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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2890 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 19, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I was very meh on Absolution. Don't know why, but it just didn't do much for me.

I loved the Lensmen books as a kid. May have to give them a reread one of these days.

I did not much like Red Mars. I find KSR dry as dust.

Cormac McCarthy is very hit-or-miss for me. No Country For Old Men is fantastic, and Blood Meridian is one of my favorite books ever. But I have not much liked any of his other books, and I really disliked The Road. It was written like "Literary author thinks he's invented the post-apocalyptic novel."

Literary author thinks he's invented the post-apocalyptic novel.

Kek, that’s how I felt about Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America but for alt-history. I did like it a lot though.

Maybe I'm easily impressed, but I genuinely thought that The Road was actually a very good book. Is it pretentious? Yeah, sure! But he does a good job of it! I keep coming back to it. There are lines from it that stick.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he. He tried to remember the dream but he could not. All that was left was the feeling of it. He thought perhaps they'd come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own.

When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up.

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