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gwern comments on August 2013 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: ArisKatsaris 02 August 2013 09:49PM

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Comment author: gwern 03 August 2013 04:32:40PM *  8 points [-]

Descending order:

  • Radiance (re-reading for my annotated transcription)
  • Shigurui (review)
  • Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes (review)
  • Spice and Wolf, Book 1 (review)

  • Qualia the Purple; copying over my interim review from MAL:

    Qualia the Purple was quite the curious read. I started it after being linked it as possibly the only example of manga discussing 'philosophical zombies', then I noted the second main character had purple eyes and began reading it to see if she'd be a hafu for my essay (the art is not great and the story was not compelling enough to keep me reading), then I kept reading because it seemed like it was improving into a light fluffy Haruhi Suzumiya-style manga with some superficial science, then it veered hard into Higurashi-level horror, then it did some shallow quantum mechanics, then it veered into really good hard SF on an almost Greg Egan level with a remarkable take on Lagrangians & Fermat's Principle of Least Action (the closest I can think of are Chiang's "Story of Your Life" and Egan's "The Infinite Assassin"), and then impressed me even more by observing that quantum indeterminacy seems like it should apply to the past as well, so by the end of chapter 12 I'm a little stunned at how this quirky yet mediocre manga has leveled up into relatively hard SF and I'm really wondering how the rest of the story is going to play out.

    (Reading the MAL forums for it, I get the impression a fair number of readers are just glossing over the QM & scientific parts and not appreciating them, but oh well.)

  • The Wallet of Kai Lung (review)
  • Vader's Little Princess

I also read through Glenn Cook's Black Company-verse, so I'll rank them separately to keep things clear (descending order):

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 August 2013 09:37:44PM 4 points [-]

Qualia the Purple - read on this recommendation and now seconded.

Comment author: gwern 28 August 2013 04:07:48AM 1 point [-]

Copying over from your MoR notes:

Murasakiiro no Qualia: Qualia of Purple, a manga about a young girl who sees everyone else in the world as robots, and can apparently predict and act thereby. Then things start to get odd, though still with a rationale behind it. If 60% of Greg Egan wrote a manga, it would be like this.

Comment author: linkhyrule5 28 August 2013 05:35:30AM 1 point [-]

Hafu link is broken, though trivially so.

Comment author: Baughn 04 August 2013 12:01:29AM *  1 point [-]

Having read through it all in one sitting today, I can't second Purple Qualia strongly enough. My god...

The chapter 12 ending worries me, I must say.

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