August 2013 Media Thread

Recently I've been reading/playing Fate/stay night, a Japanese visual novel. (A "visual novel" is basically an illustrated choose-your-own-adventure, albeit with a much higher ratio of plot to choices). It's interesting from an LW perspective because Eliezer is a fan (eg quoting it here, and apparently there's a reference in HPMOR) and there are philosophical similarities with HPMOR and Eliezer's work in general on topics like heroism and making an extraordinary effort, the notion of "something to protect", etc.

Plot-wise, it's an urban-fantasy-slash-romance story where ancient heroes are summoned to help mages like our reluctant hero fight a battle for the Holy Grail, which promises unlimited power. Like apparently a lot of VNs there are 3 "routes" where the main plot works out differently depending on an early choice. I'm halfway through the 2nd one right now.

Positives:

• Fun setting.
• Fun characters and interactions, good comedy at times.
• Good art.
• Excellent voice acting in the patched version.
• Often gripping during the dramatic parts.
• The secret identity of one of the main characters is pretty much maximally absurd and maximally awesome at the same time. Edit: having gotten further into Unlimited Blade Works, make that two of the main characters.
• Good character development for the main character who starts out a bit chumpy and annoying in some aspects ("surely this woman who is 10x more powerful than me needs my protection") but grows well.

Negatives:

• Extremely long and long-winded. The narrative style during scenes is often repetitive, as is the overall story - you get similar exposition multiple times and I've gone through at least 15 breakfast scenes already.
• The sex scenes (2 in the first route) were overly pornographic for my taste.
• Some combat scenes are overly drawn out - plus the main character has been beaten/chopped half to death probably 10 times at least so far.
• The background music is bad (but can be turned off).
• It seems to be the default setting in the anime-related cluster of stories, but there's really no good reason for this to have a high-school setting.

Depending on your taste:

• Follows the "relatively normal guy somehow gets to choose between multiple attractive women" 'harem' structure.

I'd say it's worth reading if the concept sounds interesting to you and you have the time to spare.

A few weeks ago I began reading the visual novel Umineko no Naku Koro ni, partially because I enjoyed the Higurashi anime and partially because Tuxedage said it was a mindfuck; I'm up to 3 of 8, and it's becoming clear that this VN is going to take a while, to say the least. (I've never read any visual novels before, so I was not sure what to expect.)

The cramped window and tedium of having to constantly hit the spacebar to advance lines aside (I wish I could just tell it 'my reading speed is 400WPM, please advance at that rate automatically except for dialogue'; visual novels seem to have the worst of both worlds of novels & anime, where they show as little information as a screen of an anime yet still force you to choose your own pacing without interaction being as easy as a novel where you read an entire page before needing to take any physical action), I'm enjoying it. It's an interesting mystery setup, I was able to beat the protagonist to some of the solutions which gratifies my ego, and recently it showed off the best use ever of Hempel's Raven which pleased the heck out of me.

On the downside, I happened to read ANN's review of the second volume of the manga and apparently the author Ryukishi07 remarks that most readers will be convinced that it's all supernatural and inexplicable (implying that it'll turn out to be like Higurashi, with naturalistic explanations for all the events) - which makes me angry since in the dozens of hours I've spent reading this, I was pretty sure that we were being shown all the events from third-person omniscient perspective, and one of the narrative rules of third-person omniscient is that you don't lie to the reader, and we see plenty of supernatural events from this perspective.

EDIT: final thoughts in my review

Katawa Shouju. It's a visual novel about a guy with a heart condition transferring to a school for the disabled. I'm not the biggest fan of the genre, but made an exception for this one.

I should probably plaster a gigantic trigger warning for this one, since, well, the big redeeming quality of this one is the ability to hit a lot of your emotions. I had a lonely childhood and adolescence, and I managed to mostly repress it until Hanako's story arc triggered me pretty badly. If you're particularly empathetic or have a history of loneliness, I wouldn't dive into this one unless you're willing to spend some time processing your emotions and having a good cathartic crying session.

Do blog posts count? Out of Yvain's nearly uniformly excellent posts WHO BY VERY SLOW DECAY stands out in July. He is not kidding when prefacing it with the trigger warnings "death, pain, suffering, sadness". Ignore them at your peril.

Vihart's "Twelve Tones" is quite possibly the most mind-expanding mix of interdisciplinarity (math, music & creativity) in 2013 I've seen so far: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794

NBC's coverage of child prodigy Taylor Wilson.

I guess it falls to me to fill this up.

