What are /r/rational's favorite Products & Services?

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And that's the end. I'm submitting this one late at night after editing took longer than I thought, so hopefully I haven't missed anything too major and the number of spelling/grammar errors will be low. If you've got any questions that aren't matters of interpretation, I'd be happy to answer them either here or in a potential epilogue. I tried to think of everything, but sometimes it just didn't get put into the text because I didn't think anyone needed to have three paragraphs of Superman talking about how he stole a piece of kryptonite from a research lab.

Edit: And thank you so much to whoever gave me gold for this post! Also for all the comments over the last two months, and the help with fixing typos!

Edit 2: Here's the Calibre generated ePub of the whole thing, in case anyone is interested.

The Erogamer on QQ is probably the best story in that genre that I've read.

Something that borrows some of the elements is Threadbare, by Andrew Seiple, which was first posted as a web serial on SV. Not exactly rationalist, but still a fun read.

This is sort of pie-in-the-sky, but what I've really been wanting for a long time is an anachronism checker.

Here's my basic use case:

1. User enters in a chunk of text (likely a chapter of 5k-10k words)
2. User enters a year (for example, "1900")
3. User clicks "Check me!"
4. Program highlights suspect words, phrases, etc.

How this would work on the backend is that it would interface with something like Google n-gram viewer or Microsoft N-gram Service, run a check against every unigram, bigram, trigram, etc. to find its frequency in that year, then compare that against its frequency in the current year. If a certain threshold is exceeded, the n-gram is highlighted.

So in our use-case example, the phrase "Albert Einstein" would be highlighted if you selected the year "1900" because Einstein was a complete unknown then.

As a bonus, it's a very short step from doing that to having a webapp that can help highlight Americanisms in works which are set in British worlds.

(There are a few ways to do things like this - mostly hacking spellcheck libraries - but all of them need setup and manual processes that are a pain in the ass.)

Worth the Candle is an action-adventure litRPG that follows a teenage boy from Kansas stuck in a fantasy realm that takes its inspiration for every tabletop game he was ever the DM for. Juniper Smith was never expecting his fifth-period English class to end up like this! If you want to read the first chapter, click here, and if you want the whole thing on one page, click here.

I think this is closer to munchkin fiction than rational fiction.

It's fun, though, and I also recommend Perilous Waif which I believe is by the same author.

Saw someone mention my book here earlier and I remembered that some people in the subreddit might be interested.

For those of you who aren't already familiar, Sufficiently Advanced Magic is a novel with a mix between dungeon crawling and time spent learning magic at an academy.

It's set in a world that's heavily inspired by Japanese RPGs like Final Fantasy and the Tales series, but where game mechanics are treated like normal elements of the world. For example, there are justifications for respawning monsters, dungeons with rooms that constantly changing, character classes, levels, etc.

There's a heavy emphasis on learning the rules of how magic works. If you enjoy that sort of thing, you might like these books.

She folded her arms, and I noticed she was wearing a different shirt from the night before, this one with “Boning by the Bay” written on it. I was partially successful in suppressing a giggle.

I had to draw this as soon as I read it.

GOD Over Djinn, with the associated Meta-Genie, Meta-Meta-Genie, etc. SeeLittle Harmonic Labyrinth in your nearest copy of GEB.

Woo-hoo! This is an excellent birthday present to myself!!! I will go and preorder it on Gumroad now... :D

It will be available on Gumroad at 9pm.

I recommend people preorder it on Gumroad or wait to buy until 9pm, because it's the same price as on Amazon but with the bonus of having the book in multiple formats (pdf, mobi, epub, html, and txt) rather than only in the kindle format Amazon sells.

Also, Max Harms gets a greater cut of the sale profits on Gumroad compared to Amazon: Proof.

Putting pieces together. Most of what we get about Tiff comes from chapter 42: >“I did [like Arthur],” said Tiff. “And I knew that he liked me. I kept waiting for him to ask me out or even just confess to me, but months and months went by and he never did, and then my interest started to fade because there was this other handsome boy, so what was I supposed to do?”

[...]

>“Yeah, I am [an asshole],” said Reimer, rubbing his forearm. “This difference between the two of us is that I know I’m an asshole, and you prance around like you were his bestest friend in the whole world. You and Tiff could have told him, he’d have been upset but at least it would have spared him being made a fool of. He died a virgin, pining after her, and you were just laughing behind his back about what a moron he was.”

So Arthur either didn't know or had only guessed about Tiff and Joon when he died, and she probably got the tattoo as a commemorative thing. Zona is Arthur's memory of Tiff, not Joon's. That's why she's different, Arthur didn't know her so well. She's also a locally omnipotent magical sentience that's been murdering people for centuries... which might tend to alter one's personality.

For anyone who is wondering about the website, only the first book is free to read. Guy needs to make money somehow!

Just to let people know, Amazon only provides a mobi format for $9.99, while for a one cent higher price on Gumroad ($10) you can get Crystal Mentality in the following formats: epub, html, mobi, pdf, and txt.

Also I think Max gets a higher cut of profits on Gumroad, but I'm not too sure about that so don't hold me to it.

PS WOOOOOOO-HOOOOO!!!!! I'm not going to sleep tonight with such a good book ready for reading!

EDIT: Amusing piece of information I had to share. In the book, Max says the book will be released into the public domain on January 1, 2039 which makes sense since that's the year the story starts in the book.

I suspect a good portion of this subreddit has at least a passing interest in space, so I'm happy to notify everyone that <em>SpaceEngine</em> has been released on Steam. It's a highly realistic space simulator which uses massive amounts of astronomical data (and procedural generation) to create what they call an "interactive planetarium." You can visit almost any astronomical object you can think of, look up close and read reports about its physical properties; also, there's a spaceship simulator mode and VR support.

There's an older free version available on its website. However, SE has been in development for seven years by pretty much a single person who lived on donations, and now that it's released on Steam, its creator plans to use earned money to hire a team to help him with updates. So if you like either SE itself or at least an idea behind it, please consider buying it to support the developer.

I've got a suggestion or two.

First up, I recommend reading the book "Becoming Batman" Link, loved that book, a nonfiction on just what it would take to become Batman in the real world.

