>Recommended reading charts (look here before asking for vague recommendations): https://mega.nz/folder/kj5hWI6J#0cyw0-ZdvZKOJW3fPI6RfQ/folder/4rAmSZxb
https://youtu.be/RQ567ezE370 unfortunately this video has nearly convinced me against dandelion dynasty the descriptions of bluntness, the "fixed right and wrong being steered towards" in contrast supposedly with GOT where bad people can win (ive actually heard that GOT has a similar underlying "justice" where bad people get their comeuppance eventually, but regardless that one essay on Daenerys is already imbuing far more nuance in my mind than what is implied by this videos description of how dandelion dynasty bluntly addresses tyranny). It just comes across as too narrow. Unironically in a twist of events, almost in retroact convinced me that GOT is a better read. But im still skeptical of that.
This guys review is almost complete opposite to that Book Guy youtubers review I posted some days ago where he said its deeply philosophical, and plays with concepts and values in a way that doesnt spoonfeed you an answer, but leaves the conclusions to be decided for yourself (there are unique problems with that theoretically, but its almost always preferable to "lol tryanny bad, ill pretend its not actually that simple by showing how le trynanny corrupts even da good, so that you have a tacit association with good and tyranny, which makes it seem like tyranny has more dimensions than strictly bad, even though, well its actually just bad and there's nothing truly complicated about that, nothing deep to investigate about how thousands of years of tyranny existed beyond "well people were just different back then and got tricked by the big bad leader, not like modern more free societies, where they only get tricked a little but still get on freedomingly) I'm going to be reading political philosophy soon this coming year so i figure scifi and fantasy's approach to politics will only start to seem more foolish.
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Anonymous06/05/26(Fri)19:31:32
Severian is literally me
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Anonymous06/05/26(Fri)19:43:14
>>25323874 >I need Daniel "It's not cheating because she's nonbinary and I have a bisexual pass" Greene to give me permission to not read a book series
pageblogspammer please, you must become a better man than this.
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Anonymous06/05/26(Fri)19:47:37
>>25323910 uhhh what? i dont know anything about these guys' personal lives, but if nobody else is going to give me a deep dive on what makes something good, worthwhile or interesting, and if AI is going to be stupid forever (likely because its just an amalgamation of the most typical collected thought ever, so it can only answer the most simplest and shallowest of prompts where specificity, nuance, and particular experiential based detail is irrelevant) then I can only basically go look at the biggest most popular guy video who talks about the thing I want to know something about. Its not like academics are talking about this, and besides, academics are stupid in their own unique way, theyre horrible at communicating ideas, and forget that they live in a society not a vacuum sealed echo chamber, where the replication crisis fails. Nothing is conditioned independent of the most complex overarching thing. Now whether it should be? Obviously not. Thats how you get echo chambers and circlejerks.
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Anonymous06/05/26(Fri)19:52:09
>>25323920 >irrelevant) then I can only basically go look at the biggest most popular guy video who talks about the thing I want to know something about Anon just pirate book 1, read the first few chapters and make up your own mind if you want to continue reading it or drop it. You've wasted hours researching and watching videos about a book when you could've just read the first chapter and made your own, independent opinion. You are the final judge of whether or not something is good- not /lit/, not reddit, not youtube, and not the hugo awards.
long and interesting read before this, no idea how any of this going to be addressed really, but it talked about mechanism and the general sense of how some modern mysticism/religion of its fictional time seemingly basically says and encompasses too much "meaning" to the point that people are left experiencing things without any purpose or value. Thats all I could gather from that. I'm just interested what it could all actually end up meaning for the story. Doesn't seem that far from our modern world is my only issue.
For example it talks about conceptualizing the mind as a computer, but something i learned even in highschool psychology is that despite that being an intuitive notion, the mind is actually nothing like a computer, and memory is like one of the biggest aspects of the mind where you can realize that. We do not process memory cleanly enough for computers to be a sufficient analogy
I just dont know what would make any future human think of the mind as a computer when past humans (our modern time) have already dismissed that analogy.
Still interesting stuff to read about in a scifi novel
>>25323997 They didnt figure out that the mind wasnt like a computer by 1992?
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Anonymous06/05/26(Fri)21:01:32
>>25323998 There are still people who think it is. A lot of people really. Also, it wouldn't matter either way.
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Anonymous06/05/26(Fri)21:04:55
>>25324003 >There are still people who think it is. A lot of people really. Makes no sense. The facts contradict such. And so does logic. Philosophers have dismissed similar analogies, but extrapolating the mind to the closest complex machinery long before computers existed.
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Anonymous06/05/26(Fri)21:25:17
>>25323910 Bakkerfag was posting his favorite e-celeb years before he became known as the pagespammer.
Probably the worst written part of the book so far. A secret special order of prostitutes that mastered everything about torture and made a deal with the super duper powered high brow assasins, to protect them from another set of random assasins that they hired to assasinate their pimps so that they could have all the money (gee why did historical prostitutes never think of such a brilliant and genius idea. what the fuck is the point of a pimp if a prostitute can just save up all her riches from the dumb men willing to throw a fortune at these women, and then get rid of the middle man so that they can own everything?) and then somehow inexplicably through their relationship with the super powered special high brow assasins, who were interested in the order (super powered high brow mathematicians that fly spaceships) they got in bed with the order, and also somehow the warrior prophets just decided to teach a bunch of super special secret prostitutes their "teachings" (whatever that means)...just because.
