I'm currently reading the Wool omnibus by Hugh Howey. It's pretty decent I've been making very rapid progress as it's been too hot to sleep here recently now the summer has arrived.

I haven't seen the Apple show, but maybe I'll watch it in the future when I've finished all the books (I had Shift and Dust as well).

It's a common trope in sci-fi that Earth has a World Government and similarly the Aliens have only one government as well.

But in historical First Contact scenarios like the discovery of the New World the fact that the groups involved were not unified played a major role - think Cortes using the other groups to overthrow the Aztecs, or the various alliances that North American tribes had with different European powers.

Are there any books that deal with this scenario? Like I imagine that if First Contact happened at the height of the Cold War, there would be incredible fear about the other side being able to leverage the aliens for an advantage.

What are the most immersive games you have played?

I think mine are:

• The Elder Scrolls
• RDR2
• Deus Ex (all of them)
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance
• Fallout 3, New Vegas, 4
• GTA V (to a certain extent)
• The Witcher 3

What recommendations do you have?

I'm currently reading The Case for Space by Robert Zubrin and it's really good. You can tell the guy dedicated his career and life to really thinking about how humans might live in Space, whether that be on the Moon, Mars or in the Asteroid Belt.

I recently read Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoğlu and that was also very good, it explained the shortcomings of other theories such as the geographic determinism espoused by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel although I think Why Nations Fail was a bit repetitive at times.

I posted this on Reddit a while ago and it sparked some really good discussion and recommendations.

I really like The Expanse - as it doesn't just discuss the attempted terraforming of Mars and the colonisation of the Main Asteroid Belt but also

So yeah, what are your best examples?

What defederating would mean:

• We won't see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.

Pros:

• There is less confusion, you can't respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.

Cons:

• We won't be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won't see any of our content.

Summary

Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our 'front page').

beehaw.org users already can't see our posts/comments anywhere so it's not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn't really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.

What do you think?

What are some great lesser-known games you've discovered via Game Pass?

I really liked Escape Academy and Supraland!

Is it possible to block entire instances? I see I can block by user or community, but not by instance.

This would be useful as there are some instances based around politics etc. that I don't care about.