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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2053 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 28, 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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Taylor's Hegel, a topic which seems long overdue.

I'm reading Hornblower with the same gusto as a child facing a plate of brussel sprouts.

Started on Reverend Insanity. The translation I found is horrible (is there a preferred one?), but I’m glued to it anyway.

Edit: if there is an adequate Russian translation, that would also work.

They're all absolutely terrible. The one I had got about 20% better after a few hundred chapters, but still very close to unreadable. I've read fanfic by 7th graders with better prose.

You kind of get used to it.

Someone should burn a couple of hundred million tokens and have a frontier LLM do a fresh translation or an extremely liberal English rewrite. Especially pretty much all original dialog needs to go. The problem is you probably need to supervise it, to keep all foreshadowing intact and all world building elements consistently named. That part of the translation was actually decent, the factions, Gu, ect. have passable or even good names.

While we're at it, liberally cutting all the superfluous explanations would probably help. Doing the absolute opposite of show-don't-tell got really annoying after the first million times he did it.

Finished Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay during the week, the third book in the Neapolitan quartet. It's the first one I can really say I enjoyed without reservation, the pacing was on point and Ferrante managed to compel empathy for certain secondary characters in a way she hadn't in previous volumes. When I started reading it I observed that, in retrospect, the first two volumes probably should have been compressed into one, an opinion that hadn't changed when I got to the end. Genuinely looking forward to reading the next one, which I can't say I felt after reading either of the first two.

On the recommendation of Rob Henderson and Theodore Dalrymple, I'm reading François de la Rochefoucald's collection of maxims. One I read this morning that I liked (I'm paraphrasing):

It is possible to find a woman who has never been in a love affair, but rare to find one who has only been in one.

It occurs to me that I know multiple femcels (either in person or people who post here), but am struggling to think of any women I know who've only been in exactly one relationship, my own mother excepted.

Rereading A Wizard of Earthsea and the rest of the novels. There's a reason LeGuin is legendary. She's an incredible storyteller and writer.

The Penultimate Truth by Philip K Dick.

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