Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
18hr ago
Oof, sorry to hear that you're not enjoying Dungeon Slayer, and I'm afraid this is where my "cheap date" reader self doesn't necessarily do me any favors when I talk about series that I've enjoyed. It's a low bar! It's been maybe a couple of years now since I read the first few books and what I remember really liking about it was, in fact, the fight scenes and also the world-building, not just
On the 12 Miles front, yeah, developing To'Wrathh's character was annoying AF to me, too, though I understand the major plot points that revolve around her character making that necessary to a certain extent. A lot of her early stuff was just bloody annoying to me, though it did get better over time. To me, 12 Miles is at its best when it's exploring its world, particularly the underground sections, and at its dreariest when it's doing its developmental/consolidation bits. I can tell you that book 5 to me was largely one of those so I'd say there's no need to rush in picking up the audiobook when it becomes available. Regardless, I'm glad you're enjoying that one!
I appreciate the Seth Ring recommendation, Kindle pimps out his Battle Mage Farmer stuff to me semi-regularly because of a similar series that I read in the past. I have another series or three that I bought to make me immune to wanting to read another one of those but I might check out Iron Tyrant--it sounds interesting and more up my alley (that whole what will he do with the premise thing) than another "exploit the farmer class" style of LitRPG.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1d ago
He Who Fights With Monsters, Book 10 By Shirtaloon. I appreciate that it's (finally) become self-aware enough to subvert some of its tropes, but I'll probably have to give the series some time before reading 11 as I've been reading too much LitRPG lately.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
3d ago
On the other hand, I think it’s a crime against human dignity to throw ashes around in any place.
I think my wife would agree with you. She has flat out told me that if I go first, she's not putting my ashes in the 39 oz Folger's can (complete with blue lid!) that I have painstakingly procured for this purpose because she sees it as beneath my dignity. To which I say:
That's, just like, your opinion, man.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
4d ago
I mean, that's a bog-standard way to look like Important Things are being done. In my far too many years at $current_employer, I have seen it countless times and when my previous boss said that we were no longer playing musical offices reorganizing our workspaces my reaction was ROFLMFAO, GLWT and also to make sure to give him shit every time he brought up the next move we had to do after a several month grace period as well, which I know he appreciated. In fact, I have watched said employer literally move different offices to the other side of the building and then back again less than two years later and that has happened two separate times with different sets of offices even! And it's not just my employer. Behold, Azure has become Entra! Azure Purview and Compliance have merged into the new Purview! Use the new-and-improved Exchange Online Admin (except for all of these things that live in the old Exchange Online Admin that still lives several years later). It never ceases. SMDH.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
5d ago
Copper IUDs have side effects too
Can confirm, my wife suffered from terrible unofficial but internet recognized symptoms from Paragard for years. She finally got the damn thing removed after a couple of bouts of intense, labor-like pains that landed her in the ER and surprise, surprise, no more of those or any of her other symptoms.
Me too, and I even like to cook but during my last period of being apart from my wife, I maybe cooked for myself 40-50% of the time, tops. Other times I might have gotten preoccupied with doomscrolling The Motte something or another or I might just not have had the time or bandwidth to actually cook. On those times I was either eating out or throwing frozen food in the Ninja to bake or air fry.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
7d ago
Haha, I didn't think about it that way but you're absolutely right!
Srlsy, tho, it's a pretty straightforward fantasy setting that has some development and big battle stuff and some stuff I think of as setting things right. At $5 a pop, I've enjoyed them more than enough, though my usual caveats of being a cheap date on Kindle still apply.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
8d ago
*Imperial Wizard 5: Seeds of Corruption (Arcane Awakening) by J Parsons.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
8d ago
I'd be somewhat interested in other men's experiences of this.
Since you're asking, my personal experience was that puberty was smooth in many, but not all areas. WRT my own sexual awakening specifically, yeah, it was pretty smooth on-ramp, and no, it never got to be a consuming fire, but it was a fire that (while abstract) wasn't quite as simple as taking deep breaths and focusing on something else, for me, either. More like I was really eager to find the one and live happily ever after, including lots of hot sex. In retrospect, I feel like I obviously bought into the Hollywood movie version of sex and love way too hard.
It has previously been argued that autism-spectrum conditions can be understood as resulting from a predictive-processing mechanism in which an inflexibly high weight is given to sensory-prediction errors that results in overfitting their predictive models to the world. Deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence are all argued to flow naturally from this core underlying mechanism.
