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grinchler160

This was mentioned last month, but The Metropolitan Man by alexanderwales is nearing its conclusion. It's a Superman story from the perspective of Lex Luthor, set in the 1930s as a period piece.

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by ArisKatsaris
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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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July 2014 Media Thread
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[-]ArisKatsaris20

Fanfiction Thread

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[-]grinchler160

This was mentioned last month, but The Metropolitan Man by alexanderwales is nearing its conclusion. It's a Superman story from the perspective of Lex Luthor, set in the 1930s as a period piece.

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[-]David_Gerard20

All the Worm fanfic I can find on SpaceBattles/SufficientVelocity. Why? JUST BECAUSE.

(Wish some of them would get finished ever.)

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[-][anonymous]00

This got mentioned last month, but The Metropolitan Man by alexanderwales is nearing its conclusion. It's a Superman fanfic from the perspective of Lex Luthor, set in the 1930s, and does a pretty good job of showing a Lex Luthor who's actually shown to be intelligent (and sees Superman as an existential risk).

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[-]ArisKatsaris20

Fiction Books Thread

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[-]DataPacRat40

The second book of S.I., by DataPacRat, has been finished. (At least, its first draft has.)

Temporary page at a permanent site: http://www.datapacrat.com/SI/ . Google Drive version allowing comments: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17xCeMCTkTYih3kYexWZ3zuI5MWWab1TArfUfoMqpkLo/edit .

(Book One starts at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AU8o3wSAiufh-Eg1FtL-6656dNvbCFILCi2GbeESsb4/edit .)

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[-]jaime200040

Just finished catching up. I wonder who is going to burst into flames at the end of book 3.

Also, I was reading your Orion's Arm stories, and I was amused to see that Bunny had a precursor of sorts.

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[-]DataPacRat30

I wonder who is going to burst into flames at the end of book 3.

Well, I /could/ have established the pattern specifically so I could break it... :)

Bunny had a precursor of sorts.

Eyep, yep she did. ;)

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[-]David_Gerard10

This series is great and everyone should read it.

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[-]ArisKatsaris00

Short Online Texts Thread

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[-]gwern90

Technology:

Statistics:

Medicine:

Economics:

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[-]David_Gerard-10

"Sequence Thinking vs. Cluster Thinking" is pretty obviously Holden expressing annoyance at the lower decile of LessWrong.

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[-]Ben Pace00

He has in mind Yudkowsky's favourite far future argument, so your statement appers wrong, and thus needlessly dismissive, which I think is why you have been downvoted.

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[-]gwern40

Politics/religion:

Psychology:

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[-][anonymous]30

Losing the War is incredible. Here's an equally incredible flash animation of the Eastern Front, to counter it's American bias.

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[-]gwern20

Yeah. It takes a long time to really get going, but then it's a pretty amazing... essay? history? debunking? critique of propaganda? I'm not even sure how to describe it.

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[-][anonymous]10

Article:

To this day, most Russians think World War II was something that happened primarily in their country and the battles everywhere else in the world were a sideshow.

Reality:

more than 3/4 of German casualties were on the Eastern Front

Article:

In August 1943, for instance, in the hilly countryside around the city of Kursk (about 200 miles south of Moscow), the German and Soviet armies collided in an uncontrolled slaughter: more than four million men and thousands of tanks desperately maneuvered through miles of densely packed minefields and horizon-filling networks of artillery fire. It may have been the single largest battle fought in human history, and it ended -- like all the battles on the eastern front -- in a draw.

Reality:

Result: Decisive Soviet victory / Germany's offensive power on the Eastern Front is crippled

Territorial changes: Soviets liberate territory along a 2,000 km (1,200 mi) wide front

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[-]James_Miller00

5 Baffling Discoveries That Prove History Books Are Wrong from Cracked. They are:

Cocaine Discovered in Egyptian Mummies, Ancient Hebrew Inscribed on a Rock in New Mexico, Ancient Roman Statues in Mexico, A Norse Coin in Maine, and Ancient Japanese Speakers in New Mexico.

