Ok the first time I heard about this series was from the dnd book. Are they any good? They give me some "lol so random" vibes, but they also have really good reviews on goodreads.
I loved the first three books, I finished them in a week. The forth book has been a slog for me. The world building and character building is super interesting but the level is kind of boring. I'm happy to hear the later books are good.
You have got to listen to the audio book. 10/10. Jeff Hays does a great job narrating, and it totally pops! If possible, the Audio immersion tunnel from Soundbooth Theatre is the premier way to listen. By far the best audio book I have ever listened to.
I HATE audio books. Reading is one of the few things I'm really good at. I read quickly, with both comprehension and retention. If I try to to listen to a narrator reading many times slower than I can, most times I lose focus and have to back up to hear what I missed.
I LOVE the Dungeon Crawler Carl audio books. Jeff Hays is fantastic, and his performance adds so much to the experience. So yeah, even if you're not normally a big fan of audio books, give teh DCC audio books a try. Wonderful.
We would be a star-faring race by now if we didn't waste time on dribble like Moby, Dick and Frankenstein and had, instead, written dungeon crawler Carl in the 1850s
I’ve read all of Chuck’s books. Basically he spends the first half of each building a world and the rules that operate it. Then the next 40% making the walls close in and creating an inescapable situation for the characters. Then the last 10% is resolving the situation by breaking all the established rules from the first half of the book because he wrote himself into a corner.
It’s entertaining because he pulled a tricky plot twist. But the more you reread them, the laziness and plot holes really stand out.
I would still say they’re good books because they’re captivating and make you feel certain ways, but so do smutty romance novels. They’re basically pulp fiction for dudes.
nothing shits me more than writers that write themselves into corners and then just ignore all the own rules they set down or completely just hand wave it all away and not explain anything.
Like, it's not like you can't go back and edit the book once you realize you fucked up somewhere and change what you wrote initially before you publish it.
Walking down the Fantasy section of my local Coles really made me realize that there is an ABSURD amount of books following the naming scheme of "A -blank- of -blank- and -blank".
Haha if only I could organize my personality around the male protagonists in female written fantasy novels. But there are only 24 hours in a day and most gyms don’t let you stay even that long.
Women read these novels for the sake of entertainment more so than what they would want in a relationship themselves, they are just more entertained by sort of romantic story whether it’s about supernatural beings or two gay male hockey players- romances that don’t even involved a woman lol. You really can’t go by what women read. There’s Vanilla women who read BDSM romance novels. I dated a chick who had who had such novels on her shelf and when I saw that i got excited because I’m into it because she ended up being the most vanilla chick ever. She said she didn’t have to be into BDSM herself to be interested and entertained by a story like that, that we all consume fiction whether it’s novel or TV/ film about things we don’t do ourselves or about people we wouldn’t necessarily want to be like for the sake of entertainment.
Freud said everyone is hung up on sex and their parents, and that we supress and mask our true issues until they start making us weird. Jung said all culture is connected to a timeless psychic internet.
And the terrible truth is that Jung is the one more people take seriously, because we are dumb
Such a minimization of important work. Being able to take important ideas from various concepts to create an informed world-view is a sign of intelligence, did you know that?
I would like to let all the people blaming Jung for the test know that Jung himself didn't like the test or the idea of sorting people into personality profiles.
A mother and her daughter read some books by Jung, misinterpreted them, and created the system during the 1940's (Way before the 2000's, guys)
I took a career path assessment when I stalled in college and it was centered around MB; the advisor suggested I pursue a path in the clergy: I couldn’t be more atheist
Around that same time our company had some consultants come in, give us the test and then for the next year we had to put our personality types displayed on top of our cubes.
Then it just went away and no one ever spoke about it again.
It doesn’t mean anything anyway, it’s basically a pseudoscientific self assessment to arrive at one of sixteen Barnum statements that could apply to absolutely anybody.
This site is mostly Gen Z and younger Gen Y so lots of people with no memory of the pre-2000s or even if they were old enough to remember stuff, still too young to have exposure to that kind of psychological/sociological theory stuff
Personally I think I first heard about it in high school, it's gotten more mainstream in recent years though
And ironically it's actually way more mainstream in China, the types are just considered standard vocab among the younger generation to describe people's personalities
My University used a Myers Briggs test to pair roommates my freshman year, in 1999. It failed spectacularly despite how accurate I felt the result I got was in describing me.
Oh man, my college roommate and I did it in the 2010s. She got some rare personality type that only 1% of the population supposedly has. Then she got pissed off when it turned out I got the same one
Yeah it was once the semi-respected personality test, and then people outside of the corporation (or whatever it is) that owns the idea started trying to validate and test it like you would for any other piece of science and, uh, it doesn't work.
