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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2724 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 30, 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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Which do you think is better for Republicans before midterms - Clancy to be acquitted or convicted (assumption is that mistrial will generate vastly smaller reaction one or the other way)

So what would you like to read (more of)? What is the specific nerdbait that would work on this crowd?
I could probably ask a LLM to condense all the works cited in these threads into some quintessential attributes but individuals have different standards they operate on, and I'm interested if you've figured them out.
Is there some genre or subject matter or trope that you would like to see more of, and would even tolerate lower-quality writing for a story that checks the boxes?
Or what makes a 'good' book for you?

At this point in my life, rational fiction and hard science fiction are pretty much the only things that do it for me. Basically everything Eliezer covers in his Abridged Guide to Intelligent Characters as well as his laws of fanfiction and philosophy of fanfiction. On that note, I strongly prefer fanfiction over original fiction, because it means I don't have to waste time learning the characters.

Things I particularly enjoy: Brain uploads, post-apocalyptic scenarios, tech uplift. Things I don't usually enjoy: LitRPG, polyamory, metafiction.

Why are most people so godawful at presenting and demonstrating things when even the tiniest bit of knowledge and effort would make them 10x better?

This was inspired by a recent demonstration video I saw that took ages to get to the point while clearly not being about engagement or view time farming, but I see the same issue over and over again whenever people present things on stage or in videos. Even many professionals seem to be really bad at it.

A long time ago in a university far away we had a mandatory "Introduction to speech communication"-course that concentrated on the basics, including how to give actually good presentations. In retrospect, that course was by far the most bang for buck of any university course I ever took. After I took it, people started somehow thinking I'm a natural presenter by just remembering a few key points and applying them to my presentations without having any particular natural talent at it (and my presentations weren't much good either before the course).

It really isn't rocket science. Most of it could be summarized by "Get to the point. Less is more. Hook the listener by starting with the key idea briefly and only then cover any background and details. Repeat the key points at the end. Keep slides to max 3-4 points per slide and reserve anything else to auxiliary materials. Always show the entire slide at once so the viewer pays attention to what you say instead of wondering when the next point will be revealed. Show brief examples if applicable."

Really basic things, super easy to learn, super easy to apply with the tiniest bit of practise (if I can do it with my "Ackshually that's a very interesting detail, let's totally get sidetracked by it"-ADHD diagnosed brain, there's no reason most other people can't). Enough to easily get me into the top 10-20% of presenters and that includes people whose entire job it is to present and market things (like a marketing director at an old job saying "Skooma, why don't you present this since you're so good at it?" - in a group where half the people were from the marketing dept). Following those rules also makes presenting much easier as you have to do so much less (by leaving out pointless details and fluff and realizing nobody is going to remember most of it anyway so it doesn't matter if you leave out some tiny detail).

Most people don't practice for most things in life, and public speaking is no exception. By practice I mean deliberate concentrated sessions with the explicit goal of improving something, not just going through the motion. That's how you get teachers that such at teaching 10 years into their career, public speakers who suck after giving 10s of talks, gamers that are stuck in silver after 1000s of hours played, even if their intelligence is at least average.

There's this interesting article by Dan Luu where he argues that 95th percentile is not that good. He talks about public speaking as an example too so quite relevant to your point.

Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do

Your own experience supports his thesis. You had a class on communication, you acknowledge applying it wasn't difficult, and you can identify yourself as being in the top 10-20% of presenters.

To give a couple of concrete examples, I helped Leah prepare for talks from 2013 to 2017. The first couple practice talks she gave were about the same as you'd expect if you walked into a random talk at a large tech conference. For the first couple years she was speaking, she did something like 30 or so practice runs for each public talk, of which I watched and gave feedback on half. Her first public talk was (IMO) well above average for a talk at a large, well regarded, tech conference and her talks got better from there until she stopped speaking in 2017.

As we discussed above, this is more subjective than game ratings and there's no way to really determine a percentile, but if you look at how most people prepare for talks, it's not too surprising that Leah was above average. At one of the first conferences she spoke at, the night before the conference, we talked to another speaker who mentioned that they hadn't finished their talk yet and only had fifteen minutes of material (for a forty minute talk). They were trying to figure out how to fill the rest of the time. That kind of preparation isn't unusual and the vast majority of talks prepared like that aren't great.

Most people consider doing 30 practice runs for a talk to be absurd, a totally obsessive amount of practice, but I think Gary Bernhardt has it right when he says that, if you're giving a 30-minute talk to a 300 person audience, that's 150 person-hours watching your talk, so it's not obviously unreasonable to spend 15 hours practicing (and 30 practice runs will probably be less than 15 hours since you can cut a number of the runs short and/or repeatedly practice problem sections). One thing to note that this level of practice, considered obessive when giving a talk, still pales in comparison to the amount of time a middling table tennis club player will spend practicing.

If you've studied pedagogy, you might say that the help I gave to Leah was incredibly lame. It's known that having laypeople try to figure out how to improve among themselves is among the worst possible ways to learn something, good instruction is more effective and having a skilled coach or teacher give one-on-one instruction is more effective still5. That's 100% true, my help was incredibly lame. However, most people aren't going to practice a talk more than a couple times and many won't even practice a single time (I don't have great data proving this, this is from informally polling speakers at conferences I've attended). This makes Leah's 30 practice runs an extraordinary amount of practice compared to most speakers, which resulted in a relatively good outcome even though we were using one of the worst possible techniques for improvement.

If you practice and do any sort preparation for your talk, you're already better than the average person. Most people go through most of life just winging it, and out society is built to be resilient that way. The upside to this is that you can probably become an "expert" relative to the population on most disciplines with just some effort.

Seems like there is some opportunity to teach effective communication as a side hustle. Business professionals already pay $1000s for bullshit courses anyways.

I would wager that this has something to do with the field of education in general. There is a reason that the Jason Arday character was able to become an Oxford professor in education. I imagine that there just isn't a ton of great competition, and the existing one is supportive of DEI.

Similarly for marketing departments, which are most likely stacked with women, that are ambitious, rule-following and socially-adjusted enough to show up consistently and suck up to the higher-ups.

Thinking about this, most of the existing products of knowledge are locked behind walls and walls of the 'librarian' type, which is an overwhelmingly female, administrative type of person, which is probably not concerned primarily with the efficiency of accessing and intellectually using knowledge as much as with following the proper procedures of gatekeeping it.

We have institutionalized 'Those who can't do, teach' and therefore the teaching is bad and nobody really has a culture of good teaching.

This might be a consequence of the web 1.0, google and wikipedia ethos of 'knowledge should be free'. Because knowledge cannot be properly monetized, agentic people, adventurers, industrialists, etc have turned away from selling knowledge as a good product.

Gone are the days when a single man was enough to revolutionize knowledge, so the men of Science of this day have to battle the librarians probably as much as they actually do Science.
ex: Augustin Pyramus de Candolle who singlehandedly described 37,000 plant species and established botanical nomenclature. I bet that guy could give you a good presentation. But maybe not.

Possibly giving talks or watching talks at the boys club of the day was a lot more fun than what we get now, where a pin-up shirt gets you in trouble.

Perhaps the angle of 'knowledge should be free akshually' is the better one. We can see this cannibalization of productive people's skills happening right now. Stackoverflow used to be a bunch of nerds answering other nerds' questions. And they would do it around the office too, when 'just google it' wasn't an appropriate answer. Now all the nerds just ask a LLM which was previously fed by stackoverflow, and they less often learn how to explain something to somebody else.

Actually it's about ethics in video game journalism.

  1. Practice makes perfect, but most people only give presentations and demonstrations at most a couple of times per year, so they never get better. Also, only a tiny minority ever record themselves and go back over the recordings to see how they might improve (particularly by excising “uh,” “um,” “er,” etc.).

  2. Relatedly, most people don’t prepare properly. I’ve heard it said that you should ideally spend an hour of preparation for every minute you’ll spend speaking. That may be taking things to an extreme, but a ratio of one hour preparing to 15 minutes speaking has always struck me as the absolute bare minimum. I think most bad presenters just wing it.

  3. “I’ll just wing it” might be more common among extroverts. They enjoy talking to people and assume that those skills will transfer seamlessly to giving presentations (they don’t). On the other hand, some introverts have a deathly fear of public speaking, so they suck because they’re nervous.

