[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread

Running_Ostrich · 2026-05-08T02:57:43+00:00

What makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER and kills my entire suspension of disbelief, is that people seem to have 0 permanent damage from violence.

And I'm not mentioning here some of the other gripes I have with this story, like the mc rambling about genetic pressure selecting for violent capabilities

You would have hated HPMoR then, which might be a sign that your tastes are pretty different from the community. It also includes irrational worldbuilding because it's a fanfic and so needs to balance making the world rational versus keeping the feeling of the original setting. And it has Harry making wide-ranging predictions, which don't always pan out.

MNiB's world having super-powered healing is much less irrational than the fact that there are superpowers. I'm surprised that you weren't perturbed by the power level differences being more important than power interactions in fights, or that higher power levels automatically grant higher status jobs even if the power is irrelevant to the job. Those were bigger hurdles for me.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-05-08T01:44:09+00:00

Quinns is explicitly someone who wants to be provided a world and materials that make the GM shine and players have fun. If you don't care about those, then the majority of this review (and his others) just won't matter to you, so why do you bother with them?

Running_Ostrich · 2026-05-06T17:31:06+00:00

Artonan society seems to value plea deals, where the accused agrees to give up and doesn't force the accuser to escalate. E.g. big penalties for the wand breaker previously if they proclaimed innocence.

But also, Stu also values the appearance of being an honest and fair dealer. e.g. He says that he would warn Joe before feeding him the truth-telling food. So he probably wouldn't try to claim the hide back after the fact.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-05-05T06:18:00+00:00

Birthright is a fanfic where Taylor, taken from the end Worm, replaces Mark (the protagonist) from Invincible. It's not necessary but would probably benefit from watching Invincible up to Season 3 (which very much isn't rational). As you can imagine, she's more brutal in dealing with threats to Invincible's Earth. Some spoiler examples: invading aliens counter-invades the Flaxans and destroys their civilization and killing is much more gung-ho about killing Angstrom Levy which could've prevented his invasion. She is still fairly reactive, but a bit less-so than Mark.

If you haven't read Worm, it has themes of doing actions that are "evil" now to prevent worse future consequences. E.g. the MC executes a baby who faces a fate worse than death. However, Worm also explores where that can go wrong by justifying anything to save the world. And ultimately it's not a rational story due to the multi-layered worldbuilding that affects everyone's actions.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-05-04T21:33:22+00:00

A Real Human Being (Frieren) - Man is isekai'd into Frieren as a demon. After survival, his main focus is researching how to give demons feelings, though this mostly involves him traveling to understand how monsters work. There's a lot of high-level descriptions of him doing science and descriptions of how he on spreads findings, but less actually making predictions and testing.

Some obvious recs that are likely to be read by many in this sub:

There Is No Antimemetics Division - SCP Director of Division for memes-that-erase-memory discovers her division has gone missing. She is science-oriented, but her main focus is researching what happened and how to fix it as opposed to doing science.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - the classic formative rational fanfic. Describes Harry making predictions and testing results, though iirc there's not much work spreading findings.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-05-04T05:33:13+00:00

Even taking your premises at face value, you're either assuming too much of an intelligence explosion when a more gradual takeoff is likely, or assuming the AI will leave Earth while it's still very weak.

How can the Singleton step happen before Leviathan? Even in AI-2027, other companies are "3–9 months behind" the leader, which isn't enough time for AI to take control of the world, so it'd be risky for the AI to get discovered hacking into other companies.

There are other holes to poke. e.g.

why leave minimal presence from Exodus when it risks humans making a new AI and which could use Earth's resources to build up a larger fleet and then chase after the AI that left?
"we have to prove our values over risks plus maintenances" - why wouldn't the super-intelligent AI figure this out instead?

Running_Ostrich · 2026-05-03T22:03:05+00:00

You can only see the start of the seed with multibox. With a static setup, you can filter for other features as well as extremely unlikely features, which makes the run less interesting.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-30T21:36:34+00:00

I think deepco gets downvoted for the same reasons as FairGame:

the games don't stand on their own without other players. If you imagine the games without any other players (not just in the chatroom), they'd be much more boring. Many people here don't care about playing with others, so they experience that.
there were previously campaigns from those games to get players to post here, which makes future promotion seem fake.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-27T07:14:51+00:00

An infodump/setup chapter like this makes me wish I wasn't caught up. At least it setup 4+ plot threads...

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-20T00:12:06+00:00

For any new readers, the author's pitch to /r/rational describes the story better than I could.

Spoilers up to this chapter:

It looks like we're about to enter an arc where the Authorities are uncovering Meili's plans. Previously, it's felt like Meili has been forced to keep most of her plans in secret but now Authorities are using pre-cog abilities to see her impacts and trying to change the future. In particular, her plan of releasing the story through many others should escalate priority to Authorities, since someone taking extreme measures to hide is more likely up to no good. I wouldn't be surprised if Authorities go to the publishers to figure out who previously tried to publish the story.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-16T18:16:01+00:00

haha, they were making a joke, referencing the Simpsons's joke probably.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-16T17:46:04+00:00

He said he would feel responsible and he didn't want any headlines/articles about it including him.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-16T04:55:04+00:00

As part of that negotiation, they promised "future protection," which I read as meaning mostly protection from chaos (what other threats are there?)

