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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on The End of Faith, Menace of the Herd and Non-Computable You.
I just caught up with Thresholder , by Alexander Wales.
TL;DR, it's a cross-over isekai/Highlander kinda deal, where characters from across a multiverse are invited to cross through portals and find themselves in a new world. There's another one, and in true Highlander fashion, there can only be one. Once defeated, or victorious, a portal opens up to let the winner through, and if the loser is incapacitated but alive, they get one for themselves.
The MC starts off in media res, as knock-off Iron Man. Good AI assistant, but a suit that's far less powerful. He started off in 2022 Earth, went to Earth 2 that's about 20 years more advanced, where he picked up a genius inventor girlfriend and said suit. He rapidly loses said girlfriend at the hands of another Thresholder, and then continues journeying through worlds in an effort to find a way to resurrect her.
I'd say it's a 7.5/10 fic. Nowhere near as good as Worth The Candle or Metropolitan Man, but a decent enough progression fantasy and a way to kill the time.
Any thoughts on "Shadows of the Limelight"? I loved "Worth the Candle" and "Metropolitan Man" (and "The Randi Prize", and "Instruments of Destruction"), but I couldn't get in to SotL and I still wonder if I just gave up too soon and didn't make it to the good part.
It definitely gets better than it is in the beginning, and I'd say is worth the read, but not a particularly good story.
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I enjoyed it, but this was long enough ago that I can’t remember most of the plot beats. I don’t believe there was an obvious inflection point aside from the finale.
Contrast something like Worm, where I can comfortably say “push through the first arc!” Or “If you got to Leviathan and weren’t sold, it’s not for you.”
That's exactly the sort of contrast I was thinking of. I personally liked Worm from the start, but I had to tell my kids "wait until chapter 5 before we decide whether to finish reading this or not" about Mother of Learning.
Are there really people who need to read like 25% of Worm before they're hooked? That would finally be something to tie with Babylon 5 as the world champion of Most Difficult Fiction To Recommend. "Just spend 15 hours or so on this so you don't miss important backstory, and then, THEN it really gets good! Unless it's just not to your taste after all, in which case I'll be out of town for a while; I can come back when you're no longer enraged."
Couldn’t say. In a rare exercise of self-awareness, I never actually told a doubter to stick with it through Arc 8. But if someone had read that far and then asked if it were going to get better, I’d confidently tell them no.
Worm had me from the beginning. It was also my gateway from Potter fanfic to a broader world of rationalfic, and then the LessWrong and Scott spheres. So I guess I was pretty invested.
I do think it had the Tvtropes page that said something like, “for those skeptical of high school fiction, it quickly moves on to the far more pleasant setting of a bombed-out city.”
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Haven't read it, and don't think I've heard of it before! I had to Google it to confirm it was another work by Wales.
Aw, well, thanks; glad I checked anyway.
Though ... instead of asking a long-shot question on my own behalf, I probably should have asked an obvious one on my son's behalf: what age would you say "Thresholder" is appropriate for? My kids loved HPMOR and he's currently re-reading "Mother of Learning", so I'd like to be able to find other long /r/rational -style work I could recommend for him, but my own next two favorites would be WtC and Worm and both get too frequently explicit about the horror/gore/trauma/etc. sides of their stories. The only warning I see on "Thresholder" is for profanity, and if even that's really excessive (or if his little sister wants in) I could probably read out loud to do a little light censorship on the fly.
I am personally not fond of age-gating literature at all, being of the opinion that if you can read and understand something, it's for you.
But that doesn't mean I don't understand what you mean haha. Thresholder has some adult content, but anything graphic happens off-screen. That's a necessity to be hosted on Royal Road, I think (without being age-gated, but it's been a while since I checked). You might see the MC looking longingly at a lady's buxom curves, have them described, but you're not getting a blow-for-blow of what follows, just a fade to black or acknowledgement. Someone might pop a boner, but no loving description of the veins or girth involved.
I would imagine most people wouldn't object to 13 year olds reading that. If you're reading it out loud, you'd be doing a decent amount of censoring for younger age groups. There's graphic violence, but nothing that would upset a psychologically normal red-blooded young lad.
I do want to thank you for introducing your kids to rationalist or rat-adjacent fiction, though that might spoil them with high standards when it comes to mainstream slop.
Thanks for this! That sounds like something I could let the 12yo read to himself, or at least something that I could read to him and the 10yo.
I consider this to be a goal of fiction but not a tautology. One of my favorite books is "Citizen of the Galaxy", a book aimed at 10-12 year olds where one of the side characters is obviously (to adults) a brothel owner-operator but where the evidence to that effect would go over little kids' heads. I also have the greatest of respect for whoever wrote the line "If I had a black light, this place would look like a Jackson Pollock painting" in "Guardians of the Galaxy". And even for less clever writers, "there's a scene change and everybody who should know what happened off-screen can probably figure it out" often isn't too hard to set up.
But my kids all started reading at age 2 or 3, and started reading long-form stuff like Harry Potter at 5 or 6, and precocious intellect runs in my family in a way that precocious maturity ... does not. My kids are much more mature than I was at their ages, but even though they'd survive darker/grosser/etc. well enough, they still have their preferences. They all thought HPMOR was good enough to be worth its most upsetting scene, but they clearly thought there was a scale there with weight on both sides.