  4. Nervous people especially, but also others, talk too fast. Sometimes this is unavoidable if you have to cram a lot of information into a sort time frame (for example), but it’s pretty common even when there are no real time constraints. Talking too fast isn’t great on its own, but it also usually leads to more “ums,” since the brain can’t keep up with the tongue.

  5. Very few people take a systematic approach to learning new skills, especially outside a classroom setting. So even if they think “I’d like to be a better presenter” (which more likely than not never even occurs to them), they’ll never take the next step of thinking “how?” And most people who did take a communications class in college regarded it as a silly freshman blow-off class; it didn’t occur to them that they might actually learn something valuable from it. (To be fair, though, many colleges treat that class the same way, assigning it to any random adjunct who happens to be teaching a lighter-than-normal load.)

  6. Most people are fuzzy thinkers. They include unnecessary details and get lost down rabbit holes when they present because that’s just how they always think. Even with ample preparation time, it probably wouldn’t occur to them to change that aspect of their presentation.

"Just wing it" is such insidious advice, because that's what it looks like all the best speakers are doing, even though they're not (for the most part). The trick nobody tells you is that the best way to come across as comfortably speaking extemporaneously is actually to put a ton of work into preparation. The more you prep, the less "prepared" you will come off as. Authenticity, ironically enough, does not come naturally to most speakers, and requires a higher level of familiarity with your material than most people are willing to put the effort into getting.

But also once you've given broadly the same talk a few times you don't really need to prep it again. Vaguely modify the structure depending on audience interests and time allotted, make sure you're pitching at the right level, slot in a couple of new things if they come up and you're cooking with ingredients you know.

  • Stress hurts. I mechanically know the rules, but in high-stakes or in front of especially skeptical it's easy to ramble or try to add too many humanizing details that weren't in the original plan. And different people react to stress differently: my boss tends to crack jokes, and I've seen people who tend to freeze up even for topics they could normally recite in their sleep.

  • We train them wrong. From 2000-2005, it was common for introductory communications technology courses to emphasize animations, and forget to talk about why you should never fucking use them. I've seen college courses that encouraged people to make sure their slides had enough detail that they wouldn't need notes. A lot of well-meaning high school courses form teaching presentation skills as small series of one-and-done tests with feedback, rather than improving the same presentation over time, which just reinforces whatever bad habits someone came in with.

  • Sometimes we're training for something else. There's something going on with a lot of US federal government and especially DoD spaces where overcrowded text is mandatory, rather than a failure mode. My guess from unrelated engineering world stuff is that the slidedeck is supposed to act as a distributable record for review later, and the conversation an invitation for discussion, but when that transfers over to one-to-very-many presentations the whole thing falls apart.

  • There's a difficult tension between good presentation and good storytelling, and most people naturally gravitate more toward the latter. Great presenters can interleave a story, but it's hard to tease a key idea when you want to leave your big conclusion for the climax.

  • A lot of people just seem to struggle fully modeling the extent other people might not share information they have, even if the know it at an intellectual level. This tends to be the sort of thing that (at least outside of government slide decks) seems to be what results in giant fifty-point slides or explanations that keep getting interrupted by 'first I gotta explain X'.

Stress hurts. I mechanically know the rules, but in high-stakes or in front of especially skeptical it's easy to ramble or try to add too many humanizing details that weren't in the original plan.

This is fairly easy to notice when it happens and totally understandable but not really what I mean.

I'm talking specifically about the things anyone can do that almost inherently will make their presentation / talk better simply by applying an almost mechanistic set of rules: Do X. Don't do Y. If you do those and "fail" due to stress, it'll come off as a one time failure instead of "man, this guy sucks as a presenter".

We train them wrong. From 2000-2005, it was common for introductory communications technology courses to emphasize animations, and forget to talk about why you should never fucking use them. I've seen college courses that encouraged people to make sure their slides had enough detail that they wouldn't need notes.

This might be it. Probably 80% - 90% of my teachers failed those basic things in slide design. Ie. never put too much on one slide and keep visual distractions to absolute minimum. Also whoever suggested adding animations to slides should be shot and their family cursed to the seventh generation.

A lot of people just seem to struggle fully modeling the extent other people might not share information they have, even if the know it at an intellectual level.

Aka "people are goddamned idiots". That would be the only thing that explained why people in the university kept repeating the same mistakes they were explicitly taught to avoid in a very easy to understand way on that course that every single student had to take.

Anyone remember that "calculation" someone did (perhaps on this forum) that distilled various sources into revealing/claiming that a modern Western liberal puts around 10x more value on a Black body's life compared to a white man's?

That doesn’t sound familiar.

Or rather—it sounds like something that this forum would do, but I don’t remember any particular instance.

All of a sudden, I can't access Kiwifarms on android. The Tartarus browser verification keeps failing, on Chrome, Firefox and Adblock Browser.

Is there another takedown attempt ongoing?

The administrator says it's network maintenance. Tor is working fine.

Thanks - I checked about noon and was able to get in.

Why, when I open Substack during the day, does the algorithm generally show me notes that I agree with – but when I open it late at night or in the wee hours of the morning, I'm presented with a cavalcade of libtards?

The algorithm knows that if it gives you peaceful content at night you’ll fall asleep and stop scrolling. So it gives you rage bait to jolt you awake.

The substack algorithm seems very swingy, if you click on the note of a reasonable lib once, you get flooded with median HCR enjoyers. Maybe that has to do with it?

Americans waking up?

That was my first thought. But during the day, Substack shows me notes I agree with, many of them posted by Americans. In the wee hours of the morning, it shows me notes I disagree with, exclusively by Americans. I don't get it.

Are there any archives or translations of the broadcasts that Hutu supremacist radio stations were playing in the lead up to and during the Rwandan genocide?

There is a searchable archive of material though it may not have what you want.

edit fixed link

Thank you it’s a good start. I’m trying to study what the rhetoric is and how it escalates. I suspect any modern genocide of any kind is going to look a lot more like Rwanda's crowd-sourced massacres than Aktion Reinhard.

So, what are you reading?

I finished al-Ghazali's Banes of the Tongue, which was well worth the read. I can dimly see some aspects of Islam, and in particular the hadith "Beware of the believer's intuition because he sees by the light of God" has caught my eye. There is a sense of leaving uncovered what God has covered and not speaking about what doesn't concern you; in particular, if one is gossiped to, the gossip says more about the gossiper than the one who is spoken about. It has kindled an interest in ways of knowing which might arise from an Islamic mindset.

What is forbidden is supposition [about another's alleged evil ways], and supposition is an expression of what the soul believes is reliable, and the heart inclines toward. God says, O you who have believed, avoid much negative assumption. Indeed, some assumption is sin [Q. 49:12]. The reason for its unlawfulness is because the secrets of the hearts are known only to the Knower of the unseen, so it is not for you to believe in another’s wickedness unless it is disclosed to you by observation and cannot be explained away.

The book is quite comprehensive, talking about things like arguments, joking, praising or being praised, and I'm sure to be revisiting this often.

Borrowed the next Dresden Files, Cold Days, on a whim. So far been disappointed. Harry wakes up, gets in a fight, snarks at people, resists the charms of a beautiful woman, and then repeats the process. Unprecedented levels of wankery from a series which has always been rather indulgent.

Maybe I just really hate faeries? They’re horrible, irrational aesthetics-first plot devices in almost any story. Even when the author leans into that, I find it fundamentally unsatisfying. JS&MN was one of the rare occasions where I felt the characters were as annoyed as I was, and it still ended with a huge faerie ass-pull.

resists the charms of a beautiful woman

I mainly waved off complaints about the male gaze in this series but, if this is the book I'm thinking about, I distinctly remember thinking "I just don't need to know whether an immortal, god-like Faerie Lady is vajazzled or not". It was getting a bit much, even for peak-hormones me.

I didn't read anything past Skin Game and that somehow stuck with me for a decade.

It is that book, and that was the exact word used.

More eye-rolling than how previous books handled Molly. At least she’s got her own character alongside being a sex object.

