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Harold Fjord posted:too many discworld books No such thing.
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Oct 29, 2020 18:08
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 16:34 |
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Harold Fjord posted:I bought too many discworld books Strange. I know all the words, and the grammar checks out, but the sentence does not make any sense.
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Oct 29, 2020 19:45
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Just finished The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. Echoing the praise, and that Monster was a bit of half-book. Looking forward to the Empress Baru Cormorant next! I really liked Amanatta's (I do audio, no idea how it's spelled) arc on the Kankreoth ship. Kicks rear end, beats down the Termite capatain, gets high as gently caress, saves the entire drat world, catches a bolt for her trouble cause she's not pale enough.
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Oct 29, 2020 20:35
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tokenbrownguy posted:Just finished The Tyrant Baru Cormorant. Echoing the praise, and that Monster was a bit of half-book. Looking forward to the Empress Baru Cormorant next! Aminata
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Oct 29, 2020 20:57
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The Killing Moon (Dreamblood #1) by NK Jemisin - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005SCS4IK/
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Oct 29, 2020 22:08
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Wolfhound Century - the sequels get better. I blasted through all three of those books hiding from terrible weather on holiday. Bliss.
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Oct 30, 2020 00:37
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quantumfoam posted:Boot camp stories need to be added to the Mil-Scifi writers merit badge. David Drake has all three, plus the ribbon for The Odyssey, but he's a legitimately good writer. And he's branched out from pure milsf in the last decade. But he still translates Latin poetry as a hobby.
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Oct 30, 2020 03:06
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im pretty sure Stross just made a worm joke. the worm fanfic community, I think. they went through a phase of loving the word copacetic and dropping it while a gang of teenage supervillains for a robbery can't be anything else. That poor man.
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Oct 30, 2020 11:43
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90s Cringe Rock posted:im pretty sure Stross just made a worm joke. the worm fanfic community, I think. they went through a phase of loving the word copacetic and dropping it while a gang of teenage supervillains for a robbery can't be anything else. What does this post mean? Worm community?
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Oct 30, 2020 12:51
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a foolish pianist posted:What does this post mean? Worm community? Worm is a very popular serialized sci-fi story. You can read more in the OP for the Web Serial thread.
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Oct 30, 2020 12:54
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worm is a story that has absolutely nothing for it beyond worldbuilding. it happened to get big during the crossover period of full-tilt avengers mania and before everyone realized how sad rational fiction was. my favorite part of worm is the extended arc where the teenage supervillains team up with the cool, suave white supremacists to beat up the bestial, poor asians. my other favorite part is how the web serial thread has increasingly come to grips with the cavalcade of unending weird poo poo that constitutes a wildbow story.
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Oct 30, 2020 13:18
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Horizon Burning posted:worm is a story that has absolutely nothing for it beyond worldbuilding. it happened to get big during the crossover period of full-tilt avengers mania and before everyone realized how sad rational fiction was. my favorite part of worm is the extended arc where the teenage supervillains team up with the cool, suave white supremacists to beat up the bestial, poor asians. my other favorite part is how the web serial thread has increasingly come to grips with the cavalcade of unending weird poo poo that constitutes a wildbow story. Jesus, I'm glad I bounced off of it before I hit that part.
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Oct 30, 2020 13:37
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Hey, it's my area of sf/f expertise. Worm's a really shaky, sprawling first draft of what could be a good YA superhero series if its word count was cut down by 50-75 percent at minimum. It has a handful of interesting ideas amid a sea of really quite dire writing, and the author is a rural Canadian who I think was home schooled for a time so his understanding of the world is a bit... off. It's a neat superhero story when it's sticking to that, but whenever the author veers into any kind of 'real world' topic it gets very bizarre, very fast. I think the thing that best illustrates Worm is that fans of it will tell you 'stick with it until Arc 8, that's when it gets good.' Arcs 1-7 constitute over 250,000 words and don't have anything close to an arc or contained narrative. What's especially unfortunate about this is that Arcs 1-7 are actually the bits where Wildbow is trying to tell an actual story. Everything after that is a mess of tensionless action scenes with increasingly higher stakes and repeated deus ex machina moments where the protagonist finds increasingly unlikely ways to get out of such situations. People love Worm because it's basically the default campaign setting of a superhero RPG textbook - there's no real story, it's just a list of events and characters and a toolbox to play around with. Hence the reams and reams of fanfic. There's a pretty sizable fandom to it, and a lot of them have never read the actual work in question. But what's interesting is that it's a Worm fandom, not a Wildbow fandom. The effect Worm's sequel - Ward - had on the whole web serial community, including Worm's core community, was fascinating, but that's a whole other topic. But to sum it up, even the SA web serial thread went from a thread where he was the golden child to the thread title being swapped out for an edit of the Rick and Morty High IQ copypasta meme. About a year ago, I heard of a pitch letter that was very much someone taking Worm and taking the good parts and turning it into a coherent story. Like, it was very, very obvious that someone had read Worm and pulled out the core bits and made it better. I always wonder what came of that. Wildbow's own attempts at publishing Worm have never panned out and, at one stage, he was openly throwing shade on an editor's suggestions on his own subreddit. But that was back when Worm's fandom was at a real fever pitch. Like I said, it's a whole fascinating topic, and a pretty interesting case study of someone getting a lot of attention and fandom without being really equipped to deal with it.
