I noticed the README comment about NNTP's limitations. I wonder if a new NNTP-over-HTTP protocol could find enough traction among the text-using crowd, or if ActivityPub could be used to provide a similar feature set efficiently.
I think this just shows it's possible to write boring summaries, and log lines are often very non-specific. I read almost all of the Hugo-nominated fiction, and wrote these summaries for my own blogging:
SOME DESPERATE GLORY, by Emily Tesh, is set roughly twenty or so years after the Earth was destroyed by an antimatter bomb, deployed by a galactic civilization called the majoda. Now a small remnant of a few thousand humans live in an authoritarian military encampment, hiding in a small planetoid called Gaea. 17-year-old Valkyr and her brother Magnus are teenagers about to be assigned to their own duties, perhaps in the attack squads or perhaps to the internal divisions such as Oikos (maintenance), Nursery (pregnancy and childrearing), Suntracker (energy production), etc. Valkyr and Magnus are both warbreed, biologically enhanced for combat, so she's horrified to be assigned to Nursery. This leads to her escaping Gaea with an alien prisoner, and then things get complicated and timey-wimey.
... T. Kingfisher's THORNHEDGE is another re-spin of Sleeping Beauty that takes a different angle: our POV character is Toadling, the fairy who now lives in the forest surrounding the castle and spends a lot of her time in toad form. She watches passers-by with suspicion, hoping they don't notice the castle hidden behind the hedge, and then after a few centuries a knight arrives in search of the lost castle. Its approach is reminiscent of Gaiman's story "Snow, Glass, Apples", but brighter ...
"The Year Without Sunshine", by Naomi Kritzer, is set in St Paul MN after an unspecified disaster and follows a neighbourhood as they self-organize, share resources, and face different obstacles over the course of a year.
In the book club I run, we voted on books for a few years. I kept hoping the non-attending voters would choose the right books to bring them to a meeting, but the choices sometimes felt aspirational like that -- people voted for a heavy title but still didn't attend, and it was irritating to be reading dull books chosen by someone else.
So we switched to making selections in person at a session; if you can't come, you can submit suggestions, but the people who actually bother to show up make the final choices. We choose a monthly book for a whole year at a time, so we just do an hour-long discussion in December and pick 11 titles. In a monthly group you could probably do it in 10 minutes after the regular discussion.
Also, as the organizer feel free to put your thumb on the scale: pick 3 books you'd personally like to read, and ask them to choose one. You may want to be completely democratic about it, but people often appreciate someone else reading reviews and limiting the choices (avoiding the paradox of choice).
Of the names on that list, GvR, Barry Warsaw, and Paul Everitt were all at PyCon in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago. Barry is currently a member of the Python Steering Council and participated in a panel presentation about what's going on with Python 3.13. So, 29 years of contributions -- very good!
