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Cicero posted:Agreed, except for typos. It's pretty awful there. And I think the author still doesn't know the difference between discreet and discrete. just pretend those are also typos
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Jan 8, 2021 05:07
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Jade Mage posted:That's a good point I never considered. I have had trouble finding fantasy books I enjoyed that weren't Pratchett before web serials. Now it's just a matter of reading the first few chapters of like 5 and seeing what I like. A *lot* of fantasy/sci-fi is generally just a much more polished version of the same sort of wish-fulfillment stuff that applies to many web serials/WNs. It's always a pain trying to find new things to read, because I've found that reviews for fantasy books are extremely unreliable, with the most highly rated ones usually being the ones that are the worst about the blatant wish-fulfillment stuff. The strategy I've developed is to look at the bad reviews instead of the good ones or the aggregate score - usually finding the reasons why people disliked a book is more useful than finding the reasons people liked it, and will quickly reveal what sort of problems the book suffers from. Cicero posted:Agreed, except for typos. It's pretty awful there. And I think the author still doesn't know the difference between discreet and discrete. Yeah, I've learned to just ignore/excuse this stuff with fast-published web serials. Forge/Threads of Destiny can also be pretty bad about typos/grammar mistakes. In general I'm pretty tolerant of that sort of thing (unless the prose is just extremely terrible, like in machine-translated Chinese WNs or something). The sort of thing that "destroys immersion" (or whatever you want to call it) for me is more subtle and hard to pinpoint. Sometimes there's just something about the characters/setting/dialogue that makes me constantly aware that I'm reading something an author is making up as they go along.
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Jan 8, 2021 20:48
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Ytlaya posted:In general I'm pretty tolerant of that sort of thing (unless the prose is just extremely terrible, like in machine-translated Chinese WNs or something). The sort of thing that "destroys immersion" (or whatever you want to call it) for me is more subtle and hard to pinpoint. Sometimes there's just something about the characters/setting/dialogue that makes me constantly aware that I'm reading something an author is making up as they go along. One of the things I hate about He Who Fights Monsters (aside from how the main character is now the ~zany~ guy/puppeteer) is how everyone "said" their lines. The author never goes beyond that. I don't think he ever uses anything else (explains, retorted, admitted, mutters, cries, yelled, smiled, looked down, blushed, spat, demanded, etc.) when the characters speak. It just feels really artificial, like the people aren't really feeling anything when they talk.
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Jan 8, 2021 21:24
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Narmi posted:One of the things I hate about He Who Fights Monsters (aside from how the main character is now the ~zany~ guy/puppeteer) is how everyone "said" their lines. The author never goes beyond that. I don't think he ever uses anything else (explains, retorted, admitted, mutters, cries, yelled, smiled, looked down, blushed, spat, demanded, etc.) when the characters speak. "Use 'say' most often" was advice that I got in a high school writing class. I, with my engineer brain, took that to its extreme and wound up using "say" almost exclusively, to the point where I would go edit out better words in my second draft. In retrospect I think this was bad advice and should have come with more qualifiers, or if it did I don't remember them. I recall that the explanation was something along the lines of "dialogue should be seamless and 'say' is invisible to readers", which is true, but also ignores that having invisible words in your text passes up on the opportunity to have words with more meaning in it instead. I wouldn't be surprised if the author got similar advice.
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Jan 8, 2021 22:01
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Narmi posted:One of the things I hate about He Who Fights Monsters (aside from how the main character is now the ~zany~ guy/puppeteer) is how everyone "said" their lines. The author never goes beyond that. I don't think he ever uses anything else (explains, retorted, admitted, mutters, cries, yelled, smiled, looked down, blushed, spat, demanded, etc.) when the characters speak. Weirdly enough, I have a ton of criticisms of HWFWM but that isn't one of them. Said is effectively an invisible word 99% of the time, and if you don't have a specific dialogue tag in mind, I say you should just use said. I don't know if excessive dialogue tags are the most common new author problem, but it's something I see a lot.