I just finished Nevil Shute's In the Wet (1953), which to me is unjustly remembered primarily for having a part-Aboriginal protagonist who voluntarily goes by the nickname Nigger in an attempt to pre-emptively defuse racial conflicts. I actually think Shute explores the racial dynamics in quite a thoughtful and believable way, but in my experience in online groups, many readers immediately jump to feeling "uncomfortable" about the protagonist's name, and lose sight of the story itself. As far as that goes, it's not one of Shute's very best; an exploration of what might have happened to the British Commonwealth if it had stayed together into the 1980s, it was always lacking the drama and tension that define Shute's most enjoyable novels.

One thing I found thought-provoking was the idea of the "multiple vote," in which citizens gain additional votes by doing various salutary things: starting a family and not divorcing, operating a profitable business, gaining education and so on. (Also explored by Heinlein in Starship Troopers and elsewhere.) Shute views this as a natural and necessary growth of democracy, without which it will devolve into whatever members of society produce the least, voting themselves benefits. I told my wife about this and she said, "Isn't that how it really did work out in practice?" Sometimes it's hard to disagree.

In all of his Australian novels, Shute displayed a belief that Australia would continue down a semi-libertarian, freewheeling path where adventurers could go and make a fortune; Hammond Innes also describes an Australia like that in novels like Golden Soak. My impression is that it very much did not turn out that way, and I'd be curious to know more about how and why. I suppose a big part of it is just that all frontiers eventually close.

citizens gain additional votes by doing various salutary things: starting a family and not divorcing, operating a profitable business, gaining education and so on.

Isn't this basically a return to "the only people who can vote are property owners over the age of 30", except this time it's gender neutral? At least the prosocial things you list, are generally attained with age, so it should work out to be fairly similar.

Somewhat. The specific criteria in this future Australia were:

  • basic vote (everyone gets it)
  • education or military experience
  • living abroad for at least two years (considered as adding valuable perspective)
  • raising children to at least the age of 14, in wedlock, without divorcing
  • achieving a high level of earned income
  • being an official in a Christian church
  • granted by the King or Queen for meritorious acts at his or her discretion (the rare "Seventh Vote" which is one of the highest honors in this society)

In one's own thought experiment, one could change these in many different ways to nudge society in his or her preferred direction. A system with these levers would, in theory, result in a society of educated, well-traveled Christian families. If you want a non-Christian or irreligious society, you could take that out; if you wanted a more service-oriented society you could add one for time served in some sort of charitable organization; and so on. I appreciate that the system in In the Wet has at least a pretty good level of fairness, in that one's birth has not too much impact: in the fictional Australia of the book social mobility is given as being quite high, so achieving a high income is possible for many; any healthy person may join the military; and so forth.

why

My guess: Australians are Britons, and whatever is wrong with those is wrong all the way through them.

I read three books last week: The Letter of Marque, instalment 12? 13? in the Aubrey-Maturin series. Very fun book as usual, including maybe the funniest subplot about opioid addiction ever?

Also read A Canticle for Leibowitz, a sci-fi classic I had never got around to. My Dad mentioned he had it for assigned reading in grade 10 back in the day. Deserving classic, very interesting premise with great execution, handles multiple different tones very well and builds up to a terrific finale.

Also because of his death I read John Crowley's short fiction collection. Never read him before, sort of a "magical realist" along the lines of Borges or JG Ballard. Enjoyed it on the whole, especially the novella "The Great Work of Time."

Little, Big by Crowley is a most interesting novel. If you like the subject matter, Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock is also worth a look. If you like the atmosphere, for some reason my mind goes to Possession by A.S. Byatt; a classic in its own right.

The Letter of Marque, instalment 12?

I think yes, 12. Though The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore are both worth reading at some point, they are not part of the Aubrey-Maturin universe.

I recommend setting aside a decent block to read the next five novels as a reasonably tightly woven block, which The Letter of Marque sets the stage for. Though, as @CertainlyWorse says, it's not the first of the continuing voyages of Aubrey and Maturin.

Thankyou for the shoutout.

I'm still in somewhat of a reader's depression at the end of the series. I haven't found its like.

To anyone that has not yet read the Aubrey Maturin series, I highly recommend it. As someone wittier than myself put it, 'It's Jane Austen for boys.'

It's Jane Austen for boys.

I ended up unironically reading Austen after, because I couldn't find anything else to fill the hole it left. Makes a lot more sense once you are used to the social norms from Aubrey-Maturin.

Did you include 21, The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey, in your circumnavigation? I like that it ends unfinished, like the series can just keep sailing, with our heroes continuing their never-ending adventures. Though I know some people prefer a sense of finality with an "ending" from Blue at the Mizzen.

I did finish 21 and I was glad that I did. I will say that because it was the Patrick Tull audiobook version it didn't include the notes on the final duel that Maturin was going to fight. I heard reference to the notes on another forum and thought I was taking crazy pills because readers seemed to be hallucinating events that didn't exist.

In any case, I was happy to let it trail away like that. They'd already left their mark.

I am still toying with the idea of Austen, because Hornblower isn't getting any traction with me.

Ha, I was going to comment that this novel really feels the most of the series like it starts and ends at arbitrary points (which I find charming, as no modern novelist would do so). Or maybe it was the previous, which literally cuts mid-scene. I thought they were really going to go to Chile in this novel, as it was set up as their next voyage in the previous. But come the end of the novel they still haven't got around to it!

I recently read Angel Down, half the gimmick of which was that it pretended to start and end mid-event. It's nonsense of course, the beginning and end points were deliberately chosen by the author and there's a clear narrative arc in between.

The Solar cycle by Gene Wolfe also has a habit of cutting out the transitions between books. Supposedly it was out of protest against a publisher who wouldn't let Wolfe finish his books as he liked, but maybe it pulls double-duty for allowing him to leave out some parts he himself considered boring. Or maybe he just liked leaving more mysteries around. Wouldn't surprise me.

Currently on Seveneves. So far my least favorite Stephenson book, but I guess I'm comparing it to Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Cryptonomicron, probably two of which are in my "top 10 books I've read" list. It's okay, about a third of the way through. Feels very much "of its time" (2008 2015): drops Internet references (Reddit/YouTube), and two of the characters seem obvious NDT and Elon Musk ("when he was still cool") stand-ins. No questions asked international cooperation. It's long (800+ pages). Not exactly a slog, but I'm tempted to set it aside for something more interesting. Thinking As I Lay Dying, since I've found I like "in the style of Faulkner" AI memes.

Previous was True Grit, which is a short read I'd recommend. Might watch the movies at some point.

Seveneves also had stand-ins for Hilary Clinton (probably the most entertaining of them), Cory Doctorow, and Malala Yousafzai. Doob-NdGT was one of the more obvious ones, for sure. Probst was half Musk, but with elements of other CEOs.

I'm a massive Stephenson fan and would agree that the Cryptonomicon/Snow Crash/Diamond Age trilogy are my favorites. I've read each of those probably ten times. Aside from that, the Baroque Cycle is amazing. Liked Anathem and am maybe ready for a re-read.

At some point he hit his 'every book must have a hypercompetent hyperintelligent black woman' phase which doesn't work for me.

Oh, one marginal suggestion: Interface with George is actually mostly pretty classic Stephenson, from the good years. Been meaning to try Cobweb again though it's thrown me twice.

I quite enjoyed Cryptonomicon. Own Snow Crash but haven’t gotten around to it. Haven’t read most of his others. Favorite is definitely Anathem, though.

It is funny that he keeps featuring international cooperation. I’d say it reminds me of Cixin Liu’s (frustrating) series, except the attitude is so completely different. Hmm.

I remember enjoying Faulkner as part of a Moby-Dick course. You should read that one, if you haven’t.

This Inevitable Ruin, the seventh book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I blasted through the first four books but it has been a bit of a slog ever since, despite some fun "high points" in each entry. At this point I feel sufficiently invested, and the high points sufficiently high, to continue through the books when I have time, but very few authors seem to be able to keep up with their younger selves.

I also wonder how the author feels about the fact that his anarcho-communist hero/worldbuilding is literally sustained by Deus ex Machina. I haven't bothered to dig into the fandom so I have no idea whether the author has commented on this, but I assume the readers have! The sci-fi trope of "preach communism but (accidentally?) notice that it's only genuinely sustainable in a world of magically unlimited resources" is one I've been contemplating for decades now, thanks to Star Trek. It feels like such a self-own except that I imagine most readers don't see it that way.