Now- having read that- or at least thought about it- you have two choices in front of you I'd say.

Either make Batman more... power hungry than he is in the comics- that is, instead of putting villain's weapons and gears in a museum, he should have a team of engineers reverse engineering it and putting it to use, to give him a leg up- and having scientists study things like the Lazarus pits when Batman comes across those- as a priority since they literally bring you back from the dead- the potential as a medicine is amazing, if you can only get rid of the pesky part that makes everyone that takes a dip insane. Might be the most important discovery of the human race since fire.

And/or you could do a deconstruction. Have Bruce Wayne realize that becoming Batman is more than a life's work, and the cost of it- which is astronomical (and discussed in becoming batman, but there's also web articles about that), and that it would be better to start a security company or fund the police, or fund scientists studying meta humans and scifi weaponry from villains to better help regular cops do their jobs- better bang per buck.

I'd say have him just donate the same amounts to charities/start charities and such, but just that would make for a short oneshot I'd say, an interesting fic it does not make.

What do we do with professionally-published works? Especially ones that are realistic or historical fiction?

Celia Grant's "A Lady Awakened" is a historical romance with a level-headed protagonist. The characters seem about as Level 1 intelligent as the characters in the works that get frequently posted here.

Even though the characters are mostly rational, I wouldn't expect books like "A Lady Awakened" to be a particularly popular among the subreddit. Maybe a romance novel would be interesting as a one-off. But in practice, there's a big filter on genre (historical romance vs. fantasy deconstruction) and publication format (book vs web-serial).

This leads to a disconnect.

If we add "... web-published serials about fantasy deconstructions" to the sidebar, we've lost a core idea.

If we don't add that, then we're not really filtering on "is rationalist" but "is interesting to the sub." And, in the latter case, who cares about the precise definition we put on the right hand side?

Yeah, but it was a fluke. You could probably do a hundred soul merges on Zach and never get that result again. And it would be quite damaging to both Zach and the recipients. So, yeah, the Gate might not have passed a thorough test suite, but I don't think any process based on soul merging is a strong possibility for RR's marker.

Reviews:

Last week Delve were recommended. It's a litrpg isekai and I think it have a really promising start with the protagonist having to learn the languages and not getting unique treatment. To be fair the protagonist haven't made any painfully wrong decisions, only arguably suboptimal ones. The main focus point from the situation seems to be how good the protagonists choice of build is. What bugs me indescribably is that the rest of the cast seem to be incredibly awed by the build despite that the build is low level and could be done by anyone, and (unless the game balance is rigged) should be inferior on certain points. Granted there are plausible explanations to why a certain build isn't widespread, maybe the search space for possible skill combinations are absolutely massive or maybe there is a stigma against aura mages or something. But it isn't explored and since the protagonist's class is widely known, auras are known, the protagonist only uses low level skills, it really comes off as poorly written powerwanking.

World of Prime were also recommended. It's similarly an isekai with implied DnD mechanics. Experience are gained from the skulls of dead sentient creatures and that have been to some degree been commercialized(mind you, still in medieval/feudal society so it isn't optimized). It revolves around the introduction of firearms to kill monsters without having levels and the societal conflicts of letting unleveled yield power that is comparable to those with levels. A lot of the NPC's makes suboptimal decisions but they do it from perspectives and motivations that seems plausible. The protagonist isn't super intelligent and mostly just survives on implementing ideas from our world. I have a lot of minor complaints but overall I both enjoyed book 1 and book 2.

I've just read the latest chapter of Lizard Person posted here and now I'm craving more stories about telepathy.

Telepathy is a bit of a broad and vague request. So to specify, I'm asking for stories where the ability to enter another person's mind is a major aspect of the story and I'm very interested in stories where a character spends time in another person's mind (like a mindscape from Naruto).

Heresy - Something goes wrong with Naruto's Kage Bushin, and Sakura and Ino need to enter his mind to help him wake up.

Patternist Series - Doro is a manipulative immortal who lives by stealing the bodies of others. He uses his immortality to breed a race of telepaths and this is the story of an Earth ruled by a master caste of telepaths.

"Thinking, Fast and Slow," by Daniel Kahneman. There's more "useful" psychology in it than an entire Bachelor program's worth of classes. Hell I'd throw my Master's in there too, if not for the profession-specific value. If you legitimately want to know more about how you and people in general think, and why, it's the first book I'd recommend.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/chapter-45-fine-3799995

From the author.

>I thought of all the exploits mentioned, but for most of them I have three basic complaints: 1. They trivialize the risks inherent in their proposals, claiming that Nothing Can Go Wrong and all risks can be mitigated (ha ha). 2. They ignore the set-up time needed to make some of the scenarios come to pass. Some things cannot be done in a month. Other can, but would take years of repetition until you could align everything just right, which is a dubious time investment. 3. A fair number of them depend on assumptions that just aren't true. The setting doesn't work that way. As an aside, a lot of proposals focus on recruit a lot of people for his projects. This is obviously a potent tactics, if fraught with its own issues, but consider this: if Zorian was the type of person who was inclined to do this, he would be already dead by this point in the story. He would have made himself noticeable within the first couple of restart and gotten soulkilled by Red Robe before he was capable of doing anything about it. The same reason that is limiting his growth is the only reason he is alive right now.

Is there any good evidence for a relationship between mattress price and quality (of sleep, back health, longevity-of-mattress-construction, etc.)? In response to questions of what it's best not to skimp on*, people often respond that mattress quality doesn't diminish too much marginally with cost until you get to the ~$1k range. Is this actually the case? Personally, I've slept on two 12" queen memory foam mattresses the last ~5y (the first one we had to toss after a badbug infestation), each costing around ~$150 new and shipped, and they've been the comfiest mattresses I've ever slept on. Admittedly I've never consistently slept on $1k+ mattresses, but I have stayed in lots of hotels of varying price and quality, as well as at rich friends'/relatives' places (with fancy, multimillion $ homes and designer this and thats, etc. so I imagine they sprung for a fancy mattress), and also briefly tried the expensive mattresses at dept/furniture stores -- and I still find that I prefer my cheap mattress. Supposedly "a bed with a retail price point of $1,000 probably costs about $250 to make", so are the cheaper online stores just operating under much narrow margins (with fewer e.g. advertising, real estate, storage, labor, etc. expenses)?

