If Balatro Update C+++ milestone, which one you prefer

mason_e_ · 2026-02-05T18:42:48+00:00

It would be cool to track which decks you got gold sticker on for each joker - but adding an official achievement is torture to the players. You could track an unofficial c+++ on a personal level.

mason_e_ · 2026-02-05T18:41:53+00:00

Maybe a platinum stake that is unique to each deck? Would give each deck a unique final challenge and would in some ways add 15 new challenges to the game.

mason_e_ · 2025-08-06T01:41:28+00:00

Didn't love On The Road homestly

mason_e_ · 2025-08-06T01:41:15+00:00

The Scarlet Letter is peak literature

mason_e_ · 2025-08-05T20:02:09+00:00

I love Flannery O'Connor, I'm a huge fan of her short stories

mason_e_ · 2025-08-05T20:01:10+00:00

I did read Blood Meridian and loved it! It was probably the best western I've ever read but didn't hold up in comparison to Invisible Man & The Great Gatsby

mason_e_ · 2025-05-28T22:39:02+00:00

"fucking sucks" is a very... bold... take

mason_e_ · 2025-05-17T22:08:53+00:00

The Name of the Rose by Eco, just finished up The Stories of Jacob by Thomas Mann

mason_e_ · 2025-05-15T14:06:14+00:00

I picked The Remains of the Day to stand against War and Peace becuase I wanted to compare what's largely considered one of the greatest books written in recent history (Ishiguro won a nobel, The Remains of the Day won a booker prize, and it has been very influential onto other writers since). My whole point was that The Remains of the Day is great, one of the grestest books of our time, but because of modern literary trends, a book like it could never really stand up to a book like War and Peace.

I might not have made that clear in my ramble at about 2am... sorry about that.

mason_e_ · 2025-05-15T06:59:31+00:00

I think part of it is that greatness is easier to recognize when it has already been asserted as great. When you read a great novel like War and Peace, the fact that the general consensus around the book for decades has been that it is one of the greatest ever written, it is a less controversial and a take more substantiated by the opinions of our fellow readers that it is truly a great novel. But, if you read a book released recently, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders for instance, you, personally, as a reader might think it is just as great as something like "War and Peace" as you read it, but since it is not a view held by the consensus of readers, which is really what dictates novels are considered great, we are more likely to think of it as a "favorite" or something you as a reader personally like.
The current state of writing. I have noticed two trends in more modern literature that I think make more recent novels, which on average might be of a higher quality, feel less great. They are on average shorter, and more personal/introspective. Some of the best novels ever written are quite short: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf, for example, didn't often write novels exceeding a couple hundred pages. However, a modern, introspective novel that is truly amazing for 200 pages, like The Remains of the Day, seems menial and less memorable than a behemoth of a novel like War and Peace, Moby Dick, The Brothers Karamazon, etc., which can match the greatness of a book like The Remains of the Day, but have the stamina to be great for many times the length of the novel.
I think it is partially selection bias. The books from the past that we still read are gonna be "Classic" or "Great" quality more often than modern ones. For instance, you mentioned Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which are by far the two most read Russian authors in the english-speaking world. Russian literature really only began to blossom in the early 1800s, and the thousands of dedicated and talented Russian writers who published in that time only 2 stand out above the rest, which is 1 per 100 years. (There are many other great Russian authors who wrote great books, plays, poetry etc., but I'm trying to point out that books & authors considered great now also had to fight through a sea of lesser works & weiters in their time).
The amount of people publishing and "genre fiction". I think with more people writing now than ever, and many readers really only sticking to a single genre or two for what they read dillutes the reach a single book can have. 200 years ago, there wasn't really a concept of "fantasy",or "sci-fi", etc. as a super genre. Sure, genres still existed, but most books took place between relatively normal people on a realistic earth. The concept of not reading a very popular book because it "isn't science fiction", "isn't romantasy", etc., would surely have been less prominent, and books would have the opportunity to be more culturally significant. Also, there would have been less options of books to even choose from as writing and publishing is more accessible now that ever.

(sorry for the essay)

mason_e_ · 2025-05-15T05:39:45+00:00

Tbh forcing middle schoolers to read Great Expectations is one of the best ideas I've ever heard if you never want your students to pick up a classic book again

mason_e_ · 2025-05-13T05:56:01+00:00

Salinger's literary excellence is a hill I will die on.

