This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

  • Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
  • If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
  • Please use the comment trees for genres. There is a meta thread for comments about future threads.
  • If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.
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Short Online Texts Thread

6[anonymous]10y
Read and enjoyed "The Robot and the Baby", a fictional short story by computer scientist John McCarthy), after being linked to his webpage from EY's "Above-Average AI Scientists". Some on the Less Wrong IRC seemed to like it as well, so I went ahead and posted it here.
5David_Gerard10y
A reasonably accurate history of how the Christian bible was actually compiled, by Jim Macdonald on Making Light. Easy, enjoyable, entertaining and educational.
5hesperidia10y
The SCP Foundation is a wiki filled with short horror fiction (that has recently become more widely known because of several games produced based on its content). Most of the entries are written as fictional reports/MSDS data-sheet-like information handouts by a bureaucratic organization that is focused on, basically, shutting mind-blowing horrors away from the bulk of civilization for fear that people would implode if they realized the world did not run on math. The problem being that not everything they're shutting away is a mind-blowing horror. The articles are (or at least should be, in most circumstances) readable in any order or no order at all. The index is a passable place to start, and the wiki has decent quality control so nearly all of the articles are at least readable and grammatical, and a substantial fraction are downright bone-chilling. This is both a recommendation and an anti-recommendation. If you are easily emotionally affected by fiction, it is probably not for you. Special mention, however, has to go to the recently created SCP-2333, which is an especially believable kind of horrifying when read through transhumanist eyes. (Jul vf vg gung rirelbar V qvfphff guvf negvpyr jvgu vf ubeevsvrq gung gur thl ng gur raq bs gur negvpyr unf gb yvir sberire, naq abar bs gurz ner ubeevsvrq jvgu gur snpg gung gur erfrnepuref nccneragyl pbqrq va gur bar-jrrx uneq yvzvg ba Fhcre Yvsrfcna ibyhagnevyl?)
5gwern10y
Mm, I was more impressed by http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-988 than 2333.
1Pfft10y
[http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/seinfeld-scripts.html] has transcripts of all episodes of Seinfeld, and they are super funny. I tried watching some episodes as well, but at least for me I feel reading the scripts is more enjoyable (maybe because of faster pacing?).
1blacktrance10y
Seinfeld is superb. From the first episode:
0gwern10y
Politics/religion: * "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy", Woodberry 2012 (excerpts; popular media coverage) * "An Economic Analysis of the Financial Records of al-Qa'ida in Iraq", Bahney et al 2010; "$0.60 for cake: Al-Qaida [in Mali] records every expense" * "The lost history of Helmand" (failed nation-state building project in Afghanistan which exemplifies Scott's Seeing Like A State) * "The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse" * "Secret without Reason and Costly without Accomplishment: Questioning the National Security Agency's Metadata Program", Mueller & Stewart 2014 (excerpts) * "Aztec Political Thought" (the king as Enemy and Mocker, leader of a theatre state) * "Hallucinated Gods" (on Julian Jaynes's book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) * "Thank God for Cancer" Business: * "Hatred and Profits: Getting Under the Hood of the Ku Klux Klan", Fryer & Levitt 2007 (discussion; excerpts) * "Inside the World of the Double-Crossing Fake Hitman" * "A Dolphin's Tale: The Story of GameCube" (history) * "Death at the Summit" (Intrade) Literature: * "Dwarf Fortress: A Marxist Analysis" (discussion) * "The Gooseberry Fallacy" (Russian literature & thoughts on the good life) "...But for Me, It Was Tuesday" (TvTropes) Medicine: * "Marijuana: Much More Than You Wanted To Know" * "Aretaeus On Bipolar Disorder" (ancient-Greek/psychiatry comparison) * "Beware Mass-Produced Medical Recommendations" (on vitamin D & niacin) Statistics: * "Bayes' Rule and the Paradox of Pre-Registration of RCTs" * "Josef Urban on Machine Learning and Automated Reasoning" * "Using deep learning to listen for whales" * "Adversarial Bandits and the Exp3 Algorithm" * "A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning", Domingos 2012 (nice guide to 'common sense' - data cleaning, modeling, overfitting, bias/variance, combining models, representation & learnability) * "The Median is Not the Message", Gould (on cancer survival and
0Prismattic10y
By modern standards, it's not the strongest story. But Robert Sheckley's Watchbird is interesting as an early treatment of the problem of UFAI.