That’s something you might wonder about most fiction. Playing with initial conditions is an author’s privilege. Doubly so for SF/F, where suspending disbelief is the price of entry.

Isn't it also a trope in Rand? The infinite energy generator in Atlas Shrugged?

Atlas Shrugged is a little funny because it's (likely unintentionally, given the timeline) a send-up of the magically unlimited resources concept.

  • The Strikers don't need the generator: they're able to produce all the oil they need anyway.
  • Its existence motivated the Strikers to strike, fearing that the broader world would use it to empower a system of slavery-in-all-but-name.
  • Except the broader world ended up with a leading scientist and a machine operator that couldn't perform basic maintenance on a car radio; they couldn't use unlimited energy even if it were delivered to their front door.

I can't speak for what Dinniman thinks or believes but that particular part of the story the cookbook and the subsequent developments related to it was chosen by Patreon vote.

It feels like such a self-own except that I imagine most readers don't see it that way.

Most readers read fantasy as wish-fulfillment, and the wishful thinking that drove them to consuming such media in the first place is usually strong enough to make them think in terms of the ideologically necessary deus ex machina being actually possible in real life. If fully automated luxury communism requires sufficiently advanced technology, then so be it, the technology must advance but until it does we can already get to work on implementing the desirable ideology it will surely enable.

People aren't rational.

If fully automated luxury communism requires sufficiently advanced technology, then so be it, the technology must advance but until it does we can already get to work on implementing the desirable ideology it will surely enable.

This perhaps gets too much into Culture Wars, but I will say, I'm in a camp similar to this, except that I follow "the technology must advance" with "to truly overwhelming and crazy scifi/magic levels, which can only be done in an immensely wealthy and productive society, and only capitalism is known to be even capable of generating such wealth and productivity, which is why capitalism must be maintained as strongly as possible right now." I honestly don't see any other route into a Communist future that is actually desirable (i.e. doesn't equalize everyone at 0).

CW topics are explicitly allowed in Small Question Sunday!

I'm basically with you. I practice something like communism with my family. I think it can probably be successfully done in a collective of many dozens to perhaps even a few hundred humans, but at some point the scale tips and competition for scarce resources has to be managed through something less personal than familial love. Today abundance and prosperity is predominantly the result of trade, which is itself driven by scarcity (no point trading for what I already have). A world with Star Trek replicators and functionally infinite energy would be super cool, but we don't live there now and certainly won't get there by pretending that we do.

According to German leftists, the replicator equivalent we do have is "tax rich people".

"Wait, why are they all leaving?"

I decided to see what web serials were all about and picked up A Practical Guide to Evil. I've read the first two books (which is like one sixth of the whole story) and I'm done with it. I ain't reading a series that is more than five times longer than War and Peace unless it is at least twice as good. And this book is not.

At its heart, PG2E is a YA novel with obvious influences: you can see when the author channelled GRRM, Yudkowsky, Rosenfelder. And it could've been a good YA novel if it had a good editor that was willing to do two things:

  • get rid of sixty percent of the text
  • bring the quality of the prose of the first chapters to the level of the latter ones

I understand that both goals are really hard if not impossible to achieve when you are self-publishing your work chapter by chapter, but I am not satisfied with the quality of the final result at all. I'll give Mother of Learning an honest try next to see if the genre is salvageable.

Are web serials for people that read a lot and like reading the same thing?

Oh, and I got through How Not to Write a Novel. The authors spent too much effort on writing excruciatingly bad examples. I would prefer if they actually used fragments from real novels as examples and spend their effort on explaining less obvious problems than "don't make your characters too perfect or completely pitiful".

I would prefer if they actually used fragments from real novels as examples and spend their effort on explaining less obvious problems than "don't make your characters too perfect or completely pitiful".

You're essentially asking that they wrote a different book. The introduction is pretty clear that the point isn't to turn the reader into the next Hemingway, but merely to keep him from being among the countless thousands whose work never gets a second look from a publisher because it's so bad. There are no actual novels with this stuff (or at least very few), because manuscripts with these kinds of non-subtle mistakes don't get published, and things that don't get published aren't readily available for reference. It's similar to how I can tell a few war stories from my old job, but I'd be reluctant to write a book full of them because I'd want to get all of the details correct and I'm not in the habit of hanging onto files from jobs I no longer have. I doubt the authors hang on to rejected manuscripts, but they've probably seen enough patterns to be able to explain the mistakes. So they can't just quote passages verbatim. There's also the fact that exaggerated examples make better teaching tools than subtle ones. If I'm trying to explain to a beginner how a synthesizer works and what all the buttons and knobs do, I don't explain resonance be making a slight adjustment (as I might when putting a sound together); I explain it by cranking it up as high as it will go without the sound breaking up, then turning it down again.

There are no actual novels with this stuff (or at least very few)

There are many more than just a few. Most of this catalog would do: https://372pages.com/about.

If you're looking for a shorter (aka 'get to the good part before I've read a whole novel') web serial work, some options:

  • Kitty Cat Kill Sat. Writing and pacing is a little flaky, but the overarcing plot and core idea are pretty good. Check out the first two chapters; if they don't stick with you, the full story won't do any better.
  • Forge of Destiny is a more conventional giant super-arc. The first book stands alone pretty well and basically feels like a Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone-level book for its setting. You do miss out on some of the writing high-notes -- a later character is Ragyo Kiryuin as something approximating a good guy, and despite that paradox the text does it well enough that I could hear Ragyo's theme song -- but you can easily set it down there and feel like you've got a good outcome.
  • Beware of Chicken's in a similar boat, except I'd honestly recommend setting the series down after the first big bad evil guy gets splattered. Plot and theme quality drops pretty dramatically.

Are web serials for people that read a lot and like reading the same thing?

That's part of it. A lot of the big web serials are huge, update faster than all but the most productive conventional writers, and leave the author space to test ideas that you'd have trouble publishing or having recognized anywhere.

It's also just a broader option. The approach has a lot more space than even Kindle Unlimited-focused sales, and vastly more than conventional publishing. Worm's starter 'novel'-worth, or Edge Cases might have been able to get a conventional publisher, but if so only for the same reason that A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet would, and probably only after loading up thirty or forty heavy-handed hints for the main twist; something like Blue Core (cw: don't recommend) or Contention just wouldn't happen.

That said, there's also something interesting specific ritual of the long-form story with a scheduled release and regular in-progress discussion that's become far more available to this genre at the same time that its conventional media competitors dropped it. Reading With This Ring every morning or Ar'Kendrythist every weekend lets you think about what's coming up or what the deeper meaning of a plot point is in a way that fixed stories don't really do anymore, between normalized binge-watching for television or an emphasis on closed novels in written media. I don't think I'd have examined Jinyu's arc in FLCL Progressive without someone else asking and having a week to think on it, for example.

It's also just a lot more monetizable. That's a mixed blessing, of course. Some authors definitely get brain-cored by the internet or be driven nuts by the pressure and immediate stochastic feedback, but some people do thrive in that environment. For readers, you can end up a whale just trying to follow three or four series, be stuck knowing there's a hundred-plus chapters of a story that'll get in normal publication sometime, or find that a series you loved got dropped close to a major climax.

I didn't like Mother of Learning. It's literally just Time Braid*, but worse†.

If you want the best the web novel medium has to offer, I'd recommend Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales‡.

* Zorian is Sakura, Zach is Naruto, Red Robe is Sasuke, QI is Orochiramu, they are all trapped in a one-month time loop that ends with an invasion, etc.; it's obvious once you know Domagoj Kurmaic listed Time Braid as one of his favorite stories on FanFiction.Net.

† Mother of Learning is slower, the fights are less exciting, the characters are flatter, and there is less fanservice.

‡ Unless glowfic counts, in which case I'd recommend Project Lawful by Eliezer Yudkowsky (LessWrong) and Kelsey Piper (The Unit of Caring).

For Mother of Learning, the worldbuilding is imo one of the best, most internally consistent fantasy world. Slower isn't worse, and likewise for the fights being more methodological. Less fanservice is, frankly, 100% a positive.

Worth the candle, I'll agree with the others that it's just not very good. It tries to be deep and subversive, but the author clearly has a very shallow worldview himself, so it just ends up cringe. It would have been better if he had stuck to a straight fantasy story, some of his ideas like the thousands of hells and the soul mechanics were very interesting. It was just hard to continue caring with his ridiculous meta-commentary and horrible character work. If the author himself doesn't take his own story/world serious enough to just let it speak for itself, why should I bother?

