of sci-fi mixed with a skillfully unfolded mystery. Even when you know ‘the answer’, there are plenty of ‘how did they do that’ film-making mysteries.

I forgot to mention his entirely ‘I, Robot’, VG 2004 film … maybe because robots don’t don’t seem so science-fictionish these days…

Hard to define ‘hard’, a few more I liked: (no ranking)

• The Time Machine (both the Pal and the Wells films; quite different)

• Dark City (1998, Pryas)

• Forbidden Planet (1956, Wilcox)

• The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, Wise)

• Fifth Element (hilarious, Besson, 1997)

• Alien (Scott, 1979)

• 13th Floor (Rusnak, 1999)

• Stargate (1994, Emerich)

• Steamboy (2004, Otomo)

Movies made from famed series I’d REALLY LIKE to see:

• Ringworld (Niven, a crime noone’s DARED to try).

• Some setting of Riverworld. (Farmer)

• ANY of Neal Stephenson’s SF books, esp. Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond Age, Anathem.

(Not even the BBC? I mean, who expected Doctor Who to get THIS far?!)

Saw a video the other day, guy pointed at a complex and said rents were $900.

Transistor FM radios are quite small.

Unlike the guy the history books call ‘Alexander the Great’. A drunken mass-murdering King who never stopped sharing his misery until the day he died. Some hero!

There might be a slim chance. But in the words of mid-20th-century writer Robert Anton Wilson,

“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.”

Eventually there has to be one, so try to hold on to that idea.

Arthur C. Clarke’s stuff is like that… So are a lot of the old anthologies from 50s-60s (e.g. the Groff Conklin ones … Omnibus for one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groff_Conklin).

The ‘Riverworld’ series by Farmer and ‘Ring’ series by Niven are also.

SPOILERS in the both the following:

This interesting 28m video goes into the book in some detail (great images as well)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2XXkauk0eU

A description at Wired

https://www.wired.com/2010/11/1101em-forster-machine-stops/