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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2892 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 12, 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.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on The Eternal Dissident.

Finished Merchanter’s Luck. Excellent, vintage sci-fi. I’d rate it quite highly for elegantly sketched characters, understated but effective worldbuilding, and economy of prose. These are enough to turn a borderline cliche premise into an immersive one. Unabashedly genre fiction without straying into pulp.

Next up is Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a period Victorian gay heist novel and/or comedy of manners. While I don’t normally enjoy such a hateful protagonist, I’m quite liking the book so far. Unfortunately, the previous owner of my copy underlined random bits and occasionally added margin notes.

The Oxford Handbook of Psychiatry, 4th edition:

The authors have made the bold artistic choice to employ what I call "narrative whiplash" as their primary technique. Patient vignettes follow a strict three-act structure: Act One (character introduction), Act Two (literally any psychiatric condition), Act Three (death/insanity/miraculous recovery). This eliminates any tedious middle section where character development might occur. It's rather like if War and Peace were rewritten as a series of Twitter threads, except instead of 280 characters you get exactly three sentences before Pierre either achieves enlightenment or develops catatonia.

Then again, the pacing might well be a stroke of genius when you consider the target audience: exhausted junior doctors who need to absorb maximum psychiatric knowledge while standing in a hospital corridor at 3 AM. Who has time for denouement? The patients certainly don't seem to.

The real mystery is why Oxford's handbook writers haven't applied this technique to other fields. Imagine: "A 67-year-old man presents with chest pain. He has a heart. He does not have a heart. The end."

(I don't actually think there any patient vignettes in it, it's too no-nonsense for that stuff)

I have previously complained that Fish's Clinical Psychopathology has very little to do with fish, nor was it written by one. A missed opportunity, I'd like to know what the SSRIs and cocaine in the water do for salmon facing the awareness of their inevitable mortality.

Verdict: False advertising, so I won't even read it.

Then there's Making Sense of the ICD-11. It always sets certain bells ringing when a book requires another to make sense of it. I hope the authors of 11 know that it should have just been a trilogy. The DSM guys are at least more restrained about milking the franchise (galactorrhea due to hyperprolactinemia).

The main takeaway, at least for me, is that the real mental illness was the classification systems we made along the way.

Ya'll don't have review books over there?

Dang.

Also medical classification systems are great. Fight me bro.

Something like:

V9135XA: Hit or struck by a falling object due to an accident in a canoe or kayak

I'm sure is a lot of fun to marvel at, but working with this system practically might be challenging... "So you say you were struck in the head by a falling object, my first medical question would be - were you per chance in a kayak at the time? How about a canoe?"

Comedy value on point though.

Review books? Do you mean like targeted USMLE prep books and their equivalent?

Never heard of any for the MRCPsych, and I just looked on Google with no luck. There are some for other specialties, I can see results for the MRCP (no pancreas involved, usually), but apparently psychiatry residents get the shaft.

What most people do is sign up to a repository of notes and MCQs. I opted for one known as SPMM. In a way, the notes are a book, one that condenses a ton of scattered bullshit into something the mere human mind can grasp. Unfortunately, the overall quality leaves something to be desired, the study material I had for prior exams was better (clarity, content, presentation), but the more niche the exam the fewer people willing to spend money I guess.

Honesty, I'm done with like 75% of the coaching material, with just about a month to go. The problem is that psychiatry, when flattened into a series of bullet points for an exam, becomes uniquely soul-crushing.

In contrast, the other exams I've discussed actually require a bit of critical thinking. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but I do now.

I just find it hard to make all that information stick when it's so boring, and I do not relish the necessary revision ahead. Spaced repetition sounds great until you're actually doing it.

I attempted to channel my procrastination into going through some of the Royal College's suggested reading, and as you can see, I'm regretting it. The notes make them mostly redundant anyway. ChatGPT in combination makes them entirely so.

Also medical classification systems are great. Fight me bro.

I cast F60.2

Wait, that's deprecated. Uh.. 6D10.1? Plus 6D11.3? For fuck's sake, in the most recent exams, they expect us to memorize ICD-11 and DSM-5 criteria, and the changes from ICD-10. When we still use 10 for all of our actual work and coding, with no plan to change before the current crop of consultants die of old age. And we don't even use the DSM, at least where I can see it. Is it there in our syllabus solely so we don't feel too embarrassed to attend American conferences? God knows.

You can see why this gives me a headache, though I will admit that classification systems are useful.

What about Anki decks for your boards?

