site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2952 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So, what are you reading?

Still on G. Kirilenko and L. Korshunova's What is Personality? Also going through some Gramsci essays.

Been diving into the cultivation novel Martial World. Also been reading Compassion and Meditation, thoughts on the relationship between Christianity and Buddhism by an Orthodox priest. It's pretty good so far, nothing ground breaking but I like it.

Just got David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament which I'm excited for.

Reaching the final third of Reverend Insanity, @self_made_human please clap.

I found that it is easier to tolerate the "light novel with Chinese characteristics" narration style if I imagine I'm reading a folk tale. The same formulaic language, the same bombastic emotion display (particularly bystanders marveling at someone whipping out particularly strong techniques). Not the kind of tale you'd read to your child at bedside, though. Truly, the profundities of human path are opening up before me.

Claps very hard, it took me 6 months to finish it the first go around, 4 on my second!

I will return to overdosing on copium, on the basis of author interviews from a few years back where Gu Zhen Ren said the story was far from over, he's got a lot more material, and there might be a road map to getting it unbanned and published one day.

I'm liking Martial World. Is Reverend Insanity really that evil? Idk. I want to want to read it but if it's too over the top I don't want to.

I remain convinced that it's Peak Fiction, and certainly in my Top 3 Novels. Go for it dude!

While so far it's been okay that the novel doesn't instantly infodump the entire power scaling system onto the reader, at the moment I'm miffed that despite Fang Yuan being one rank away from venerable, it still wasn't explained what makes the third myriad tribulation so hard that only 10 people ever made it. I wasn't under the impression that those things grew in power exponentially within a single tribulation category, and as far as I understand there were many rank eights who were stuck at two out of three.

I presume you overlooked the fact that not just anybody can even begin the tribulation to become a Venerable. Normally, it takes the support of Heaven's Will and Supreme Grandmaster status in a path. The latter is incredibly rare, remember there were only 3 SGs in Refinement path over 3 million years! The former is a deal-breaker for most, if Heaven/Fate doesn't want you to become a Venerable, you can cross as many Myriad Tribulations as you like without attaining it. If you do, then you keep becoming stronger due to Dao Marks, but even then it's not the same. I think it was some combination of the destruction of fate and the availability of Primordial Domain that let FY, who wasn't supposed to become a Venerable, still manage in the end. Also, the actual final tribulation involves battle against Chaos, which is so difficult that even actual Venerables struggle and survive by a thread each time. Even the normal Myriad Tribulation is shit hard even for the strongest Rank 8s!

At the point I'm at, I think the only thing that was mentioned was that every Venerable was a supreme grandmaster - not that it was a hard requirement to cross into the ninth rank, although in retrospect it would be a reasonable assumption. In particular, I saw the scene of Red Lotus immediately after ascending and I do not recall anything other than the tribulation being mentioned.

Oh dear, my bad, I had thought you had finished the novel entirely. I'm sorry about the spoilers, but they're not that big, and you raised a valid question about why we don't see more Venerables!

Just finishing The Thirteen Gun Salute.

I can see why some Aubrey/Maturin enjoyers favourite some of the later books in the series. Its great to follow Maturin after all of the character growth that he's been through and interacting in pragmatic ways with strange fauna that would never be allowed in the modern world. Knowing something of Indonesian and Malaysian culture, its interesting to see them used as a colonial era set piece for the series' usual political skullduggery.

Its also so strange to see colonial European attitudes towards pederasty and homosexuality in practice. I've got no idea if things were actually like that back then, but its pretty interesting to see it woven into the narrative and used as an attack surface for Maturin's intelligence machinations.

Really happy with my time investment in this series.

RSPCA disclaimer - No Sloths or Orangutans were debauched in the writing of this review or the novel itself. At least as far as I know.. there was this one night time scene in the Buddhist temple that wasn't entirely descriptive of what went on.

Poetic Woods by Ann Blockley, and reading A Wrinkle in Time out loud to my daughter.

I was in a charity shop a few months ago and found two books I wanted to buy, one of which was a collection of Father Brown stories. They had a buy-two-get-the-third-free deal, so on a whim I bought Nell Zink's Doxology despite knowing nothing about it.

It's set in the early 90s in New York and charts three characters who are close friends, one of whom unexpectedly makes it big as an indie rock star while the other two get married and have a baby. It's extremely knowing, all of the characters are annoying and pretentious (none of them even slightly believable) - and yet for all that, entertaining enough that I'm more than a quarter-way through this large-format 400-pager after starting it on Friday.

