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shrike82 posted:are there other examples of a third party actualizing a fictional piece of fiction? I believe several of Lovecraft's Necronomicons have been written. Crashbee fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Nov 18, 2020 |
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Nov 18, 2020 15:38
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https://twitter.com/EssaHansen/status/1328840026730373120 I think I need to pick this one up, a new space opera sounds baller about now.
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Nov 18, 2020 17:34
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My space opera was supposed to be out this year  I don't think it's gonna hit shelves until 2022.
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Nov 18, 2020 17:50
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General Battuta posted:My space opera was supposed to be out this year A reddit thread today reminded me of how awful that site is. When I'm googling a book, it's the second worst site to see in the results after pinterest.
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Nov 18, 2020 17:56
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Carrier posted:Wikipedia description of GranBretan:
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Nov 18, 2020 18:27
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StrixNebulosa posted:https://twitter.com/EssaHansen/status/1328840026730373120 Thanks for this, I was looking for something new to read.
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Nov 18, 2020 18:52
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shrike82 posted:lol while rereading "the man in the high castle", I noticed that someone IRL has actually published a book called "the grasshopper lies heavy" pulling the same alternate world/war history trope (the reviews for it are pretty bad). Not exactly the same, but there's The Iron Dream which is an actual novel written by a fictional Hitler who fled to America and became a pulp novelist.
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Nov 18, 2020 19:51
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General Battuta posted:My space opera was supposed to be out this year You wrote a space opera?! My god, just the other day I was watching the Blue Planet developer commentary and wondering if you'd return to sci-fi any time soon. Great to hear it already happened!
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Nov 18, 2020 19:55
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General Battuta posted:My space opera was supposed to be out this year Oh no  I didn't even realize you were writing a space opera and now I find out that it's years out, which is a shame, because I'd love to read more SF from you.At least we have The Fourth Book Baru Cormorant to look forward to? Maybe? Speaking of which, I just finished Monster Baru, holy gently caress that was a wild ride. Launched right into Tyrant Baru and I have no idea what's going on, which I guess puts me in good company with Baru herself. Speaking of which, I noticed something about the narration in Monster-- Baru's chapters are written in third person past tense, with occasional right-justified first person asides which I think are probably Other Baru. Xawa's chapters are written in first person past tense. Tain Shir's chapters are written in third person present tense. This is definitely deliberate, but I don't know if it's just to make all the viewpoints feel stylistically distinct or if there's some deeper meaning, and if the latter, if I'm meant to have figured it out by now (I definitely haven't).
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Nov 18, 2020 20:00
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Release "The Starship Captain Baru Cormorant" now IMO.
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Nov 18, 2020 20:24
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Not exactly the same, but there's The Iron Dream which is an actual novel written by a fictional Hitler who fled to America and became a pulp novelist.
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Nov 18, 2020 20:53
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90s Cringe Rock posted:I can give it a five star review on goodreads if that would make you feel better. Maybe with some cute animal gifs? I actually find Goodreads pretty useful, because if I'm googling a book the main things I want to know are: - who wrote it - is it out already - is it part of a series - if so, is the series finished and GR is very good at answering #1-3 and more reliably than not at #4. (If you have a better recommendation, especially one I can query automatically, I am all ears.)
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Nov 18, 2020 21:08
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I have never gotten into GoodReads but even when I search for books now the site comes up and just looks barbaric. I did read an article complaining that there isn't a viable alternative and that there probably won't be because Amazon owns GoodReads and for anyone else to compete with that will require a huge amount of work/capital just to keep it updated. I think some of that could be done with scripts but still a big hurdle to get going.StrixNebulosa posted:https://twitter.com/EssaHansen/status/1328840026730373120 ToxicFrog posted:
The landing is entirely consistent with the way the series is written, even if it seems like parts of it were really rushed and certain major characters just get mentioned as casualties in a battle. I did like the new book even though it sort of blew all the established canon away (or remixed it!), but that's also sort of consistent with the books just being the biased logs of whoever the narrator is, who often freely admit things are embellished and will rag on prior authors for not explaining things correctly. Part of the appeal is the original crew being featured again, or at least not so old they are invalid. I can fully understand why people wouldn't like it.
