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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2472 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 13, 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 Herzog's Citizen Knowledge. It's a good primer for knowledge debates in recent times, and the references are great.

Paper I'm reading: Hannon's Are knowledgeable voters better voters?

Started reading Wizard's First Rule. Maybe it gets better but the ~100 pages I read were pretty terrible so I put it down.

Got caught up on The Game at Carousel, a horror movie litRPG. It's truly fantastic, the sort of book that makes a part of me wish I could live in the setting (despite all the terrible stuff happening there).

Just started @self_made_human's Ex Nihilo, Nihil Supernum and The Dao of Simulation. They're pretty good! The latter didn't interest me too much--it may not quite be a typical videogame setting, but I have a very hard time caring about anything where the setting is fake/virtual--but the former is quite fun and interesting so far.

Also started reading The Windup Girl. It was well-written and interesting but the rape scene was much too much for me, so guess I'm never finishing that one.

Wizard’s First Rule does not, in fact, get better. You dipped out before some of the more memorable cringy bits.

Just started @self_made_human's Ex Nihilo, Nihil Supernum and The Dao of Simulation. They're pretty good!

I'm glad you liked them!

where the setting is fake/virtual--but the former is quite fun and interesting so far.

Would it cause you pain to learn that most of the books you read were fiction?

Jokes aside, I suppose we have very different metaphysics, but in that particular story, the MC faces just as much risk of oblivion as anyone IRL. The Developers are perfectly capable of reviving him on a whim, but they choose not to, since that raises the stakes and draws in more viewership. (I'd point to a parallel to God, who can trivially reincarnate anyone the moment they die, but refrains from it. In this case, he's not even guaranteed a Heaven or Hell to go to, those cost computation and energy, and the region where the story's mainframe is placed is kinda like an Ancap dream/nightmare, where pesky things like rights for baseline humans are minimal to nonexistent, making them perfect toys or NPCs.)

Of course it's a Xianxia setting, so people far up the tree can and do revive or reincarnate, but if the MC needs to, he'll have to figure out a diegetic means of achieving that, without the narrator simply hitting the respawn key!

Yeah, it's interesting. If I learned that we lived in a simulation, that wouldn't change my attitude towards life. It would be just as valuable, "real", and meaningful as I had previously thought it was. Still, reading about it in a story totally destroys any sense of stakes for me, regardless of the other details around it such as how permanent death is.

The one quasi-exception to this is qntm's Ra which handled it pretty well. MAJOR, MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD: in the end the main character is attempting to save the world from the quadrillions of simulated humans who already control the sun's power output and want still more power. There are an arbitrary number of them, they have an arbitrary amount of time to consider their next moves, and they already have control of the sun and far more power than the rest of humanity, collectively, has access to. In the minutes between their escape and the destruction of earth, she uses what's left of physical reality's sun-computer permissions to upload the entire earth. It was a fitting solution and really the only realistic one given the situation.

But yeah, for me it has nothing to do with whether death is permanent. I'm not sure I can even articulate a true reason fictional simulations don't appeal to me. They just don't. Not a criticism of your story at all.

EDIT: could we get links to not appear in spoiler text? They show up blue against the otherwise black spoiler highlight.

I'd like the spoilers to work at all, they're always open by default and I can't toggle them @ZorbaTHut.

Did you mean Wizard's First Rule, by Terry Goodkind?

If you think the first 100 pages are terrible then I doubt you'll like the rest. From my recollections reading it as a teenager, books 1 and 2 were good, and the rest were hit and miss. I still maintain that those two books are perfectly good fantasy novels in their own right.

Ultimately Goodkind has the reputation as a knock-off Robert Jordan, and I can't say I disagree with that assessment.

Yes, that's what I meant, I'll edit it.

I liked:

  • The wall, that was pretty interesting
  • Everything involving Richard's brother, who was a fairly interesting antagonist
  • The blood flies and their purpose
  • The secret book which was burnt after it was memorized

I disliked:

  • It was all super predictable
  • Richard was much too much of a blank slate to me. He seemed to basically just be "generic good guy."
  • The world overall felt tiny. It just wasn't interesting. Maybe it opens up more later.
  • Laying out explicitly the main character's whole quest right from the start, plus the main characters, all of whom are just very trope-y

I read the Wheel of Time series about 10 years ago and have been reading plenty of epic fantasy since, so maybe it's just that I read these stories in the wrong order. Certainly the prose etc. was fine, it just felt like a story I'd read many times before.

you haven't even gotten into all the weird sex stuff yet!

It was all super predictable

Well, Wizard's First Rule was 1994 and A Game of Thrones wasn't until 1996. Goodkind was definitely exploring well-trod ground. Martin gets shit these days for not finishing his series, but AGoT deserves to recognized for the sea-change that it was.

The world overall felt tiny. It just wasn't interesting. Maybe it opens up more later.

It does, starting where you quit and further in the second book. There's the wall you need to cross, and then another, and then another. Crossing these thresholds is something of a theme in these books. Willful separation in the libertarian ethos.

Laying out explicitly the main character's whole quest right from the start, plus the main characters, all of whom are just very trope-y

You will never get away from this, unfortunately. The arc of each book is pretty clearly explained early in each book. The main characters don't change much, though new allies and enemies sometimes emerge.

I read the Wheel of Time series about 10 years ago and have been reading plenty of epic fantasy since, so maybe it's just that I read these stories in the wrong order. Certainly the prose etc. was fine, it just felt like a story I'd read many times before.

Yes, Goodkind's work has not aged well. It's been done better and in more interesting ways in the 25 years since. Still, he sold a ton of books, so he was clearly delivering what some people wanted to read. I maintain that he's the poor man's Jordan, which is a backhanded compliment, but still means he writes a decent fantasy story.

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