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Oct 30, 2020 13:48
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yeah it's Problematic as gently caress and the worldbuilding's a total mess even before you get into the plot. it's got a lot in common with Harry Potter. it's broken but open in a way that makes people really want to either fix it or write about their cool OC or alt-power. and there's a lot of weird fanon because people are writing fanfic based solely on reading other fanfic without reading worm itself. also coil was black and browbeat died at leviathan 90s Cringe Rock fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 30, 2020 13:50
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Coil, for those of you who don't know, was one of Worm's major antagonists. He has the ability to split any two timelines and explore actions in both of them, but gets defeated by someone paying off his mercenaries. He's also a bit of a sadistic murderer and has a precognitive child doped up on drugs whom he uses to assist his future planning. Wildbow can never decide whether Worm has determinism or not but he does love leaning on precognition as a plot device. Coil is never seen outside of his supervillain outfit which covers him from head to toe. Anyway, at one point, a fan got upset with the number of minority characters in the story and declared that they thought Coil was a cool white dude. Wildbow said that, actually, he was black. Like, just to piss the guy off, which is pretty funny. However, this means that another marker was added to the rather, ah, unfortunate tally Wildbow tends to have with his characters that aren't white or straight. Browbeat is much funnier, though. He was a fairly no-name character who showed up in one fight scene and then had, like, half-a-dozen background mentions throughout the rest of the story afterward. During Ward, the Worm sequel, the fandom insisted that all new characters were Browbeat in disguise. Now, Wildbow hates memes. Like, he tolerates them up until the moment he doesn't. This is what happened to Browbeat. One day, someone noted that Worm had been edited. The only edit it has ever received since being completed. Wildbow had gone back to the fight scene Browbeat was in and swapped 'down' for 'deceased' and then removed him from every other chapter he was mentioned in. For a time, the fandom assumed that this was because someone in Ward was altering history. No, Wildbow just really wanted the memes to stop. They didn't. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 30, 2020 14:06
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Jesus, I'm glad I bounced off of it before I hit that part. That's a bit of a...tendentious way of putting it. The white supremacists are clearly bad people from the start, and the protagonists come into conflict with them almost immediately after the Asian gang is defeated. But it is fair to say that they're portrayed as just one evil street gang among several, in a way that Wildbow probably wouldn't have done if he'd been writing post-2016.
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Oct 30, 2020 14:43
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The nazis are clearly baddies, and they're not the cool underdog protagonist baddies, but they are the shiny baddies that get the humanisation and possibility of redemption, unlike the greater azn co-prosperity gang and the homeless druggies who grab normal people on the street and inject them with drugs to make them addicts.
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Oct 30, 2020 14:48
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Another good part is when the white protagonist gets attacked by the "savage" black school bully and her black love interest is only allowed to enter the store and help her because the black shop owner thinks he will help beat the white girl up
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Oct 30, 2020 14:52
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When the rich white nazi lady baddy goes on a city wide murder spree because the government took her baby, she gets a slap on the wrist and she and her extended family get to live together under house arrest When the poor asian man baddy gets attacked by the Nazi group and escapes, he gets thrown in super jail where mention is made of a man hating feminist cell block leader Or who could forget Bastion, the racist superhero who said gamer words on camera and had his life ruined by bleeding heart liberals but got a big redemptive moment during the leviathan fight despite never appearing in the story before and being otherwise irrelevant to anything that happened afterward Or how about
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Oct 30, 2020 14:57
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The bit where the nazi's son becomes a superhero and calls himself golem because gently caress nazis is pretty funny though.
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Oct 30, 2020 14:58
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A totally underdeveloped character though, but yeah golem is a neat idea. unfortunately he shows up during the absolute nadir of work with the s9000 and all that and he's kind of poisoned by proximity
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Oct 30, 2020 15:00
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90s Cringe Rock posted:The nazis are clearly baddies, and they're not the cool underdog protagonist baddies, but they are the shiny baddies that get the humanisation and possibility of redemption, unlike the greater azn co-prosperity gang and the homeless druggies who grab normal people on the street and inject them with drugs to make them addicts. The thing that baffles me about Worm's take on white supremacists is that it's obviously the section of Worm that Wildbow did the most research into. He'll have chapters built around incorrect info/assumptions in easily researched things like not knowing how a flashbang works or which kinds of spiders are venemous, or repeated bits where he confuses radar and sonar, and arcs built around not knowing what an aquifer is etc. and then whenever the Empire Eighty Eight shows up there'll be a few paragraphs of detail about their iconography and symbols and code words and what they mean. Between that, the character of Golem, and stuff he has said about wanting to make the E88 not just cardboard cut outs to beat up (a treatment the other gangs didn't get) I've always wondered if, like, he had some friends or family who'd been caught up in that sort of thing. Edit: It's also probably not on-topic for this thread, so, whatever. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 30, 2020 15:19
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Before we get off the Wildbow digression, is Twig worth reading? It was recommended to me ages ago, but I never really tried it.