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Nov 18, 2020 21:58
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ToxicFrog posted:I actually find Goodreads pretty useful, because if I'm googling a book the main things I want to know are: It's still in beta and so currently unfinished, but I've really been enjoying StoryGraph. (Might not be exactly what you're looking for but right now it seems like the most viable GR alternative in general at the moment.) They have a lot of, if not the exact same the same book metadata that Goodreads will have. But since it's in beta, they're pretty open to implementing new features as people are requesting them. I also love that it shows breakdowns of your reading stats (it's sort of the main point, hence the name) so you can see charts and graphs of stuff like how much you've read in a given time period, what genres and "moods" you tend to read, etc. And they're adding more features almost weekly.
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Nov 18, 2020 22:09
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Sounds horrible https://twitter.com/KMSzpara/status/1329153117242470402
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Nov 18, 2020 22:16
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Welp that's a lawsuit
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Nov 18, 2020 22:25
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I have twitter turboblocked what happened??
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Nov 18, 2020 23:16
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Is Kellan okay?
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Nov 18, 2020 23:17
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Yes. It's about Disney being trash about royalties.
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Nov 18, 2020 23:20
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General Battuta posted:I have twitter turboblocked what happened?? Oh no so sorry Yeah its just Disney deciding they get to publish Alan Dean Foster's books, but they don't have to pay him royalties
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Nov 18, 2020 23:28
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Ha ha joke's on them I just published in a charity anthology where the authors already gave up their pay 
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Nov 18, 2020 23:34
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goodreads is okay but boy you have to go diving through reviews to find ones that aren't: - packed full of animated gifs every paragraph or so - a youtube link - written by pat rothfuss under the shelf 'books i would blurb'
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Nov 18, 2020 23:36
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Goodreads is useless for reviews because its just user averages rather than machine learning predictive. Amazon is still the gold standard for that, unfortunately, because they've generally ruined their UI for the case where you review books that you didn't buy from them.
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Nov 18, 2020 23:42
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withak posted:Release "The Starship Captain Baru Cormorant" now IMO. The Stellatrix Baru Cormorant.
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Nov 18, 2020 23:47
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I have next to zero patience for the prevailing style of GR reviews these days, where every single review reads like the person who wrote it is absolutely convinced they're going to be picked up by a publication as the Next Big Book Reviewer on the strength of their prose and trenchant insight. Seriously I will take "Starts off strong but I didn't really care for the protag, the book kind of lost me halfway through because a lot of the plot felt arbitrary. Still had fun and finished it, 3 stars" over a 4000 word "review" that's basically just gushing and begging for ARCs. I thought about starting to leave reviews but I think my ratings are calibrated wildly differently than most GR users, given that everybody else's scale seems to start at 3 stars and go up from there.
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Nov 19, 2020 00:00
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pseudorandom name posted:Goodreads is useless for reviews because its just user averages rather than machine learning predictive. Amazon's rankings just boost whoever is the first person to say something that sounds intelligent about the book. Do that and you'll have the top review on any given entry. Do it consistently on popular items and you'll break the top 1000 and they'll ask you to be a Vine Voice and start sending you free poo poo to review. That *is* better than goodreads but isn't really "AI" either.
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Nov 19, 2020 00:07
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I wasn't talking about Amazon's reviews, I was talking about their recommendations. edit: I guess I wasn't clear and confused several things -- Goodreads has review scores, which are useless because they're just the aggregated averages of all reviews, and recommendations, which are useless because they just recommend based on authors you've acknowledge existing regardless of the sea of one star ratings you've given them. Amazon has review scores which I've never looked at, and recommendations which are actually predictive based on your past rating history. Their recommendation UI used to show you your own personal predicted score, but they trashed that for a much more worthless interface where you can't really browse recommendations and actually rating books requires you to jump through a bunch of hoops. edit 2: The remnants of their old recommendations UI is at https://smile.amazon.com/gp/yourstore/iyr -- there used to be a category for recommendations of everything in their catalog, with further sub-categories for e.g. Books or Science Fiction & Fantasy. Now its only for products you've bought or claim to own, and can't recommend anything new. This is also where they've buried their Prime Video ratings, if you want better recommendations there. pseudorandom name fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Nov 19, 2020 |
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Nov 19, 2020 00:10
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DurianGray posted:It's still in beta and so currently unfinished, but I've really been enjoying StoryGraph. (Might not be exactly what you're looking for but right now it seems like the most viable GR alternative in general at the moment.) Yeah, I have zero interest in using a book tracker, I already have my own, offline one that I like more. I didn't realize storygraph also had useful metadata, the stuff I heard about it before made it sound like it was strictly a recommendation engine and book journaling site.
