I have a problem with LGBT books, because they are read by mostly LGBT people who then feel obliged to praise the story and how they identified with the characters. Have the writer be a woman and you will be hard pressed to find the few reviews written by people who just randomly stumbled upon the book or maybe lazily read some very positive reviews and decided to read it, like I did. And when you get burned like that, the more you stop trying to read these books, amplifying the effect.

  Unfortunately, Karen Memory is one of those books. Funny enough, I've previously read a short story collection by Elizabeth Bear and I've forgotten all about it, but then I reread my review and... it's kind of the same. She writes well, but I can't relate to the stories or the characters and mostly because she uses fantasy settings to sell basic bland ideas that are not related to fantasy or sci-fi. A bit of a bait and switch.

  Karen Memery (with an e) is a teenage middle-end lesbian prostitute who knows horses, fighting, shooting and is also a seamstress. In a Western-like steampunk universe which sounds suspiciously similar to episodes from Warrior (great TV show BTW), she is the protagonist, but there is very little steampunk and no sex. Instead it's all about diverse people caring about each other's feelings while the bad men are coming for them.

  20% of the book in, I've decided to abandon it, but I did make the effort to hunt down the reviews that were focusing on the story and not on the diversity or how cool steampunk westerns are. People finishing the book didn't think much of it either, especially since she seems to go all Mr. Nobody towards the end. She's a teenage girl!

  Anyway, no.

  I started reading this book at random, and by random I mean I used a tool to choose it for me. And what a coincidence that, published in 2011, it talks about the geopolitical and economical drivers that would shape the next decade while I read it in 2022, as a conflict between Russian and the U.S. in Ukraine is looming. Was Friedman a sort of Hari Seldon and he predicted it all or was it all just bull? Well, a bit of both.

  The Next Decade wants to be a U.S. centric but objective dissection of the world, all pretenses aside, with the goal of predicting what will happen and what Americans should be doing about it. George Friedman starts by explaining why the United States have become an empire, almost by accident, and that while the reality of the fact cannot be denied, the anti-imperial principles upon which the nation was founded as still relevant and even essential to the wellbeing of America (and hence the world). He decides that the most important actor in this story is the American president, the modern embodiment of both the principles of the nation and of a Machiavellian prince. The rest of the book is a continent by continent analysis of what countries are driven by and will do and what this prince has to do to ensure and promote American supremacy over the world. In the author's view, the highest virtue of a good leader is to act in the best interests of his nation, while attempting to follow a moral code as well as possible in the circumstances.

  Does it sound arrogant, pompous and presumptuous? Yes, quite. But does it also sound close to how heads of state think and make decisions? A resounding yes. In fact, his talk of the Georgian conflict, where Russians invaded and Americans wrote some stern condemnations in response is terrifyingly close to what happens now in Ukraine, only the U.S. cannot afford to repeat that performance now.

  Here's a quote:

  In order to understand this office I look at three presidents who defined American greatness. The first is Abraham Lincoln, who saved the republic. The second is Franklin Roosevelt, who gave the United States the world’s oceans. The third is Ronald Reagan, who undermined the Soviet Union and set the stage for empire. Each of them was a profoundly moral man … who was prepared to lie, violate the law, and betray principle in order to achieve those ends. They embodied the paradox of what I call the Machiavellian presidency, an institution that, at its best, reconciles duplicity and righteousness in order to redeem the promise of America.

  Friedman thinks, for example, that bin Laden forced the hand of the American president to overextend in the Middle East, a pointless military gesture, but a politically necessary one, which lead to a rise of Iranian influence and distracted from Russia. As in The Next 100 Years, the author is still obsessed with the importance of Mexico, Poland and Turkey, but he adds more stuff related, for example, to Romania, which must be built up militarily so that it defends the Carpathians for the Americans for free. The European Union is a joke, fractured by history, culture, economy, financial systems, laws and held together by a fairy tale ideal of a bureaucratic world where war (inevitable to Friedman) doesn't exist. But even so, Germany must be stopped from joining up with Russia and as best as possible removed from its alliance with France. Africa is a place that the U.S. should just ignore. And so on and so on. Basically, America should make sure that in no place will any power even begin to rise in a region because it would impede its natural right to rule the world.

  The scary thing is that every one of these predictions or analyses are propped by well explained and documented arguments. It's not that Americans are assholes for doing that, it would be costly and stupid for them to not do that. As Friedman puts it, the U.S. has become empire without intention and is now forced to act as such for better or worse.

