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Dakota Krout is one of the worst writers in the genre because he's juuuuust coherent enough that he can almost write something compelling but he's so personally odious in philosophy and locked into the incurious banality of nerd culture that I bounce off every one of his books I try.
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Apr 9, 2024 15:21
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Listening to Heretical Fishing and it's absolutely just a beware of chicken knock off but it's still fun if you want to experience that precise formula again, executed less adroitly
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Apr 14, 2024 06:02
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Beware of Chicken is good when it's fun slice of life stuff and the quality varies greatly whenever it does actual "serious" xianxia stuff.
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Apr 14, 2024 22:39
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I'm looking for something like Roadside Picnic or the Southern Reach Trilogy. I've forgotten the exact name of the genre, but the plot is usually about adventurers who travel into 'forbidden zones' where the normal rules of reality no longer apply. Going and leaving will change you, somehow. I'm thinking like a classic Dark Forest, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in STALKER, a vast dungeon with variable geometry, of even the Bermuda Triangle. If I want to be fancy, I'm looking for 'katabatic narratives' or 'descent narratives'. Thanks!
Marsupial Ape fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Apr 18, 2024 |
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Apr 18, 2024 06:05
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Aren't we all, when it comes down to it, looking for decent narratives? ok maybe not in this thread but
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Apr 18, 2024 06:49
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Marsupial Ape posted:I'm looking for something like Roadside Picnic or the Southern Reach Trilogy. I've forgotten the exact name of the genre, but the plot is usually about adventurers who travel into 'forbidden zones' where the normal rules of reality no longer apply. Going and leaving will change you, somehow. I'm thinking like a classic Dark Forest, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in STALKER, a vast dungeon with variable geometry, of even the Bermuda Triangle. If I want to be fancy, I'm looking for 'katabatic narratives' or 'descent narratives'. Thanks! It's the 'new weird' genre if we're talking Southern Reach specifically. I think the only thing that I've read that comes close within the type of stuff discussed in this thread is the Daily Grind series. It's definitely a lot more artless and is more of a portal fantasy than new weird. You might ask in the main SFF thread? This is specifically the thread for middling schlock (I love middling schlock).
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Apr 18, 2024 15:36
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Yngwie Mangosteen posted:It's the 'new weird' genre if we're talking Southern Reach specifically. I think the only thing that I've read that comes close within the type of stuff discussed in this thread is the Daily Grind series. It's definitely a lot more artless and is more of a portal fantasy than new weird. So you’re telling me that there is little competition for what I am describing in the schlock marketplace?
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Apr 18, 2024 16:19
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Seems to be the case. The schlock marketplace is typically power fantasies and nerd poo poo, where new weird tends to be realizing how pitiful and tiny you are in the face of incomprehensible complexity or strangeness. Dungeon Crawler Carl's author Matt Dinniman might be the only person to really explore that, at least that I'm aware of and even his end up being sorta power fantasies.
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Apr 18, 2024 16:41
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here's my schlock request: more superhero school poo poo. anything readable out there beyond Drew Hayes's two series and the web serial Super Supportive?
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Apr 18, 2024 16:45
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AARD VARKMAN posted:here's my schlock request: more superhero school poo poo. anything readable out there beyond Drew Hayes's two series and the web serial Super Supportive? If you’re willing to drop the School part and are ok with the story edging into horror-adjacent, there’s always the web serial Worm. It’s probably the other best written super hero thing but it’s decidedly darker than anything from Hayes
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Apr 18, 2024 16:52
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Good Citizen posted:If you’re willing to drop the School part and are ok with the story edging into horror-adjacent, there’s always the web serial Worm. It’s probably the other best written super hero thing but it’s decidedly darker than anything from Hayes I'm going to anti-rec Worm. I think 'best written' is a stretch compared to a bunch of other stuff out there, and it has the same fail state ending as a bunch of shonen manga, in that every plot arc needs to escalate from the last one until the ending is just 800 pages of people manifesting sudden power ups and screaming at each other as stuff blows up.
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Apr 18, 2024 21:16
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If we're talking superheroes, I would like to re-recommend this goon written book from back in January:Robert Deadford posted:Hey! I have a book on Kindle Unlimited. Coq au Nandos posted:You’re very welcome! Just finished the book and seriously well done. A really engaging story with some of the best prose and character work I’ve read in ages. I really enjoyed the way you handled superpowers as well - Superman as a gravity wizard is a fun way of thinking about things. There’s a twist around 30% into the book that totally caught me by surprise, too. I finished it myself recently and it is legit great. Superhero mysteries are hardly an oversaturated genre, either.
