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Sham bam bamina! posted:What are this thread's thoughts on Mother of Learning? Pretty good overall, ending sucks
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Dec 1, 2020 19:13
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It scratches an itch I had for Groundhog Day wizards. Good and the ending is also as good as it could get.
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Dec 1, 2020 21:09
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Piell posted:Pretty good overall, ending sucks It's this, though I'd say that the story starts falling apart in the last 1/3 rather than just the end, you can almost feel the author getting tired of the story.
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Dec 1, 2020 22:29
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Sham bam bamina! posted:What are this thread's thoughts on Mother of Learning? It reads like fiction that began on a fanfic website a decade ago and got steadily better. If you started reading it a decade ago and didn't mind that style of writing back when it was first being posted, you'd probably have fond memories of it. If you don't mind that sort of fanfic-feeling writing (glossing over a lot of stuff, uneven pacing, characters that feel a little bit more like archetypes than fully realised characters until the author really gets a grip on what they're doing and dives in deeper, characters having kinda samey voices), it's not a bad read. The writing improves a ton over the course of its life. I think I was like 19 when it started and my tastes were a lot more forgiving back then than they are now, so I enjoyed it at the time, but when I tried to come back to it about five years ago it felt kinda juvenile and the earlier stuff was pretty rough and didn't hold my interest anymore. One of the problems with such long-running serials and long-running book series in general is that by the time you as a writer have gotten through 800,000 words of something, you will not be the same author you were when you began the project. If you aren't working with an editor, it's even harder to smooth over the gaps in quality that will grow with such a project. I find it hard to recommend a lot of the serials that began in the early 2010s because if you go into them expecting the same quality at the beginning that current readers are seeing in chapter 400, you'll end up disappointed. I haven't read up to the parts where people started saying it gets bad, so all I can say is that if you can read the first few chapters and the writing doesn't put you off, you'll probably enjoy a good chunk of the story as all it does is improve from that point.
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Dec 1, 2020 22:43
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Sham bam bamina! posted:What are this thread's thoughts on Mother of Learning? Slow start, great once it finds its stride, astonishingly disappointing botched ending. Persistent language and editing issues that never go away, some real frustrating lack of resolution on a lot of (to wit, all) side characters, ending reads like it was written for a completely different story. I really enjoyed about 50% of it, and tolerated the other half. (Also, I'm unclear- did it literally start as Naruto fanfiction, or was that just a joke people made at its expense? Because wow is the DNA visible once you know to look for it.)
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Dec 2, 2020 01:10
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I like it but if I'm being honest with myself, its because I too wish my social stunting masquerading as angst would reveal itself to actually be a super power.
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Dec 2, 2020 01:26
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Sham bam bamina! posted:What are this thread's thoughts on Mother of Learning? I quite liked it. I read it after it was finished and found the ending simply average - I suspect it felt a lot worse if you were reading it chapter by chapter and waiting for a grand finale.
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Dec 2, 2020 01:28
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If you want a completed story that starts good and stays good, Vainqueur the Dragon has been done for a month or two and is extremely entertaining, in a "trashy LitRPG but is fully aware of it, plus good jokes' kind of way.
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Dec 2, 2020 02:46
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Peachfart posted:If you want a completed story that starts good and stays good, Vainqueur the Dragon has been done for a month or two and is extremely entertaining, in a "trashy LitRPG but is fully aware of it, plus good jokes' kind of way. Vainqueur the Dragon's style of humor is not for everyone. My go to recommendation for a finished serial is Threadbare. Sham bam bamina! posted:What are this thread's thoughts on Mother of Learning? It is one of the better web serials I've read, which is damning it with faint praise. It's hard to get into and doesn't get fun until ~10 or so chapters in. About 2/3rds of the way through the pace and powerlevels both start ramping up which is one of the reasons for the dislike of the ending. I enjoyed the novel looping mechanic. It allows the MC to be dumb, get hurt, and fail, without causing the action to grind to a halt while he recovers. I like that the MC isn't the predestined hero. It does a decent job of justifying it's magic system and spends a lot of words on how it works which I personally enjoyed. I think the characterization is better than average. More importantly, it's consistent. People mostly make decisions based on their personalities and motives and don't do sudden heel turns or other nonsensical reversals. There's a bunch of people the MC dislikes, and he consistently goes out of his way to avoid them to the point where they don't show up for 10s of chapters. On a first reading, you don't even notice how little he interacts with them until late in the story when someone else asks him about it. 90s Cringe Rock posted:It was a big rpgnet thread, basically as Juniper described it in the story. e: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=391379 This is pretty cool.
