charlesf
8d ago
Yea I remember a fair amount of this clustered west of Skid Row in a neighborhood called the Toy District I think. Not just toys though, just about anything that can be mass imported from Asia wholesale can be found there now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_District,_Los_Angeles
The article discusses the economy of the area a little bit. Looks like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/1XyjCRMusLzY5SGBA
charlesf
13d ago
I'm to old to have ever used these, and my wife and I have been together since the 90s. However, where I work brings me into contact with a lot of college age and slightly older people who do use these apps to varying degrees. The young men are often getting together on breaks to critique each other's profiles, and the women get together to...also critique men's profiles. As far as I can tell there are a handful of distinct experiences being had here. If you are a good looking man, top 10% or better really, you can have sex with a lot of average women. If you are an average woman you can occasionally have sex with a very good looking man. If you are an average or worse man you can finance the above interactions while being strung along with the promise of maybe having the first experience described here, until you realize that's not going to happen and give up. Very rarely an actual enduring relationship will develop, but these seem more like a fluke than any intent of the app creators. The apps that empower the women even more than usual like Bumble seem to be loosing popularity too. In theory women like being the only party that can initiate a conversation. In practice they are terrible at it and generally unaccustomed to putting any effort into courtship at all. There also appears to be a fair amount of romance fraudsters as well, who seem to target both genders equally, through with different strategies.
charlesf
13d ago
In addition to the rituals of the active civic Roman religion, ancient Romans (and all ancient people) were incredibly superstitious to an extent modern people struggle to imagine. Magic and the supernatural were very obviously real to them. Worldly events, good or bad, had supernatural causes, or at least nudges, and the original Roman religion was the organic accumulation over time of how, when, where, why, and who interacted with this supernatural reality. Of note these needs did no go away when the empire adopted Christianity. Many changes were made to the religion of the apostles to satisfy the Romans need to interact with the supernatural forces that obviously drove all events on Earth.
charlesf
18d ago
The Indians I work with say its about 30%. Work has sent me to Hyderabad a couple of times, and a few other cities like Chennai and Delhi for shorter periods, and this % seems like its large enough that its much easier to actually be a vegetarian there. My coworkers there always just used the shortened term "veg", which was also the label used on menus and food packaging. My veg coworkers from the US always enjoyed being sent to Hyd for a while as you could reasonably expect effort to be put into the veg offerings almost everywhere, though we could all do without the heat and humidity of India in July/August, though Hyd seemed not as bad as some other cities. Also you can get beef in India if you really want to; ask the Muslims about it. You can generally identify them by their names in many cases I've found.
charlesf
18d ago
If imitation meats were a bit higher quality, a bit cheaper, and reliably available I'd switch to them without hesitation. I always try the newest offerings on the market; we aren't quite there yet, but I feel like we're getting progressively closer.
I've already stopped eating mammals. It started with pigs over a decade ago, then all mammals about 5 years ago. Just birds and fishes. I might eat a lizard but its never come up.
charlesf
18d ago
but had truly abysmal response rates for reasons I can't quite fathom
As someone with chronic health issues that knows the inside of the hospital fairly well, any communication from a health care provider that isn't explicitly from someone in scheduling or providing test results is assumed to be a new mystery bill you were never informed of verbally or in writing at any point, and 95% of the time that assumption is accurate. Sending the survey as a text message or email will have better hit rates. Also, this seems like it shouldn't need to be said but really, really does, make sure the survey actually works. I actually try to complete these when I get them (probably 8-12 a year) and fully half of them are dead links or malfunction in some other way. The institutional work ethic of an organization free from market forces and able to obfuscate its billing practices without consequence, imo, spills over into absolutely everything they do and encourages mediocrity at best.
