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self_made_human  amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi  5mo ago (ussri.substack.com)   3176 thread views

Pokémon for Unrepentant Sociopaths: A Review of Reverend Insanity

ussri.substack.com

Well, this is just about exactly what it says on the tin. I've finally mustered up the energy to write a full-length review of what's a plausible contender for my Favourite Novel Ever, Reverend Insanity. I'd reproduce it here too, but it's a better reading experience on Substack (let's ignore the shameless self-promotion, and the fact that I can't be arsed to re-do the markdown tags)

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It's fascinating how a person's favorite stories are so often a direct window into their soul. It's almost like a cheat code. If you want to understand what someone's all about, you can dispense with almost everything else and just ask them what their favorite books/games/movies are.

(Not at all saying that you, self_made, are an "amoral sociopath" or anything like that; it's just that, if someone had asked me what your favorite novel was, this is exactly what I would have imagined.)

Perhaps I'm not prominent enough on this forum for you to have formulated a model of my preferences and/or personality, but now I have the inexplicable urge to ask you what you think my favourite novel is and see how close you actually get.

I'm sorry, but I don't recall enough of your posts to form an educated guess! (Nothing personal though, there are at most a single digit number of "characters" here where I feel like I have some model of their personality.)

I assume it's something related to sci-fi, based on your other recent comment. Probably a very long web novel that I've never personally heard of. I imagine that a lot of earlier 20th century works weren't intricate and hard-SF enough for you.

No worries, I imagined that would probably be the case - it is just a forum after all and I'm not a super consistent poster, especially not lately. Mostly I just come up with a very long essay-style post every now and then on a hobbyhorse of mine, and then I drop out. Just got curious and thought I might ask.

I'd say that summary of my preferences is largely accurate, though it's not a long or obscure web novel actually. It's a piece of fiction I think most people here are familiar with.

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