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Dec 2, 2020 04:27
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I accidentally introduced my 74 year old dad to web serials and he likes The Daily Grind enough to read each new chapter as it is released. Which is amusing because being a 74 year old he absolutely does not references to such obscure things as Magic the Gathering and thus needs me to explain them afterwards.
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Dec 2, 2020 10:24
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Sham bam bamina! posted:What are this thread's thoughts on Mother of Learning? Pros: -Good story, -Good main character progression, -Fleshed out magic system. Cons: -Kinda ignores side characters and doesn't really address their issues, -The ending feels really rushed and feels like the author didn't really know how the story was supposed to end.
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Dec 2, 2020 17:40
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Omi no Kami posted:Slow start, great once it finds its stride, astonishingly disappointing botched ending. Persistent language and editing issues that never go away, some real frustrating lack of resolution on a lot of (to wit, all) side characters, ending reads like it was written for a completely different story. I really enjoyed about 50% of it, and tolerated the other half. (Also, I'm unclear- did it literally start as Naruto fanfiction, or was that just a joke people made at its expense? Because wow is the DNA visible once you know to look for it.) The author's previous work was naruto fanfic but afaik MoL never was.
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Dec 2, 2020 21:01
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vainquerer is decent but i felt no motivation to read past the first kindle release
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Dec 3, 2020 01:31
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Patrat posted:I accidentally introduced my 74 year old dad to web serials and he likes The Daily Grind enough to read each new chapter as it is released. Thanks for mentioning The Daily Grind. It's not great, but it's thoroughly enjoyable.
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Dec 3, 2020 04:16
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The Daily Grind is the most okay web serial I've ever read. It's not bad enough to get me to stop reading it, but it's not good enough to drive me to think about it for even a second after I finish reading it. It's just something I consume due to inertia at this point I guess.
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Dec 3, 2020 13:51
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Did Erfworld ever go anywhere? It had fun art and a neat idea, but it slowed down a lot after the first book and I stopped following it.
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Dec 3, 2020 16:52
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It died due to external circumstances. Also no, it did not end up going anywhere interesting. PS: It spent multiple years attempting to cover about 24 hours of time. And then went sidestory before it died. PPS: There's a thread in the comics subforum if you really want slagging on how it went off the rails of actually telling a coherent story https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3757826 lurksion fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Dec 3, 2020 |
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Dec 3, 2020 17:34
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Didn't the author try to pivot into selling cryptocurrency or trying to get his readers to install crypto miners for him or something, too?
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Dec 3, 2020 17:56
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i'm rereading worm and theres a line from taylor's internal monologue that's just "Everyone had probably experienced the sensation of having a lot of bugs crawling on them". Lol what
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Dec 3, 2020 20:13
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Stairmaster posted:i'm rereading worm Your first mistake.
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Dec 3, 2020 20:22
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My favorite was that time the erfworld guy tried selling webcomic DLC in the form of "limited edition" models of props from the comic that looked like something he had thrown together in blender in half an hour, because he'd thrown them together in blender in half an hour. Also I can't remember the numbers anymore, but I looked it up once out of curiosity and I believe at its height he was making something like 150-200k/year and employing at least 5 different people to help him make the comic, and averaging 1-2 pages a month. Rigorous production and editing is important, 'yall! (Not screaming at your employees is a good trick, too.) Omi no Kami fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Dec 3, 2020 |
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Dec 3, 2020 22:22
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Stairmaster posted:i'm rereading worm and theres a line from taylor's internal monologue that's just "Everyone had probably experienced the sensation of having a lot of bugs crawling on them". Lol what *taps thread title*
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Dec 3, 2020 22:54
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Horizon Burning posted:*taps thread title* It's like Cats-the bugs are probably a metaphor for Iran-Contra or something.
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Dec 3, 2020 23:09
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Omi no Kami posted:at its height he was making something like 150-200k/year ... and averaging 1-2 pages a month. This causes me physical pain.
