For me, shitty style / lazy writing make me put a book down immediately. I was raised on the worship of style you find in writers like Flaubert or Nabokov (who also happened to have deplorable political views) and I can’t shake it.

Others commented here recently that making every female character in a story into a sex object is a bad thing.

What are some reasons you’ll put a book down after you’ve spent at least a little time giving it a try?

  • FidelCashflow [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I maintian hp:mor is good. The slaver and rape stuff was from the original. It is otherswise a quest to overthrow the bourgeois and give everyone universal healthcare.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I disagree but I'd rather not get into it. I'll just summarize that if the intention and the prevailing message was really about that, then Peter Thiel wouldn't be throwing millions at Big Yud for writing it and there wouldn't be the billionaire worshipping LessWrong cult in its present form that gets its doctrines and jargon from HPMOR, all under the leadership of Big Yud himself.

      • FidelCashflow [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        You are correct in both that it is at this point tedious to examine, and that isn't what yud ment to write. It is entirely luck and his lack of foresight that allowed thst work to be any good at all. If he possed the skill to write what he wanted it would have been garbage. I think he still has me blocked on Facebook for calling hpjev a maoist

        • UlyssesT [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          If that really is the wrong interpretation of HPMOR, Big Yud doesn't seem too interested in correcting the cult that follows him entirely based upon a billionaire bootlicking paperclip maximizing "rationalist" perspective of that fanfiction that has also made him quite rich.

          • FidelCashflow [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            I will die on the hill that he is a weiner and objectively wrong about his own work. It accidentally has good stuff in it because he copied from better writers and didn't file the serial numbers off.

            All the miri stuff is seperate and painfully childish. Just straight brainworms and sophistry As he blocked me from the sub-reddit for reminding him. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer.

            • UlyssesT [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              He's a fine example of the folly of "autodidacts." He isn't particularly good at anything except promoting his own brand and steering his own cult with a lot of billionaire backing because he kisses that much ass. He wrote very bad poetry about how it's too bad that the masses won't learn to code, but he fucking doesn't know how to code either.

              • FidelCashflow [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                I have a very specific and parasocial beef with the guy. Probably the biggest part of my being able to imagine a better world and become a filthy commie was through rationalism. I tried to get a less wrong meetup going, emailed him a bit, visited other groups. It was what allowed me to imagine a better world was possible after obama broke my faith in the dnc. It was the specific failure of that group to be less wrong that primed me for chapo and bernie. I still have specific enmity for them starting a fucking cult dedicated to logic and consistently being irrationally credulous fools.

                • UlyssesT [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  I can relate. I don't want to doxx myself any further than I already have, but I was big into the extropian then futurology convention circuits from the late 90s all the way into the late 2000s when just about every gathering became bought and owned by billionaire oligarchs and started having Department of Defense guys showing off their surveillance and killing machines, too. There was even a phantasmagoric presentation where someone was getting a crude implant stuck in them with an audience watching, blood and all. The cult vibes were too much and I left forever. It gave me great ideas for my book trilogy, though.

              • BeamBrain [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                He's one of those "too smart for school" types, which I used to think I was back in high school. Then I went to college and had to overcome serious academic challenges for the first time, and I realized just how limited that knowledge was. He dropped out of high school and never went to college, so he never had that sort of humbling experience. Instead he, as you say, gets his ego inflated by billionaires because he tells them what they want to hear.

    • BeamBrain [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      The slaver and rape stuff was from the original.

      This definitely wasn't in the original:

      CW: Rape, racism

      Draco snarled. "She has some sort of perverse obsession about the Malfoys, too, and her father is politically opposed to us so he prints every word. As soon as I'm old enough I'm going to rape her."

      There had been ten thousand societies over the history of the world where this conversation could have taken place. Even in Muggle-land it was probably still happening, somewhere in Saudi Arabia or the darkness of the Congo. It happened in every place and time that didn’t descend directly from the Enlightenment.