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[-]Nornagest30

I don't know anything about the rest, but the Maine penny, while certainly Norse (with the caveat that there's some dispute over its context), could easily have been obtained through trade from the well-known Norse outposts at e.g. L'Anse aux Meadows. Not that baffling.

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[-]ArisKatsaris00

Online Videos Thread

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[-]ArisKatsaris00

Nonfiction Books Thread

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[-]ArisKatsaris00

TV and Movies (Animation) Thread

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[-]gwern30

Anime:

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[-][anonymous]00

I've been watching Silicon Valley, a sitcom about a startup in the eponymous, erm, valley. Overall I'd say that it's fairly good. One of the characters, Gilfoyle, is a surprisingly sharp portrayal of a certain contrarian cluster type: polyamorous and satanist (and probably a libertarian, too). Shades of ESR, too, somehow. Worth a look.

(Edit: retracted in order to repost under live action subthread.)

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[-]lmm00

Macross Zero (4/5 watched): half the length of a regular series, but crams in an engaging romance (with very well-done character revelations), a fun plot and some great action series. The whole thing has visuals that would be impressive in a series half its age. I'll withhold full judgement until the ending, but right now I'd say it's been better than Plus. Recommended.

Allison to Lillia: quite a sweet, childish fantasy series, lots of emphasis on the joy of flight. Fun but didn't entirely stand up to a rewatch; I think Patapata Hikousen no Bouken is a more enjoyable example of the genre.

Space Battleship Yamato 2199: Not that good; reasonable visuals, but the plot was all over the place; episodes didn't really hang together into a coherent whole, lots of plot elements that came up once and were then never referred to again. Antagonists were unable to present a believable threat after the first half or so; some of the more interesting relationships were left unexplored, whereas the ending romances seemed to come out of nowhere unsupported by the rest of the series. I've seen far worse series, but I wouldn't recommend this.

A note on Hunter X Hunter now that I'm up to episode 95 or so: quality really does seem to have picked up in the last 20-or-so episodes, so some of my negativity last month was unwarranted. I still can't really recommend a show that takes this long to get going though.

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[-]ArisKatsaris00

TV and Movies (Live Action) Thread

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[-][anonymous]00

I've been watching Silicon Valley, a sitcom about a startup in the eponymous, erm, valley. Overall I'd say that it's fairly good. One of the characters, Gilfoyle, is a really sharp (surprisingly so, for the mainstream media) portrayal of a certain contrarian cluster type: polyamorous and satanist (and probably a libertarian, too). Shades of someone like ESR, too, I think. Worth a look.

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[-]ArisKatsaris00

Music Thread

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[-]gwern30

Touhou:

Doujin:

Vocaloid:

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[-]ShardPhoenix00

What would you say are the best Hatsune Miku songs? I rather like this one but I haven't so much liked the couple of others I've heard.

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[-]Skeptityke40

Due to the preposterous number of Vocaloid songs out there, "best" in practice often means "personal favorites of the limited subset the person you are talking to has heard of". Vocaloid seems to follow Sturgeon's Law, as does everything else with low barriers to entry (like fanfiction), but fortunately, it doesn't take much time to check whether a given song is good, so hunting for hidden gems is a fairly fruitful activity as far as Vocaloid songs go. A useful site for this task is VocaDB

Endorsing Gwern's response below, here are five that I'd say are fairly decent.

Not is Destination The producer, Aerial Flow (that's his channel, by the way, poke around on it) is one of the best trance producers in the community, and there's quite a bit more stuff by him that I wanted to link but didn't.

Lost Memories A fairly nice Dark Append song that is tuned higher than the one you linked, but that I still suspect you may like. Not quite sure what to class it as.

Everlasting Love First song I listened to where I went "I like the vocal tuning on this one." Piano ballad.

