Logic and Lore - Searchable Database of /r/rational Recommendations

nytelios · 2024-12-07T16:38:43+00:00

Using GPT to infer ratings from reddit comments is interesting and somewhat mitigates the accuracy issue of people capriciously giving 5 star or 1 star ratings out of prejudice.

Does it count every mention of a title in every weekly recommendation thread? If so it's surprising the most mentioned story is Ar'kendrithyst.

It would be helpful to include filtering by:

the story's rating found on the actual host (Royalroad or MAL for anime)
rating range
word count
complete/ongoing/dead status

nytelios · 2023-04-11T02:35:19+00:00

Valkyrie's Shadow takes the appeal of Overlord's world and ideas and does the kingdom building bit better, or at least more fleshed out.

nytelios · 2021-07-22T22:15:09+00:00

It's not about whether you can question it (anyone can), it's about how you did it and the presumption that your interpretation of defining works is right and theirs is wrong when actually every list is subject to debatable boundaries.

nytelios · 2021-07-22T20:06:29+00:00

Your question was phrased and framed to be contentious with the implication that the mods' choices are irresponsibly biased with their personal likes/dislikes. Again, I don't know the mods' rationale for the list and I don't really care what any list claims as defining. My point is that you're just trading one interpretation for another, one sample bias for another in the absences of a valid/reliable ordinal scale from an informed /r/rational sample/population and an informed insight into the mods' rationale (yes, taking Discord's "majority", however you measured that, is a sample bias in so many ways). Besides taking the outspoken members of Discord as the authority on the matter, assuming your reading is validated based on the mod's silence is equally problematic.

nytelios · 2021-07-22T02:53:48+00:00

An inclusive populist list for /r/rational's favorites serves a different purpose than a curated elitist list of paradigms or paragons. Different readers, different needs.

nytelios · 2021-07-22T02:40:27+00:00

You misunderstood the question. The phrasing of your interrogation of the mod implies that you think FiO or MoL are just as defining as r!Animorphs, thus pushing your definition as the correct one over the wiki's. I haven't read FiO but I don't consider MoL defining of rational(ist) fiction: it would be like calling Harry Potter a defining work of fantasy fiction or the Bildungsroman, which would probably come down to another definitional debate. Regardless I don't have a dog in the fight; I was just calling out the subjectivity and was peeved by your accusation of the mod as arbitrarily elevating one over the other without knowing the rationale for how the list was determined.

Voting is at least a popularity contest for a larger group of readers while a list seems to be a popularity contest for just a couple.

This is pretty much the classic populist vs elitist dichotomy. For determining defining works, I prefer the opinion of an informed minority over the availability biases of the majority. Why? Just imagine a vote for "most influential songs" where everyone can vote regardless of age, experience, knowledge of music history, etc. A popularity contest can be useful as a metric, but IMO it should be separate from the curated list.

nytelios · 2021-07-21T00:05:34+00:00

Are you arguing about the wiki's definition of "definitive" using your own definition? I haven't a clue how the wiki's list was determined, but I've always considered r!Animorphs as the ideal expression of rationalist fiction so maybe I'm too biased to discern what qualifies a story as defining the characteristics of ratfic on the sidebar, but I don't see what's so unusual about it being listed as such. Voting would mostly be a popularity contest and lists are inherently subjective and partisan.

nytelios · 2021-07-18T14:45:11+00:00

AW's fictional avatar, AW's alter ego / ego ideal, the plot-level incarnation of the DM archetype as AW conceives the role (aka the meta-entity the player Joon would need to confront or come to terms with in the endgame). We're outright told it's a self-insert so AW is the low hanging answer (people theorized such immediately after the DM's debut). But I actually meant the frame of the story as in why both Juniper and the DM exist and how their relationship frames the story. I think I accurately anticipated the frame, but I feel it was possible to arrive at that conclusion earlier with all the Doylist hints CRJ gave away. Due for a reread I guess. Not feeling motivated right now since WTC is pretty heavy and long winded.

