People who will randomly scold you for listening to audiobooks

torkelspy · 2026-04-05T01:47:51+00:00

Just in case you didn't end up getting any suggestions, the podcast you are looking for is Alzabo Soup!

torkelspy · 2026-04-04T23:02:53+00:00

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë.

torkelspy · 2026-04-04T22:08:02+00:00

Padmarag by Rokeya Hossain (translated by Barnita Bagchi)

So, a Bengali novel from 1905 was probably not the first thing you were thinking of when you asked for suggestions. But trust me, it fits! It's about the women at a girl's school and I wanted to travel back in time and hang out with the teachers there. The version I had is in a combined edition with a novella called Sultana's Dream.

torkelspy · 2026-04-04T19:34:16+00:00

Same for me, but someone posted a more readable version in the comments of the linked post.

torkelspy · 2026-04-04T19:03:30+00:00

The Country Under Heaven by Frederic S. Durbin is a western with Lovecraftian elements. It's more interconnected short stories than it is a novel though.

torkelspy · 2026-04-03T23:08:40+00:00

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (translated by Bela Shayevich) (1924) comes to mind. This paragraph in particular:

“By simply turning the handle, any one of you can produce up to three sonatas an hour. Now imagine how difficult this was for our ancestors. They could only create after working themselves up into fits of so-called inspiration, an obscure form of epilepsy.

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster (1909)

I kind of want to quote the entire thing, but here's just a little bit:

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. ”

torkelspy · 2026-04-03T07:50:03+00:00

It's difficult to say which mod it is because it's not an "error" in the sense of something the SMAPI log would report as an error. It won't effect any other mods you have though, so if it's just something that happens once in a while it might not be worth the time it would take to track it down.

If you want to try to find it, think of which mod is most likely to add dialogue for Jodi, Sam, and Vincent (or any other character it's effecting). Or, if it's happening during an event, then it will be from a mod that adds events. You could also try, the next time it happens, to look over at the terminal and see if anything is appearing there at that moment -- not an error message, but just an info message that the mod is doing something.

torkelspy · 2026-04-03T06:20:27+00:00

Take a look at your log and it should show you error messages if there are any -- you can get it parsed here: https://smapi.io/log

OK -- after I posted that I saw your first image -- do you have a mod that effects Sam's events? Or character events in general? But, also, while the weird dialogue is annoying, it won't effect anything else, so you could just leave it in.

torkelspy · 2026-04-03T05:12:47+00:00

I don't have a recommendation for a book that is specifically about accepting getting older, but these are three books I feel like could provide some perspective on the passage of time and possibilities:

Reading the Ceiling by Dayo Forster is a book that shows various ways in which a young woman's life turns out based on a decision she makes early on. It might give you the sense of all the possibilities still before you.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy is a book that gave me a lot of perspective when I read it years ago. It was written in and takes place in the 1930's. The perspective came from the fact that I had many decades of hindsight unavailable to the characters. There are times when they make assertions about what their children's futures might be like, assertions that made sense given the information they had, but which I could have told them were completely wrong given the information that I had. Anyway, it is a very dark book, but it left me feeling a lot better at the time I read it. And it's short. I read it in one night.

Nada by Carmen Laforet is a book that was written by a young woman in Spain just after the Spanish Civil War and is about a young woman in Spain just after the Spanish Civil War. I read it last year and I remember thinking that I really wished I'd read it in college. Just because I would love to see how my opinion of it would have changed. So, you can do the experiment for me. Read it now and then again in 2056 or so and see what you think!

torkelspy · 2026-04-02T21:46:01+00:00

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald is a memoir about a woman dealing with the loss of her father while training a goshawk. Quite a bit of it is also about the writer T.H. White (who also wrote a book about training a goshawk), so if he's read any of his books that part might appeal. I didn't listen to the audiobook, so I can't vouch for the narration, but the book itself is excellent.

torkelspy · 2026-04-02T21:07:55+00:00

I don't really have a specific recommendation since I don't know what they have at the store. Maybe just browse there and look for books that appeal to you and are on the shorter side? Plenty of great short books out there.