Online Videos Thread

Fanfiction Thread

6lmm10y
The recommendation may have been from here originally but I can't find it now: To The Stars - incomplete, set in the far future of the Puella Magi Madoka☆Magica universe, contriving to shape the plot and tone into something resembling Starship Troopers (or more likely Old Man's War). I find the way it forces a fantasy story into quite hard sci-fi rather interesting; there are places where you can see the strain, but mostly it works well, and the characters strike a good balance, developed from but solidly rooted in their canon originals. I will say it's not that well written - the phrasing is distinctly clunky at times - but for me the plot, characters and especially the worldbuilding were good enough to shine through.
6Dorikka10y
Link.
4beoShaffer10y
It's been recommended multiply times on LW and in the HPMoR author notes, but is worth re-recommending, particularly since you gave and above average summary. Also, the author lists Old Man's War as a significant inspiration, but has said elsewhere that he just took a few specific ideas and didn't actually like Old Man's War overall.
3ShardPhoenix10y
I've finally got around to reading this and I'm quite enjoying it so far, though it's a bit heavy on exposition and flashbacks.
0lmm10y
Ah yes, I'd forgotten how clunky those early exposition chapters are. Should've mentioned that.
0ShardPhoenix10y
I think some parts would have been better if I was familiar with the Oriko Magica spinoff. At any rate I'm up to chapter 14 and it's moving much more smoothly. At this point I'm thinking that Ryouku is n pybar bs Znqbxn, juvyr ure tenaqcneragf ner cebonoyl Uvgbzv Fuvmhxv naq Xlōfhxr Xnzvwō (ylvat nobhg gurve ntrf). edit: I appear to have mixed up maternal and paternal grandparents so I guess the second speculation above doesn't apply (at least not how I was thinking of it). Also chapter 14 clears things up a bit on this front anyway...
4somervta10y
Rational!Munchkin!D&Dfic
1jaime200010y
Currently reading Hard Reset 2: Reset Harder. It's better than the original Hard Reset. In fact, I'd say it's the best time-loop fic I've read since Time Braid.
1Leonhart10y
Ooh, new Eakin? Sweet. Not that it will live up to the greatness of Twilight Tries To Explain The Monty Hall Problem, of course, but what could?
0jaime200010y
It's not Eakin actually; it's horizon. He got Eakin's permission for a Hard Reset Alternate Universe story.
0ArisKatsaris10y
Only three chapters out so far, it's too soon to tell whether I'll like it or not -- but I like that the author seems to be establishing very specific rules about how the loops work and applying them with bizarre but consistent results...
0jaime200010y
Welp, chapter four's out. I don't think it's quite as good as the first three, but it's still excellent. Also, I liked the old cover better.
0[anonymous]10y
I have an author recommendation: Rathanel. His stories are noteworthy in that all his characters feel like they have agency. While not explicitly rationalist, many of his characters do a good job at weighing evidence and updating their beliefs throughout the stories. Also, (and I'm not quite sure how to phrase this) his worlds feel like they operate on a rational rule set, as opposed to the plot driven rules which many stories seem to follow. He has two series, both in the Naruto-verse. In The Empty Cage the main character is a demon (the 9 tail fox) who is posing as a human (Naruto). The character is interesting in that he has his own set of non-human morals. There is a spin off story, Swapping the Cage, in which this character is inserted into the canon universe. Naruto: Ramen Days is a VideoGame!Naruto story. It's written in first person, in the perspective of Canon!Naruto, as he goes through the time travel-like loops of a video game. It has an interesting juxtaposition between a world where rational behavior is optimal (and there are many intelligent characters), and a main character who is really not smart.

Nonfiction Books Thread

4gwern10y
I reread Discovery of France because I liked it so much the first time (review).

Fiction Books Thread

Reading through Worm, an original novel posted in serial form over about two years, after Eliezer's fervent recommendation in the HPMOR author's notes. It's a single novel of about 1,750,000 words. And it's brilliant. It's the story of a world with superheroes, with a teenage girl as the viewpoint character. Tropes reminiscent of Miracleman.

