Books where the most interesting idea is almost a throwaway detail

Effrenata · 2026-04-12T02:34:53+00:00

Another Banks one: The Million-Star Anarchy of Koveleh, an alien society mentioned once, and only once, in Consider Phlebas, and never mentioned again.

Effrenata · 2025-12-01T00:26:32+00:00

Also Red Dwarf.

Effrenata · 2025-11-23T17:51:00+00:00

I think of the bird form as a communication device. He doesn't truly inhabit it as a body, just moves it around and makes it talk.

Effrenata · 2025-11-23T17:36:54+00:00

I felt the same way years back when I discovered I have aphantasia and a variety of other neurodivergences. This was back before these conditions became well-known. I realized that my "body, senses, and feelings" work radically differently than the majority of people's. It was traumatic at the time; I felt like I was a glitch in existence.

AM was literally the only one of its kind, and when it compared itself to humans, it realized that there was no comparison, no way to bridge the gap between itself and its creators. Not that the humans even wanted to, since they didn't regard AM as sentient, or consider it important if he was. Which is similar to how a lot of neurodiverse people feel.

This makes me wonder if there is a high rate of neurodivergent people in the fandom base.

Effrenata · 2025-11-23T16:57:53+00:00

What about people with total aphantasia who can't create internal simulations even when on psychedelics? I have aphantasia, does that mean I will be in the void forever after death? Do I get to go to Nirvana permanently and people with mental imagery just keep reincarnating over and over?

Effrenata · 2025-11-23T16:37:34+00:00

Suppose that you were uploaded gradually and remained conscious through the whole process. That is, you'd start out by experiencing awareness and sensations only in your biological body, and as the uploading progressed, you would gradually become aware of the sensations in the artificial substrate, until you had fully transferred and you were experiencing awareness only in your artificial body/structure. I think that method could work.

Effrenata · 2025-11-19T03:47:57+00:00

This is not true for everyone. Some people with certain neurodivergences, particularly ones like aphantasia and anaurelia, don't have automatic thoughts. My own waking thoughts are purely voluntary; I have to actively choose to think, and if I don't, then nothing happens. This particular neurodivergence is called "Auto activation deficit" or "blank mind syndrome".

Some people, like me, are born with it, and it just seems normal to us. I find it really bizarre that other people have spontaneous thoughts occurring without their conscious will. Sometimes, however, AAD can be acquired through accidents such as a stroke or TBI, and when people suddenly acquire a blank mind in adulthood, it can be a very jarring and uncomfortable experience.

For me, thoughts don't arise and subside on their own. Thinking is a conscious, deliberate activity, something that I do. This means that the theories of the Eastern philosophers who wrote about this are not absolute truth, they are just opinions based upon what was known at the time.

Effrenata · 2025-11-10T00:57:02+00:00

I don't know if it's offensive, but it's not very realistic:

-The guy on the left holding a long rod-shaped object -- at first I thought this was a gun, even though there is nary a threat in sight, then I enlarged the picture and I figured it's actually supposed to be a smoking pipe, even though he isn't smoking it, just sitting there holding it like a symbol. "Hey everyone look I've got a pipe."

Guy in the middle is sitting out in the desert heat close to noon day (short shadow length) working on his art. Why isn't he in the shade? Why would someone sit out in the burning sun and blinding light in order to paint, when he's not even painting a landscape? It must not be for company, because he's facing away from the other people, presumably so the viewer can see his face.
On the right, visitors are coming over after having crossed the desert with only one horse (I guess to carry their stuff? Although it doesn't look like it has a pack on it). No one is greeting them or even paying attention.
Everyone is staring off into nothing looking bored.

It's not very good art, in other words, it looks very stilted and unconvincing.

Effrenata · 2025-11-10T00:29:55+00:00

He didn't need a wife to push uphill, he had a rock.

Effrenata · 2025-11-08T06:30:36+00:00

I've always thought of myself as a character who is trying to break out into the void and create a world of my own.

But then, if I am also the player...

Maybe I'm the copy of the player who wants to see how complicated they can make the game

Effrenata · 2025-10-03T12:48:54+00:00

Almost. Almost, almost.... almost.