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Nov 19, 2020 00:50
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The key to making Goodreads useable is to follow a group of self-selected reviewers that you actually like. Their reviews will always show up at the top, removing any need to scroll down into yas-kween gif-land.
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Nov 19, 2020 01:34
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ToxicFrog posted:Yeah, I have zero interest in using a book tracker, I already have my own, offline one that I like more. I didn't realize storygraph also had useful metadata, the stuff I heard about it before made it sound like it was strictly a recommendation engine and book journaling site. Recommendations are definitely one of the main things it does (and it does them A LOT better than GR and it's only getting better as more users join/add to the data pool), but yeah, at least right now it's mostly tracking and recommendations. You can get pretty in the weeds sorting your recommendations with things like page length, story pace, genre, etc. and they just keep adding more stuff you can sort by as time goes on. While they do pull some of the more subjective aspects of the book sorting (like moods and pace) from user input, they actually really de-emphasize reviews and are explicitly not trying to be a social/ratings site like Goodreads, which I can appreciate (for example, star ratings are displayed at the very bottom of each book entry and to even see reviews you have to expand out a collapsed-by-default section). I think it's worth keeping an eye on as they keep adding to it in the future, but yeah, if you've already got your own system it's probably not worth ditching that for unless you really like what they're doing currently.
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Nov 19, 2020 01:36
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pseudorandom name posted:I wasn't talking about Amazon's reviews, I was talking about their recommendations. Goodreads recommendations are great! After reading a history book on ancient civilizations it told me I would love to read: A book on investing, American Psycho, A russian cookbook, or Doctor Zhivago in Arabic.
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Nov 19, 2020 02:41
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Carrier posted:Moorcock owns (do NOT quote me out of context!) And in case you missed it, the playwright Elvereza Tozer wrote plays titled Chirshil and Adulf and King Staleen. The History of the Runestaff is somewhere in the lower middle of Moorcock's work, but it's hardly surprising when each book was written in three days.
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Nov 19, 2020 03:16
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DurianGray posted:I think it's worth keeping an eye on as they keep adding to it in the future, but yeah, if you've already got your own system it's probably not worth ditching that for unless you really like what they're doing currently. Yeah, I don't want to use it (or goodreads) as a user, I just want something I can query for book/author metadata.
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Nov 19, 2020 03:41
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Finished Interlibrary Loan by Gene "unreliable narrator" Wolfe. Not sure how I feel about it, sad and unsatisfied but not disappointed, I don't think. I'd forgotten the weirdness in A Borrowed Man since it has been five years, so that came as a surprised when it reappeared in this book, and then it just sort of meandered to an inconclusive nowhere. It didn't help that I read On Safari in R’lyeh and Carcosa with Gun and Camera in the middle and my mental state from the two stories bled together.
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Nov 19, 2020 06:59
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ToxicFrog posted:Personally, I liked all the Black Company books and thought that it absolutely stuck the landing, but a lot of people seem to dislike the later books, and I think it probably is true that if you start disliking them you probably won't start liking them again before the end. Personally, I thought the series had a couple of clunkers in the middle (any book narrated by Murgen) but finished pretty strong. I don't know how common that opinion is, but you might start liking some of the later books even after you get to one you dislike. I did.
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Nov 19, 2020 07:08
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instantrunoffvote posted:Personally, I thought the series had a couple of clunkers in the middle (any book narrated by Murgen) but finished pretty strong. I don't know how common that opinion is, but you might start liking some of the later books even after you get to one you dislike. I did. Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing, regarding your spoiler! The Silver Spike is still my favourite one, but it definitely ended well, I feel. I'm not sure how the upcoming (at least, last I heard) new final book will turn out, though...but my hopes aren't high...
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Nov 19, 2020 07:24
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Halfway through Piranesi and loving it. It's society's loss that Susannah Clarke has a chronic illness preventing her from writing more.
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Nov 19, 2020 07:36
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Sooo I take it Baru Cormorant is a solid rec? Picked up Traitor sometime back (along with Memory of Empire) and when covid hit I thought, "well, maybe now I'll have time to finally get through my TBR pile." Pandemic brain has hit me hard and with the exception of Harrow the Ninth I haven't had the energy to read all year. It's really bumming me out 
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Nov 20, 2020 10:51
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Baru good.
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Nov 20, 2020 10:57
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You take that back. Baru is a traitor and a monster
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Nov 20, 2020 14:07
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