Both of my neighbors are doctors and both are on their 2nd marriages with younger women they met at work. The surgeon had a huge new sprawling estate built to house not only his current wife and 4 young children, but also his 3 adult children from his first marriage who refuse to move out. His house actually has separate living rooms, kitchen, garages etc for both 'halves' of his family.
edit - neither are nurses. While it is common for doctors to "trade up" to younger women, the doctors and nurses I've spoken with (my wife, sister in law, and nephew are all nurses), say doctor/nurse affairs seldom lead to long term relationships as they all kind of hate doctors generally, as a class of people, and nurses personalities are often not pliant enough for the doctor's liking. Instead both of my neighbors married admin staff of some sort, one was an insurance liaison at the hospital, the other worked in patient intake.
charlesf
21d ago
I actually opt into a service with Google where they track where I am at pretty much all times through my phone. I can go to a dashboard and follow myself through the past going back to when I first opted in. I assume they do this for everyone and I'm only opting into the tools to see the data myself. My wife can also see where I am at any given time, which is also intentional. I have issues with my health and get holes in my memory; I've needed others to be able to locate me before when I'm not well.
charlesf
28d ago
- 350 miles
- 50 miles. In the state capitol. Its not a very high end one though, clients are mostly politicians and local lawyers it seems.
- <1 mile. Tobacco.
- 8 miles
- 8 miles
- 50 miles
charlesf
1mo ago
This is a good point actually. I've knows a few Chinese American youths who spend a lot of their non-school time working at the restaurant their parents own. None of these kids were on the books as employed at all, and received pay to match.
charlesf
1mo ago
I speculate the the higher income families might also have more connections with which to secure their kids summer work. All of my summer jobs as a teen and in college came from connections, not randomly dropping applications or otherwise cold approaching employers. Living in a higher income area probably helps too; one of my summer jobs was working at the boat service center at a private marina.
charlesf
1mo ago
4m per year? or 4m total between 2025 and the end of 2028. I wonder sometimes what the actual realistic ceiling is on deportations. There are only so many ICE members, courts etc to process them. Though the budget for such was recently increased, it takes time to hire and train and build institutional capacity in any organization. I would expect a ramp in capacity over time; 2028 is likely to have more than the prior years. I read a semi-convincing argument that at current capacity, assuming the political will remains strong, we could maybe do 1m a year. Definitions and motivated statistical analysis also confound efforts to accurately capture such figures.
charlesf
1mo ago
Anything like this that still exists on the internet has to be protected from "the web at large". These sorts of things worked in the past due to the filtering of all internet users for for smarter, more tech savvy, PC owners. Anything today that gains a reputation as someplace quality discussions might be taking place will be face a number of dangers from people and groups who would have been filtered out in the old system: bots, paid shills, culture war crusaders, and people who interact with the internet entirely through their smart phone. This has forced the older, higher quality users onto largely private Discord servers, Onion sites, or fora that otherwise apply a filtering mechanism locally, either through vigorous manual enforcement, like this place, invitation only membership, paid accounts, or other equally effective systems. While I don't think its been explicitly investigated or analyzed, I think its largely the case now that the dangers that the new cohorts of internet users present to thoughtful discussion spaces significantly outweigh the potential losses of smaller numbers of new quality contributors.
My father was a career NCO in the USMC, retired in the early 90s. Apparently the military is, or at least was, ripe with various theories and conjectures. His take on UFOs/UAP was that someone(s), somewhere made a decision to deliberately trick a small number of the most gormless, credulous service members in all the branches into having sort of staged experiences to leave them with the impression that there actually was knowledge of UFOs in the USG somewhere, its generally well covered up, but somehow a steady trickle of corporals and specialists were leaving the service absolutely convinced that they saw something they weren't supposed to see or otherwise experienced direct evidence of aliens. I've met a few of these intrepid veterans myself over the years and they really did seem absolutely convinced, though they were quite poor at actually communicating their experiences of describing the 'evidence' they witnessed. As to why the DoD/USG decided to plant misinformation in a subset of the troops and release them in to the general population to spread their stories, this was never clear.
The most common story I heard was usually about them witnessing some technology or phenomena that obviously could only have been reverse engineered from, or made out of, salvaged alien technology. A few attributed nuclear power/weapons generally to this.