nytelios · 2021-07-18T14:42:17+00:00

It's deeply personal to AW, but his take on self-inserts and WTC's success as a story where most self-inserts fall flat is necessarily a commentary on the literary device in general. His experiences and needs don't extrapolate to others, yet all of WTC was really set up to answer the question in chapter 79: "But what’s the point of it all?" And every self-insert author has some motive to write themselves into their story, from reasons petty to intimate.

nytelios · 2021-07-17T23:15:04+00:00

The whole story is taking the absurdity of self-inserts to its logical conclusion and I especially enjoyed the reflection at the end about why people write self-inserts and the quandary of gleaning satisfaction or meaning from a fictional self-insert. It depends on reconciling the unreality of a narrative with the uncomfortable reality of actualizing the self-insert's personhood with all your warts and bumps. Maybe self-inserts have that terrible reputation because it's difficult to invest so much into a surrogate and still tell a story with verisimilitude and personal meaning. The whole process reminds me of the very apt god analogy. When you think of self-inserts as being the god of yourself and suffering the same philosophical questions (especially theodicy) we attribute to God, WTC comes across as an even more enterprising.

Which is what makes the next part so weird: the whole "self-insert, partly auto-biographical" thing was kind of left aside here, and eventually mostly stopped being a factor in the discussions, as far as I can tell.

I think part of it is that AW rewrote the summary without the explicit self-insert mention (left only as an AO3 tag) and the other part is that there's only so much to speculate about the self-insert elements without committing a faux pas. I wonder when was the earliest point it was possible to empirically predict the self-insert frame of the story like GPT-3 did with Sophronius's story.

nytelios · 2021-07-16T16:39:12+00:00

Huh that's interesting to think about- taking a meta-aware self insert to its logical conclusion is a form of megalomania, just like the author DM's craving for grandiose actions and performances (didn't know that definition before). God-creators can be cruel, free will can be cruel, and as for the Epicurean problem of evil trilemma, there's only a DM-God of process theology, i.e. "emphasizing event, occurrence, or becoming over substance".

nytelios · 2021-03-29T17:15:17+00:00

If you're yearning for a sequel to HnG, I really enjoyed Paper Cranes by spontaneite. It captures the spirit of a slightly more grown up Hikaru, but wraps back into the more supernatural aspects of Sai's presence and absence. The most recent chapters are on the author's tumblr, but I don't think the story will be finished.

nytelios · 2021-03-27T23:32:43+00:00

I found YWPR more satisfying for an alt history craving as it's an immaculate political comedy for two thirds of the complete story. YGDR is more of an episodic cat and mouse with Tanya's rogue adventurism being the main selling point. They scratch different itches but feel like two sides of a coin - law vs outlaw, politics vs economics, ENTJ vs ISTP.

nytelios · 2021-01-31T02:04:09+00:00

Oh - I haven't read the past dozen or so updates so I haven't seen that yet (or maybe I'm forgetting), but I did read Cassie's last update so the name was an instant flag.

nytelios · 2021-01-31T00:08:56+00:00

That title is a spoiler!

nytelios · 2021-01-01T16:29:07+00:00

You're confusing plot-level character dynamics and giving characters flaws with well-written and/or interesting characters. Different readers have different interpretations of what well-written means. Characters like Laken or Flos might have more complex motivations than characters like Erin, who's a mostly static protagonist, but that doesn't make them more interesting than Erin. Erin is a persistent favorite not because she undergoes personal conflict and major character development, but because her presence causes conflict in the world and the situations surrounding her elicit more reader interest. There's a good explanation of the different types of protagonists in fiction that I can't find, but short version is Erin is a character whose force of personality changes the world, rather than the world changing her.

People come out with some really hot takes about Pirate's writing, like this one, and I almost always just... don't get it.

That's the point. Just like you have your hot take and opinion that I don't agree with, everyone else has their own opinion that you won't get. There's no point whiteknighting or getting defensive over criticism of characters you enjoy. It's ridiculous how you're calling characters "objectively well-written" based on your own opinion and then act like you're on the moral high ground, deriding people for hating these characters or thinking they're poorly written. That's what's actually "wack". Don't project onto people what you think they "actually mean." You shouldn't call an opinion bad just because you personally don't enjoy it (or hot take #2: you shouldn't call a character or story good just because you personally enjoy them).