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Jan 8, 2021 22:16
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blastron posted:"Use 'say' most often" was advice that I got in a high school writing class. I, with my engineer brain, took that to its extreme and wound up using "say" almost exclusively, to the point where I would go edit out better words in my second draft. In retrospect I think this was bad advice and should have come with more qualifiers, or if it did I don't remember them. I recall that the explanation was something along the lines of "dialogue should be seamless and 'say' is invisible to readers", which is true, but also ignores that having invisible words in your text passes up on the opportunity to have words with more meaning in it instead. My understanding was that dialogue flows better and is easier to understand with fewer interruptions, and say is, as you put, basically invisible. I've certainly noticed in the past when an author goes out of their way to use say as little as possible, and I find it really distracting. That doesn't mean that anything other than say shouldn't be used, just that their use should be considered. When declare is used, for example, it's best when the statement is an actual declaration by a character. If a section of dialogue doesn't have moments that justify using something other than say, than that's a signal that it could use a little attention to adjust the conversation for those to fit instead of just adding them in to provide qualifiers after the fact.
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Jan 8, 2021 22:29
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I can kind of understand using in a low-key manner, since it's a very neutral word. The problem I have is that the author uses it almost exclusively, so you do start to notice it after awhile. It feels like a scene is just "still" somehow, like nothing's happening except the dialogue. And it does limit the dialogue when you could add more emotion/emphasis to the story, or give a character something to do while they talk Here's a scene from the one of the latest chapters: quote:“If the EOA had so many defections, it sounds like they messed up,” Ken said. Compare that to this chapter from APGtE: quote:“Some of the Scourges will have made it out,” Indrani quietly said. “The Hawk for sure, maybe the Prince of Bones as well.” The scene just feels more alive, like the people are actually invested in what happened. e: To add (since that Guide scene is a very emotional one), there's a chapter where Jason gets angry and starts yelling. But the scene is just weirdly written because he's supposed to be getting angrier and angrier while people are lecturing him about what he did, but he just keeps "saying" his lines. There's no buildup, either through tone or action, so it feels like it comes out of nowhere. Narmi fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Jan 8, 2021 |
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Jan 8, 2021 22:35
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Omi no Kami posted:Yeah, that’s the big thing I was referring to when I mentioned the general demographics. Narratively tons of stories do really neat stuff, but yeaaaah- the prose is very frequently more Metaworld Chronicles than Chaucer, and it weirds me out that it doesn’t bug more (any?) readers. I think part of it is that people tend to compare apples to apples. When I read a webfic that’s great, I tend to compare it to other webfic, not books I’ve read recently. This is total speculation on my part, but I could easily see readers forgiving a lot of basic prose sins if they were using bottom-tier webfic as their yard stick. Also, having just gone back and read a whole glut of posts in this thread, almost none of the critical posts actually read as that bad? Discussing aspects of stuff that you dislike or interrogating a piece of writing from the perspective of having not enjoyed it is still a valid way to discuss it. Unfortunately for Worm, I think it ends up a target of this type of post more than most serials simply because most people have read it and that makes it easier to discuss. I’ve read a lot of serials that had the same problems I feel Worm has, but using them as an example in a big post is a gamble because for all I know only 40 other people read it. It’s sorta like how almost every writing group on the internet has big discussions about Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings at some point–they’re big popular works more people can discuss because more people have read them, and those who haven’t have possibly at least seen the movies. If I wanted to discuss the topic of how a lot of webfic focuses too much on worldbuilding and not enough on setting scenes within their world and conveying mise en scène to readers, there’s a lot of examples that would come to mind before Worm. But if I was posting about it in a big discussion somewhere, I’d probably use an example from Worm because it’s the one most people will have read. I know it can sorta look like a bunch of people just trying to tear down a popular work, but I don’t really think that’s the always goal when Worm or Potter or HPMOR discussions come up. It’s just that critical discussions about how web serials work (in a sense of what works vs what doesn’t) would be a lot shorter if we were all using different examples that only 1 or 2 people each had read. And to go back a little further… Narmi posted:Has anyone ever done that? The closest thing I can think of is The Wandering Inn where some names get blanked, but that’s more like classified, blacked out than spoiler text. I originally had something like this planned for Mire, but I couldn’t figure out a way to make it work for readers who use screen-reader software. Accessibility is a big deal for me and I don’t like the idea of parts of my story being unavailable to blind readers, so I nixed it.