charlesf
1mo ago
Maybe, but I've never really used books very much as part of my practice. I find books about Buddhism and meditation interesting intellectually but not always useful for progressing actual practice. The ones I enjoyed the best are probably the more semi-biographical ones were other people share their experiences and details of their practice. There are certain predictable milestones as well as potential stumbling blocks that almost all life-long meditators eventually encounter. Some of these I would also categorize as real dangers. An experienced teacher is indispensable for navigating this and I don't find books or writing to be a functional ersatz. I imagine you could probably do ok with instruction over the internet though. Still, there a few books I've enjoyed that stick out. Anything by DT Suzuki is pretty good, though he is a major figure in modern pop-Buddhism that's not really his fault; the hippies became somewhat obsessed with him in the 60s. Alan Watts is also quite good, though I prefer his more academic audio lectures where he explains the basics of Indian philosophy. His other stuff in general is quite syncretic and personally idiosyncratic to his own practice and not really what I'd call standard or traditional, and the hippies got ahold of him too. Another author I enjoy is Taitetsu Unno who writes in English about, and is a minister in, Jodo Shinshu Pure Land Buddhism. There is much less interest in the west for Pure Land, despite it being the overwhelming majority of Buddhists in China and Japan. I learned to meditate at a Jodo Shinshu temple when I was young. Meditation is actually not a core practice of Shin Buddhists at all, most never do it at all, though it does exist in the tradition and is more common in the clergy. The underlying philosophy of Pure Land doesn't really require it as part of the practice, they are mostly chanters; their path to liberation is entirely different from the more well known types like Zen or Tibetan traditions. However this temple shared a facility with a Rinzai Zen sensei who held twice weekly sessions. Shin and Zen have a good and fairly long relationship in Japan so this wasn't that strange to the natives at the temple. I feel like speaking or writing about the experience of meditation is always something of a farce. Its a category of experience I find often beyond my ability to communicate about. At its core is meditation practice. I do a mixture of sitting and walking/working meditation as well as chanting, mostly the nembutsu. I think I understand the aversion to pop-Buddhism though. I learned at a temple of Japanese immigrants and their decedents. They were extremely sensitive to the idea of their religion being a caricature and their non-Japanese visitors being any sort of cultural/religious "tourists". Many of them were quite militant about resisting anything that felt like being exoticized and were very clear that they'd prefer that no non-Japanese were allowed in the services at all, ever. One thing the Shinshu in the USA does that I really like is translate the majority of their teachings into plain English, borrowing many terms from Christianity. Their organization is even called the Buddhist Churches of America. Many of these changes were made post WWII in an effort to integrate more fully into American culture. The temple I attended was founded by former internment camp prisoners who left their old communities en masse after the war and founded entirely new communities in American cities that had little or no Japanese presence before the war. I think that my introduction to the practice coming from this group was very helpful for avoiding a common trend I often see in western Buddhists of what I can only really describe unkindly as LARPing. I have over the years learned a great deal of Japanese and Sanskrit/Pali terminology out of academic interest and as part of deepening the practice. Some of these terms are very useful for describing concepts that sometimes require an entire sentence in English to convey, but I don't think a successful meditation practice requires learning any foreign languages at all, nor adopting the cultural practices of a different people.
charlesf
1mo ago
Instead that particular problem returns on schedule, almost but not quite clockwork, to make an outrageous post and get banned again.
Things like this will always remind me of the Something Awful poster who was banned for posting solicitations for one of his personal businesses in a subforum where that isn't allowed for 11 years. Then, 11 years to the day he broke the exact same rule in the exact same subforum. He caught another 11 year vacation and everyone fully expects to see him in 2035 when this one expires, assuming the forum still exists.
I've lost about 160 lbs on semaglutide and have been able to mostly maintain the lower weight for a number of reasons, but I can speak to the difficulty of "not doing something" and the different experience of the sensation hunger that I have now vs in the past.
Before describing my experiences with the sensation of hunger, I think its worth noting that I was relatively healthy and active as a child through my 20s and early 30s, so I always remembered what it felt like to not be fat and I think actually being healthy before I started gaining weight made it somewhat easier to ignore at first. I think people that are fat their entire lives have it harder. I began overeating after surviving cancer and the depression I experienced from the lifelong nerve damage I have now.
On the sensation of hunger and the specific wording I'm using "the sensation of hunger" and not simply the term hunger, this is part of the meditative practice that I think has allowed me to maintain the weight loss. In Buddhism we talk about dependent phenomena and conditional arising, and the fundamental emptiness of all such things. In this understanding, hunger is not an indication of needing to eat, or at all even related to the nutritional state of my organism, its a sensation like the temperature of the air, or ambient sounds. It never, ever, ever goes away. If I am awake, I am hungry. Starving. Even now that I'm "better", I'm hungry from the moment I awake until I return to sleep. No amount of eating of any type of food has any effect whatsoever on my sensation of hunger. In fact, eating generally makes me even hungrier, as well as exhausted. I could eat so much food that I had trouble walking, I would feel like I was on the verge of vomiting from how stuffed I was, and I was still starving. I think something like this drives the behaviors of many, if not all, obese people to some extent. I am fortunate that the same techniques I use to manage chronic pain work pretty well with chronic, inescapable hunger.