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Apr 18, 2024 21:29
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Marsupial Ape posted:I'm looking for something like Roadside Picnic or the Southern Reach Trilogy. I've forgotten the exact name of the genre, but the plot is usually about adventurers who travel into 'forbidden zones' where the normal rules of reality no longer apply. Going and leaving will change you, somehow. I'm thinking like a classic Dark Forest, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in STALKER, a vast dungeon with variable geometry, of even the Bermuda Triangle. If I want to be fancy, I'm looking for 'katabatic narratives' or 'descent narratives'. Thanks! Check out Katalepsis and Necroepilogos by Hungry on Royal Road. They're both really solid stories. Katalepsis posted:For Heather Morell, nightmares and hallucinations lurk around every corner, relics of schizophrenia and childhood bereavement. Necroepilogos posted:Nothing walks the black cinder of Earth except the undead leftovers, reanimated by science so advanced it may as well be magic. Twisted into unimaginable forms by flesh-shaping and machine-grafting, the undead are the only remnant of a civilization reduced to bitter ash and organic slurry. Zombies shuffle through the ruins of nuclear fire and biological warfare and far worse, alongside rusted war-machines still holding the posts of a thousand ancient conflicts, dwarfed by god-engines turned so alien that even the extinct necromancers would have run screaming.
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Apr 18, 2024 23:04
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Roadie posted:I'm going to anti-rec Worm. I think 'best written' is a stretch compared to a bunch of other stuff out there, and it has the same fail state ending as a bunch of shonen manga, in that every plot arc needs to escalate from the last one until the ending is just 800 pages of people manifesting sudden power ups and screaming at each other as stuff blows up. I don't disagree that the stakes-raising gets a bit silly by the end, which I'd say is somewhat common in the serialized format. At least for the main character, though, the power ups are mostly just her finding creative new ways to use her powers until the end-end, and there's a loooooot of story before that admittedly way over the top finale. Honestly I didn't like the finale of either of wildbow's serials so I hear you there. All that said, I felt it had above average character writing for being in the 'free shlock' pile and as primarily a horror reader I enjoyed some of the grimier elements. Totally not for everyone and I get it.
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Apr 18, 2024 23:11
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AARD VARKMAN posted:here's my schlock request: more superhero school poo poo. anything readable out there beyond Drew Hayes's two series and the web serial Super Supportive? Chris Tullbane's Murder of Crows series is pretty good.
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Apr 19, 2024 03:52
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AARD VARKMAN posted:here's my schlock request: more superhero school poo poo. anything readable out there beyond Drew Hayes's two series and the web serial Super Supportive? Focusiing on actually school setting superhero stuff instead of running with it, I can think of two, both on Royal Road: Millisecond: Superspeed is a Curse is about a highschool girl that develops extreme superspeed powers she can't really control, as in for alternating periods she experiences the world at like a thousand times normal speed. Falls into a genre that, I don't know if it has a proper name, but I tend to think of as "lesbians being cute" which honestly I'm not really a big fan of but it's not like it was written on the cover. Beyond that the power and the worldbuilding was kind of fun, with a slowish pace, but the big downside is there haven't been any updates in five months so it may be dead. Fluff: I actually haven't read this one, because it was much more upfront about it being a "lesbians being cute" book, but I've seen people talk about/recommend it. A few others come up searching Royal Road, including one called Hero High, but as usual with webfiction without a recommendation 90% of it is probably crap. Bremen fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Apr 19, 2024 |
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Apr 19, 2024 16:17
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Thanks for the recs, grabbed the Goon WrittenTM one and a few others I want to read Worm but I haven't been able to get a working ebook of it on my Kindle yet and I don't wanna read something that long on my phone.
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Apr 19, 2024 16:39
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AARD VARKMAN posted:here's my schlock request: more superhero school poo poo. anything readable out there beyond Drew Hayes's two series and the web serial Super Supportive? If the school part is less important than the “coming of age” part there’s “Wearing the Cape” series by Marion Harmon. Follows a plucky young thing who awakens as a Flying-Brick type and has to learn to be a superhero by joining a big-time super team. Also there is the Full Metal Superhero series by Jeffery Haskell about a disabled girl who builds an Iron Man suit.
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Apr 20, 2024 15:00
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I know the Locked Tomb series has a bunch of in jokes and references I don't get. But a god damned "none pizza with left beef" joke was not the poo poo I expected while God talks about what would happen if he ever died.
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May 3, 2024 19:06
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Ravus Ursus posted:I know the Locked Tomb series has a bunch of in jokes and references I don't get. But a god damned "none pizza with left beef" joke was not the poo poo I expected while God talks about what would happen if he ever died. Honestly I like most of the locked tomb jokes but this one completely brought me out of the story, cringing. It’s a serious part, too!
