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Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 17, 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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Controversy around the inspiration for its most well-known story aside, I received Kristen Roupenian's collection You Know You Want This a few Christmases ago and enjoyed it quite a lot. Every story is short enough to be read in one sitting, her spare, terse style means that the stories never drag, and there were several stories I enjoyed quite a lot and none that I actively disliked. The stories are "dark" in the sense that they deal frankly with BDSM and weird sexual fetishes, but they're more like campfire stories or high-class /r/nosleep posts (made explicit in one story which veers into outright supernatural horror) - there's nothing here that's grounded or realistic enough to be truly disturbing or unsettling. As an understated slice-of-life examination of modern dating culture which is never really trying to shock or scare the reader, "Cat Person" is actually the outlier here.