Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
18d ago
Dungeon Crawler Carl was my gateway drug to LitRPG and it's must-read series in my book. Others that I have highly enjoyed include 12 Miles Below, Noobtown, He Who Fights Monsters, The Menocht Loop, The Dungeon Slayer, and Oh, Great, I Was Reincarnated as a Farmer. Some of these aren't, strictly speaking, LitRPG in the sense that they talk about and/or expose game mechanics in any sense, but they're all good. There are a couple more series that I left out that I don't think were categorized as LitRPG and there are a few more series that I've read but didn't continue for various reasons, a big one unfortunately being genre fatigue.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
19d ago
Wow, The Diamond Age is my single favorite work of his as well! Given your dislike for those aspects of Reamde, I'd definitely tell you to stay away from Fall--it takes that reverse verisimilitude and cranks it up to 11, so much so that my favorite review of it described it as fractally bad. I would add that Fall is a dreadfully predictable wall-banger of a novel that's about as subtle as a brick to the head. Worse, it wears Neal Stephenson's style as a skin suit. Seveneves isn't that bad, IMO, if you can stand an expy of Neal DeGrasse Tyson being a character and played straight as a hyperintelligent protagonist, though there are other parts you might not enjoy as well.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
19d ago
Right?! I kinda feel like in retrospect, Cryptonomicon and the Baroque cycle were peak Stephenson, and were it not for the whole LitRPG phenomenon, I'd probably be doing more re-reads of my favorite works of his. Hell, if it weren't for Fall, I'd probably still be gobbling up whatever he chose to write!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
22d ago
Gate Crashers, by Patrick S. Tomlinson. Good read, but really not living up to the favorable comparison to Douglas Adams that helped get me to bite, either.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
22d ago
Never read the book, but those GOP types were definitely way high on their own supply in retrospect. Having been there at the time, I would say that in the right-coded media of the day, there was a commonly shared perception that the Obama campaign was weak and that much of his campaign was artificially inflated, whereas the Romney campaign, despite suffering the traditionally-perceived pro-Blue bias, was doing better than reported. Regardless of the perceived weaknesses of Obama the incumbent (and I believe he did lose a significant amount of votes from 2008), they paled in comparison to the actual weaknesses of Romney the candidate as revealed by the voters.
The replay of these dynamics in subsequent presidential elections has been an endless source of fascination to me personally, though I have long since given up on personally having any decent idea who would emerge victorious as I have lost both the ability and the desire to separate the signal of actual voter sentiment from the noise of propaganda.
and it seems that it gets pretty bad once you're in your mid 30s, and concerning past the 50s.
Since we're sharing anecdotes here, I'll add two more to the pile: my wife's experience and my own. Let's just say that my wife and I are both mainstream Gen Xers, in relatively good health overall, and a bit closer to the concerning side of your time frame without being specific about my mumble decades on this ball of iron, rock, and water. In 2020, IIRC, both my wife and I had minor respiratory symptoms (drippy nose, scratchy throat) and while mine went away the next day, hers hung around and got a little worse so she got a telehealth appointment and was diagnosed with COVID based on no other information. She really didn't get much worse from my perspective but the fear was real even though it cleared up quickly, which is to say that she remembers that episode as being significantly worse for her symptom-wise than I do. IIRC the vaccine zapped her for maybe a day, whereas mine was again, minor respiratory symptoms and fatigue for <1 day.
Fast forward to 2023. My wife quickly develops cold symptoms. Now that we have quick and dirty home tests for COVID, she uses one, tests positive, has another telehealth appointment, and is advised by the doctor to get the good, behind-the-counter Sudafed and prescribed cough syrup. She does this and is (mostly) better in a couple of days. I quickly develop symptoms the next day, also test positive with the home kit, follow her same regimen, and do not see improvement. I think I discontinued in a day or two because the ephedrine in particular was messing me up and so I just went with regular OTC cold medicine. I have a telehealth appointment, in which the doctor pretty much tells me to keep doing what I'm doing, and spend a solid week with stubbornly persistent symptoms of low grade fever, head and sinus congestion, and low energy. I was not up to doing much of anything other than the bare minimum during that time. Finally, the congestion starts to break up and move, and I am mostly back to normal in another few days, although I don't feel 100% for another couple-few weeks. It was certainly the longest bout of illness I've had in my memory (10 days), but in the last two decades I've had two serious bouts of the flu that were more acute in their presentation, with the nastier one lasting for a week. So overall, yeah, a lot like coming down with the flu, though neither of us felt like our lives were in danger.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Hear hear!
I've tried to refrain from commenting on this myself but I found the middle of the WoT books to be tedious as often as not. I'm one of the ones that bogged down hard for the first time right around the bloody menagerie in TFoH. Nor did I particularly care for the style of rapid-fire exposition endings that were then revisited in excruciating detail in a subsequent book that evolved around that time, either, but Brandon Sanderson finished out the series so strongly that I liked it enough overall to go back for a re-read.