2Luke_A_Somers10y
Good, and so tense it's a superstimulus hazard. I wouldn't normally put good books in the superstimulus hazard category, but when they're that long, you can't just take an evening and finish it.
2David_Gerard10y
I read it over a bit less than a week. I thought "this is taking a while, how long is it ... oh, 10 really fat books or 25 normal-sized ones. OK."
2Luke_A_Somers10y
It's a touch over half as long as The Wheel of Time.
2David_Gerard10y
But finished rather more quickly.
7JayDee10y
Reread Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Highly recommended, it has most everything I like about cyberpunk in a modern day real world setting. Without losing the Gibson world-building, world-building as a collage of interesting ideas and perspectives on things. When I first read it, I thought this was his best book, right up until the end of chapter 37, I disliked chapters 38+ about as much as the epilogue of HP: Deathly Hallows. (And with similar belief that the book would be far better with those pages removed.) Since then I've re-read the Bridge Trilogy, and read the sequels to Pattern Recognition. And this time I didn't find the ending frustration at all. Maybe because I could see the shape of things to come, or because I had different expectations. The metaphor that struck me is that the structure of this book is like a certain kind of origami; much folding and unfolding, leaving you - just before the climax - with a flat sheet of paper covered in creases. Then all of a sudden it crumbles up, or seems to, but in actuality it all comes together in a new and unexpected shape.
2TheTerribleTrivium10y
This interview with Max Gladstone was linked to on Yvains blog last month and on its strength I picked up the first two books in his craft sequence - Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise Its "magicians are like lawyers/economists" premise and urban fantasy parts are very well done, and there are a decent few jokes that probably only those with some legal training will spot. The plot of the first book is a bit simple (the bad evil guy who we are told on first meeting is bad, turns out to be evil - and also reads like a less impressive Quirrel from HPMOR) however the second in the series has so far avoided the "clear bad guy" in favour of a more nuanced, Princess Mononoke style arrangement (which I hope continues until the end).
2gwern10y
Descending order: * I finished Umineko back in September but only yesterday finished writing a review. * New Legends (SF anthology; review)
0[anonymous]10y
I just watched Neon Genesis Evangelion. If you haven't seen it yet, it lives up to its reputation.
0lmm10y
I read and enjoyed The January Dancer. I think the top amazon review is fair; the prose is florid, the pace ponderous, and the characters flat. But the story and universe are very engaging, and the ending came together superbly. I very much liked The Melancholy of Mechagirl, a short story collection, particularly the last entry; while the treatment of AI is probably too soft for many here, I liked the balance it struck between human-relatable and at the same time quite alien.

Television and Movies Thread

6Halfwitz10y
I just finished Neon Genesis Evangelion. If you haven't seen it yet, it lives up to its reputation.
8Moss_Piglet10y
Which one? That it's a classic that everyone need to see and revolutionized the Super Robot genre, that it's unspeakably bizarre and will make you want to slap the annoying protagonist silly, or both, or some third reputation? (I haven't actually seen it, but you can't swing a cat in some areas without hitting a bunch of people talking about it so there's been some osmosis.)
6Halfwitz10y
Ha, both. I really enjoyed it though.
4Leonhart10y
If you thought NGE was too light-hearted and hopeful, move on to Bokurano. If you want more of the same, but coherent, move on to RahXephon.
6ygert10y
Evangelion is... Evangelion. It's the kind of work that is very hard to apply adjectives to. That said, it's very good. Just be sure that you watch The End of Evangelion after watching all the episodes. I have a friend who watched all the episodes of Evangelion, then went around for quite some time thinking he had finished watching the whole show. Only months later did he find out that there was more, and that he had in fact missed out on the entire climax of the show.
5spxtr10y
I watched several Charlie Chaplin films. They're so old that you can watch them for free on youtube, and they're hilarious. In descending order of enjoyment: * The Gold Rush * Modern Times * The Great Dictator * The Kid * City Lights
5bramflakes10y
While I have to applaud Steven Moffat for his ambition in creating such a complicated time travel plot over 3 years, I can only be disappointed in the overall resolution to the Eleventh Doctor's story arc. Even though you can spend days listing the plot holes, I'd be okay with them if the interactions between the characters actually made much sense or if we were given reason to care about them. River is annoying and Clara is boring. That's not to say it was all bad - the Doctor is a consistently great character and the Amy/Rory arc was satisfying, and watching Tennant, Smith and Hurt's Doctor's play off each other in the 50th Anniversary episode was amazing. If you didn't spend time drawing diagrams to figure out where exactly in each other's timelines everyone is, you'll be consistently confused from the beginning of Series 6 onwards. If you do spend the time to figure out what's going on, the payoff isn't worth it.
6[anonymous]10y
I'd be more likely to applaud his ambition in creating a 3 year time travel plot if it looked like it had actually been designed like that as opposed to taking the collection of disjointed loose ends that accumulated over the years and smushing them together any old how.
2Ben Pace10y
Yeah, 11th Doctor was a rip off of the previous one, with added Mr. Fanservice (I won't put the tvtropes page in). However... Capaldi? The most incredible improvisational actor in one of Lukeprog's favourite film's of 2009 "In The Loop" based on the tv show "The Thick Of It" - find lots of him here (warning, lots of swearing) and also watch this. Can't wait.
0bramflakes10y
Nah I liked Eleven a lot, and I don't know how one could call him a copy of the Tenth. They're very different. Agreed on Capaldi though, he's been a wonderful actor in everything I've seen him in.
0ShardPhoenix10y
The good news is that Moffat seems to have intentionally wrapped up all those story lines in order to start fresh with the new Doctor, and has also promised (unspecified) stylistic changes. I feel like the show was getting stale so I'm interested to see how it changes.
0Gvaerg10y
This topic is for recommending media, not for random criticism...