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May 3, 2024 19:19
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I discovered that when searching for books on KU, if you add a negative sign "-" to a search term it will be excluded from the results. "-litRPG" and "-harem" knock a whole bunch of poo poo off the top of the pile, if that's not your thing, for example.
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May 3, 2024 19:28
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Ravus Ursus posted:I know the Locked Tomb series has a bunch of in jokes and references I don't get. But a god damned "none pizza with left beef" joke was not the poo poo I expected while God talks about what would happen if he ever died. I don't remember that one, I though Harrowhark dropped the line The other that got me to actually yell was "Happy Birthday", an niche fighting game meme
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May 3, 2024 19:55
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Bremen posted:Focusiing on actually school setting superhero stuff instead of running with it, I can think of two, both on Royal Road: Fluff isn't exactly a 'superhero school' story, mainly because the protagonist would really, desperately wish for it to be something as supportive and structured as that. Instead, it's about a meek, friendly girl who's unlucky enough to live in a superhero litRPG setting with random class allocation, and gets given the 'supervillain' status plus a powerful but extremely inconvenient superpower (basically, it summons minions in the form of 'little sisters' with superpowers, basically turning her into an instant single mother to a bunch of rambunctious, criminally-inclined children). So she's stuck trying to survive all of that while still being as much of a good person as her designation and gameplay incentives allow. And yes, it's quite gay, but any romance is slow and difficult for our supervillain single-mum protagonist for reasons that should be obvious.
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May 3, 2024 20:22
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Marsupial Ape posted:I'm looking for something like Roadside Picnic or the Southern Reach Trilogy. I've forgotten the exact name of the genre, but the plot is usually about adventurers who travel into 'forbidden zones' where the normal rules of reality no longer apply. Going and leaving will change you, somehow. I'm thinking like a classic Dark Forest, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in STALKER, a vast dungeon with variable geometry, of even the Bermuda Triangle. If I want to be fancy, I'm looking for 'katabatic narratives' or 'descent narratives'. Thanks! Chasing Sunlight is pretty close to what you are asking for. It was originally published as a serial on Royal Road, but was completed and is now available on Kindle Unlimited (but still up on RR, I didn't know you were allowed to do that).
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May 4, 2024 01:25
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Thanks! I’ll put it on the list.
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May 4, 2024 02:41
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man it’s bullshit that the Kindle app can’t add stuff from KU to my library. I’m not buying anything!
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May 4, 2024 19:19
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Uh, the kindle app on iOS absolutely can do this.
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May 5, 2024 01:25
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So did I hallucinate this or did Amazon used to have a banner at the top of a book listing that showed the last time you checked it out under Kindle Unlimited?
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May 5, 2024 01:54
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It does but it appears intermittently. Unclear what triggers it.
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May 5, 2024 02:28
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Anias posted:Uh, the kindle app on iOS absolutely can do this. I was using the iOS app!
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May 12, 2024 01:07
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holy poo poo The Daily Grind 4 goes hard
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May 12, 2024 01:33
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Marsupial Ape posted:I'm looking for something like Roadside Picnic or the Southern Reach Trilogy. I've forgotten the exact name of the genre, but the plot is usually about adventurers who travel into 'forbidden zones' where the normal rules of reality no longer apply. Going and leaving will change you, somehow. I'm thinking like a classic Dark Forest, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in STALKER, a vast dungeon with variable geometry, of even the Bermuda Triangle. If I want to be fancy, I'm looking for 'katabatic narratives' or 'descent narratives'. Thanks! my first thought was The Sick Land which was published as a bunch of blog posts but is very good (also finished) and almost exactly what you are describing https://thesickland.blogspot.com/2013/03/last-day.html?m=0 about a researcher who gets posted at a station near a "zone" where poo poo is very wrong in a very Southern Reach-y kinda way
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May 12, 2024 13:05
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Blankspace posted:my first thought was The Sick Land which was published as a bunch of blog posts but is very good (also finished) and almost exactly what you are describing Let me suggest "House of Leaves" but definitely not an ebook.
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May 12, 2024 17:17
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The key thing about the presentation of House of Leaves, for those not in the know, is that every single page was manually laid out, sometimes mixing different texts, sometimes turning the text of a single narrative into geometry or scraps of words meant to mess the reader as you're following the surreal horror vibes. It's also one of the ancestors of Backrooms and other liminal horror stuff you see everywhere nowadays.
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May 12, 2024 21:55
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