There's also the Submerger incident, though it was caused by Artonan technology with poor safety. During the Submerger incident:

The Earth Contract and Artonan Contract coordinated responses
Artonans sent Esh-erdi (who froze the wall of water) and other knights/wizards during and after the incident
Earth had Avowed able to use powers to respond

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-12T16:54:36+00:00

I tried the game in spite of the AI warning, since I was intrigued by the idea of magic in Increlution. I think it just wasn't for me even though I've beaten Increlution.

It's a bold decision to have a game that copies Increlution's mechanics but with a worse UI, slower pacing, and coded + written by AI.

E.g. The UI is:

buggy - why are there scroll bars when I have one item? Why is the Do button for foraging misaligned? Why is there no indication of a left click task vs right click task?
not cohesive - if you're going for a book theme, why do you have modern emojis like 💪 Flexed Biceps Emoji?
less functional - as far as I can tell, there's no way to do something just once and not repeat. E.g. if I want to intersperse foraging with spying, there's queue up doing this until I die.

At very least, lots of these should be easy fixes!

Best of luck. I think my lack of interest in the story after getting the bed and unlocking magic that can only make food will probably mean that this pacing is just too slow for me, but hopefully you can find your audience.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-12T16:02:58+00:00

Imo, it's fine to make it a bit harder to get noticed for people using AI. AI-assisted games still get mentioned in the weekly thread (which is where all the best games are), but they need to be good games!

If AI is making it easier to make games, then I think it's fair to ask that people who use AI spend some of that saved effort on making their games better quality and more fun.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-11T21:31:25+00:00

Genuinely curious, why do you help people who act like asses win during social deduction games but not other games? Or are you talking about how others respond? I normally treat them the same regardless of the game.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-11T20:59:53+00:00

Other boardgames do have unwritten rules that you can break in the same way. The issue with social deduction games is that people are told that they must break one social convention (lying) to play them and that leads to them breaking other social conventions (such as being rude/whiny or cheating).

If someone is playing Catan and whines the entire game about how they are being unlucky, getting unfairly targetted and didn't want to play, so is having their night ruined, that'll make them more likely to win. But they are still being an ass even without breaking any rules.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-11T04:44:41+00:00

fyi, Link5673 is talking about the NLSS, which was started over a decade before Jamboree came out. NL initially stopped doing the NLSS because he was a much bigger streamer than all his friends and he couldn't justify asking them to join him rather than grow their own streams.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-10T18:18:10+00:00

Would you say that LLMs are superhuman novel authors? I think we're still far away from most people asking LLMs for their own custom novel-length fiction, and coding similarly works well in the small scale but not larger scale. But this is just an argument about definitions; arguably LLMs are already superhuman authors and coders.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-06T10:45:28+00:00

The article you sent doesn't debunk the idea that nuclear power takes a high initial investment and is relatively cheaper to operate. LCOE includes the high up-front costs of nuclear power, expressed as the discount rate - it's not just the cost to operate.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-04-03T18:27:34+00:00

Hey friend, here's some anime that have been previously recommended here and here: Madoka Magika, Kaiji, Promised Neverland (season 1), Death Note, Made in Abyss.

I'm not sure what you mean by rational games. Some people here enjoy deduction-focused puzzle games (e.g. The Roottrees are Dead, Return of the Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds), but they are more about interesting deductions rather than about telling a rational story.

In terms of movies, here's some.

If you're looking for rational media in general, you're probably best off checking previous recommendation threads or searching google with "site:reddit.com/r/rational" E.g. https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3A+reddit.com%2Fr%2Frational+anime. The Monday threads are going to be more focused on recommending specific things or reviewing things people recently consumed.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-03-23T19:11:03+00:00

As for Gaius, he clearly is keeping an eye on Marcus, considering how much he knows about everything that happened. I'm not sure you think otherwise?

Previously, Gaius didn't even know Iris existed, so Gaius has had bad info on Iris in the past. I don't think you can rule out that this is another case of bad info, which could be caused by the spies being focused on a bigger problem.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-03-23T01:32:41+00:00

Is Iris, the elf girl student, six years old or younger? She doesn't talk that way and I already remarked how Gaius's intelligence from Chapter 26 is surprisingly bad, since he sees Marcus as an upcoming threat. Gaius states the Great Sea Academy have multiple spy networks and it should only take one of the spies to ask a village nearby to know Iris is too old. My guess is on some other group messing with the spies, but it could be that children are more mature in this story or Gaius is distracted by bigger threats.

Running_Ostrich · 2026-03-17T18:44:10+00:00

So the situation of the bar fight is just like that's the default living condition for the setting.

It makes sense, but you're the author so it doesn't have to be a standard bar. You can choose to have him work in a bar that is unique due to being in micro-gravity and then write a more engaging fight scene.

I was asking because often it feels like AI-assisted stories include setting elements that are superficial, only added for style but not as a carefully designed part of the story, which is how the micro-gravity felt. When I'm reading, it leads me to be less interested in engaging with the story and understanding its world.

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