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Jan 8, 2021 23:01
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Anomalous Blowout posted:I originally had something like this planned for Mire, but I couldn’t figure out a way to make it work for readers who use screen-reader software. Accessibility is a big deal for me and I don’t like the idea of parts of my story being unavailable to blind readers, so I nixed it. Having spent a year working on making web sites accessible, I hate screen readers. There's no industry standard for how screen readers handle anything more complicated than raw text, so a solution that worked for one screen reader would rarely work on any other. Or worse, other screen readers would garble the formatting. Any non-standard formatting ended up requiring extremely convoluted tagging and scripting to get something that was intelligible for just the three most common screen readers. Even getting tables to be read in a way that wasn't horribly tedious was a challenge and resulted in very odd looking "code." Oh, and the JAWS screen reader hijacks the mouse and keyboard user interface (or something like that, this was a few years ago) so I had to turn it off to do development, and then turn it back on when I needed to test. LLSix fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Jan 8, 2021 |
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Jan 8, 2021 23:06
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Anomalous Blowout posted:I think part of it is that people tend to compare apples to apples. When I read a webfic that’s great, I tend to compare it to other webfic, not books I’ve read recently. This is total speculation on my part, but I could easily see readers forgiving a lot of basic prose sins if they were using bottom-tier webfic as their yard stick. Yeah that's a great point- web serials can be a pretty niche area to begin with, and due to the popularity of RRL, the HPMOR community and a few small reddits, it's a pretty incestuous place- people who like one thing end up reading similar things, but as far as I know there's not a great deal of crossover even between different genres within the serial space. I think there are two things to consider with critique. One is that it's always important to separate critique of a piece from critique of both the writer and the reader- if I say "Worm is poorly written and is in serious need of structural editing," (or a narrower, more specific set of suggestions in the same vein) a lot of people hear "I don't like Worm, and think that people should feel bad for enjoying it." Which, no- read what you want and enjoy what you want, but I think that as long as critique is constructive, it should have a place in the conversation. That having been said... sheesh, the serial community. I'm not talking about this thread in particular, but I've seen more defensive and nasty reactions to constructive criticism in the serial space than maybe in any other medium. It almost never comes from the authors though- it usually seems to be a gatekeeping thing from the fan community itself. HPMOR and Wildbow stuff are where I see it most often (I know the parahumans community got a massive injection from early shoutouts by the HPMOR guy, so the two communities seem to share a lot of DNA). RRL has some of the same stuff, but a lot less- from what I've seen fan communities there tend to just kinda implode into feedback loops where every chapter is the same X dozen "Thanks for the chapter/generic noises here" responses. It's definitely a really rough space to work in though- I don't think I would ever have the patience or stomach to gut it out, especially once you realize that, like most Internet Stuff, you can look forward to insane and weird feedback almost irregardless of what your actual product is.
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Jan 8, 2021 23:18
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LLSix posted:Even getting tables to be read in a way that wasn't horribly tedious was a challenge and resulted in very odd looking "code." Blind/visually impaired people must hate LitRPGs. I know a ton of series use huge tables for stats and such.
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Jan 8, 2021 23:21
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Narmi posted:Blind/visually impaired people must hate LitRPGs. I know a ton of series use huge tables for stats and such. They probably do what I do and just completely ignore them. I don't really need to examine the story scaffolding.
