i'm considering asking people to recommend me bad books
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@ignaloidas they... translated Sorokin to English?
@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems I read it in Lithuanian, but yes
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems I read it in Lithuanian, but yes
@ignaloidas huh he's a lot more popular than i thought
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i'm considering asking people to recommend me bad books
it's easy to get people to recommend you good books! however, good books make me feel things, often quite intensely. i think usually this is appreciated however i am living what is considered an "interesting life" already and i really don't need a book to put me on the edge in addition to all of the things that normally put me on the edge, like "stalkers" or "immigration" or "wondering if someone i know got shot", etc. similarly i have thought enough about the nature of identity that i'm quite done with it for a while.
most recently i have read Blindsight, which was a good book, but it made me conclude that if i have to choose between another good book and 10 hours straight of youtube shorts, the latter will passively benefit my life by not taking up more of it than i can spare
please recommend me your favorite bad book
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@whitequark this appears to be some new meaning of "benefit" that I am totally unaware of.
@nxskok I've actually considered using PASIAS as bedtime reading with similar reasoning, but concluded I'll need to engage more than that with the subject material to get what I want out of it
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@crow literally in progress, and I feel like that's still too far into the "I am feeling things and their amount is too high" territory
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@whitequark have you read Ignition! yet (it's hard to get legitimately but I have an epub I can send you)
@bob years ago yeah
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@ignaloidas huh he's a lot more popular than i thought
@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems russian litterature does tend to be a bit of a hit or miss when translated to english, I think it really depends on the author and how they use the language.
E.g. Max Frei books are fucking amazing, but the translations to english just flopped because it's just hard to translate -
@Pokemod97 yes, my issue here is specifically with the phenomenon of "ask someone in my environment for a book recommendation" → "get flashbanged for three days"
@whitequark Ah in my experience turn off your brain books are perfect for recommendation algorithms. Flashbanged are human recommendations almost entirely defined by their nature. I have read 12 romance books in a weekend and enjoyed it but couldn't tell you the title when I'm done.
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems russian litterature does tend to be a bit of a hit or miss when translated to english, I think it really depends on the author and how they use the language.
E.g. Max Frei books are fucking amazing, but the translations to english just flopped because it's just hard to translate@ignaloidas i've read basically every book in the Echo series in its original language, yeah. I have... mixed feelings about them in retrospect. I think they're well written and I liked them at the time but certain resemblances to my actual life leave an unhappy observation
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i'm considering asking people to recommend me bad books
it's easy to get people to recommend you good books! however, good books make me feel things, often quite intensely. i think usually this is appreciated however i am living what is considered an "interesting life" already and i really don't need a book to put me on the edge in addition to all of the things that normally put me on the edge, like "stalkers" or "immigration" or "wondering if someone i know got shot", etc. similarly i have thought enough about the nature of identity that i'm quite done with it for a while.
most recently i have read Blindsight, which was a good book, but it made me conclude that if i have to choose between another good book and 10 hours straight of youtube shorts, the latter will passively benefit my life by not taking up more of it than i can spare
please recommend me your favorite bad book
@whitequark when thinking of bad books I have a fallback to this Arthur C. Clarke book. But I forgot the name so I looked it up on the net only to find my own GoodReads review from 2016 marked with 2 stars.
Without further ado:
1. Arthur C. Clarke — Islands in the Sky (1952)
This book is great for people who don't like/feel emotions because ACC fails to evoke any, though.
And another one while I had my GR profile open:
2. Nicolas Evans — The Horse Whisperer (1995)
Two people fuck around but nobody finds out or has hard feelings (not even slightest regrets of adultery). There are also horses, for the background.
Edit: This book was weirdly often attached to Tell-Don't-Show which added to worsen the reading sensation
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back when i was a child my bedtime reading was "Advanced Win32 Programming" by Jeffrey Richter and maybe i should do that again but make it the basics of DSP or something. this would probably benefit my mental health
@whitequark may I suggest the PostScript Language Reference Manual? It's not a half bad read, actually.
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back when i was a child my bedtime reading was "Advanced Win32 Programming" by Jeffrey Richter and maybe i should do that again but make it the basics of DSP or something. this would probably benefit my mental health
@whitequark "basics of DSP" makes me think of https://dspguide.com/ ... i don't know if its a "bad book" or "good book" because i did not finish it but parts of it have been moderately useful for me -
@whitequark "basics of DSP" makes me think of https://dspguide.com/ ... i don't know if its a "bad book" or "good book" because i did not finish it but parts of it have been moderately useful for me
@wermi literally that book
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@nxskok I've actually considered using PASIAS as bedtime reading with similar reasoning, but concluded I'll need to engage more than that with the subject material to get what I want out of it
@whitequark haha!
(I should be careful what I put on grebedoc.dev!)
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