Am I the only one reading this passage and thinking, "what the actual fuck?!" Because my understanding is that the defining neurological characteristic of autism is that the corpus callosum of autistic people does not primarily pass traffic directly back and forth between the brain hemispheres as it does in a typical person but rather it primarily passes sensory inputs to the brain. The autistic brain compensates for this somewhat like the internet, which is to say that it develops a significant amount additional neural connections that essentially travel around the hemispheres and facilitate communication between the left brain and the right brain. Taken together, between the much greater amount of sensory processing that an autistic brain does and the greater isolation of each brain hemisphere, the autistic person experiences reality in a profoundly different way than not just a typical brain, but another autistic brain as well! Thus, blaming the autistic brain's predictive-processing mechanisms and calling them the core underlying mechanism of autism reads to me like wet streets cause rain.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
14d ago
I love that book! Still my favorite read of all time, and one I've been intending to re-read for, fuck, over a decade now. It was a remarkably profound book when I first read it, and significantly more so for its time. Like you, I didn't agree with every idea LeGuin entertained in the novel either, but between the extensive world-building and the evolution of the relationship between the main characters I quickly went from almost bouncing off of it the first time I read it due largely to said world-building at the beginning to completely enthralled.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
15d ago
Death of the Ideal: Godclads Book 2 by OstensibleMammal. Still like Cyber Dreams overall, but by book 4 some of the plot devices were becoming repetitive and one of the major plot threads felt majorly "off" to me so I'm putting that series down for a while.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
19d ago
Yeah, thanks, I was all, "how could anyone who is opinionated about which sorts of fancy espresso machines are good refuse to drink from an AeroPress?!" Then my brain kicked back in.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
20d ago
Whaaa....? My head just exploded.
ETA: Is she possibly looking for some sort of frothed milk beverage with espresso in it? Because that's the only way I can make sense of those two sentences together.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
20d ago
Desert Storm was a short war, but special bunker busters were developed and dropped in combat within a month.
I have it on Very Good Authority that the primary reason that this is so is because the DoD cut out all of the typical red tape involved in developing said munitions.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
21d ago
Dan Carlin constantly quotes some historian talking about ancient texts, and it goes something like "We cannot believe ancient history, but we have no choice but to believe ancient history."
I know I'm dating myself here, but one of my history professors kicked off the semester by brandishing a Weekly World News and proclaiming it to be equivalent to about 95% of recorded history. Needless to say, I was greatly entertained that semester!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
22d ago
I'd say that the TV series was limited by what was possible at the time, more than anything else. More specifically, I don't know how much better the source material could have been treated for a modestly budgeted SyFy series. I think that Netflix or Prime could potentially do a much better job with it these days but, of course, they'd be just as likely to screw it all up for Reasons if they tried, alas.
I'll be interested to hear what you think of the series if/when you return to it. FWIW, while I know that Butcher himself has said something to the effect that the first four books are completely skippable, it was the third book that set the hook for me as a reader. Where the first two felt to me like they were more mid-level urban fantasy fare that weren't necessarily too serious, shit got real in Grave Peril, and IMO it hasn't stopped since. While there are plenty of folks that have been upset by this twist or that turn in the overall series, I'm not one of them. There have been many deeply touching moments in the series for me, more than any other that I've yet read, and some of them are made that much better by being brought to fruition over the span of several or even many books. Even the seemingly-slightest rhetorical flourishes can be pregnant with foreshadowing, and I personally think that Butcher has just gotten better and better as a writer as he's cranked them out, with Ghost Story being my personal favorite.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
22d ago
Fortune's Envoy (Cyber Dreams book 3) by Plum Parrot. I started the first one after finishing Daring and I'm still way into it!
I was just talking about WoT a few weeks back and while the series as a whole was kinda uneven for me (tl;dr I loved the first four and last three books, it's 5-12 5-11 that could be so-so) I still have to say it's an excellent series overall. I think @SubstantialFrivolity is dead on in observing that the wait for the next book was a significant factor in making the slog through the slower-paced books more difficult for me personally as well. More generally, with a story of such epic scope, there's almost bound to be some characters that you're eager to read more of, others that are irritating and/or frustrating, some plot threads that you find really satisfying, and other plot threads that are b-o-o-ring to the point of tears. But even with everything we fans have to complain about, it's still a hell of an epic tale at the end of the day. I'd encourage you to stick with it a bit longer (although certainly pull the ripcord if it's not grabbed you by the end of the first book at the latest) and see whether or not it picks up for you.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
28d ago
I know a lot of people like The Culture series, would you advise me to persevere or try another book or just look elsewhere entirely?
If you're not feeling the overall vibe of Banks' work then I'd encourage you to go ahead and drop him from your list. Life's too short to read stuff that's only kinda appealing and all that. While Banks' novels, be they Culture novels or not, build different worlds and, to an extent, explore different ideas, they all tend to have the same sorts of edges to them, and if that's not engaging you, then you're really not missing anything by letting them go. FWIW, I've read quite a few of his books, and they're not bad by any objective stretch, but at the same time I have several more that I may not ever read because I've lost the desire to engage in his work myself. I'll probably read one in the not-too-distant future, perhaps just because of this comment, but still, there never seems to be a heart to any of his books that I've read.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
29d ago
Daring (Pax Arcana Book 2), by Elliott James.
