hot_guava

There’s nothing stopping them from setting up a stealth instance and doing this now, right? Who’s to say any instance isn’t already being run by Facebook for data mining?

The biggest problem with openness is that anyone can come through the door.

If you just want the gameplay, Unfathomable from FFG is essentially a clone of BSG in an Lovecraftian setting. Not really what you are looking for, I suspect, but it’s probably the closest we’ll get to a reprint.

I would probably pay $80/month for 1 service that had everything guaranteed with no problems.

You’re describing cable, and for years we begged for a la carte options to free us from cable packages. I can’t fathom going back to paying $80/month for a bunch of crap I’ll never watch when I can jump around for a third of that. I’ll never argue that what we have is the best solution, but it’s a damn sight better than where we came from, at least from a consumer perspective. It perhaps peaked when Netflix was the only game in town with both physical and streaming to get me everything I could ever want for $20/month, but 8 streaming services is still better than shelling out for a cable package.

Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I enjoyed Discovery and hope you do. It took some big swings and not all of them were hits, maybe even a minority of them were, but I respect the desire to do something new and push the franchise forward and it has some legitimately good stuff.

I’ll also pitch in Jellyfin+Finamp for a self hosted option. Navidrome is also very good, but if OP is already in the Jellyfin ecosystem, it’s a good choice.

Hyperion is one of my favorite books. It’s uneven, but very good. I’ve read the whole series and after the first one they are fine, but nothing to write home about. You can easily stop after the first book if you want something else.

Dune’s complete series is worthwhile, but I don’t really care for Herbert’s writing style. The universe is very rich and the series explores some of the great ideas in science fiction, but it’s like an RPG sourcebook masquerading as a novel to my tastes.

Hyperion is a bit uneven, but I wouldn’t call it dense. It’s deliberately exploring different literary genres, some more successfully than others, but I’d never call it difficult reading. Dune can be a real slog at time and there are parts when I’m not even clear who’s saying what.

iOS or Android?

Well, I was referring to the book Hyperion rather than the whole series. I actually wouldn’t necessarily recommend any of the sequels to Hyperion. They are fine, but forgettable and as hard as they try, they just don’t recapture the big ideas of the first.

So for me it’s Hyperion > Dune, but probably Dune Chronicles > Hyperion Cantos overall, especially in terms of ideas because I never warmed to Herbert’s style.