|
Action Jacktion posted:Von Neumann machines going out of control has been used a number of times, though you might be thinking of one of the Revelation Space books by Alastair Reynolds. Yep it was one of the Revelation Space novellas, thanks
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2021 14:34
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 11:28 |
|
|
wizzardstaff posted:Is it "The Diary of Trilby Frost" by Dianne Glaser? I mean, that's gotta be it. I guess it was a wagon accident and not a bike. Thanks!
|
|
#
?
Nov 15, 2021 06:12
|
|
|
Trying to remember a historical fiction thing, no idea when published, it was set before and during WWII in East Prussia, in an village in the middle of nowhere. It had a weird tone, as it was about an old farmer avenging the death of his young nephew(?) at the hands of the thuggish and incompetent local shitheads who joined the Nazi party so they could do whatever they want etc. The tone was weird because it’s a deathly serious story about a guy becoming a partisan, but the interactions with the Nazis actually tend towards farce and comedy as he runs circles around them. There’s even a part where a proper Nazi party official from Berlin passes through to check things out, but has nothing but disdain and disgust towards the oafish local nazis who complain that the old guy down the lane is bullying them.
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2021 14:30
|
|
|
Looking for a book, probably newish. Saw it on twitter a few days ago so naturally I can't find anything. It's hard to describe, it's a book about something (I can't remember the title or the plot) but it was something like real life examples of something. The author is a famous guy (think he's on british tv or something?) and he's written at least 2 other books in the same genre of "Stuff happens, here's a humorous take". I can't remember wtf the books about, but an example would be something like weird science and a humorous writeup about it. I know, not much to go on, but I'm lost.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2021 11:50
|
|
|
You mean something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat ? (Not new but just trying to get a feel for what type you mean)
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2021 12:09
|
|
|
Kinda. Sort of like Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2021 12:38
|
|
|
The Truth About Lies, came out in August? It’s quite good. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Truth-About-Lies-Taxonomy-Deceit-ebook/dp/B08WC3YZX9 Edit: totally ignored the description of the author, sorry. It’s still a good book! James Felton, You Don’t Want To Know? https://www.amazon.co.uk/You-Dont-Want-Know-jaw-dropping/dp/0751580805 Sanford fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Nov 26, 2021 |
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2021 13:57
|
|
|
That's it! Thank you! I was afraid it was going to bug me until the dude wrote a new one.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2021 08:13
|
|
|
Sorry if this is out of scope for the thread, but I'm trying to find the right metaphor to describe the ice maker in my fridge which just keeps making ice and never stops because the little lever that's supposed to flip up to shut it off when enough ice has been made isn't working properly. It just keeps churning out mountains and mountains of ice. What story is this like? I want to say it's some obvious childhood meme which has a well-known piece of music associated with it, like a goose that is cursed to lay eggs forever and you come back to it after a few hours and it's just relentlessly popping them out on top of a huge pile of eggs, pouring out the door of the room it's in while whatever goofy (or ominous) music plays. That's not what it is but that's the idea I'm going for. I'm going to feel really stupid and wonder how much my brain is dissolving once I remember.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 02:09
|
|
|
Tomie dePaola's classic picture book Strega Nona?
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 02:11
|
|
|
Oh there we go, fuckin Sorcerer's Apprentice (as found in the links), that'll do nicely
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 02:15
|
|
|
Data Graham posted:Oh there we go, fuckin Sorcerer's Apprentice (as found in the links), that'll do nicely on the surface that is a good description, i ju st wish you'd stop see sricjnf thj ha. Aut
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 02:44
|
|
|
Carthag Tuek posted:on the surface that is a good description, i ju st wish you'd stop see sricjnf thj ha. Aut
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 02:51
|
|
|
Carthag Tuek posted:on the surface that is a good description, i ju st wish you'd stop see sricjnf thj ha. Aut No, that’s the Tower of Babel.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 04:19
|
|
|
wizzardstaff posted:No, that’s the Tower of Babel. i would like that
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 04:19
|
|
|
Trying to remember an author, and her book. Think it may have been categorized as magical realism fiction. I think her books incorporated homeopathic medicine stuff into the plots, with how the characters saw the world. I believe the author believes in homepathic remedies too. Thanks much!
