/lit/ - Literature

>>20166267
The End is Nigh, The Apocalypse Triptych #1 - John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey, editors (2014)

This is a self-published trilogy of anthologies, which is rather peculiar. Adams is among the top anthologists, or otherwise this probably wouldn't have been possible. There are 22 authors in this volume and 28 across all 3. 17 of those authors are in all 3 volumes. Consult the the provided image for more details. The stated goal was to have stories that depict the same setting across three different times of the apocalypses. A problem with this was that for several this meant that only a third of story was provided and on its on own was rather unsatisfying because they were fragments rather than entire stories. Those stories surely would have been better received as a whole, especially for those reading as the volumes were released. I considered reading across the 3 volumes for each story as I went, rather than reading then from beginning to end of each volume, but decided against it.

Apocalyptic Causes
Impact: 6
Malice: 5
Idiocy: 4
Aliens: 3
Disease: 3
Volcano: 1

The Balm and the Wound - Robin Wasserman
A cult leader, the protagonist, prophesized that the world would end in nine months. He doesn't believe that at all though. An ex-lover appears and drops off a ten year son he never knew he had, who may want to be an actual cult leader. As far as cults goes, this is certainly one of the most beneficial for its members that I've ever read.
Enjoyable

Heaven is a Place on Planet X - Desirina Boskovich
Aliens proclaim the Earth will be destroyed and all shall be transported one trillion light years away. All humans must remain calm and not change their behavior in any way. Randomly selected humans are issued ray guns to vaporize anyone who doesn't continue to live as they normally would. If their promised rapture doesn't come, apocalypse will have to suffice.
Ok

Break! Break! Break! - Charlie Jane Anders
School kids film jackass-like stunts and are oblivious to the world crumbling around them except for realizing that it makes for great content.
Blah

The Gods Will Not Be Chained - Ken Liu
A girl's father has been uploaded into the cloud and has to relearn how to communicate with humans.
Enjoyable

Wedding Day - Jake Kerr
Maybe it's just me, but there seemed to be a lot of mixed messages in this story. The only clear message was that if you know an apocalypse is coming, you should do whatever you can to mitigate it in advance, but people would rather procrastinate. Also, even if isn't there one, you should still be trying to live your best life.
Meh

Removal Order - Tananarive Due
A young woman tends her to terminally ill and bedridden grandmother despite the imminent apocalypse. This reminded me too much of similar personal experience.
Blah

System Reset - Tobias S. Buckell
A skip tracing duo are searching for a techno-utopian terrorist to collect the bounty on him.
Meh

>>14956033
>hayek, friedman, yellen, marx, rand
yeah anglos lol. no other possible term to describe these people that would be schizo /pol/ idiocy. totally fine to denigrate anglos though, just can't mention that other group, it's different to bring them up than it is to bring up anglos haha

>>14448641
>>14448689
It's weird actually, the whole thread is there, but only the earlier replies appear using the search function

>>/lit/thread/S14437315

>>/lit/?task=search&ghost=yes&search_text=Solved+metaphysics+ended

>>/lit/?task=search&ghost=yes&search_text=Though+it+is+possible+idiocy

>>14448641

Forget the last part, most of yesterday's threads are not showing either. Though it IS possible that your idiocy has broken the board itself.

>>14121445
>keys-lock idiocy
That isn’t idiocy though, that’s a cultural heuristic to better understand the reproductive asymmetry behind the game theory that causes the slut-stud double standard. Sure cultural heuristics tend to be folksy and simplistic but that’s because your average person isn’t going to bother reading textbooks just to understand social dynamics.
A double standard must be rooted in an asymmetry, namely that women are a population bottleneck, a man can impregnate many women but a woman can only be impregnated by ONE man, this means that since the dawn of civilisation you needed to keep female populations as high as possible. Subsequently during wars you kill the men, but often you take the women for repopulation purposes. This then led to both biological and cultural changes in how men and women have sex, men will have sex as much as possible because they risk nothing since if they impregnate a woman they can just impregnate another. Conversely a woman must act as a genetic filter, if a man impregnates her she can’t then get pregnant with a superior male if she sees one. A slut then is a “poor player” from an evolutionary standpoint because if a woman has low reproductive standards she is promoting maladaptive traits. So when you couple the biological implications with the disproportionately high value society places on women’s sexuality (her virginity etc) you get the lock and key analogy. It’s all rooted in the very first asymmetry (wombs vs sperms) and is quite obvious to anyone who understands biology.

>>13874215
> I thought the bible was anti-sex and you were only supposed to do it for reproduction though
The New Testament (1 Corinthians) teaches that a husband and wife should have sex as much as possible, and that depriving one another for any reason is a grave sin.

