STG's

 Startide Rising, by David Brin, is: - a SF novel - The second book in the Uplift Saga (I just read and reviewed Sundiver) In this book, a starship with uplifted dolphins (mostly), humans and an uplifted chimp made a huge discovery, and now a lot of alien enemies are after them. They go to a quite interesting water planet to hide for repairs.  This book is from the early 80s, and sometimes it feels like it. Thankfully, the big ideas are more important and shine through the rest. Middle felt a little slow, but the conclusion was satisfying enough. There is a very mild connection with book 1, Sundiver. No need to read it first, nor would I recommend reading it - it was just ok.

 Sundiver, by David Brin, is a SF novel and part of his original Uplift trilogy. In Sundiver, Earth has met the galactics, and there a ton of them, in constant war except for some institutions such as the library, that contains all they know (supposedly). There is barely any research - it is considered bad to not just look things up in the library. Now humans and a bunch of alien go dive into our Sun, to make contact with living sentient creatures there. Chaos ensues. Overall, good, considering it is a 1980 book. In SF sometimes being old is super obvious, sometimes not. This one is in the middle. The Uplift part - where almost all sentient life in the galaxy is uplifted by a patron, which usually gets 100,000 years of slavery (ouch!), is interesting. In this book, mankind has already uplifted chimps, and is working on dolphins.

 I have played Sniper Elite 4, 3 and 2 (in that order), and I was a big fan of 3 and 4.  Sniper Elite 5 is quite similar in many aspects, and it keeps the game loop where you probably want to be stealthy, as well as taking advantage of opportunities (such as noisy places) to snipe. But it also adds nice progression elements, such as useful skills you can unlock, as well as weapons and weapon parts. As on the others, sniping can be trivial or a bit hard, depending on the difficulty you pick. There are also extra difficulty option. Graphics are much better (although cutscenes still look sub-par), and there are a few extra modes, including multiplayer. Problems were minor - sometimes FPS will drop (using a 3070 at 4k) to 20s for a few seconds (mostly always at 60FPS with VSYNC), I get a weird flicker on movement, and the pre game setup is slightly broken with large fonts. So far it seems like a major advance, and a great game. Update: finished in about 24 hours (including the Hit...

A Psalm for the wild-built, by Becky Chambers  Pretty much amazing. Frankly, when I read the description I wasn't very interested, but there was so much praise for the book I read it anyway. The story is mostly about a non-binary tea monk, which goes around cities providing tea and conversation for distraught people in an eco-friendly world. Robots disappeared a while ago - they went sentient, asked people to go away, and they just said fine (probably the least believable element here, but quite refreshing). The monk meets a wild robot, that is trying to understand how humans are now. A very pleasant road trip  (well, at least for the reader) ensues. Can't wait for the next book!

Vi o curso Finclass Imposto de Renda, de Jhonny Martins. Faço meu imposto de renda faz décadas, mas investi em renda variável pela primeira vez ano passado e achei que o curso seria interessante. Pelo tempo gasto, gostei. Obviamente falta muita coisa (por exemplo, não falou nada do IR pré-preenchido, ou de opções que fazem o IR por você), mas aprendi várias coisas que não sabia. Por 2 horas de tempo, se você já assina o Finclass, bem interessante.

 The Ophiuchi Hotline is a 1977 novel by John Varley. I happened to get this one because of a book discount newsletter. Most days I just ignore it, but when I saw John Varley, I immediately went and bought it. The story is interesting enough - it mostly covers a geneticist who is condemned to death, and then saved. She lives on the Moon - one of the 8 planets that have most of the remaining human race, after invaders took over the Earth.  The geneticist is rescued by Tweed, who is dedicated to fighting the invaders and regaining Earth, and apparently have very soft ethical boundaries. She proceeds to get killed and cloned several times (I imagine no one will be impressed in SF by cloning by at this time, and they also have memory recordings). Part of this tech was given to humans by the Ophiuchi Hotline, which is a signal that comes from 17 years away with lots of tech humans can use. There are a lot of tech novelties like advanced surgery, nullfields and use of quantum black ...

 I recently got Watchdogs in a sale, but when I tried to play it, Uplay would fail at start with a libcef.dll error. The solution is simple - look for Ubisoft Connect (not adding the link, you really should not click links to download software from blog posts...), and install the latest version. I imagine Watchdogs installed an old version, which would normally update but failed for some reason on Windows 11. Then the game ran just fine.