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There are at least some adult content works on Royal Road that do not have any serious age-gating: Blue Core is an example (cw: painfully straight tentacles-on-woman, imo mid-but-complete work). They do have warnings that are moderately well-enforced, but I would not give a pre-teen random access to the site.
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Montaillou is an absolute chore to get through. Dying to finish it so I can move on to something more interesting.
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Started Generation F by Winston Smith, from the short-lived era of blog-turned-book behind-the-scenes public sector exposés. It's partly "if only you knew how bad things really are" but so far it's been let down by its shallow analysis. For example the author questions why the number of supported housing units expanded so rapidly under New Labour? Answer: Because "it became easier for parents to offload their children into State care". Leaving aside how that puts the cart before the horse it also begs the question of how New Labour and more importantly their backers and supporters benefitted from this change, and this coming immediately after a brief accounting of his workplace's state-funded running costs.
The characters are very two dimensional too, boiling down to little more than interchangeable pastiches standing for male resident, female resident, coworker, and lower/middle/upper management.
On the plus side it's not shy about critiquing the poor/negative outcomes of the system the author finds himself working under.
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I'm finished up Different Seasons, four novellas by Stephen King. TL;DR: I very much enjoyed it.
King has a utilitarian style. So much of what I read is really not that. When you're so clear with your communication, there's less room for evoking emotion. He is still able to do that. Breaking the fourth wall a bit, the fact that he can when putting out so much content is undeniably impressive. This is the last time I'll connect the work with his politics, but it's just sad that he created art of this caliber just a handful of years ago, and now he's essentially an NPC.
The first Novella is essentially the Shawshank redemption. There's nothing crazy about the book, even "the twist", but it's a satisfying read that stays largely positive. I've heard critiques on this board that King focuses on the reality of prison with a bit of a sadists eye and would respectfully disagree. It's just well done.
The next is "Apt Pupil". Light psychological horror. One thing I really respected about this was that there was a focus on details and continuity.
Then there was "The Body" which turned into "Stand by Me". There are frankly dozens of important sections, but the one that stuck with me the most was when the boys were discussing precisely why they were taking the journey to see the body described in the title. It reminded me distinctly of how we would walk through the woods as kids, following the creek for hours with air rifles in hand and chips in backpack to make it to a spot minutes away by car. Some things deserve to be hard.
Last but certainly not least was "The Breathing Method" which was purposefully evocative of Lovecraft which I have always enjoyed.
All in all, a diverse set of stories with enough highs and lows to make it an even-keeled read. I very much enjoyed it.
Now starting in on "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", "Conversations with Friends", and "Incurable Graphomania"
Different Seasons is one of King's best. If someone asked me which Stephen King book they should start with to get an idea of his style, I would recommend this one or Misery.
Did you read the Dark Tower series? I'm considering it
I have read the Dark Tower series. The first four books of the Dark Tower are awesome. Book 4, Wizard and Glass is actually my favorite Stephen King book. After book 4 though, things really fell off a cliff. SK was seriously injured in a car collision in 1999 and it feels like him coming face to face with his own mortality caused him to race to finish the series. He pushed out books 5, 6, and 7 in the span of like three years after it took him 20 years to release the first 4.
I'll never not recommend Stephen King, regardless of the book, but I'm not the biggest fan of how The Dark Tower ended up. The good news is that you can plow through those books in a couple months or less.
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Which did you prefer, the movie of Shawshank Redemption or the novella?
I think the Novella. Books have an advantage by default for me though it should be said
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Continuing working my way through (rereading) Ian M. Banks.
I have a growing thought that the Culture series would have been (even) better if about the last two chapters of most books had been cut out or reworked to leave things more ambiguous. Many of the books have an epilogue or two that outright states'yep, this was a deliberate intervention & the Culture knew all along' .
Agreed. To the point where you should probably spoiler-tag that last sentence. The catch is that those epilogues have completely different valence depending on the book.
So far, I’ve read Phlebas and Windward, Player, and Use. I’ve got copies of a couple later ones, and I’m consciously avoiding Excession.
My working theory is that the novels can be divided by whether Banks was using the Culture as a stand-in for American imperialism or American hegemony. The epilogues in “imperialism” books are awkward because it’s not like they were hiding their message. The ones in “hegemony” books work a little better, since theyat least try to function as a twist . All in all, though, I have to agree that the epilogues don’t usually add much.
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Finished Matthew Bracken's new book, Doomsday Reef. It was a fun read IMO, but surprisingly weak on story structure. His other 2 Dan Kilmer books go along with the standard 3-act story structure, where there's a "main" story and all of the subsidiary action is revealed later on to play a part in shaping how the "main" action plays out. This book was more like a bunch of stuff just happens as his improvised band of merry sailors travels the world, and it's all interesting, but doesn't really connect together into a broader plot. It also seems to attempt to push a little harder into the background of exactly how the whole world fell apart in this alternate timeline, which just doesn't really make any sense to me. Seems like he's sticking with the trucks, trains, boats, etc just stopped coming, nobody's even going to try to explain why or account for the fact that this just doesn't ever happen in the real world, and even if the US goes completely crazy for some reason, why would China, Russia etc do so too? Oh well, no sense over-analyzing things I guess.
Still reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles.
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House by Tracy Kidder. Yes, This Inevitable Ruin: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 7 delivered the goods, just as previous installments did IMO.
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