I tried Worth the Candle from all the recommendations here but couldn't finish it. The highs it hit were amazing, but it frequently went so low that it became a miserable slog to read. It had amazing worldbuilding, an awesome magic system, and each arc by itself had more interesting ideas in it than entire books I've read. But the author seems to hate his own story, and hates you for reading it and getting enjoyment out of the conflicts and adventures. For every awesome arc there was an equally long time spent on navel gazing, group talk therapy, masturbatory meta commentary, and criticizing the elements of the genre that make it enjoyable to read in the first place. I don't know, I find it very distasteful to trade on genre elements as an author, gaining attention and money from them, then turn around and spend so much time criticizing the nature of things like power fantasies, harems, adventure stories — you name it, whatever part of this genre you like, the author seems to think you're a terrible person for liking it, and will spend page after page making that clear.

I quit during the time compression chamber arc, when Joon learned about Fenn's child and was nothing but enthused at the opportunity to be the dad who stepped up. Fenn was my least-preferred pairing for our hero, and this was the nail in the coffin for me. I wound up reading the last few chapters to see how it ended and had to put it down in disgust by the end.

I apologize for the venom; I did not intend on it when I started writing this comment, but once I started writing I had to let it out. If the story were just bad, that would be fine, almost preferable. It's the fact that it can be so good when it wants to be that makes it more frustrating.

I quit during the time compression chamber arc, when Joon learned about Fenn's child and was nothing but enthused at the opportunity to be the dad who stepped up. Fenn was my least-preferred pairing for our hero, and this was the nail in the coffin for me. I wound up reading the last few chapters to see how it ended and had to put it down in disgust by the end.

Okay, fair. I knew Fenn was a used good, but after reading the extent how much of a used good she was, I stopped shipping them together. If don't like this kind of thing, it's probably better that you quit when you did; Joon ignores Valencia so much that she ends up getting deflowered by Jorge.

I read that plot point on the wiki and had to stop and marvel at the level of loathing the author shows for himself and his audience. Knowing this, the entire purpose of Valencia’s character was to soft cuck Joon so he would internalize a lesson about women’s agency. I read Wales’ postmortem on the story a few months back (page seems to be dead now or I would link it here) where he talks about how a certain type of reader probably wanted Valencia to, if not get with Joon, at least eternally pine chastly for him. I guess he got to show them.

There’s a bizarre level of misandry in the story too. I can’t think of any men in Aerb who aren’t villains that die immediately / aren’t shown to be corrupt or evil besides Joon, the guy who exists to cuck him, and Grak (who doesn’t really count). Even Joon has to constantly examine his desires, criticize and demonize them, and learn the important lesson that he is wrong to have them. It reminded me of Scott Aaronson talking about internalizing lessons against misogyny to the point that he wanted to chemically castrate himself.

More than anything, Wales' writing reminds me of the aphorism: "Explaining a joke is like vivisecting a frog; you might learn something but the frog dies". Wales is constitutionally incapable of choosing to let a trope stand, and constantly chooses to interrogate the conceits of his plot instead of keeping up all the little contrivances that would make that plot satisfying. It's like being on a car journey with an engineer who can't resist disassembling the engine every few minutes: you might get somewhere eventually but you're not going to enjoy the process.

I read Wales’ postmortem on the story a few months back (page seems to be dead now or I would link it here) where he talks about how a certain type of reader probably wanted Valencia to, if not get with Joon, at least eternally pine chastely for him. I guess he got to show them.

Here's a copy. (The Wayback Machine is failing to respond at the moment, so I can't tell whether the page has been archived there. It's on archive.today here.)

The biggest thing she adds to the story is probably an interrogation of rescuing a weak person to have them fall for you, and naïve broken birds in general, and showing what maturity means. I think there’s a kind of reader that doesn’t necessarily want Juniper to sleep with Valencia, but does want Valencia to remain virginal and lusting after him in perpetuity.

Thanks, I had been wanting to give this another read. Nice backup, I’m bookmarking that.

Clearly the dwarf is the superior waifu. Joon and the rest of the community are just blind.

*vomits a little in da nad mouth*

I never even made it that far. The whole thing just didn't resonate with me at all.

MoL is totally DnD progression-fantasy as applied to Naruto. This is completely different from TB, which functions first and foremost as a fanfiction.

Both of them keep the fun, evocative magic framework, and both replace the dogshit shonen treadmill with something more compelling. But TB relies on familiar characters (and the resulting divergence). I don't think it would be remotely coherent without canon knowledge. This is fine, this is good! Naruto has some generational character designs, and riffing on them gives the author all sorts of interesting options.

MoL is playing the worldbuilding game, not the character game. The characters exist to explore this spin on a fantasy kitchen sink, which is why they can be so forgettable. It's not better so much as it has a different, parallel appeal.

And yes, Worth the Candle does both, which is why it's the best.

I didn't like Mother of Learning. It's literally just Time Braid*, but worse†.

Well, I have zero interest in reading Naruto fan-fiction, so there you have it. Loved Mother of Learning and especially its pacing. Would like to read it for the third time soon. Tried the audiobook and unfortunately the quality and narration are pretty bad.

I'd recommend Project Lawful by Eliezer Yudkowsky (LessWrong) and Kelsey Piper (The Unit of Caring)

To someone who just specifically listed "get rid of sixty percent of the text" as something that would improve most web fiction?

To someone who just specifically listed "get rid of sixty percent of the text" as something that would improve most web fiction?

A lot less than 60% of Project Lawful needs to be cut. My guess is 40% of Eliezer's text and 10% of lintamande's. The graphic BDSM scenes are identified as skippable and worksafe summaries are provided. The existence of the BDSM scenes is genuinely justified by character development - they are not gratuitous. (Lintamande is a technically better writer than Eliezer, and the driving force of the second half of the saga is the contrast between the two authors' views of what rationalists winning actually means.)

I wish lintamande would go back to finish At the End of All Things. While I have some appreciation for the glowfic format, her actually-formatted work is close to the Platonic ideal of fanfiction.

Well, what part of planecrash would you cut, exactly? The decision theory lectures? The polyamorous BDSM orgies? Those are not filler; they are the core of the story!

This template just keeps on giving. Imagine being the dude who drew the original "virgin vs chad" or Wojak or trollface. It's overwhelmingly likely your greatest achievement, but people around you either don't care or don't believe you.

I've not yet made it through the whole story, which logically does undermine my criticisms of it ... except perhaps for this specific criticism ...

I didn't like Mother of Learning. It's literally just Time Braid, but worse. It's slower, the fights are less exciting, the characters are flatter, and there is less fanservice.

As a person who has read Time Braid literally half a dozen times (though not within the past few years) and counts it as his favorite book ever (very possibly with rose-tinted glasses), I think this is too harsh an assessment. Not everything needs to be up to eleven all the time. Call Mother of Learning relaxing rather than plodding.

I'd recommend Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales

I want the best medium-length web novel medium has to offer. Wales is good, but if I remember correctly, he's not known for brevity.

If it has to be original, I quite enjoyed Ra. The author is better known nowadays for his Antimemetics Division SCPs.

I also stand by Wildbow’s work. Twig is his best character writing, in my opinion, but it wasn’t nearly as condensed as I remember.

There’s really something to be said for reading those as they come out. I’m currently keeping up with Flower that bloomed nowhere, which is far far too meandering to recommend in this case. Still, it’s convinced me that it’s carefully planned to come together. The Blemished Age is much tighter but also unfinished.

Ra

Hm. I completely forgot about the book, even though it hasn't been so long since I read it. And I feel similarly about Antimemetics and UNSONG. I read those, and it was fun while I read them...but in the end, nothing stuck. They left no impression. And I say this as someone who extensively, obsessively thinks over, re-reads and researches what he reads. Rationalist fiction is completely ephemeral to me. I suspect it has something to do with them trying to be too clever, and failing to build upon truly universal themes in favor of overly complicated, completely overengineered gimmicks that end up being broad but shallow. Or maybe they're just mediocre writers whose prose isn't up to snuff.

If it has to be original, I quite enjoyed Ra.

So did I.

There’s really something to be said for reading those as they come out.