This seems like a really straightforward (if expensive) experiment to carry out, so has anyone done it yet?

*incidentally, people also say this about shoes, where I've also found it to not really be the case -- e.g. my dressier chippewa boots are comfier than my much more expensive, equivalently styled red wings, my AE strands are decidedly not comfy to wear for long periods of time, I've had ~$50 hiking shoes completely outperform $200 hiking shoes, etc. But shoes are much more personalized, so I think they're harder to compare.

Not to toot my own horn too loud, but if you wanted something short, finished, and rational, Rules of Wishing probably fits the bill quite nicely.

My username is actually derived from a character in The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. Gil-Galad. When I started playing online games, I modified it to Gilgilad and I've been using the username ever since.

A really well done short story, and a good opening to other possible stories in the same universe too. Thank you for writing it.

(spoilers)

What the Chooser failed to notice though was that the prevalent “protags save the world” stories were appealing mostly to those of the humans who weren't hungry for power to begin with. The power-hungry ones went into politics and ignored the manifestations of the human magic on the world (the RPGs, etc) because before the Awakening those manifestations were simply not any good for climbing up the power ladder and putting your boot on the world's throat.

And now that it has become good enough for them, those types of people will start influencing the “default” narrative patterns much more, and likely make the human-made RPG much more ruthless.

Hell, if Chooser just ended up in China instead of Japan and had her introduction to human story-telling from a xianxia reader, she might've even deciding to support the decision of nuking the whole thing from orbit.

Works assosiated with this story:

• The Gods Themselves
• My Stepmother Is an Alien

I've recently become somewhat obsessed with Zendo, a tabletop game of inductive logic.

I think many people here would get a kick out of it, because the point of the game is to figure out a secret rule through experimentation.

Incidentally, I learned about its existence from a story posted here, Cordyceps.

Loyalty 5? Granted, we don't really know how this "loyalty" works. The game couldn't be tricked, exactly, but it certainly could "play along" with any sufficiently competent or dramatic manipulations or betrayals in the making. Among other evidence could be her lines about Juniper being "a very decent person" and apologies for leaving him, but obviously it's even easier to fake than loyalty.

That said, it's mostly irrelevant. We know Juniper is attracted to her, which means she counts. This is an advanced RPG we're talking about, why wouldn't there be optional romantic subplots for every companion?

Oh, by the way, I'm reasonably confident that her beauty is abnormal. Reread the relevant paragraph from chapter 2:

>Imagine that someone spent a few years studying your likes and dislikes, running through video of your every private moment, somehow surreptitiously hooking up EKGs to measure your physiological responses without you know. Then imagine that they sat down with that data and the best photo manipulation artists in the world and made the absolute perfect picture to cause your heart rate to spike, a jolt to run up your spine, butterflies in your stomach, and a cold sweat on your palms. Then imagine that they did this again, over and over in slight variations, until they had a full 4K 60fps 3D movie to show you. That was what it was like watching her.

It's not normal, it's either some glamour magic, or the DM-entity deliberately putting Juniper's dream girl in front of him; neither implies good things about this whole arrangement.

Oh, and the term's kuudere.

My link about rational fiction just got to the front page of HN =)

This is the first time a thing I've made got some real traction online. Feels like christmas =)

Hey all, welcome back! Big announcement to make: after lots of suggestions and feedback, I've finally made a Patreon. If you want to check it out and contribute some sandwich money to show your appreciation, feel free to check it out here. Becoming a patron gives access to info about all the other writing and projects that I plan to put up at my website soon. I've also begun putting up posts to answer questions other patrons ask, and have blog and info posts there, like a team roster for Red, Blue and Leaf, which will be updated monthly!

Thanks in advance for any patronage, but more importantly, for your fandom. It's been over two years since I started writing this story, and I'm as glad as anyone to still be at it. Consider the patreon my commitment to continue for many more to come. I write the stories I write for me, but the hours of editing and research and fact checking to make sure I write the best quality I can, that's for all of you awesome guys and gals.

As always, any feedback is welcome, whether on the story or the patreon. Enjoy!

>I think I might take Genie from Aladdin, who would be compelled to grant me three wishes (probably enough to get to godhood).

1. A wish that will allow you to craft a near optimal second wish. Depending on the type of genie that might be knowledge of the rules, an intelligence boost, or something else.

2. Wish for near optimal wish granting you as close to omnipotence as is allowed.

3. Free the genie or something, you can now probably do anything you can wish for yourself.

Unfortunately, the .mobi converter that AO3 uses can't handle files past a certain size (for unknown-to-me reasons), and this isn't going to be fixed in the near future. Easiest method right now to get a .mobi that Kindle can handle is to download Calibre, load in the .epub, then convert it to .mobi.

(I haven't confirmed that this works, but it should work in principle; it's been a few years since I've used Calibre.)

> unless socially awkward amputees are considered attractive these days.

Shall I assume that you haven't heard of the wonderful visual novel Katawa Shoujo? It's actually a pretty good game to play.

It's not super rational, and has been recc'd here before, but I really enjoyed Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard series. If you haven't already read the first one, give it a try: https://www.amazon.com/Lies-Locke-Lamora-Gentleman-Bastards/dp/055358894X

It's fantasy/adventure/outwitting/snark series, with a few 'creative problem solving' moments.

OK, I read the prologue and the first chapter. Gonna stop there for now and give you my criticisms so far. I put it in a pastebin because it's long. I apologize for how harsh it is; I chose to be as blunt as possible because you don't strike me as the type to prefer sugarcoating. The overall takeaway is, "Way less telling, way more showing."

I recommend reading Steven King’s “On Writing – A Memoir of the Craft.” It describes a lot of the common beginner-writing pitfalls you’re falling into, and how to avoid them. It’s not the be-all end-all of how to write well, but it’s a succinct and comprehensible starting point, perfect for a beginner.

