Two Weeks Left Edition>Old:>>24936611>Recommended reading charts (Look here before asking for vague recs):https://mega.nz/folder/kj5hWI6J#0cyw0-ZdvZKOJW3fPI6RfQ/folder/4rAmSZxb>Archive:https://warosu.org/lit/?task=search2&search_subject=sffg>Goodreads:https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/1029811-sffg
>>24948206it's an observation many have made but it seems like people who don't read much have a limited idea of what is good writing or seem to latch onto one writer or style or genrethis goes for all sorts of readers, but i see it most in "serious literary" types who only read to have read important works, or sci fi people who just don't like to read outside their preferred genre because of autism
>>24948759problem is you can't read JUST the greats because it you don't really develop standards if you don't read some bad books as well
>>24948206The Affinities - Robert Charles Wilson (2016)The Affinities is a social science fiction novel in the sense that it was inspired by the author reading a book on teleodynamics and wildly extrapolating from its insights. An Affinity is sort of like if the admission process to joining a co-ed Greek letter organization was a battery of psychometric and biometric tests. There's no way to know whether someone has the same Affinity as you unless they've undergone testing. That means a person's assignation isn't in any way decided by them. It also means there's no way to be certain that someone has the same affinity, at least until a mobile testing device is developed. The whole thing is basically a shared group delusion where once a person has been determined to be part of the ingroup, their empathy instantly reaches a maximum level for others in their ingroup and near zero for those in the outgroup. This requires almost as much of a suspension of disbelief for the reader as it does for the characters. These sort of groups exist, but nowhere to the extent described in this book. Some examples are: sports teams; ideological groups; website fans; corporate supporters; entertainment fans; stan culture; parasocial members; religious institutions. Basically any grouping where a shared identity makes the people predisposed to liking you more. The Affinities take it to the extreme where they're meant to be a replacement for literally everything and everyone else in your life. This may superficially seem like the found family trope, but it'd be more accurate to call it an arranged family.Unfortunately, its premise is also its greatest failing. Because it relies so much on the suspension of disbelief, the narrative tries to minimize the strain on credulity by mostly only having situations where ingroup members are involved. The first person protagonist is very passive. He's very happy to have somewhere to belong and just goes with the flow. He's not a true believer, but he can get caught up in the fervor at times in wanting to believe he's one. Ultimately this is more his story than anything else, especially as it comes to an end. I'm conflicted about that because while I would've like to Affinities to be used in a far greater way, it also probably would've been too ridiculous to do any serious way. Too Like The Lightning, which came out the next year, is somewhat similar with its Hives, though it sidesteps these problems by being in a far future setting where society has been entirely rearranged already.Despite all these problems and limitations, I liked it. This is the first book that I've been interested enough to finish by the author since Spin, which I rated 5 stars. I tried reading a lot of Wilson's other novels, but none of them drew me in. The sympathy I felt for the protagonist and my agreement with the resolution went a long way with me. Those who prefer the opposite will probably feel the opposite.Rating: 3.5/5 (4)
>>24948206Version Control - Dexter Palmer (2016)Version Control is a literary alternate history hard science fiction novel. By that I mean it's a meandering exploration of the contemporary human condition that occasionally remembers that it has a science fiction plot. The alternate history is that the book's title is literal. For hard science fiction there are many monologues about whatever and digressions into science. The most frequent mode is criticism. There's so much of it on so many topics. A very limited selection includes: race; gender; dating; science; academia; politics; religion; nostalgia; conspiracy; and philosophy.In the beginning, there are seemingly endless possibilities. As progress is made, the possibilities dwindle, until eventually only the singular outcome remains. So it was with my reading. I was very pleased with all the possibilities I imagined that the story could go. For a brief moment there was a chance that this could be my book of the year. Any possibility of that was eliminated over time as the wrong decisions for my enjoyment were made. I feel like I was misdirected. Of all the possible ways this book could have been written, Palmer chose No Fun Allowed Morose Realism. This novel could also be described as Anti-Escapist Science Fiction or The Deconstruction of Wonder. Maybe I'm being uncharitable. If nothing else, the story does follow through on the theoretical idea on which everything is based. Saying which one it is though would spoil the ending.In terms of its overall content this is a nonlinear story about a failing marriage. The protagonist, the wife of the scientist who has invented a Causality Violation Device, is usually the viewpoint character. The reader sees her go through a nonlinear life from her post-college years to being almost 40. All of the characters are dysfunctional in their own ways, and at least one is actively dislikeable. The speculative elements are mostly in the background or incidental. They aren't given focus, because they aren't of interest. They're mundane. This is How The World Has Always Been. As with much, how radically different this world is from our own is played down and minimized.If you're reading this for science fiction, then unless you're greatly interested in being teased, neglected, and denied, you're going to feel greatly frustrated. If you're reading this for literary fiction, then you're going to be even more annoyed by all the lecturing probably. The ideal reader is someone who wants their book to be literary and scientifically-oriented but anything science fictional should decorative and nothing more.I wish this had gone differently. The versions I imagined were so much better. This isn't a book about time travel, as you might believe from its synopsis. It's a deconstruction of time travel and it's all the worse for it. It'd be admirable if it weren't such a killjoy. The ending is eminently reasonable and utterly miserable.Rating: 3.5/5 (3)
>>24948786>>24948781your """reviews""" are SHITFUCK OFF
>Nor may they imitate the neighing of horses, the bellowing of bulls, the murmur of rivers and roll of the ocean, thunder, and all that sort of thing?>Nay, he said.
What is there even left to read after him?? Why is his prose so good?
>>24946325Grow up.
>>24948722it's true. cope
>>24948729Cool as fuck? I miss enjoying playing with dolls (action figures obviously)
>>24948719not surprising you would be a Freudian. The most lazy and obvious housewife-level psycho-pathologizing of artistic expression. >Why put such a scene in a book about pedophilia when everyone who reads the book already knows what will happen?Why take any artistic risks, in fact, why write any novels at all, just make sure everyone knows you're against bad things like child abuse by a strongly worded tweet or tiktok.
>>24946400doesn't the repetitive assonances and alliterations lower the quality?
>december 2025>novel still unfinished
>>24948774So you are ahead. Some anons haven't even started.
>>24947068Chinese and Japs have some kino
>>24944482AI reponses should warrant a permaban kill yourself you cocksucking faggot
>>24948477What's your argument? That AI post is literally more intelligent and meaningful than your post.
>>24944496>Gregory HayesI think Hayes is an interesting case.He has made the best translation of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations by far.But he also has shown he knows fuck all of Stoic philosophy in some texts of his about it in the George Floyd era.
Best translation for this scene?
Ἁλικαρνασσόθεν edition>τὸ πρότερον νῆμα·>>24877858>Μέγα τὸ Ἑλληνιστί/Ῥωμαϊστί·https://mega dot nz/folder/FHdXFZ4A#mWgaKv4SeG-2Rx7iMZ6EKw>Mέγα τὸ ANE·https://mega dot nz/folder/YfsmFRxA#pz58Q6aTDkwn9Ot6G68NRg>Work in progress FAQhttps://rentry dot co/n8nrkoAll Classical languages are welcome.
Anyone start out memorizing all principal parts of the Greek verbs in Anki before studying their specific grammar? I hope this pays off well because it is tough with the irregularities, finding the paradigms, etc. wiktionary is somewhat messy in this regard. I got a very high grasp of the overall Greek verb structure though and it is pretty cool. There is a,so this iPhone app called Hoi Polloi Logioi which is good for drilling verb conjugations
>>24947398doing Athenaze's decks I preferred to keep it in line with the grammar seen up to that point so earlier verbs have only present, then there's some verbs with present, aorist first person, and then eventually all principal partsbut at the end of the day those verbs were in the first chapters because they are common thus one will meet principal parts often anyway by reading
I am trying to understand relative pronouns in ancient Greek. The following construct I understand:ἀρά πιστεύεις τοῖς λόγοις οὓς λέγω;meaning: do you believe the words which I say?It makes sense since the relative pronoun is in the accusative. But what if it's in the dative?:ἀρά πιστεύεις τοῖς λόγοις οἷς λέγω;I am assuming this is a case of attractio relativi? Would then the translation be something like:do you believe the words that I believe?but what happens to λέγω then? Is it just dropped entirely from translation?
>>24948653>Would then the translation be something like:>do you believe the words that I believe?I don't see why, attraction in your sentence as shortened version of the first sentence with the same meaning probably would look more like ἀρὰ πιστεύεις οἷς λέγω;maybe I don't understand what you mean to do
>>24948733>maybe I don't understand what you mean to dothe two sentences were already "given to me". I am trying to understand what the difference between the two is or rather, why one would write that sentence with the relative pronoun in the dative to begin with
In a world where 90% of the internet traffic is online video streaming, to detriment of the environment and our minds, why aren't you rejecting modernity and going to the library? The library is literally free and fun for all ages. It is the most environmentally and civic minded thing you can do. Instead of being in a haze of pleasure, living in a digital cocoon of reels and streams, why aren't you forging the future of humanity? The weight of the world is on your shoulders and only you can make a better world.