In Memoriam, a reimaging of Toaru Majutsu no Index that generally raises the competence of everyone involved. Significant changes; prior knowledge not required.

Overlady, Zero no Tsukaima as seen through the lens of the Overlord games. Guess who's the new Overlady. Prior knowledge of ZnT definitely required; prior knowledge of Overlord positive but not required.

Halkeginia Online: Sword Art Online meets Zero no Tsukaima meets Island on the Sea of Time. In short, Louise summons Alfheim, as it turns out that AGI beats magic but AGI has odd priorities. Prior knowledge of ZnT and SAO required. Warning: TVTropes link.

Uchibi Sasuke: Naruto crackfic-with-plot. Highly amusing. Prior knowledge preferred, but fic is not to be taken seriously.

Game Theory: Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, with a slightly saner and far more rational Precia Testarossa. Highly recommended, prior knowledge of Nanoha preferred but not required; it's a rewrite. Complete, sequel in progress.

So, I've been hitting the ponyfic pretty hard lately. Here's the pick of the bunch.

Note: I'm assuming no-one here needs to be told about either the Optimalverse or Mortal.

Contraptionology!: Complete, Dark comedy. Everyone in Ponyville simultaneously becomes a mad scientist and steampunk apocalypse is initiated. Somehow manages to be deeply moving given this premise. Has the best Applejack. Read the prequel "Infernal Machines" first (in appendix C of the main fic).

Whom The Princesses Would Destroy... Complete, Comedy. Bickering and politics in the Equestrian Civil Service. Tastes like early Pratchett; has footnotes. No real Mane6 presence.

Naked Singularity Comedy. Twilight attempts to write a sensual romance novel. This goes about as well as one would expect.
Edit to add: Warning, cringe comedy.

I Forgot I Was There Incomplete, Dark. Twilight accidentally creates a duplicate of herself. And then they both slowly go mad. Warning: Incomplete and stops in a sad place.

Parting Words, complete, and The Great Alicorn Hunt, incomplete. Munchkining and anti-deathism; not very good, narratively (not clear where the author's going to get any real conflict, and it's ranty) but the themes are unusual enough in FiM fic to point out.

Melt Complete, WAFF. Celestia looks after filly!Twilight, who has caught the most overcomplicated form of flu possible. Much d'aww.

Twice as Bright Complete, Romance, Pinkie Pie/Celestia. Yes, Celestia and Pinkie Pie can be successfully shipped. No, I didn't believe it was possible either.

The Games We Play Complete, Romance, Rainbow Dash/Mare-Do-Well. One of Rainbow's friends is stalking her. Set after S2E08.

Twilight Discovers Literary Analysis Complete. Twilight loses her perception of free will. Very meta; almost 500 milliNewsomes of meta. Warning: the author thinks it's a comedy, but I found especially the third part to be viscerally horrifying.
Edit to add: On reflection, I'm upping my warning on this. Leaving it here because it is still very good and my reaction seems atypical based on the reader comments.

MLP Loops Incomplete/Anachronic/Multiple Authors. The ultimate expression of the Peggy Sue lifestyle. Probably bad Fun Theory. Makes my model of Eliezer flee screaming into the night. Still kinda want it.

Descending:

• Quantum Computing since Democritus (review)
• Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (review)
• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (review)
• Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapon: The Physical Principles Of Thermonuclear Explosives, Inertial Confinement Fusion, And The Quest For Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons
• Mrs. Astor Regrets: The Hidden Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach
• Shame: Confessionas of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (review)
• Introducing Nietzsche: A Graphic Guide

"Don't Shoot the Dog" by Karen Pryor is about conditioning / elementary hedonics for humans and other mammals. This book is really really important and I should write more about it at some point.

How to Think Straight About Psychology is the best introduction to the ideas of science that I've read. It's by Keith Stanovich, the cognitive scientist who wrote Lukeprog's favourite book on the cognitive science of rationality and who is also on the board of advisors at CFAR. It introduces, amongst other things, important ideas of how science works, how pseudoscience works, two chapters on probabilistic reasoning and recommends reading Kahneman, and also a section on why we shouldn't be arguing about the meaning of words, only the differences that exist in the real world (y'know, anticipated experiences that let us test hypothesise). It also destroys a lot of public misconceptions about science and psychology.

I plan to give it to all of my friends who need a simple introduction to science. Contact me about a pdf.

Edit: By the way, for a typical LWer though, it would be very basic; sorta like one of the best books of 'Traditional Rationality' or something.

