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Wellness Wednesday for January 8, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Day of the Oprichnik I hated this book and didn’t get it, but I think it’s because I’m not Russian and I don’t find gross-out gore or porn interesting.

It's one of these pomo books that expect you to be familiar with the source material, like Fowles, Eco, contemporary art or jazz. The source material in question being primarily Russia's homegrown brand of Dark Enlightenment wankery from the aughties.

I disagree, the only thing that it requires from you is that you are Russian and lived in Russia. It’s actually funny how every review for it that I’ve heard from non-Russians is negative, but Russians love it. In general, I’m a bit baffled that foreigners try to read Sorokin because it’s akin to trying to understand an inside joke without any context.