Until semaglutide. I knew once it started to work that there was probably always going to be an end date. The normal American medical system was a failure from the very beginning for me here, I've always had to obtain it on the 'gray' market so to speak. (Its actually much cheaper too, about 20% what my clinic's pharmacy would charge w/o insurance, which always refused to pay for it) So, while I still am able to maintain access to a "maintenance dose" now, I knew from the outset that I needed to use the possibly very limited time I had access to retrain my body and my mind to a new relationship with eating. I spend about 30-45 minutes per day meditating, and have for over 20 years now. One of these daily sessions is focused entirely on internalizing the fundamental emptiness of all phenomena, but specifically the sensation of hunger, to mentally sever the relationship between feeling the sensation of hunger and the arising desire to eat. Its now simply another flavor of physical pain. Its been largely successful; I've been able to sign a peace treaty, so to speak, with hunger. I do not attempt to fight it, or suppress it, but simply experience and observe the sensation without it conditioning my behavior. Without the previous experience with meditation for coping with chronic pain I don't think I could have done this. Using meditation to "short circuit" the connection between physical pain and mental suffering was much more difficult than addressing hunger, though the two are similar in many ways, the primary similarity for me being the absolute unavoidability of both. The pain my body produces is just as omnipresent as the hunger, and is likewise a false signal. The depression that I used to feel from chronic pain contributed to my overeating. In a way both of these issues had to be processed together to address either of them individually.
The second set of changes: I had to train my body to accept, and then expect, a completely different relationship with eating. I had to build enduring lifestyle habits that were unique to my situation. I mentioned earlier that actually eating offers no relief to the sensation of hunger and usually just makes it more severe. For me what worked is not eating at all, most of the time. Three meals a day, or even two, is entirely unworkable. Given the very low number of calories I can consume before I start to gain weight again, three meals would all have to be the size of snacks for most people. As I was able to cope with the hunger with the medication, I began to reduce my calorie intake, settling at what my doctor said it appropriate for a 6'3'' man, about 2400cal per day. This is way too much. I'm not sure exactly how people's metabolisms differ, and how much being sedentary due to my disability contributes, but at 2400 calories a day my weight will stabilize at about 330lbs. Even 2000 only gets me to about 290-300lbs. So I stopped counting daily calories for the most part and now account per weekly intake: 8000-9000 calories per week stabilizes my weight at about 235lbs. This generally takes the form of one 1000-1500 calorie meal per day in the evening with one 0 calorie day per week. I buy food once per week based on these limits. If I somehow eat everything before its time to shop again I'm looking at more than one 0 calorie day. I have to eat in the evening as it exhausts me and causes varying levels of brain fog eventually driving me to bed. After about 2 years of this my body is acclimated and I will actually become nauseous if I eat more, though I'm still starving the entire time I'm nauseous. It never goes away.
I think the people that gain the weight right back are largely letting the medication "do all the work" as it were. So, at least while they are on it they have the metabolism and habits of a normal person. Sort of. I suppose its possible to stay on it for life if the supply and price gouging issues can be resolved, but right now most people can't or don't. If you don't use the opportunity provided by the medication to reestablish a new relationship with eating and retrain your body and mind then its likely to only be temporary. In a way I'm fortunate to have already had the toolbox for dealing with chronic pain.
charlesf
1mo ago
The anti-cheat services compile quite a bit of data but its generally not released to the public beyond limited disclosures to try to sell their services to game studios. Valve anti cheat is one of the bigger ones. Its expensive, but customers will get access to the "rap sheets" as it were for various online credentials. IPs, UBID, steam installs, accounts related by payment method, hardware IDs etc. You don't get large data sets to just browse, but you can see the history or reports and flags for clients that connect to your game, substantiated or otherwise. You can set up auto-bans for known cheat engines or bad actors.