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow. A popularisation of the P=NP question. Very readable.

The Emperor of all maladies An excellent laymen's book about cancer specifically, but also about the culture of medicine, how they deal with uncertainty, etc.

Via a comment in the proggit thread about an online Haskell and music theory book mentioning Guerino Mazzola's very intimidating The Topos of Music, I ended up looking up the author and finding that he's also written Comprehensive Mathematics for Computer Scientists 1 and 2. These look intriguingly compact, while staying at a sufficiently fundamental level that someone with a modest theoretical background might still have a chance of following them.

Now I'll just need to try to actually read them properly.

http://www.sagaofsoul.com/ for all your "magical girls who wonder why their attacks are much less powerful than the mass-energy of the matter they can apparently create, who teleport to space so they can look at the Earth, and who synthesize unbihexium so scientists can get a look at it" needs.

Descending order:

• Radiance (re-reading for my annotated transcription)
• Shigurui (review)
• Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes (review)
• Spice and Wolf, Book 1 (review)

• Qualia the Purple; copying over my interim review from MAL:

  Qualia the Purple was quite the curious read. I started it after being linked it as possibly the only example of manga discussing 'philosophical zombies', then I noted the second main character had purple eyes and began reading it to see if she'd be a hafu for my essay (the art is not great and the story was not compelling enough to keep me reading), then I kept reading because it seemed like it was improving into a light fluffy Haruhi Suzumiya-style manga with some superficial science, then it veered hard into Higurashi-level horror, then it did some shallow quantum mechanics, then it veered into really good hard SF on an almost Greg Egan level with a remarkable take on Lagrangians & Fermat's Principle of Least Action (the closest I can think of are Chiang's "Story of Your Life" and Egan's "The Infinite Assassin"), and then impressed me even more by observing that quantum indeterminacy seems like it should apply to the past as well, so by the end of chapter 12 I'm a little stunned at how this quirky yet mediocre manga has leveled up into relatively hard SF and I'm really wondering how the rest of the story is going to play out.

  (Reading the MAL forums for it, I get the impression a fair number of readers are just glossing over the QM & scientific parts and not appreciating them, but oh well.)

• The Wallet of Kai Lung (review)
• Vader's Little Princess

I also read through Glenn Cook's Black Company-verse, so I'll rank them separately to keep things clear (descending order):

• #2, Shadows Linger (review)
• #1, The Black Company (review)
• #6, Dreams of Steel (review)
• #7, Bleak Seasons (review)
• #9, Water Sleeps
• #5, Shadow Games (review)
• #4, The Silver Spike
• #8, She is the Darkness
• #3, The White Rose (review)
• #10, Soldiers Live (review)

Started reading The Name of the Wind. The main character behaves a lot like HPMoR!Harry in many ways (although maybe the causation is in the other direction), I like the magic system, and there's a decent amount of lampshade-hanging. And the dialogue is surprisingly funny. Generally recommend.

Recommendations

Tooth and Claw) by Jo Walton. Briefly summarized as, "Maybe I would be able tolerate reading Jane Austen and the like if all of her characters had been dragons."

Embassytown by China Mievelle. This a book that is primarily idea-driven and secondarily milieu-driven, with plot and character far behind. The pacing is a little slow to start, but it picks up. I guess I would says it's a work of speculative fiction about philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, which is unusual, and I thought it was quite well-executed. I'm now reading Kraken), which is ok, but not awesome, so based on my sample so far, definitely go with Embassytown if you're only going to pick one of his books.

I have been making my way through all of Iain M. Banks work. The Algebraist (not a Culture novel) was quite good. All of the Culture novels I've read have been good, but if I had to rank them (best to... least best), it would go Consider Phlebas, Look to Windward, The Player of Games, Matter), Use of Weapons

Also working my way through all of Pratchett, but I assume I don't need to recommend that here.

Antirecommendation:

The Rapture of the Nerds It's transhumanist literature, so it should appeal thematically. Unfortunately, I think they made a conscious choice to convey the sense of an accelerating future by having the plot jump around frenetically and semi-randomly, and I hated this conceit. The parts taking place while the protagonist is an upload are pretty good, but you have to get through a lot of awfulness to get there.

