Search the Community

Movie thread got me thinking. Also, searched and didn't see a reading thread other than favorite books. If I missed it, please banish me to the shadow realm. I am currently reading The Wheel of Time series (15 books, I think) by Robert Jordan. I'm on book four The Shadow Rising.

Do NOT cancel me for this but I hated the movies (way too long for me, didnt get it, just didnt like it) so I have always been turned off to the books. Would you say the books are better than the movies, if so, what is the biggest difference? I own this book as well! Great manual for aquarium plants. YES! I ADORED this book omg. Very dystopian. A teacher recommended it to me after 1984. I had to take a break from dystopia books after that hahaha

I know you said you're not a big sci-fi fan, but you might give David Weber a try. He's heavily into building societies in his books, and they often have religious backgrounds that influence the societies to one degree or another (no particular religion we would recognize though, for the most part). Some of his series also have quite a bit of historical context, such as sailing ships and primitive firearms.

Excited to have another novel from my favorite fantasy artist, Brom who has ventured out into writing. I have all his books.....this time I got a signed edition....

I was going to say that if you think the movies are too long the maybe don't read the books which are even longer. Personally I love the books but I get that they are not for everyone. A read for slightly younger readers but a series I found entertaining nonetheless was Fablehaven by Brandon Mull. Again its an easy read but if you want to read a book without having to puzzle out story lines its nice.

They're my favorite movies ever... I have watched them SO many times. I prefer the movies vs. the book. I appreciate what the books have done for fantasy and all that. But to be honest, they're a bit much. So many song breaks... 😄 I know that might not be a popular opinion, but I think if you don't like the movies you're going to have a hard time with the books.

As I read through this thread I couldn't help but notice the amount of Fantasy people were reading. Which brought me back to my younger days of loving David Eddings books. Books about knights & dragons, chivalry. Good stuff!! Now that im old...... Errrr; more mature, im mostly a big fan of motivational, inspirational, spiritual, or how-to books or like above which lightly touch on numerous interesting topics that can be applied to improving oneself. I cringe when I call them self help books. Anyhow my next book is one I loved in my late teens and most likely inspired by this thread! Im intrested to see how after 20+ years since originally reading it, my perspective has changed! I was also excited to discover they made a 2006 movie out of the book!

Long books are not the same as long movies. I don't know how to describe it. I will read a book that is 1000+ pages but if a movie is longer than 90 minutes I do NOT want to watch it. No clue why that is lol

Yes, i've never seen the movies, but Tolkein put 20+ years into his worldbuilding and intends to prove that to you in his writing. It is wordy. Pretty much the example in the writing world as a "info dumping" prologue/writing style in general. Movies are designed to be faster paced so if those were too slow for you, the books might not be any better. The Hobbit is much faster paced though, with a lot of the worldbuilding cut down. Read this series when i was younger. I definitely recommend it, fulfilling story without over-extensive world building.

Bernard Cornwell wrote The Saxon Series, it was made into a series by Netflix called The Last Kingdom. They're both good. I will say that the books get a bit repetitive, but they're good. Perhaps my favorite non-fiction book that I've ever read is Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. I don't think it's particularly complex, but is a really good look at... well... "us".

I was at a book store and happened opon these two books. Opon opening them, I found both hold hundreds of species of fresh and salt water fish. The books go into detail on each fish size, identifying features, habitat type, exactly where they live, and more! The book to the left has many species of goby, killifish, sunfish, and daters along with butterfly fish and more! The book on the right is detailed about nothing but tropical salt water fish! Both books are very interesting and I thought I should share for anyone else interested in these types of books!

Try taking a look in photos and videos under tips in your main menu... I usually found features by mis-swiping, but evidently they are all explained in tips. Man do I miss printed instruction manuals. The animated gif are better than nothing, but they don't hit as hard as the For Dummies instruction books/pamplets from the 90s

Yep, I’ve heard 20T works for breeding. I watched a video by Dean from Aquarium Co-Op, where he says he has been breeding them in 20Ts for many years. But it seems to me that a 20L, being as short as a 10g, is just too short, even for an angel with relatively short fins. Many of the books and websites I’ve read say that 20-30 gallons is the minimum tank size for angels. That just amazes me, given their size. But again, they are thin and relatively inactive, so I guess that makes sense.

