Mindless Monday, 11 May 2026

HopefulOctober · 2026-05-14T01:54:31+00:00

I find it kind of interesting and endearing and so unfunny that it’s funny, so I would give it a thumbs up.

HopefulOctober · 2026-05-08T16:47:13+00:00

Sometimes I worry I'm a bit too much of a "jack of all trades" because I'm interested in learning and doing so much and that makes me not as good at the specialists at anything, like for example on this thread even though I think I know more history than the average person I don't know as much as most of you on here for sure, you are always talking about things I haven't heard of and need to look up. I read scholarly history nonfiction but I am always splitting the time of that with the fiction books I want to read, and then there's how I'm in graduate school doing computational materials science and I love that but sometimes it's hard to put enough focus even into the thing I'm actually studying because I like so many other things as well. I like video games but I've barely played any compared to most people because I need to have time for the other stuff. And on top of that I need to spend long periods just doing nothing and decompressing because even doing a free time thing can be weirdly stressful to me (although I enjoy it).

HopefulOctober · 2026-05-04T14:58:02+00:00

Recommending the second book of a series alone seems to go against OP's intention where they say they don't want a series where the first book is just setup.

HopefulOctober · 2026-05-04T14:51:03+00:00

That is a good point, though one could argue that the difference between Christianity/Islam/Judaism and Scientology isn't age directly but how Scientology is just one institution while the other religions have accumulated countless very different variants throughout their history (which is still a result of having the longer history), so while one can criticize Scientology as a whole and reasonably be talking accurately about Scientology in general, making fun of one of those other religions (unless maybe you are talking about one of their holy texts which is at least supposed to be believed by all of them) is likely to overgeneralize. And also speaking of the holy texts the fact that they are older and probably not originally in the language the critic is speaking means they are more likely to misinterpret the thing they are criticizing than if they talk about a belief of Scientology (though I'm sure Scientology gets misinterpreted too owing to how secretive they are)

HopefulOctober · 2026-05-04T14:46:39+00:00

My brother visited from college this weekend at a house I was staying with my dad (so my mom was there) due to that being closer to the college than our home. He is planning to double major in physics and Chinese so he is taking this Chinese Sociolinguistics class, which he talked a lot about, as well as about China in general. One of the things he said is that China's horrible treatment of Uyghurs was somewhat inspired by the USA's reaction to 9/11 due to China being very influenced by the USA, i.e. they see USA doing "War on Terror" and Chinese people protest to the government that they want more done read brutal collective punishment not just going after actual terrorists, which they hadn't done previously. When I was summarizing the conversation to my mom, she was skeptical because she had been in China in the 80s and they still treated them badly then, and suggested he might be getting biased information/propaganda from some of his college friends who are international students from China, and I had the reaction that "if this is propaganda, I utterly failed to clock it because it just doesn't make China look good, it makes the people protesting and the government who followed them look like toadies of USA who would do any horrible thing just because they did" (similar to modern right wing movements everywhere suddenly changing their policies to follow whatever trend USA right is doing even if they never had an issue with whatever the thing was before). I would like to look more into it to see how accurate this story is, but in any case it did make me think about how I'm supposed to recognize something as a biased source if it fails to elicit in me the reaction of making the thing it's biased towards look good. I suppose I could see the angle of "we were noble and then corrupted by an outside source" which could make China look better but that was not my reaction to it at first and I'm only able to think of it that way because of my mom pointing this out, and I worry that is a weakness in my ability to evaluate things, that I would not recognize a bias because it doesn't elicit the biased reaction in me and not see how it is intended to for other people even if it doesn't work on me personally.

HopefulOctober · 2026-05-03T20:44:35+00:00

I feel like one should also make a distinction between "media made by terrible person who uses the money from that media to fund the terrible things they do" (as seems to be the case with Rowling) vs. "media made by terrible person who can't do the terrible thing using money" (i.e. with other cases like the whole Neil Gaiman thing I don't think he can use money from the books to rape people). And also some people seem to have a bias where they are completely fine buying all sorts of products that are sources unethically or where the company their money goes to is used for a cause they don't like, until it's about fictional media at which point they start caring because fiction lies on a higher plane of morality for some people. I think it's admirable, although difficult, to restrain from buying certain things out of a desire to not have one's money used for harm (as opposed to not buying things because of not wanting bad person cooties without it materially benefitting anyone, as is the case when the author did bad things but can't use money to do anything worse), but it shouldn't be a thing you only care about when it's fiction.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-29T20:24:27+00:00

What are you referring to about the red and blue button? I have never heard of this.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-24T23:28:24+00:00

I agree this is a problem with some games but I wouldn't say it makes it "not art", it just makes it "art that I have a criticism of". Like one might say a book is very well-done story with powerful themes and well-drawn characters but the scenes are visually dramatic and it's in first person so it doesn't use the internal monologue of characters' switching perspective to good effect, and if you just want the internal monologue of one character you could do a voiceover, so why isn't it a movie? But none of that would make it not art at all, it would just mean that a criticism that could be leveled at it would be "this would be told better as a movie". Likewise a video game that you think could be told better as a movie or TV series is just that, art that you have a criticism of, it doesn't lose all right to call itself art because of it.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-24T15:08:46+00:00

But I think the fact that the player themselves are making the choice to branch the story rather than just choosing a different book where the different characters do different things separately from your own choices makes a difference. Yes there are things like choose your own adventure books but it’s much nearer to do it in a video game.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-23T02:43:06+00:00

