Rottcodd

I liked the book all in all - it just had a lot of flaws, and that made it kind of a slog.

Since this was not just a first novel but a first novel that started out as a webserial, I think it's safe to assume that his later books are better, so I'll undoubtedly go back to him some time.

For the rime being though, as a sort of palate cleanser, I was craving something that I could count on to be well-written if nothing else, and Murakami definitely fills that bill.

"And by 'we' I of course mean 'you'."

Yeah - I was sort of afraid of that. I like this place - you've done a good job here. But there's no reason you should put yourself at risk. So it'd be a shame if it came to that, but it is what it is.

For whatever it's worth, I've both noticed and appreciated your efforts lately.

And just what I've seen of it via posts and announcements has already been enough to sort of vicariously exhaust me, so I can only imagine...

Finished John Dies at the End by David Wong. It was okay all in all - imaginative, but not very well-written.

Started Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I've been working my way through Murakami in publishing order for the last few years, reading one every few months, and it's time for this one. I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far.

The Tell Me Why books by Arkady Leokum - Goodreads link Those probably had more to do with shaping me than anything else I've read.

When I was about eight or nine, I went through a period of reading lots of (juvenile) non-fiction - mostly biographies, history and myths. I don't remember the specific titles, but I particularly remember reading biographies of James Cook and John Paul Jones, histories of ancient Egypt and medieval Europe, the myths of Perseus and Jason, and especially the history/myths surrounding the Trojan War.

And of course I went through a dinosaur phase, but the dinosaur book I remember most clearly was heavy on pictures and light on text.

Then when I was about ten, I switched pretty much entirely to reading fiction.

Still plodding through John Dies at the End. I suppose I'll finish it, but not terribly enthusiastically.

Part of the problem is that David is just such a tedious asshole. He's not even an interesting asshole - he's just petulant and self-absorbed and dull.

And part of the problem is that it tries so hard to be witty, but it's just mostly... not. It has its moments, but too many of the bits that were obviously supposed to be witty turns of phrase just fall flat.

It's okay I guess, and I do want to see how it all plays out, but it's just nowhere near as good as I'd hoped.

Yes.

I have a friend who is extremely intelligent, endlessly curious and was raised in a locally well-established and notoriously generous and civic-minded family. So he was raised in that milieu of sincere kindness and generosity, and whenever he's come across anything that interests him (which is seemingly something new every week) he seriously researches it until he understands it.

So it pretty much doesnt matter what the topic is - he knows something about it, but his personality has been shaped so that he's attentive and considerate rather than pedantic and self-absorbed. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen him engage in obviously mutually enjoyable conversations with complete strangers over... pretty much anything.

I vacillate between thinking that it's remarkable that he's the way he is and that it's remarkable, in a different sense, that that's so uncommon.

I stopped trying to contribute to battles between reductionists many years ago, since they're not coincidentally also binarists, so each just takes the fact that I'm not 100% in agreement with them to mean that I'm on the falsely dichotomous other side.

That's an awful lot of why they're so exhausting and discouraging - because I know from bitter experience that there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I'm constantly tempted to respond - just, if nothing else, to for instance point out that something as enormously complex as the US Civil War cannot possibly rightly be said to have been about one specific thing - but I've learned that that can't possibly accomplish anything.

Should I then have just kept my mouth shut? Probably, in much the same way as I'd likely just keep walking if I saw two drunks brawling in an alley.

But I didn't, and so be it.

And who knows? Maybe somebody somewhere will read this and think, "You know... it really is kind of dumb to reduce a complex issue to just one single idea, then get into shouting matches with people who have reduced it to some other single idea."

Or not. And again, so be it.

There are few things that exhaust and discourage me more than reductionists shouting past each other.

That's a hard call, and I'm glad it's not mine to make.

On the plus side, engagement is a fundamental good, diverse viewpoints are beneficial and literature can play a role both ways in a relationship with hexbear users - both the things that they read and share and the things that others might share with them.

On the minus side, some significant number of hexbear users have demonstrated, and repeatedly, that... well... not to put too fine a point on it, they're obnoxious assholes who flatly refuse to act civilly. And as unwelcome as that might be in other communities, it would be doubly so here, since an awful lot of the appeal here is that it's relatively quiet and sedate.

The problem though is that that's not all of their users - it's just the most visible ones. If they were all assholes, the decision would be obvious and easy. But they're not.

So...

I don't think we can have any reasonable expectation that the asshole users will behave like decent humans. In fact, if you read through their discussions on their own instance, many of them are actually determined to be disruptive and abusive, and explicitly to the degree that someone might insist that they not be. Given the chance, they will do it. So the only way to be sure of stopping them is to not allow them to participate in the first place.

But then it becomes relevant that that's not all of their users, and that this is a relatively non-political instance. It's possible that those users won't even bother with this instance, and while they're off trolling whoever somewhere else, those among the hexbear users who actually can and will be civil will be the only ones who actually participate here anyway. Which would of course be fine, and even good.

So the way I see it, there's no means of stopping the disruptive, abusive and bigoted hexbear users from being disruptive, abusive and bigoted other than defederation, but there is a chance, and potentially even a fairly strong one, that that particular subset of hexbear users won't bother with this instance anyway, and the more thoughtful and reasonable ones will be the only ones who do. Which would absolutely be to our benefit.

I guess I would lean toward federating, but with a zero tolerance policy for disruptive and abusive behavior (and with the intent to follow that policy clearly communicated to the hexbear admin). At the worst, we could have a brief period in which the hexbear users prove that they can't be trusted to not be assholes, and then they go back to being defederated.

But mostly I'm glad it's not my decision to make.

Finished Shampoo Planet by Douglas Coupland. It was okay. If nothing else, it's worth it to read Coupland just to watch him turn phrases, but the story and characters were too similar to too many of his others.

Started John Dies at the End by David Wong. It's good so far - maybe a bit too self-consciously quirky, but certainly engaging.