the mortal enemy of videogames

general
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Delany's early stuff can be real hit or miss, but Babel-17 is where he starts to really starts writing well, I think. The Einstein Intersection is my favorite of those early ones, probably with Nova as a distant second.

Dhalgren is both great and frustrating and sometimes frustratingly great. Definitely worth checking out, though I'd describe it as magical realism rather than SF, though experimental literary fiction, as yeso says, is a good category as well.

Triton is a fascinating novel, meant to be in dialogue with Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed. It's not my favorite, but it is my friend's favorite! Neveryon is probably my favorite, though it's also an extremely bizarre sequence of stories/novels. It's Bronze age secondary fantasy but also happens to include the first novel ever published dealing directly with the AIDS epidemic in New York. The way a fantasy story can also be about the very real ongoing epidemic in 1980s New York is part of the genius (or disaster, depending on how successful the stitching works for you) here.

After Neveryon, Delany has primarily written pornography. Which is certainly an interesting career choice! But it is deeply unpleasant to read for many reasons. I think, though, that his crowning achievement may be his memoir The Motion of Light in Water.

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@“yeso”#p86300 Yeah I'm def in the genre headspace right now so Babel seems more my speed(I will read Dhalgren eventually too of course)

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@“edward”#p86305 After Neveryon, Delany has primarily written pornography.

ah the Alan Moore trajectory

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@“wickedcestus”#p52919

@"rearnakedwindow"#p52905

I was looking through old conversations on here that took place during the 9 months I was taking a break from the internet from mid 2021 - early 2022, and I saw your conversation about Dream of the Red Chamber and The Scholars, so now I feel compelled to belatedly say stuff about them.

My favorite Red Chamber character is probably Wang Xifeng, who I guess is the villain of the book the way Newman is the villain of Seinfeld (i.e. the only one with a job where they actually do stuff).

(ok, that's obviously not true, since there are all the servants.)

I think her whole story arc is very relatable even today, and perhaps influenced my relationship with my own mom, who could be described as the Xifeng of the family (and ultimately got the short end of the stick in terms of her marriage to my dad).

Lots of people I've talked to dislike Xifeng for perhaps understandable reasons. She did lots of terrible stuff! Though I find the "person upon whom all responsibility is placed, and ends up breaking because of it" archetype extremely compelling.

I keep wanting to read the original, though who knows when that will happen. There are long passages (probably the majority of the novel) that is basically just modern Mandarin and not any more difficult to read than the typical 20th century novel, but then that is punctuated by segments that are completely impenetrable to me. I guess the main problem is the first chapter is very literary, which is of course where I try to start. Maybe since I know the story well enough I can just skip it?

I haven't really engaged much in the genre of Chinese/Taiwanese Domestic (as in taking place in a big house/palace) Period Dramas other than watching the first two or three episodes of a few shows. (This isn't the shows' fault -- I do this with basically all television.) Maybe I should watch those instead of rereading the book?

On the topic of bumblers (and TV shows), I've been watching the mid-2000s Taiwanese TV drama Black & White/痞子英雄 (and succeeded in getting past the third episode for once!) which has a very high-level bumbler protagonist, bumbling into situations that lesser bumblers could only dream of. The show is very dumb, but also very funny, and somewhat clever. It feels like the TV equivalent of a dating sim (stumble into a new situation, and suddenly a new girl to woo appears! of course all romance ends in shame and embarrassment and explosions) -- despite ostensibly being a cop show.

Re: The Scholars, I think that's the book that made me become a study monster (if there's no other take-away I got from it). For some reason the idea of this big exam that all these people spend years of their life studying for (many of whom are also bumblers and instead of studying get into weird misadventures) made me want to study really hard for something. At the time I'd dropped out of college and was working at a 7-Eleven. For my first two years of college I had zero work ethic, had no desire to engage in human society in any meaningful way, and made [stupid, only partially functional games with childish writing](https://saddleblasters.itch.io/puppy-soup) (which I'm pretty sure was aping Tim's style, though I don't have the guts to replay it and find out) instead of actually doing my homework. The Scholars was filled with lazy people and ne'er-do-wells, but it also had characters with a fetishistic desire to study, a love for study so extreme that they become weird half-human entities -- and after reading the book I wanted to be a study fetishist as well. So I started studying math. Originally I was majored in physics, because a character in a [Wang Xiaobo](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/538-the-mortal-enemy-of-videogames/633) novel had majored in physics (lol), but I had no real interest in it. Math is much more useless and metaphysical, so it's more suitable if your goal is to become a study monster (it also feels more like game-like). And I guess I succeeded! In my two years back in college I took the maximum number of credits you're allowed to take each semester and got A's in all my classes -- and I guess I learned a lot about math. I also completely cut myself off from all my previous artistic ambitions and perhaps became less of a person because of it. That of course was the goal! In that year out of school I had met so many failures and by the end felt completely empty of any artistic ability, which I suppose is why the study monster life seemed more appealing to me than the wannabe-artist-bumbler life. Now I wish I were a bumbler! Maybe I will be someday, and will probably hate it.

