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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2317 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 30, 2026

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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.

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".

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.

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.

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