Ask Lemmy

when I say 1984 it is going to be very cleche but hear me out
so I grow up in China and only moves out around 12 when I was 10 they suddenly banned a book that the name is just a year I get super confused and pleed the local Liberian to read it before they destory it. holy shit that is some messed up shit for my age at the time, but it made be see the environment around me a lot more clearly

There's plenty I could list, but when it comes to seeing the world through a new lens it's all about Discworld. Just keep reading and it'll change you. Sir Pratchett's understanding of people, society, and philosophy is phenomenal.

In his Discworld novels, Sir Terry Pratchett gave me a love for humanity. He's so good at writing, but especially at characterization. The people he writes are just so human, and for me, it increased my empathy for people overall.

Also, even though I'm an atheist, after having grown up fundie Southern Baptist, I'd like to think that if the spiritual and supernatural exist, that it works somewhat along Discworldian lines. Certainly there are two Deaths that I wouldn't mind meeting: The Discworld Death, and the Sandman Death (Neil Gaiman).

But it was with Pratchett's help that I've come to believe that there are no good people and no bad people. Just people, and all the choices they make. Which in some ways makes "evil people" more terrifying, because I believe they make those choices. But it's also heartening: People can choose to be better.

The principles expressed in the novels helped me change my views on what's important: I think the most important thing you can do is to make others' lives a little better, if you can. Huge projects like social safety nets, but even making a stranger laugh for a moment and brightening their day.

This life is all we get, and anything that makes it better is the main thing that's worth anything at all.

His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. Made me realize how dogmatic religion is, also its a really fun and accessible book to read, teenage coming of age story, with a sprinkle of religious criticism.

Umineko. It's a visual novel that teaches you that empathy and imagination are necessary to understand other's actions. It's very good. If you like mysteries or detective stories then you will definitely love it but it is still very good if you don't.

The Good Place, especially the ending of it.

Really a wild piece of work from the same man who made The Office, Parks and Rec, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

What did I take from it? I personally took the point to be "world's fucked, people are fucked, but who cares? Goof off more!"

The Left Hand of Darkness and other Le Guin stories. Good timing on when I started expending my scifi reading in her direction; I was in high school, meeting more people outside my little conservative family and church bubble, trying to form new conceptual models for the much bigger world that I was previously insulated from.

Stranger in A Strange Land was called "the hippy bible" for a reason...

It was written in the 1960s tho, so even the "woke" parts can be pretty problematic. That just means society progresses tho. If 60 year old media doesn't have anything problematic in it, it means society has stalled instead of peogressed

Fahrenheit 451. I started noticing increasing censorship and the growing intentional denial of knowledge and learning more and more. It's terrifying.

Mornings in Jenin. Growing up as a child of refugees, it was difficult to fully grasp the horrors of Israeli violence against Palestinians, my parents shielded us from the worst they witnessed, only telling us of the good memories before they were forced to leave. This book helped shape who I am today, motivated me to learn the truth, and exposed me to a whole world of non colonial literature, both fiction and non. And while it is a story of fiction, it is based on the reality of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, ongoing for 78 years now.

1984 and it's spiritual prequel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas .

These books opened up my teen mind to the fact that we are always, individually and as a society, creating, editing, and manipulating consensual reality.

Unfortunately the bad guys are way ahead of us on the manipulation bit, and with LLMs/Gen-AI I fear a total collapse of consensual reality. But if we have enough Hunter S's in the world, we may still be in the fight.

Ghost in the Shell. It really changed how I seen my body, not as something that I am, but as something I control. Now I can start and stop peeing whenever I want.

Cloud Atlas (I feel like every book post I make is about Cloud Atlas) It taught me two important lessons.

1. We're not kind enough to each other and
2. Even if a goal seems hopeless it's worth making the attempt if you see something wrong in the world.

Sounds weird, but Ascendance of a bookworm and time. Use to work agile and doing things quick, then I read bookworm and the tiny gremlin who wanted to do things quick and now, and the consequences for doing so.

Now I give as much time as I can/need for anything and everything. And I now start getting annoyed when family says they’re dropping in. Like dude, give me time to prepare, like 2-4 days heads up so I can clean, get more food and properly welcome you.

Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy instilled in me a deep faith in science above all else. And a lot of hope that, even if times can suck, overall we have been developing and live has been getting better and better. I am way more cynical now, but I still hold on the hope that eventually everything will be fine.

Dogma helped me see how absurd religion, specifically Catholicism, was and helped be begin to untangle what it all meant for me, a hyper-religious teenager at the time.

Snow Crash is a Sci-Fi book from the early 90s. It coined the term metaverse. It takes place in a post American collapse setting, where corporations have taken over. There's a lot of interesting points in the book, probably as interesting today as the day it was wrote.

But what stuck with me, and helped form my understanding of society and helped me build my career in tech was his observations on franchises. He posits that franchise are basically a living organism, who's DNA is written in binders. These binders cover every eventuality. They explain process, procedure, and expected results so that the humans in each franchise can keep the organism alive.