If there are specific criticisms you agree with, but aren't sure how to incorporate into your story (e.g. "how could I organically introduce this particular detail?"), I'm happy to offer suggestions for you to build off of.

Edit: Just read the author's note for Chapter 2. "I think I'll do a Weiwei chapter when next I'm horny, or maybe I should try Liz?" [Shudder.] Dude, please don't do this. This takes the story from your metaphorical to your literal masturbation material.

If you want to write a porn, write a porn and post it on a literotica site. If you want to write a story, you need to plan out and write an actual story which may contain sexual elements when they serve the plot, not just spontaneously write in sex scenes when you happen to be horny--not to mention making your audience deeply uncomfortable by announcing the fact. Nobody who's trying to read a story about a complex struggle against a powerful leader for rulership of the world wants to picture the author typing it with one hand.

I enjoy the rationalist works from this community quite a bit, but feel like I haven't done a great job of incorporating it into real life.

Towards that end, are there any significant non-fictional rationalist works, or by prominent rationalists? There are science-themes works such as “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Kahneman, or “Godel, Escher, Bach” that explicitly deal with brain biases and heuristics, for example, although I was hoping for suggestions with a more philosophical bent.

I adopt the middle stance as well.

I recommend MacCaulay's speeches on copyright from 1841 and '42, especially the first. You can find them on Project Gutenberg (link is to first speech; the second immediately follows). They're long and verbose, but worth reading and make a number of interesting arguments.

I'm pretty sure copyrights at present are far too long in the US especially; however, I haven't done any sort of survey of the literature to even start to see what sorts of terms would maximize the public good. The current state of affairs, where Disney keeps pressuring US legislators to extend copyright every time their fucking cartoon mouse looks like it will enter the public domain, so that nothing will ever enter the public domain in the US again without dramatic and far-reaching reforms of the entire system of government lobbying is ... pretty sub-optimal.

Yeah. We pushed him, here in this sub, to make this. I emailed patreon to ask about some details about how their credit cards worked, others noted their happiness to support him.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2rcs9f/mother_of_learning_chapter_31_marked/

I think it's a good sign of us. As we know, nothing happens solely because the plot requires it, if you want something to happen like more rational fiction you have to give it a plausible reason.

Likewise I've supported Eaglejarl in his patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/davidstorrs?ty=c

And am happy about the competitions and such that are running in here to encourage more writing of rationalist fiction. Archives have been created.

We are getting into the details. Some infectious tracking spell on their souls. I do like the two new characters too. A badass priest and a monstrous transformer.

The magic is quite fun too. I like the ideas of how it works, of there being some cost for whatever effect that can be reduced by changing it's properties. It's a much more detailed and rational magic system.

Also, I've finished the basic system of my MOL roleplay game. It is actually theoretically playable now. It also has lots of character and place names in it for reference.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/251688546/Mol

While without internet I did lots of work on it.

That sounds exactly like the game Doodle God where you make everything necessary for human civilization to function starting from the four elements. Some combinations of the elements don't really make sense, but it's a good time-killer.

I haven't gone into the really fancy stuff, like memory walks and similar, but I've found spaced repetition systems to be very effective (specifically Anki).

Once you finish the books and put some time into the practice, do you think you could report back? I've been thinking of getting MWE, but haven't been sure about it.

I do have a subreddit set up for this over at /r/shadowsofthelimelight, if anyone wants to use that. Also, a Patreon campaign which (if nothing else) will let you see what I look like. Mirrored on FictionPress here.

I adore everything Shiga has ever done and treasure my copy of Meanwhile.

That said I just wanted to jump in and warn anyone squeamish that you aren't kidding, DEMON is REALLY dark and does not shy away from extremes. I recommend it for people like me who gobble down dark stuff if it's the right flavor (e.g., I binge every season of Black Mirror as soon as it comes out.)

I personally can't think of a music video that I'd be comfortable showing to aliens without having to explain a lot of context.

On a almost completely tangential note, if you have Amazon Prime, the 1984 concert film of the Talking Heads is available:

https://smile.amazon.com/Stop-Making-Sense-David-Byrne/dp/B079Z7WPYP

Utterly fantastic, fantastic concert film, making me wish I could travel back it time to see it live.

Ah, yeah, you're right. DeBeers created the value of diamonds in the 20th century, out of whole cloth. Thanks for the reminder.

It looks like artificial rubies might be a good option. The things are ridiculously cheap today and would be as good as the real thing back in the past.

Very interesting concept. In the cryptocurrency community there is a thing called Proof of Burn where you prove that you've spent coins to unspendable addresses. This shows a monetary commitment without actually paying anyone specifically.

More broadly, smart contracts can achieve this precommitment function extremely generally, such as "send one dollar to bob that is only spendable on bread." Scripts enforce the spendability of the token inside the network. Ethereum is an attempt at a Turing complete scripting language for smart contracts.

My favorite example of a dead man's switch precommitment in fiction is in Snow Crash where [spoiler](#s "one of the characters has a fusion bomb that will go off if he dies").

I'm considering resurrecting rules of wishing and first finishing it off with a concluding chapter (which I've been intending to do for literally months) and then taking it apart and trying to fill in the gaps so that it actually covers the whole plot of the movie instead of just a collection of fragmented scenes.

Obviously this is not how you're "supposed" to do NaNoWriMo but I don't really care. :-)

This may all fall apart as a plan though as the rest of the year is looking likely to be very busy.

Would it be safe to assume that you've already read the DCU fanfic "Inviolate", at https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5536346/1/Inviolate (podcast version at https://archiveofourown.org/works/2658290?show_comments=true ), and the version of the Green Lantern Corps presented therein? (Non-spoiler: I believe it predates DC's expounding upon the full emotional spectrum, which may affect how useful it would be to you.)

Calibre the e-book manager has a fanfic plugin. The downloaded books automatically get put into a calibre archive which supports e.g. rating with stars and user-enterable tags (while also auto-populating the tags from the websites it scrapes them from). It also supports checking for updates for fanfic, and works with most common fanfic websites (including Xenforo threads for e.g. spacebattles or sufficientvelocity).

Downloading fics and updating a larger calibre archive with fanficfare is a little slow; I understand it's purposely that way to avoid hammering shoddy fanfic servers too hard.

