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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2741 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 1, 2024

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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The wife and I decided that instead of watching 3 hours of TV a night, we should read together, which has been a nice change. The wife suffers a bit from literary narcolepsy. Which is to say, reading puts her immediately to sleep. So the night turns into 10-20 minutes of us reading together, and then me reading for another 2 hours while she's asleep on the couch next to me. Which is fine by me.

I finished A Princess of Mars and Day of the Oprichnik this week.

I gotta admit, A Princess of Mars left me underwhelmed. All the descriptions were just so perfunctory and staid. You'd think it would be difficult to describe the fantastical flora and fauna of a living mars in a boring manner, but he pulled it off. The characters are frankly tedious and boring as well. Even the action is so-so. Possibly the most interesting part of the book is the fact that it came out in 1912. Which means the main character, a former confederate cavalry officer and southern gentlemen, is generally esteemed and presented as a noble and moral person. It also heavily features the canals of mars, which were believed to exist at the time he wrote it. Has some fun airship battles, which play out like naval battles since the era of flight, or aerial combat, was so new when he wrote it.

Was also interesting to read on wikipedia how the book influenced Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury, James Cameron, Flash Gordon and Carl Sagan. But ultimately, I can't really give it a recommendation.

Day of the Oprichnik was wild. Really pulled me along, and I finished it in about two days. Checking the wiki for this book, something like 70% of it is analysis, so I'm sure most of the subtext of the book went over my head. But I enjoyed it all the same. Honestly I don't want to spoil anything about it, since going in completely blind was half the fun for me. I will say, it's a bewildering and perversely charming slice of life story in a dystopian Russia. It's also 100% from the first person perspective and an enforcer of the regime. So that's fun.

A Princess of Mars

S.M.Stirling wrote IMO an amazing riff on the Barsoom books called "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings" . For those who don't know Stirling, he's a 1776 (luv me liberty, luve me small government, luv me common law etc) Canadian, who is, also, at the same time a hardcore HBD/biodeterminist guy but keeps very quiet about it to not upset the Boomers who are most of his readership.

It takes place in an alternate timeline where someone (or something) terraformed Mars & Venus to support life and transplanted humans there. Cold war kind of fizzles out into a huge space race when it turns out both places are habitable and in fact inhabited. Venus is a jungle planet with primitive tribes, Mars is very cold and quite dry but its engineered ecology supports a slowly declining civilization despite its inhabitants being almost Ivy League material of 125 average IQ. Why Mars isn't in space and colonizing Earth is handwaved in the book with a "no uranium on Mars" claim.

It's amazing how much heresy you can pack into what looks like and is a fun adventure book and get away with it if you package it sa "fiction". There's even some obvious applause bait with mild subversiveness of the male human hero getting rescued by a princess etc. Meanwhile, it seems the reviewers completely avoided mentioning why "hero getting rescued by a princess" makes perfect sense in context. (my metaphorical sides are hurting)

One can also tell that Stirling is uneasy with things as they are for us, because somehow, Martian biology is precisely of the kind that liberals like him would like ours to be. Little in the way of sexual dimorphism, due to an average lifespan of ~250 years, childbirth and child-rearing doesn't hurt women's vocations or careers much.

Publishers Weekly called it "charming", and praised Stirling for "successfully creat[ing] a truly alien environment", but criticized his "inclusion of pirates with eye patches, heavily armored guards riding 'fat-tired, self-propelled unicycles' and other moments of near-parody."[3] Kirkus Reviews lauded Stirling's "magnificently wacky Martian biological machines" and "fully developed and carefully crafted social system", calling the book overall an "unexpectedly rich lode of creative ore", and judging it extremely favorably compared to Stirling's previous work.[4]

At the SF Site, Dave Truesdale "heartily recommend(ed)" the book, saying that he could not "think of a better [example]" of planetary romance.[5]

Meanwhile, within the book, it's made clear that Martian biotechnology works flawlessly and that Martians at their apogee routinely engineered themselves for various desirable character or physical traits. (E.g. the imperial bodyguard caste are almost as strong as earth humans and have psychology similar to that of special forces soldiers. Ultimately obedient to lawful, competent authority but never quit and independent of mind..

We do this whenever I feel like I need to look at something that doesn’t glow before bed.

Absolute best success was Code of the Woosters. My girlfriend and I took turns reading it aloud, which really suited the comedy. Cripplingly funny.

How do you feel about Elric?

I haven't read A Princess of Mars, but I watched John Carter last year, which I understand to be a fairly direct adaptation of it. My wife thought it was too hard to get into given the strange world building, but I thought it was a super fun adventure romp. I didn't know the history going in, but I remember thinking "wow, this is practically ripping off Flash Gordon, almost scene for scene".
Needed more Queen, tho.

Day of the Oprichnik

At first the book doesn't even resemble typical Sorokin's prose, lulls you with its now obviously prophetic story and then the centipede scene bludgeons you from behind like a stealthy mugger.

Meanwhile me, recognizing that scene like an old friend. "That's it! That's where the Space Marine meme is from!"

The discussion spurred me to read the book. If that's what all Sorokin is like, I ought to check out some of his other work.

Yeah, I knew nothing about it, the author, or anything. Just showed up in a list of recommended Russian literature.

Apparently Russia also has a hyperventilating liberal class shouting "THIS BOOK IS LITERALLY JUST LIKE RUSSIA IS TODAY!" Which seems... unlikely. I know it's not great, but yeah.

It's not literally that, but consider that it was written in 2006, right in the middle of the first, pro-Western phase of Putin's rule. The whole idea of Russia isolating itself from the West, reinventing itself as a junior partner of China and adopting an explicitly reactionary internal policy sounded about as plausible as the plot of The Day After Tomorrow back then.

Superficial people were misled by the Chinese efforts at pretending they're going to liberalize. Anyone with a more suspicious mind and some real interest in China would have understood that's a lie.

2006 was when Politkovskaya’s murder happened, and at least in Finland that was widely considered a sign that things were developing to an adverse direction. Of course even before that it was common to speculate on far-right/left forces taking over in Russia, and Putin was considered at least lightly authoritarian.

Politkovskaya's murder went relatively unnoticed here, since her favourite topic wasn't exactly popular with the general public. "Chechens killing other Chechens? Finally some good news!"

So what happened? Where did it all go wrong? Was Putin not invited to the slumber parties?

Depends on which Kremlinologist you ask. If you ask the man himself, like Tucker did, it all went wrong when Wolfowitz proposed his unilateralist doctrine.

Whenever I hear about "A Princess of Mars" it seems like the proper way to adapt it is as isekai anime.

When I first skimmed the post and saw the title I did indeed think this was an anime they were watching, until I went back and actually read it.

Aldnoah.zero is halfway there. Not very good though.

The wife and I decided that instead of watching 3 hours of TV a night, we should read together, which has been a nice change. The wife suffers a bit from literary narcolepsy. Which is to say, reading puts her immediately to sleep. So the night turns into 10-20 minutes of us reading together, and then me reading for another 2 hours while she's asleep on the couch next to me. Which is fine by me.

I applaud this. I keep trying to get there and failing.

We've been doing this for about a decade. Highly recommended. We watch a movie(or equivalent) together maybe once a week, for the rest of the time we sit together and read or watch our own stuff.

Our media interests don't particularly align and I personally feel like media consumption is a mostly personal thing anyway, if someone else starts commenting on stuff I lose immersion.

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