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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1523 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 30, 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?

Still on The Dawn of Everything. Picking up Tom Brown's School Days.

Reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It's actually quite a fun fan fic. I wish Yudkowsky had stuck to writing fiction, he's quite talented in that realm!

He doesn't have any other fiction on the level of HPMoR, though, does he? "Three Worlds Collide" was interesting but not great. I really like "Kindness to Kin" but it's just one short story. I'm working my way through "planecrash" right now, and so far it's a pretty good first draft of something that could have become a good novel series after it got a ton of editing that it didn't get.

On the other hand, HPMoR is roughly four long novels put together, and I watched it get produced in real time and saw how little editing it got, and although I find that intensely annoying (I'm trying to avoid getting too spoilery, but at at least one point there's an explicit moral that the protagonist has been an idiot by neglecting to consider advice from others, and the irony just hurts), it's quite amazing for someone to make it from beginning to end of that much writing, juggling a coherent arc-plot through multiple major tonal shifts, without ever seriously dropping the ball. In "planecrash" he's at least capable of co-writing and adapting to others' ideas, so he could have handled working with an editor if he'd ever actually made a career of writing and gotten one.

You may enjoy some of his other glowfics; I really liked "but hurting people is wrong". There's also the conspiracy world, a series of stories set in an alternate Earth. And the Masculine Mongoose trilogy on Tumblr. But, yeah, he mostly does one-shots.

Oh, hell, I forgot about the Masculine Mongoose! Yeah, those were wonderful, and more accessibly so than "Kindness to Kin"; still short stories, but I shouldn't have forgotten to mention them.

The "conspiracy world" stories were interesting but not great as stories.

I hadn't read "but hurting people is wrong"; thanks for the recommendation!

He doesn't have any other fiction on the level of HPMoR, though, does he?

Not on the level of MoR, but he is very likely the author of The Waves Arisen, which is a similar take on Naruto, with less intensive plotting.

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