There's a new cryptocurrency called Steem that pays you for writing. Possibly a good incentivization to keep your wordcount up, if nothing else. Fiction section here. You can sign up using your reddit account, and they give about $6 worth of free currency.

> Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?

Is anyone here already using Habitica? (Tagline: "Your life, the roleplaying game".) I stumbled across it this past week, and it looks promising. But I haven't signed up yet, so 1) I'm not going to plug it directly :P, and 2) usecases from real-world users wouldn't hurt.

<em>A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California</em> seems like exactly what you're looking for. It's unfortunately out of print, with used copies being unreasonably expensive, but there's a chance you could track down a copy at a library, or perhaps e-mail the author.

I would like to recommand a book, but I am not sure.

Qualityland by Marc-Uwe Kling https://www.amazon.de/dp/1409191133/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_rrWhFbZV5SPNR

Here is why I am not sure: -its not realy rational, more a dystopian satyrical society extrapolation and critique -I dont know the english version, only the german original -I didnt read it, only heard the audiobook. Its done by the author himself, who is realy, realy good at this.

The author studied philosophy and is very political, so some of the characters say some remarkable stuff. But be warned. I gather most americans would consider him an dangerous communist. From german standpoint he is somewhat left.

P.S.: I am writing on my mobile, english is not my first language, I cant format shit in reddit

> I actually rather like C++ when I can get things working. It's not an easy language, but I think it's good at teaching how the computer works at a lower level, where Python seems to hide it. For learning computer science over learning programming, I don't think it's a bad choice, and it makes languages after that easier to understand.

That's an argument for learning/teaching C, not C++.

As far as learning computational science goes, simpler languages are better. Maybe Scheme, or Python. I recommend Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

> when I can get things working

... that's the problem. Students should be learning theory, not struggling against the language. With C++, a simple const violation can lead to a cryptic compile-time error twenty lines long that no one can read. I'm of the opinion that first-year students need to be seeing results instead of errors, in order to get positive reinforcement.

> in some cases planned obsolescence.

I was kinda gonna ask if this thing was just a conspiracy theory thing or if there is any actual evidence of this and then I remembered I'm a total dunce and I just read about fucking DRM in cat litter box.

https://medium.com/@jorge_lo/the-future-a-cat-litter-and-drm-6dbda26428f8

I mean, it's not quite the same think as making it break sooner, but it's not far off and even that actually happens with printers.

Well, if you insist... Flotsam is my short science fantasy. It's free and the preview shows the full story. The protagonist uses his eye for physics to escape a sticky situation, although I hesitate to call it rational fiction.

The Drone Papers by The Intercept is a pretty good resource, created after a recent leak. The recent bombing of the doctors without borders hospital in Kunduz is all too typical of Drone assassinations.

As far as comparing death tolls, look at numerous sources. But it's clear that the US is far and away in the lead, take for example Iraq, where 100k-300k civilians have been killed since 2003. That's far more innocents than 200 in Paris or 3000 in WTC.

• So many crossovers with Young Wizards. The setting integrates with basically anything, and lends itself beautifully to stories with a genuine clash of values (anything from black/white to grey/grey) rather than stupid non-communication.

• Harry Potter AU in which the POV generation (and ok, others too) is actually competent. I mean, we see all these amazing things done by parents, Riddle, Dumbledore in school and then the trio just muddles through when they know someone is trying to kill them? Note: Forging the Sword is pretty similar, though I'd skip to later and just open with competence porn.

• High-stakes, competent magical girl megacrossover. Similar to Haigeki or Battle Fantasia Project, but focussing on collaborating with the power of <friendship/love/magic/warm fuzzies/pink dakka/whatever> to protect Earth from all the many invaders instead of constant darkness.

• Post- Narnia story in which four teenagers have all the memories, skills, and charisma of legendary royalty... and a country that needs help. Partly-done by the <em>National Service</em> series.

This story may hold some relevance to that scenario. [edit: better link]

It's the tale of a man who defined himself to death.

A few days I purchased Cold Turkey, a productivity/blocker program that has thus far been helping me out more than similar apps have (among other advantages, it also blocks non-web programs). I recommend it if you have a problem with procrastination.

K. J. Parker's works tend to delve pretty deeply into certain aspects of historical artisanship - the Shadow series goes in to the origins of cannonsmithing and how buttons were crafted, for instance, and the Fencer series goes through historical swordsmithing in the first book and then bowcrafting in the second.

Just letting you know, while he went a bit crazy with the sex stuff in fanfiction, he made it only between characters of consensual age for his published works on Amazon.

The Daniel Black series and Perilous Waif are really good and I'd recommend them to this subreddit. Granted, there's quite a fair bit of sex, but I liked the books in spite of it.

In fact, he has a new book in the Daniel Black series, Thrall, coming out December 1st.

EDIT - Actually, I can't remember if there were even any sex in Perilous Waif? All I can remember is some frank discussions about it, but no sex scenes.

Oh man, I'm assuming you mean Physics of Magic? Blast from the past! I super don't mind if you upload somewhere. (FYI that that series is pretty long-abandoned and unlikely to get finished, and has probably long since slipped into the uncanny writer valley of "things I am embarrassed to have written.")

I self-published the first book on Amazon at one point (though I don't think I actually get any money for it because I never figured out all the tax information I was supposed to put in): https://www.amazon.com/Magical-Delinquents-Physics-Magic-1/dp/1499367139/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1545079248&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=magical+delinquents+miranda+dixon-luinenburg

If people rather have a physical copy of the book made out of dead trees rather an electron-only version, you can get a copy off Amazon.

I really enjoyed 'The Power of Habit'. I'm not sure how entirely generalisable the ideas in it are, but it completely changed my view of my own behaviour (and human behaviour in general).

On a different note, 'The Ascent of Man' was very fun as well. It's a sort of history of civilisation, heavily abridged.

From <em>Thinking, Fast and Slow</em> (but also a common bit of LessWrong jargon). Wikipedia sez:

> The book's central thesis is a dichotomy between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.

Literally rationality: "How to win."