Hello, all. I am hailing from Vancouver, British Columbia. We have one retailer here (April's Aquarium) who carries the Aquarium Co-Op line of products. An impressive operation with the most amazing display aquariums I have seen outside of a public aquarium. Anyway, I have been an aquarium enthusiast since I was 15, and that's half a century now. On and off I have owned perhaps a dozen aquariums, built my own several times, from 10 to 120 gallons and had just about every sort of tropical fresh water fish at one point or another. 50 years ago, technology was still poor. Plants didn't grow well under incandescent light bulbs, and fish were prone to disease because both breeders and retailers did not practise the kind of hygene which is commonplace today. Furthermore, there was no internet, no forums, no advice outside of books and aquarium clubs. It was a costly and frustrating hobby! I stopped keeping fish for a few years, then started again, stopped again, and so on. Now that I am mostly retired I have more time to dedicate to keeping an aquarium again. I just set up a 65 gallon tank and am getting used to the "new ways" of keeping fish. Nowadays, with all the fancy LED lighting, high-quality livestock and abundance of high quality feed, fish live longer, plants grow better, and having a resource like this forum makes the hobby much more fun. 30 years ago I went back to college for a degree as a Certified Fishculture Technician. I have spent many years in salmon hatcheries and on fish farms. The fish may be different, but their physiology, behaviour and husbandry is similar to other species. So, between all this past experience you would think I was some expert on fish. Not so. I am finding out every day that I really don't know much at all. This forum is very helpful for filling in the gaps. I am looking forward to browsing all the topics.

There is only one magazine I know of, called Amazonas. Books are not readily available. I know, I keep looking. But there are a lot of basic fish profile videos on YouTube. Just figure out what you might like and search there. My favorite sight for that is Primetime Aquatics. Plants have their own sites on aquascaping. But, yeah, I'm kind of annoyed with the lack of books. But nobody reads books anymore 😔

Finally found this topic. I am an avid reader, but I read utter crap. It is astonishing how bad books I pick. The problem is, I read most of the time when re-watching tv shows, or while boyfriend is still working and we have something in the background. Some books require to be read in silence, without distractions and I find it hard to do that. So instead I read cheap fantasy, scifi, even romance books that have no deeper meaning or complicated language and can be easily read while not fully committed. I also have this other bad habit where I know what good books are, I have them in my library and then I have hard time getting into them and give up. I have Joe Abercrombie series, read two chapters, sitting on a shelf. Lies of Locke Lamora, 15% in, lost interest and that was few years ago. Some scifi is just too hard to read cause the language is not easy to follow. I desperately need to switch to the "good" books and stop wasting my time on the "crap". I know I dont even finish some of them, if I dont finish the book that evening, I will most likely not pick it up again, as I dont have the interest anymore nor the drive to figure out how it ended, given they are mostly the same. On the other hand I promised myself to stop being so hard on myself, given I enjoy some of the books and it is comparable with watching bad tv. So why not. I also reread books and series a lot, when I remember a line or a feeling or a scene, I just have to read the book again, which sort of leads to rereading the series. My most favorite ones are books by Ilona Andrews (The edge series, Hidden Legacy series, Inkeeper series, not the Kate Daniels and the following) or Patricia Briggs or Kim Harrison, so it is clear there what style I like 🙂 On that note I started reading Great Gatsby, interesting one, sort of feverish pace, reminds me of Kerouac books and I need to do just a chapter or two at a time. I also started the Dawn from the Lilith Brood series by Octavia E Butler, I am listening partially to some czech crime book which is too scary to listen to in the evenings so I switch it with Killer Moon by N.K. Jemisin. Not to mention I have tabs opened for some of my crap books, like The Alpha by Avanne Micheaels or Unwanted by Marley Valentine How do you manage to do the correct books? I even tried like Haruki Murakami, boy I hated that book (1Q84), took me long time to finish and I hated it even more after that

"Back in the 70s, we didn't have the luxury of the internet / youtube. There are loads of fantastic vids on starting and maintaining saltwater tanks. This is a couple channel to check out." Yeah, back in the seventies the big name in saltwater fishkeeping was Nektonics. I used their undergravel filters with the built-in protein skimmer cups and also their hydrometer for my marine tanks. Dolomite was the substrate of choice back then. Crushed coral wasn't widely available. While YouTube and the Internet weren't really around, there were lots of good books offering guidance. The first "instant bacterial starters" hit the market then and revolutionized the hobby for a bit. You could add some of that magic stuff and have the tank ready to go fairly quickly. Or so the manufacturers said. I still cycled my tanks the old-fashioned way. I may opt for a nano marine tank at some point again. It's been a while since I branched off into the marine side of things.