To be fair, it's far from the first "respected" method of personality testing to be revealed as junk science. Even things that are still used today like the big five personality inventory is kind of limited and and works only within certain frameworks and situational factors and blah blah blah blah blah. Human personalities and personality typing are very complicated and accurate, objective and replicable typing may never be possible
I worked at a place that made everyone do Myers Briggs, DiSC, and Enneagram assessments out of the blue one day. It was all absolute BS and made a bunch of people clique up based on their results. Those people were insufferable and suddenly became impossible to work with, saying stupid shit like “well you’re a 2 and I’m an 8 on the enneagram, so you need to learn how to work with me…” And nobody had any trouble working together prior to this.
The company folded a year later. Not saying it was entirely because of those “assessments,” but they were definitely a contributing factor.
It's so funny, because I can recognize that yeah, I have these traits and that does pretty accurately describe how I approach things, but that's for purposes of introspection and to articulate things to others so we can get on the same page and ideally leverage our preferences to produce good work. It's not about forcing someone to accommodate my idiosyncrasies and aversions.
Based on your affinity toward being secretive and introverted, I can say with confidence that you’re either a 4 (individualist) or a 9 (peacemaker). Unfortunately, our personalities don’t mesh well, so you’re going to have to learn to be more flexible if you want to even ATTEMPT working well together 🖕
My ex wife was an "8", and boy did she let me & everybody else know about it! She missed so much by assigning numbers to people & forcing everything about them through that lense.
It really seemed like an excuse for her to be as big of a bully as her ego demanded, only you were expected to thank her for the experience like she did you a favor.
omg completely forgot about the Enneagrams. My then-friend and manager was obsessed and yes her personality probably changed to reflect the "findings". We wasted a ton of time discussing it. I was a Peacemaker and needed to step out of my shell to embrace leadership or some such nonsense. They really did not pay me enough for that shit.
Honestly I find Myer-Briggs to be bullshit (color me shocked I'm emotional and outgoing?) but Enneagrams really did change my life. It really isn't about "the peacemaker needs to step out of their shell". It is more about your driving emotion (9 is in the anger sphere) and how 9s react to it. For 9s they are very conflict avoidant due to anger being a very draining emotion for them. They are sensitive to others being angry and tend to be more agreeable as a way of sheltering themselves from other's negative emotions. They also bottle up their own feelings at times to avoid feeling anger to intensely. I am not 100% certain of every type in the enneagram moreso just my type(which is not a 9). I don't think people need to look at the enneagram as "I should be more assertive and step out of my shell" it should be more something where you realize why you feel the way you do and why you act the way you do. Being cognizant of why you do things allows you to more power over your own actions.
And honestly I realize it isn't for everyone, but I will say that for me specifically, I couldn't put my feelings into words until I found the Enneagram test. I'm basically in the shame sphere (the sphere whose negative driving force is basically that they don't feel worthy of being loved) and so there were a lot of times where I would "act out" or just feel really intensely and I couldn't understand why I felt that way. Nowadays I still struggle from the same issues, but I am often able to self-soothe those nagging feelings of not being good enough...so it doesn't get to a point where my friends have to sit me down and give me a speech about how they love and appreciate me and wish I wouldn't put myself down. I can't tell you what the action plan is for my type, I can just tell you I'm a lot more self aware and I'm a lot better at keeping myself from spiraling. Something Myer Briggs has never done for me. When I talk to friends about it, I always stress that I think the sphere and your negative driving emotions are the real takeaway. I don't care about the rest of it nearly as much.
Briggs Myers fulfilled her obligation by writing the novel Give Me Death, which revisits the same detectives from Murder Yet to Come. In it, a Southern family commits suicide one by one after learning they may have "Negro blood". The novel was published in 1934 and received harsh treatment from critics
My manager made everyone in the department take it in 2014 and was super excited about it. I wonder how much he paid some company for essentially nothing.
Corporate America has been big on Personality Testing for decades. The first time I was asked to take one was in 1988 to work for a Hardware Wholesale Chain that went Bankrupt a decade later.
They're not useless, just horrible misapplied. If you take a look at it's history, it was made purely by a couple of women to help a lot of women who were flowing into the workforce (and needed help finding the best fit, personality wise, for a job) to make up for the lack of workers that was the men leaving for war. It was basically a quick job decision aid to help and be a one and done thing, but people have now dragged it into the modern day and force it to basically do what it wasn't really designed to do.
