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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   4747 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 18, 2024

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So, what are you reading?

I'm going through Dewey's The Public and its Problems. Still on McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary. Thoughts below.

Done with King Rat. I really enjoyed that book and would recommend it to all. Cool metaphor between the rats in the latrines and the prisoners in the camp.

I’ve become a bit fixated on Michael Jackson after having watched Leaving Neverland (for the second time) and seeing MJ The Musical. MJ the Musical was…good, not great. The MJ lead was absolutely outstanding, a 10/10 singer, dancer, and impersonator. But the story is flat and the dialogue really causes the show to drag. The musical numbers are, of course, outstanding.

Anyway, I tried researching the existence of a comprehensive biography of MJ, one that comes at it critically, yet truthfully. And what I’ve found…is that there really isn’t one. Not one that the public-at-large considers to be the definitive version. He was just too big and unknowable, it seems, and has been a challenge for all biographers to separate fact from fiction.

I ended up choosing The Genius of Michael Jackson. I’m about 120 pages and it’s good so far. A little short on how Michael actually views the world, but interesting to see his upbringing and rise to stardom. We’ll get to the kid diddling soon, I’m sure.

Started rereading Magician by Feist, and it's blowing me away. Such a good story, it has all the classic epic fantasy elements from Tolkien but with much sparser descriptions, and a far more engaging pace. Feist is an excellent storyteller.

I remembered liking it as a kid and wasn't sure I'd like it coming back to it, but if anything it's even better now that I've slogged through hundreds of other fantasy books that were totally mid.

Also reading Christ in our Midst, a book of letters from a Russian Orthodox monk to his spiritual son. It's quite good so far, lots of very basic but solid wisdom.

I am happy to be able to report that the sequels to Magician are also pretty good! You can never really rely on that in fantasy...

Oh yeah, I've read the whole Chaoswar Saga and attendant books. Excited to dive back in.

Someone here recommend Dungeon crawler Carl a few weeks ago and I really enjoyed listening to it. I have tried other litRPGs/Progression fantasy/cultivation but nothing else I've tried has even come close and are usually very poorly written (maybe the writers are ESL?) and I'm dumbfounded as to why they're popular.

Anyone have any recommendations in this space? Goodreads and Amazon ratings don't seem to mean much.

There's some ESL (especially among cultivation fiction), but the average writer just isn't that good, and the average litRPG/progression fantasy/isekai writer tends to be a little worse than average. That said, some recommendations, with the caveat that they're almost all unfinished serial pieces, starting with the strongest characterization and working down.

  • Forge of Destiny, feminist fantasy cultivation fic. It's not the most original plot or system -- think the protagonists of Kill la Kill go to Wuxia-skinned Hogwarts -- but the characterization is very strong and the style starts decent and quickly works its way up.
  • Beware of Chicken, comedy cultivation/isekai. Main character dropped into the half-dead body of a junior sect member and promptly nopes the fuck out of the rat race, to quickly find a different sort of challenge when he's the biggest fish in a tiny pond, as accidentally uplifts spirit beasts and grows a cultivator-grade rice too valuable for anyone to buy. The original version needed an editing pass like whoa, and it was still worth it; the reworked (though Kindle Unlimited/purchase) version is much cleaner.
  • _The Humble Life of a Skill Trainer, progression fantasy, low-stakes. Main character is a skill trainer, in the sort of system where the line between 'teaching specialized skills' and 'physical and psychological torture' is blurry at best. Mostly focuses on smaller-scale politics and interpersonal stuff than how to best stab the Big Bad Evil Guy. Tone is a little too self-introspection focused, but it mostly works out rather than feeling like a bad Hannibal clone.
  • Delve isekai/progression litRPG. Crushingly realistic take on the everyman-dumped-into-an-abandoned-system-world genre. Somewhat interesting approach to avoid shonen syndrome by making the main character's combat skills very numbers-driven, explicitly. Pacing sometimes suffers, especially if you're reading it 'live', and a few characters are pretty wooden -- Amelia has a lot going on, but you're not really sold to care in the same way that Tallheart's stoicism or Rain's ADHD or even Reese's frustrated cynicism manages to grip -- but there's a lot of serious consideration for how people-as-people would treat a gamified system of this class.

Thanks for the recommendations! Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by feminist in the case of forge? I don't mind female protagonists but I'm not super keen on being preached at, regardless of ideology.

More feminist fantasy in the Mercedes Lackey or Tamora Pierce sense: a large proportion of characters and especially viewpoint characters are female, women's issues pop up in ways that are uncommon in mainstream fiction (even 'mainstream' cultivation fiction), the viewpoint characters are much more self-driven than in typical works for the genre, so on. There's some of the Girl Power! stuff going on, but it's more cultivator-on-cultivator pranking or sabotage than preachy aesop.

