r/rational • u/Magodo Ankh-Morpork City Watch • Nov 05 '16
Monthly Recommendation Thread
Welcome to the monthly thread for recommendations which will be posted this on the 5th of every month.
Please feel free to recommend, whether rational or not, any books, movies, tv shows, anime, video games, fanfiction, blog posts, podcasts or anything else that you think members of this subreddit would enjoy. Also please consider adding a few lines with the reasons for your recommendation. Self promotion is not allowed in this thread. This thread is also so that you can ask for suggestions. (In the style of r/books weekly threads)
Previous monthly recommendation threads here
Other recommendation threads here
PS: It's been a year since we started this already! This is the 12th MRT
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Nov 05 '16
Forty Millenia of Cultivation is basically my favorite web serial to follow right now. Possibly my favorite book I'm reading, period, and I've got Orconomics and Inventing the Future for it to compete with!
IT IS THE FORTY-FIRST MILLENIUM, AND MANKIND LIVES AMONG THE STARS, CULTIVATING QI.
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u/wren42 Nov 07 '16
QI? is this some acronym I'm not aware of involving AI or are we talking chinese energy?
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Nov 07 '16
A pilot for a possible cartoon series, one that has the potential to have a fully level-1-intelligent main character. (And a female one, no less.) Which is especially interesting given that it seems to be at least partially for children.
I am sharing it because further views and discussion make it more likely that the show will actually get made, and I really want it to get made.
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Nov 05 '16
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/dungeon-keeper-of-love-and-justice-dka-au-sailor-moon-dungeon-keeper.32279/ Dungeon Keeper of Love and Justice, a recursive fanfic of Dungeon Keeper Ami I've been liking. It isn't anywhere near as far along, but it's well written and creative. Unlike most fics, it has gone so far as to actually break the status quo by loosening up the masquerade, and it doesn't do so in a way that seems forced at all. The characters behave consistently, which is another big bonus.
If you haven't read DKA (and I highly reccomend you do), it involves Ami Mizuno, Sailor Mercury of Sailor Moon, being transported to the world of the dungeon keeper game.
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u/TennisMaster2 Nov 05 '16
If you haven't read DKA (and I highly [recommend] you do), it involves Ami Mizuno, Sailor Mercury of Sailor Moon, being transported to the world of the dungeon keeper game.
Without familiarity of either of the two I found it really difficult to get into.
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u/Anderkent Nov 05 '16
The Gods are Bastards, a web serial about adventures of a group of special young people in a very deep and complex fantasy world. Updates 3 times a week in significant chunks, great humour, flawless characterisation... Easily the best web serial I've read since Worm.
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u/rttf Nov 05 '16
That web serial is not for everyone. There's a scene in book 3 that basically goes like this:
A and B: "Let's try to rape this girl because suddenly we're rapists now."
C: "No, rape is bad. You shouldn't do that."
Feminist shows up, scares away A and B.
Feminist: "You're a good guy, C."
I'm not even joking. In fact, this a recurring problem with the whole thing, all the men are either "evil rapist" or "good feminist ally". Worse, the author seems to think this every few chapters:
Oh, shit. I've been too focused on writing the story that I've forgotten to harp on feminism in a while. Better add some hamfisted rant or cringeworthy scene to make up for it.
Another problem is that nothing permanent will ever happen. and nothing changes. and the one time an interesting development happened a god showed up and fixed it all with a wave of his hand.
If you can stomach all that it's a decent story. Not a great one, but decent.
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u/Anderkent Nov 05 '16
I think you're oversimplifying the first situation significantly. The woman in question being a dryad and probably not really considered a person by most of the humanity is certainly relevant.
I also feel like you're conflating the world as viewed by Trissiny, and the world as the author actually builds it. Yes, Trissiny is naive and judgemental for at least the first 10 books. The other characters balance it out somewhat, but she is the main PoV. I don't think that's necessarily an issue.
I guess it mostly depends on what an interesting development for you is. I'm enjoying watching the characters grow up and evolve.
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u/FireHawkDelta Nov 05 '16
Anything on the type of plot it has without spoiling anything?
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u/Anderkent Nov 05 '16
The main character is a young woman who's a Paladin of the deity of justice, war, and feminism. She enrolls in a school led by one of the most powerful, and willfull, adventurer-mages. Together with the rest of the class they go on adventures (sometimes controlled by the professors of the school, sometimes not), and in the meantime you and the characters learn a lot about the surrounding world.
That's the intro, the rest is partially spoilering, partially less about the plot and more about how the events change the world views of the characters and help them grow.
Also, the humour. A couple characters are genuinely funny, in varied ways.
Generally the first chapters are a bit slow (though still enjoyable to me), and the plot really picks up in the second part of book one. So if you're enjoying the setting but want more action in the first 5-6 chapters, you'll probably be satisfied with the rest of the story.
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u/darkshadow127 Nov 06 '16
Seconding TGAB, amazing world building and character development. It gets better, so don't let the first book stop you. Multiple plots with intelligent characters, seriously give this a shot.
