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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3996 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 23, 2023

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.

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Where's the what are you reading guy? What are you reading?

I picked up some random book lying around. It’s Magician: Master by Raymond Feist, and I am not impressed. I don’t read much fantasy though.

Style is terrible, Dialogue sucks, ideas are uninteresting, and this latest plot point is preposterous:

The hero was a slave in a foreign society, but he is recognized as a powerful magic user, brainwashed and trained into an order of magicians. But he secretly still feels loyalty to his old world and their superior ways.

He goes to the king’s arena, and at the sight of the gladatorial games taking place, he loses his shit, threatens the king, magically annihilates hundreds of spectators, while all the other magicians can do nothing to stop him. Then half the foreign characters, who were laughing at the gladiators a second ago, congratulate him on his moral fortitude, and he fucks off back to his old world.

Why is he like 1000 times stronger than other magicians? Why didn’t he just take over the kingdom and end slavery, which he has painful personal experience with, instead of these games? Why is no one appalled at the loss of life? Why is everyone suddenly on a completely different moral wawelength?

I first heard about Feist from the Digital Antiquarian’s comments on Betrayal at Krondor. Since then I keep seeing his books in used bookstores. They’ve always looked a bit rough for me, despite my generally high tolerance for fantasy bullshit.

Riftwar is pretty tropey fantasy, there’s better stuff out there. I’ll lyk if I enjoy Second Apocalypse enough to recommend it. Scott is a huge fan iirc.

Dipping into Montaigne's essays. I definitely won't read the entire ~2500 pages, and I'm not getting much out of it, but I'll plod through a few more before I switch for something lower brow.

I’m reading Healing Back Pain by John Sarno. It’s an instant classic.

In keeping with the ongoing Giant Robot theme, I've introduced/started re-reading Micheal Stackpole's Battletech books with the kids starting with the Warrior Trilogy. This being the price I pay for letting them watch 8th MS Team and other UC Gundam shows.

Aside from that I've been reading Calculus made easy by Silvanus Thompson, and a history of ground based nuclear deterrence (IE ICBMs) by Gladstone and Williams.

Yo, recommend me some Giant Robot Lit, I love that shit.

Assuming I've read everything BattleTech and 40k, is there anything else you liked?

I was trying to figure out how Calculus Made Easy would be about ICBMs…

Ernst Junger's 'On The Marble Cliffs', some really beautiful writing.

Been kind of mid-book recently. I've spent some time this week on Intelligence, Race, and Genetics - an interview-format book by journalist Frank Miele, interviewing Arthur Jensen. Jensen is perhaps the best-known advocate of the concept of the heritability of IQ. He comes off in this book as a man who was very sincerely concerned with finding the truth, a scientist in the realest sense. I find this book to be a good introduction to his ideas, perhaps an easier read than The G Factor.

Also been casually, slowly reading Maupassant's Bel Ami. Man. I wish I lived in the Belle Epoque. I'm sure I'd die of tuberculosis but it would be fun while it lasted.

Still trying Historical Construction of National Consciousness, but it's putting me to sleep. Content is good but the style is dense.

Looking at Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. It starts with a Socratic dialogue where the grasshopper in the grasshopper-and-ant story is a leader of a philosophical school who leaves behind a puzzling dream for his followers when he dies. It is said to be both an influential and a sometimes overlooked book on game studies (not game theory, more like Homo Ludens).

Read the first five books of Mike Hockney’s The God Game series and started on R. Scott Bakker’s Second Apocalypse series.

The God Game is a fascinating but nutty and somewhat repetitive nonfic books that present a theory of everything based on Leibniz’s monadology. In fact, the author(s) claim to be Illuminati members who have access to Leibniz’s actual beliefs on monadology that he Christianized slightly when he published. Whether or not you believe this should be mostly irrelevant to your enjoyment of the series I think. It’s a good overview of the history of ideas across philosophy, physics, and mathematics. The basic theory they present is a dual-aspect monist idealism where numbers alone have a real ontological status. Monads are basically zeros that contain infinities within them. Some are linked to animals (souls), but there are an infinite number of them. Hockney basically identifies “mind” as the realm of non-extension (0 and infinity) and “matter” as the realm of extension (all the other numbers including imaginary numbers). Space is associated with the real numbers and time with the imaginary ones. Presents a teleology that’s nearly identical to Hegel’s The series is not very well-organized overall but most of the books so far stick with a theme (except for the 2nd). You do have to get past the constant rants about “Abrahamism” and how it’s the stupidest thing humanity ever invented, but overall still really interesting and obviously written by people who have more than a surface-level understanding of the history of ideas.

I'm only 100 pages into Bakker's The Darkness That Comes Before. It has been on my list for years and I’m finally getting around to it. Fascinating world so far, and interesting exploration of determinism. Also beautiful prose that's much heavier on people's internal monologue and relatively light on description, just my taste. Might post a longer review when I finish the series, I know it's a Motte/SSC favorite.

Ahh hell yes Second Apocalypse is incredible. Make sure to appreciate my boy Kellhus.

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