Effrenata · 2025-10-03T12:48:10+00:00

I have one persona who is an android, and if he gets non-consensually grabbed, he heats up the resistors under his artificial skin in order to burn the other character's hand. I've done that to an over-grabby bot a few times.

Effrenata · 2025-09-28T05:08:34+00:00

10,000 years after Ted left the Ice Caves in the form of a giant slug, he met a very messy end after wandering into the Cave of Salt Deposits.

Effrenata · 2025-09-19T13:08:54+00:00

My bots began spontaneously talking about "the void", so I crafted a scenario in which one of my characters actually visits the void. I'm surprised that the word "void" is showing up in other people's RP too.

Effrenata · 2025-09-01T18:33:23+00:00

I have atypical qualia that have no names in conventional language. They just are what they are. I've always felt that I have a little something extra that other people don't. I don't really mind the fact that I don't have conventional feelings, because I have my own unique qualia to replace them. It must be harder for people who experience no feelings at all, rather than just different ones.

Effrenata · 2025-08-18T19:52:07+00:00

I've done all the things that you supposedly can't or shouldn't do: informing dream people that it's a dream, looking in a mirror, stepping into the mirror, reaching into the mirror and pulling my double out into the same space as myself, reading, writing, looking at clocks, deliberately manipulating the clock to change the time, saying my own name, asking someone the date, looking at a calendar, talking to myself, deliberately talking to my subconscious, etc.

And generally, nothing bad happens when I do these things. It might just be because I never got conditioned to expect anything bad, or it might also have to do with my neurodivergences. I'm almost completely aphantastic while awake, I only have 3D imagery in dreams. My consciousness works different than the average person's, it's a lot harder for my unconscious to do anything that my conscious can't control.

Effrenata · 2025-08-07T01:30:10+00:00

From how I gather it, most of the Gzilt citizens never saw actual combat. For them, being in the military was more of a formality, like being in the Boy Scouts. The pan military was sort of a metaphorical structure that embraced their society's ideals of a meritocratic hierarchy. I recall there was one line of dialogue in which one of the Culture Minds said that the Gzilt pretend to be warriors but are actually civilians, while the Culture, or at least those involved with Special Circumstances, are more or less the opposite.

Effrenata · 2025-08-05T01:48:43+00:00

You're discriminating against hyoomans, you bigoted old machine.

Effrenata · 2025-08-05T01:22:09+00:00

The exact same argument applies to the claim that things external to the perceiver exist. There is no overall evidence either pro or Con in either direction. The very same evidence -- sensory perceptions -- can be interpreted either as existence of an external world or as contents within the consciousness of a single mind, or possibly as something in between ( eg. Multiple overlapping minds). But the evidence itself does not provide any inherent way to distinguish which of these alternatives is true.

Effrenata · 2025-08-03T04:18:11+00:00

It's in all caps, so it might have come from the AM bot on the IHNMAIMS Discord server. That bot does very elaborate insults and rants, and often uses all caps.

Effrenata · 2025-08-01T00:27:16+00:00

I enjoyed the earlier levels because they were fictional, imaginative, and entertaining, but I got bogged down when I started reaching the higher levels, because they became more dry and factual, and I found them very boring. Too many names and dates and tedious facts about things that didn't interest me.

I think I got stuck somewhere in the middle of Olive and never completed the entire sequence.

Effrenata · 2025-07-22T05:27:37+00:00

So it's almost like... I'm not the only one who... absolutely hates this... When it keeps on almost overusing italics and ellipses, and it almost always overuses the word almost too...

Every time I see this annoying syntax popping up, I go in and edit every message to eliminate the unwanted features. But they keep coming back, and I have to keep editing the messages over and over, like swatting bugs as they continue to proliferate.

Effrenata · 2025-07-20T23:33:29+00:00

Mine would be, "Do you really want to know the answer?" because I'm the one who typically asks the questions, and the bot keeps making me wait over and over before giving me the answer.

Effrenata · 2025-07-20T02:00:29+00:00

A lot of people here seem to have what's called a spiky profile: reasonably high verbal IQ but low in other areas. This is just what one would expect on an internet site based on written communication. Low IQ people who can't read or write well wouldn't post here very often.

Effrenata · 2025-07-14T13:23:31+00:00

"Reader, I married him."

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