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Jan 9, 2021 00:23
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What is RRL? I know about Royal Road, but that doesn't have a trailing L.
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Jan 9, 2021 00:31
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LLSix posted:What is RRL? It used to be named royal road legends.
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Jan 9, 2021 00:42
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Narmi posted:I can kind of understand using in a low-key manner, since it's a very neutral word. The problem I have is that the author uses it almost exclusively, so you do start to notice it after awhile. It feels like a scene is just "still" somehow, like nothing's happening except the dialogue. And it does limit the dialogue when you could add more emotion/emphasis to the story, or give a character something to do while they talk I think the problem with this scene isn't that it uses "said" every time, but rather that there's zero description interleaved with the dialogue. The characters are apparently standing perfectly still and doing nothing other than talking. You could replace replied/noted/murmured with said in the pgte example and it'd still be a much better scene because it mentions the characters doing things other than just talking at each other.
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Jan 9, 2021 00:47
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I feel it's a better screen for a lot of reasons (the dialogue itself being one), and the character actions are definitely one of them. But I kinda think that even if you took it out it would still be much better because the dialogue tags offer some insight into the characters and what they're going through. It's such a little thing, but it would drastically improve the scene. At least to me. Narmi fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Jan 9, 2021 |
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Jan 9, 2021 00:57
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Plorkyeran posted:I think the problem with this scene isn't that it uses "said" every time, but rather that there's zero description interleaved with the dialogue. The characters are apparently standing perfectly still and doing nothing other than talking. You could replace replied/noted/murmured with said in the pgte example and it'd still be a much better scene because it mentions the characters doing things other than just talking at each other. Yeah, there's also the fact that a lot of the dialogue itself is just stilted and kinda bad. Changing the tags to make it feel less jarring would be like installing better shock absorbers instead of just not driving over rocks.
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Jan 9, 2021 00:59
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Narmi posted:Here's a scene from the one of the latest chapters: I think the main difference between the He Who Fights With Monsters scene and the PracGuide one is that PracGuide mixes its dialogue with non-dialogue lines, rather than just alternating between characters speaking. If you remove all the non-dialogue lines, it actually can sound pretty awkward when you use a bunch of alternatives to "said" back to back. For example, that PracGuide segment just sounds kind of goofy if you remove the non-dialogue lines. vvv basically this Plorkyeran posted:I think the problem with this scene isn't that it uses "said" every time, but rather that there's zero description interleaved with the dialogue. The characters are apparently standing perfectly still and doing nothing other than talking. You could replace replied/noted/murmured with said in the pgte example and it'd still be a much better scene because it mentions the characters doing things other than just talking at each other. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Jan 9, 2021 |
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Jan 9, 2021 01:19
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Omi no Kami posted:I think there are two things to consider with critique. One is that it's always important to separate critique of a piece from critique of both the writer and the reader- if I say "Worm is poorly written and is in serious need of structural editing," (or a narrower, more specific set of suggestions in the same vein) a lot of people hear "I don't like Worm, and think that people should feel bad for enjoying it." Which, no- read what you want and enjoy what you want, but I think that as long as critique is constructive, it should have a place in the conversation. "The Moon Raven is a garbage book, full stop. The characters are all wooden simpletons with a depth that rivals cardboard, the dialogue and humor sound like the author is stuck in middle school, and you can see every plot twist coming from a continent away. There's nothing of worth here, stay far away if you value your time." I think most people will infer that I'm saying something about the audience for that book as well (at least, any audience member who enjoyed it). This is an extreme example for critique, certainly, but when you see the occasional critique that says that certain authors are basically the McDonald's of [genre], it doesn't surprise me that it feels like an attack to those demographics.
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Jan 9, 2021 01:38
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Critique is good, and I enjoy reading it especially for the stuff that I like a lot. But some of it does edge pretty hard into what appears as attacking the author of whatever is being critiqued, which is usually Wildbow here. It feels like he gets treated as some abstract entity that produced a bunch of text, rather than just a guy.