charlesf
1mo ago
I can't speak to academic cheating with confidence, but I can about videogames. First, there are more opportunities as time passes as more and more players get into online games so the whole number is going to go up. This matters b/c these are all potential customers of the next part of the problem. Its never been easier to cheat at online games. Used to be, back on the 00s, it was much harder. You either needed to be a programmer yourself with knowledge of the game engine and build your own hacks, or you needed to know the right people or be part of fairly insular online communities, the Warez scene probably being the most prolific. There was a lot of overlap between the game cracking/piracy scene and the online game cheats scene, both of which were almost never just stumbled upon by normies. Now that much larger numbers of people play these very competitive games, they are large enough to constitute a customer base worth trying to get the attention of. People are also much more comfortable with paying over various apps now, so its much easier to sell to them. Prices are wildly variable with the specific game, but for anywhere from $10 to $200 you can get a download link to a fully contained .exe that you run with the game, there is a relatively user friendly interface, and you money buys not just the download of the exe, but also updates as the sellers of the cheat engines try to stay one step ahead of the game devs and other anti-cheat service providers like VAC. In addition, the people using the engines are much, much sloppier with using them, not even bothering to try to hide it most of the time. To accommodate this the same groups that sell the cheats also sell various ban-evasion packages, helping you make new accounts, teaching you how to use a VPN etc, or in many cases just selling you a pre-made, clean account to get right back at it. A few more infamous ones over the years have also had inside people at the game studio who would just remove the bans for money. Money changed everything with videogame cheating. I don't think any of this applies to online chess, which is its own strange world.
charlesf
1mo ago
I've taken hallucinogens many, many times in my life. Mostly LSD when younger, shifting more toward mushrooms as I've gotten older, to entirely mushrooms now in my late 40s. Its the only 'hard' drug I use any more, usually 1-2 times a month on the weekend. Your report sounds like a small amount tbh, mostly based on your ability to actually record the experience. Higher doses absolutely shoot your attention span. The inconsistency of natural mushrooms is a real thing. I'm lucky to have had the same source for a long time now, but even then the same weight batch to batch has noticeable variations in strength. Taking it in a clinical setting sounds frankly horrific. I'm accustomed enough to using psilocybin that I can perform a wide range of tasks while tripping and have never had anything close to a bad trip, and I wouldn't do it in that setting ever. I live on a farm in the country. My primary activity on mushrooms is playing in the fields with my dogs. I think people refer to spiritual or mystical experiences on hallucinogens because we lack other language to describe the experience. I find trying to describe it in words very difficult, like its a category of experience that can't effectively be spoken or written about. I feel this exact same way about the effects of meditation over the long term. We just don't have vocabulary for it in English. As far as enlightenment/ego death/loss of the self experiences, most of the people I've know that have these, and I've also had many personally, are already engaged in this pursuit outside of their psilocybin use. Generally through various forms of meditation practice. Hallucinogens alone generally don't trigger these in my experience, with the massive exception of DMT, which I don't really recommend for beginners. DMT will absolutely slam into the user with ego-death/loss of the illusory self, and though temporary, you don't know that at the time. Its a class apart from other hallucinogens massively altering your thought processes and sensory perceptions.
charlesf
1mo ago
Kratom provides a kinda-sorta opiate-like buzz the very first few times its used that taper off pretty fast and generally stop around the 3rd-4th use. It is a fantastic pain reliever though, and a godsend for people with chronic pain who cant get medical pain management from a doctor. The pain relief doesn't go away with repeated use like the buzz does.
There is a predictable profile for the people we see who have problems with kratom (I volunteer at a local rehab). They are opiate addicts, usually heroin, pretty deep into it. They get off dope but are struggling with terrible withdrawal. They learn that in the cultures that kratom is native too people use it to get off dope, that it blunts the withdrawal symptoms. This is true, its great for this. Then, the first time they use it they get sorta opiate-like buzz and a lightbulb goes off in their heads: "I've found a loophole! I can keep getting high! I'll still pass my drug tests!" But as mentioned the psychoactive effects fade very fast. This can temporarily be countered by taking more, so they move from the capsules to the liquid extracts then the more concentrated extracts. Still by the end of the first week the buzz is entirely gone. It still offers relief from withdrawal but thats not why they're using it now. This stuff got them high once, why isn't it working anymore? This is where the huge amounts of money kick in. The individual bottles of the concentrated extract cost $20 each or so and they're taking 5-10 a day chasing that buzz that isn't coming back. Way more than they ever spent on heroin (which has been dirt cheap for a while now) Many go back to dope at this point. We see a lot of ODs at this point; having been clean for a while, even just 1 month sometimes, is enough to reset their opiate tolerance but they still dose based on their previous habit, which is now too much.