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2021 00:10
|
|
|
I couldn't find much by Googling "homeopathy novel" (Google doesn't care that almost no homeopathic books are novels, and putting "novel" in quotes mainly gives results for homeopathy curing the novel coronavirus), but I did find this masterpiece, which almost certainly isn't what you're looking for but which I will be purchasing as soon as I'm home from work.
Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Dec 3, 2021 |
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2021 00:21
|
|
|
Yeah. I googled a bit and saw that the field is very funny and large now. The author i'm thinking of is, like, literary fiction rather than genre specific. Published between 2000 and 2016, i think.
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2021 00:25
|
|
|
Along those lines -- my vague understand of homeopathy is that "medicines" impart some kind of impression on water molecules and so you need essentially none of the actual active ingredient itself in the end product. Also, it's completely bogus. But setting that aside and looking at it from the viewpoint of believers -- all water on the planet has been around for essentially forever and in the course of the water cycle has surely come in contact with every substance on earth. So any healing properties should be just as present in tap water as in the actual vial of homeopathic headache medicine, going by their beliefs. Setting aside "well they're just morons" and "it's all fake" (because that, at least, is a given), isn't that a huge flaw within their own belief system? How do they rationalize that to themselves?
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2021 00:44
|
|
|
Water memory is a LIFO stack, clearly.
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2021 00:48
|
|
|
I don't want to push on this derail too hard, but a friend of mine who is generally living in a reality-based milieu has one of those water memory theory books in her guest bathroom you know the sort of thing where the guy writes words on the test tube of water, freezes it, and then takes photos of the ice crystals "oh! the test tube I wrote "peace" on, the crystals are all symmetrical and delicate! the test tube I wrote "gently caress" on froze into brown-grey slush! water memory! how craaaaaazy!" actually, bringing it back on topic, what was that book called? written by a Japanese pseudo-scientist. last name Endoh, or something similar? blue cover with snowflakes on it. anyway my point is that, when I brought up how bullshit it was to her, her response was "well, it's a nice idea, anyway" and that's my impression of how that sort of thing works: people "oh that's a nice idea" themselves into not thinking about what any of it means
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2021 01:52
|
|
|
I found the author and book by logging into a long unused Goodreads account. it was Scarlett Thomas and her book The End of Mr. Y The End of Mr. Y posted:The book tells the story of Ariel Manto, a PhD student who has been researching the 19th century writer Thomas Lumas. She finds an extremely rare copy of Lumas' novel The End of Mr. Y in a second-hand bookshop. The book is rumoured to be cursed - everyone who has read it has died not long afterwards. This was long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Thank y'all for sharing your encounters with homeopathic stuff.
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2021 04:50
|
|
|
More like homeopathetic, amirite?
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2021 04:55
|
|
|
I love that with the right preparation of loving water, you can enter the magical realm of loving air.
|
|
#
?
Dec 3, 2021 06:28
|
|
|
I'm glad the book was found but I think by the principles of homeopathy, any book that had sat next to a book that had been in the same distribution warehouse as another book from the same (self) publisher as that book, would have been as healing and fulfilling as the original book.
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2021 04:47
|
|
|
lol your post is good. just want to clear up it's not a woo woo crystal spiritual healing author. she writes thrillers with a similar writing style as Neal Stephenson. and probably includes less mysticism than half of his books have.
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2021 05:43
|
|
|
branedotorg posted:I'm glad the book was found but I think by the principles of homeopathy, any book that had sat next to a book that had been in the same distribution warehouse as another book from the same (self) publisher as that book, would have been as healing and fulfilling as the original book. that sounds a lot like a "best seller lilst" to me  but unironic
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2021 11:27
|
|
|
I've asked before but no harm trying again. This is a sci-fi book I read in the late 90s. The main character was exiled from some imperial-ish polity to a libertarian-anarchist planet with a bunch of nuclear-armed enclaves. The main identifying element I recall is that interstellar travel is via wormhole, but anyone taking the terminal end of the wormhole the other way would go back in time. At the end it turns out that the protagonist's older/alternate self traveled back in time to save the life of the love interest.
|
|
#
?
Dec 4, 2021 21:19
|
|
|
Copernic posted:I've asked before but no harm trying again. Doesn't quite fit, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Dragon?
