Here’s an another uncomfortable statistic: most of ASOIAF was published before 9/11.

Personally I gave up after AFFC, which I read around a decade ago. The quality of writing had plummeted, and it was increasingly obvious the series is going to take way too long to be finished.

The guy should just give up, relive himself of the duty and the audiences of the frustration, and spend his remaining years peacefully writing Dunk and Egg stories.

it is quite literally named the “land of the blacks” after all that is what Egypt means

Egypt is from Greek and definitely doesn’t mean that. The Egyptian endonym was kmt (traditionally pronounced as kemet), which is interpreted as “black land” (km means “black”, -t is a nominal suffix, so it might be translated as black-ness, not at all “quite literally land of the blacks”), most likely referring to the fertile black soil around the Nile river. Trying to interpret that as “land of the blacks” should be suspicious already due to the fact people would hardly name themselves after their most ordinary physical characteristic; the Egyptians might call themselves black only if they were surrounded by non-black people and could view that as their own special characteristic, but they certainly neighboured and had contact with black peoples. And either way one has to wonder if the ancient views of white and black skin were meaningfully comparable to modern western ones. On the other hand, the fertile black soil most certainly is a differentia specifica of the settled Egyptian land that is surrounded by a desert.

More screenshots are here: https://xcancel.com/p9cker_girl/status/1844203626681794716

What I find odd is that the message that they actually left on the site has nothing to do with Palestine, just childish “lol btfo” sort of message. So I wouldn’t be surprised if these guys aren’t the ones who actually did it, and it’s merely a false flag to make pro-Palestinian protesters look like idiotic assholes.

That might depend on where you live, but generally no, I think.

https://github.com/elementdavv/internet_archive_downloader

This one? I’ll definitely give it a try.

FYI, there are multiple methods to download “digitally loaned” books off IA, the guides exist on reddit. The public domain stuff is safe, but the stuff that is still under copyright yet unavailable by other means (Libgen/Anna’s Archive, or even normal physical copies) should definitely be ripped and uploaded to LG.

The method I use, which results in best images, is to “loan” the book, zoom in to load the highest resolution, and then leaf through the book. Periodically extract the full images from your browser cache (with e.g. MZCacheView). This should probably be automatised, but I’m yet to find a method, other than making e.g. an Autohotkey script. When you have everything downloaded, the images can be easily modified (if the book doesn’t have coloured illustrations IMO it is ideal to convert all images to black-and-white 2-bit PNG), and bundled up into a PDF with a PDF editor (I use X-Change Editor; I also like doing OCR, adding the bookmarks/outline, and adding special page numbering if needed - but that stuff can take a while and just makes the file easier to handle, it’s not necessary). Then the book can be uploaded to proper pirate sites and hopefully live on freely forever. Also there are some other methods you can find online, on reddit, etc.

Produce infinite copies of bread loaves, and then get arrested because the baker lobby doesn’t like that.

Came here to post this.

It is a funny pic, I’ll give you that.

But the articles literally don’t exist. It’s 2024, do we still have to explain that chatbots can generate nonexistent “scientific” references?

This is so obviously generated by GPT, none of these articles exist.

Yes, it’s https://t.me/library_genesis_libgen_bot

Why they were down, you mean? In their TG channel they mentioned a cyberattack, that’s all I know.

True, the .li domain was still fine.

There’s also Anna’s Archive, which I use primarily, since it provides downloads not just from their own db, but links to Libgen and other places where the given book is available.

Most domains (other than .li) were down for several days, making people worried it’s gone for good.

Perhaps a paid app to track and manage your subscriptions…

It’s alright for free. The slow downloads are still perfectly usable unless there are server-side issues, and they also provide links to other mirrors (libgen.li, which is still up, Z-lib, and IPFS).

I don’t get the impression there are even precise definitions of these generational labels.

And I don’t think they make any sense at all outside of USA and maybe west Europe.

So, uh, what is the difference?

This reminds me of the anti-wind-energy arguments about the turbines killing many birds…