Which was a mistake that I was making because once again, I bogged down at the bloody menagerie and realized that regardless of how much I liked the series as a whole, life was too short for me to force myself to slog through those middle books all over again. I still think that the first four and last three books are tightly plotted and well written despite their length and I can only wonder at what might have been if Jordan had never gotten deathly ill with amyloidosis.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I'm finding it gripping as well and in fact I'm right at the point where they're pushing for their IPO!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I started Retail Gangster: The Insane Real-life Story of Crazy Eddie by Gary Weiss just a couple of days ago. It's been a highly interesting read thus far, the glimpse into the New York City of the 70s has already made the read worthwhile for me, much less the story of Eddie himself.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Just finished The Universe Within (Amaranthe book 22) by G.S. Jennsen and have moved on to Girlfriend in a Coma: The Novel by Douglas Coupland.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
You say UI doesn't matter, but Amazon's enshittification of the Kindle OS is a crime. My library is buried beneath ads.
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAS. I have a huge Kindle library that I read through, and I personally find that Fire tablets are cheap and serviceable enough to serve as my readers but even with the ability to cut out the ads the experience has steadily declined. I still love to buy books to support the "independent" authors that I like rather than subscribing to Kindle Unlimited but even so, Amazon seems to have their fingers in every piece of that pie as well, be it books from 47 North or serials from Royal Road curated into Kindle books, and the bookstore itself is utter shite to browse now that every. Single. Damn. Page. Consists of about 25% of the same four "sponsored" books at the top and bottom of each page.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Thanks for the write-up! That was indeed long but I still read every word of it and found it highly enjoyable. I appreciate how immersive your travelogues are as well as your appreciation of the places you visit!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
It's been years since I've read Casino Royale but FWIW, ISTR coming away from it thinking that the movie was a good overall adaptation of the book.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
The Neon Court (Matthew Swift #3) by Kate Griffin. Fun series, I'd probably love it even more if I were a Brit and I might absolutely adore it if I were a Londoner. Or perhaps in that case, I'd think it was shite.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Thanks for this, it's amazing what a boost a simple fragrance can be when it's suitable. I've been mucking about for years now trying all different sorts of things ever since my one cologne (Clinique Chemistry) went away. CK One has been the closest I've gotten but even so, it's just not the same.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I finished book six last night and I just have to say: holy shitsnacks did some major stuff go down! I was sorely tempted to start right in on number 7 although I chose a different book, I'll be tempted tonight to put that choice down and go back to the Hollows anyway.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I did think that Dotson had more upside potential than Zacchaeus, as much as I liked the latter, but it's hard to say that the trade paid off when looking at Dotson's stat line. Regardless, I have to agree that it's hard to care too much about Dotson's production or those future picks given that we could just feed Saquon the rock and reap the rewards for game after game. Never thought I'd get to see good old-fashioned NFC East smash mouth football win a ring in today's modern game.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Interestingly, I was going to reply in the opposite. I greatly enjoyed the original with all of its exploration of Rama and the wonders therein and couldn't get past all of the characters and their various agendas in the sequel, which made it the rare DNF for me. Can you tell me more about what you liked in Rama II and if it ever really gets going?
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I liked your piece! I'm more than a little bit of a hopeless romantic so I can't help but appreciate the echoes of Courtly Love in it. That said, I can't help but wonder if I'm misreading the last line on your notes, "imagine a world where things had no backs" Regardless of whether or not I got that right, my brain, too, has turned to mush trying to decipher those notes, but then, I never was a big English guy, even the idea of taking a course like Modern Criticism feels like the mental equivalent of the proverbial nails on a chalkboard for me.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
Sure! I'll start by saying that I can be easy to please with books in general, especially when I'm getting them for a couple-few bucks a pop at the Kindle store. On top of that, I have a soft spot for Urban Fantasy thanks in no small part to Shadowrun and Anne Rice novels when I was a teenager and, more recently, The Dresden Files. But yes! I like them so far and have been having fun getting to know the world and the characters, and when I saw that a whole bunch of them were on sale for a few bucks each, I got all of the cheap ones for my Kindle.
I'd say that thus far, The Hollows books are, in a general way, reminiscent of the earlier Dresden Files books to me, which is to say that they have a strong MC narrating in first person, they aren't too heavy/grimdark despite both MCs having issues with their respective authorities, they have the mystery novel aspect to them, they have good worldbuilding, and they are centered around a Midwestern city. The Hollows seems to be a little bit more lighthearted and whimsical overall, although there is plenty of double dealing, death, and hair-raising adventure to be had in each book thus far, as well as plenty of relationship drama. For me, it's the development of the various characters that I'm really enjoying and where I feel the writing shines, including the will-they-or-won't-they situations, the snags, imperfections and complicated interplay between the various characters and factions that are slowly but surely drawing our MC into deeper and more troubled waters. I particularly like how Harrison has developed and deepened the relationship between MC Rachel Morgan and her roommate and business partner, Ivy.
If you like the looks of it, I'd encourage you to pick up Dead Witch Walking and give it a try. Also, I stayed kinda general here to try and keep away from spoiling anything significant but if you want to hear more/have more specific questions, fire away!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2mo ago
For a Few Demons More (The Hollows, book 5) by Kim Harrison.
Same, I gotta say that IMO a lot of this just boils down to industrialized food targeting the lowest common denominator, which is to say that sweet and salty tastes in particular tend to be ramped up in most store-bought food items in order to enhance its appeal to the mean human palate.
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