I went through most of the Heinlein's Future history series and some other writings. It's very very uneven, even within a single novel. The dialog is often gripping and witty, at other times long and boring. Technical and scientific descriptions tend to ramble on as if it were a textbook or a manual. At his best, Heinlein has several quotable sentences on every page, it his worst, you can skip whole chapters. He generally sucks bad at writing endings, even to otherwise excellent novels.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (not generally considered a part of the series) is one of those I liked most. Stranger in a Strange Land was great at tmes, but spoiled by the occult parts and the meaningless (to me) ending. Time Enough for Love is probably the most uniformly well written, if you excise the genetics babbling, though the ending, again, could have been better. Whoever were his editors, they never did a good job. Still, as sci-fi goes, it aged well, except for computer-related references and plot twists.

His rather anarchist and libertarian political ideas did not grate on me. This was a welcome contrast with Ayn Rand, whose novels I found impossible to get through.

Brandon Sanderson continues to be impressive. He's started a new series with The Stormlight Archive, and it looks great so far. Warbreaker was also really good.

It's not a book, but it doesn't really fit in the other categories either...

Shadow Unit is quite good, though I wish more of it was available in e-reader format. Think Criminal Minds meets The X-Files.

Just finished reading K.J. Parker's Devices and Desires. What struck me at first was "Eh, no, medieval people didn't think like that," but after mentally shifting gears to thinking of it as an author tract like HPMOR, with modern characters in a quasi-historical setting, it was much more enjoyable.

I first read Metagame by Sam Landstrom around 2008. At the time, I was an effectively broke high school student who had decided that I liked AIVAS from the Pern series and wanted more of that, which got me pointed to science fiction, despite the school library making it impossible to tell science fiction from the literary kind by shelving them in the same place. Which meant that, by default, I ended up wandering the Internet looking for long science fiction. Metagame was, at the time, available on the author's website as full text, and I came out the other end of the novel most of a day later with my mind blown. And then I reread it...

The short version of the premise is that some sort of almost-Friendly AI has taken over the world, attached everything a human can do to a point system, and offers immortality (by brain transplant; there's no uploading, apparently) to the people who "win" the game by amassing massive point totals (keep in mind this is 2008, well before "gamification" hit mainstream thought) - but the Game also has zones and rules about how to kill people, and thus "losing" and "dying" are the same concept. Also, there are clones that are morally equivalent to "expensive pieces of furniture" and with ~95% human genetics but are clearly sentient and sapient at human-like levels. These concepts collide (sometimes awkwardly); plot ensues.

Metagame is very clearly a book written in service of its worldbuilding, rather than the other way around, and this shows as occasionally excessively "tellish" prose, occasional protagonist idiot-balls, and a general sense that the book does not actually pick up until Act/Part II (did I mention it was divided up into parts that exactly match modern interpretations of Greek three-act structure?) It is also an interesting read when interpreted as a almost-FAI weirdtopia where the original AI seed value programmers still retained the idea that human meat was special and privileged, thus preventing a) uploading and b) nonhumans with human-level intelligence from being recognized as moral agents.

If you can find it in theaters, Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing is very, very well done. The Shakespearian English takes a few minutes to get used to but is highly understandable. The cinematography is superb. The movie is, as a whole, lots of fun.

Pacific Rim pleasantly surprised me. I could list the manifold ways this movie dramatizes how to correctly deal with catastrophic risks, but I don't want to spoil it for you.

Plus it is awesome, in both senses of the word.

Animated (descending):

• Little Reimu (I both admire and resent this for how effectively it manipulated my emotions with its sentimentality)
• Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! (review)
• Nisemonogatari (Wow. That toothbrush scene is really something else, isn't it? Pity that the second arc is wooden, and the first arc didn't make much sense.)
• Fantasia
• Death Billiards

Live-action:

• Simon Birch (really bad; hilariously melodramatic, ham-handed, and predictable)

Previously.

As it turns out, Day Watch is on Netflix. (Unfortunately, this is the sequel to Night Watch, which is not on Netflix. Argh.)

It was directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who also directed Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. However, those things happened long after Day Watch, so his style here is a bit less refined -- which quite suits the setting.

As far as I can tell, the Night Watch movie covers about half of the plot of the first book. Day Watch roughly covers the second half of the first book, dealing with Anton's attempts to recover the Chalk of Fate in order to undo a bad decision he made in his past. Of course, because it has this ability, practically everyone on either side also wants the Chalk.

Good things: The movie may not be true to the book, but it is thematically true to it. Kostya's father was perfect. The casting of Gesser, Zabulon and Olga was flawless. Svetlana was chosen well, though her acting was not great. The subtitles are very excellent -- they use typographical effects to translate the tone of the speech. The mood is spot-on, and the plot captures the back-and-forth of the two sides quite well, with plenty of stereotypically Russian humor.

