u/2299sacramento

I'm curious, how well do off-meta stories tend to do on RoyalRoad? Things that aren't progression fantasy etc. Is it unlikely for off-meta to succeed, due to the readerbase? I'm interested in historical fantasy, which I know is not the typical fare for this site.

please feel free to remove if this isn't welcome.

I built a small, free site for reading public-domain books (magicbookshelf.org), and I just added The Brothers Karamazov [well, also Crime and Punishment].

You don't have to make an account and there are no ads. I just think the classics deserve a nicer home than a wall of plain text.

The reason I'm posting it here: when I first tried reading Karamazov, it was really difficult for me to keep up with everything.

Karamazov is the book where everyone gets lost in the names. Alexey / Alyosha / Alyoshka, Dmitri / Mitya, Fyodor Pavlovitch, Smerdyakov, two different Ivanovnas. The usual fix is to keep a wiki or a character list open, but those spoil everything that happens later.

So the reader comes with a companion I call the Margin: a guide to the people, places, and ideas in each book that only ever shows what you'd know at your current point.

For example.. Alyosha's entry while you're in chapter 3 and you get who he is by chapter 3, with nothing about his later arc.

A few notes:

• The translation is Constance Garnett
• There's optional narration if you'd rather liste

Read it here: https://magicbookshelf.org/read/the-brothers-karamazov/ The Margin companion: https://magicbookshelf.org/margin/the-brothers-karamazov/

I make and run it on my own, so if you spot a wrong note in the Margin, a typo, or an entry that gives away too much too early, please tell me.

https://preview.redd.it/vpf27x6wx9ah1.png?width=1206&format=png&auto=webp&s=52f8b4399073648daad7654b7972a98308882180

https://preview.redd.it/fhhzxidtx9ah1.png?width=1206&format=png&auto=webp&s=a4b137b7d53f16263beb5b16e8348e036c118065

Click "Begin reading" and the audiobook of the novel is available at the [Listen] button.

I've been working on worldfall.ink, novel/side project, where the magic system is based on the linguistic reconstruction of an ancestral parent language.

I'm curious, how much can you really recover, and of what? What's the line between "reconstructed" and "we genuinely know"?

1. In the story the parent splits into only two branches. With just two witnesses you often can't tell which side innovated and which kept the old form. How crippling is that in practice, and what breaks the tie when you only have two (internal reconstruction, a conservative liturgical register, loanwords into a third language)?

2. Does a frozen, conservative register actually help? There's a sacred liturgical language kept by rote at very high fidelity (think Rigveda-style oral transmission), plus a community whose dialect got cut off and frozen at a datable moment.

3. How much input is enough? Roughly how large and how diverse a corpus do real reconstructions need before they're considered solid? Is there a rule of thumb for how much divergence makes the parent recoverable at all?

Lately there have been some big announcements about AIs cracking serious theorems, and along with them, a lot of anxiety from mathematicians and researchers about what their future in the field looks like.

Am I the only one... feeling optimistic about this?

For as long as I've been around math, I've heard it described as a vast landscape- cathedrals and mountain ranges, hidden valleys, strange country stretching out in every direction. For centuries we've been exploring it on foot, in the dark, with nothing but a candle to light the next few steps.

What happens when we get a floodlight?

I think about all the structure that's been sitting just past the edge of what one human mind, or even a generation of them, could reach. Connections we never noticed. Theorems no one had the lifetime to chase down. Whole regions of the landscape we walked right past because the candle didn't carry far enough.

For anyone who loves knowledge for its own sake, who got into this because they wanted to see more of the thing. I think we're standing at the edge of something spectacular. Not the end of the adventure.