@Titanium Butterfly, City was quite thought-provoking! Not at all surprising coming from Simak, and I'm really glad that someone has dedicated themselves to getting his stuff published. I've probably read at least one book that was directly influenced by it--don't remember the exact name of it, maybe Manta's Gift, but it was by Timothy Zahn.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
30d ago
I think we see this along broadly similar lines, and I would add that the reason I spot more often in men is simply because most of my knowledge comes from them. The only FTM gender dysphoria case I know of is firmly in the first category according to her therapist, and I trust that judgment. More broadly, there's a decent amount of teens that identify as trans and the overall "vibe" that I get from the therapeutic standpoint is that these teens are largely trying out gender (and sexual) identities that are subject to change, as teenagers do in general with their identity.
To dig into MTF a little more specifically, firstly I'm not seeing anything in your description of the MTFs that you know that shouts BPD to me either, and my expectation is that MTF plus BPD is no more than a significant minority. That significant minority is definitely a Thing in my book, though, and what makes them stick out like sore thumbs to me is the DRAMA. Mostly, this seems to present as the individual almost always reporting that relationship failures and poor interpersonal dynamics are because people can't accept the MTF identity of the individual. Said individual never questions the role of their own behavior and treatment of others. There's a particular incident that sticks out in my mind here where a MTF teenaged client's MTF parent hijacked the kid's session and spent it all ranting about their own struggles loudly enough that I could hear it from a room away. The self-centeredness, lack of empathy, and splitting seemed to me to be dripping from just about every sentence. The session was supposed to be about how to help your struggling kid, for crying out loud! Occasionally, the reason for the relationship failures, poor interpersonal dynamics, etc., is seen by the MTF individual as more generally due to envy, jealousy, and other negative emotions that others have, as in, "I'm the hottest of the hot girls and they're just jealous and out to get me!" Either way, it's classic cluster B and to me matches BPD behavior in particular.
If you've got more thoughts, I'm more than happy to continue the conversation too. I think I've mentioned before that my wife is a therapist and some of this is based upon her experience. She is an idealist and is all about the needs of her clients, but even she privately confides in me that she worries about the social contagion aspect herself and cannot speak with this even with her cohort of fellow therapists.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
I was deliberately vague because my answer has CW implications but I suppose putting it in spoiler tags is a decent compromise:
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1mo ago
Three word rejoinder: sunk cost fallacy.
Words fail to convey how deeply black-pilling this particular subject has been for me. Not only is cutting entitlements generally unpopular in the abstract, cutting SS specifically would, I think, be generally seen as a massive breach of the American social contract, given that it is commonly represented not as an entitlement but as a retirement fund for the elderly. I've spoken with a lot of people over my decades about the inevitability of Social Security's demise, and even run into a few that understand that it's always been a massive Ponzi scheme, but the vast majority of them have a level of emotional investment in getting their fair share of SS that precludes any productive dialogue or planning to avoid the inevitable shortfalls. The common refrain that I've heard when talking to people is that the FICA taxes they've paid are, "their money," making me a pedantic asshole if I point out that no, what you've paid is a tax and what you'll receive if you live to retirement age is an entitlement, and moreover, there have been several Supreme Court cases that reaffirm the actual underlying legal reality of SS. I have actually heard the, "it's my money," refrain even from the very person (whom I admire greatly) that introduced me to ancap philosophy and is generally anti-government!
So while I'd agree that what you're proposing isn't unreasonable, I don't think that reason has a thing to do with it.
Is anyone else test driving the Cosmic desktop experience from Pop! OS and if so, how do you like it? I've been using it for a couple of weeks now and as expected (being an alpha and all), it's been a mixed bag overall but it looks like they're moving in the right direction and it does fix some of the things that annoyed me about GNOME while introducing other minor annoyances, which goes back to the whole mixed bag, alpha release thing. Overall, I've been finding that while the look and feel of Cosmic is quite GNOME-like for the most part, the performance does seem snappier and it has some welcome additions as well. I look forward to seeing how it shapes up! Ironically, it also seems to be showing some long-term performance issues that I never saw with GNOME--my current desktop has session has been live for a little over a week and I'm starting to experience significant lag and stuttering, which was never a problem with GNOME.
Background: I bought a Beelink ultra-SFF a couple of years back and installed Pop! on it to run some old games that I told myself I'd try and play through at the time. The latter has turned out to be more like, I get the game running in Wine/Dosbox and then move on to another because I'm having more fun making them work than I am replaying them but still, Pop! turned out to be "good enough" for a DD for me to keep it.
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