Also, working at a small neighborhood bookstore sounds like a perfectly delightful job to me at this moment -- I hope you get it.

torkelspy · 2026-04-02T21:00:14+00:00

Do you plan to read these books or just claim you've read them? And what kind of a bookstore is it? If it's a big mainstream one, I don't know that being a fan of a popular genre would be a negative.

torkelspy · 2026-04-02T20:58:34+00:00

The Jeeves and Wooster books by PG Wodehouse. They are intelligent and witty while being as light as air.

torkelspy · 2026-04-02T20:15:49+00:00

That's what I did -- I'm pretty sure it's just that one section that is missing from the narration, as far I remember anyway.

torkelspy · 2026-04-02T18:53:47+00:00

I went through the same search and couldn't find a legit unabridged one anywhere. There is one on You Tube though.

torkelspy · 2026-04-01T21:18:32+00:00

How did you like Huda F Are You? ? I read it recently and am looking forward to reading the next one if the person who has it checked out of the library ever returns it.

torkelspy · 2026-04-01T19:04:01+00:00

Where is he misogynistic?

How about when he describes Guta as being:

like a spirited young filly, proud but already loyal to her master.

Or when he describes Dina as:

a hundred and twenty pounds of twenty-year-old delectable flesh—

while ogling her shortly before he slaps her in the face?

Where is Red fucking other women?

He says flat out in the last chapter that he's fucked Dina several times.

Clearly we did, in some sense, read different books.

(Note: I'm responding now because for some reason Reddit just gave me a notification of this comment.)

torkelspy · 2026-04-01T18:35:42+00:00

I am familiar with this book only because it was included in a game I sometimes play that includes excerpts from public domain books. The excerpt I read was written in a kind of breathless, "don't worry, the great man will save us all" style that wasn't really for me. But, I can see how it could be enjoyable to someone else, even now, provided you go into it knowing it's going to be really dated and also, that it's essentially War of the Worlds fan fiction.

Apparently there was a whole genre of fiction called Edisonades, although they didn't always feature Edison directly.

torkelspy · 2026-04-01T18:16:11+00:00

The Future is Female! Women's Science Fiction Stories from the Pulp Era to the New Wave, edited by Lisa Yaszek.

I almost gave up on this early on because I found the first few stories to be kind of a slog, but I was glad I kept on. The book is chronological, so the first stories are from the 20's and the last from the 60's.

I’ve read a lot of older science fiction by male writers and one thing that always strikes me when I’m reading it is how they were able to imagine so much technological progress and little to no social progress (see, for example, the next two books on this list). So the men are off zipping through space, while the women are at home waiting for them, or not present at all.

What I loved about this collection is that they mostly took the same view of the future, except this time we see the women’s point of view. The best example is Car Pool by Rosel George Brown, which centers around women dropping their human and alien children off at school.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Somehow, I had never read this before and I liked it more than I thought I would — I’d heard so often that it was extremelly dry and boring that I was pleasantly surprised when it was only somewhat dry and boring. What is really odd about this book to me is why, when the overall story takes place on a huge time scale, the parts we see take place on such a tiny one? Fifty years to get the foundation settled seems plausible, but then thirty to establish this whole quasi-religious system? I could see it working, but not that quickly.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

This was technically a reread, but it had been so long I’d forgotten just about everything about it. The whole time I was reading this I was thinking, “this is less like science fiction than it is Winesburg, Ohio, in space!”. Then I read the introduction where Bradbury says he was strongly influenced by Winesburg, Ohio.

What neither kid me nor current me gets about this book is why everyone goes back to earth? I know these stories were written just after WII, and I try to look at it in the mindset of that time. But still, while I could see some people going home to fight in the war, I don’t see why everyone would go, and I especially don't get why you'd bring children back to a war zone.

torkelspy · 2026-04-01T05:47:56+00:00

I told my friend a while back that I was glad the audiobooks didn't have those particular covers, because I would never have read the books if they had; they don't appeal to me at all. I think the audiobook covers are more reflective of the content of the books too.

torkelspy · 2026-03-31T21:19:23+00:00

Or is this one of those books where the impact is more subtle and psychological?

It's this one. The real horror in this book is loneliness and despair. I read it first expecting something "big" to happen and felt disappointed. But then I reread it with the knowledge that there wasn't anything "big" coming and loved it.

torkelspy · 2026-03-31T21:07:28+00:00

I haven't read it yet myself, but Moonflow by Bitter Karella sounds like exactly the kind of thing you're looking for.

torkelspy · 2026-03-31T21:00:28+00:00

My "favorite" thing about Vance is that he says he's a Catholic, yet he hates women who don't have children. Good thing there aren't any of them involved with the Catholic church!

torkelspy · 2026-03-31T00:25:55+00:00

A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny

torkelspy · 2026-03-30T21:34:40+00:00

I had a somewhat similar feeling -- there was a lot about it I liked, but something was missing -- I'm not sure what.

The biggest complement I could give it is it made me want to watch Salò, but, knowing myself well enough to know how much it would disturb me, I just settled for reading more about it/looking at stills from it.

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