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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2992 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 19, 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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Holy shit. You're not the first person to lavish this amount of praise on it, but it was the worst book I've read in the past.... 10 years?

I literally threw it away 3/4 of the way through. Shut it, walked outside to a dumpster, and dropped it in.

The main protagonist is a Mary Sue who's a barely veiled stand-in for the author. Even she's a cardboard cutout: only the combination of her and her two sidekicks begin to make a whole human being. Every gaming reference is inaccurate in some critical way or topical enough to have come from asking an LLM. The sheer hamfistedness of the central conflict (a right-winger strolling in to shoot up a game studio because he's mad about gay marriage being allowed in this Super Perfect MMO That Everyone Loves) couldn't have possibly been more idiotic.

Anyway, sorry to be a wet blanket about it, but I'm continually baffled by the praise.

Agree with your overarching point though (re: Pareto distribution of modern literature). It's all becoming a lot more monolithic, for many reasons, and it's not a development I appreciate.

Okay, I know I said I wouldn't change a thing, and yet I did bristle a little at the culture war aspects. Marx just had to get murdered by a homophobic white American, didn't he? We couldn't dream of having him get killed by an Islamic extremist. This and the book I read immediately beforehand, Doxology, were published within five years of each other and mention 9/11 and the ensuing atmosphere prominently, but one of the ways you can tell they were written by Blue Tribers is that the authors express no curiosity about the motivations behind the 9/11 attacks at all: 9/11 is essentially just treated as a natural disaster, an act of God, something that just happened. But after Marx's death, the rest of the book is just about how Sadie and Sam process and come to terms with it, and the culture war implications of his murder are barely even touched upon.

But for all that, it didn't sully the emotional impact of the book for me one iota.

it was the worst book I've read in the past.... 10 years?

Try reading the aforementioned Doxology and come back to me.

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