>>24947159I'm just tired of the librarium man. Why don't we just build cyber cafes to remove the laptop people? What are we gaining from the librarium getting dumped with generic tech books, generic biography books, generic social issues books, generic fantasy. Why are librarians even a thing anymore? Can't you just get fake answers to your made up keyboard warrior jobs through the multi trillion dollar nuclear reactor powered lying machines like chatGPT or gemini? What do we need phone charging stations for? What do we need the public roblox machines for? Why are you even in the librarium to print things? Just get a shitty chromebook at walmart. Fuck it man. Just shut em all down along with the university scams, build affordable housing/gardens/farms in its place. Any academics in future should just be monks in churches/temples with candles. Everyone else should just go back to medieval games.
honestly I think libraries should, at least in part, be devoted to digitizing stuff in their collection (that doesn't have known digital copies) to a very high standard of qualityalso digitizing collection items of special interest, such as books owned by famous authors that have notes written in themthey should also do bookbinding and serious book repairI don't know of a single library anywhere near me that does this stuff
>>24944042I laughed.
>why aren't you forging the future of humanity?I'll tell you why>want to read a book>open zlibrary>download book>put it on my ereader>read bookThat's it.
>>24948765nuff said
>read a book>it's good>read it again>it's even goodername even one time this has happened
>>24946447This.
My diary desu
>>24943875VERE ARE ZE BOOKS, LEBOVSKI??!?!!?!
>be french canadian hick>have incredible passion for auto racing and mechanics>have no money, have to steal tools, have to live in an RV with your family>somehow work your way from racing snowmobiles to racing single seaters and get noticed for beating a former F1 champion >get the most prestigious seat in auto racing>almost become world champion but come up just short>stay loyal to the most romantic team in auto racing during their worst era and put up some of the most legendary drives of all time in subpar equipment>be the only everyman in a sport full of rich dicks>finally get a car that can win you the championship >get betrayed by your team>die in a horrible accident The book writes itself. I cry every time.
>>24943875>any Dostoevsky book>Laurus
What did I think?
>>24947523The publisher gave Seuss a list of 200 words he was allowed to use and he ended up writing multiple books using only them. That anon couldn't write something as good as The Cat in the Hat without such limitations.
>>24946201Dr. Seuss books are genuinely lightyears better than most other children’s books, and this is obvious as a father reading hundreds of different children’s books to my kid.
I utterly loathe how The Grinch has become a part of Christmas mythology. Stuff like yard decor and Grinch photo shoots is like seeing Facebook minions posting IRL.
>Doesn't steal ChristmasFucking false advertisement
>>24948627We got a Grinch here that needs some bullying.
Mention here literature according to /lit/ suitable to matriculate as a real /x/-ian. Or if /x/ was /lit/ cohorts first.
>>24946516If you're interested in spooky weirdness that's also quite emotionally profound check out The Shadow Book of Ji Yun. It was written in Qing Dynasty China, but many of the stories themselves are timeless and highly resembles commonly reported paranormal phenomena of current times.The Highest Strangeness by Richard Freeman is also a fascinating read.
>>24946528The relevant information in the OT to occultists seeking power is the story of the development of the western mind. You're not even close to literate.
>>24948385Great recs anon, I'll be checking both of these out. Thank you.
>>24948417Glad to hear it, enjoy!
Otherside Picnic is literally about netlore as a medium for otherwordy beings to intrude upon earth.
>blocks your path
>>24945709You'd be surprised how many muslim women have lost their 'anal virginity'. Its just a larp.
>>24945913Maybe 100 years ago, now unless they marry each other at 16 there is none. Even "trad" women won't veil>>24945916And that in an Islamic society would be lashings or death for Zina
Bump
>>24946801Bump
>>24945802>In this respect Christianity is far belowBut he doesn't even explain why the aforementioned is wrong. Plato also thought the denial of a fact was a moral wrong. Most non-religious ethics systems also would say that purposely and knowingly denying a fact (aka, lying) is morally wrong. Punishing what is deemed to be morally wrong in a society doesn't seem like an issue to me, Feuerfag
Man, you're right, Aristotleanon. Christian apologists are the worst when it comes to anally raping the Aristotelian corpus beyond recognition. They don't fucking understand anything. They don't understand dunamis, they don't understand energeia, they don't understand Metaphysics Zeta, they don't understand syllogisms, and they definitely do not understand the four causes. I just had apologist tell me, definitively, that Palamas was a top scholar of Aristotle (lmfao), and that De Anima isn't about life at all, since according to Palamas, only human beings have life because you somehow need "intelligence" to be "self-subsistent" (fucking LOL). Even when you read Aquinas's commentary on passages like the controversial active intellect, you can see him at pains to make the active intellect cohere with the passive intellect into one united soul. And then he fails to do so. But then magically says "but it has to be the case, and so it is." I ask another apologist, is an intellect which becomes everything, something which changes or otherwise remains as it is? And obviously, they short-circuit. Because obviously, that's the kind of intellect that we have, and it can't be active in any pure sense. So Aquinas is wrong and our intellects are perishable in the sense that it is soul. Oh the horror!!! These fucks have absolutely destroyed Peripatetic commentary throughout history, and they polluted literally everything, especially the translations, with the most hamfisted articulations possible to the point where intelligent conversations with them are not possible. Their brains are wrapped in verbal poison. If you ever get caught up in it, you basically have to spend years unlearning Scholastic hackery as it pertains to the deepest parts of the Aristotelian thought to even have a CHANCE at beginning to understand its depths.