This is just dumb, this is silly and makes no sense. One of the greatest sins of writing something can commit, is establishing a set of facts and conditions, without explaining how it makes sense that certain phenomenon or events or further conditions arise out of the preceding ones. It just makes it look like youre sloppily making shit up on the spot, and also more importantly, HOLDS ME HOSTAGE so that I have to push forward through the story accepting some relevant (made relevant not by relation of affect, but by brute force relation of attention) condition.
Its weird. The narrator does stuff like this where they sort of skim through some information you dont yet have access to to explain and deepen some understanding of the current thing the narration follows after, or precedes. But that works when its psychological information that cant easily be accessed, or is already justified by what has already been established so that the narration is just an efficient way of adding depth that otherwise is only implied, and therefore makes no sense, like how much narration there is about Hanu's feelings, his mental battles with himself, and information hes hiding.
But this doesnt feel the same, this feels like a hasty justification of a new condition (courtesans with great social power) of the story that has never before been relevant, and also the explanation on its face just makes no sense, it doesnt add depth, it just adds information that has no real relevance or basis beyond its mere mention.
This is why I say context is not depth. But at the same time. This sequence and Danlo simping for her would be retarded even without the context. So the fundamental framing of this interaction is just broken, until further notice. Assuming the courtesans are better explained later, and escape seeming merely like a quirky plot device.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)01:02:13
>>25324404 Nobody reads these. You really need to consider killing yourself.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)01:03:39
>>25324404 God how I wish you would shut the fuck up.
How do you select for which short stories to read next? I gave up on longer forms due to tendency of authors to include time-wasting frill. I tried Hugo, Nebula and mainstream Greatest Of anthologies but dislike the political messaging present in the stories and inherent selection bias. Also don't have time to wade through underground or niche magazines to uncover that one gem in a pile of shit. What do
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)11:19:58
Are there any scifi stories where the evil megacorp is actually smart and good at business?
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)11:26:09
>>25324984 >>25324984 Your best chance is to find authors you like and read their collections. Drop the ones you don't like quickly. Other than that, I don't know what to tell you. Even reading themed anthologies or themed best of anthologies may not help if your taste doesn't align with the anthologist. For my part, I've accepted it. I've posted my favorites here before but again, it may not be of any value. You can try reading from older decades as well. Short fiction goes back to the early 20th century.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)11:32:07
>>25325006 Name some real word examples of smart and good at business and/or what you are specifically looking for. Are they still the enemy? Maybe the protagonist works for them? Could even be story justifying them.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)11:48:23
>>25325017 >authors you like The same issue - few good stories and the rest is filler.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)11:53:24
Anything like 20 Evocations or The 60 Minute Zoom?
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)12:05:39
>>25323990 >I just dont know what would make any future human think of the mind as a computer when past humans (our modern time) have already dismissed that analogy.
You have dismissed that analogy because you are a retard that doesn't know how either works.
Meanwhile we have just discovered the mathematical principles of thought which, though our understanding of them is in its infancy, have already led to the invention of large language models in real life.
The brain IS a computer, there is nothing else it can even be, although it is different to our purely silicon-electronic machines in how it operates. Don't say humans dismissed the idea, because no one serious really did, YOU DID, because you're an idiot.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)12:10:07
>>25325043 Guess you'll just have to give up on reading altogether since it's not worthwhile enough and focus on some other form of entertainment. Though, the problem seems like it'd be for everything . If you find something where it isn't, you should stick with that.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)12:46:15
>>25325064 ur retarded. AI is our understanding of how brains works translated into binary logic. not the other way around
>>25323801(OP) Is The Wandering Earth any good? There's a goofy movie, too.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)17:43:29
>>25325064 Kek the fuck does this retard think LLMs are? Why would you even bring up LLMs in favour of a brain as a computer analogy, how fucking stupid do you have to be to insist that computer scientists/engineers understand the brain more than Neurologists and Psychologists? Fucking retard.
>>25325759 >local autistic pagespammer remains baffled by empathy and being able to predict a person's thoughts. He believes it to be a mindreading gimmick
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)21:27:18
>>25325759 >>25325869 Wait, is that's what's going on here? Pagespammer is a sociopath that doesn't know that the normal person would just be able to relate to another person. This concept being so foreign to him that he thinks a character is reading a person's mind?
>Pagespammy admits to being "tired of this gimmick" Now you know how I feel when you make a post.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)21:50:24
Whats wrong with some of you guys? Is creating mental fantasies about somebody else that has no basis that satisfying for your shallow selves? It's retarded.
>>25325927 We just want you to fuck off. It's pretty goddamned simple. You haven't noticed (because you're an oblivious autistic who cares for nothing and no one but yourself and your own narcissistic, inane navel gazing) that EVERY SINGLE THREAD that you post in goes IMMEDIATELY down the shutter.
Fucking kill yourself man. We fucking hate you.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)22:05:39
I've never actually sincerely wanted someone on this earth to fucking kill themselves and rid the world of their bullshit until bakkerspammer/pagespammer came along.
Put the barrel to the roof of your mouth and pull the fucking trigger.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)22:06:19
>>25325936 Since they are all mobile screenshots, it would probably be pretty trivial to pull a geolocation and IMEI from them given the number of samples.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)22:13:45
>>25325988 Not that I'm aware of sadly.
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Anonymous06/06/26(Sat)22:16:59
>>25325992 Ehh, it's already I'll just build a database of all of pagespammer's posts, and use word link analysis to find his writing style to search for posts from him elsewhere on the internet. Then analyze the images in bulk under the assumption that he's posted even just one of these screenshots elsewhere.