  I must warn you that this is not your school history book, where valiant heroes defend their homeland against evil, but a very cynical overview of how foreign policy is done. It describes a world in which every country is at war with every other country and any sense of morals is slave to necessity and only serves to bring a modicum of validation to the inevitable evil nations do.

  Bottom line: a very well written book, extremely apropos these days, something that I urge to be taken with a grain of salt, but highly recommended as a read.

  I am a fan of the original quadrilogy, but The Cold Forge is the first book from the Alien franchise I am reading, mostly because of the Alien Theory YouTube channel which recommended this (and Into Caribdis, also by Alex White) as two of the great books in that universe. And I did like it, it is well written and using a lot of the Alien trademark items: the bleak predatory corporate world, the psychopath in love with the aliens, the isolated setting, the company stooge, the female protagonist who has to do everything and then some just in order to survive, the double crossing, the androids, the power loader robot and so on. But at the same time, it felt too familiar, like the writer was too afraid to set foot outside the established borders of the franchise, lest he stumbles and gets impregnated and eaten.

  Also, while reading the book I've got to realize that Alex White nailed it in regards to the main character. Yes, she is a woman, but physically weak. Her strengths lie in determination, smarts and high morals. It was never about the gender of the protagonist as it was about raising the stakes by following a weak character who has to overcome even more than an average person. I think Ripley is also the same, even if towards the end she was physically intimidating and powerful as well: not a strong female lead for the sake of it, but because it makes sense and brings value to the story.

  Anyway, back to the book, I felt that we got way too much of the villain and too little of the aliens, maybe even of the protagonist herself. As such, The Cold Forge is more a very detailed exploration of the mindset of a psychopath than a new perspective on the xenomorphs. We get a space station in which dozens of aliens roam around and the focus is almost always on what the antagonist thought and felt while conveniently only secondary characters had to deal with the aliens.

  Be warned that this book will make you hate humanity a little bit and get you more and more frustrated, to a point close to Stockholm Syndrome, with how paralyzed by social norms the characters are and how freely the predatory psycho navigates through those and kills anyone he wants. The parallel is clear: the worst humanity can bring is very similar to the alien drones: hidden, unexpected and brutal, uncaring of anything but their goal.

  Bottom line: I liked the book and I think it was a good introduction to the literary Alien universe, but I expect many new ideas and more focus on the aliens in following works. I don't want to read again and again about people being people while some random killer bug brings a slight element of chaos to the story.

  Brandon Sanderson writes books set in many worlds and having to read again and again about the same characters can tire people up (probably writing about them, too). So he has this system of writing shorter books in the same universe, but featuring less significant characters, thus maintaining interest in the world, keeping it fresh in the mind of the reader and showing different perspectives on the same universe. And while in theory one could skip these, they often add some new angle to the story and expand concepts and characters, so in practice you have to read them if you like the series they are part of.

  Dawnshard features Rysn, the female trader that has lost the use of her legs in an accident. I have to admit my memory is not that extensive, so I genuinely don't remember that or who Rysn is in the main books, but it's irrelevant, because this is a somewhat standalone story. At the behest of both queens Fen and Navani she captains her ship to a remote island where mythical riches can be found, accompanied by (the) Lopen, his cousin Huio and Cord.

  What I thought was interesting is that completely new enemies have been defined in this book. Not some throwaway antagonists used solely here, but vague references to god like creatures that could destroy the entire cosmere. Adding cosmic terror to the Stormlight Archives books can only improve it! Can't wait to see where this is going.

  As usual Sanderson's writing is smooth and the reading is fast. I spend at least twice the amount of time reading other books of similar length and I often feel deep regret every time one of his books end. Dawnshard was no exception. Maybe the plot is simpler and more linear than other books, but it opens up captivating avenues.

  I understand why people liked Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell's prequel to this, more. The book is fresher, the characters more introspective, the irony thick. In contrast, Mr. Bridge is more revealing while at the same time its lead character being dry and joyless and for today's readers quite "problematic". Not to mention that we already know how he will end up. I also half expected to see some of the same situations from the first book, but from Mr. Bridge's perspective, and it wasn't so. However, I hold this book to be better.