So it boils down to:

• Level 1 Winner Strategy: Repeat winning move.

• Level 1 Loser Strategy: Switch to the move not used in previous (losing) round – ie, if you lost via paper-rock, play scissors.

• Level 2 Winner Strategy: Copy your opponent's losing move.

• Level 2 Loser Strategy: Copy your opponent's winning move.

• Level 3 Winner Strategy: Level 1 Loser Strategy

And so on. By this reasoning, the Level 6 Winner Strategy is the same as the Level 1 Winner Strategy; I don't know what that says.

Frustratingly, the video gave no tips on how to recover from a draw, which is the outcome in 33% of all theoretic matches (though, I suspect, that percentage is much higher in practice).

Funnily enough, I wrote a clickbait-style guide to RPS years ago; it's still on Pastebin here. I'm not sure how well it holds up to the strategy in the video, since it's less of a strategy and more of a collection of stray observations on human behavior.

In a previous Friday Off-Topic Thread, I was looking for advice on stemware. I recall someone asking for me to report back when I bought something, so here's the report. I am still shopping around for some casual with-stem wine glasses, but I finally got some casual stemless wine glasses that have worked out quite well. They are Riedel stemless Riesling/Zinfandel glasses (amazon link) and they pretty much meet my needs. They're a bit expensive ($8 per glass) but so far seem to be doing well.

They are fine in the dishwasher if you put them somewhere nothing will bump them on the top rack, and they are basically wine-glass shaped. They seem to have a normal wine glass level of fragility, and although their shape isn't perfect for a red wine, the experience is fine and you're probably not going all-out with expensive wine if you're drinking from a stemless glass.

When I ordered them, I had to return my order to Amazon twice due to the glasses arriving with some of them broken, so make sure to check the box carefully to see if any of the glasses are broken. Amazon handles this sort of return for free (including giving you a shipping label) but it's kind of a pain. In the future, I'll see if I can buy these in a store near me instead to avoid that hassle.

Overall, I recommend them if you can find them in a store near you, or are fine dealing with Amazon returns.

The only game I play on android is the port of Simon Tatham's Puzzles. It's very barebones, and the ui is ugly. But there's no ads or any bloat. Just endless randomly generated puzzles.

I like Carl Sagan and I've read some of his books, my one problem with him is that he's very poetic and tends to focus on the beauty and amazing nature of reality as opposed to the concepts behind it and how humans think about it philosophically.

I liked Predictably Irrational too.

I've seen Thinking: Fast and Slow recommended a lot here and in other places, I'll definitely pick that up soon, thanks.

I've seen Thinking: Fast and Slow recommended a lot here and in other places, I'll definitely pick that up soon, thanks.

Writers can be usefully put across a spectrum with people who meticulously plot things out at one end and people who make it all up as they go along at the other end. George RR Martin calls this distinction "architect" and "gardener", the Writing Excuses podcast calls it "plotter" and "pantser". "Discovery writer" is just another term for someone who's feeling out at as they go along. In reality, most writers are impure (they do both) but there are definite trends.

Stephen King is firmly at the discovery writer end of the spectrum. His method (as stated in "On Writing") is to create some compelling characters and see where a challenging situation leads them. His method for writing "The Stand" was to write a chapter, end it on a cliffhanger, then write another chapter from another viewpoint, and continue on like that, occasionally dipping back into a viewpoint he'd already hit to resolve a previous cliffhanger then end on a new one. Eventually the plot gets where it's going, the viewpoint characters come together ... and then Stephen King gets some terrible writer's block and nearly gives up because he doesn't know how the book ends. This is one of the reasons that Stephen King seems to have trouble with endings (and the same is true for many authors who have trouble with endings, especially people who write web serials, which are usually not tightly plotted).

For contrast, Brandon Sanderson is a meticulous plotter. He plans out his whole book before he's written a single word and figured out the shape of the plot with all the story beats well in advance. He goes in with a plan and then executes that plan as well as he's able.

(My natural tendency is to write by discovery, but that's left me with a lot of drafts that have difficult problems by the late-middle, so I've made a commitment not to write things until I've pinned down the climax and ending.)

I would like to cast my vote for, in descending order of preference:

• AI: A modern approach

• Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

• Probability Theory: The Logic of Science

• Thinking, Fast and Slow

• Thinking and Deciding

• Anything else on your list that is not GEB

• GEB (I've already read it, and ~~I suspect many have~~ I didn't enjoy it much, and before I caught myself, I tried to provide a convincing rationalization to tip the scales in my favor, because in actuality I am selfish and would only begrudgingly support this option if it lead to reading other books)

I have the first 5 and have been meaning to read them, but haven't been able to make myself keep at it. A community read-through would give me that extra bit of motivation.

You may cast one Wish spell each year on January 1. If you don't cast it by 12:00am on the 2nd, you lose your wish for the year.

How do you use this to attain your CEV? Do you ever risk using a non-standard Wish and permanently losing this ability? What 8th-level spells would you most often replicate, assuming you're not just hoarding money every year (which is a reasonable approach as long as you can launder it)?

One of the best ways to measure gas temperatures in low-density fluids in astrophysics is through their EM emission and absorption properties. Emission and absorption produced by specific atomic ions (like the emission lines from catching a free electron) is ideal, because at a given temperature and density most atoms are in a single ionization state. Luckily, on Earth we don't need to rely on radiation and can go directly to measuring ion concentrations and gas densities to extract the temperature. The hard part in this case would be to pick a good probe element, because it needs to have an ionization temperature of 2500 K which is pretty mild, astronomically. Implied here is that we can also look for atmospheric emission and absorption to corroborate the results

Do you have a picture or model of these creatures? I find looking at things actually makes thinking about capabilities a lot easier.

If you don't, and aren't someone who could draw it themselves, you could try the Spore Creature Creator. It costs 5€ (which is weird, since I remember it being free), but it makes designing approximations of your mental image quite easy.

They said they're going to restart the campaign soon though, in the update.

They have everything in place only they're not sure whether to do this through Kickstarter, or something like IndieGoGo where there is a definite transfer of funds.

Chapter 23, or Chapter 73, depending on which mage you mean. You're welcome.