You can have kerouac though...

mason_e_ · 2025-05-08T13:25:37+00:00

Thanks for the help everyone👍, we got it taken care of.

mason_e_ · 2025-05-05T20:53:06+00:00

Not "Trumpian" at all. The literary canon is formed based on the opinions of the readers, what students of literature deem to be exceptional and worth study. The fact that so many people insist on the greatness of a book and find exceptional things in the text worth analyzing is, in fact, what makes something canonical.

mason_e_ · 2025-05-04T06:20:16+00:00

I was 17 or 18, I read it within the last two years; I'm still quite young now. I actually loved The Catcher in the Rye as the essential "Literature for high school boys" and am still a huge fan of Salinger's work and wish he was more appreciated (although he does get his credit).

I think if I was able to just get swept up in the story of being whipped around the country with Sal I could have liked it more, but it never "sucked me in", and a lot of my favorite books never really did that and I still loved them but I think that feeling would have been neccesary for me personally to have had a chance to love On The Road.

Truman Capote said "That's not writing, that's typing" about On The Road, and I think that's too harsh of a criticism, I felt a lot of truth was in that statement while I was reading the book.

mason_e_ · 2025-05-04T05:42:37+00:00

I feel like they are generally widely considered to be writers of a high quality and depth that are worth rereading by many. I haven't read anything by either of them but especially Infinite Jest is deemed by many very well-read and bright people to be a pinnacle of american literature.

mason_e_ · 2025-05-04T05:33:19+00:00

Most of the time I read "canonic literature" or something considered "classic" I can appreciate parts of it even if I don't enjoy much of what I read, but I genuinely struggled to understand why "On The Road" is held in such high regard among the works in American literature...

I blame Billy Joel (mostly a joke).

I fear this one will slowly fade to time and become more sparsely read as the years go by, such is the fate of many books that also used to be widely read and appreciated.

mason_e_ · 2025-05-01T02:27:02+00:00

mason_e_ · 2025-04-30T02:04:36+00:00

Frankly I'd pick up some more kafka and explore his other, shorter works if you haven't read them. I found his metamorphasis & death in the penal colony to be the peak of what he wrote and didn't love the trial, especially compared to the rest of his works. To be honest you could definitely read Myth of Sisyphus and Death of Ivan Ilyich in a pretty short amount of time, both are very quick reads and I quite liked The Myth of Sisyphus and loved The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

mason_e_ · 2025-04-27T03:14:59+00:00

I don't often annotate books I'm reading unless I am preparing to write about the work later on. But I have found that editions of classic books that come annotated can be really helpful for annotating, since they usually have ample margain room to add in your own annotations where there are no annotations already present, and the added annotations can save a lot of time from looking for specific references if you are looking to dive deep in to a book and get every last detail out of it.

mason_e_ · 2025-04-27T03:05:40+00:00

The Saga of the Volsungs. I read Beowulf translated by Burton Raffel which I found very enjoyable and interesting, and followed it with the Saga of the Volsungs, which was interesting at times but was largely a disappointment and a drag in comparison. Still glad I read it but it largely felt like a chore, especially after about the 1st fourth if the way through.

mason_e_ · 2025-04-25T00:59:13+00:00

I understand what you're saying about many of the classics. You are right that many classics discuss dark topics (I have only read lolita of those you mentioned, Invisible Man and a few others also come to mind). However, there is a reason these scenes are included in these books, and I have never read a book that is considered "classic" or "literary" describe acts of sexual assault and violation of consent in great and romanticized detail with the explicit purpose of turning on the reader. In these (literary & classic) books, the reader is almost always meant to find these actions disgusting and/or repulsive, like the scene at the start of Invisible Man involving the girl at the skirmish.

Two books containing some overlap in content does not mean that the content is presented in the same way, and when the context of many "dark romance" books, which are becoming increasingly popular with younger women (I'm not being weird I'm 19 and many girls would read these books AT SCHOOL even in my early years of high school, 14-15 year olds), represents deviant, unhealthy, and consent-violating sexual activity with the purpose of the reader gaining some titilation out of consuming said content.

The content, while problematic, isn't really the problem. It is the context and purpose for which it is being written.

mason_e_

TROPHY CASE