  While the first book was focused on the wife and a little on the male child, this one focuses on the husband and a little on the two daughters. Walter Bridge is what one would call a very respectable man. He loves his wife and children and feels a strong responsibility to protect and care for them, but he is also stern, stingy, authoritarian, racist without considering himself that, a conservative and a prude, which is a tad ironic because he feels an (unwanted by him) sexual attraction to one of his daughters. He always knows what's best and isn't afraid to tell you that or act on it. He could be the picture in the dictionary entry for patriarchy, in a time when such things as female empowerment and anti racism were in their infancy, if at all.

  Yet he is a decent man, with flaws but good. He has strong convictions, but they are subject to reason. One can change his mind if they bring rational arguments. And while most chapters show him as the rather emotionally guarded protector of his family and dignity in general, some of them lay him bare when you least expect. The first chapter, for example, explains how he absolutely and unconditionally loves his wife and how happy she makes him; then most of the next 135 chapters show him completely ignoring that fact. As a self made man, he is acutely aware of the value of things, denying himself and others the simple luxuries of relaxing or not caring about their things and their reputation.

  Yes, Mrs. Bridge was a more entertaining book, not to mention more focused and a bit shorter. The sequel, while maintaining the same structure of many very short chapters vaguely connected, is broader, with more characters, also more clinical and cruel. The last chapter shows Mr. Bridge pondering if he ever felt joy and concluding he did not, as that is an emotion for simpler people.

  I feel it is important to read these two books today. It talks about how people lived and felt 100 years ago, how their world worked and what they considered absolute, reasonable and decent, how they raised their children and what they thought life should be. One can see what we have gained and lost in a century, while emotionally connecting with these two people.

  Third book of the collaboration series between Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson, Evershore stars Jorgen as the guy who has to keep everything together while Spensa is doing whatever she feels like doing, Cobb is unavailable and his parents just died. Add to it having to create and maintain alliances with alien races as the Superiority just wants to kill everything. I have to say that this book went a whole level up on crazy. I know that it probably builds towards the big reveal of what Detritus really is, but things are going Boomslug and making less sense as we go along.

  Now, to be fair, Skyward was never a grounded series about realistic scenarios, but about young people doing their best in absurdly dangerous, entertaining and emotionally fulfilling situations. It's a young adult series, with adult as an afterthought, where how the characters (and by extension the reader) feel and define themselves is the only thing that matters. Yet I can't help but feel (heh!) a little disappointed as more and more characters are just doing whatever they have to in order to further a less and less believable plot. It hasn't gone full Fast and the Furious yet, but give it time.

  As the writing goes, it's the same as the other books in the series, only this time the lead character is a guy. Yet it might as well not be, as Jerkface is acting and thinking in exactly the same patterns as the previous protagonists. It almost feels like an anime: ai, mamoru, aaaaaarrrgh, Super Saiyan! Still fun, but way too mindless.

  As I was saying in the review of Sunreach, the Skyward Flight subseries of the Skyward books by Brandon Sanderson is basically another book of the series, split into three volumes that are each written from the perspective of another character.

  The second volume, ReDawn, it written from the perspective of Allanik, the alien cytonic pilot that crashed on Detritus and which Spensa replaced as a Superiority pilot cadet. I liked that the humans are finally getting new allies and the end of the novella also brings a tragic event which will probably shape the third volume.

  If you were curious what happened to the rest of the pilot crew during the events of Cytonic, Sunreach tells the story. I expected to get a short story that was independent of the rest of the storyline, but instead this a not so short novella which expands into a subseries (Skyward Flight) of at least three volumes. Written in collaboration with Janci Patterson, it feels just like the other books in the Skyward series: first person perspective of young female pilot fighting the Superiority, light content, only the main character is not Spensa, but Freyia (callsign FM).

  It is just as filled with adventure and easy to read as other books in the series, I've actually finished this and the next volume in the series in about two days. Can't really say anything about the plot because - let's face it - it makes little sense, and it's very similar to Spensa's arc, but it's fun. If you've read and enjoyed any of Brandon Sanderson's Skyward books, this feels just like another entry and I believe you will need to read the subseries volumes to understand things in the next full book.

  It might sound strange to say this about a book published in 1959, but Mrs. Bridge was a refreshing read. It is made entirely of short chapters - more than 100 of them in a 246 page book - which describe little moments in the life of Mrs. Bridge, the wife of rich lawyer Walter Bridge in the 1930's America. I loved the fact that the chapters were ironic, but remained descriptive, without any judgement. There is nothing to push you in one direction or another; whatever you think of Mrs. Bridge, it's your own verdict, not the author's. The small vignettes are also disjointed, very rarely connected to each other, and although they are told in a chronological order, they shatter any semblance of a story. The book is literally a portrait.

