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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   1804 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 8, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I'm powering through an enjoyable book recommendation from friend, and it's reminding me of how much I've recently thought about how much - or if at all - people send messages through art.

I miss mixtapes, dearly. I still have a few scrawled CDs in sleeves that never get played, most of which I did make myself. It's a bit arrogant to say, but I have historically gotten positive feedback from those I distributed to others. Truthfully, I'd put some effort in - parsing through a wide collection to find things I truly believed the other person would like. And yes, sometimes, sending a message. I suspect that thrashing genres thew some people off occasionally, but I think it was worth it to get them hooked on something new.

As time has gone on I've found that people's recommendations of books and music haven't hit the spot as much as they once did. We've spoken endlessly about the degradation in quality of art on this forum, and yeah that's part of it, but I also see it as a consequence of the distance we keep from each other as we become adults.

Books are particularly challenging. I think sharing a great novel with someone has a sort of intimacy that is matched by very few things, perhaps as a result of how long of an investment it requires. But I also think the medium just has more emotional potential than movies/TV (definitely) or music (probably).

I love fiction and tend to stay in the realm of fiction focused on anything other than people, but I do occasionally treat myself to more "realistic" interpersonal fiction. I still think "This is Where I Leave You" was one of the best books I've ever read. It either helped process some trauma or inflamed it, not sure, but the recommendation that set me off on this rant is of the genre. It's kind of nice to be back after what's probably been a 4 year hiatus from it.

In any case I'm not sure how common talking to each other indirectly through this stuff is. It feels like most people view the exchange of entertainment recommendations as somehow related to status - like they're just pushing something to you to get the endorphin hit from you saying you liked it. Given how much content is available, how freely it flows, that's all anyone has time for. But it seems like a waste of time, even if "sending messages through art" is presumptuous or paranoid.

Some book recommendations for you and anyone else:

Classics: I rate Clarke much higher than either Asimov or.. Bradbury. As a writer. Although honestly even if Clarke paid for child sex in Ceylon, that still makes him a vastly more likeable individual than Asimov, the eternal consequences of evolution denying high-modernist tool..

Midrange: SM Stirling is essentially an SF writer even if he writes fantasy, which he seems to like. He's not the best but he's pretty good and the Draka series is unparalleled as a political Turing test. He is a rare type of guy - a die-hard 1776 liberal, but biologically aware, evolution-pilled in regards to organisms of all scales, whether individual or societal. Most of his stuff is weird alt-history like the Dies the Fire series where electricity stops working. Probably a good read, but I like his SF. He has notably contributed imo the best novellas to both the War World anthology (about the codominium prison moon of Haven) and Niven's Kzinti one.

Alastair Reynolds (active from cca 1990) worked as an astronomer, so he's got the hard-sf part down. It is often space opera, but it's a fresh look at how that'd be in a STL universe where you can, at best, hug the lightspeed because a bunch of actually elite human capital- cybernetic researchers taking advantage of freedom on Mars networked their brains with nanomachines, became something way beyond human and moved the tech frontier in a big way to infinite thrust engines that, rumor has it, just tap the ongoing big bangs in parallel universes thus allowing constantly functioning reaction drive.

Setting (for the obvious reason) doesn't have superhuman AIs with a few exceptions.

New:

I have sympathies to anarchists, one can't really feel glad about the necessity of the entire sausage machine required in our finite world on a flat surface. So Iain M.Banks's Culture series isn't really about the utopia or even that political, it's more of a very high effort space opera.

You seemed to have missed Greg Egan. If he's too weird/spergy for you with his math stuff, it's not omnipresent. The short story collections Axiomatic and Luminous are very good, Distress & Zendegi I'd also recommend.

Like I said in a previous FF thread, I very much appreciate Walter Blaire, a new true SF writer. As in, it's not just lasers pasted in for rifles, it's about internally coherent worlds that are different to ours for material reasons. That's why I came to dislike Star Wars - it's just the stale old WW2 myth but in space.

Although he takes more of the 'human/history' angle, as his books are less about shiny tech but more about the ways organisations and biology trap people. Especially raising the salience of the latter is very praiseworthy and I hope to one day make him profoundly cringe about the implications of that. Guy writes as fun book, steps on the sorest thumb there is inadvertently.

He then nailed me to the wall by saying, “Surely a man of your diverse intellectual interests and wide-ranging curiosity must have tried to find God?”

(Eureka! I had it! The very nails had given me my opening!) I said, smiling pleasantly, “God is much more intelligent than I am — let him try to find me.”

This answer from Asimov pleases me immensely. To be a humanist Jew, a top-notch scientist, and world-famous author, and to taunt the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in this way, pretty much guarantees a response.

I’ve been trying on a bit of theology recently, the idea that YHWH is the “God of the lost,” in the way other people call Thor the god of thunder and Hera the goddess of marriage. My dad has always instructed my siblings and me to pray as soon as we notice something is missing, because God knows where it went. It only makes sense to start any search by asking the One who knows literally everything and has a O(0) search time complexity, and can have prearranged everything in the universe since the beginning of causality to decrease my own search time.

It is a great answer, I'll give him that.

See, you say a lot of things that are helpful, which probably explains why religion spreads. None of it seems remotely plausible or truthful to me.

Inferring a benevolent creator from this vast bloody altar is just too darn odd. And various gnostic shades of shit, where you posit an actual great deity behind an evil one. (sigh). Even worse outcomes, even more preposterous.

I'm powering through an enjoyable book recommendation from friend

Which book?

"Normal People" by Sally Rooney

Have you seen the show?

No - it has a high Rotten Tomatoes rating but that's not as solid a thing to have faith in anymore. Have you?

Yes. It's excellent. I'd even argue one of the very few adaptations that's better than the original material.

(scratches nose absent-mindedly) So what kind of SF reader are you?

I've read cca 400+ books on last count, most of them SF. Surely I could come up with a few recs.

I'd say I've been diverse in what I've read, and haven't disliked much. Also read a good amount of fantasy though scifi is my first pick.

  • Classics - Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury.
  • Midrange - Niven, the aforementioned culture series, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Michael Crighton, Dan Simmons
  • New school? - I really liked Peter Watts, Paolo Bacigalupi, and read some of the tie-in novels for video games.

If I had to pick what I'm into I'd say harder scifi appeals to me far more than the alternative. Once you have that, I tend to like grittier/dystopian stuff I guess.

Last year my girlfriend bought me the book A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov, as I discussed here.

I think being compared to what appears to be a braver and more charismatic character is... pretty positive. Nice.

Increasingly it seems like recommending any kind of media to anyone is a fools errand. People just have very little tolerance to anything outside of their media comfort zone. Even short YouTube videos are usually a dud.

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