Χίμαιρα corvids @autistikai@computerfairi.es

@BestGirlGrace @themorgangoats thirty seems like a pretty severe underestimate

@dopple@cryptid.industries ....given it's the english we're talking about? yeah no, everybody hates the english

@dopple@cryptid.industries they'd probably be very upset about that, given their history with the english

@Pyretta ok but gentile is definitely not of celtic origin

when scots words bot accidentally grabs a regular english word

@cdmnky why would i need pictures when i can have the real thing

correction: it's exceedingly common for them to be really d__n disturbing for a modern minority audience

from my understanding, most cis white dudes are left unscathed by reading these

honestly a lot of the so-called classics of literature fit this general pattern—most of them are relatively uninteresting to a modern audience in terms of writing style, and the majority of them are useful tools for developing a contextual perspective on the time & place they were written. the downside, of course, is that it's exceedingly common for them to be really d__n disturbing for a modern audience, especially if one happens to be a minority, since the list tends to be curated by white men

@Pyretta probably; though my familiarity with that is limited mostly to memes

@Pyretta the kind of book where the fact that it was published comes as a shock because it's without question lower quality than probably any fanfic i've read

i will, however, encourage folx to look into dickens' work if you're not already familiar with it. i wouldn't generally recommend any of his novels, but his short stories tend to be good and it's worth reading commentaries on a christmas carol just for the history—i'm legitimately impressed by the amount of detail he fit into that one story in support of better treatment for the poor, and a lot of it is hard for a modern audience to pick up on. so decent commentary contextualises a Lot of things

also absolutely do not ever read the wizard knight please learn from my mistake. there's literally thousands of better-written self-insert fanfics you can read online if you really want to, and most of them don't glorify abusive behaviour

this pretty much delineates the three categories:
• bad books i'm glad i read, it's because i learned from them
• bad books i regret reading, it's because something about them is actively stressful—disturbing (or actively triggering) content or exceptionally poor basic writing skill, for me
• bad books i don't care about are mostly just not compelling. nothing especially hateful beyond a lack of especially positive qualities

david copperfield, for example, is an incredibly dull read (imo). but it doesn't actively bother me having read it, and sometimes knowing how it goes comes in handy. so overall i don't care about it but i'm situationally glad i read it

the wizard knight, by contrast, combined poor writing quality with stuff i found highly disturbing in a way that means i can't entirely get it out of my head. literally just the knowledge that i read it is stressful. i regret having read this book

there's a fundamental difference between a bad book you're glad you read, a bad book you don't care about, and a bad book you regret reading. and there's no easy words to distinguish them from one another

@Alexis i mean given the choice i'll typically eat something cold over microwaving and rarely have the spoons for more than that. but yeah, that should work—as with all oven heating, ofc, careful not to dry things out too much