Yeah F codes are a little silly at times cough cough struck by orca but automated tools help make them less of a pain in the ass.

The DSM is great though for kludging a million random phenomena into something that can be actually communicated between humans.

I haven't run into an any Anki decks specifically designed for this till date. I've made a few of my own, and I intend to go through them eventually.

The Oxford Handbook of Psychiatry, 4th edition

An interesting read, as long as it's not compulsory. I find it interesting that it has a new section 'to reflect changing cultural attitudes around gender dysphoria' but once you get into the more usual boring disorders it will tell you the gender incidence and relative ratio with bracing honesty.

Pathological fire-setting/pyromania: Multiple episodes of deliberate, purposeful fire-setting, leading to property damage, legal consequences, and injury or loss of life. Rare in children; more common in male adolescents, particularly those with poor social skills and learning difficulties

Kleptomania: Failure to resist impulses to steal items that are not needed for their personal use or monetary value. Usually women, mean age 36yrs, mean duration of illness 16yrs (often childhood onset). ~5% of stealing in the United States (USA).

I finished my reread of Vineland. It is roughly as I remembered it: something of a mess with not-fully-fleshed-out ideas and plotlines going all over the place, but perhaps the strongest attempt by Pynchon to write some real characters instead of his usual 1D cartoon characters. It feels like a braindump to get rid of a bunch of quarter-baked ideas that were clogging up his head so he could get down to writing Mason & Dixon and Against the Day.

Interesting. After discovering that One Battle After Another was based on Vineland, I've wanted to read it to get a feel for the source material, all the more so since I made my way through Gravity's Rainbow and well remember the sense of,"what in the actual fuck did I just read," stupefied awe that I felt afterwards. I kinda want to read it both less and more at the same time after that description!

I made my way through Gravity's Rainbow

You're a stronger man than me. I thought "what in the actual fuck did I just read" and closed the book about five pages in.

Die Staufer: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Kaisergeschlechts, by Johannes Lehmann.

It's a historical work about the medieval house of Hohenstaufen, and especially about the emperors, with Friedrich I., known as Barbarossa, serving as the headliner. It's pop-sci, but very dry, just the way I like it. Tries to draw from as many different sources as possible, compares them dispassionately, usually shrugs and admits that there's no way to know for sure, and then goes on to recount the history of those rulers in a workmanlike fashion. It's unexciting, calm and goes for accuracy instead of shock value. Thus my teutonic heart gets all warm and fuzzy. What a comfy read.

Also, my wife pulled it out of a book stop, so it didn't cost me anything.

So many German books on the Hohenstaufen I will never be able to read... Oh well, I don't really need to, considering that Kantorowicz's Frederick II is an entirely true and accurate portrayal of just how great he was.

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton. It's the book which is widely credited with inventing YA fiction, for better and for worse. An easy read which I know I'll never read again, and probably the best book written by a 17-year-old girl I've ever read. The name on the protagonist's birth cert is "Ponyboy"; now there's another reference I understand, RIP.

One of those movies where the casting director should have been given a raise or something.

"Poetic Woods" by Anne Blockley (2023), hardcover version. I like it! Well bound, lots of paintings of slightly abstract forests.

I'm really locking into Infinite Jest, a work of unrealistic genius and prescience, so good that I don't even know what to say about it.

On audiobook I finished Two Weeks, Eight Seconds which was exactly what I wanted at the time that I wanted it. A perfect sports book.

In between I've been reading the Fort Bragg Cartel about drug running in the specops world in the South. It's good, but the author is just such a weenie. I'm antiwar as they come, but the book is so preachy about it when it is irrelevant to the action in the book.

Infinite Jest is nearing the top of my to-reread list. I first read it in 2012 or so. I thought it was great and want to see if holds up.

I remember the worst parts being the terminally unfunny bits that drag on and on and on. There are some "jokes" that weren't funny to start with and certainly didn't get better with repetition.

When you're done, you need to immediately re-read pages 1-17. Then there is an interpretation of "what really happened" written by Aaron Swartz that is worth reading, although it has drawn some criticism.

the Fort Bragg Cartel

My buddy (who has periodically contemplated trying out for the 19th SFG and could probably hack it) put me on to this. It's entertaining, but if I had to take a drink every time the author delivers what is supposed to be harsh criticism of Delta or ST6 that actually makes them sound absolutely fucking rad, I would have passed out in a state of advanced intoxication a quarter of the way through.

I wonder if that would improve or ruin my use of the book as my "read a bit before bed" book, the whiskey might cause me to pass out faster by that ruleset, but the hangover would be killer.