I've read a few LitRPGs. The main appeal of them is the clearly defined power system where you get to see number go up and the explosions get quantifiably bigger. Dungeon Crawler Carl honestly is very different from most LitRPG imo, Carl is rarely the super powerful protagonist who smashes people in fights, he wins with clever plotting.

Another LitRPG you might like is Worth the Candle, a story about a normal teenager isekai'd into a kitchen sink fantasy world, with a game interface that lets him rapidly get stronger. But it very much puts a lot of time into its characters and their personalities and relationships. But also gives the standard LitRPG "numbers get bigger" rush.

Thanks, I'll give it a look!

Worth the Candle is unique and memorable, sometimes frustratingly uneven but hard to put down. Much of the kitchen sink world building fell flat for me (but there are some striking inventions); sometimes the story drags (but it rarely feels like the author is losing his grasp on it); some of the characters have odd motivations and aren't especially likeable (but they're consistently and characteristically odd, and their dynamics with each other are well developed, with moments of surprising insight); in all, it's rarely missing on every aspect at the same time, so there's almost always something to keep pulling you along. And the prose is workmanlike throughout, which is saying something because the book just does. not. end. Even the end isn't the end, but if you're still with it by then you won't mind. As the only LitRPG I've read, I can't say with authority that it's way better crafted than most of the genre, but that's certainly the impression I get secondhand, despite it being a Door-Stopping Work of Staggering Self-Indulgence.

I liked most of it a lot, personally my only issue is that I felt the author forced a couple extra arcs in just to display more of his world building. Personally I liked his world building a lot, but eventually it did start dragging on as he'd describe monsters or magic items or whatever that didn't actually have much relevance to the plot at a time when the story should be climaxing.

His other story after it, This Used to be About Dungeons, is like that x10. Just endless descriptions of magic items.

That might have been me. For LitRPG, 'World of Chains' was an enjoyable listen for me (and the compendium, books 1-3 at 45 hours total, is listed as a single audiobook on audible!), but not quite as good as DCC. My bigger recommendation would be the Bobbiverse series, which is technically not considered a progression fantasy and rather just goes under "SciFi". But fundamentally, it follows the trajectory of an initially powerless AI (which is itself just a copy of the mind of the eponymous Bob) towards literally settling the universe, so imo it's conceptually in the same space.

One recurring issue that i note is that characterization is either weak or practically non-existent.

Do these series have real characters other than the main character and is main character acting plausibly within the confines of the established world? I feel this genre has a painful self-insert and infallible MC issues.

Regardless, I'll check them out.

The Bobbiverse kinda sidesteps this issue since the entire point of the series that after a (near) human extinction, the self-replicating AI called Bob becomes it's own spacefaring empire. So there's a decent number of different characters in the main plot, it's just that they're all Bobs. While their values increasingly diverge as he's replicating himself, they generally are recognisably the same kind of nerdy programmer type the original Bob was (and it's implied that some of the latest generations of Bobs diverge even further). On the other hand, it's a book with an unusual lot of sideplots, humans didn't get entirely wiped out and there are a few other species, so there is a small number of non-Bob characters which get okay characterisation. It's sufficiently weird and imo enjoyable to listen to give it a try.

World of Chains is on the other hand a fairly standard Fantasy-RPG setting. One of the main points in the first books is specifically that the MC behaved like an ass to the major of the town he started the game in - which is in the middle of nowhere so he can't go anywhere else - so he has to patch up his relations with the entire town since, unsurprisingly, the major is pretty popular. Most individuals are reasonable people with reasonable motivation, including the major and her supporters. But since it's an RPG in-universe, there are a few enemies that are almost comical archvillain-tier of badness and some oddness around how quests and NPC behaviour/reputation works, but it's explicitly talked about.

Overall both stories regularly have situations where it's implied or explicitly stated that the MC has made a mistake (especially in the bobbiverse, where different Bobs are MCs in different parts of the story and they don't always agree with each other). Admittedly I'd say both stories seem pretty strong on the self-insert - for both Bob and Daniel (WoC's MC) I wouldn't be surprised if their backstory is literally the actual life of their respective authors. And also, both books have a bit stiff prose that is pretty common among nerd writers. And they're very obviously progression fantasies, so while the MCs do make mistakes along the way, they never screw up so badly that they're done for (on the other hand, for Bob this is only true in the aggregate - some Bobs do in fact fail and die).

Do you recommend them as listens or reads? I noticed that WoC is narrated by the soundbooth theatre guys so I assume that is well done.

Listens, for precisely that reason.

Thanks, I'll check them out!

Started in on Jame's Clavell's Tai Pan. Still on the intro but I'm already learning some (pseudo) history about the opium trade that I never knew before, which isn't too hard because all I knew before was that Britain and China had an opium trade and it led to a war.