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Jan 9, 2021 01:58
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Cicero posted:A certain level of critique does automatically sound like critiquing the audience, though. E.g. if I'm like I definitely see what you're saying, and I agree that it's never cool to go after the author or audience, but I'd also like to point out that serial audiences in particular love to infer offense that isn't actually given. Like, if I were to jump into a discussion about one of Wildbow's stories, I think it would be fair to say something along the lines of "The pacing is glacial, 75% of the total length could be cut without meaningfully impacting the story, most of the characters talk like pod people, the descriptive passages are far too long while simultaneously not actually giving me enough information to understand what is happening, and the lack of any pervasive narrative spine makes it profoundly difficult for me to care about what's going on." We could go back and forth on the details, maybe I'm right and maybe I'm a dummy, but either way I think that's a pretty reasonable place to start C&C... but I almost guarantee that the vast majority of the fanbase would bury me in angry and extremely nasty posts accusing me of personally attacking Wildbow, arguing in bad faith, and probably kicking puppies or something. I never said anything about the guy or his fans, but so many fan communities feel like they're perpetually a hair away from processing any criticism as personal criticism.
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Jan 9, 2021 02:22
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I thought the you're a
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Jan 9, 2021 22:07
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Plorkyeran posted:I thought the you're a The entire abyssal dysphoria plotline could not be more blatant trans content if I literally dedicated an entire paragraph to describing Lozzie's trans flag poncho all over again, but I try not to pay too much attention to weird comments. The rest of the readerbase gets it, they let me know often enough!
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Jan 9, 2021 22:53
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Please keep describing Lozzie's poncho, it's great.
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Jan 9, 2021 23:23
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TWI Patreon is back Silveran is hilarious. The quest for Erin's revival is on going and doesn't look like it will wrap up anytime soon as the only person with a solution is unreachable and probably wouldn't help.
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Jan 10, 2021 22:10
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asur posted:TWI Patreon is back Silveran is hilarious. The quest for Erin's revival is on going and doesn't look like it will wrap up anytime soon as the only person with a solution is unreachable and probably wouldn't help. Az'kerash or teriarch?
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Jan 10, 2021 23:52
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I had to cancel my patreons rip. I'm broke lol. I've been reading the gods are bastards, though. It seems pretty good. Despite having like, 10 main characters I'm invested in them all. It's like if TWI was all action instead of slice of life stuff, maybe.
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Jan 11, 2021 00:06
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Lol, “10 main characters”. You must still be early on - by the time I dropped around Book 11 there was like 6 concurrent storylines, each with 10 main characters.
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Jan 11, 2021 00:42
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A big flaming stink posted:Az'kerash or teriarch? If it wasn't clear I meant Magnolia, though she would have to get the crazy ancestor trapped in the vault to agree as well. Az'kerash seems to be failing though that does look most likely path. Teriarch probably has a method to revive her. It's unclear if he would intervene given his general stance on that and he's been intentionally removed from the story to make it more interesting. The Gods are Bastards picks up way too many side plots that don't really matter and starts to drag significantly.
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Jan 11, 2021 02:11
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Silynt posted:Lol, “10 main characters”. You must still be early on - by the time I dropped around Book 11 there was like 6 concurrent storylines, each with 10 main characters. It calmed down a bit after that.
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Jan 11, 2021 02:35
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Yeah, it generally only tries to focus on 2-3 storylines over the course of a book now. That being said tGoB is on hiatus while the author tries to recover from burnout after treating himself incredibly unhealthily this year.
