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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   5876 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 21, 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.

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 still on Delany's Babel-17. It's definitely on the too-weird side, but Rydra Wong is a fantastic protagonist with the apparent ability to read people like a book.

Paper I happen to be reading: Elias (1956). Problems of Involvement and Detachment. My impression of the social sciences has undergone a rehabilitation ever since I learned that Comte coined "sociology."

I just finished The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell, the second book of his Saxon Stories series of historical fiction. These are the basis for The Last Kingdom TV series from the BBC and later Netflix, and chronicle the life of a warrior during the Viking incursions in 10th and 11th century England. The fictional protagonist is wonderfully woven into real historical events, and the writing has excellent pacing. Cornwell also wrote the Sharpe novels which were made into a popular BBC program in the '90s. I'd highly recommend the books and Netflix series to anyone with an interest in the time period, as I often find myself motivated to research the historical events after reading them in such a compelling narrative.

Finished Greg Evan’s Permutation City and Arrow of Time series. The former was incredible world building, the latter was cool but went a little too hard into the fake physics for my taste.

Like all Egan novels the characters are basically blank screens to project cool physics ideas on.

Finally read and almost finished Louise Perry's Case Against the Sexual Revolution after seeing her good showing in a debate with Aella., who...didn't come off well in comparison.

It's a pretty standard critique of BDSM, prostitution, porn and so on with some criticism of liberal feminism's assumptions to help ground it on firmer ground.

Really, its only value was seeing where a feminist thinks other feminists and normies are, since those are who she's writing to - if you've done a bare amount of reading in evopsych, TRP or critics of liberalism like Deneen it's all banal. And where she thinks we are is still arguing over blank slateism and needing to tell her peers that things like evopsych and parental investment theory aren't inherently sexist. Awesome.

I also got Christine Emba's book in a bulk buy and now I'm actually dreading it.

Thresholder by Alexander Wales. It's extremely meh compared to my favorite work by him, Worth The Candle, which is about as close to a 10/10 as it gets.

To put it as simply as possible, a normal ish dude gets isekai'd, becomes Iron Man before the plot commences, and then gets sequentially thrown into new worlds where he needs to face off against an ideologically opposed opponent to progress on.

I have a soft spot for the better class of Xianxia, so I just started Reverend Insanity, a rather highly rated one. Shame the genre as a whole is rather trash, but I did find a few good ones like 40 Millenniums of Cultivation. Your brain gets used to the weird translation quite quickly, and I'm honestly surprised that more of them don't rely on GPT-4 for translation these days, though given how fucking longwinded some can be, it might cause bankruptcy haha.

Which would you recommend most highly?

If you're looking for more conventional cultivation stories, Forge of Destiny's my favorite westernized one so far.

Is it Finished?

Volume 1, the first 209 chapters, is complete, and stands pretty reasonably on its own. Volume 2's got a little over three hundred chapters in, but still in progress.

Xianxia? 40MOC by far.

Contrary to the name, it has only minimal similarity to Warhammer 40k and you don't need to know anything about it to enjoy it.

The scope is truly insane, and the author manages to keep the stakes high across wildly ridiculous scales. The characters aren't particularly Xianxia tropey, and the exploration of different styles of government and conflict in varying shades of gray is great.

But most importantly, it's gut bustingly funny, I haven't laughed that consistently at anything since, and it even unironically teared me up multiple times.

Look for it on Boxnovel, you can read it for free and with minimal hassle.

Is this one finished yet? I can never tell from a quick Google for xianxia.

It is. I had to abandon my read through because the version I was reading hadn't been translated further, but a while later I did see a fully finished version.

I'm just finishing John C. Wright's Count to a Trillion and just bought the other five books. Really looking forward to seeing where he takes these characters. So far the first book has been real easy reading, just a good sci-fi romp. Really glad there are another 5 books I can plow through, they've been incredible for enjoying a few cups of coffee in the morning before work. I've also got a ton of shelved reading I need to get through, my reading buddy has been hounding me on picking up some of his favorites from his reading list this year.

I really liked his Awake in the Nightlands and City Beyond Time (short stories).

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