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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3118 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on Freinacht's 12 Commandments. It's sparking some curiosity about what post-metamodernism might look like, though I'm still not sure that I have a clue as to what metamodernism looks like.

Just finished Dawn of the Void by Phil Tucker. It's a pretty competent apocalyptic litRPG, definitely hit the right notes for me.

I've been listening to the audiobooks of the Stormlight Archives. They're alright, but honestly a bit too generic fantasy to really make me love them like some people do. Lately I've found I want my fantasy to either get very realistic in how people and nations act, or get very weird and not even really pretend to be like real life people and nations.

I've also started reading Mad Investor Chaos by Elizier Yudowsky and it definitely falls into the category of "Weird fantasy". The first bit of it almost turned me off because the two characters having an introductory conversation were very odd and I wasn't sure what parts of their personalities were supposed to be exemplars the author thought people should try to be like, and which parts were supposed to be laughably absurd. I'm glad I got through though, it got much better once a few more minor characters were introduced.

Reading Tales of the Ketty Jay and loving it so far. It’s an unapologetic romp of some dastardly freebooters in a steampunk world with airships. Quite fun.

Wallerstein's World-Systems Analysis (on ebook). Picked mainly because it was the shortest book on my international politics reading list and cause it was the one Marxian-themed book on it. Actually enjoyed it (it is a concise intro to many concepts I often hear from socialists) and want to see more from Wallerstein's vantage point.

Mearsheimer's Tragedy of Great Power Politics on audiobook. A reread, which allows me to speed through it at 2x speed without bothering to take notes.

Just finished Tom Bower's Revenge: Meghan, Harry, and the War Between the Windsors on audiobook yesterday. Every once in a while I just need something to decompress, and non-fiction gossip seems to be working better than fiction right now.

My interest in royal gossip was renewed after seeing the absurdity of Harry's book tour and, well, this was more interesting than I thought reading Spare - which by all accounts seems to be a whine-fest and a cautionary tale about associating with narcissists who use therapyspeak to justify covert aggression- would be. And it was fun, though how much you can trust Bower is debatable. I've certainly hardened my opinions on Markle and Prince Harry based on what he reminded me of/I can verify.

Just started Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962.

It's an account of China's Great Leap Forward. Needless to say, it is incredibly depressing.

Just started The Tunnels of Cu Chi after seeing it mentioned in the Reddit comments when somebody posted the classic viet cong tunnels infographic.

Using firsthand accounts from men and women on both sides who fought and killed in these underground battles, authors Tom Mangold and John Penycate provide a gripping inside look at this fearsome combat. The Tunnels of Cu Chi is a war classic of unbearable tension and unforgettable heroes.

Caliban's War. It's entertaining.

I have two going. First, Brian Jacques' Castaways of the Flying Dutchmen. I really enjoyed his Redwall tales as a child and wanted to see how this one stands up. The second is John Pomfret's The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. Exactly as the title indicates, it traces US-Chinese relations from the founding of the US up to about 2016.

Just finished Bowman's The Mormon People. The book filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge about how the Mormon religion operates and the history of Utah, which is helpful. But I'm still left with that feeling of "why do people believe this?"

This is not unique to my relationship with the Mormon religion. I grew up Methodist, loved it, and wish I could continue to be part of a religious community. I just couldn't get over the hump of having to believe things that quite clearly seemed not to be true (or didn't have any convincing evidence for me to think them true). The LDS church seems to turn that up to 11, requiring members to believe that this guy (who had a career as a treasure hunter) found golden tablets in NY that only he could translate and which then disappeared. And that afterward he continued to have divine revelations about the nature of the universe that would dictate how they live their lives.

I know we have practicing Mormons in our community here, and I'm so curious if they actually believe these things or just find that the religion provides a useful guide to living and a foundation for a well-functioning community.

Yep, it's an actual, earnest belief; I don't see the Book of Mormon as a wise fable or well-intentioned story but as historical record.

The treasure hunter thing is very stupid, and Smith himself later confessed that it was nonsense he had been fooled into believing was real. The plates are less of an issue with me due to the witnesses backing them up. At the end of the day though my own belief in the church is based on my personal experiences with God rather than historical details. Not to deny the importance of the latter but they are pretty tough to evaluate one way or another relative to evaluating firsthand experience.

The Corner by David Simon. I thought Homicide was one of the best books I’ve read in some time. This book is better.

I'm still mad that there's no unabridged audiobook of Homicide . Really want to reread it.

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