Are you excited about the new Shogun TV series?

Indeed. I've never seen the original TV show but I've read Shogun twice now.

I thought it was time to try out a second Clavell Asian Saga book, and choosing the next one by internal chronology made sense.

Did you end up watching the series? How did you find it?

It's difficult to judge as a TV show because I know the book and so I knew the plot and the characters going in and could tell what parts they took out, what parts they altered, what parts they cut down and so on. Over all it was fine, no complaints*, but the book is necessarily a much richer experience and if I ever want to revisit the story I'd re-read the book rather than rewatch the show.

* One complaint: Lady Ochiba's anime villainess dialogue delivery.

Thank you. I think I need to go and read the book.

In The Public and its Problems, Dewey argues that government is the outgrowth of people observing each other and noticing the consequences of their actions. Officials arise when people try to indirectly control consequences of behaviour which go beyond the immediate people involved. This is in contrast to "original impulses" claimed to be found in people, like some mystic force which drives us towards an ideal form of government. There's something about this book which makes one pause.

Even yet, however, toleration in matters of judgment and belief is largely a negative matter. We agree to leave one another alone (within limits) more from recognition of evil consequences which have resulted from the opposite course rather than from any profound belief in its positive social beneficence. As long as the latter consequence is not widely perceived, the so-called natural right to private judgment will remain a somewhat precarious rationalization of the moderate amount of toleration which has come into being. Such phenomena as the Ku Klux and legislative activity to regulate science show that the belief in liberty of thought is still superficial.

Now, when I read Kant saying Sapere aude! I wonder how his words might seem if viewed in Dewey's framework. I'm not sure that the world needs more disillusionment, but a more realistic appreciation of principles, or rather the origin of arguments which seem principled, might do us some good in evaluating those who argue that they had no choice but to use heavy-handed means to control people. One must become familiar with his tools if he is to use them effectively. And perhaps the people who we hate are sometimes not so different in all their thought processes from the people who we revere.

The Master and his Emissary continues. In McGilchrist's framework, the left hemisphere is more explicit, the right more implicit, and this sometimes manifests in the terms "verbal" and "non-verbal." However, these words themselves seem inadequate, because metaphor, which is ultimately verbal, is in his account the right hemisphere's domain. McGilchrist might say (I can't remember if he did) that our thinking in these terms is itself a left-brain phenomena. In other words, our very idea of "non-verbal" interaction might be subtly misleading us from something profound.

Being myself, I naturally try to shortcut the investigation of this profundity, and have begun to wonder if the internet needs a passive-aggressive quip system. Imagine a smaller italics label on posts, something like a flair on the bottom, one which says EdenicFaithful did not find it necessary to respond to this commenter.

Do we need more room to praise or display aggression in less direct means? We normally think of this in terms of "body language," but this too might be missing the mark.

Of course my first suggestion seems likely to pour gasoline on the fire, but maybe there's a recognizable format which would allow more implicit expression using the mediums available to the internet, including text. Likes and dislikes are, after all, black-and-white, which is in McGilchrist's account a left hemisphere phenomena. Something obvious may be eluding us.

I've been thinking of Dewey's point as The Riddle of the Flute Children. Its applies quite generally. Cutting and pasting the riddle:

Amartya Sen starts his book The Idea of Justice with a parable about three children and a flute. Who gets the flute? The child who can play it? The child who made it? The child who has nothing else?

The response that gets to the heart of the matter is

Kill the person who asked the question. Once the idea of redistributing flutes takes hold, ambitious men will fight to be Lord High Distributor of Flutes. The fighting will escalate. The flute will be broken and the child who made it will die.

Asking who deserves the flute is self-defeating because the question sets off violence that leaves us without a flute.

Turning aside from political philosophy and turning back to the reading of old books, I notice that Dewey has priority. He made my point in 1927, 96 years before me. But his point and his once popular book have faded and I was unaware of them.

It seems obvious to me that my violent and strident phrasing of the Riddle of the Flute Children is a mistake. The idea gets masked by peoples reaction against the over-the-top expression. I would do better to phrase it in a mild and temperate way. Perhaps

recognition of evil consequences which have resulted from the opposite course

Whoops! That doesn't work either. Only a dark wizard of Ravenclaw would pick up on the profundity of the point being made. How is one supposed to expressive this difficult idea?

🙄 🤓.

EdenicFaithful laughs without comment.

Oh god. I parsed that as one of Pillars of Eternity II's companion reactions.

If you haven't played the game, they're short lines which pop up when a companion has strong opinions about your dialogue choices. Each of them has a variety of things they care about, and there's some randomness, so it does a good bit to liven up the interactions. Most of them are sensible. Others are hilarious.

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