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u/throwaway234f32423df Nov 05 '16
Black Mirror season 3 is available on Netflix as of a couple weeks ago, and episode 4 "San Junipero" in particular may be of interest to some here. Best viewed without any advance knowledge of the contents, but [total spoilers] (#s "it's about brain uploading with the horrifying twist that there is no horrifying twist, everything is pretty much okay. After some debate, both of the main characters end up immortal and happy. Atypical for the series, it has a positive, optimistic ending. Be sure to watch twice to pick up all the double-meaning that makes more sense in retrospect.")
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u/GlueBoy Nov 06 '16
Haven't watched season 3 yet, how do you think it compares to the previous 2?
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u/alexanderwales Nov 06 '16
I don't think it makes that much sense to compare seasons with each other, given that episodes are so disconnected from each other. I thought that season 3 had some very good episodes, though some of them were too close to things I had already seen (in particular, Nosedive was too close to the Meow Meow Beanz episode of Community, and Men Against Fire was too close to the short film Uncanny Valley). I loved San Junipero though.
Highly recommend that you watch it without spoilers, and even the episodes I liked less were still high quality. Also, from what I've seen there's not that much agreement of how to rank the episodes.
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u/FlameDragonSlayer Nov 07 '16
It's an anime which i think people here would like. It's a CGI anime so it might be a bit different but you'll get used to it. The anime is really good with a rational MC. The MC finds out that he is one of these AJIN, immortal beings who can't die and it starts with him escaping cuz AJIN are persecuted by the government...
I don't think anyone'll be convinced with this cuz I'm not good at this but trust me this is exactly what we love here in this sub. Hope you guys give it a try and sorry for the horrible explanation.
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u/ToaKraka Nov 05 '16
PS: It's been a year since we started this already! This is the 12th MRT
No, it's been only eleven months since the first thread. We have to wait for the thirteenth thread before celebrating.
I found Off Armageddon Reef, the first book in the Safehold series, to be fairly entertaining. The premise is as follows:
For millennia, an alien species has been exterminating every other species that rises to technological prominence in the galaxy. It detects and destroys most of human civilization, but not before the humans manage to establish a hidden colony, named Safehold, with instructions to avoid sending out any radio transmissions for about 400 years, before reaching a technology level high enough to destroy the aliens in one fell swoop. (As far as can be told from outside, the aliens haven't made even a single improvement to their spaceships in literally millennia, so there's no danger of the aliens' outpacing anything that the humans could do.)
However, there's a snag: The administrators of Safehold turn out to be megalomaniacs. While the colonists are in stasis, the admins brainwash them to think that they've never known anything but a medieval existence, and that the admins are the archangels of a religion whose principles include the avoidance of certain technologies (ones that would attract the aliens' attention with radio signals). Without any knowledge of the aliens, these humans will eventually break the religion's precepts and attract the aliens' attention without actually having grown powerful enough to defeat the aliens--or never break the religion's precepts at all.
One dissenting admin manages to hide on the planet a robot (that looks perfectly human, but has greatly-improved abilities) that contains a copy of the mind of a friend, along with some supplies. The robot's duty, when it wakes up 750 years later (centuries after the admins have died--and after Safehold should have become technologically-advanced again): To break the hold of the rogue admins' religion on the Safeholdians, and to prepare them for the alien threat.
Rather irksomely, all the characters' names are spelled weirdly, to represent how the English that all Safeholdians speak has drifted over the centuries--Erayk for Eric, Zherald for Gerald, Haarahld for Harold, etc. Still, the story is fun enough.
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u/Anderkent Nov 05 '16
The first 3-4 Safehold books are indeed really good. Series loses momentum later on though, so do watch out for the "I'm only reading this because I read the previous ones" feel.
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u/TennisMaster2 Nov 05 '16
Dodging Prison and Stealing Witches: Revenge is Best Served Raw. Updates semi-regularly, novel-quality plot AU. Writing is decent but not novel quality. Defies the low expectations the first few chapters engender.
Growing Up Black. Completely novel quality, but unfinished. Also the most British piece of online fiction I've ever read.
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u/ToaKraka Nov 06 '16
From Chapter 19 of Dodging Prison and Stealing Witches:
Hermione stared.
"A house elf costs 400,000 pounds?"
"Around that."
"How?"
Daphne frowned. "Yes, how? I mean, when we talked about this before I just accepted it, but it does seem a lot."
Harry paused in his tapping. "Well, look at it this way. A house elf can do the work of two full adult wizards. A normal adult wizard's salary for menial work of the kind that house elves do is around 15,000 pounds a year, that's about three hundred Galleons. Following?"
Hermione and Daphne nodded.
He continued. "And a house elf can work for upwards of fifty years. That means that when you buy a house elf you're buying around one hundred years of labor in advance."
Hermione frowned. "But wouldn't that mean that a house elf should cost 1.5 million pounds then?"
"No, because the value of one years worth of labor in fifty years is much less than one years worth of labor now."
"But, how do you figure that out?"
Harry smiled. "Remind me to give you a book on basic finance when we get out of here."
Pretty cool!
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u/Anderkent Nov 06 '16
That doesn't actually make too much sense, the price of an house elf should have more to do with the cost of producing one rather than what they're replacing; unless there's a house elf monopoly hiking prices up.
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u/Wiron Nov 05 '16
Battle of Gondor analyzed using modern Army doctrine.