On Thursday I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which I did enjoy a great deal, although not quite as much as Never Let Me Go. Normally when a novel employs an unreliable narrator, it's to set up an elaborate twist ending: I found it interesting here to be used for the comparatively modest goal of conveying the inner life of a character who is so used to repressing the emotions he experiences that he is effectively in denial about doing so. Arguably a deconstruction of the whole "English stiff upper lip" thing, though as I pointed out to herself, earlier this year I read Theodore Darlymple's book Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality, which (as its subtitle unsubtly implies) argues that the pendulum has swung much too far in the opposite direction and now British people are encouraged to engage in flamboyant displays of emotion far more than they should.

Kazuo Ishiguro writes the same story over and over and over again, but he does it well. The servant who believes in their service and doesn't mind that it eats their life up. Klara and the Sun is the same. After reading The Remains of the Day, Klara and the Sun, and Never Let Me Go I realized that I've seen pretty much all he has to say.

On Thursday I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day,

I found it an enjoyable book, but it also came across as incredibly fake--not necessarily in a bad way, as I don't care if an author is an authentic whatever-he's-writing-about because the whole point of fiction is telling interesting stories, but it was very apparent he was writing about being English as an outsider. I read Remains after reading a long list of English authors when I was trying to get a feel for what 1905-1914 and 1920-30 England was Really Like: Huxley's Crome Yellow, Forster's Room with a View and Howards End, two of Ford's Parade's End books, the 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time by Powell (over a million words and went by in a flash; I look forward to re-reading it), a number of Waugh's novels, and others I'm forgetting right now. Remains is a character study using some English trappings, but after reading so many authors who lived through English society of that era, it doesn't compare.

And coincidentally enough on the topic of English society, I'm about halfway done with the 4th Jeeves omnibus. In some ways, bits of Wodehouse's jokes and characters are wearing out their welcome, but in others, his writing has gotten so much better he went along that some of the sentences are breathtakingly brilliant and funny.

On that note, I'm currently reading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, and it's very helpful to try and get into the mind of an Englishman from that period - the ways of thinking they brought into and then out of the War.

Started reading the Divine Comedy at the behest of a friend. It's going to be tough reading as I am not really a poetry guy, but I do want to persevere and read one of the most famous works in the literary canon. We'll see how it goes.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. A weird little guy goes on a road trip through ‘50s England while reminiscing on his former employer and colleagues.

I don’t think I got it. Delightful prose, vividly drawn characters, and some excellent scenes…but I just don’t understand how it works as a novel. What was the point? Or was it some sort of metafiction where the lack thereof was, itself, the point? It just didn’t land for me. I enjoyed the process but was left unsatisfied and a little embarrassed.

Up next is C J Cherryh’s Merchanter’s Luck for a change of pace. This feels incredibly “genre” in a good way. Pretty impressed with the economy of prose so far, too. Looking forward to it.

He was in denial about his love for the other servant and hers for him (they could have married and had a happy life, but no); he was in denial about his employer's support for the Nazis. When he finally realized the depth of his sacrifices (see: other servant's love for him), he told himself they were justified because he had given good service to a great man (a stereotypical "blockheaded aristo" who had supported the Nazis along with the abdicator king).

(Looking it up after writing the above: Miss Kenton; Edward VIII.)

Kazuo Ishiguro writes the same story over and over and over again, but he does it well. The servant who believes in their service and doesn't mind that it eats their life up.

It's kind of an anti-novel. You hope for character development, but it doesn't happen. It's more like a series of vignettes.

His other novels do have more development and plot, but never to the point where the main character advocates for themselves.

I found his body of work poignant and depressing.

Up next is C J Cherryh’s Merchanter’s Luck for a change of pace. This feels incredibly “genre” in a good way. Pretty impressed with the economy of prose so far, too. Looking forward to it.

I'd be interested to hear how you liked that, I've got Downbelow Station somewhere in my, "one of these days," stack of books to read.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. It's the kind of book that makes me wish I was fluent in Japanese so that I could read it in its original form.

I love Murakami! Is this your first one? I'm always amazed at how well written they are even in another language.

Yes, essentially. I'll have to check out more of his work and I've been impressed with the translation, too. I've particularly noticed the abbreviated speech of some of the characters and I can't help but think that the translator is mimicking the Japanese tendency towards the same in their speech.

Great book, I wrote a song inspired by it years ago.

Hey I'm reading that too! Good book.

Cool, look forward to hearing your thoughts on it once you've finished, if you're so inclined. I read it once earlier back around the time it came out, and I remember it vaguely but I think I'm definitely enjoying it more the second time around.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats