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Grace Baiting posted:I'm not sure if it's been mentioned here, but I stumbled across su3su2u1's review on someone's blog: quote:I used to teach undergraduates, and I would often have some enterprising college freshman (who coincidentally was not doing well in basic mechanics) approach me to talk about why string theory was wrong. It always felt like talking to a physics madlibs book. This chapter let me relive those awkward moments.
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Nov 13, 2019 18:41
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Daikloktos posted:And here I thought that doublepost ruined the punch of the initial... but it does actually make me feel less alienated by how easily stunted people I've known turned out, to keep tabs on this community. To me the saddest fans aren't the ones completely down with Eliezer's philosophies and fantasizing about uploading their consciousness to cyber-Equestria, but the ones who catch the more overt absurdities in HPMOR without engaging with the fundamental problems in "rationalizing fiction". This is a pretty good thread because as much as it hits the easy dunks it doesn't ignore how deep you can trace the rot. You know, as much as I despise Yud and his followers, and the philosophy he espouses, I don't disagree with his general (originally stated) goal, to add more consistency to a series of novels where the magic system was too underdeveloped to be interesting. There are worse problems with the books, like Harry not actually having any kind of effect on the plot, etc. But for some reason, the magic system always bugged me the worst. Mostly, how Rowling never bothered to put any effort into developing it. It's emblematic of a lot of the problems in Rowling's writing, and political beliefs -- that she puts nothing more than a surface-depth thought into anything. It explains her most recent remarks -- a lot of them are driven by "hey this is neat, and will get me retweets and popularity, I'll tweet it!!". It's usually the mark of a good writer to put more thought into their work than actually ends up on the page, and as a reader you can generally feel how much thought has gone into the universe that ends up on the page because it comes out through the writing. Pratchett, for example, had an "inconsistent" magic system, but hell if he didn't privately work out the details. The jokes all revealed something about the world, and the later books explored it in depth (The concept of "narrutivium" as a magical force, a fourth wall break, and a joke is pure genius, to be honest). The same with LeGuin. And it would have been nice to see the magic system, and hell, the politics, the entire universe, recreated with consistency, or investigated in-universe and imbued with some consistency retroactively. Seeing what kinds of consistency we could create out of the smouldering trash heap of a universe that Rowling put onto paper. But nope! "gently caress u!" says Yud.
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Jul 6, 2020 02:19
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