I'd rather have some sort of discussion than just people posting the names of things.

4Halfwitz10y
For those of you who haven't watched Sherlock and don't feel like committing to the whole miniseries, I recommend A Scandal in Belgravia as the only episode you need watch, as it's by far the best of them. It's a good adventure story, has a very entertaining romance wrapped in, and it plays like a self-contained film.
4David_Gerard10y
Horrendous quantities of BBC CBeebies Bedtime Stories. My daughter demands one every night before bed. The books are generally well-written for children's stories; some have dreadful readers, but the interesting bit is when they get a high-powered actor in to do one. ('Cos are you going to say no to the gig reading stories to kids? Of course you're not.) Patrick Stewart is a regular.
3gwern10y
* Aku no Hana: dropped after a few episodes, couldn't stand the rotoscoping * A Christmas Story/National Lampoon: Christmas Vacation: watched with family. The former was pretty good. The latter, though, had some good jokes but was generally mediocre and strained, and a product of its time.
0lmm10y
FWIW I very much enjoyed Aku No Hana; I felt it captured the experience of disaffected youth better than anything else I've seen. It was everything Catcher in the Rye is reputed to be. Gwern mentioned the rotoscoping; it's also paced very slowly (extreme but indicative example: several minute shot of the characters walking home, saying nothing).
0gwern10y
I could believe that based on what I managed to sit through. It's definitely a series I had a strong impression that, if not for a fatal flaw (in this case, rotoscoping), I would have liked it a lot. Not actually a problem for me except that it forced me to look at lots of low-res rotoscoping which only exacerbated the problem for me...
5Nectanebo10y
I began reading the manga on the recommendation of a friend before the first episode of the anime adaptation aired but after the promising PV for it dropped. I keenly remember not enjoying the plot at all to begin with, and the art is initially horrible, probably even worse than the rotoscoping in the anime. I persevered with it, however, since this particular friend is yet to supply me with a poor rec, and gradually, the art has become quite pretty, and the story has also developed into an entertaining rollercoaster of events and emotion. I think it improves so much that of currently running manga, AnH is the title I anticipate new chapters of the most out of 50+ I'm following, and it has been consistently so since I first caught up, with each new monthly chapter delivering drama and excitement in spades. Since the anime's sales were amazingly poor, there will never be a second season, and imo the story only really becomes enjoyable a fair while past where the anime stopped, so I would recommend reading the manga if you ever plan on revisiting the franchise, or for anyone else who wants to pick it up. As it isn't finished, it could still turn to shit, but it's pretty great right now. - Edit made months later: It turned to shit. No longer recommended.
0gwern10y
All the more reason to try to only consume finished works. In-progress recommendations are treacherous.
0Nectanebo10y
I agree with the sentiment because it's frustrating not being able to complete something right away, but with AnH I really did enjoy following it month by month. I think that some pieces of entertainment are suited to that style of consumption and are fun to follow, even if they don't turn out to be very good in the end and aren't worth it for those who would go back and consume it all at once.
2oliverbeatson10y
I watched 'Oz the Great and Powerful'. I really liked the pro-innovation / science-inventory / mind-over-might themes.
2JayDee10y
Looking back, so did I. When I saw the film I enjoyed it for being very pretty. And was pleasantly surprised (and surprised by my surprise) at how the plot led toward the original film.
0shminux10y
Saw the first two episodes of Intelligence. The show is of average quality, but the idea of having a chip like that in my brain makes me drool. I want my augmentations, dammit.
3[anonymous]10y
I've been listening to Random Access Memories, an album by Daft Punk. I've found it quite useful for getting into a "flow" state while working, and I enjoy listening to the music recreationally, as well.
3gwern10y
Misc: * Raiders of the Lost Ark, "End Credits" (John Williams) [orchestral] * "I Saw Three Ships", (King's College Cambridge) [Christmas carol] Giants (recommended if you like Explosions in the Sky or El Ten Eleven; I particularly liked "While the Ages Steal"): * "A Near-life Experience" (Demo) [post-rock] * "The Sleep of a Laboring Man" (Demo) * "Berlin Rooftop" (Demo) * "Under The New Sun" (They, The Undeserving) * "Steps In Static Progression" (They, The Undeserving) * "The Palace Stands In Its Proper Place" (They, The Undeserving) * "Withered Life- Communal Rhythm" (They, The Undeserving) * "While The Ages Steal" (Old Stories) * "At Last, Ashore" (Old Stories) * "O' Tide" (Old Stories) Touhou: * "流体、ライフサイクル instrumental (Fluid, Life Cycle)" (o ben to box; miskyworks {C82}) [instrumental] * "パンザマスト (instrumental)" (o ben to box; miskyworks {C82}) [instrumental] Vocaloid: * "echoes_teha" (声になる; HKGrecords) [trance/vocal] * "vanishing_しじみ" (声になる; HKGrecords) [electronic/vocal] * "小規模な世界の私_ぴすた" (声になる; HKGrecords) [Jpop]
2Manfred10y
Excellent Indie Album: Jim Guthrie's Takes Time.
0David_Gerard10y
Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed is what to put on headphones at work when the sales guys are yammering away at top volume (yay open plan!). It is literally nothing but noise, an hour of multiple layers of feedback. Reed was quite into the amphetamines at the time, and literally intended the album as a musical version of speeding off your nut. It's possibly one of the greatest musical trolls of all time. Of course, it's been vastly influential with people who like horrible noise music. The whole album's up on YouTube.

