There should be an Effulgence thread

[Alicorn]

I meant the former. Don't try too hard to figure out how big things are on the inside from the outside, etc.

Tales of MU does approximately equal amounts of porn, college student social drama, and worldbuilding, with a little plot in there too. It does the first three things at longish stretches, too, which will mostly not work if any one of them leaves you cold. The writing is uneven and many characters are personally controversial. That said, I have read it all (more voluntarily than Sarion's canon).

[Throne3d]

I find the idea of a world where math itself fails literally inconceivable. As far as I can tell, “If you assume the Peano axioms and these definitions for numbers and ‘plus’, then two plus two equals four” is just plain true. Materia might intervene by saying “No, the Peano axioms do not describe what you’re doing” or “Plus actually means divided by this time” or “STOP ADDING NUMBERS HERE BE ON FIRE”, but I don’t see how it could stop the theoretical addition from working that way.

I mean, it wouldn't actually affect whether maths works or not, but it could just alter people's brains whenever they try to do a specific calculation, so that they always get the process wrong? I'm not sure it would actually do that, though.

Tales of MU does approximately equal amounts of porn, college student social drama, and worldbuilding, with a little plot in there too.

I think it's also rather descriptive with BDSM stuff (light BDSM? Maybe? I'm not sure how to classify BDSM... Whips and things), so if people don't like that they will probably end up disliking or skipping large sections.

[DanielH]

I also found the sections I disliked skippable, and eventually decided that the rest was not actually good enough to be worth the time investment. I’m not saying you’ll like it; I’m saying it is probably worth checking out, assuming you particularly like the setting.

[rockeye_stonetoe]

It seems to me like Materia would be more 'You can't rely on assuming that, if you eat two apples a day, at the end of ten days you've eaten twenty apples. The numbers do not necessarily mean anything, even if they behave normally while being numbers.'

[MaggieoftheOwls]

I started reading it and got bored of how much of a doormat the main character was being. I know she stops, later, but...enh, the later didn't sound appealing enough to slog through the meanwhile.

[Ezra]

There are a few short stories around that explore what happens if the universe changes the math on you. "Luminous" and its sequel "Dark Integers" by Greg Egan, and "The Secret Number" by Igor Teper, come to mind.

[jalapeno_dude]

I started reading it and got bored of how much of a doormat the main character was being. I know she stops, later, but...enh, the later didn't sound appealing enough to slog through the meanwhile.

^this.

[PlainDealingVillain]

I also found the sections I disliked skippable, and eventually decided that the rest was not actually good enough to be worth the time investment. I’m not saying you’ll like it; I’m saying it is probably worth checking out, assuming you particularly like the setting.

This was me as well. I believe I skimmed through the first porn chunk and stopped reading shortly after that.

[DanielH]

The recent Effulgence combined with some completely unrelated comments on "The Twelve Days of Christmas" I recently heard made me wonder: can there be turtle fowl in addition to turtle ducks, such as for example turtle doves?

[Alicorn]

I suppose there could.