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Jan 11, 2021 03:32
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Omi no Kami posted:It really depends on the author's style, the kind of book they're writing, and the editor, and that's a really good point to hit- a lot of what I was hitting with that smorgasbord of graphics was looking specifically at structural editing. In this case I think good editing corresponds to quality (e.g. a smaller number of condensed beats leads to tighter pacing and easier-to-follow plotting), but that's not always a guarantee. If the author is going for something intentionally slower and more contemplative they might not be served as well by the same workflow, and there's really outside the box stuff like The Road where the intentional eccentricities of the narrative voice and the book's overall structure (e.g. two people run around looking to eat and not get et) would make it look like a dumpster fire when you turned a lot of data-driven tools towards it, but in practice it works pretty well. I am just  about this and would happily read more or play with the code if it is on GitHub somewhere. I want to point it at something like Eddings and see if it just puts out barcodes, then go look at say dickens and see if it is similarly barcodes. Several “classic” authors are essentially the pulp of their time, and I’m curious if pulp is pulp is pulp to a NLP analysis. Stuff that is more wandering obviously doesn’t seem to line up, but I wouldn’t be shocked if data analysis of house of leaves or similar matched up well with other wandering works.Thanks for posting, it’s neat to think about.
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Jan 11, 2021 03:52
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Anias posted:I am just Yeah no problem! The stuff I posted didn't even require a fancy project to build, I just generated it from a single python script- there are tons of NLP addons for python, so if you take a look at something like http://www.nltk.org/ (which is the bread & butter NLP starting point), there's already a ton of crud right out of the box. For anything more complex I'd start with the analytical model (e.g. figure out either the metrics you want to pull, or think of an interesting question like 'what are the quantitative indicators of Pulp," then run a bunch of corpora through your stuff, tweak 'em, and repeat. NLP is a weird field where some stuff, like speech recognition/synthesis are insane rabbit holes, and others are actually really straightforward to implement, and require more rigor from the model than the software.
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Jan 11, 2021 04:54
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The Gods Are Bastards felt like it ran out of plot a year or two ago and has just sort of muddled along since. I stopped reading last summer because it was just getting bad.
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Jan 11, 2021 21:19
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All I know is I've been reading it non stop for like 4 days and my biggest complaint is that I want it to be slower and more about making friends The author clearly put a lot of effort into thinking about how this wacky d&d esque world would work. I think world of prime is one of the only ones that comes close in terms of being very tabletoppy without sounding like everyone operates under cartoon physics
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Jan 12, 2021 02:18
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Man, the current arc of He who fights sure blows. I was looking forward to more hijinks with his family, not whatever this conspiracy arc is. Gaping plot holes and awkwardly forced tension with ambigious stakes just don't do it for me. That it feels like a less interesting rerun of the Church of Purity stuff, though that might just be because I enjoyed the fantasy trappings more.
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Jan 13, 2021 00:41
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It is absolutely a less interesting retread. For one, we already know the builder cult connection is going to be there. First time around it was a reveal, but now it's just something they'll pretend is a reveal. It was very nice to have a chunk of dumb fun serial fiction at 5pm every day, but I'm probably going to drop it soon.
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Jan 13, 2021 01:58
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Wittgen posted:It was very nice to have a chunk of dumb fun serial fiction at 5pm every day, but I'm probably going to drop it soon. Same. I've been reading He Who Fights With Monsters since it came out. It was fun, even if it wasn't the most original of stories. But this latest arc has just soured me completely on it. It's turned into some forced plot where everybody is dumb except the MC and his friends. The characters, especially the main one, are all over the place. The bad guys literally saying they're ok if the world burns, so long as they can rule the ashes. It went from being a fun story to read to actually taking effort to slog through to find out what happens. And at this point it's barely even worth that. It's still making a ton of money, but it's also been bleeding support for months on patreon (it's lost about 20% of its 2700 subscribers, which is not insignificant). I hope the author knows what they're doing and turns it around. I guess we'll see.
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Jan 13, 2021 16:51
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It's not the first story I'm going to drop in the near future, but it's something I read first when a new chapter comes out, so I can follow it up with an unread chapter for something I'm excited about. At least it's not metaworld.
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Jan 13, 2021 16:56
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its probably the weakest of the 'actually worth spending money on' stories i read
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Jan 13, 2021 17:40
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