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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Herzog's Citizen Knowledge. I can't say I care much for the discussions of actual events, but there are a lot of interesting references, and its position is very clearly written.
I'm also reading papers found in New Directions in the Ethics and Politics of Speech, edited by J.P. Messina (also open access). Currently, Cohen and Cohen's The Possibility and Defensibility of Nonstate "Censorship." This collection at least seems much more self-aware of censorship issues raised in recent times.
I'm at the 2100s in Reverend Insanity, that's chapters, not pages. I honestly have no clue how long it actually is, since I heard that it's technically unfinished, I've been stridently resisting the urge to peek and see how many remain. One of the many advantages of ebooks over dead tree books, which always make me feel a sense of dread when a new novel comes to an end.
And as per usual, I've been working on my own Cultivation novel The Dao of Simulation, which is significantly easier to write than my other unfinished work, which had me sticking to the very high standards of rationalist fiction as best as I could.
In Xianxia, both the reader and the author can usually switch off their brain and the former write whatever the fuck they want, knowing that the latter will read anything that's grammatically coherent (and not even necessarily that, given old machine translations).
My work is a mixture of deeply stupid humor, in-jokes, and occasional poignancy. Spoilers below, but you can look forward to charming excerpts like:
Bruh I say again, these are spoilers
Or
">What's a Chinese?" The envoy asked suspiciously.
I'm sure @2rafa will appreciate the deep-cut RSP reference if nobody else does
I'm tired of using spoiler tags
Then:
Please choose a class:
Can one forget? :
Or my personal favorite:
Bad:
Good:
Nonstandard, but useful as an illustrative tool:
I will take this opportunity to rant that I am really tired of bad English. I'm approximately 85 percent of the way through (my scraped EPUB of) Twig, and I find it extremely annoying that Wildbow—a person who has written literally millions of words—(1) makes exactly the same mistake that I explained above, (2) always uses a single hyphen followed by a space (not even a pair of hyphens!) rather than an em dash, and (3) can't tell the difference between subject and object (actual quote: "just behind Jessie and I"). At work, several of my coworkers—a pseudo-subordinate of mine (Cantonese), my boss (Vietnamese), and my boss's boss (Sri Lankan)—are ELLs who routinely verge on sending gibberish in their emails, and I have an "English tutoring" folder on my work computer to catalog the literally dozens of helpful corrections that I have emailed to the first two of them over the past six months (for which they have thanked me).
Is your issue that it's supposed to be "behind Jessie and me/myself"? I'd assume it is a deliberate archaism.
More options
Context Copy link
That's (possibly) my autocorrect being annoying, capitalizing the H in he after the use of quotes IIRC.
I'm not overly fussed about minor issues like that, if you think that's annoying, wait till you see what translated Xianxia often looks like!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link