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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2874 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 16, 2025

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So, what are you reading?

Still on The End of Faith, Menace of the Herd and Non-Computable You.

I just caught up with Thresholder , by Alexander Wales.

TL;DR, it's a cross-over isekai/Highlander kinda deal, where characters from across a multiverse are invited to cross through portals and find themselves in a new world. There's another one, and in true Highlander fashion, there can only be one. Once defeated, or victorious, a portal opens up to let the winner through, and if the loser is incapacitated but alive, they get one for themselves.

The MC starts off in media res, as knock-off Iron Man. Good AI assistant, but a suit that's far less powerful. He started off in 2022 Earth, went to Earth 2 that's about 20 years more advanced, where he picked up a genius inventor girlfriend and said suit. He rapidly loses said girlfriend at the hands of another Thresholder, and then continues journeying through worlds in an effort to find a way to resurrect her.

I'd say it's a 7.5/10 fic. Nowhere near as good as Worth The Candle or Metropolitan Man, but a decent enough progression fantasy and a way to kill the time.

Any thoughts on "Shadows of the Limelight"? I loved "Worth the Candle" and "Metropolitan Man" (and "The Randi Prize", and "Instruments of Destruction"), but I couldn't get in to SotL and I still wonder if I just gave up too soon and didn't make it to the good part.

Haven't read it, and don't think I've heard of it before! I had to Google it to confirm it was another work by Wales.

Aw, well, thanks; glad I checked anyway.

Though ... instead of asking a long-shot question on my own behalf, I probably should have asked an obvious one on my son's behalf: what age would you say "Thresholder" is appropriate for? My kids loved HPMOR and he's currently re-reading "Mother of Learning", so I'd like to be able to find other long /r/rational -style work I could recommend for him, but my own next two favorites would be WtC and Worm and both get too frequently explicit about the horror/gore/trauma/etc. sides of their stories. The only warning I see on "Thresholder" is for profanity, and if even that's really excessive (or if his little sister wants in) I could probably read out loud to do a little light censorship on the fly.

I am personally not fond of age-gating literature at all, being of the opinion that if you can read and understand something, it's for you.

But that doesn't mean I don't understand what you mean haha. Thresholder has some adult content, but anything graphic happens off-screen. That's a necessity to be hosted on Royal Road, I think (without being age-gated, but it's been a while since I checked). You might see the MC looking longingly at a lady's buxom curves, have them described, but you're not getting a blow-for-blow of what follows, just a fade to black or acknowledgement. Someone might pop a boner, but no loving description of the veins or girth involved.

I would imagine most people wouldn't object to 13 year olds reading that. If you're reading it out loud, you'd be doing a decent amount of censoring for younger age groups. There's graphic violence, but nothing that would upset a psychologically normal red-blooded young lad.

I do want to thank you for introducing your kids to rationalist or rat-adjacent fiction, though that might spoil them with high standards when it comes to mainstream slop.

That's a necessity to be hosted on Royal Road, I think (without being age-gated, but it's been a while since I checked)

There are at least some adult content works on Royal Road that do not have any serious age-gating: Blue Core is an example (cw: painfully straight tentacles-on-woman, imo mid-but-complete work). They do have warnings that are moderately well-enforced, but I would not give a pre-teen random access to the site.

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