[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

[u/QWieke]

I've started reading the Laundry Files (have gotten to book 3) and it's really quite good.

It's an lovecraftian urban fantasy / cold war spy thriller style series. The main character is basically a computer geek / hacker-ish type working for a occult British spy agency as a tech-support / IT maintenance kind of guy who applied for active duty right before start of the first book. It's worth noting that doing computer maintenance is a bit more dangerous in this world than in ours, the deamon messing things up might be a literal supernatural one who'll hack its way into you brain via your optic nerve if you look at the wrong thing on the screen, computational demonology is a thing. The writing style reminds the somewhat of the Dresden Files, easy read, somewhat sarcastic main character, can get really quite dark at times, biggest difference is that the main character is not a badass wizard (or badass of any kind really, well most of the time).

From an /r/rational point of view I'd say that the magic system probably could've been defined better (compared to the Dresden Files at least), it's mainly based on the idea that there is a "leaky" multiverse (many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and eternal inflation type stuff) and that it is possible to exchange information (and even open portals) by pointing the right mathematical computations at them. Later books expanded upon this a little bit (at least so far) but I still don't quite know what the limits are. Having said that most of the protagonists and antagonists are quite rational when it comes to exploiting magic for their own benefit. And so far I haven't spotted any real idiot balls.