Yeah, the current price of seahorses is impressive. In my younger days, you could order them through the mail from ads in the back of comic books and things like Mad Magazine. And they were cheap. You could get a pack of ten for next to nothing. They were often sold next to the "sea monkeys." I have a pet theory that you could create a freshwater line of seahorses. They tend to be coastal critters, and coastal waters are prone to wild variations in salinity. Some species are found near river mouths where salinity can vary wildly. Heavy rains can drop the salinity a lot in coastal waters. Establish a colony in full saltwater then gradually (over years, probably decades) reduce the salinity as they breed and breed. It might take a decade or two and need a restart or two, but given their readiness to breed and adaptability to fluctuating salinity levels, I suspect it's possible to eventually create a freshwater line of seahorses. There are freshwater pipefish that are closely related to seahorses. You'd probably still need a high pH and hard water, but even that could eventually be overcome. Selectively breeding the hardiest of those in less and less saline water could/should eventually give you a line of freshwater seahorses. Time and money would be the big issues. It would be a labor of love to pull it off. And you'd need colonies of them with lots of food and maintenance. Then once you'd created the line, they'd flood the market and kill the price since they breed so easily. The first pair of freshwater seahorses that hit the market could sell for God only knows how high of a price. But within a year or two the market would be flooded with them since they reproduce so readily. It would take the right lunatic with lots of cash to pull it off, but I think it's doable. It would almost certainly be a very bad investment though. The overall cost to develop them would likely be well over a hundred thousand dollars. If you're a hobbyist who wants to make a name for himself/herself though, it could be doable. You'll kill a lot of seahorses in the process though as many/most won't be able to adapt to the conditions you're trying to impose on them. It would be a very Darwinian process, with few surviving each step, but eventually you could create a freshwater line of seahorses. Or maybe not. Do you go with a gradual ever-reducing amount of salinity or do it in jumps? A ten percent reduction then plop and drop and see who survives? Let them breed for a bit and then another ten percent drop? Or do you just have tanks very slowly becoming less and less saline over time? It's something someone would pretty much have to give their life to in order to pull it off. And the semi-adapted ones couldn't be sold as they aren't either freshwater or saltwater seahorses. They'd be living somewhere in the brackish realm.

This is solid solid advice. For me, it's shell dwellers. It's a bonus that they're fun to keep and watch. Keeping and selling shell dwellers, which are almost always in demand, allows me to branch out into less profitable species, that wouldn't be sustainable or worth it on their own. I've done premium guppies, nicer bristlenoses, nicer cherry shrimps, and furcata rainbows. The cherries and furcatas are the only ones I've ever produced in big batches, like 100-200 per sale. That may seem like a lot, but if you're keeping up on water changes, the conventional tank size/stocking recommendations are way way low. 50-100 small furcatas in a 20 gallon high is nothing. 🙂 For me, 95% of my "business" is with fish stores. I'd rather sell 10-20 fish at $6 each, than two or three at a time to the fickle and deal-seeking public. Even if the fish retails for $15, and you ask for $10 privately, they'll want to haggle you down, they'll want to choose their specific fish, they'll want the largest ones, they'll want all females when you have mostly males, and so forth. You make two deals under those conditions and you've grossed $30 if you're lucky, and you hate the world. Or get $60-$120 from the fish store, no haggling, shake hands and done. All you need to do is give the fish store a reason to buy your fish over (or in addition to) what they get from their wholesaler. The fish I sell them come in bigger, are healthier and look it, survive better (less loss for the store), and they sell well for them. They don't need to check all those boxes, sometimes just one is enough. If you're selling to a store, DO arrange the deal before you bring the fish in. Don't just show up with fish in a bag and expect someone to want them. Also, if selling to a store, more volume is better. For most species selling just 5-10 individuals is more of a problem for the store than 50-100. If they're going into a species only tank in the store, whether you sell them 5 fish or 100, they need a tank available for them, and they can't put anything else in that tank till the fish are all sold. Of course this has to be tempered by demand. That store might move 200 guppies in a week, but might take a month to move 20 shell dwellers. Swords would fall somewhere between those. For taxes, one thing to consider is that the govt doesn't care where your income comes from, but they do want you to report all of it (I'm in Canada, can't say if this is true in US or UK). If you have a job that grosses $50K per year, and you make $1000 in revenue from fish sales, you owe income tax on $51,000. The $1K from fish sales might fly under the govt's radar, but if they review the fish store's books/receipts, and the fish store recorded the purchase from you... For myself, I don't report the fish sales income (it's never over $2K per year), so I don't/haven't paid tax on it. But I'm prepared to fork it over if they find out/ask for it, and that could be a big 1-time hit. Fair is fair. I love the roads, the health care, the law enforcement, and all that jazz.

