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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1089 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 27, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up al-Katibi's The Rules of Logic, an apparently influential Arabic logic primer. The book itself is actually quite short, with the commentary by the translator taking up the majority of the pages.

It has recently been said of Peter of Spain’s Summaries of Logic, probably written in the 1230s, that no other book on logic prior to the twentieth century had such wide readership or, in consequence, did so much to shape Western ways of constructing well-formed sentences and putting them together in valid arguments. But perhaps one other logic text has had just as many readers, and as profound an impact on ways of formal discourse and argument. In the Muslim East, al-Risālah al-Shamsiyyah (literally The Epistle [on Logical Rules] for Shams al-Dīn) was written some forty years after the Summaries, by someone who was Peter’s exact contemporary: Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī (d. 675/1276). Al-Risālah al-Shamsiyyah also came to figure in the education of nearly every aspiring young scholar, and is still read in traditional schools.

Magic-school time-loop litRPG progression slop: Serpent's Coil. Twist: The protagonist of the story is, not the primary looper, but just a secondary looper who can be erased by the primary looper if he ceases to be useful.

Mildly interesting Harry Potter short story: The Subtle Science and Exact Art of Asking the Right Question

Potions is presumably based on medieval alchemy more than anything else. Slughorn's antidote lesson is even called "almost alchemical". Why shouldn't it look like it?

Besides which, the other thing that comes up a lot in fanon is tables of ingredient interactions. With the hundreds, perhaps thousands of ingredients used in various potions, those could fill whole volumes like the logarithm tables of the 1600s. But worse is having to keep track of all the interactions within a potion that might have dozens of ingredients. (Hermione's antidote in that same lesson had 52.)

But the thing is, that's not really how real-world chemistry works. In chemistry, you make one (or a few) intermediate products at each step (such as Syrup of Adoneta here), and you only have to keep track of interactions with those intermediate products, which themselves may fall into a few broad categories. That problem is still fiendishly complex (ask any pre-med student who's taken Organic Chemistry), but much more tractable, as it scales linearly rather than quadratically.

Even fics that go all-in on Snape mentoring Harry to become a potions master rarely give a reason for the brewing steps, rather seemingly pulling names of ingredients and interactions out of thin air. They rarely even address the question of why the Half-Blood Prince's canonical potions modifications work. Treating potions like real-world chemical synthesis could go a long way to resolving those questions.

TL;DR, if I had more free time and a degree in chemistry, it would be eminently possible to create a potions-centric canon rewrite every bit as rigorous and innovative as the Arithmancer-Verse was for arithmancy. But since I don't have either of those things, let this one-shot stand as a taste of what's possible.

Mildly entertaining magical-girl novella: An Uneasy Stalemate

The Bane known as Decay has watched his fellows getting slaughtered, and decided he wants no part in their fate. When he's ordered to cross the rift to Earth himself, he's willing to do anything to survive. There may be no chance of victory, but, with a little effort and a few acts very much against his nature, it might just be possible not to lose.

This is a short story, mostly following the POV of the very confused and slightly traumatised magical girls as they try to figure out what to do with their rather atypical enemy.

Mildly entertaining grimdark Madoka Magica fanfiction: Fargo DX

In the frostbitten American Midwest, ragged Magical Girls vie for territory to survive the unforgiving landscape. One such girl is Sloan Redfearn, who wastes away in no man's land after being betrayed by her best friend. Only one goal keeps her alive: Revenge.

Mildly entertaining grimdark Madoka Magica fanfiction: Fargo DX

If you didn't already know this, the same author (Bavitz) wrote "When I Win the World Ends", which is probably my #2 pokemon fanfic.

I can't say that I'm the biggest Pokémon fan. I have vague memories of watching a few third-generation anime episodes on television as a child, I caught all the Shadow Pokémon in Pokémon XD, and I've watched a fair number of gameplay videos (speedrun and competitive) on YouTube. That's the extent of my experience with the canon—enough that I probably could give correct labels to images of all the Pokémon from generations 1–3, but not many past those. I've read very little fanfiction for it, and none of that fanfiction interested me enough that I bothered to download it. The first four chapters of When I Win the World Ends do not spark much interest in me either.

(In fact, I'm not even the biggest Madoka Magica fan. IIRC, prior to reading Fargo DX, my knowledge of the magical-girl genre consisted of Sailor Nothing, Sailor Moon season 1, and scattered 4chan webms of Pretty Cure battles, in that order. It wasn't until after reading Fargo DX that I even bothered to watch Madoka Magica.)

It may help to know that When I Win the World Ends is specifically a fanfiction of competitive pokemon, inspired by the author's onetime league of legends obsession and smogon/pokemon showdown/vgc. Pokemon-as-sports-movie rather than pokemon-as-adventure-story, with all the megalomiania, pressure for victory, and strategic complexity that entails.

...of course if you already read and dismissed the first few chapters it probably just isn't for uou.

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