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Dec 3, 2020 23:45
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Hungry posted:This causes me physical pain. What's even worse is that that isn't gross, it's net. I can't for the life of me remember the exact figure, but I think at one point he was doing well over 500k... the problem was that he had a huge staff of people to help him make the comic, and they were all paid full-time. I watched that whole situation out of morbid curiosity for years, because HowDoesThisHappen.gif, but I think the moment I finally lost hope for that poor webcomic guy was when he wrote an angry blog post to pwn his haters by explaining how hard it was to make a comic. (And to be fair, yeah- anything creative is labor-intensive as heck!) So, in said post he did a detailed breakdown of how he made a McDonalds bag for the comic, and it was the craziest frigging thing I've ever seen. I forget every step but it involved him, like, consolidating dozens of reference photos, measuring them, making a model in Blender, tweaking it, doing all kinds of stuff, starting the crazy all over to get realistic textures, then putting it in perspective for the frame, taking a screenshot, and running a zillion photoshop filters over it to make it look comic-y. The punchline was that after tens of hours, he looked at the finished panel, went "I don't like the joke I wrote for that panel," and scrapped the whole thing.
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Dec 4, 2020 00:18
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The difference in output between artists can be crazy. IIRC basically all the art in Hollow Knight, a game known for its gorgeous environments and wide variety of enemies, was made by one dude. Granted, most of the characters have fairly simple lines, but still.
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Dec 4, 2020 00:48
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I'm biased because I do a ton of work that requires bulletproof pipelines and workflows, but I really think that production is the magical ingredient a lot of talented creatives struggle with. Because, yeah- you can make a photorealistic mcdonalds bag in 40 hours or whatever, but you can probably make something good enough in 60 minutes or less. Then you take a step back, and chart out what your prop/scene complexity budget is, and another step back to plan out your panel composition and general story flow based on what your art limitations are, and eventually you get to a high-level operational stage where you're farting everything into an Eisenhower matrix or something. Then a problem pops up and all your plans don't handle it, oh noes! My point being, I often wonder if the most prolific artists aren't the ones who either learn or are instinctively good at time and project management.
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Dec 4, 2020 01:24
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Cicero posted:The difference in output between artists can be crazy. IIRC basically all the art in Hollow Knight, a game known for its gorgeous environments and wide variety of enemies, was made by one dude. Is Hollow Knight fun? I got it for free last month but haven’t tried it yet
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Dec 4, 2020 02:07
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Megatokyo has somehow made it 18 years of being the author's full-time job with only 1000 pages in that time.
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Dec 4, 2020 02:27
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navyjack posted:Is Hollow Knight fun? I got it for free last month but haven’t tried it yet
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Dec 4, 2020 02:58
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knowing when to say "good enough" is definitely a skill all its own
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Dec 4, 2020 03:17
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Plorkyeran posted:Megatokyo has somehow made it 18 years of being the author's full-time job with only 1000 pages in that time. I thought that ended a decade ago. Look at him go! Two whole pages all last month. The first 1000 pages were finished in 2006. They've done 800 pages in the 14 years since. That would be an entirely reasonable one page a week if they weren't mostly frontloaded in the earlier years. Sadly, the art seems to have gone downhill from what I remember. It's a shame, they helped keep me sane during a hard time in my life. Omi no Kami posted:I'm biased because I do a ton of work that requires bulletproof pipelines and workflows, but I really think that production is the magical ingredient a lot of talented creatives struggle with. Because, yeah- you can make a photorealistic mcdonalds bag in 40 hours or whatever, but you can probably make something good enough in 60 minutes or less. Then you take a step back, and chart out what your prop/scene complexity budget is, and another step back to plan out your panel composition and general story flow based on what your art limitations are, and eventually you get to a high-level operational stage where you're farting everything into an Eisenhower matrix or something. Then a problem pops up and all your plans don't handle it, oh noes! Part of it is probably that once a creative person has said whatever it is they wanted to say, it can be hard to find something new to say. No amount of project management will help with creativity, although a good outline of what you're trying to write or create can help you push through the bad days.
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Dec 4, 2020 05:34
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navyjack posted:Is Hollow Knight fun? I got it for free last month but haven’t tried it yet It was my favorite non-AAA pc game until Hades came out. Visually speaking it's gorgeous, it does so much work with 2d cartoonish visuals that ultra HD realistic 3d stuff could never even hope to convey. The gameplay is great too. And the music, holy gently caress.
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Dec 4, 2020 06:18
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The Shortest Path posted:It was my favorite non-AAA pc game until Hades came out. Cicero posted:I liked it, the combat especially. A ton of good bosses and challenges in that game. The exploration/traversal parts I was more iffy on, though it gets plenty of praise and is often considered the best modern Metroidvania. Sold. Starting it tomorrow. Thanks.