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2021 00:19
|
|
|
Runcible Cat posted:Doesn't quite fit, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Dragon? This has the time travel element but no, I don't think so.
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2021 04:44
|
|
|
Book set in the American past somewhere between the 1910s and 30s. Main character is a weak willed piece of poo poo dude trying to find his place in the adult world of other men. At an Elks or Octagons meeting or something like that he displays his weakness by asking that the waiter "might bring a plate of french fried potatoes."
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2021 07:15
|
|
|
That line rings a bell but no real idea. Pure guess: A Confederacy of Dunces
|
|
#
?
Dec 5, 2021 08:27
|
|
|
Data Graham posted:Sorry if this is out of scope for the thread, but I'm trying to find the right metaphor to describe the ice maker in my fridge which just keeps making ice and never stops because the little lever that's supposed to flip up to shut it off when enough ice has been made isn't working properly. It just keeps churning out mountains and mountains of ice. I hope you can stop it in time.. regulargonzalez posted:Along those lines -- my vague understand of homeopathy is that "medicines" impart some kind of impression on water molecules and so you need essentially none of the actual active ingredient itself in the end product. Also, it's completely bogus. But setting that aside and looking at it from the viewpoint of believers -- all water on the planet has been around for essentially forever and in the course of the water cycle has surely come in contact with every substance on earth. So any healing properties should be just as present in tap water as in the actual vial of homeopathic headache medicine, going by their beliefs. Please ask this question in the pseudoscience thread, where we can answer it at great length: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3100175&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
|
|
#
?
Dec 6, 2021 07:05
|
|
|
Saw this in a StackExchange discussion: quote:I remember reading about something like this once... A species had wiped out its home planet and all animal life was a genetic modification/variant of the sentient species... Does anyone know what book/story (or other media) this could be referring to? I feel like I've read a few sci-fi stories with similar premises, but nothing that quite fits. Also, another precedent for the unstoppable ice machine is this Scandinavian tale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_Sea_is_Salt ScienceSeagull fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Dec 9, 2021 |
|
#
?
Dec 9, 2021 03:50
|
|
|
ScienceSeagull posted:Saw this in a StackExchange discussion: That happens in Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon but it could be in another book too.
|
|
#
?
Dec 9, 2021 04:56
|
|
|
Probably not it, but I'll mention it anyway since someone else might want it; it's a classic "where did I see that" book: Dougal Dixon's Man After Man. It's an illustrated guide to a future where humans have abandoned the earth, which is populated by their genetically engineered descendants. Over millions of years, we see fish people, rat people, sloth people, and more. One of the illustrations is the source of the "Season's Greetings" image that goes viral occasionally, with a spindly brown biped attacking a bulky white yeti. Lots of neat images here: http://monsterbrains.blogspot.com/2010/12/dougal-dixon-man-after-man-1990.html
|
|
#
?
Dec 9, 2021 05:53
|
|
|
wizzardstaff posted:Probably not it, but I'll mention it anyway since someone else might want it; it's a classic "where did I see that" book: Dougal Dixon's Man After Man. Those are cool but also the stuff of nightmares.
|
|
#
?
Dec 9, 2021 17:08
|
|
|
ScienceSeagull posted:Saw this in a StackExchange discussion: A mote in gods eye
|
|
#
?
Dec 9, 2021 20:37
|
|
|
Thanks!Biplane posted:Those are cool but also the stuff of nightmares. If you like Man After Man, look up All Tomorrows.
|
|
#
?
Dec 10, 2021 00:24
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 11:28 |
|
|
A children's book of short stories that I had in the '90s - think something like Stephen King's Night Shift except not scary, and all the stories were interrelated and involved a matronly character, Mrs. ___________. Mrs. ___________ was something like a cross between an (American) Mary Poppins and Mary Worth. In each of the stories, a member of a family would have a certain problem, like talking too much, and she would be summoned to fix the issue. If I remember correctly, her solution usually involved something like adding magical ingredients to a person's food to force them to go to one extreme to the other. In other words, if a person talked too much the magic ingredient would give them laryngitis for a certain amount of time so that they couldn't talk at all. There were three or four stories like this in my book, and it seems like it may have been part of a series. But I've long since lost track of the book and I'm wondering if anyone else remembers it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2021 20:28
|
|
