The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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@sun_the_second you've been tricked, mwahaha
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Context, for those of us not in on it?
"Xianxai" is a genre of fiction centering on "Cultivators", martial-arts practitioners who develop various reality-bending superpowers by "cultivating" their chi, or mystical life-force. These stories tend to be produced in serial format, and are often very, very long, many hundreds of chapters for text versions being relatively common. Think Dragonball Z.
Cultivators generally congregate in "sects", communes dedicated to further developing and perfecting their particular method of cultivation and raising the power of the sect's members generally; these communes are usually depicted as rigidly hierarchical, and often mercilessly competitive and even grossly exploitative for those on the bottom of the hierarchy. Within a sect, someone lower on the hierarchy is one's "Junior", someone higher is one's "Senior". Seniors are often depicted intentionally stunting or interfering with their junior's training for various bad or even occasionally good reasons.
Cultivation takes a very long time, generally is depicted as passing through a long sequence of distinct levels and sub-levels demarcating significant increases in power. There's usually a pretty distinct tradeoff between slow, steady, diligent growth and rapid "get rich quick" growth that shoots up quick but plateaus early. The slow-and-steady growth is often referred to as "building one's foundation"; if you do this poorly you may grow quicker but plateau earlier, and the reverse might mean slower initial growth but much more capacity for growth.
The meme is portraying Xianxai fandom as recapitulating the medium; the "senior" (fan who has read tons of Xianxai) is misleading his "junior" (fan who has read less), claiming that he's read an extremely long work and that they should definitely read it as well. The story is "building it's foundation" and the quality pays off spectacularly 1400+ chapters in. In fact, the senior hasn't read a single page, but by the time the "junior" is in a position to assess the truth of this claim, it could be argued that they will certainly learn something from the experience, and perhaps will be Enlightened.
The specific context is that @self_made_human is claiming to have pulled this gambit in his previous recommendation of "Reverand Insanity", an extremely long and apparently quite polarizing Xianxai serial that's been discussed here in several previous reading recommendation discussions.
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