^(Wow, Amaryllis was actually "kidnapped by a mage" twice, that must feel so embarrassing. I now see where her self-worth issues are coming from.)

An n-gram can be a unigram (one word), bigram (two words), trigram (three words), etc.

"The" is a unigram. When you see it at 10%, that percent is the occurrence as a percent of all unigrams. So if the graph shows "the" at 10% in 1990, that means that if you were to slice every book on record (edit: for 1990) into unigrams, and put those unigrams in a hat, your odds of drawing the word "the" from the hat would be 10%. If you added together the percents for all unigrams, you would have 100%.

Same goes for bigrams. If you divide up the entire corpus into bigrams, how many of those are "Albert Einstein" or "loosey goosey" or "wild card"? (For an example of how this works, the sentence "Albert Einstein was smart" would get divided into three bigrams: "Albert Einstein", "Einstein was", "was smart")

This tends to be a bit better than just counting whether an indexed book has that word, because otherwise an entire book about Einstein would be counted the same as a single reference. Given the sheer size of the corpus, mostly you get smoothish lines.

Check out their About page for more information.

Season 2 of Hilda just dropped today on netflix. I recommended season 1 here before as a prime example of wit and charm and wonder and whimsy put to clever storytelling and great worldbuilding. Season 2 seems equally good so far. Recommended for adults and kids.

Yeah- it's HTML and a subset of CSS that's pretty permissive except for custom fonts. It's mostly set up the way it is to prevent people from hosting arbitrary/potentially dangerous content as a fic. This chapter was pretty much just done with tables and some styling to mess with font size and padding and so on! (h/t Nostalgebraist for an example of how to do it in The Northern Caves.)

I'm only really familiar with Amazon, so:

Pros

• You can buy the book right away
• Verified reviews so that you can ensure the person making the review actually at least owns the book (see the rather famous case of Doors of Stone on Goodreads having 800 ratings and 150 reviews despite not even having a release date yet)
• Usually has a preview of the first couple of pages so that you can see whether the writing style or content interests you (above and beyond the recommendation you get here).

Cons

• Region specific issues
• May not have the best price
• Amazon has an incentive to try to get you buying bad books
• Shill reviews (but you get those everywhere online that has reviews, and at least Amazon has some economic muscle to use as threat in particularly egregious or widespread cases)
• Amazon has a referral program that I don't know too much about that gives an incentive to excessive posting (probably not a problem with our size given how low the rewards would be though)

Now personally, I don't think there really needs to be a standard, because we're just not that large of a subreddit. By the general theory of online participation rates, a thousand subscribers means we have maybe in the dozens of people who will ever submit anything to this subreddit. Instituting rules increases overheads and reduces participation rates.

As a mutually agreed upon (as opposed to strict policy) standard, I would choose Amazon, since that's where I always go to see whether a book is really worth buying.

The thing about online encyclopedias is that they use hypertext. If you want structure and context, just click on the blue text :)

If after a wikiwalk you feel that you need more structure, consider looking for a MOOC that teaches whatever topic interests you. Coursera has a broad selection, for example.

I use Calibre to keep my ebooks and downloaded works organized. I use the FanFicFare plugin to create epub/mobi/etc versions of Web-published works. Anything that FFF doesn't support can be typically handled using WebToEpub, although some sites require tweaking.

Rating can be done either via Calibre's native functionality or by adding a custom column. Notes can entered in a custom Calibre column or -- my preferred solution -- in a separate Word document.

Calibre also supports multiple "libraries", which can be handy if you want to keep different types of works, e.g. fiction vs. non-fiction or fan fiction vs. regular fiction, in separate virtual folders.

You can use this Greasemonkey script to warn you about invisible text on the spacebattles forums.

>This script adds a button to reveal invisible text. The button is placed under a poster's avatar, and will only be displayed if there is transparent text in the post. Also, a dotted grey border is placed around any invisible text to denote its presence.

The most I've got is Patreon. If that doesn't work for you (and I totally get why it wouldn't), I'm planning to release this book as a pay-what-you-want thing when it's finished, which I'm hoping serves double duty for a donation/tip.

I have a super simple script to help you then

Install AutoHotKey

Then save this code (in notepad or any other word processor) as NAME.ahk (make sure you set set "Save as type: All Files"

Here is the code to save: ]::Reload [:: Loop { send {LButton} sleep 10 } return

[ starts the script, ] stops the script To close the script, right click on the Green Button with a White H in your taskbar and click exit

On the video game front, I'd like to link an old game: Master of Magic (The link goes to GOG where you can buy it. Alternatively, you can find a DOSBox version if you're on Mac.)

If you read the reviews you will see a steady stream of "Best fantasy 4X game ever" and similar.

Want to know more? Take Civilization and cross it with Magic: the Gathering. Five color-themed schools of magic, hundreds of spells, dozens of creatures, fourteen races with a dozen or more units each, two worlds (Arcanus and Myrror) to explore...there's more replay value than you will ever be able to use up. Among the strategies you could try:

• Slings and Arrows: Endless hordes of happy little hobbit slingers!
• Hero Hit Team: Heroes with artifacts that let them rain down fire and destruction!
• Black Hearts: Shadow Demons or Wraiths: cast them early, cast them often, kill everything that moves.

There's tons more.

CONS: The game was made in 1994 so the graphics and music are awful by modern standards. The AI also isn't as good as one would like.

Aside from those, this is an amazing game.

From the TOS:

> Waiver of Property Rights: You understand that by providing any sample, having your Genetic Information processed, accessing your Genetic Information, or providing Self-Reported Information, you acquire no rights in any research or commercial products that may be developed by 23andMe or its collaborating partners. You specifically understand that you will not receive compensation for any research or commercial products that include or result from your Genetic Information or Self-Reported Information.

So basically, yes; if 23andMe discovers that you have some mutation that proves to be the cure for cancer, they're the ones who can potentially profit from it.

I'm against patents on genes, but more generally speaking I'm in favor of data-mining large samples of user information to advance the state of the art in medicine (that they're using the information to do genetic research is what I would consider an incentive to use the service, rather than a reason not to).