Anyway, I should re-read The Scholars. I suspect my takeaway from it would differ much more greatly from the first reading than if I re-read Dream of the Red Chamber.

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@“saddleblasters”#p86603

  • 1.

    I really appreciate you not being afraid to bring up an old conversation. I sometimes am afraid to, but I‘m glad you weren’t.

  • 2.

    I relate to Wang Xifeng, too, honestly. I think it's a sign that Red Chamber is a great book that ~most~ of the characters are pretty believable as far as their motivations (esp. when the motivations are mundane and normal and kind of sad), but Wang Xifeng as a character is especially grounded in reality.

    • Books like Red Chamber and Tale of Genji exist in this interesting duality where the main characters have an almost utopian life in front of them (at least in terms of their physical needs (internally they're as f'd up as the rest of us)) but they also have some strong threads of realism where they show decay and decline and the cost of living this way. Wang Xifeng is, in Red Chamber, maybe the only character who lives on both sides of this duality. You really feel for her as she's trying to hold the seams of this aristocratic clan together as they continue to just fart away their wealth and status. Also: I struggle with being kind of type-A and constantly worrying about doing well enough, so I relate to her there. Also: her husband is a dick, so I forgive her for being kind of intense. So basically I agree with you all the way.

  • 3. Your story regarding The Scholars is wonderful and makes me want to read it even more. It definitely moved up “The Pile” for me after reading your post.

    • Regarding being a study monster, I am always interested in readings of Classics that involve literal application of the story. My favorite example of this is my friend who was reading The Trial when some dirtbag acquaintance tried to sue him in small claims court. My friend took inspiration from The Trial- not because of its philosophical depth or black humor or intertextuality or whatever- no, it was the legal strategy. He realized if he just constantly missed dates and stalled out the case, the dirtbag acquaintance would eventually run out of money to pay his lawyer and drop the case. It worked.

    792

    I finished Ubik which, shocking, was pretty great! Just a highly entertaining scifi book, some sections dragged a little compared to the forward momentum heavy narrative the rest of the book had but nothing bad enough to make it miserable. Would highly recommend if you‘re looking for a scifi book that’s dreamy and mysterious. It doesn't get into the hard scifi weeds too much.

    Picked up [The Decagon House Murders](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25561888-the-decagon-house-murders) from the library. Supposed to be a foundational Japanese mystery novel. Through the first few chapters I'm already wondering how much of an influence this book was on creators like Kotaro Uchikoshi.

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    Ubik is a hot time alright. That ending is something else

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    @“yeso”#p87700 the entire last quarter or so was just a rocket, I couldn’t put it down

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    i have never listened to Japanese Breakfast, but after hearing nothing but good things about Michelle Zauner‘s Crying in H Mart, something compelled me to read it. i’m glad i did. i found it to be a deeply personal, idiosyncratic look at one woman's relationship with her mother and her identity. it was raw and funny and peculiar, full of well-observed and surprising wisdom and whimsy. it really is as good as everyone says.

    796

    I finished up the Edith Wharton collection “Ghosts” and y'all she is an insane writer. In “Pomegranate Seed” especially the way she puts into words feelings that are typically wordless, or worse clumsily explored, is just absurd. Loved it.

    797

    I‘ve been reading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.

    Seriously, what a strange book. I'm certainly enjoying it as I'm already a good ways through the third volume, and I think the framing of it as an autobiographical recollection from the central character helps a lot of the weird stuff go down, but I'm often left scratching my head.

    I can't decide if little baby Miyazaki Hidetaka trying to chew through translated or English language genre fiction definitely read _The Book of the New Sun_, and it contributed more than most to how _Dark Souls_ and such revolve around such inscrutable events and unknowable weird stuff, or if he definitely didn't, because if he did _Dark Souls_ definitely would have had ||Iron Era reading by candlelight guys living in an abandoned rocketship or rocket silo or something (a fact they are so generationally removed from in the present that they don't even know that that's what it was at one point)||, rather than just the same sort of eschatological melancholy.

    ----

    [img height=90]https://i.imgur.com/ESymy6K.png[/img]

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    @“sabertoothalex”#p88513 going to check this out - her name always pops up re supernatural fiction but I've never read her work in that vein

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    @“Gaagaagiins”#p88575 the same sort of eschatological melancholy

    my advice is to pass on Urth of the New Sun if you want to preserve this vibe. The 5th book goes a little too >!catholic!< in that regard and at least to me winds up being >!banal!< as a result. Although depending on what's commonplace to you re metaphysics and religion, that might not be the effect

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    @“whatsarobot”#p88092

    Ah, wild! I just got this from the library today.