Bad things: Anton. Sadly his actor doesn't do a great job. The scenes that happen in the Twilight can be difficult to follow. The translation itself is bad in many places, and inconsistent with the book's translation. There probably won't be a sequel, which means -- barring a reboot -- there won't be a canonical film adaptation of the series.

Touhou, reverse chronological:

• "神々が恋した幻想郷 ～降神～" (hal; from '彩-AYA-完全版' {M3-2009}) [classical]
• "Antique Days" (Kraster; 'Re:solution' {C79}) [vocal]
• "稲田姫様に叱られるから (Because Princess Inada Is Scolding Me)" (高瀬; '風祝と神様のさいしょの物語 - Preview -' {C83}) [instrumental rock]
• "Bad Apple!!" (おたクインテット; 'おたクインテット木管アレンジCD vol.0 おたっと♪' {M3-31}) [classical]
• "幽雅に咲かせ、墨染の桜" (埼玉最終兵器; 'Frenzy Frenzy' {C83}) [instrumental rock]
• "幽霊楽団 [Ver.2012]" (Eru; 'Frenzy Frenzy' {C83}) [instrumental rock]
• "上海紅茶館" (埼玉最終兵器; 'Frenzy Frenzy' {C83}) [instrumental rock]
• "無何有の郷" (埼玉最終兵器; 'Frenzy Frenzy' {C83}) [instrumental rock]
• "傷林果 Bad Apple (演奏 ver)" (Yorihide Fukushima; '和楽東方撰' {C83?}) [Japanese classical]
• "ネクロファンタジア" (Tutti Sound; '東方交響音楽選-Toho Symphonic Selection-' {C83}) [orchestral]
• "Colorbar" (roop; 'T/H/E.2' {M3-31}) [techno]
• "東方妖恋談" (Floating Cloud; 'C83 Special') [acoustic/Celtic]
• "もう歌しか聞こえない ～ 蠢々秋月" (Floating Cloud; 'C83 Special') [Celtic]
• "紅楼" (Floating Cloud; 'C83 Special') [acoustic]
• "no more cry" (FELT, Boyz party; 'Ground Snow' {C83}) [ambient]
• "kiminiaete" (Zytokine, aki; 'Double Key' {C83}) [electro-pop]
• "Dreaming Again -T.V. Million Glittering Stars Remix" (Zytokine, SYO; 'Double Key' {C83}) [electro-pop]
• "the LAST MOMENT" (Zytokine, itori; 'Double Key' {C83}) [electro-pop]
• "2 Keys" (Zytokine, cold kiss; 'Double Key' {C83}) [electro-pop]
• "DREAM A DREAM" (古川未鈴; 'ABANDONED DANCEHALL' {Reitaisai 9}) [dance]
• "Lunatic Blaze" (SYNC.ART'S feat. 仲村芽衣子 (Meiko Nakamura [Adresse]); 'LIMIT BREAK ～限定解除～' {C83}) [vocal/rock]
• "恋の手本 / emaru" (DiGiTAL WiNG; 'Frozen Traveler' {C83}) [club dance]
• "ハートフェルトファンシー (Heartfelt Fancy)" (Demetori; 'Tendre est la Mort' {C83}) [prog rock]
• "Eye Closer" (LV.4 feat. サリヤ人; 'Bon Voyage!!' {C83}) [vocal]
• "Empty hearts" (LV.4 feat. サリヤ人; 'Bon Voyage!!' {C83}) [vocal]
• "Ice fairy's frolics" (Casket; '幻想パブ：午後9時') [Celtic]
• "ROCK IN THE SPARK" (Halozy; 'TOHO R&B HOUSE Party Vol.0' {M3-31}) [electronic/house]

At least half the music from the Ar Tonelico series, especially the hymns. Given that music plays a large role in the games, this is perhaps to be expected.

Just for an example, try EXEC_PURGER.

Has anyone mentioned Welcome to Night Vale yet? It is a comedy-horror podcast (there are transcripts, although I recommend listening to one or two so you can imagine the others in the narrator's voice) and it's highly entertaining, with lots of room for creative headcanon.

I just want to mention how much I appreciate these threads: this is my most trusted source of media recommendations! Thank you to all involved.

How about subsuming the fan fiction thread under the fiction thread instead? 1) Less clutter; 2) my impression is that there aren't enough high-quality works in fan fiction for it to warrant its own thread.