domain:drmanhattan16.substack.com
My recent reading queue has been a tour through various subgenres of speculative fiction, with predictably mixed results.
First, John C. Wright’s Golden Oecumene trilogy. Post-singularity fiction is a high-difficulty endeavor, usually collapsing into either utopian hand-waving or prose so baroque you cannot parse what the god-minds are even doing. Wright’s work mostly sticks the landing. It presents a surprisingly coherent model of a far-future society without shying away from its deep strangeness. I have a much longer post on this simmering in my drafts, but the short version is that it’s one of the few genuinely solid attempts I’ve seen.
Next was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history with a compelling hook: what if the Black Death was 99.9% fatal in Europe? I found it interesting, but with two confusing caveats. The author makes a strange ontological commitment from the outset: Buddhist reincarnation is literally true, and we follow a small cluster of souls through the ages. I’m still not entirely sure what work this does for the narrative that couldn’t have been achieved by other means. A more confusing structural choice is the novel’s reluctance to explore its own primary conceit. A vast, effectively empty Western continent is sitting there, yet we spend surprisingly little time with the civilizations that eventually investigate it. It feels like a missed opportunity.
Then I tried Virtuous Sons, a highly-rated web serial. A Greco-Roman take on Xianxia cultivation tropes is, on its face, a brilliant idea. And to its credit, the story executes the core translation of concepts like qi and cultivation into a classical framework with reasonable competence. The problem is that everything else is aggressively mediocre. The characters lack interiority, the prose feels unrefined, and the worldbuilding seems to operate on dream logic. This seems less an indictment of one specific author and more a reflection of the incentive structures of platforms like Royal Road. It is optimized for high-volume, low-friction content, and the market rewards this optimization with high ratings. A classic case of revealed preferences in action, and the revealed preference seems to be for slop. I could not continue.
Finally, I am now reading Through Struggle, the Stars. It’s military science fiction, and the most accurate description is that it’s aiming for the same niche as The Expanse. This story, however, operates under stricter constraints: no alien magic, and a much more rigorous adherence to the laws of physics. So far, it’s just solid, competent storytelling. No major complaints.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
An Aryan Bakery has nothing to do with Open Ideas, because there's no idea being expressed or defended.
Contrary to common belief, freedom of speech does not only apply lengthy substack articles explaining ideas in great detail, but also to symbolic acts which show support of an idea, such as flying symbols or flags, or burning them.
This is a load-bearing feature of free speech. A society where people could only academically discuss ideas but not establish common knowledge about certain ideas being popular would not be a free society.
In the Western world, the meaning of the swastika is rather well established. It is a handle attached to a certain ideology with well established ideas. I see very little difference between our baker putting the swastika in his logo and him writing a lengthy article regurgitating Mein Kampf. I mean, with the logo, I do not learn if he blames the Jews, the Left, or the Blacks for high flour prices, but I am unlikely to find that very interesting, personally.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8hr ago
Well, according to the Anchorage School District, the top 5 languages after English (for K-12 students, as of 2023) are:
- Filipino
- Hmong
- Samoan
- Spanish
- Yu'pik
Presented in alphabetical order, not ranking. Based on an older Anchorage Daily News article from 2018 (which gave numbers, but had Korean in fifth place and Yu'pik a couple rungs down), the order should be:
- Spanish
- Hmong
- Samoan
- Filipino
- Yu'pik
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8hr ago
Curiously enough, I've been reading the Old Testament.
Uh... I'm doing a lot of noticing. Like the entire story is just Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and then Joseph ingratiating themselves with wealthy and powerful people, then running off with all their shit. Possibly their daughters. Joseph really takes the cake, where he convinces the Pharaoh to tax his people exorbitantly, and then sells their grains back to them at such insane prices, they have to sell themselves into slavery to him in order to not starve. But you know, they're happy to do so. That's what the book says after all. So anyways, the next book starts with the Egyptians unjustly turning on Joseph and his clan as soon as the Pharaoh dies and they lose his protection, for some reason.
Like, bronze age morality, I get it, Odysseus is quite the scoundrel too and he's still a hero. But, uh... that is the single most Jewish origin story I could possibly imagine. Like if the most antisemitic person you'd ever heard of tried to write a story about where the Jews came from, I'm not sure he'd do it any different. And that's the first book and change of Moses.
Anyways...the bronze age, amirite?
Onystri
9hr ago
Once a week or so I come by /r/foxhole subreddit to harvest the crying and the bitching.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
9hr ago
I was horrified to see that I spent 7 hours looking at my phone yesterday.