I really dislike ongoing series. Having to shift from binging to waiting is my least favorite part of the reading experience.

Wales actually has a handful of great short stories. IMHO they're better on average than his long fiction!

Also, although I loved Worth the Candle, it's long and some of its twists and turns are controversial. IMHO every revelation was utterly sensible in hindsight and made a good story even better, but de gustibus non disputandum, and I recognize that if I didn't like a major twist after I'd read 200-odd chapters to get to it I'd be massively disappointed.

You might try his The Metropolitan Man. Fan fiction, but a great combination of clever reconstructions and deconstructions that lead to unique differences from the canon. 80k words, so more "short-length web novel" than medium-length, though.

I really liked The Metropolitan Man. The Terminator fanfic was terrible, though.

Link to his website

AO3 link for easy downloading

You might try his The Metropolitan Man. Fan fiction, but a great combination of clever reconstructions and

Seeing the Wales discussion, I was going to mention Metropolitan Man. Quite possibly my favorite Rationalist story, not least because it's one of a handful of well-made art pieces that I love for very clearly elucidating a perspective I strongly disagree with. It's simultaneously the best argument for and against Rationalism that I've seen.

very clearly elucidating a perspective I strongly disagree with

I'd love to find out what you're talking about here. The obvious candidate that jumps to mind is Lex Luthor's rational but ultimately self-destructive analysis of Superman-as-existential-threat but although that's one of the most fascinating parts of the book, it's a classic villain elucidating a perspective that even the author, albeit non-clearly, disagrees with and once I start thinking of less-obvious candidates ... well, I don't mean "what are you talking about?" in the idiomatic "you sound crazy" sense, but in the literal "there are like five things you could be talking about but I'm not sure which it is" sense.

Is there author commentary somewhere? My read was that Luthor did the rationally-correct thing, that the benefits of Superman weren't worth the existential risk, and the ambiguity just drives home the idea that Rationalism is a gamble, and the best you can do is make smart bets. In what sense would Wales disagree with that position?

What were the other five things? I really ought to read it again.

I haven't read author commentary, so you could be right. My read is that Luthor might have been doing the rationally-correct thing in a world where only Superman exists, but in a world where Superman is just a single example of a whole class of existential threats (which is likely from Luthor's perspective, a priori, and which would be certain if this universe actually matched the DC universe, and which arguably includes Luthor himself futzing around with Kryptonian technology), the risk of Superman turning on us if left alive is less than the extra risk of meeting others among those threats without Superman to help.

IIRC the other big perspectives that might engender disagreement (or stronger disagreement, when there's disagreement presented in-story):

Luthor's characterization here was excellent, and Superman's good, but my only concern with the story is that I think Lois feels like more of a stretch vs her canon characterizations.

It was just too implausible that Kryptonians would look perfectly human but have superpowers, and something like the "spider-eel" form was necessary to keep the story rational.

Superman arguably should be obeying virtue ethics, even if the consequentialist outcomes of that allow for horrors, because the risks of him becoming less virtuous (or, as it turned out, of being perceived as less virtuous) are even greater.

"Clark Kent", though, is a weird and probably suboptimal compromise between the suffering that could have been prevented via extra time spent as Superman and the suffering to Superman himself (and to others if he snaps) if he couldn't even pretend to be a regular person.

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Okay, yeah, if you want brevity, then webfic is probably the wrong medium for you.

On the other hand, I feel like a lot of the complains about how long web novels are comes from a category error?

They are absurdly long compared to individual books, but they aren't unusual by the standards of sagas like Harry Potter or Narnia. Some of them are even internally divided into books (Worth the Candle, Mother of Learning, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, etc.).

But people are still treating them like someone dropped a one-million word book on their shelf, instead of a series.

I would prefer if they actually used fragments from real novels as examples and spend their effort on explaining less obvious problems than "don't make your characters too perfect or completely pitiful".

Sounds like a great way to make a lot of enemies in the publishing industry.

Just use dead authors. Roughly anything from 1900 to 1960 is modern enough to be readable but old enough that the writer is gone.

But a lot of the examples of bad writing they cited were distinctly modern ones, whether at the stylistic level or in terms of plot construction (e.g. the array of plots that no longer work since the invention of the mobile phone).

Also anything where the badness stems from the author being immersed in therapy culture and/or lefty politics without realising that the rest of the world isn't. Which is about a third of the book.

I think the legal term is "public domain"?

Criticism, review and parody are fair use, so a version of How Not to Write a Novel which used real excerpts would almost certainly be legal even if the books being panned aren't public domain. But that "almost" is probably enough to make it unpublishable.

I fucking wish, but no. With the passage of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, American copyright extends to 95 years from the date of publication. As for other public domains, the US uses trade deals to continually force countries to expand their copyright terms, such that life of the author + 70 years is now the standard.

I got through How Not to Write a Novel. The authors spent too much effort on writing excruciatingly bad examples. I would prefer if they actually used fragments from real novels as examples and spend their effort on explaining less obvious problems than "don't make your characters too perfect or completely pitiful".

Me, I loved the excruciatingly bad examples. It's what I was there for. But yes, a lot of the problems were very obvious, but I figured it was written more for the "so you're just now trying to write and have written your first book" crowd, rather than the "experienced writer looking to hone their craft".

for the "so you're just now trying to write and have written your first book" crowd

That's literally me, and I still found it insufferable.

If you interpret it as mildly misogynistic mockery of bad fiction by women (which it mostly is, because the vast majority of wannabe novelists are women and most of the errors it calls out are either directly female-coded or characteristic of female-coded genres) it is a lot more sufferable.

I'll give Mother of Learning an honest try next to see if the genre is salvageable.

Obligatory complaint: Web serials constitute a publication method, not a genre. I also abandoned A Practical Guide to Evil after skimming the first two books and seeing nothing that interested me, but I've enjoyed many other web serials, including Mother of Learning. See also The Three Musketeers and its sequels, which originated as non-web serials.

It's technically a publication method, but it also becomes a genre by coevolving with its target audience.

See also The Three Musketeers and its sequels, which originated as non-web serials.

As always, I feel a need to advertise the excellent Sienkiewicz Trilogy, which was also originally serialized in a newspaper.

For mother of learning, FWIW I enjoyed the audiobook.

Are web serials for people that read a lot and like reading the same thing?

I remember very well the discussions of procedurally generated game (civ/xcom etc) style gamers vs well-crafted short story (say, portal) style gamers. It's a mentality thing; I can understand both of them very well.

If you've found a world you like, then why not try to enjoy as much content as possible inside of it? This is especially true for cozy-fiction, where you not just not expect, but not even want complex plots and dark, irreversible developments. I think a lot of people could basically go their entire life listening, say, an hour each evening set in a cozy-fic universe that appeals to their personal taste.

The opposite, a serious story with a clear beginning and end, high stakes & drama, is of course also very appealing. But by its nature you can't just relax and get that every night; At some point it's over and you have to find the next story. Often, you'll have to pay new money, start a new story with lots of promises, spend mental capacity to learn the world, but in the end it does not deliver and you get the worst of all worlds.

So if your life is already pretty busy, your money is constrained and you just want to relax anyway in the afternoon/evening, this kind of content - web serials, ultra-long tv shows and procedurally generated games - starts to become more and more appealing.

So if your life is already pretty busy, your money is constrained and you just want to relax anyway in the afternoon/evening, this kind of content - web serials, ultra-long tv shows and procedurally generated games - starts to become more and more appealing.

I observe that this varies a lot from consumer to consumer.

I have little wasteable free time, so I choose to spend it with procedural games that I know to be up to my standards, or at least seem like they will make for something that has a chance of reliably delivering a challenge evening after evening, rather than consume one narrative game after another the quality of which might vary wildly (and is usually disappointing). But I have friends who, when they have little time, would say that they have no time to learn the rulesets of complex games, and would rather play one narrative game after another, since they're usually mechanically simple and generic.

TV can go hang though. It's all terrible.

Rome and The Sopranos are both pretty good though I'm not a fan of HBO's "Obligatory tits in every episode" MO.

Deadwood and the Wire belong on this list (above the Sopranos, at least).

The Wire's aesthetics are too repellent for me to countenance; I think I tried Deadwood but it wasn't right for me at the time. May try again. IIRC I found the swearing excessive to the point of obnoxiousness, but maybe that was some other show.

