For me, !superbowl@lemmy.world is basically the only active community that I really love on Lemmy and the main reason why I keep coming back here. Other places can be fun too, but Superbowl is just different. There are so many funny owl pictures in them as well as so many informative posts (mainly the Owl-natomy Posts). Also, it is a very positive place. I highly recommend checking it out!

It was probably Hans Niemann then

I should really start listening to audiobooks more often. I just looked and the book is freely available on Librivox, so I may switch back and forth between reading and listening from now on. Thanks for the tip!

Reading “A tale of two cities” by Charles Dickens. I am not too far into it, but so far it’s been really enjoyable! The English accents are really hard to follow for someone whose native language isn’t English, but I’m getting used to it.

Homage to Catalonia, George Orwells memoir about the Spanish civil war. I never read memoirs or autobiographies, but I am very glad I have read this one. It gives a good insight into various aspects of the civil war, as well as Orwells personal views (and his sigarette addiction). On top of that, it is at times hilarious. And it is almost unbelievable how many things happened in just 6 months.

Highly recommend it if you’re into history or politics or love Orwells other works.

Did some re-reading of Anna Karenina and Pride and Prejudice. Now reading George Orwells “Homage to Catalonia”, his memoir of his time as a volunteer against the fascists in the Spanish civil war. I’m about a third of the way in and so far it has been quite enjoyable, but I am hoping for some more politics later on; right now it is mostly about the situation on the front.

I am a big fan of Leo Tolstoy. His biggest works are War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but those are both quite large, so if you want to know a bit about his style i would suggest some of his shorter works. Of the shorter works I have read I really loved “The Death Of Ivan Ilyich”, “Hadji Murad” and “Master And Man”.

I also really like Jane Austen, you can’t really go wrong with her. Her novels aren’t that difficult either; they were the first novels in English (my second language) that I really enjoyed reading and they significantly improved my English.

It is getting a lot better, but traditionally chess was a game for men only. Until the 2000s women were seen as inferior by most top players, like Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov (AKA Gary Chess, inventor of chess). Right now 95 percent of members of the Dutch chess federation is men. In my local chess club the average ratio men/women is provably like 90/10, with the difference between children being a lot less than adults.

If you haven’t seen it, the series “The Queens Gambit” does a pretty good job portraying the difference between men and women at the top of chess: maybe one woman, hundreds of men.

The gender gap is coming down, but it is still there.

Also, pro chess players only sacrifice their queens, but not their kings. I do both

I don’t mind seeing the country name uncensored, but it is a tradition in chess to not only be sexist, but also racist (at least against one country)

It is an album by the famous Frnch singer Jean-Jacques Goldman. Even though he is not known for anything chess related, he is Frnch. The Fr*nch are looked down upon in chess for some reason, so anything in chess related to this nation has been called “en passant.” This includes capturing a pawn that moved two squares, throwing a croissant on the board and starting a revolution turning all pieces into pawns.

In the Netherlands we always outperform you stupid Belgians. As you can see, we are higher than you on this map too!

Maybe, but alcohol works fine. Intellectual research at my local chess club shows that three beers is the optimal amount, massively increasing intuition, without significantly decreasing intelligence. So for beginners I would recommend starting there.

Your world vision is too narrow. It is time for you to expand your horizons, move across borders, explore new worlds, new planets, new lives! Start with checkers. Maybe some day your board will be big enough to see the squares you can only dream of.

Chess generators would never invent a name as glorious as “grob opening, double grob variation, Coca-Cola gambit”.

!reclaimedbynature@lemmy.world vibes here

I am reading a bit too much different things at once right now, so this is a fairly long comment:

I’ve been reading “For Whom The Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway for a while, and I have read 5/6 now. It’s about partisans in the Spanish civil war. I am enjoying Hemingway’s prose and the story, but I think I will wait a bit after this before reading any of his other works.

I’ve been meaning to read the great Chinese classic novels for a while, but I never got to it. Last week, after seeing someone on here was reading it, I decided to start reading “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”. The story (about the fall of the Han dynasty and the war of, you guessed it, three kingdoms) is very fun so far, but there are like 50 names in the first 50 pages, so I have trouble remembering who is who. I’m hoping for a bit more dialogue too.

I’m also halfway through the “Aeneid”, the great Latin epic by Virgil. It’s a decent story, but I should have gone for a modern translation instead of the old one I have now. I think I’m going to stop with this one for a while, as this is the perfect point to stop.

Lastly, I’m reading Leo Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God Is Within You”, his most well-known non-fiction work. I am a massive Tolstoy fan (War and Peace is my all time favourite novel), so I wanted to know more about his philosophy. It is very interesting so far, with how he makes arguments for non-violence, as well as his arguments against the principle of the Church. I don’t always fully agree, but it is a very thought-provoking book.

Last week I also read Tolstoy’s short story “Master and Man”. I think it may be the best work to read as an introduction to Tolstoy. The setting is perfect for this time of the year, the prose is amazing as always, the psychological depth is unbelievable for so short a novel, and the moral part is typical for his later works, but not too prominent that it bothered me in any way. So if you’re interested in reading some Tolstoy, you should definitely read this one!

Top left? I believe that’s Billy Joel, but I may be mistaken

On top of that it avoids Bg5, pinning the horsey, which could otherwise maybe be annoying. Also, I thing you meant Qa4+ instead of Qh4+, which is the anarchychess idea in this position for white.

Cormac Mccarthy enters the chat

No, Picasso, pronounced Pizza-so.