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Friday Fun Thread for December 16, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I have never watched more than half an episode of mlp and I have never had a desire to - will that impact my understanding much, or does the author cover anything unusual? I will definitely check it out either way, because mlp plus those elements sounds like madoka magica, which was amazing, but fan fiction can get a bit inside baseball sometimes so I would like to prepare if necessary.

Side note re Lovecraft - he works better in adaptation imo. I find his fiction writing style to be both too bland and too florid, which is an impressive but offputting combo (it works better in his correspondence I think, although you don't want to read that unless you are a super fan.) If you aren't averse to comics my suggestion would be to get Alan Moore's Providence and read that. If the hand-written prose sections at the end don't put you off completely, you will probably enjoy reading Lovecraft straight.

Otherwise I would stick to adaptations - movies like From Beyond and Color out of Space, podcasts like the BBC's The Lovecraft Investigations, comics like The Fall of Cthulhu and The Doom That Came To Gotham (neither are straight adaptations, but both have a deep understanding of the mythos and are good entry points - there are straight adaptations of Lovecraft's works in comic format, but they are old and very hard to get, although probably less so on the high seas. If you go that route, try to get your hands on the manga adaptations of his works, because the one I've read (shadow over innsmouth) was excellent.)

My memory is that it’s presented from an outsider’s POV, a donkey or a mule, and so he describes the culture of the colorful Hobbitish equines around him with a measure of accuracy and disdain.

Funny, I was also told to read adaptations & pastiches instead of Lovecraft himself when I posted this six years ago on /r/rational.

Excellent!

And yeah I'm not surprised that it's a common sentiment. This is a bit of a convoluted explanation but bear with me - it reminds me of a throwaway gag in the excellent Shadows over Loathing game where the game describes a character as 'phlegmatic', prompting something like 'ew, gross' as a response. And if you pick that response, the game tells you that phlegmatic as a description of a person means they are stoic and calm, not drenched in mucous or something like that. And when the game tells you that you can respond with 'Well just say that then' and the game retells the description of the character using calm instead of phlegmatic. I imagine his books are annoying to people who don't have large vocabularies, but even if you do you are basically thinking "You could have cut that sentence in half if you just used normal words, just talk normally you dink" at least once every two pages. I'm pretty sure Lovecraft's writing style is inseparable from his ability to build stories, but it can be very off-putting for new readers, and it's his stories that hook most people, not his writing.

I watched every episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic up to season 8 and can't stand any of the fanfiction, so maybe you'll be lucky and have the exact opposite reaction. That makes sense, right?

Perfect sense, but now I am in a predicament, because we haven't talked a whole heap about media, but to the extent we have I think we have similar taste, except I got the impression you have a lower tolerance for stupid and lazy writing. So I am going to have to give mlp a proper shot, and pray the off putting thing about the fan fiction is that it's stupid and/or lazy.