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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3150 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 24, 2023

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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What are y'all mfers reading nowadays? I'm on Tales of the Ketty Jay and I fucking love it. It's a fun romp with a freebooting airship captain in a fantasy world making moves and fuckin' bitches.

I'm sure everyone else is reading things much more erudite...

Last week, my girlfriend gave me Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (it's one of her two favourite books, and she wanted me to read it too). Yesterday I started reading it on the return flight from our weekend getaway, and slipped out of my office this afternoon so I could read the last chapter. I think the last time I found a book so compulsively readable was Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens (for reference, this edition is just shy of 300 pages). Terribly sad, moving, chilling, with characters so well-drawn I feel like I know them personally. Easily the best book I've read so far this year, and probably better than any book I read last year too.

"Never let me go" is very fucked up, I'm not sure there's another book that touched me so deeply. Actually, when I try to recall anything similar, certain moments of "The Talos Principle" come to mind, in how it builds a very relatable world and then force kicks you into the Acceptance stage of grief about it while you're utterly unprepared.

The Managerial Revolution by Burnham.

I've finally published my first work over on Sufficient Velocity and SpaceBattles.

It's a hard sci-fi take on superpowers set in a near-future transhumanist world with cyberpunk elements, something I desperately wanted to read when I thought of it, but alas, it looks like I'll be doing the hard work myself.

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/ex-nihilo-nihil-supernum-superpowers-cyberpunk-hard-scifi.114516/

That was a fun read! I'll see if it continues holding my interest in later chapters. Though I wish you posted it on a less weird forum thread format, like Royalroad.

I appreciate the kind words! As for posting on RR, I do intend to do so once I have a few more chapters in hand. I was unsure of the rules regarding work that's been posted elsewhere, but I think I managed to figure it out.

Congrats that sounds awesome!! I wish you luck man.

Thank you, I might as well get some chapters in before GPT4 makes me obsolete haha

I finished Love for Lydia by H.E. Bates last night.

"The Northants setting becomes the background both ugly and beautiful for the story of a young girl, the daughter of a decaying aristocratic household, and her lovers, of which the most important is the narrator himself."

I thought it was brilliant honestly. The characters really mature and change over the course of the story, and the ending was so tense. Would ardently recommend to anyone who likes 75-year-old sentimental novels - it's basically Thomas Hardy but in the motor age.

I'm started reading Eliezer Yudowsky's glowfic Planecrash about a person from a hyper-rationalist world getting transported to the Pathfinder world, and an evil magic dictatorship scrambles to deceive him as they try to get him to reveal his advanced science. It's similar to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, except I'd say it contains more of the worst parts(long lessons about science that are overly complicated, long lessons about science that are just incorrect, often arrogantly rants about stuff Eliezer thinks people do wrong). It also has overly detailed sex stuff that's especially uncomfortable to read knowing how much the MC is a self-insert. But overall I still really enjoy it, because Eliezer writes evil schemes and counter-schemes better than any other author I've read, and also is really funny.

It also has overly detailed sex stuff that's especially uncomfortable to read knowing how much the MC is a self-insert.

Let me guess, some vanilla dom type BS ?

Let me guess, some vanilla dom type BS ?

Yes

Then the old OKCupid profile photos going around cca 2008(?) were correct and also one more datapoint for: sexuality doesn't really change much in adulthood.

I'm been slowly working through HP Lovecraft's complete works. I uh... gotta be honest. I'm starting to see the claims that Lovecraft was abnormally racist even for his time. His description of an African boxer in Reanimator as a grotesque apelike creature, before the reanimator serum makes him even more monstrous is pretty brutal. Although the black cat named "Nigger Man" in The Rats in the Walls is kind of funny.

But I guess I never really felt strongly about whether Lovecraft was or was not racist. I more got up in arms about the over reactions about what to do about "it". But that's a discussion for another thread.

Check out Medusa's Coil, the ending is so racist it's actually hilarious!

"ONE... PERCENT... WELSH!?!?!"

Especially in comparison with the whole raising from the grave stuff lol.

Lovecraft is an unabashed white supremacist, which has no bearing on my opinion that "The Rats in the Walls" is one of the best horror stories I've ever read.

I find it helps to see him as a flawed man of his time from an era where many ideas we take for granted today were still unheard of.

That modern racist authors are capable of reaching far greater heights of racism means only that they stand upon his shoulders, and we owe him a great debt for paving the way for them long before the invention of tools like genetics or FBI crime statistics.

I'm starting to see the claims that Lovecraft was abnormally racist even for his time.

Huh? Was that claim ever in question?

It's very much in question, still.

There was an anonymous questionnaire given to GIs during or shortly after WW2 that found that they'd basically all qualify as far right extremists today. There's also this book that claims a 1943 poll found that Americans at the time would have rather lost the war than given full equality to blacks.

People back then were very racist. The infamous Rosedale book about 'White Flight' mentioned the utter disgust and contempt with which elderly whites treated a white woman running away from an abusive black boyfriend - they'd not let her in, they'd not let her use the phone, they'd not call the police on her behalf. And this was 1970s.

I can easily see how someone who is just a run of the mill racist and fond of describing the grotesque in his stories can seize upon the more unusual features of the black phenotype - say, the wide nose, the prominent lips, etc and go on about them.

I don't think you have to be a particularly heinous racist to be that way. Someone who is truly bigoted and racist would be far more obsessed and far less likely to ever use neutral language.

Meanwhile, if my memory serves, Lovecraft describes blacks as usually primitive, more in tune with their animal nature than whites, but not irredeemable or wholly evil. Note that he sometimes mentions various obscure tribes or races of men that were wholly given to serving alien powers, etc..

As WhiningCoil notes, I suppose it's not in question that Lovecraft was racist, at least by our modern standards, it's more the question of how to handle Lovecraft. I'd say that, as far as degree goes, Lovecraft is maybe a notch above the typical old-timey Anglo racism, which probably stems from him having such a sheltered life.

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