  And as I was reading this, I was constantly thinking about this woman. Is she a victim or an abuser? Is she stupid or just simply stuck in a role she can't get out of? Am I sympathetic to her or do I despise her? Is it a tragedy or a comedy? Could and should anyone love her? I was constantly trying to cast judgement as the book kept reminding me that I don't actually need to.

  The book felt refreshing for presenting the life of a housewife in a world where women are treated more like pets than human beings, but not going into a tirade about how that's good or bad. It talks about the lives of negro servants, but doesn't shove some message down your throat. It happens before and during the first part of World War II, but it doesn't spout the virtue of Allied forces and condemn the evil of Fascism. It was just great writing which doesn't try to jam some conclusion down the throat.

  At first I thought the book was written by a woman and only at the end noticed that it was written by Evan S. Connell. He also wrote a Mr. Bridge book, which I am not sure if I want to read or not. Probably I will, because it completes the tableau. The portrait, you see, is of a couple.

  Personally, I feel  Mrs. Bridge is just trapped by her own superego. She has to look and behave as she was trained to, to maintain appearances regardless the cost to her own desires or personality. She doesn't do it for some end goal, she is not political or malicious, she isn't even two-faced, because she has suppressed any other face than the one she is showing. The few moments where her thoughts or desires come to the surface and quickly buried back are just a sign of how tragic the book is. At first I wanted to quote something from the book in the review, but there are so many quotable bits that I've decided against it.

  Bottom line: Mrs. Bridge makes you aware of how people lived in the '30s. Easy to read, the book's short chapters hide the depth of observation the author used to write them. In short, I loved it.

  If it weren't a Brandon Sanderson book, I think I would be more critical of the outsider kid turned hero through sheer power of will and reluctantly going towards becoming a minor god plot. I mean, I've seen it before, it sells, it's fun, but it never is good quality. Yet, Sanderson manages to make Cytonic about the characters, and it's hard to not empathize with them, once you get past the "oh, god, what a mess this story has become" feeling.

  And if I had to name one thing only that makes Brandon Sanderson books so good is that he doesn't give a crap about how credible his universes are. He can make emotional phone books having romances work, if he ever chooses to. (Please don't do it, man!)

  Back to Cytonic, Spensa again does things because she feels like it, rationalizing it afterwards as "she had to, despite her feelings", discovering new powers, making new friends and being sweet and aggressive at the same time (told you Sanderson can make anything work). I don't want to spoil anything, although I feel it would be impossible. I've forgotten most of what I've read in the first two books and it didn't matter that much. Ironically, it all happens in "the nowhere", a place where people can live, but slowly lose their memories of the real world (obviously, the somewhere), so maybe I went into the story a bit too much.

  For people who don't know this, Skyward is more of a young adult/children's series of books, where a young girl discovers she has a destiny. It's Harriet Potter in space, kind of, only with more focus on what people are like and how their feelings inform their actions than a world that makes objective sense. So, yeah, like Harry Potter. The tone is light, yet engaging and entertaining, and while it is not Sanderson's best work, it's quite fun.

  Trading for a Living is a pack of four different books, but of similar design:

• The Best Trading Lessons of Jesse Livermore
  • contains quotes from Jesse Livermore and a short translation/analysis from Frank Marshall for each
• Expert Trader: 93 Trading Lessons of Richard Wyckoff
  • contains quotes from Richard Wyckoff and a short translation/analysis from Frank Marshall for each
• Secrets of Trading Performance
  • a list of 10 principles to help you get in the mindset of a day trader
• Trading Essentials
  • a list of 20 principles to help you get in the mindset of a day trader

On the surface of it, you might say that this is not a book at all, just a collection of random musings from Frank Marshall. However, it does offer a direct and clear entry in the world of trading. As a complete noob in the business, I thought it was useful, if only as a browse-through and a reference book.