No, the excessive swearing is definitely Deadwood. I found that the language (not just the swearing, but it was part of it) set the environment for me.

No, that sounds like Deadwood lol -- if it makes you like it better, as I recall it was a considered artistic decision in that the characters are basically the underbelly of society and would in fact have been swearing all the time as a class signifier if nothing else. Period-correct swears were considered but came off as sounding quaint and silly, so they went with all-cocksucker-all-the-time.

I'm just not going to immerse myself in that.

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I'll give you Rome, but that was a long time ago.

They both were.

I'm trying to think of anything since and can't, really.

I didn't mean to discount The Sopranos; I elided it because I've never seen it. Probably never will; it's not really a topic I'm interested in.

But yes I agree with your assessment, as far as Rome is concerned. I watched Rome and was done with TV. That was very much peak television and I entirely quit the medium since.

I'll say in favor of The Sopranos that's it's a fairly meta treatment of the genre. It's not The Godfather or Wise Guys; it's people living in (1999) modern era who (explicitly) grew up watching that stuff but find themselves in a very different world where the old ways aren't working any more. A major thread is the main-character mob boss going to his therapist. Much more interesting.

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I remember very well the discussions of procedurally generated game (civ/xcom etc) style gamers vs well-crafted short story (say, portal) style gamers. It's a mentality thing; I can understand both of them very well.

I can understand this for games (I have 450+ hours in CK2, 250+ hours in HoI4, 1100+ hours in EU4 and 300+ hours in EU5, God knows how many hours in pre-Steam Dwarf Fortress, in TTDPatch and a couple of MUDs), but overlong TV shows and books fill me with dread. I guess the difference is that in a game it's me puttering about, while in a show I have to watch someone else waste my time.

Of all the web serials I've read, I don't think even one approached War and Peace in terms of production value per chapter, for what it's worth. Then again, I didn't like War and Peace and liked most of the web serials. Maybe I'm giving Tolstoy too much credit, the joke goes he was paid by the word.

I didn't finish PGtE either, felt too sloggy. Mother of Learning I liked, even though the prose is obviously second-language English (thankfully not as bad as Reverend Insanity).

Web serials are, I suppose, for the same people who like TV shows over movies. They like the setting, might as well watch the events unfold for 60 hours (12 books) instead of 2 hours (1 book) where all the scenes and character interplay would be necessarily compressed.

(Funny enough I dislike TV shows, primarily because they consume my time at a fixed rate. A web serial I can just readingspeedmaxx.)

I didn't finish PGtE either, felt too sloggy. Mother of Learning I liked, even though the prose is obviously second-language English (thankfully not as bad as Reverend Insanity).

I am mostly fine with its somewhat irregular English, but this phrase in the first chapter made me stop: "a fact made obvious by the fact". Yeah.

I think a TV show that goes for just one, or a couple of seasons is the perfect size. Long enough to avoid shortcuts necessary to fit the plot into a couple of hours, but not too long to start accruing unnecessary padding.

Limited series like Shogun and North and South are almost always better than regular TV shows which have 22 episodes per season and an explicit goal of staying on the air as long as possible.

Something interesting happened to anime. In the 1990s, most animes were double cours, 24-26 episodes. These days the standard is a single cour, 12-13 episodes, then maybe a second cour a few years later if your are lucky. On the one hand, this means a lot of stories are never fully adapted and the anime ends up being an advertisement for the manga or light novels. On the other hand, when an anime does manage to adapt a whole story into a single cour, the results are great; all the filler is stripped away and the story consists of only the essentials.

Haven't you enjoyed any sit com, procedural, or other long form fiction where it mostly consists of "monster of the week" with the meta progression mostly being getting to know the characters a bit better?

I have, but I haven't enjoyed one for maybe a decade. Since my kid was born, I'd guess.

Started the Young Wizards series. Mostly through the first book.... it's ok. Don't love it.

The Young Wizards series never grabbed me, but I loved the spinoff set in the same world, The Book of Night with Moon.

I'll absolutely second The Book of Night With Moon. Incredibly strong motif work, tight plotting, amazing characterization.

Does it stand on its own?

Reasonably well. It does spoil the second and third Young Wizards books, but it's just a 'the same characters are alive' sense, and they're not important to the plot of BoNwM. The book's own sequel definitely isn't required, and it's a return to 'not bad' rather than the amazing interlocking pieces from Book Of Night With Moon.

I have not come across that hadith before, interestingly, but I have come across, in my experience, Islam having very strong taboos against making assumptions about other people. Barring the most extreme circumstances, it is not for you to judge another person non-Muslim, because you cannot see into their heart. It is not for you to ever say that so-and-so is going to heaven and so-and-so is going to hell, because you cannot know the condition of their soul, and their final fate rests in God's hands only.

This is one of the places where Islam is, I would hazard, closer to Protestantism than it is to Catholicism. There are some places it seems to have more kinship with Catholicism (the emphasis on law, community practice, etc.), but it shares with many strains of Protestantism a deep reticence to make definitive judgements about matters that properly belong to God.

It's not that judgements can never be made. There is a procedure for declaring someone takfir. But it is truly the nuclear option and there is, traditionally at least, an extreme reluctance to use it. (Some more radical groups in the 20th century have gotten more willing to; I take that as a negative development.)

Barring the most extreme circumstances, it is not for you to judge another person non-Muslim, because you cannot see into their heart. It is not for you to ever say that so-and-so is going to heaven and so-and-so is going to hell, because you cannot know the condition of their soul, and their final fate rests in God's hands only.

This is the official stance of Catholics as well. We know all people are saved through the Catholic Church, but we cannot judge if someone isn't a mystical member of the Catholic Church or not. We can tell you what makes up the matter of a grave sin, but we cannot tell you if any individual person has actually committed that sin which requires full knowledge and their own volition. We do not affirm that any specific person is in Hell or damned.

You do, however, affirm that specific people are saved. Canonisation, for instance, involves making the formal judgement that the person canonised is in Heaven.

In this world, at least, I think Catholicism tends to be more confident than Protestantism in making clear pronouncements about whether a person is currently in a state of grace or a state of sin. The sacramental economy is visible in Catholicism, whereas I think Protestants tend to emphasise the invisible church more.

Catholics have 0 confidence that any given person is in a state of mortal sin. I see people ask priests all the time if something was a mortal sin and they say something like, "that is grave matter but I cannot tell you if you committed a mortal sin. You need to tell me, what did you know at the time? Was there any cohersion, were you in a good state of mind..."

I think Catholics are very confident in their ability to guide people in examining their own consciences, but not in their ability to judge others.

And case in point with Saints, we don't cannonize saints on the strenth of how they appear on the outside but only after a confirmation from God in the form of an attributes miracle.

You've inserted the word 'mortal' there. Mortal sin, in Catholic theology, has three elements - it must concern a grave matter, it must be committed with full knowledge, and it must be committed with deliberate consent.

The grave matter can be determined objectively and externally. Knowledge and consent are where grey areas emerge, and is it is technically impossible to fully see into someone else's head, we thus cannot determine mortal sin with total reliability. Knowledge is the easier fork; for many mortal sins, e.g. murder, it is practically inconceivable that the sinner not know that the act is wrong. Consent is the trickiest, because consent can be made somewhat less than full by passions, addictions, mental disorders, or any other frailty. It is impossible to fully rule out the possibility of some such frailty.

This is thus the usual justification for hope in the situation of people who've committed suicide. Suicide is in theory a mortal sin - it concerns a grave matter, as it is murder, most Catholics can be reliably assumed to know why self-murder is wrong, and since suicide involves making a choice to kill yourself, consent seems pretty easy to observe. That was why for a while the standard line was that all suicide victims go straight to Hell. Nowadays, however, I think the line is that suicide in itself suggests that there was some sort of mitigating factor like a mental disorder.

In any case, I did not say mortal sin. I think the terminology appropriate to what I'm saying would be 'grave sin', which only requires the first of the three points of the mortal sin trident. Dying with unrepented grave sin does not necessarily mean you are damned, but grave sin is discernible from the outside, and Catholicism has various procedures for identifying and repenting of grave sin, and participation in various rites of the church (most notably the Eucharist) is contingent upon doing so.