Yumemidori Yes, it isn't Miku. Yes, it isn't electronic, it's guitar and drums. I'm still pretty enamored by it.

Idiolect Another popular techno song with the Dark Append.

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[-]ShardPhoenix00

Thanks for the suggestions.

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[-]gwern40

Hard to say.

Part of the problem is that I don't think the Miku voicebank is very good - too high-pitched, as the Japanese like their singers - but Miku is overwhelmingly used by the Japanese producers, so I still wind up with a lot of Miku-using pieces I like. (Although I do try to swap them out for Luka or Ia-using versions when possible.)

And there's a couple ways a producer can use a voicebank: you can treat it as an instrument, you can use it as a voice which can sing impossible pieces like rap or extremely-fast chants, or you can try to carefully tune it to sound as realistic as possible, or you can embrace the roboticness of the voice as a singer.

I'd describe your link as possibly a Miku Dark (deeper-pitched), realistic tuning, in an electronic/techno vein. So if you were looking for more music like that, you'd want to look at pieces mentioning using the Dark variant on the Miku voicebank or less squeaky voicebanks like Luka, in genres like electronic techno vein, and described as realistic or well-tuned. And then you can follow up particular producers. (Remember that fame in online media is highly fickle, so if you find you like one track by a producer, the odds are that he has plenty of other work as good but not popular enough to show up in your search or be reuploaded from NND to YouTube.)

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[-]ShardPhoenix00

I see, thanks.

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[-][anonymous]20

Most undepressing (yes, this word exists) song I've ever heard: Marina And The Diamonds -- Oh No!

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[-]Aoi10

There's a decent Maria Holic AMV with this song.

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[-]Ben Pace00

Well that was... Weird. And why was it undepressing?

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[-][anonymous]20

Because of its lyrics:

Don't do love, don't do friends / I'm only after success / Don't need a relationship / I'll never soften my grip

I know exactly what I want and who I want to be

And because it has clicked with me.

I don't know why, but every time I watch this video I experience a strong urge to open Brain Workshop ^^

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[-]ArisKatsaris00

Podcasts Thread

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[-]ArisKatsaris00

Other Media Thread

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[-]James_Miller70

http://euclidthegame.com

Fantastic way to learn Euclidean geometry. High school math should be like this!

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[-]Pfft30

There is also Ancient Greek Geometry. The user interface is more "elegant", but less powerful.

The main difference is that in Ancient Greek Geometry you don't acquire constructions as atomic procedures, you need to inline all the steps each time. So it doesn't scale to complicated constructions, but on the other hand it is kind of interesting, you get a sort of gut feeling for how many steps are involved in the proofs. For example, a high school textbook will show the construction to make perpendicular lines at, like, page 1, and then you never think about it again. But if you actually have to do all the steps of it each time, you will want to plan out your constructions to make sparing use of perpendicularity...

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[-]polymathwannabe40

The What if? section of the webcomic XKCD displays excellent examples of using science to answer bizarre trivia questions. In this episode, a Fermi estimation of ink molecules:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/106/

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[-]lmm10

The Last Express (I finished this a while ago but was reminded by reading Stamboul Train this month). It's... ambitious, and mostly successful at its aims; it's literally the only game I've ever played that's created a solid-feeling world that feels like more than just a setting for the game, and the characters have lives that feel like they extend beyond a single narrative. As a game it has its downsides - the puzzle format is frustrating, at least for me (a climactic sword fight on the top of the train sounds like an excellent idea, but implementing it as 8 quicktime events in a row makes it much less so. Having to replay the same timeframe over and over again when you get something wrong can also be irritating, though mitigated in that the game does make some efforts to send you back to where you made your last mistake). But as a work of craft it's beautiful, and the characters and scenes have stayed with me in a way that few games have.

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[-][anonymous]00

Marvellous flash animation of WW2's Eastern Front.

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[-]ArisKatsaris00

Meta Thread

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