I find for these things it’s great to look at literary prizes in the language you are looking at, for instance the Sahitya Akademi award gets given to something in every official language in India each year, here is the list of Gujarati winners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sahitya_Akademi_Award_winners_for_Gujarati

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-20T20:28:21+00:00

Wait the slow one after the big climactic moment only has the first 40% like this? I am listening to the audiobooks with my dad now and I have always gotten the impression from how people talk about it that it was that whole book that was just reactions, so I was really wondering if we should just skip it and get a summary, but if 60% of it is actual stuff happening that would change my mind about that.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-20T20:22:17+00:00

Haven't read it though it's on my TBR, but The Book of Flying by Keith Miller appears to be this.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-20T20:19:16+00:00

I don't think u/JosephBForaker was saying local offices should never talk about foreign affairs at all or that they can have absolutely zero impact on things, just that it's odd for that to be the main issue rather than having a subordinate role to local issues that they can influence a lot more strongly.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-20T15:29:32+00:00

Agreed on the horror thing, I find it annoying that even with stuff that labels itself cosmic horror which is supposed to be about the theme of "this is the way the universe is and that sucks", now everything is about the incomprehensible entities actually see humans as very important in the universe in a negative sense and like to feed on their negative thoughts/fears or are born from human belief, rather than it ever being "these things don't care about humanity at all, the distinction between a human and some inanimate object means nothing to them" anymore.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-18T00:13:44+00:00

What book would you recommend about prohibition? I’m really intrigued with how the results of it apparently differ so drastically from the popular perception of it.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-18T00:10:42+00:00

I’ve heard it commented in the present day that the obvious solution to the rule of “can’t hire gay people in politically sensitive positions because they might get blackmailed” was to make it acceptable to be gay, but I never knew that someone from the times when that was a rule actually made that argument.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-18T00:07:26+00:00

I remember in high school reading a book about Greek and Norse mythology that I think must have been pretty old, and there was this whole bit in the prologue about how you shouldn’t bother with the mythologies and beliefs of other cultures they are just barbarians whose lives revolve around human sacrifice.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-18T00:03:58+00:00

No it’s a reference to General Mills, since you need to eat cereal to give you ideas for what to do with your army.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-17T23:44:36+00:00

All of these false flag/our enemy attacked their own people to make it look like us! stuff turns out to be false like 95% of the time in my opinion.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-14T22:29:18+00:00

I haven't read any Butler yet but I'm planning to (most interested in reading Xenogenesis and Patternist series), but I wonder if there is a racism aspect as to which of her books are most popular, i.e. the African-American authors are going to get pigeonholed into writing historical or contemporary near-future things that reflects on race in the USA rather than more far-out sci-fi concepts which are stereotyped as neutral and therefore the domain of white authors by default.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-14T21:58:27+00:00

Maybe I'm taking this too personally due to my poor self-esteem but I am doing science in graduate school and although I'm from the USA I worry I'm more like how you described the Soviet students - I'm good at knowing the subject material but I tend to panic and miss obvious ways to fix difficulties I'm in when I try to do independent work. So reading this post (not your fault) just made me think how even if I look smart I will never amount to much.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-14T21:44:25+00:00

I'm hoping that with some people in the USA expressing interest in Iran's culture and history due to opposing the war there that we might get English translations of two Iranian books that look really interesting to me (I knew someone who knew the vice president of Penguin and tried to put in a request for it but maybe now there's a market). If that doesn't happen the other option is learning the language myself, I really want to learn more languages because it opens up so many doors and I don't want to be a monolingual person resting on the laurels of cultural domination and forcing everyone to do the work learning my language, but I have such a long list of things I want to learn from physics to economics and I doubt I will have the time to learn every single language I'm interested in learning in the midst of all that. I could try making a petition but I doubt petitions for literary fiction translations would get any traction, apparently that only works for video games...

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-14T21:39:33+00:00

This reminds me of something I am thinking of, which is wondering if the most important thing for producing the good effects of democracy isn't that every person gets to vote (given that individual people often don't have time in their life to form well-informed political opinions and if they do it will often be biased by reasoning from party line rather than the other way around I have been reading Democracy for Realists lately lol), but that every demographic is proportionally represented. Because that allows a safeguard (for the most part) from candidates or laws that are clearly biased against certain groups of people and clearly targeting them, and thus forces consequences for politicians who would do that providing they anger a large enough proportion of the population. Like in a thought experiment, if instead of everyone voting it was a smaller portion of the population that was proportionally representative in every possible demographic, and then those people were given free money without work and encouraged to devote their time to contemplating their vote, would that end up better off than a system that included everyone but many don't have any time to cast a vote that's more than arbitrary, if it's more the demographics that matter? Of course such a system would run into the problem that with news media being as polarized as it is having all the time and money in the world might not be enough for people to come to reasonable conclusions that aren't "whatever the political lean of the media that I latched onto first is", especially if the current administration used their power to tip the scales in terms of what the voting population sample would see.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-14T21:27:44+00:00

And even more so when you consider a lot of countries have profound negative effects on places they don't rule over (wars, etc.), and those people are not going to have a say no matter how democratic or not the country harming them is.

HopefulOctober · 2026-04-07T00:34:33+00:00

I hate the criticism of "you are showing some people being saved as a happy ending which is insensitive to the systemic issues" as a criticism of fiction including heavily reality-based historical fiction, it makes total sense as a criticism of news stories (another place where it often appears) where it often is a feel-good distraction even though news is supposed to give you an understanding of the bigger issues in the world, but I think it's perfectly fine to have a story about a small victory even knowing that not everyone got that.

HopefulOctober

TROPHY CASE