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Friday Fun Thread for January 10, 2025

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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Some frankly insane bastards persevere nonetheless, becoming one with the Dao of MTL, and self-reportedly no longer see the broken Mandarin Matrix but grokk the underlying intent. Unfortunately, often at the cost of being unable to process normal English.

That's why I stopped reading Chinese novels. When I read them, even though I read "translated" novels(I started around 2017, and back then shitty translations were much worse than MTL/LLMs are now) my ability to read anything else became much worse. I speed-read them, because the faster I go through a story, the pacing and other things make up for the lacking in coherence. In the end I got to a point where I could almost skim past sentences if I didn't find them interesting.

Although I also just ran out of stuff to read. I drop things very quickly if I don't like them, and I dropped almost everything I tried, so I read novels on Royalroad and English web novels like Worm instead.

I wasn't sure how seriously to take the people claiming that reading MTL actually damaged their reading comprehension (the subreddit has a lot of LARPing and shitposting), but after hearing your account I'm glad I didn't give in to the temptation!

Finding good Xianxia can be a slog. I've read maybe 4 novels, and 3 of them were highly recommended by word of mouth. Not that it's much easier to find good stuff on RR either, but at least you can expect legible grammar most of the time.