It was kinda a throw away set dressing just setting up the world at the beginning of the book, but it is the part that had real meaning to me.

A Demon Haunted World by Sagan should be taught in school.

Go Tell it On the Mountain by Baldwin is such a beautiful work of fiction that you could totally miss the profundity of it's themes.

Redwall - I didn't realize when I was reading the series but looking back now they absolutely instilled in me the knowledge that I could stand up to those in power despite being weaker or smaller. Those books lead to me rebelling against my abusive parents and striking out on my own. I shed their conservative views and hatred. All because a mouse and his friends stood up to a rat.

I've got more but this one probably had the largest impact on how I think overall in the long term.

Imajica by Clive Barker flipped a switch in my (then) teenage brain making me understand that "fantasy" books don't need to have swords, wizards, and all the other tropes. That the idea of "fantasy" as a genre is far far richer than I imagined.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Neon Genesis Evangelion also (positively) changed my view on life and what makes it worth living.

Gurren Lagann is much more overt with the positive messaging.

Back in the nineties, for me it was the TV show Northern Exposure. I grew up in a small town dominated by hockey jocks, pickup trucks and underage drinking--always being labelled a nerd for reading books or being in cadets (where we flew gliders on weekends and got teased for it.) This show really encouraged me in its depiction of an isolated, northern backwater town where people appreciated literature, philosophy, and valued different backgrounds and unorthodox endeavours. As I was reaching adulthood, I felt it normalized self-reflection and provided a perspective for me to see a bigger world outside of where I grew up, opening a lot of windows to seek out real self-actualization at a time in my life where I needed it.

Going to go with a video game: Outer Wilds. The game is very story and mystery oriented, so I don't want to spoil it, as that can ruin the experience. In short though, it's an exploration game where you get to do your first flight around a miniature solar system - exploring it freely without a linear sequence or quest markers.

The story is told in a nonlinear way, depending on how you explore it, and the way it comes together and the conclusion it reaches were amazing to discover.

!!! WARNING. SPOILERS. !!!

Everhood for me. It's divisive, if you manage to connect with the game and don't bounce off it, I think it's one of the most emotionally powerful experiences I've gone through at least. The themes just happen to be intensely involved with most of my longest standing philosophical and existential struggles and the game was cathartic in dealing with them. Plus it's psychedelic, eastern/buddhist inspired, and is fully capable of rendering you emotionally raw.

That the asynchronous musical real time combat works so well for me just sends it even harder. The OST is nearly 3 hours long and nearly every song is a banger. Quite intimate at times, as the game I think deliberately ties the song to the character's very "soul" as you're struggling to kill them.

https://youtu.be/IbHZngyTDZ0

The basic premise is this: You may know, if you're in the right type of debate or philosophy communities, how often the topic of dealing with death comes up. Atheists I often find saying living forever would be absurd mental torture and maddening. Even though I agree I'd still choose to be ageless all the same as I'd rather that than not existing. Unpopular opinion. I don't expect anyone to agree with me and that's fine, I'm weird. Well, this game explores that scenario and certainly doesn't agree with me either.

You're orbiting the very last star in the entire universe, experiencing a later stage of Universal Heat Death before the last thing happening is evaporating black holes exploding in gamma ray bursts. With people who countless eons ago figured out how to become ageless. They've lived for so long they're physically twisted, messing with their forms out of sheer boredom and they're various flavours of insane.

Your character is pressured into finally ending the lives of the remaining survivors and then destroying the last star and reality itself. Truly ending it all. It's muddy and the game isn't going to let you go about that without feeling conflicted. The main character has tried before, failed, and lost their memory out of grief, laying dormant in the forest for who knows how long before this amnesiac second attempt begins with the encouragement of a frog man who very much wants to end reality itself. You can refuse btw, and get an extremely difficult fight out of it.

This is all played out with Undertale styled humor and characters. It's certainly under the Earthbound branch alongside LISA but much less crass.

At the end, I walked away being far less afraid of death and that's a big deal for me as an atheist who before this found zero comfort in the responses people gave online when it came to dealing wirh death when you're unwilling to believe in comforting lies like religion. I'd still choose to be ageless if I could :p but at least I'm at peace with reality for now.

If I caught anyone's interest I think it's best played on Expert so the fights really feel like the narrative wants them to feel: tooth and nail struggles. If you end up enjoying it, the sequel is an utter travesty and the biggest disappointment in a form of media I've ever experienced.

Probably a bit stereotypical, but in my teens I read Brave new World (Aldous Huxley), followed shortly by Brave new World Revisited. Really showed that even back when it was written, society is slowly getting worse. Sort of made it very easy to see how it continued (and still is) to the present day.

Idiocracy shattered my delusional optimism for the future.

Children of Men. Lack of human sustainability is depressing.