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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   301 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 11, 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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What are some products that are a really good deal or overly expensive?

Good deal:

Fairlife Nutrition Plan, 30g Protein Shake. This is mostly just milk that's been filtered. It has 150 calories and 30 grams of protein. It costs like $2 a pop at costco. Tastes like milk. No crazy amount of additives. I'm just not gonna mess with protein powder so this is an easy way to get closer to my macro goals.

Good product, way too expensive:

Those 3M command strips for hanging pictures. They're somehow like $1 a piece when it feels like they should be 10 cents. It's just velcro and tape.

So, what are you reading?

I'm attempting Ahmed's Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities, so far a seemingly interesting open access find, interesting because it seems critical of common names in anti-colonial thought, who he thinks have adopted colonial forms of thinking in philology.

The philological revolution against anciens régimes in both East and West turned immediately, in other words, into the rule of this historical consciousness, which was consequently identified with human liberation. Philology still possesses that identity in Erich Auerbach’s and Edward Said’s dialectically opposed concepts of comparatism. Colonialism’s first trick is to make language appear to be the colonizer’s possession. Its second trick, per Jacques Derrida, is the idea of “liberation,” which internalizes the colonizer’s concept of language within the colonized. As the chapters that follow demonstrate, this colonial trick explains phenomena as apparently disparate and politically opposed as language-based racism, Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu nationalism, and the global discourses of environmentalism and indigeneity, all of which descend from colonial philology.

Read 10 Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker. An interesting critical review of several "foundational" books on modern liberal culture. Of course, not without bias, as one might have guessed from the title, and one can debate the selection until blue in the face, but leaving that aside, the author raises some interesting points. Of course, blaming a handful of books in all the troubles of humanity is a bit too harsh, in my opinion, but if you take them not only as books but as expressions of the dominating thought patterns and cultural phenomena, then I think the author has a good ground to stand on.

Finishing that, I've switched to a different area and started Monster Hunters International. Pretty fun so far, though I think I like Dresden's writing a bit better. Will report more when I finish it.

Maybe 80% of the way through The Story of the Lost Child. The, uh, titular event has occurred, but there's still more than a hundred pages left.

The homily at mass this morning began with a metaphor to the crac des chevalier, a crusader era fortress which successfully repelled assaults by artillery and aircraft having forces in the Syrian civil war. This got me thinking- what’s the longest continuous use of a not-uprgraded/remodeled fortress in active military service(to rule out things like the kremlin and Tower of London which are old fortresses used today for non-combat purposes)? I’m doubting the crac des chevalier is it.

i think there were some castles in WWII - like one case where Wehrmacht allied with pows against SS, but since many of the castles in Germany were relatively modern it is hard to tell.

I don't know when the relevant portion of the wall was built, but the Great Wall of China was used as a defensive fortification as recently as 1933.

Buried in the culture war thread, there has been some discussion about differences between male and female writers, and how one might recognize the gender of a writer without knowing from the name.

Rowling supposedly writes all her male characters like they are girls. Draco is a bully in a mean girl fashion, while Harry falls in and out of love in a manner more similar to women than men. Another pointed out that male stories tend to converge on one point, whereas those written by women tend to move in many different directions. The "men writing women" tropes are also often telltale sign of author's gender.

I figured it would be fun to ask the rest here: Do you see different trends in how men and women write, and do you believe you can reliably tell the gender of a writer from their works alone?

I write some genre fiction under a female pen name. One thing my partner constantly has to point out is that I focus entirely too much on events that are happening, rather than how the characters in the story feel about those events. There are a handful of things related to voice and psychology that also come up, but that's the big one.

Men tend to be interested in abstract systems, while women tend to be interested in people and interpersonal relationships. This is reflected in the kind of genres of fiction that the two sexes read and write (men tend to favour thrillers, crime novels and hard SF, while women tend to favour romance novels, family dramas and literary depictions of psychological interiority). Even within writers working in the same nominal genre, the people-vs-things distinction is readily evident: fantasy novels written by men tend to be high fantasy, D&D-adjacent novels which place a lot of emphasis on the rules and mechanics of magic systems, or pseudo-historical fiction examining the political machinations of warring tribes or factions; while fantasy novels written by women are often narrower in scope, focusing on interpersonal relationships in a fantasy setting (e.g. the "romantasy" genre). The people-vs-things distinction is apparent not just at the macro level, in terms of plots and genres, but also at the micro level. I imagine if one were to perform an analysis on books written by men vs. women, the latter category would feature a much higher proportion of sentences about the relationships between characters or a character's interior psychological state when compared to the former category, even when controlling for genre.

Needless to say, there are exceptions: one of the most popular romance novelists ever (Nicholas Sparks) is a man, while the most commercially successful novelist ever is a woman (Agatha Christie) best-known for her work in a mechanics-focused genre more commonly associated with male writers. But on the whole, women tend to write (and read) novels which are focused on interpersonal relationships and psychological interiority, while men tend to write (and read) novels which are focused on abstract rule-based systems.

Accordingly, I daresay that if I was presented with a thousand words of prose by a novelist with whose work I was erstwhile unfamiliar, I would be able to guess their sex significantly better than chance. Maybe I'll create a survey.

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