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Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 6, 2025

Finished Sharpe’s Tiger by Bernard Cornwell. I’d love to read more historical fiction of this quality, especially set in India.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 6, 2025

Louis McMaster Bujold is always a blast. Sometimes a little preachy in the later works, but great howdunnits. Miles, Mutants, and Microbes is a little weird of an anthology since "Labyrinth" touches on topic the topic but not as heavily on the plot points of the other two works, while Diplomatic Immunity is more dependent on Cetaganda than either of the other two stories.

DI can stand alone or as a sequel to Falling Free, but it's an odd editing decision, even by Baen's standards.

You see that Vorkorsigan-like tones more often in fantasy -- Diana Wynne Jones is a little less high social drama but similar -- but it does seem pretty badly underserved in scifi. Maybe some of the Ciaphas Cain series, if you're into Warhammer?

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 6, 2025

Style history:

  • Special Forces types started wearing them during Iraq / Afghanistan. So a lot of tactical bros started that as well. You can see this all over GunTube and CopTube.
  • On the other end of the culture spectrum, "chill dude" vibes since the early 2010s have been facial hair friendly. Everything from a kind of lazy, Seth Rogan three day beard, to weird retro mustaches a la Arthur Shelby from Peaky Blinders.

The underlying reason common to both; growing a beard is a pretty good solution if you have a weak jawline. Some women don't like beards, but some do. The pool is large enough you aren't giving up much if you go for the beard. Very few women will totally overlook a particularly weak jaw line.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

I have at least heard the idea from Aboriginal people directly, though the way they framed it to me was in terms of having 'weak genes'. That said, I do not rate the scientific literacy of the person who told me that at all, so I have no idea if it's actually true, or just an excuse one might tell oneself on seeing one's pale skin.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 6, 2025

This reminds me, I'm finding Dungeon Slayer pretty bad so far. The worldbuilding makes no sense, the main character is pretty dumb, and the secondary characters' behavior is extremely unrealistic. Fights have mostly been interesting and cool though!

I did laugh at the thought of adventurers pulling up to a dungeon in beat-up Honda Civics, doing their thing, and driving off. The author should lean a lot harder into this incredible juxtaposition of settings he's created. Like, it's weird to me that they do this dungeon in an urban area with good road access, then afterward sit around a campfire. They should be sitting around a table at Burger King afterward! Or perhaps shawarma.

(Edited to spoiler on the side of caution and also to add:)

Still enjoying 12 Miles Below but it's slowed down a lot and frankly I don't care about the robot girl who's gradually becoming human at all which sucks because I think she's like >50% of the content at this point. Seen it done too many times before and the author will have to pull of something truly surprising to make these chapters worth my time. Still a super cool setting and the high points are pretty great. I think only four books are on audible though and I'm almost done with number three, so I'll probably hit a wall with that soon.

Anyhow even though I'm mostly complaining I do appreciate the recs. 12 Miles Below has unquestionably been worth the read overall and will stick with me.

Oh hey I started a new series recently called Iron Tyrant by Seth Ring and it's a lot of fun. First few chapters are extremely unrepresentative of the rest of the series. Overall the author shows a lot of competence in the stuff he's writing about and that makes it good. First book is called Chain of Feathers. Absolutely cannot wait for more of these to come out. Oh, but I'll say that the magic system is... idk, it's not the most interesting, but he does cool stuff with it and for a litrpg it's surprisingly light on stats and stuff. It's much, much more about the character, the setting, politics, and just general coolness than it is about the magic system.

@Muninn extra ping in case you missed the edit.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

Should be possible to slaughter a calf in a rad suit -- the L*** helps those who help themselves, y'know?

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

Most places in the US do tightly regulate floodplain development. Most places like these summer camps, some of which are 100 years old, are grandfathered in so it's left to local government, communities, and operators to determine what they need to do to ensure adequate safety.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 6, 2025

July 4th is more important than jobs. Not being facetious.

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

End of day you really can't account for every variable, or conditions that are far outside the 'expected' normal range.

Weather in particular is a chaotic system. Some days the conditions just happen to coincide to make things more severe than expected.

Remember just about a month ago a Swiss village got swept away by an avalanche. What are we to do about this risk? Engineer every mountain to be stable?

Or Volcanic eruptions. We don't HAVE an engineering solution to those!

The arguably better solution in many cases is to build the houses and infrastructure as cheaply as can reasonably be done so they can be more easily rebuilt, and spend the extra money on early warning and evacuation efforts.