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Dec 4, 2020 06:25
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navyjack posted:Is Hollow Knight fun? I got it for free last month but haven’t tried it yet It's an incredibly good game and one of the very few complaints people have about it is "it's too long" which just means more fun game if you're actually enjoying it.
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Dec 4, 2020 06:51
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LLSix posted:Part of it is probably that once a creative person has said whatever it is they wanted to say, it can be hard to find something new to say. No amount of project management will help with creativity, although a good outline of what you're trying to write or create can help you push through the bad days. That's why DotF will always be better than HWFWM: the latter ran out of ideas 30-40 chapters in, but as far as I can tell Defiance of the Fall never had any ideas to begin with, and if the barrel's empty when you start it'll never get any emptier. I definitely know what you mean though. Heck, even tradpub authors with planned-out series pretty regularly hit points where they're done with the series way before it's done with them.
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Dec 4, 2020 06:52
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LLSix posted:Part of it is probably that once a creative person has said whatever it is they wanted to say, it can be hard to find something new to say. No amount of project management will help with creativity, although a good outline of what you're trying to write or create can help you push through the bad days. Creativity isn't magic, it's a skill. You can learn it and hone it and practice it the same as anything else. When these online projects fall into these morasses where nothing is happening beyond a meagre offering every few months, it's not an issue with creativity as such. It's more that the creative in question might need to admit that they're done with the project or unhappy with it or... Not much different to writer's block, which is always a symptom of a deeper issue and not an issue in and of itself. And, yeah, maybe there are some people who only have one story in them, that's fine, too. edit: See Also: Rothfuss, Patrick and Martin, George. Stairmaster posted:i'm rereading worm and theres a line from taylor's internal monologue that's just "Everyone had probably experienced the sensation of having a lot of bugs crawling on them". Lol what That's a pretty good Wildbowism, but I still think the best line from Taylor's internal monologue is something along the lines of 'everyone was moving around the mall but then everyone stopped, listening to the announcement, then started moving again, like someone had pressed pause and play on footage from an old vcr.'
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Dec 4, 2020 07:00
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i honestly think the only reason i managed to finish worm is because I was too depressed to find something I actually wanted to read lol. it sucks so bad when I look back at it it's amazing that I even got past the first chapter.
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Dec 4, 2020 07:20
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Creativity isn't magic, it's a skill. You can learn it and hone it and practice it the same as anything else. When these online projects fall into these morasses where nothing is happening beyond a meagre offering every few months, it's not an issue with creativity as such. It's more that the creative in question might need to admit that they're done with the project or unhappy with it or... Not much different to writer's block, which is always a symptom of a deeper issue and not an issue in and of itself. And, yeah, maybe there are some people who only have one story in them, that's fine, too. I've always felt that writer's block specifically is, yeah- it's not an ephemeral obstacle in your path to getting stuff done, it's just something you need to learn how to get past. As Stephen King puts it, a writer's job is to write, and that can't wait on anything. Burnout's a different story though. I don't know any magical technique to deal with it, but I've definitely seen enough authors who are exhausted and capital-d Done with a story or universe to really sympathize with them. Milkfred E. Moore posted:That's a pretty good Wildbowism, but I still think the best line from Taylor's internal monologue is something along the lines of 'everyone was moving around the mall but then everyone stopped, listening to the announcement, then started moving again, like someone had pressed pause and play on footage from an old vcr.' Oh man, I should have so many of these but I'm struggling to think of a single, quintessential Taylor line. I'm honestly split between the time she referred to Brian's hot sister as a Mercedes benz that someone had put tacky decals on, or the shitzillion times she referred to her bully in sexual and vaguely racist terms. quote:She looked like a panther, black-skinned, savage, teeth bared just a little as she panted. I'm also tempted to go back to that bizarre moment where she thought her computer science teacher was so ugly that she looked like a transexual woman who couldn't pass, but even Wildbow realized that was a completely hosed thing to say and edited it out.
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Dec 4, 2020 07:49
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that's one of those lines where it's hard to figure out if wildbow is just insanely racist or someone who desperately needs to go outside. every black character is either dressed like a prostitute or is a savage animal, except grue because hes a love interest I guess
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Dec 4, 2020 07:59
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