This was in the beginning of May as well. It looked really gorgeous, but some of the flowers (tulips especially) were already wilting.
I think a week or so earlier would’ve been even nicer, though the weather was really good that day.

Nice! It reminds me of the concrete elephants of Almere.

It’s cute because it’s not my screen door :)

Wow, this gorgeous! I love the detail and composition.

Looks to me like it’s still standing :)

I did a bit of extra reading and I made a mistake. The Utrecht library is 132 years old, but this building is exactly 100 years old.
I really need to read more thoroughly.

If you zoom all the way in, you can see a few between those pillars at the end of the hall :)

I don’t know about over there, but here they’ve started selling them with paper straws. Making it even more impossible to puncture that stupid little hole while ruining the straw in the process.

And of course it’s the only thing my daughter wants to drink. I’ve had to resort to using a nail file to open those things.

In Dutch it’s whey-whey-whey.

I still remember when companies started mentioning their websites in commercials.
It was one big torrent of whey-whey-wheys.

“The planet Arrakis, known as Dune”

My very first experience with a sound card was watching the Dune 2 intro on my dad’s friend’s computer. I was so amazed, I just sat in awe as that intro movie played.
On the drive home I tried to remember if what I heard was real, and I just couldn’t imagine it. When I tried to recall what I saw and heard, I could only imagine hearing that tinny internal speaker making bleeps and bloops instead of the actual sounds. It just seemed so unreal at the time that I could not recall what I had heard only a few hours earlier :)

On a side note, I don’t think any studio in the nineties made as memorable tunes and sounds as Westwood did. There was always something enchanting about them. Dune 2, the Kyrandia games, they all had excellent music that really played into the strengths of what was available back then.
Of course I’m talking with pink tinted nostalgia goggles, but still… good memories :)

Yes, I remember these! Countdown And Tex Murphy: The Martian Memorandum come to mind. I remember being amazed at the sounds suddenly coming out of our internal computer speaker. It even had something close to speech!
The manual also came with some info on making the sound even better using some alligator clips, but that went waaaay over my little head at the time :)

You can use the \blend command if you want to combine two images without any prompt.

https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/blend

I got into sci-fi because my dad had a giant shelf with nothing but pulp sci-fi books, mostly from the 60’s and 70’s. Most of them were not very hard sci-fi, but I loved reading through all of them as a little kid. They triggered my imagination, especially the ones that came with little maps in the back where I could follow the story’s progress. Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure was one of my very favorites, full of… well… adventure (it delivers exactly what it says :)
Most of them were already ridiculously dated, but it was the idea of traveling through space, exploring new places with strange and exciting cultures that made them so appealing to me.
I tried to find more books in the high-school library when I got older but was disappointed to find almost nothing outside of the traditional literature like H.G. Wells. It did motivate me to get into fantasy literature like Beowulf and LOTR to fill out my reading list for English class (English is not my native tongue), anything to get out of reading “proper” literature.

Anyway, if you want to recommend science fiction to young people, keep it simple and trigger the imagination. The hard stuff can come later.