Patch
If you haven’t read Philip Pullman’s other novels in the HDM universe they might be worth a go. The Book of Dust trilogy is still waiting for its third part, and the second book is not brilliant, but I really enjoyed the first one and it stands pretty well on its own as a prequel novel.
I’ve recently been reading the Rivers of London series, which is sort of urban fantasy / crime. They’re not high literature, and I recommend them only relatively weakly, but they’re very easy reading and pretty fun. Might be a nice one to ease yourself back into the habit again.
If you want some “serious” sci-fi that is also very accessible and action-oriented, The Expanse might be worth a look too.
I have read Three-Body Problem, and it certainly wasn’t a bad book, but it also was far from top tier for me. The story is a little silly in places, and the writing (at least in the English translation) can be a bit of a slog. By all means read it, and you’ll probably enjoy it, but maybe not as your first foray back into casual literature.
For the record, I’m not an American and I don’t microwave water for tea. Being a Brit of these blessed shores, and of our blessed 230v mains electricity supply, I have an electric kettle.
I am also a big tea drinker, and I’m perfectly happy with my setup. I have a metal kettle with a thermostatic heating element (because I prefer my green tea brewed cooler than my black tea), and I use filtered water (because I live in a very hard water area). My kettle is kept sparklingly limescale-free. I am well used to drinking other people’s terrible tea, and I know what a good cup tastes like and how to make one.
But I also know that heating water in a pyrex jug in a microwave is exactly the same as heating water in an electric kettle, as long as you’re not leaving it boiling for too long or letting it cool too much before using it. Because heat is just heat…
With respect to you, that’s about technique rather than tooling. If you overboil your water you’re going to have overboiled water, but nobody is making you overboil water in a microwave.
Fundamentally, a microwave just applies heat the same as any other cooking appliance. It doesn’t add or remove fluoride or change your water hardness. The temperature of boiling water will always be as close to 100° as makes no difference because of simple physics. If you let your water sit bubbling away in the microwave for endless minutes then that’s on you for not taking the water out of the microwave when it was done (and is not fundamentally different to overboiling water with a stovetop pot either).
People seem to think microwaves are some sort of spooky exotic magic technology, but they’re not. They’re just heaters.
I’m going to go to bat for our American friends and say that there’s nothing wrong with boiling water in a microwave if that’s the quickest water-boiling-method you’ve got. Boiling water is boiling water, who cares.
America’s greater sin against tea drinking is their habit of letting the water cool down and then steeping a bag in the barely-hot water so that it makes a drink the colour of dehydrated urine. Why drink tea if you don’t want to actually taste the tea?
But then on the other hand iced tea is nice, so they do redeem themselves a little.
I don’t think they were necessarily intentionally taking out the thread in your example (I dunno either way)
As per the second half of the sentence in my parent comment, they deleted their original comment only to repost the same comment again without the replies, and did this at least 3 times (after which I’d lost interest).
There’s no reason to do that other than to remove the replies you didn’t like.
FYI, an admin here told me there are 3 levels of deletion: user delete, mod delete, and purge. Purge is the only one that actually removes it from the server, but only admin have that capability. Admin should honour any request to purge, but it’s still up to them to actually do it. Also, there’s nothing to say that a federated instance will honour that, however this is ultimately no different to web scrapers.
As an aside, it’s worth noting that “right to be forgotten” laws apply here for any server based in the UK, the EU, and a fair few other jurisdictions. In the UK and EU it’s part of the GDPR regulations. GDPR breaches can carry hefty fines, and in the case of a setup like on this instance the admins would be personally liable for those fines (what with there not being any limited liability holding company). So deletion can be pretty serious business.
It’s not hard to see how this could be used maliciously. Someone could say something, be corrected and put in their place, only for them to delete their top comment and spoil the conversation.
Someone did that to me once; it was very frustrating. They posted a wrong thing, got corrected by me and others, their post got downvoted and the corrections got upvoted. So they delete their comment (and ours) and repost the same thing again. Get corrected again, votes pan out again…so they do it again. Basically repeated the trick until the others in the conversation gave up and left them to it.
Glad to hear it’s fixed.