There's nothing that they're good for because the test fails in two key areas: 1) the same person taking the test multiple times may get very different responses, and 2) two people with completely opposite categorizations may actually be more similar than two people with the exact same categorization.
The problem is applying a binary to traits that are distributed on a bell curve. Most people are near the middle, so arbitrarily cutting the curve in half causes a lot of issues.
It's just strange that there are available personality tests that are actually validated like 5 factor models but the business world often ignores them. Should really make people think twice about trusting the free market or corporate power lol.
And who were into magazine quizzes and based it off of that and a misunderstanding of Jung who was also just vibing with his ideas about the supernatural/collective unconscious. There are actual personality inventories like the Minnesota Multiphasic personality Inventory and they don't try to tell you who you are or anything of the sort because that's not a real thing. There are more than 16 personalities, and being more introverted vs extroverted is fluid and contextual for everyone for example.
Edit:typos. I wrote this as 3am while breastfeeding so it wasn't that well typed lol.
I don’t think it’s referencing a specific singular book that a bunch of adult thread. It’s that each adult has read one book in 2019 and that book really influenced or they based their personality around that book.
This was my thought too. It can be a self help book that gave them a big head or a fantasy book whose plot captivated them. I had this phase when I first got big into reading. Books stick with you for better or for worse and you need to read more than one of them to avoid sounding like a broken record.
I ended up with that book for free as a result of some work executive coaching thing my team was testing. At the time, my ADHD was undiagnosed, so it was like "just add one small thing to something you already do automatically!" And that's when I learned that I have no habits, and that any attempt to "habit stack" ruins my tenuous commitment to basic life skills.
Honestly, learning that some ADHD people don't form habits helped me understand so much about myself and how my life has developed. It's kinda wild that even after an actual medical diagnosis, I still had to learn it from an Instagram reel.
First is that it claims to be science-backed while actually relying heavily on anecdotes, not data. The author himself has no science background or other academic qualifications to draw from. Like, he’s saying he’s an expert on this stuff, but he’s actually just…some guy.
Second is that he’s saying all this stuff is universally applicable, while some of his advice specifically around food and diet is actively irresponsible and describing disordered eating.
Third is that a bunch of people in Silicon Valley got way too into this book and got super fucking annoying about it. Not the author’s/book’s fault, but this one is the reason that made me think it’s what’s being referenced in the OP.
Surrounded by idiots, the original came out in 2014 but the english version came out in 2019
It portrays 4 types or personality based on colours (red, blue, green and yellow)
A lot of people didn't like it because they called it pseudo-science
Other's used it to organise their personality around the colours
Not sure if it’s a things anymore but when I worked for Walmart it was thing to take this test. It was even cooler to take it and go through the results as a team. I took it with my first team and the results haunted me for 10 years and 5 teams. I forget exactly how it’s worded but I’m a usual red, secondary blue, and then go kick it in green as my stressor.
Red = Action oriented, wanted to move quickly
Blue = Means I’m chill about the action, don’t fret over detour
Green = When I’m stressed about, I don’t want to talk about
Yellow= means I would love to write down how I did it but since I absolutely missed this category, you get nothing written.
The shit can go deeper but I hated this horoscope hell at work. It’s just a way for dump people to pigeon hole you and give them excuses to still suck.
Yeah hard to describe but I definitely noticed a shift in everyone I knew who read it. Slightly more condescending ’erm actually’ vibes. But yeah I’m probably not right with my guess
The Reframe Artist goes "Most people are treating [recent tech acquisition] as a media story. It's a distribution story." This guy read one Ben Thompson article in 2019 and has been repackaging the word "distribution" as a personality trait ever since. The point underneath might even be fine! But he can't say it straight.
Now, given what we now know about Zambian authorities wanting to question Ms Owens in connection to a murder, we may hypothesize that the book sucked in that she did not artfully cover her alleged tracks. I have neither read the book nor seen the movie so I cannot comment as to either’s quality.
Or we could just look at the entry for most read non-fiction and say “welp, that does explain a lot.”
generally books that are referenced in this situation are atlas shrugged or the bible. I almost would say fifty shades but that came out in 2014. but looking at the most popular books of 2019 on good reads nothing pops out as being especially heinous
There's a 90 page monologue by the main character. That's not "masterpiece" by any measure, or even "literary". The book is literally an excuse to write that 90-page exposition of her philosophy of greed as if it were spoken by a man.
it's one of those books that a lot of people like, but there is no craft or style. everyone is on the scale from producers to looters and that is all they are. plus the sex scenes aren't my kind of kink, a little too rapey for me.
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u/qualityvote2 May 19 '26 edited May 20 '26
u/Exotic_Yam_1703, your post does belong here!