The biggest challenge for me is finding a replacement which allows for frequent interruption without diminishing enjoyment. Memes and X threads take a seconds to consume, so if one of my many children spills a cup of milk or bumps his head I can easily put the phone down. Even smartphone games require too much unbroken engagement. I would love to read some of my many books, but I've tried and I just end up reading the same page 47 times.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
9hr ago
Interesting, I have the opposite experience with sleep trackers. Rather than feeling wracked with guilt for feeling energetic despite my low sleep score, I feel confused because unless my sleep score is >90 (Garmin) I feel at drowsy and a little sluggish.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
9hr ago
English and Chinese, then a big gap, then probably Vietnamese and Tagalog.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10hr ago
That he got shot and his reflex was to jump up and yell fight fight fight. You can't teach that.
Soteriologian
10hr ago
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the DLC, aesthetically or gameplay-wise, and even the base game's combat often felt "overdeveloped" to me. There were multiple occasions where a boss uses what is obviously a finishing move (e.g., Tree Sentinel raising his weapon and smashing it into the ground) only to PSYCH! ITS NOT ACTUALLY A FINISHER LMAO with some physically-nonsensical follow-up attack to smack you in what obviously "should" have been a punish window. Also, lots of bosses have input reads, where if you try to do anything (in particular use a potion to heal) outside of a designated punish window, they'll immediately intercept your action with a fast attack. I found this extremely crass design.
It feels like FromSoft is annoyed that good players are too good at their games, but the ways in which the developers are trying to raise the difficulty are pretty lame. Though in some sense, I do understand their frustration: Souls games have a skill window that is far smaller than most other games, in the sense that beating them as a casual is quite hard, but learning to play at a near-pro level (in the sense of doing lvl 1 challenges, no-hit challenges, etc.) is surprisingly easy. It really is too difficult to be mediocre at the game, and too easy to be good at the game.
ABigGuy4U
10hr ago
Anecdotes and rumors. The fact that it gets mentioned in both positive and negative anecdotes about him makes me think it’s true. Muhammad Ali dodged the draft too, that doesn’t mean I would want to get in a fight with him.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10hr ago
Snow flakes are not susceptible to social contagion.
An avalanche seems very similar to to a social contagion that snowflakes are susceptible to, if we're accepting metaphors in the first place.
An Aryan Bakery has nothing to do with Open Ideas, because there's no idea being expressed or defended.
"Swastikas are cool" isn't an idea? "I stand with the people who use the Swastika as a symbol" isn't an idea? Where would you get the idea that abstract symbols aren't routinely freighted with meaning by humans, and thus used to communicate ideas?
The fact that you believe an Aryan Bakery has anything to do with actual freedom of speech shows the need for Open Ideas.
How so? what's the argument?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
10hr ago
Spanish is #2 by far. #3 is hard to say, but maybe Korean? I see Korean writing on some businesses and churches in my part of town, but can't think of any other foreign languages I see while out and about.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11hr ago
Finished Nancy McWilliams Psychoanalytic Diagosis. Interesting and understandable for a layman. Provided me with a good deal of clarification to the terminology, the development and the current practice of psychoanalysis, which in turn reveals that the way that terminology is used in the public sphere is even worse than I already suspected.
Now starting Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm. I found this after reading a comment at Reddit that described the 2010s as "the golden age of travelling". That struck me as wrong, I'm not keen on travelling but I would imagine the golden age of travelling to be somewhere around the time that the Lonely Planet books were being written, and maybe the first generation of travellers who were inspired by those books, ie. before everyone went to the same places via the same routes to do the same things with the same people who'd all got the same ideas from the same books (at this point even I've heard about Khao San Road and I've never entertained any thoughts of going there). People used to drive or even hitchhike across the continents to reach Aghanistan and Nepal where they would meet and interact with Afghanis and Nepalese. Then they'd travel back with a van stuffed full of trade goods (and contraband). Now they stack discounts they heard about online to get a cheap flight direct to BackpackerVille and come back with credit card debt, and still call it "travelling" when it seems to me more like a hipster variety of basic tourism. That got me looking into the history of the Lonely Planets books and I came across DTWGTH. The blurb for the book bills it as a behind-the-scenes expose of the production of the kind of travel writing that contributed to the Loney Planet series, albeit it was written in 2007.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11hr ago
Have you seen, like, any American cop movie? "Cowboy detective who doesn't play by the rules" has been done to the point of parody, and is almost always portrayed positively.
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
I think the idea is moreso that although they fantasize themselves to be radicals fighting the Man, they will eventually realize that Big Woke is the Man and, far from being countercultural rebels, they're fighting to preserve the current institutions and balance of power.
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
How is this different from simply "woke"? You cite it as just one trait, but everything else on your list is a trait I would expect to be implicit in describing someone as "woke".
Imaginary_Knowledge
11hr ago
Thanks. Could be worse: you could be South Korean government IT.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
Right I don’t expect anyone to check census data. What are the common not-majority languages near you?
Onystri
12hr ago
It just feels like an excuse for FromSoftware to develop crazy anime-jumping-all-across-the-arena bosses with crazy moves. "Oh no, the player has so many bullshit combinations now, we need to create more bullshit bosses to combat this." And that way we have dlc with bosses dancing all over the floor, goddamn sunflower. The worst part of course is that even with the stakes of Marika you will spend 2 minutes buffing yourself and after a certain point I started to despise this cycle.