    @"Gaagaagiins"#p88575
    I reread Book of the New Sun earlier this year and I have a lot of thoughts about it. Wolfe is sort of known for the way he meticulously constructed the text, but reading it again, this seems to be so obviously untrue! The series is so driven by random digressions that it feels clear that he's just flying by the seat of his pants.

    @"yeso"#p88607
    Definitely agree with this. I also think Urth of the New Sun is the reason Book of the New Sun has the reputation of being so cleverly constructed, but I actually hate the way it recontextualizes events. Made many of the things that were interesting about the series feel silly and lame.

    I'm reading Eji Yoshikawa's massive novel Musashi about...Musashi. It's certainly long!

    Also, for not very complicated reasons but definitely dumb reasons, I've decided to read RA Salvatore's Drizzt novels. They're definitely books! But I kind of like it.

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    @“edward”#p88680


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    I’m reading Eji Yoshikawa’s massive novel Musashi


    >

    and that man would go on to invent the fabulous video adventures of a Dr. Mario Brothers

    my partner just brought me a pretty rad haul of the Perigee printing of Mishima's Thirst for Love (only a few more to go!), Ol' Laffy Hearn's Exotics and Retrospectives (rad cuz it ain't just a collection of spoopy goop, lots on crickets. crickets the critters) and Confessions of a Yakuza which is esp fuckin weird cuz i was literally looking for it this time last week without mentioning it. i done read the latter in 9th grade around 9/11 or so and i been curious to revisit it now that my head's a bit pulled from my ass.

    i will not read any of these in the foreseeable future.

    i *am* reading Ellery Queen's Japanese Golden Dozen which is pretty fuckin sick on account of it being 12 detective shorts and none of them are by Ranpo or Yokomizo. i like both but i mean it's great to see that many other writers i might be able to follow. by now, detectives, you may have deduced my reading proclivities and, yes, i *do* primarily read comic books and schizophrenic scrawlings on dollar bills and bus stop benches.

    what kinda mysteries do *you* like to read, dear reader?

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    @“Syzygy”#p88698

    The Charles Terry translation. Sadly, despite living in many places, I'm monolingual.

    I'm very much new to manga so I haven't read Vagabond but it's on my list!

    This also reminds me of the amount of trouble I had requesting Steve Erickson books at libraries and bookstore and having to tell the librarians and bookstore clerks that Steve Erickson is a different person than Steven Erikson and I only want books by one of them (though, a decade later, I did eventually read Steven Erikson - he's pretty good!).

    804

    I’m once again trying to read the first Witcher book and it continues to flop between being engrossing and a little boring. I don’t like the multi page fight scenes, they’re super repetitive and I don’t find the language used in them to be very exciting. I do enjoy the dialogue sections more but I think it’s suffering from me already knowing a fair bit about the world because I played all the games. I imagine if you know nothing about them then it would be more interesting.

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    @“sabertoothalex”#p88735

    I thinknthe short stories are great! Sapkowski is a minor master of scene construction.

    The novels are sort of a rollercoaster of quality, in my opinion. Unfortunately, I think they become borderline unreadablebe as the series goes on.

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    @“edward”#p88749 I’m hoping I like more of them later on in the book! I just am not into the fight scenes so far. Obviously cool to see one of the earlier ones being the opening cutscene for the first game.

    Bummer about the novels, I at least want to read one of them for myself to get a feel.

    807

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    @“edward”#p88701 Steve Erickson

    which one you like? I bounce off

    808

    @“yeso”#p88766

    I‘m very attached to his first nine books. He even blurbed one of my books! Somehow, I haven’t read his 10th or 11th books. Read the first nine all twice over the course of 6 months when I was 21. I read them all in publication order, too, which isn't a requirement, but I think it offers some nice treats, since characters from one book drift in and out of other ones, with Our Ecstatic Days being a fever dream connecting all his previous novels in interesting ways.

    He's one of those writers it's difficult for me to be objective about! But I think Tours of the Black Clock or Rubicon Beach are my favorites. Everyone else loves Zeroville the most.

    Which one did you read?

    809

    Well, the chatter about Book of the New Sun made me finally pick up The Long Sun series by Gene Wolfe. I don‘t know about this one. I read the first half and just feel like I’m trudging through tar so I‘m giving up for now. Maybe I’ll try again in a year or two, but I'm pretty bummed. I had high hopes!

    After that disappointment, I jumped into All the Seas in the World, which is the newest Guy Gavriel Kay novel and it's everything you want out of a Kay novel. Melancholic, elegiac, and haunting. It's not pitched as a sequel, but I think you should read A Brightness Long Ago first and probably Children of Earth and Sky before that one, and then probably the Sarantine Mosaic before that.
    Or not! Just enjoy it, I guess. But I read like nine of his novels last year, so it was fun to see all the ways this new novel is connected to a bunch of his other novels.

    Read Crying in H-Mart, which is suitably sad and somewhat inspiring. I didn't know anything about the author so the ending was kind of a surprise since it seems like she's kinda sorta famous.