This is the standard position of almost *every* major religion.

The "sex for reproduction" idiocy was invented by Gnostics in the modern age. You can see the logical continuation of it with modern feminism, 'yes means yes', strange consent laws, etc.

I am a reasonable man, rational mostly, but I guess that means that I don't fit in well with science and environment communicators or writers. I am only a consumer, I guess. I read science and philosophy to deepen the mysteries in my life, and that seems to piss people off. I have watched a woman have her cognitive abilities turned insideout by memes in the same method as those used on the public by FB, and I will never be able to convince them how it was done, nor that it will be done again and again according to political, ethical, and economic justifications. That this is not the end of humanity and ethical concerns altogether is a point of contention I have with these writers, and yet what would be the point of my corrections when if I were in the same spot as say someone like Tesla owner whatshisface, the bodysuit guy, I would agree with social manipulation on the individual level as well as the mass level because I would have the perspective of someone with power over millions, maybe billions. My personal place as an unemployed white male though forces me to seek protections against these intrusions because I represent to some degree the powerlessness. Though this is what? an ability to deceive myself into thinking I am able to use ephoche for all actions and that this programming is not just as was intended, too. That people call these others ethical hackers saddens me and pushes me to disagree about monetary policy in order to fix what is just. I am not a lawyer, nor have the tenacity of phd candidate, but I know politics and aesthetics, and if I like many others are going to truly learn to be happy, it will not be through targeting people and systematically limiting their language and the their visual content. There is a big fight coming in international laws and I am not going to be gaslighted into idiocy and partisanship by Stirnerites, Religious fools, and tech companies exes. The ridiculousness of my actions and the harm that is supposedly attributed to my speech acts was nowhere near as horrible as the "help" offered by the government doctors and rcmp. That this is the politics of the liberals, torys, Greens, and NDP in my country gives me no hope for supporting a political group to amend sovereignty issues in regards to individuals - as it appears that we would rather see ants than humans in building our cathedrals. Where to go from here in my writing? As far away as humanly possible I guess, right? What stand does a stupid man have for his own rights anyhow? Unless I am in school for Law, why should I be allowed to advocate for a position? You want a door knocker, a meme machine, and an attack dog? Cause I am about to lose my shit up in here (a rational anger that sure seemed to me to appear crazy, or emotional, like a child who was overly sad and lost). Sorry brands; I love you (as much as that has meaning anymore). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E1qCAPJJPE

>>12500739
Ive just become more and more cynical, I was already an edgy as fuck teenager at the beginning of this process, and it's gotten to the point where I feel barely human anymore. What I discovered is that you can so far beyond the pale of what you're allowed to think that you stop setting off alarm bells because people don,t even have antibodies for whatever fringe perspective you've arrived at in your isolated misery. After having increasing trouble getting along with people for years, you suddenly find interaction much easier and without conflict because there is no common ground left to fight over. This is a small victory of sorts, I am no longer angry, and my interactions with people are pleasant enough. I haven't offered my honest opinon to what I still call my 'friends' in something like 5 years now, I just go through a kind of zombie relationship with them. I made the mistake of attempting genuine connection with the last girl i dated and I found once again a sort of black hole of idiocy lying right beneath a thin layer of unexamined beliefs congealed from instinct and social pressure

The very worst part is knowing youare just as pathetic as everyone else, trying to rationalize the fact that the real reason you 'love your girlfriend' is because her face and tits are nice and you have some inside jokes or something, not because of some fabled intellectual or emotional connection you each project on the other while not understanding them. And all your theories you've attempted to construct are sad impulses towards rescuing your image of yourself and the world from the bleak and unpleasant reality that keeps impinging on you. More than anything we try to find a way to look at existence and say 'this can be fixed', and every miserable deformed person dying alone right now indicates that the only possible way this could be true is if this world is a punishment that will be redeemed by a better afterlife, for which there is no evidence and never will be. The paticularly pathetic among us try to elude this entire issue by deforming our understanding of reality with concepts that sublimate all that is negative into a Whole, an Atman, something that cannot be criticized by logic because it transcends it. These same people cling like infants to concepts like free will and morality, vigorously deny what they see as an overly biological conception of humanity, even though if they were truly privy to higher modes of understanding this sort of squabble should be entirely irrelevant to them, based as it is in 'dualistic thinking' and other illusory modes of apprehension, far below the sacred Oneness they know is the truth.