Continuing from last week as usual on the worldbuilding of a kung fu battle wizard setting. I should probably get someone to proofread the work.

Also, I am told that the magic system I am using is not original enough and too close to Naruto's magic system. Let me know how I can make the magic system more distinct.

Do note that it's crucial that ninja must be able to navigate a three-dimensional world and carry out logistics for their civilization. Right now, ninja use pocket dimension storage and adhere to walls and trees like spiderman.

What do people here think of

https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/antidepressants-taken-during-pregnancy-increase-risk-of-autism-by-87-percent

http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20140827/do-antidepressants-in-pregnancy-raise-risks-for-mental-woes-in-kids

These are two studies that appear to reach opposite conclusions on whether antidepressants cause autism after controlling for level of depression. The first of these was frontpage at reddit today.

I know someone on antidepressants who is considering having a baby. I wonder how much of an effort she should make to go off them.

As Oliver sAcks alludes, there are non-fiction examples of memory loss that drive our understanding of how memory works.

Clive Wearing is a good example -- he developed severe HSV encephalitis that hit his temporal lobes hard and only has 10 seconds of short term memory. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwigmktix2Y

The experiment that is referenced in Memento likely is about the real case of Henry Molaison, also famously known as patient H.M. http://ed.ted.com/lessons/what-happens-when-you-remove-the-hippocampus-sam-kean

Gandalf's fall in Moria was fated, or at least foreseen given that they passed through Moria. In addition to this, the sacrifice he made by dying was necessary to prove to Eru Iluvatar that he was worthy of being returned from death, stronger, as Gandalf the White. This moral test was planned by Eru Iluvatar so that the mission of the Istari would not fail, as Saruman, originally the White, had betrayed them. Without the sacrifice, everything would have been significantly more difficult, if not impossible, and the Istari would have completely failed. Changing things in Lord of the Rings is significantly harder than other stories, simply because its world is so vast and intricately designed.

[1] [2]

Prank

I should also note that I use the Web of Trust extension for Chrome, which vastly reduces the chance I make bad clicks on the internet. I highly recommend it. Pretty sure they make a Firefox add-on as well.

DNS66 is what I use, from the F-Droid appstore. It is a local VPN that only routes port 53 (DNS) and blocks known ad domains. It's not perfect, but 98&#37; of ads are gone now.

You can put it all in a single page though :P

I like to use Page Zipper. It’s a bookmarklet, inserts a javascript into the page on clicking.

Also, not just for reading. It’s great for archiving interesting forum threads in one fell swoop too. You have to scroll/PgDown all the way down so all the pages get to load (Not Ctrl End.. learned that the hard way)

Then save the page and convert to Pdf. I think I saw a few other thread saving methods around if this doesn’t work for you.

Link to ch. 55.

Also, as part of Kickstarter's All-in-1 event, trying to encourage campaigns that last for only seven days, I've launched a project to release a short story of mine. It's a 1,600 word short story about a fugitive programmer who stows away on the wrong spaceship, and if the project raises just $90, then it'll be released under a Creative Commons license for anyone to read or remix, forever and ever.

Check it out here.

If you've been looking for an opportunity to support HSTW but don't like how Patreon is a monthly thing, then the $5 tier will also get you some other books that I've written, like a guide to comparative mythology.

On a more serious note, Malcom Ocean's Beeminder might be helpful.

It lets you, among other things, put money on "hoc" until it's verified that you've finished your task. If you don't finish in the time frame you want, it donates your money to charity.

It can also be used to do the timer/buzzer thing that /u/waylandertheslayer recommended, I think.

The beginners guide to magical site licensing used to be free, now it's on kindle unlimited

https://www.amazon.ca/Beginners-Guide-Magical-Licensing-ebook/dp/B07NK7GTBS

Maybe still alive here: http://starterserials.com/active/the-beginners-guide-to-magical-site-licensing/in-which-a-man-with-a-headache-does-a-spell/

Off To Be The Wizard (free on Kindle) is a fun exploration in this space. I wouldn't characterize it as rational, but it's fun.

(The full series probably qualifies as rational-adjacent, but the sequels aren't free.)

I would suggest the Cradle series by Will Wight. Among other things, it has the virtue of having been originally written in English, and thus does not suffer from a poor English translation like most cultivation stories.

It's actually one of my favorite book series, so I can definitely give it a recommendation in its own right! If you give it a try, I'd suggest making sure you read at least the first half of the first book, whereupon something happens that will probably make it obvious if you'll enjoy the rest of the series or not. The first two books are widely considered to be the weakest, though there are really good parts in both.

I also had Kindle Unlimited for a while. I concur that the quality to chaff ratio if pretty terrible, and Amazon's interface makes it near impossible to find things that would fit the user's preferences. I gave up on Kindle Unlimited when I realized that fanfiction websites such as fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org had a much better selection of amateur works - for free.

That said, I did find a few series on Kindle Unlimited that were worthwhile. For example, Edward W. Robertson's fantasy series are all pretty great (i.e. The Cycle of Arawn and its sequels). Not necessarily rational, but a very enjoyable read nonetheless.

I also thoroughly enjoyed Icon-Violet, which is a dystopian scifi story that examines interesting concepts related to AI, ethics, and problems of personal identity. I think it would appeal to people on this sub who like Greg Egan's novels.

The Quarter Share series gets there eventually - by the second or thirdish book the MC is in his 30s and secure in his life.

The story is very slice of life, and the setting is kinda Horatio Hornblower In Space.

There's also the EarthCent Ambassador series, which again starts out with a 20something protagonist who's in her 30's or 40's within a couple of books thanks to time skips.

Also fairly slice of life, but in this case the books remind me of the more laid back Star Trek episodes - there's a focus on dealing with aliens, particularly because she's an ambassador from Earth on a trading station.

[](#s "I get that 'grr why doesn't Tedrin die in a fire on page 15' reaction a lot. He, and in a more mundane way, Veronica, represent ways the non-rational world can screw with Eden. Thanks to them, she meets with failures and horrible suffering despite usually taking a rational approach.")

I'm going to add to my post above, but: If you enjoyed the book, I'd really really appreciate it if you posted a review on Goodreads and/or Amazon!