Finished Nell Zink's Doxology on Friday.
Easily the most consistently annoyed I've felt reading a book this year. Have you ever been at a standup comedy gig and the comedian tells a joke which doesn't land, and there's just this awkward silence? Doxology is that in literary form. There were so many attempts at humour which simply fell flat. While reading it, I found myself constantly rolling my eyes at some of the really lame attempts at humour. Zink seems incredibly smug and pleased with herself for some reason beyond my capacity to divine — her attempts at humour are neither funny nor even clever enough that she gets brownie points for being obscurantist. For some reason, I pictured Zink making this expression the entire time she was sitting in front of her computer typing. There's one point where one of the characters tells her husband that she's looking for a collaborator (i.e. in a business startup), and her husband "quips" back something like "You mean you're going to shave my head?" And then the narration adds a parenthetical literally explaining the joke, that the husband was referring to the French women who dated Wehrmacht soldiers during the occupation. I'm not saying the joke would have been funny to begin with, but explaining it didn't help any and just made me feel annoyed in addition to not laughing.
Awhile back, someone on this forum complained that, when writing fiction, Scott suffers from "MCU disease", in which he's unable to stop himself from cracking jokes even when it's inappropriate, thereby puncturing the dramatic tension. I agree that this is a bad strategy, and the chapters in Unsong where he's able to restrain himself are some of the strongest, showing that he's perfectly capable of generating real dramatic tension and power when he wants to. But in Scott's defense, at least a lot of his jokes actually work. The only thing worse than disrupting the tension of a dramatic scene with an actually clever joke is disrupting with a joke which isn't funny and which just annoys the reader.
Nell Zink is attempting an ambitious family drama charting three generations of a family. But with half of an exception, all of the characters (regardless of age, sex, which state they grew up in, which state they live in, their political affiliations, profession, education etc.) sound exactly the same. If one of the characters makes a reference to some obscure hardcore punk musician from the 1980s, the other characters will always understand without any explanation required. In written fiction, dialogue is the primary means of making characters feel like distinct entities, and Zink completely fucking whiffs it. Dialogues in this book sound like two chatbots with identical training data talking to one another. Because none of the characters feel like real people, all of the melodramatic soapy efforts at generating emotional torque (corporal punishment! sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll! 9/11! death by OD! family reconciliation! May-December romance! infidelity! indeterminate paternity!) go nowhere. A character must feel real before we can feel affected by their travails, and none of these do, because they're a league of interchangeable sock puppets.
And my God, the politics. This is some of the most sophomoric, Boomerlib, TDS-brained "political commentary" I've ever read. In the final third of the book or so, it's 2016, immediately prior to the election, and one of the characters decides to become a political activist travelling to various purple states canvassing for Jill Stein. Of course Trump gets elected and all of the characters are devastated. Zink is not even the least bit interested in honest speculation as to the nature of Trump's appeal: in her view, it does really seem to boil down to "Trump is evil and full of hate, and half of America voted for him because they're so hateful and evil". In Pennsylvania, immediately after the results are announced, the narration observes a man driving around in a pickup truck and speculates that he's "probably looking for some black people to shoot", a goal in which he's bound to be frustrated because Pennsylvania is 98% white. Oh, please.
In a particularly outrageous act of historical revisionism, Zink even has the nerve to more or less directly argue the reason Hillary lost was because her campaign was too positive. One of the characters is a political campaign advisor who strongly encourages the DNC to go hard on attacking Trump sooner rather than later, but they ignore his advice in favour of a campaign founded on hope and optimism. "When they go low, we go high" etc. The clear implication is that if the DNC had followed this character's advice, Hillary would have won. With respect, Zink — are you fucking kidding me? Have you completely forgotten about the basket of deplorables? The "grab them by the pussy" tape? "America's Bully"? "Mirrors"? I don't know how anyone could possibly claim in all seriousness that the reason Hillary lost was because she was too positive and hopeful, and didn't spend enough time attacking her opponent. This kind of self-serving cope might be excusable if Zink was Hillary's campaign advisor trying to keep her career afloat after a shocking upset — but no, there's nothing for Zink in this, this seems to be what she really believes. (For clarity: I'm not saying I found the book annoying only because of its politics. The plot arc involving the 2016 election only appears in the final ~third of the book or so, and my goodwill had been more or less exhausted well before that point.)
I donated it to a charity shop this afternoon. Probably my fastest ever turnaround time between finishing a book and disposing of it. Next up is SE Hinton's The Outsiders.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
12hr ago
Do you have a second example? I keep seeing just that one.
Oh, I'm not for a second saying that they can't be beaten. They can be beaten. What I'm saying is that you can't just get around their memes by switching terminology. That is the fool's errand - and is what your post is advocating.
The way to win is to confront them head-on. They're fast, but they're not unstoppable.
More options
Context Copy link