Honestly after one or two hurdles like that, I expect it to be a sunk-cost trap.

Where they make you jump through the hoops and then charge you to not feel like you wasted your time jumping through hoops.

Although one job site did allow me to download the new CV they made me before trying to charge me for an account.

But I bet it’s full of white text and creepy metadata (i.e. watermarks) so probably I will copy the design and make it from scratch myself.

So many things out right now where the protagonist’s superpower is being old and tough/wise. And all the opponents are “young upstarts/punks”

“The old man” probably a but on the nose.

Tulsa King, Yellowstone etc

Sending this to every Dutch person I know

Haha thanks I found it eventually but it was some entertaining confusion in the meantime

I guess I now know what my Dad is getting for his birthday…

I went looking for it and found only a book of the same name written by William Harwar Parker, in 1864.

https://archive.org/details/elementsofseaman00park/mode/1up

It’s less entertaining…

Haha he could have just written three to five books instead.

If you can do the audiobook version of Daughters War, I’d highly recommend it.

The reader is super charismatic and is a woman with some kind of latin accent that fits the tone and mood of the viewpoint characters so well.

It’s like being at a poetry reading in postwar Spain.

I’ve put loads of stuff in the thread but what I’m saying is let me know a couple of books you’ve enjoyed and then I can narrow it down a bit.

“So… You’ll cut my head off.” I raised an eyebrow at the salescritter. I was baiting him. I knew it, he knew it, I knew he knew it.

We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor

Honestly it doesn’t do the series justice, but it’s still a standout.

The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996. I was dying my usual death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted like an ice cube down my spine.

— the first fifteen lives of Harry August, by Claire North

Oh yeah that was an excellent opener! Absolutely glues your nose to the book.

I honestly couldn’t finish it.

It changed from an excellent comedy at the start, to a spy thriller, to a war action movie and then to some kind of tech-startup biography.

Insane changes in pace. Did I miss a good ending then? I’ve got about 20% left.

Ah damn how did I forget this one?! One of my absolute favorite books!

I ugly laughed a lot when I read it the first time.

I went scrabbling through my lending library to find good stuff when I saw this.

I love these posts.

If you want recommendations, let me know a few things you loved and I’ll send more your way!

I’m a massive quality snob so you’ll get no low-grade prose in anything I send you.

“Somebody warned them that we were coming. The sympathisers left nothing behind but an empty apartment and a few volumes of illegal verse.”

• Blackwing, by Ed McDonald

The following lines are even better in terms of raw world building but it’s an excellent open.

He was a big fan of the power of the first line. You can really see it in a lot of his books.

His last ever book started with

“The two craft met within the blast-shadow of the planetary fragment called Ablate, a narrow twisted scrue of rock three thousand kilometres long and shaped like the hole in a tornado.”

Or maybe it’s the second para. I haven’t got my copy on me. But I memorised the last bit on the spot.

I saw my first goblin the same day I saw my first shipwreck.

I was under sail, on my way to war. On my way to fall in love with death, and with a queen.

On my way to lose all of my friends, and two of my brothers.

I would see a great city fall in blood and fire, betrayed by a false god.

Later, I would be commanded to die on a high stone bridge, but I would fail in this.

The rest of the First Lanza of His Majesty’s Corvid Knights would not fail.

This is not a happy story, but it is a true one.

I have no time for lies, or for liars.

• The Daughters War

And yes, Corvid Knights are as badass as you think. Maybe more.

If it’s not already trivia you know, apparently Tolkien just wrote that line on a piece of paper one day and just built the story around it.

Hopefully it’s not apocryphal.

Yeah, it’s something that’s super useful about humans.

They’re very durable, and can follow instructions effectively.

They make excellent slaves, compared to other forms of life.

For me, that’s the resource aliens would invade us for.

It’s us.