Podcasts Thread

Other Media Thread

5Locaha10y
http://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ This is an amazing blog about Japan. Sadly, no longer updates.
2hesperidia10y
Through the quote threads and references elsewhere on the site, I find I enjoy LW's taste in (short-to-medium-length) poetry. Can I have recommendations for more?
4Alejandro110y
"The Other Tiger", by Jorge Luis Borges, is a wonderful meditation on map and territory. Spanish original. English translation.
4Nornagest10y
I'm rather fond of some that the late John M. Ford produced. Here's a sonnet on a LW-relevant topic. Here's a more lighthearted one,
3Bakkot10y
Each of these I have liked well enough to memorize, which is about as high a recommendation as I can possibly give for sort-to-medium length poetry. Roughly descending order of how much I like them. Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem, Bob Hicock Dirge without Music, Edna St. Vincent Millay Invictus, William Ernest Henley I-5, aleashurmantine.tumblr.com A blade of grass, Brian Patten Rhapsody on a Windy Night, TS Eliot Evolution, Langdon Smith untitled, vd This is in my notes as being by 'vd', who per this I assume is this person, though I can no longer find the original. Also, The Raven (Edgar Allan Poe) is somewhat longer, but is absolutely worth it. Read it aloud. Even if you think you have read it and not particularly been caught by it, go back and read a couple of stanzas aloud before giving up on it entirely. He does some of the best things with words of anyone I've ever read. "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain..." Most of these links I've added to archive.is (see here ), so if any of these links are dead and Google is proving inadequate, check there.
0Leonhart10y
I particularly like Wallace Stevens. My favourite is Of Mere Being; I had the vague idea that I somehow found it via LW, but I can't find any references to it now if so.

Manga Thread

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
2ArisKatsaris10y
I didn't mention this last month, though you did the same thing then, but I would have preferred it if had you followed the guidelines mentioned above of "If you think there should be a thread for a particular genre of media, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month." That having been said, I suggest a Comics subthread, or even a "Comics & Animation" subthread, so that non-Japanese comics wouldn't need be grouped separately.
3Halfwitz10y
Sorry. Retracted. Didn't read the rules (as the thread seemed self-explanatory) or notice that all the thread posts were made by you.