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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3377 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 14, 2026

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 about halfway through Churchill's Savrola. It's basically a political conflict between authoritarian President Molara and democratic agitator Savrola, with a woman in the middle. It's actually engaging, though the dialogue can be quite stilted. The focus is on the game of ambition and the necessary qualities to win in it, and the characters seem divided on either side between the people who matter and the people who need a firm hand. Probably it is more fascinating than it otherwise would be because of who wrote it, but I think I would like it anyways.

Was it worth it? The struggle, the labour, the constant rush of affairs, the sacrifice of so many things that make life easy, or pleasant—for what? A people’s good! That, he could not disguise from himself, was rather the direction than the cause of his efforts. Ambition was the motive force, and he was powerless to resist it. He could appreciate the delights of an artist, a life devoted to the search for beauty, or of sport, the keenest pleasure that leaves no sting behind. To live in dreamy quiet and philosophic calm in some beautiful garden, far from the noise of men and with every diversion that art and intellect could suggest, was, he felt, a more agreeable picture. And yet he knew that he could not endure it. "Vehement, high, and daring" was his cast of mind. The life he lived was the only one he could ever live; he must go on to the end. The end comes often early to such men, whose spirits are so wrought that they know rest only in action, contentment in danger, and in confusion find their only peace.

This weekend I read Colossus, of which the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project was a remarkably faithful adaptation, and which is hopefully not prescient, as well as The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul on a lighter note, my first outing with Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective.

I remember watching that movie with my father when I was young. One of those sort of cult classics that always stuck in my mind when the binary was being read out horizontally on the digital visor in the command center, and it was processing data humans couldn’t understand.

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