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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."

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?

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.

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