“glowfic” apparently. written in a roleplay forum format.
This is not a story for kids, even less so than HPMOR. There is romance, there is sex, there are deliberately bad kink practices whose explicit purpose is to get people to actually hurt somebody else so that they’ll end up damned to Hell, and also there’s math.
start here. or don’t, of course.
hah I’m down for this! I wanted to start on the podcast you linked last night til I got sidetracked, but it looks like they tackle a bunch of my least favorite books that have been dropped on my doorstep like dead birds by family members
broadly I’d say this is in-scope for our instance, because a lot of the writing tricks that the 90s thrift store fodder pop psychologists used to get famous got adopted directly by futurist authors to sound smart (and get famous), which in turn shaped how our current crop of rationalists and technofascists communicate. it’d be interesting to analyze that awful lineage.
I’d say the two outstanding questions I have before we go for something like this are around scope and (of course) a good name. do we want this new community to sneer at the genres Deborah listed only, or is any crank/charlatan author fair game? should we start an interest check thread for this idea and discuss these things there?
I generally don’t get to podcast at all ever because sensory fuckery interplaying with no effective space to listen to them (wfh, and when I go walking etc I listen to music not casts), so for me discussions and posts are where I tend to get the most info about topics
But I’d definitely be keen for an antibook club sub, whether here or elsewhere
Anecdotally, the only one of these books I ever purchased was Superfreakonomics (after it kept coming up in conversations around me in uni etc). I made it to page 2.5 before I had so many “okay, gonna have to research that claim” notes that 1) I’ve never opened that book again since, 2) it rapidly taught me something I’d had an inkling/guess of but then became certain of: popular != good. It’s been an extremely useful guideline in the years since
I’m here for it.
Oh man if you’re a person that podcasts work for i think you’ll probably love If Books Could Kill.
(Also i am pro any iteration of this honestly.)