While I may have the utmost respect for Livermore and Wyckoff, they were trading a century ago. Their insights, even translated by a modern trader, don't mean much, although the small explaining paragraph from Marshall at the end of each is concise and useful. However, the two small booklets at the end, with the 30 principles in total, are kind of gold. And not gold in the sense of "read those and you will get rich!", but because they are honestly telling you:

• trading is HARD, because it depends on you finding an edge over everybody else (you only win because someone else loses)
• trading is discipline, because you need to fight your own urges and emotions and follow an (ever evolving) strategy
• you need to keep your own mind, body and life in balance (he even recommends meditation and therapy)
• trading is a job, which needs to be done with the mind, not the heart
• most people losing big (the 90% that don't make it) usually enter trading with the wrong mindset: trying to prove something, gambling, fear, wanting to get rich fast, etc.
• trading is hard work: following the trends, interpreting the data, doing math and statistics, etc.
• you trade because you enjoy it, otherwise you won't make it

Bottom line: Frank Marshall is telling you NOT to pick up trading unless you are really into it. Even these relatively vague advice he gives is prefaced in every book by a disclaimer that you are not to follow it with the expectation that it will automatically make you win money. You need to put in a lot of work to even start making a dent and strong discipline is required to stop yourself from going in too deep and never coming back up.

  There is an issue with American science fiction, where the stakes have to be raised all the time. Everything has to become different, bigger, flashier, louder, until it becomes so ridiculous that you just have to start over. My greatest regret is that the Expanse series didn't focus more on the Sol world, so carefully crafted in the first books only to be discarded for (cheap?) alien cosmic horror. Perhaps there was never a market for that, but when the series ended, it is the complex interaction between Inners and Belters and the larger than life characters there I missed the most.

  Leviathan Falls doesn't address all of the open threads, loses focus on the world and stays on the crew of the Rocinante: victims, heroes, rebels, guardians of the Universe. It then unequivocally cuts all of those threads and ends the entire series with terrible finality.

  But the book is great, like most of the series, a page turner that I couldn't let go until I had finished it. Stakes were never higher, heroes never this heroic, villains never more terrifying and yet relatable. To me, at this moment, biggest villain(s) is still James S. A. Corey for killing my world.

 So you clicked on this post because you thought that:

• I was smart enough to know how to be better than anybody else
• I could summarize all the ways to become so
• I would generously share them with you
• You would understand what I am telling you in 3 minutes or whatever your attention span is now

While I appreciate the sentiment, no, I am not that smart, nor am I that stupid. There are no shortcuts. Just start thinking for yourself and explore the world with care and terror and hope, like the rest of us. And most of all, stop clicking on "N ways to..." links.

  Stranger in a Strange Land is mainly satire. It tries to shake the reader from stasis and make them ask questions and think for themselves. For Robert A. Heinlein, science, freedom of thought and critical thinking were really important and it shows in how he approaches the story. However, the book is also philosophy, pulp fiction, religious experimentation, erotica, science fiction and pure lunacy. Also, if you are one of the social justice people, don't read this book, especially feminists.

  First published in 1961, it both shows its age and is way ahead of its times. The book immensely influenced culture to the point that it added a new word to the English dictionary: "grok", which is used throughout the book as a synonym to "comprehend", although apparently it means a lot more.

  The book is pretty damn large, split into five parts which each felt like a different story. Probably today it would have been published as a pentalogy. The first part is pure science fiction satire. A young man, raised by Martians, returns to Earth, where he has to confront the reality of our culture. Shots are fired towards everything: politics, law, religion, capitalism, culture. 

  The second part is about him finding some allies which protect him and allow him to have the time to evolve. Here it kind of transforms to the normal kind of pulp published at the time (and since).

  From the third part on, Heinlein gives agency to his character. People interact with him, teach him about the world while he starts "spreading his wings". A lot of discussion about how he naively perceives the world. More focus is put on his superpowers: he can not only make stuff (and people) disappear forever, but he can control his body, move things with his mind, is capable of telepathy.

  In the fourth part, Mike the Martian becomes a cult leader. He establishes a church, starts filtering people through a number of "circles" and at the end he has them speaking and thinking in Martian, which gives them the same powers that he has. His church is all about free love, communal ownership (if it even matters), group telepathy and so on. At this point I was reminded of The Center of the Cyclone, which started as a scientist's journal on LSD experimentation and ended as a complete mental breakdown of a person communing with extraterrestrial beings.

  The fifth part just wraps it all up in a biblical allegory, with Mike the God sacrificing himself for his church and humanity as a whole.

  It took me forever to finish the book. Partly because I was focused on other stuff, but also because the book is filled with random stuff. You might think that as Mike is the primary character, he is also the protagonist, but instead this old man Jubal is the carrier of the reader's point of view. The man is cultured, intelligent, arrogant, likes to hear himself speak, condescends to everybody and is generally grumpy - which is presented as being endearing, but in fact it's pretty annoying. He lives in a grand mansion with four young girls, which are his secretaries. When he permits them, they are quite lively and opinionated :) Apparently, many considered Jubal as a stand in for Heinlein himself.