I think any profiler should start from a place of sympathy with their subject, even if it is ultimately a hit piece, the story will hit harder if you start by looking at them as a hero. Even a biography of Stalin or Mao is better if you start by looking at them as on Campbell's Hero's Journey and then show them going off the rails, show them becoming a villain. If you start out hating them, it kind of undermines the story. The closest he gets is the kind of standard shitlib "oh he was kind of sad and pathetic and poor before he joined the army" thing.

Particularly I guffawed when he described Delta Force selection ending with a "40 miles ruck that would turn a normal man's ligaments into gelatin." Which, I'm sure I wouldn't pass half the stuff they have to do there, and I'm sure it would suck, but 40 miles isn't gonna kill you. But the guy just clearly doesn't do anything.

Lol, I read it more as addressed to an audience that's never done anything than as by an author that's never done anything, but you may well be right. Separately, the accounts I've read of Delta selection (e.g. Haney's Inside Delta Force) make it pretty clear that the challenge comes more from navigation, elevation gain, bushwhacking (using the road is an auto fail), and beating the time cutoffs than from merely covering ground as such.

I've heard Infinite Jest is quite the doorstopper. Are you finding it difficult to read?

I did not enjoy Infinite Jest. The author is a gifted wordcel: he has nothing worthwhile to say, but he is very good at saying it. It's just Reddit philosophy, dressed well.

When I read it around age 17 (circa 2002), I found it really invigorating. I got a kick out of the detailed detours (especially the footnotes) and it struck me as novel and true. I reread it 2-3 years ago and it was a bit of a slog (though I still finished it--I just wasn't excited each time I picked it up). Sometimes you have to be in the right place in life for a book to speak to you, and sometimes you've already seen the tricks that make a book notable that the charm wears off.

I no longer feel compelled to continue reading books that don't hold my interest though. Give it 100 pages. It should be clear at that point if it currently resonates with you.

The worst parts of Infinite Jest are:

  • The use of footnotes endnotes
  • The fact that it's considered so pretentious to have read it that it's now just a punch line that nobody takes seriously

Still haven't met a single person IRL who's finished it. Bummer.

Footnotes would be fine. What makes IJ obnoxious is that it has extensive endnotes such that you are constantly flipping to the back of the book. Or have they fixed this in newer editions now that Wallace isnt alive to stand in their way?

Anyway, if you guys enjoy IJ, I would consider Solenoid to be an absolute must-read.

Sorry, you're correct, it's endnotes. It makes the Kindle edition of the book really the only readable one. I'm curious if DFW was sending a message of contempt to his readers with the approach. A lot of artists hate the people who consume what they create. I've specifically isolated myself from reading his interviews etc. because I suspect it may have been the case here.

@FtttG

This is my third or fourth attempt to read this book. In the past, I've gotten a few hundred pages deep only to fizzle out as it didn't go anywhere in particular. It's incredibly difficult to read, not so much because of the footnotes or the pure length as because of the structure of the story.

I'd previously enjoyed DFW's shorter work, and to some extent I think Infinite Jest is just a really large short story collection that links together in intricate ways to produce a bigger work. A lot of the chapters, or sub-chapter units of the book, really constitute stories or vignettes or essays of their own, and their significance to any broader plot (indeed the existence of any broader plot) only becomes significant later. DFW's brilliance in writing essays and short stories gives you these really gripping moments throughout that seem to have nothing to do with the entire rest of the story. DFW also uses very non-linear storytelling, with a confusing in world neologism for years, to obfuscate what you are seeing and when.

Then you have the overall setting, which is sort of semi-sci-fi magical realist near future-past in a way that's incredibly difficult to find your bearings in. When I read Tolstoy, I know what the rules of the universe are because they are the rules of my universe. When I read Asimov or Tolkien, I can quickly grok the rules of the universe because they're very different from the rules of our universe in specific fairly well explained ways. Infinite Jest's universe is different in confusing and non-specific ways, and it's not clear when narrators are unreliable or taking the piss, or when we're supposed to take things seriously. At times DFW chooses to be brutally realistic, at times absurdly fantastical, nearly always pessimistic in outlook.

It's also disgusting, viscerally disgusting in a way that only a writer as talented mechanically as DFW can be. Everyone is asymmetrical, everyone is disgusting, bodily acts are described in extensive detail, rape abuse illness and addiction are commonplace, deformity is everywhere. It's just how the book is, but there are significant sections that are just viscerally unpleasant.