Some people are fairly fortunate, and don't suffer as much while actively enjoying life to a degree, they are given a more pleasant ride-along than others, though they don't really understand what is happening, they just have a nicer dream, and this is the only good part of reality. Everything else is shit

You're talking about a lot of things that you can't stand any more. Uncertainty and doubt most of all, a pressure to know it all, perhaps to control it all, not only that, but to be certain of it, to test for what is false and what's "the real thing".

Even when you admit to an impossible endeavour (which is a great first step), you resent it greatly. It's true that you won't know about the Greeks or current Chinese politics in depth while also about nutrition and movies and math and walk around without feeling humiliated by attractive people (!!! Do you hear yourself?). It's important that you notice this. But then again, you can choose. You can choose to read more about economy today, or to watch a movie tomorrow. Pay attention that you'd be choosing one of them in detriment of all else, true, but in order to do that, you would have to learn to lose something, to miss it. It's also true that the next day is a new day to make a new choice, so perhaps no idiocy is "iredeemable", I'd doubt that.

No wonder it is frustrating to discover history is indeed a never ending, never concluding read of the world's past, with no certainty of knowledge.You'll always leave something behind, you're just mourning that you have done so. "Painfully adapting" to "abandoning the pretension" to be a "dilettante in everything". Why do you want to be a dillettante in everything anyway?

You know it is impossible, you just want it to be possible. Your neurosis appears when, as you try to control everything and take all for yourself, you also take this impossibility to your responsibility, as a sign of a supposed impotence of yours. You are not impotent for not knowing everything, knowing everything is impossible, as you've pointed out yourself.

>I just about read books but only because society tells me I should, though I don't derive much enjoyment
Why embrace such suffering? In other words: what do you suppose you'll get by doing what you think society is telling you to do? What do you want from this? See how you do not even accept missing out on something you do not enjoy doing? What exactly do you think that happens if you stop reading books?

>I am so past watching movies or tv shows, even ones that pander to "edgy" young males
Wow, "even those"? You think society tells you to like those as well?

>And obviously I have an existential crisis
Everything is so "obvious" to one who is dilettante in everything, isn't it? Even /lit/'s reaction you predict and answers it before it gets to you. It makes it very hard for the world to surprise you when you try to be ahead of it. What you call existential crisis, I'd call simply neurosis.

You'd gain a lot by going to see an analyst. Though you'd lose a lot with as well, which is perhaps more what you need to do right now, if you want to shake things up in your life.

(tl'd from Spanish)

Daniel Steinberg was pacing, looking at the floor, among the tall trees. He'd run away from his responsibilities, again, knowing, again, that he'd end up paying for his pigheadedness, again, but that, in the end, he'd end up doing the same thing even though right now he wanted to change his life, again. Occasionally he had thought of taking his life, when he couldn't find how to escape from it, but since arriving to this forgotten piece of land, where there was quite a lot of greenery, he'd acquired the habit of hiding in the ample veg. Oh, if only he hadn't ever realized the disgusting associations of that color, his favorite color green.

So our co-protagonist (or rather deuteragonist, otherwise half-main or super-secondary character), as the proper Hebrew he was, knew that time is money, and much like a 21st century banker, he was about to use the economy in stupid and potentially catastrophic moves, but unlike those other dudes, Dan "der Mann" Stein would incorporate nobody else on his squandering. So, again, he was completely alone when he heard the noise of an approachan choppa.

"Oy vey," he said with ironic intention, for our good boy made every possible effort to disenfranchise himself from any race, religion, ideology, gender, or anything else that could lead to him getting criticized*, "oy gevalt." The airraft seemed to spin around, looking for where the fuck to land, because obviously magic medieval castles know nothing of no heliports. Finally, it found a clearing in the forest to come to rest.

From the golden insect hopped down a WASPy blonde, tall and blue-eyed, hair reaching her shoulders wide-wavy and collected by an obsidian plastic headband, kinda long in the visage but still cute, with silver void rhomboid earrings, a white bishop sleeved shirt with a sable black tie on the neck, grey camo short safari shorts from the bellybutton to the top of the legs, black pantyhose on the rest of these long duo, and small white cotton shoes on the feet.

Once eye contact was made, Lily Anne Lofting smile at our buddy, uncovering the brace-metal on her dentures, prompting Dan to think: "this chick is monied to the teeth."

* that this gesture was in accordance with the historical Jewish position towards cultural assimilation, wasn’t something Dan “you get the Zerg if you fuck with the” Berg was aware of; we can’t tell for sure if he’d have changed his actions if he were to be, and we won’t go further into this, because that would be speaking of things that haven’t happened, and, as it is known, talking of non-facts and possibilities, be them past, present or future, is idiocy.

cont.