>>24948617So it's schizophrenia then.Your question doesn't help interrogate anything. It's manipulative nonsense that now turns out is based on your inability to read, not any coherent thought process we can actually explore.Like all things the mind needs potency and action. The mind becomes all things through senses but it also creates through imagination.For imagination the role of potency is played by the possibility space of all reality, not a passive part of the mind like when the mind acts to recognize a cup. The book up to then is mostly about the human mind except in this sense:>the soul is in a way all existing things; for existing things are either sensible or thinkable, and knowledge is in a way what is knowable, and sensation is in a way what is sensible: in what way we must inquire.>Knowledge and sensation are divided to correspond with the realities, potential knowledge and sensation answering to potentialities, actual knowledge and sensation to actualities.He then turns to the souls of animals which can't access "actual knowledge" through the active intellect.
>>24947161Christians are quite literally subhuman morons, there is no such thing as a christian with a 130+ IQ. They're too stupid to study actual philosophy and math so they study christian theology.
>>24948617>That's what soul is. It's the form of living beings, and some souls have powers of thinking. This is the whole point.What I don't understand, and maybe you can clear this up, is how those powers are attributes of the form (eidos, yeah?) itself. Because it seems to me that then the form (of the man) is changing whenever you cognise a new thing. If that's what is meant then fine I just need to think about it more but it seems at odds with a man having a persistent form, which is what he is to keep on being / essence, for that form to change passively while he's thinking.>>24948685>So it's schizophrenia then.I am a Christian and when the guy you're replying to is being a lot more lucid than you are (like now) I don't think this sort of remark helps at all.
>>24948603Bud, no offense, but you're not even getting the little snippet you're basing your entire assessment off right. But I don't even think you're trying to understand. You think displaying your own ignorance is some sort of gotcha. You're engaged in the equivalent of some modern assuming that when they see "soul" in an English translation of Aristotle it means some sort of sui generis Cartesian thinking substance, and then accusing Aristotle of believing in magic homunculi that pilot the body because he used the term soul and then calls it "immaterial."
>>24948603Also, fully subsistent relations only exist in the Trinity. This is not a problem for the Christians, but an obvious consequence of creation ex nihilo. Creatures are not wholly intelligible in themselves. It is "in God that we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28).But this is a problem even in the Pagan tradition because nothing seems wholly intelligible or active in itself. Things are revealed through their interactions and their external context makes them what they are. There is a thick relationality and dynamism apparent in the world (later we would say all things exist in a semiotic web). This is also why Aquinas says all the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly. Eriugena says something quite similar at the opening of the Periphyseon.>And I think it's lost on Palamas that if you take away life as part of the essence of an animal because life supposedly needs rationality for "true" self-subsistence (which is a ridiculous definition of self-subsistence in the first place), then you also have to take away life from the essence of human beings because human beings are in potency to God and therefore not truly self-subsistent either.Rose tinted glasses or not, you are horribly misreading this passage. The point isn't that animals aren't living organisms, it's that their souls aren't immortal. When you totally butcher your reading of a passage it's hard to take you seriously.
Good night frens.Tell me your:>favorite poet>favorite playwright>favorite composerSo I have some new comfy suggestions.
TolkienShakespeareBeethovenObvious basic choices, but I refuse to apologize for my taste.
>>24940941ChaucerAristophanesWagner
>>24947638Has to be bait.>>24947670Please be bait.
>>24940941>Marina Tsvetayeva>William Shakespeare>Claudio Monteverdi
Fernando PessoaEugene O'NeillErik Satie or Federico Mompou
Desperately reconcile with your irredeemable faith, sheep.
>>2494833699% of women think he looks good.
>>24948379Nah man. Not long ago clips of this dude wormed their way into my algorithm. I had to block it all because this dude is insufferable.
>>24948329>(vague r/atheism post)>here's my husbando btw (IM GAY)
This guy is a great soldier in the war to continue to destroy the disgusting christian religion.Reminder that atheism is growing faster than any religion, and christianity is the fastest dying religion in Europe and the united states.
>>24948717Ah dang man, I’m super upset rn, gosh
Just got caught up with this series, it's about feudal power armor knights doing battle with terminators and robot demi-gods where the main character kills a female robot so hard that she basically comes back as a female yandere robot that desperately needs to be impregnated by the main character.
