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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2936 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 12, 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 still attempting Taylor's A Secular Age without much progress. Have been reading a lot of Theodore Dalrymple essays.

I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski, by Bill Green, Ben Peskoe, Will Russell, and Scott Shuffitt.

The Screwtape Letters from C.S.Lewis. Even though wokepedia calls it "Christian apologetic" and I am not a Christian, it is a very illuminating and though-provoking work for me. Written in 1942, but so far I have encountered nothing that sounds out of date.

Even though wokepedia calls it "Christian apologetic"

I mean, it is. It's also wonderfully written, both enjoyable and enlightening.

It is and it isn't. I mean, in some sense it most certainly is, but it's more than that. For one, it doesn't even mention Christ anywhere so far (I'm about half through, and not once), and neither does it discuss any specifics of the religion. It could be as well applied to any deistic religion (and if it didn't personalize God, some non-deistic ones too). I'm not writing it as a criticism, but rather to say the bucket of "Christian apologetic" is way too small for it, it's like saying Hamlet is a "murder mystery". Technically, yes, but...

Claw of the Conciliator. Really impressive in a way I find hard to explain.

  • It’s very easy to inhabit Severian’s head right up until he does something unhinged. “Oh, right. Raised by the torturer’s guild. Has never had a normal conversation with a woman in his life.”
  • Worldbuilding by implication. Characters assume familiarity with their world. Vocabulary is archaic or exotic, but consistently so: the author isn’t reaching for his thesaurus, that’s just what people call it.
  • Excellent portrayal of the surreal.

It’s like…I’ve been reading Brando-Sando-styled mechanistic fantasy for long enough that it’s a surprise when characters are out of their depth with regards to the fantastical elements. When Dalinar sees a god you know he’ll try and negotiate, or at least to hit it with a sword. Okay, it’s not fair to pin this on munchkin fantasy; go back to Tolkien and characters only acknowledge the sublime in order to compare it to the mundane. Hospitality like no other. A face more beautiful than any in Middle-Earth. Extraordinary versions of normal things.

Wolfe’s Urth is studded with total out-of-context experiences. Characters see things and have no idea how to fit them into their paradigm. Or worse, they know exactly how they fit in, and it’s not flattering. So the reader will get a confused, alarmed description and remain unsure if this is business as usual or something downright eldritch. Usually it’s the latter.

Makes for a damn good reading experience.

I will echo sarker and Book of the New Sun deserves to be mentioned alongside every great American novel ever written. Possibly the best book written in English between 1950-2000, and it might be the best book of the 20th century.

The Book of the New Sun is legitimately a masterpiece that probably deserves a volume of similar size for exegesis of all the layers involved.

It's stupid good. Extremely active reddit community on /r/genewolfe

Gilley's The Case for Colonialism, which I'm finding tedious. I've spent too much time in spaces like this, there's only so much examination of the culture of free speech, or lackthereof, on campus that I care about compared to the object level question.

Still reading de la Rochefoucald's maxims. A few I took photos of on my phone:

Absence makes average passions decrease and great ones increase, just as wind extinguishes candles and kindles a fire.

What makes us so bitter against people who act cunningly is the fact that they think they are cleverer than we are.

(In recent weeks, a man tried to scam me into letting him use my parking space without paying for it. Another man punched me in the face. For the reasons outlined above, I was far angrier about the former.)

We readily forgive our friends for faults that do not affect us.

We try to pride ourselves on the faults we do not want to correct.

The same pride that makes us criticise the faults we think we do not have, also leads us to feel disdain for the good qualities we do not have.

Moderation has been turned into a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to comfort average people for their lack of fortune and lack of merit.

“Absence makes average passions decrease and great ones increase,” I think.

Thank you.

Wrapped up The Worm Ouroboros. Overall liked it a lot, but not sure that I am interested in the spiritual sequels at this point.

Now on Dostoyevsky's The Gambler. I'm finding it useful to ask Claude about some of the historical context around the Polish-Russian wars. It's not key to the story but there's a few references to it that add a bit of depth. With LLMs it's like having a very knowledgeable friend on call who's read everything about everything and knows how they're related, so I no longer have an excuse to not bother figuring out the references.

It was a strange thing: I had plenty to think about, yet I was completely absorbed in analyzing the nature of my feelings for Polina. Truly, I had found it easier during those two weeks of absence than I did now, on the day of my return—even though, while traveling, I had pined like a madman, paced about frantically, and constantly seen her before me, even in my sleep. Once—it was in Switzerland—I fell asleep in the railway carriage and apparently started talking aloud to Polina, making all my fellow passengers laugh. And now, once again, I asked myself the question: do I love her? And once again I failed to answer it—or rather, I answered myself, for the hundredth time, that I hated her. Yes, I loathed her. There were moments—specifically, at the end of our conversations—when I would have given half my life to strangle her! I swear, if it had been possible to slowly plunge a sharp knife into her breast, I think I would have seized it with delight. And yet—I swear by everything holy—if, up on the Schlangenberg, at that fashionable lookout point, she had actually said to me, "Throw yourself down," I would have thrown myself down instantly, and with delight, too. I knew this. One way or another, the situation had to be resolved. She understood all this perfectly, and the thought that I was fully and clearly aware of her utter inaccessibility to me—of the impossibility of my fantasies ever coming true—that thought, I am certain, gave her immense pleasure; otherwise, how could she—cautious and intelligent as she was—have allowed such intimacy and frankness between us? It seemed to me that, all along, she had looked at me the way that ancient empress did when she began to undress in front of her slave, regarding him as less than human. Yes, many times she had regarded me as less than human...

Still on Reverend Insanity. The translation is somehow getting worse. Still hooked. At the current pace, expecting to finish sometime in winter.

It's kind of interesting because you can't tell how much is just the author largely ignoring prose after a certain point and how much is the translator. And then there's the weirdness of the language itself, there's a lot going on in Chinese names that we barely even get to see since 'Feng Jin Huang' is just meaningless to us.

Can you not run it through an AI for cleanup?

I try to avoid AI outside of work.

I don't think running a bad translation through an LLM makes much sense, since the LLM may fix bad English but cannot fix mistaken meaning and inconsistencies between chapters.

Running the original Chinese through an LLM has been briefly discussed previously (1 2).

Dalrymple is like AC/DC in that they only write and play one song with a thousand small variations, but what a song!

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