Once the weather gets nice, I tend to read quite a bit less and end up listening to a lot more books. I don't personally count audiobooks as "read", but here are the paper books I've read here recently... Of Darkness and Light - Ryan Cahill (The Bound and the Broken #2) - This series is very good. The books are chunkers, but they're worth it. I think I'll read the third book after I finish Foundryside (the book I'm currently reading). Snowbound - Blake Crouch Golden Son - Pierce Brown (Red Rising #2)

Hey all looking for some good fishbook choices.justcloooikg for some fun interesting and informational reads. I'm old school I like physical books 😆

I think a quicker way to cycle a tank is a great idea. More quickly cycling a tank lets people enjoy it quicker and would certainly lead to fewer fish deaths. Nobody wants their newly purchased fish to die. Nobody wants fish to die at all. Cycling quicker is definitely a need. Would it keep people in the hobby longer? Maybe. Maybe not. Valid points already made either way. But it would be more likely to start people and fish off on the right foot. It’s so very discouraging to have fish pass right after getting them that it can’t possibly help the hobby or hobbyist when a tank takes weeks and weeks to cycle. Way back, we used to start with just a few small fish for a week or so, then a few more for another week or so, etc. Or we might blind feed for a couple weeks before adding fish. But we were mostly getting reasonably solid advice from experienced mom and pop fish stores because the five and dime stores that also sold fish from just 6 or 8 tanks didn’t have anybody giving advice, they only netted and bagged the fish, nothing else. There was no such thing as a big box store that sold fish with minimally trained or inexperienced employees that may or may not have any actual fishkeeping experience. Most specialty fish stores are going to give at least decent advice (with some exceptions), and many (but not all) general pet stores are going to be less consistent with the quality of their fish advice. It would be terrific if we could trust every fish YouTuber’s advice but that just isn’t the case. Some give outdated advice or advice that contradicts available scientific evidence. Unfortunately, there isn’t one single answer for an ideal information source since most fish people have more experience in certain areas and less in others. I would never presume to give advice on African cichlids, for instance, since I’ve never had any in all my years of fishkeeping. But I can drone on well beyond most people’s tolerance levels about other species that I love. I warn my coworkers that ask for pics of my fish tanks that they’re opening a can of worms, are you still sure you want pics? 😆 Oddly enough, they rarely ask for tank pics a second time. I don’t know why. 😂 🤣 If everybody started because of an experienced friend in the hobby I think it would make a big difference. It’s how I started way back when and she also took me to the mom and pop basement store where I got good advice and found books and magazines about the hobby. WE can be that experienced friend for each other. WE are the village that it takes to raise a good fishkeeper and grow the hobby!

My reading ebbs and flows with the season. But I'm quite literally always reading a book. In fact, if I finish up a book at say, 11 PM, while laying in bed. I go out to my book shelves and pick out the next book and start reading it. I might only make it through a page before nodding off. But I've always got one going. I've always joked that if I run out of books to read I'll die. I can appreciate moving to different hobbies, however. It's difficult to do other things while reading (unless you're listening to audiobooks). I can also appreciate that a lot of the tropes and whatnot are recycled. That said, I think we might be in the golden age of fantasy... the same ol' tropes, but interesting and unique twists. 🙂 My reading does sometimes stray from fantasy. I also enjoy horror, scifi and thrillers for changes of pace. I have tended to try to listen to audiobooks for non-fiction books when I can precisely because of what you mention. I can appreciate some effort being made to tell a compelling story. But a lot of times it just seems like they're trying to hit a page count for a publisher. I read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of time many years ago and that was like running into a buzzsaw. A really interesting book, but it felt heavy.

You know, I just don't read books anymore. I don't think I've actually read a book in a about 15 years. This is funny, because I have multiple graduate-level degrees in Literature and taught at a couple college for a little while (both community college and university-level courses). So while I have read A LOT, one day I just thought to my self -- Ok, you know, I'm done with books. What's next?