Finally, I think the book has gotten a lot harder since its publication, in that it represented a fork from the past around the publication date. For my partner in my book club, who was a teenager when it was published and read it for the first time when she was in art school in the early 2000s, there are a lot of references or just moods that make more sense to her than they do to me, ten years her junior. It's very like Stranger in a Strange Land in that way, a retro-futuristic work that projects the current mores and world forward. In your mind you have to back up to 1995, then fast forward to a world where some technologies never develop and others hyper-develop.

That said, my foolproof method for reading difficult books is to just keep swimming. This developed when reading the great Russians, in that way that Americans typically get confused by the use of first name or surname or patronymic or title or affectionate diminutive to refer to the same character, I used to get stuck trying to figure out who exactly was who in Anna Karennina then I decided one day that I should just keep reading and I'd figure that out later, and that worked. I approach everything confusing in DFW the same way, I just keep reading and I figure it out later. I think this is what @Rov_Scam is getting at, knowing that it's an important book he keeps trying to read it while understanding everything said but it's impossible to understand everything so he can't read it; his brother just read it without worrying about understanding everything and was fine.

The other aid getting me through this reading is my book club, in which I meet up with a pretty lady every few hundred pages and we discuss the book and its themes and broader philosophical topics over drinks. And this creates accountability in that as a man I can't let a pretty woman mog me at something, and also makes the book easier in that discussion helps explain things. Marx's famously dense Kapital was originally published in France serially in socialist newspapers for workers to read in clubs, they wouldn't (probably couldn't) understand such a book on their own, but in a group it becomes comprehensible. The lack of reading groups is one of the unfortunate consequences of our world today.

It's truly a work of rarely-reached genius, a fitting heir to the western literary canon (though in my mind the canon truly ends with Joyce). It's highly prescient philosophically, it has a lot to say about modern concerns on AI. Though I also kind of think the whole book is just about internet porn. Everyone on this forum should put in the work to read it, it's worth it, but I can also see how its cultural impact is mostly negative rather than directly influential.

I do wonder if Parker and Stone were influenced by Infinite Jest when they wrote South Park, though.

I completely understand your experience regarding the Russians. In any given domestic situation, the same character is given four different names, and none of these are what his coworkers call him.

What really used to get me were the diminutives, which are not intuitive to an English speaker. Ilya doesn't naturally turn Ilushka in my mind.

Yes, Mr. Ivanov, Alexander Ivanovich, Alexander, Alex, Sasha, Sanya, Shura, Shurik, Ivanych, etc. are all the same person, depending on context. And using the wrong one in a wrong context may be a major social faux pas too. Unless you grew up with it, it can be a bit tricky to guess, especially that some diminutives have very little obvious connection to the full name, and some of them are also non-unique. You just have to know it.

It's my favorite book but it can be Work.

I am shocked at how it only seems to become more prescient as I age.*

*and disturbed.

Recommend me any outside the box interpretations I can bring to book club to look smart l.

Now the secret is that I haven't actually reread it in nearly 20 years. But it was "sticky" (and formative given my age when I read it).

It's okay to love something and not be obsessed with it. It's also okay to keep bouncing off of it even if you love it - stop when you feel you've got enough.

That's maybe one of the lessons of the book haha.

My experience of the discourse of the book is course then out of date.

I can't say anything about Parker and Stone, but the creators of The Office (US) were big DFW fans and wrote in a lot of references to his work.

MY brother is unpretentious and got into Wallace after I showed him the essay about the cruise ship that we both quote relentlessly. On year at the beach he read Infinite Jest because he wanted to read Wallace. He not only finished it, he's reread it several times. I think part of it is that none of his friends even know who Wallace is so he came into it as a book written by a writer he found funny (we both have an excessively dry sense of humor) and not as something he felt obligated to read. I started it years ago but with my own knowledge of the book's import I found it impossible to continue, even though my brother insists that it's right up my alley.

Another interesting part is that it rewards reading it twice. I didn't have the time to commit to it but yeah.

I don't think you have to read it but I did hit a bump in it part way through, fought through it, and then was glad I did.

Loved the cruise ship essay too. One of many reasons I haven't done one

Just cracked open Verner Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. The hook was he has fun insights on how a civilization deals with software that's thousands of years old.

How does a civilization deal with software that's thousands of years old?

I don't know! I just started it!

Clever strategy, but it'll only work for the first sprint or two

Working Class (SC Marva Collins Book 2) by Nathan Lowell.

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