Thus, for instance, Catholics do stress sometimes about who is or is not permitted to partake of communion, whereas in my experience the Protestant line is usually "examine your own conscience, and then decide" (cf. 1 Cor 11:28).

I think in Catholicism there is a kind of external economy of grace that the believer participates in. The Catholic Church is much more willing to list and define the parts of this economy, and state their implications for one's eternal welfare - in that sense I'd argue that Catholicism is, intentionally, a more legible religion than Protestantism. There are senses in which I'd say that Judaism and Islam are both even more legible than Catholicism, though I think it depends on the issue a little. Thus in this case, with both Muslims and Protestants being, I think, more reluctant to make definite statements about the saved than Catholics. Catholics don't make pronouncements recklessly or willy-nilly, but as you say, there are circumstances where they will definitively say that such-and-such is in Heaven.

Generally speaking you are correct in the specific points you make, but I think you're not really contradicting me in terms of the big picture.

You've inserted the word 'mortal' there.

Because you contrasted "State of Grace" vs "State of Sin." A person who has committed a venial sin is still in the state of grace. To contrast the State of Grace with a State of Sin I have to add the word "mortal" in there.

Catholic laity sometimes bay for this politician or that celebrity to be refused communion because of what looks like a public sin. You will note that these calls are almost never answered by the leadership. Even excommunication is not The End - a few people who were excommunicated are officially recognized saints!

Are you telling me that Protestants don't believe they can even tell what constitutes a sin or not, even when examining their own consciences?

I admit what was going through my mind when I wrote that, as a mental example of a good Protestant response to that question, was Joan of Arc's answer to the question of whether she was in a state of grace - if I am not, may God put me there; if I am, may God so keep me. Since that we cannot ourselves know whether we are, we should try to adopt the attitude that Joan did. In a sense it does not matter, because our obligation to always continue to put our trust in God and turn back to him is unchanged.

In any case, I'm certainly not saying that Protestants don't know what sins are. What I'm saying is that I think for Catholics the economy of grace is considered somewhat more visible than it is for Protestants. This is not about whether or not such-and-such thing is sinful, but rather about, with our limited human self-knowledge, estimating our own places in the larger economy of salvation.

From my perspective, the biggest difference is Catholics have the Sacrament of Reconciliation, which provides definitive ways to know a sin has been forgiven. Whereas Protestants have to hope they've been forgiven, and that ambiguity doesn't seem like a positive to me.

But to a Catholic, knowing that a specific sin has been forgiven does not equate to knowledege that one has sanctifying grace. Instead:

“Since it belongs to the supernatural order, grace escapes our experience and cannot be known except by faith. We cannot therefore rely on our feelings or our works to conclude that we are justified and saved” (CCC 2005).

“no one can know with a certainty of faith, which cannot be subject to mistake, that he has obtained the grace of God” (The Council of Trent, Session 6, Chapter IX).

We can have very good reason to believe we are in a state of grace, and this belief is a requirement to receive communion worthily. We can't know we are with unmistakable divine faith. We can be mistaken about it.

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Judas has to be an exception, right? “Woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.”

That is a topic of massive debate among Catholics. There is the "Dare we hope?" camp that says we should hope that any given individual is saved, and yes that includes Judas. And there is the camp that says "Jesus wouldn't have said that unless Judas was going to Hell."

See the "What about Judas?" question here: https://www.wordonfire.org/hope/

Indeed, the longest section of the book (almost a third, though the book itself is relatively short at 166 pages) is dedicated to backbiting and gossip, particularly about others' faults or what they would not want said about them. Muhammad apparently described backbiting as the metaphorical equivalent of devouring the flesh of your brother.

The corrupt may conceivably be truthful in his report, but it is not allowable for you to believe him.

And one of them said, "If what a gossiper conveys to you is true, it means that he is bold enough to vilify you to your face, in which case the one from whom he conveyed it is more deserving of your clemency, because he did not vilify you to your face."

Among the consequences of having wicked suppositions about people is spying. This is because the heart is not satisfied with just supposition—it seeks verification and so is occupied with spying, and this is also forbidden, as God says: And do not spy [Q. 49:12]

As often is the case, there is an attempt to delineate the terms which resembles legal reasoning, and a focus on harms and benefits. I found this definition rather striking:

Slander amounts to gossip unless it is conveyed to someone who is feared, then it is called "slander." The Prophet said, "The one who slanders one people to another people is like someone without guidance..."

I'm sure that the choice of the word "slander" may be subject to the nuances of translation. Nevertheless I believe the meaning behind this is found in the following:

Hammad b. Salama said, A man sold a slave and said to the buyer, "He has no defects except gossiping." The man said, "I accept him." So he bought the slave and after a few days with him the slave said to the man's wife, "Your husband does not love you. He plans to take a concubine. If you take a razor and while he is asleep cut some hair from the top of his head, I can use it in magic that will return his love to you." Following that, he spoke to the husband and said, "Your wife has taken a lover and wants to kill you. Pretend to her that you are sleeping so that you can find out for yourself." So he pretended to be asleep and his wife approached him with a razor to cut some hair, but he thought she wanted to kill him, so he jumped up and killed her instead. After this, the wife’s family came and killed the husband, and a feud arose between the two tribes that went on for years.

In other words, the basic intent behind all of this is the avoidance of such terrible harms up to and including war.

That's not gossiping, though? Gossiping is the careless sharing of (usually slanderous) rumours, with little concern to their accuracy. What the slave is doing here is conscious, malicious trickery.

As often is the case, there is an attempt to delineate the terms which resembles legal reasoning, and a focus on harms and benefits.

Islam is certainly a religion of law to a much greater degree than Christianity. A common Islamic criticism of Christianity is that it is a regression; it has not transcended the need for law and replaced with grace, but rather by abandoning law it has removed the possibility of grace.

One consequence is that you find that legal reasoning occupies a much higher place in Islam, and abstract theology a much lower place. There is theology in Islam, but it's fair to say that fiqh occupies a higher place; much the same way that canon lawyers exist in Christianity, but are more peripheral. If you think about the major schisms in Christianity, they are mostly about what is permissible to believe, whereas the divides in Islam tend to be more legal or even political in nature.

This is a tendency and not absolute. There are theological differences in Islam - for instance, a noticeable difference between Sunni and Shia is over the question of whether God should be wholly identified with his attributes. Some Islamic thinkers have argued (e.g. here) that the Qur'an simply does not have a theology, but rather has an 'ergatology', a doctrine of works. I think that's going a bit too far myself, and the Qur'an does have a theology, but it is true that the Qur'an is primarily concerned about how to live well.

More than halfway through Eliza Clark's Penance. In some ways it's a frustrating book to read. When Clark is describing the social dynamics of teenaged girls in secondary school (the sniping, the passive-aggression, the jokes that aren't really jokes, the abandoning of one friend as soon as a better one comes along), she's in her element, and I can't put it down. It doesn't just feel "true to life": it makes me literally feel like I'm back in secondary school, like these are girls I personally went to school with. The period detail is also spot on, with pitch-perfect descriptions of pink clamshell Motorolas, or sneaking bottles of blue WKD into a house party. Anyone who was a teenager in Ireland or the UK in the period 2005-15 would read this and feel a shock of recognition.

It's everything else that doesn't work. I imagine Clark was worried about getting pegged as a YA novelist (even though this novel, despite its primarily adolescent cast of characters, is not suitable for teenagers), so she pads out the novel with digressions about the main characters' parents, the backstory of the town itself, the socio-political context in which the murder occurred. In these chapters, Clark sounds hesitant and unsure of herself, and rightfully so. While the chapters written from the girls' perspectives are confident enough not to lead the reader by the hand, these other chapters are anything but: far more telling than showing, lots of underlining for emphasis. Worst of all, they compromise the novel's verisimilitude: while the teenaged girls feel like people I've personally met, their parents are two-dimensional at best. The worst offender in this regard is the father of one of the guilty girls, a stock caricature of a Telegraph-reading, UKIP-voting blowhard with delusions of grandeur, who immediately rushes to the defense of a friend of his (a thinly-veiled stand-in for Jimmy Savile) when he's accused of pederasty.

I predict that when I finish the novel (which I fully intend to), I'll come away thinking it could have lost a hundred pages without compromising any of its themes or effect. Clark would have been wise to stay within her comfort zone for the sophomore effort.

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