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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2875 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 8, 2024

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So, what are you reading?

Still on The Conquest of Bread and Future Shock. Also finished Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life, which posits that Wallace was a precursor of intelligent design. The biography was good, though the arguments at the end were sometimes confusing.

Currently rereading R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing series .

Got sucked into reading some passages across both trilogies since I haven't toughed it since the second trilogy wrapped up and finally decided to bite the bullet and just do the whole thing from The Darkness That Comes Before.

So, what are you reading?

Hope on royalroad.

It's a real treat to read, I would describe it as "swords and sorcery fantasy but extra nerdy". And a lot more sorcery than swords.

I tried, but the buy in for the story didn't work for me at all, even Godclads wasn't that thick.

I'm about halfway through "Legal Systems Very Different from Ours". I don't remember where I came across this book, but I put it on my to-read list a year or two ago and recently picked it up. I don't know too much about the author, but it seems like he became interested in this topic and went through a bunch of secondary-source material and compiled this book with his findings. The author put the book on his website: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm

Most chapters are self-contained. Some particularly interesting ones that stuck with me were "Prisoners' Law" which puts prison gangs in a new perspective (might it actually be in prisoners' best interests to have an informal law-and-order system within the prison?) and "Pirate Law" which shows how a bunch of outlaws paradoxically create a new set of laws.

I think I've seen Friedmann on DSL, if you want to talk with him about it.

David Friedman was a regular on SSC and is still active on one of the splinter forums, so chances are you heard about the book somewhere around these parts.

Finished Martin Amis' collection of short stories Heavy Water. Nothing special, the highlight was the sci-fi entry The Janitor On Mars about a billion year old robot left behind by Martians for no other reason than to gloat about the end of planet Earth. Chosen as a follow up to reading Amis' Lionel Asbo, which was probably a biting satire of contemporary British social mores but I found it simultaneously too smug, too vulgar, and too banal, and written using a type of dialect for dialogue that he exaggerated to the point that it became jarring. Or at least I've never heard anyone talk like that.

Starting on a collection of Gogol's short stories. I like short stories. After reading two Clavells and two Dostoevskys in close succession it's nice to get through a whole story in less than fifty pages.

Huge fan of short stories. I find it interesting that unit economics was a key point of influence in making novels a dominant format for literature.

We were brought up on short stories in Ireland. (Frank O’Connor’s Guest of the Nation and Michael McLaverty’s The Poteen Maker two great examples of great stories told across a handful of pages.)

Claire Keegan is a fine current day practitioner. Foster was brilliant and her recent So Late in the Day was top class too. (Both published as standalone books but they’re just short stories really.) Kevin Barry is another. Beer Trip to Llandudno made me go wow. I thought Roddy Doyle’s story Bullfighting was excellent too.

I finished There Is No Antimemetics Division last night.

Overall... Good. Lovecraftian modern horror with a dash of X-files. Excellent writing with atmosphere for days.

Like any other book of this genre I think it starts off strong and then tapers off towards the end in many ways. 4/5 maybe.

For those who read and enjoyed it I think a similar novel was Annihilation. TINAMD was far better in one key way: it never sacrificed being understandable in the name of pushing the boundaries of art, which annoyed (and enthralled) me about Annihilation.

A good review with similar complaints to those I had is here: https://a.co/d/9cLqhP7

On a related note, anyone noticed the hard left turn on recent SCP articles? I occasionally go back to read new highly upvoted posts and the last few times there were a) an apocalyptic story that turned out to primarily be a lesbian love story b) an article literally titled "deadnamed" about exactly what you would expect and c) the most hamfisted allegory for south US anti-black racism I've seen.

It's been years since I've read any SCP articles, but I really enjoyed them at the time. It breaks my heart to hear they, too, have been coopted. Everything sacred must be profaned, apparently.

Thankfully (?) I read this book solely based on its title and cover art. I'm totally outside of whatever community this was/is.

I, on the other hand, wasn't even aware that it had been turned into a book.

"the aristocrats", horrible ravenous cannibal monsters that 1% of humans mature into.

Some story about an industrialist making a huge factory machine thing and feeding his workers to it because they couldn't unionize fast enough.

A rewrite of the "Chronicles of the Daeva", where the deava alternate history merges into our own, and it turns out they weren't a blood-magic slavemaster empire of human-sacrificing necromancers, but actually a peaceful, enlightened matriarchy and everything bad written about them was just an evil plot to convince people to keep them sealed away.

That last one was where I checked out. Chronicles of the Daeva is one of my all-time favorite SCP entries. Look how they massacred my boy...

...As Arjin notes, this was all years ago.

Recent? I'm not following SCPs, so maybe its got better since, and is now lapsing again, but this is ancient news.

I don't doubt that there always has been such an undercurrent, but at least in my impression the most upvoted articles had mostly original main topics and small woke side topics at most. Now it feels the other way around. But maybe I've just missed it.

I could be wrong, especially as I haven’t yet read the last Southern Reach book, but I think the shared DNA is a bit oversold.

Antimemetics, as with many SCP stories, is about experimentation. Ask a question, devise an experiment, observe the results. Very /r/rational. Just because the subject is Lovecraftian doesn’t mean they aren’t approaching it with the scientific method.

