• 0 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle

  • It’s not simply a reading comprehension thing with bullet points. If your questions require research on my end having them already structured in bullets does a few things to help with that process.

    The asker’s bullet structure gives something to mimic. You can even put your answers directly below the question, so the asker can be reminded of their own questions.

    The bullets also help skimming, if I need to see which item id is needed next it’s easier to do so without losing my place.

    Bullet grammar structure also allows for much terser sentences. If I need to reread your question it’s easier if I don’t have to ignore a bunch of words that don’t substantively alter the meaning.

    Do I need any of these? No. Could I put the questions into bullets myself for the reply? Sure. But it’s easier to spend more time and effort on answering your questions if you save me a few steps.


  • Of what others have suggested and that I’ve read: the ones most similar to what you’ve finished are:

    • The First Law series by Joe Abercrombie
    • The Expanse series by James SA Corey
    • Hyperion (at least the first two books, w/ optional two more) by Dan Simmons

    New recommendations:

    • Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany (content warning)
    • The Baroque Cycle series by Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash and the Diamond Age may both be better starting points for the author, but may fit your other criteria less)
    • The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe

    Other works that stretch your genre boundary but may evoke the right emotion:

    • Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
    • If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
    • The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
    • Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
    • The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
    • Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
    • Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth
    • John Dies at the End by David Wong





  • That’s a wonderful eggcorn.

    I was watching a video talking about how eggcorns are an unusual category of error because they require intelligence and creativity to make. The argument was that the process goes like this:

    A new word or phrase is heard, but not understood. The brain makes sense of it using existing vocabulary that has sounds that are close enough. This is accompanied an explanation for why those specific words make sense in this new context.

    For example: the original eggcorn was a mishearing of acorn. Egg because it’s roughly egg shaped, and corn is sometimes used to describe small objects similar to how grain can be.

    All this to say, it’s maybe not something to feel dumb about. Your brain did something neat.