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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2891 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.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on The Eternal Dissident.

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.

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.

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

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