Annihilation is almost the opposite. When the expedition members express goals, they’re cryptic, confused, and not necessarily their own. Characters try things for bad reasons or no obvious reason at all. The plot develops with a sort of delirious, runaway feel, because neither the characters nor the reader can know what to expect. These are intentional artistic choices, and they’re very well-executed, but they sell a different story than Antimemetics. I’d call them anti-rational.

This isn’t a counter-recommendation, both because I loved Annihilation and because it does include a lot of the stuff that makes Antimemetics fun. So I’d still encourage SCP fans to try it. I’ll also offer a couple related recommendations.

  • Sam Hughes’ other work is very good. Ra, in particular, sells the worldbuilding. It’s also got a twist that brings it a lot closer to Lovecraftian and a lot further from SCP.
  • The STALKER series takes place in an irradiated wasteland surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It’s filled with horrible creatures, forgotten laboratories, and physics-bending anomalies. While there are some anti-rational elements, it’s played much more like SCP as the player learns to handle and exploit the weirdness. You can play an excellent open-source campaign here.
  • Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a Georgian comedy of manners where several leading characters are magicians. Those characters would very much like to have a rational, cause-and-effect sort of story, but alas! their setting has faeries. I find this book does an excellent job illustrating why such entities are aggressively anti-rational.
  • CORDYCEPS is my pick for a bridge between Antimemetics and Annihilation. I don’t want to spoil it, but it combines character volition with a lot of reasons why that could be a bad, bad idea. Very original. Very good.

There Is No Antimemetics Division

Man I love that one. The second half isn't quite as good, but the first half is absolutely enthralling with its new ideas and the tactics the protagonists use to overcome such novel problems.

I'll have to give Annihilation a try. The movie was pretty good.

Finished The Devil's Chessboard. My opinion about the main theme of the book is basically unchanged since my last post on it.

The last section of the book is all about the JFK assassination. The basic theme, according to the book, is that a ton of people around Lee Harvey Oswald and the Book Depository building had "links" or associations with the CIA, anti-Kennedy Republican activists, and anti-Castro activists and a bunch of weird stuff happened around Oswald himself, including being allowed to live in the Soviet Union for a number of years, and move back with a Russian wife, at the height of the Cold War, with basically a rubber-stamp level of scrutiny. Also supposedly the whole Warren report was a whitewash.

To all of this I say, well maybe, but this is a lot of smoke but not much fire. Okay, it seems pretty unlikely that Oswald just up and decided to shoot the President one day. But exactly who did what here, and why? There's no more information on that in here than I had before. And if it was an organized conspiracy by... some groups... exactly what did they hope to accomplish by doing this? Why did they actually pull off an assassination of Kennedy, but not any other American president? Did they just kind of decide that that was too far and not to do it again? Is it like part of the plan or something to be so vague and confusing about exactly what happened that nobody has any idea what to do?

Kennedy was the first time that there had been a major conflict in goals between the newly created security organs/State Department and the President over a question of foreign policy. The conflict had already been brewing for some time: Over the course of his two terms, Eisenhower became increasingly resentful of the CIA for running roughshod over his foreign policy goals in favor of regime change to install anti-communist hardliners. Read Legacy of Ashes if you want more info on that. When Kennedy came to power, the friction between the office of the presidency and the State Department /intelligence agencies finally boiled over. Cuba was a fixation for the agencies. Getting Cuba out of the communist sphere was a huge, huge priority. The CIA never expected the Bay of Pigs invasion to work by itself. It was designed to pressure whoever was president at the time into sending massive airstrikes and possibly ground troops to assist. Kennedy screwed that up. He refused to send anything. This made the CIA absolutely furious. Cuba had now slipped into the Soviet sphere of influence permanently. Kennedy was also furious at the CIA’s attempts to railroad him, and was beginning to plan steps to limit the CIA’s influence on foreign policy. Then Kennedy’s head mysteriously exploded. As for why it never happened again, it did. It just didn’t need to be as shocking and overt. The CIA forced Nixon out of office for abandoning the Vietnam war instead of escalating it to all of Southeast Asia. Woodward and Bernstein were laundering information leaked to them by the CIA. Then they spiked Carter’s attempt at reelection for being too weak overseas. Then they installed a CIA officer, George H.W. Bush as President. Every President after that, except Trump, has had connections to the CIA. Clinton, Bush II, Obama. Mysteriously, the President always just lets the CIA do whatever they want now. Imagine that!

Woodward and Bernstein were laundering information leaked to them by the CIA.

Deep Throat was Deputy Director of the FBI. You can argue that the FBI and CIA were working together against the White House, but that argument needs to be made - conventional wisdom is that the FBI and CIA are outgroup to each other within the internal politics of the US Deep State. To say that Deep Throat was working for the CIA is obviously silly.

How was Obama connected to the CIA? Serious question.

Halfway through The Habsburg Way: 7 Rules for Trying Times by Eduard Von Habsburg. Thus far, a bit like a rad trad 12 Rules, but with more geeking out about history in Eduard Von Habsburg’s voice.

Two thirds of the way through Seveneves. Would have probably dropped it if not for some nostalgia for Stephenson’s older works. The writing is bloated, and the cast before the time jump feels excessively SJW-flavored.

The first two-thirds of the book would've worked as a standalone novel.

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