Kratom is a very effective treatment for pain. Its also very good as alleviating withdrawal, but those first few doses that provide a ersatz high for recovering addicts ruins this use case for some people leading to the observations in the above post.
charlesf
2mo ago
Oh I know. My father ultimately lost his license after his 9th DUI. He started racking them up in the 60s, before they put increasing penalties on subsequent violations. He drove everywhere with a tallboy in the console. After he finally lost license around '94 he transitioned to drinking and biking. He'd be 2-3 cans into the case before he even arrived home. He had a sleave that he put around his beer can that made it look like a Pepsi. He could have gotten his license back with a hefty fine after 5 years but he knew he'd just lose it again. He had to choose between drinking and driving, and chose drinking. Some people will never stop. It ultimately killed him early, along with the smoking, at 62 via colon cancer. He actually started drinking more when he was diagnosed.
charlesf
2mo ago
I'm some places it already is illegal to sell cold beer for carry out. Indiana I believe, and maybe Oklahoma. Actually it looks like OK repealed it a few years ago. Some beer is also meant to be consumed at room temp, but the people that are into this type of beer are probably not drinking it in the car. Most of the degenerate alcoholics I've known, people who literally can't wait to get home and have to drink in the car, do not care in the least what the temperature is and have often also bought a half-pint which they downed in the parking lot before even getting back in the car.
I'm on the boarder of the midwest/upper south, so there are some hispanics here but not a large fraction of the population. Pickup trucks, however, are extremely common and popular. Some of them are work trucks, though vans are more common as actual work vehicles. The overwhelming majority of pickup trucks on the road here (I'd estimate 80%+) are single passenger commuter vehicles. 99% of their drive time is to carry their driver to and from their job that doesn't require a truck at all, or running errands. Nothing has ever been, nor will ever be, transported in the (tiny) beds, which generally have a hard cover of some type so they don't need cleaned. Many of them boast considerable off-road capabilities yet will never have a single tire touch dirt, short of occasionally hopping a curb to get out of a small driveway or parking lot. All of my neighbors, the men anyway, drive one of these as their primary vehicle. If they do find themselves actually needing to haul something, the more well off actually buy a second, usually older, truck to use for that, or they have a trailer. Trailers are very common and popular; nothing really fits in the beds of these trucks anyway. They are essentially lifted SUVs with enormous engines with the rear storage area converted into a semblance of a truck bed that is never used. Decades ago this same demo (their parents and grandparents) would have driven Lincolns and Cadillac sedans. The interiors of these trucks often have the same luxury options as the current Lincoln/Caddy offerings. More offroad vehicles like jeeps and hummers are also popular with the younger men. These are slightly more likely to be used for their ostensible purpose, especially if they've aftermarket alterations, but I'd guess at least 50% of these vehicles are also single passenger commuter vehicles. The locals who are fans of offroading/mudding disparagingly refer to both types of vehicles as pavement princesses or mall prowlers. As mentioned down thread, all of these commuter trucks are in impeccable condition, regularly washed and kept away from any scenarios that might scratch or ding them in any way.
As to the question why? They are men, and men drive trucks. There isn't much more introspection than that. A non-trivial amount of women use pickups as their primary commuter vehicle too, but they also tend to prefer jeeps, or the jeep pickup, which I'm seeing more of, or just regular giant SUVs. Many of the wives of the men who own the giant commuter trucks near by me have nearly identical black Cadillac Escalades with the silver trim. I have a Lincoln Navigator personally, I think Ford makes better vehicles, at least right now. I also have a Nissan pick up that is used as a farm truck mostly, and looks like it.
There have been a few books that were especially well written that I read twice. The first time I'm too consumed with finding out what happens, plot progression, resolution of tensions etc. I overwhelmingly am interested in how the story ends, which distracts from some of the finer points of the writing, sub plots and characters that weren't critical to the main storyline etc. During a second read I already know how these things are going to resolve and can more enjoy the total quality of the writing. Most books aren't actually good enough to warrant this though. I can usually tell when I'm going to reread a series pretty soon after I start it too. Steven Erikson's books are a first example I can think of.
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