  I admit that I loved the first part of the book. I thought it was humorous and poignant, laying bare the hypocrisy of the modern world. Also it had a good pace, it was presenting new information and there was no Jubal. Then things started to feel a bit weird, but I kept at it. The ending was almost like having to listen to one of those convinced hippies telling everybody how God is love and therefore you should let him fuck you. There are entire chapters about Jubal explaining someone how things truly are and why that person is wrong in their thoughts or beliefs. And then there is the church of love thing, where everybody groks and drinks deep and calls everybody "dear", while smugly announcing that they have the answer to everything.

  As far as I know Heinlein specifically tried to piss off people with the book, to shake things up. It all started from a idea of his wife's to write a Mowgli book, but where the kid has been raised by Martians. more than a decade later, this is the result. I think the Strugatskys did a better and more concise job in Space Mowgli, yet Heinlein managed to inspire whole generations with this book. To this day there is an actual church that follows the principles in the book and a Heinlein Society dedicated to encouraging critical thinking. Who am I to criticize it? But it was damn hard to finish.

  A while ago I had discovered the Brave browser for mobiles, which was a Chromium fork that featured ad blocking and privacy guards out of the box, when Google stubbornly refused to enable extension support for mobile Chrome. The thing is, it was only available for mobiles. And even if it were available for the desktop, would it really have anything over Chrome with extensions like uBlock Origin installed?

  The answer is YES! Brave for PC is available and, from the limited interaction I've had so far, it is superior to Chrome. Why? Let me list the reasons:

• it cares about your privacy and not about how Google can track you best, which might not be high on your agenda or on your browser extension creator's agenda. That's a plus, because as you didn't care about it before, you don't have to care about it now, but it's taken care of.
• by removing unnecessary functionality from Chromium, it is actually faster than Chrome! Are you old enough to remember when Chrome appeared as the underdog and Internet Explorer reigned supreme and then everybody was like "IE sucks, Chrome rules because it's so fast and only cares about the user experience"? That's what Brave does now to Chrome!
• it has a "forced" dark mode flag that can turn EVERY web site dark. It's not perfect, but it's out of the box! All you have to do is go to brave://flags/#enable-force-dark and enable the feature. (admittedly, you can achieve the same effect with chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark or edge://flags/#enable-force-dark, but I only found out about it from Brave)
• the best feature yet is the Simplified View. Most of the times when you open a web site in the mobile version, you get a "Show simplified view" button. You click on that and you get:
  
  • just the text of the web site
  • whatever font you want
  • whatever theme you want (dark/bright)
  • no ads
  • no flashing things
  • no sidebars
  • no "accept cookies" and "register/subscribe" popups
    Again, this is probably a Chrome feature, but Brave made it public, visible and natural. Haven't found the way to turn it on the desktop browser, yet.

Correction: I have found that in Chrome you can enable reader mode with a flag (chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode) only it doesn't work that well. In Brave all that moved to what is called Speedreader, which also must be enabled via a flag (chrome://flags/#brave-speedreader).

  Have you ever browsed one of these "modern" web sites and you got half way through scrolling past the huge image that fills the screen only to get a big popup about registering to some bullshit service, with another popup asking you to enable cookies and then some lazy overlay hiding the content and demanding you pay for the content? Imagine you have one button to click and you get to read the actual information on that page! How can people browse on the web without Brave?!

  I know that some extensions cover most of the points above, but Brave plus uBlock Origin are amazing! I get to a web page that is automatically stripped of most ads, but there are still parts of it that are not strictly ads, like a subscribe form in the middle of the content, for example. You use the Block Element feature of the ad block extension and you get the cleanest browsing experience you can get. (BTW, Brave also has its own Block Element option, so you might not need an extension at all!)

  And there are dark clouds on the horizon. With the V3 manifest version that Google is pushing, many of the APIs available to ad blocker extensions are limited or downright broken. It's not in their interest to block ads, considering they are in the advertising business. Their biggest achievement (and mistake) was to open source Chromium, so no one can take something like Brave away from you.

  Bottom line: switch to Brave. It's like Chrome, only a lot better! And I am not really one of those "fuck the system, stick it to the man" people, so don't think I do this because I have some big agenda. I really really enjoy using this browser and I hope you will, too.