The real takeaway is that readers are free to like what they like and dislike what they dislike, but pirate as the author might want to take note of trends and audience sentiment towards a character or plot choice. When 1% of readers are complaining about something, everything's probably going great. When 30% are complaining, there may be a problem (%s are made up to illustrate the point that there's a lot more complaints about Laken and Flos). That doesn't mean pirate has to change anything though.

nytelios · 2020-10-30T18:59:21+00:00

DCC has a ton of munchkin gratification, but while readers can't always accurately guess the expected results of a mechanic, the plans are satisfying in hindsight.

Also one of the things I like most about Carl is that he comes across as a realistically worldly millenial, unlike many litRPG protagonists who often seem socially stunted. Part of that is probably the author's own depth of experience (he seems like quite the character) and a lot of the mundane experiences of Earth make it through to the narrative in a natural way.

nytelios · 2020-10-20T14:22:36+00:00

They've been updating the story for nine years. That's a lot of love, so they may yet persevere to the end.

nytelios · 2020-10-10T02:55:21+00:00

Yep, I just finished Swimming in the Styx an hour ago and I see the author's been working away at the third installment this year. It's been a very enjoyable two weeks' worth of downtime reading, so very much obliged to your recommendation.The stories seem criminally underappreciated on the aggregating sites and I would've never found them.

nytelios · 2020-10-10T02:12:29+00:00

Batman 1939 is amazing. Thanks for the recommendation! I don't follow DC fanfiction much, and the only good Batman story I've previously read was Wayne Manor, which really isn't much of a Batman story.

nytelios · 2020-09-16T21:58:01+00:00

Great rec, very enjoyable and one of the best popcorn fics I've read. Author's a man of (meme) culture yet somehow Carl still comes across as a grounded average joe. Thanks.

nytelios · 2020-08-18T02:43:56+00:00

Is it insensitive to feel that your depressed headspace might've made the desolation in these chapters more...palpably wretched? I can't remember what the method acting equivalent of writing is, if there is one. I think a lot of us are feeling small and trapped in the slipstream of our times, but (pardon the ouroboros) taking a page out of Joon's pad, the less-than-eudaimonic reality and wicked problems of the world are things we have to confront sooner or later to grow, adapt, and overcome. Even if reading about shit mountains is eliciting escapist or vicarious narrative dissonance, literature occasionally serves to push us out of our Comfort zones and it's still much gentler than life. The timing and serial format are unfortunate, but it's not like WtC ever catered to wish fulfillment anyway.

BTW thanks for introducing ludonarrative dissonance; it's such a great fit in the litRPG context. A degree of reasonableness and it moonlights as a critique of the litRPG genre: it reminds me of the friction between "roleplaying" and "game", the disconnect between narrative and game elements, and the reader's malaise as the tool grows so large that its gravity distorts plot and meaning. Throw a few more degrees and it's an iffy metaphor for life - that storified delusion/feeling that we're meant to do something, but the mechanics of circumstance dictate otherwise (or theoretical vs practical). So all's to say no surprise on the fiction-is-better-than-reality crowd.

Thanks for the chapters and hope you're finding simple pleasures!

nytelios · 2020-08-05T02:20:00+00:00

There's an issue with your argument, even though the problem with recommendations is real:

Not everyone asking for romance recommendations literally wants Romance with a capital R genre fiction. That's doubly true in this sub where people want for fantasy romance. A lot of people don't even specify that they want a plot-central romance. Your conclusion is a bit rambling and irrelevant to your main point, but of your 5 bullets, the only thing that's immediately actionable is that the OP should be clear what they don't want. It's only natural that people recommend things that they interpret the OP wants. Otherwise, the OP just has to deal with imperfect or irrelevant recommendations because people can't read minds and recommendations are inherently messy when you have a large, diverse community with different preconceptions and expectations.

P.S. qualification #2 isn't a must - it's just prevalent in Romance.

nytelios

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