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Oct 30, 2020 16:56
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Marshal Radisic posted:Before we get off the Wildbow digression, is Twig worth reading? It was recommended to me ages ago, but I never really tried it. Twig is good, yes. (Pact, however, is not.)
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Oct 30, 2020 17:30
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Marshal Radisic posted:Before we get off the Wildbow digression, is Twig worth reading? It was recommended to me ages ago, but I never really tried it. Twig was my favorite WB story, but it has all the problems his other stories do and a few brand-new ones that the others do not. Replacing the weird racial poo poo is a ton of weird and creepy sex poo poo, and the story constantly lies to you to the point that it feels like thinking about the story is an actively nonconstructive activity. I still recommend giving it a try, just be aware that if you find yourself going "Holy poo poo, <X> was weird and/or creepy, I really hope the story doesn't do that again," the story is totally going to do that again. Speaking of which, I am still kind of weirded out by the race poo poo in Worm. If it were just tasteless crap it'd be one thing, but the sheer amount of minute, detailed trivia Taylor knows about white supremacist poo poo makes me wonder how many hours the author spend diving down that rabbit hole. Like, I thought it was a plot point, and we were eventually going to learn that Taylor was a veritable font of Unfun Nazi Facts because she was kind of a garbage person, and either internalized or intentionally embraced the worst of her city's culture. And then the story just kinda dropped it and moved on, like it almost always does. That's the thing with WB's stories- they aren't 100% bad, he semi-consistently comes up with interesting worldbuilding ideas or fun concepts, but I don't know if I have even once seen him fully develop an idea and take it from setup through a final payoff. Reading his stories feels more like reading the very rough draft of a tabletop gaming manual- it shotguns ideas everywhere, then leaves them sitting on the floor in case the reader wants to do something interesting with them.
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Oct 30, 2020 18:44
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webserials seem to suffer from insane bloat
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Oct 30, 2020 18:52
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PsychedelicWarlord posted:webserials seem to suffer from insane bloat
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Oct 30, 2020 19:11
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90s Cringe Rock posted:pirateaba lol I haven't read it, but from everything I've heard The Wandering Inn sounds less like a web serial with a bloat problem, and more like a bloat with a web serial problem.
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Oct 30, 2020 19:26
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It's really good though and I love getting tens of thousands of words of it every week.
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Oct 30, 2020 19:34
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That's totally fair- I looked at some of the first arc when I first heard about it, and the bloat/lack of a narrative spine is really my only big gripe, and that's not a dealbreaker for most serial fans so I can totally see why people enjoy it.
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Oct 30, 2020 19:56
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The sheer number of words that come out each week is the only thing that makes the pacing bearable. Though so many people really like the model, maybe there's an underserved market for slice of life fantasy?
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Oct 30, 2020 20:04
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I thought LitRPG was the bottom of the well, but no....
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Oct 30, 2020 20:08
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buffalo all day posted:I thought LitRPG was the bottom of the well, but no.... *laughs in translated chinese web-novel*
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Oct 30, 2020 20:08
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Oh it does have litrpg elements And isekai
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Oct 30, 2020 20:08
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StrixNebulosa posted:*laughs in translated chinese web-novel*
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Oct 30, 2020 20:09
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Wandering Inn, even with its immense pacing issues, is still one of the better LitRPG's around.
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Oct 30, 2020 20:46
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quantumfoam posted:Boot camp stories need to be added to the Mil-Scifi writers merit badge. I bet it's easier for the average reader to empathize with the lowly boot. I'm trying to think of a pre-2001 milSF series that isn't one of these three things that isn't The Forever War or Bujold's Vorkosigan series and it isn't really working. I've seen some (pun intended) novel milSF in the last ten years though.
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Oct 30, 2020 21:03
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buffalo all day posted:I thought LitRPG was the bottom of the well, but no.... quote:
There is absolutely no shortage of these things: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=harem+litrpg&ref=nb_sb_noss_2
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Oct 30, 2020 21:16
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Cicero posted:Wandering Inn, even with its immense pacing issues, is still one of the better LitRPG's around. Praise so faint that we should call it an ambulance
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Oct 30, 2020 21:20
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 16:34 |
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Uhh.. did this thread decide to dress up as the litRPG/web serials thread for Halloween?
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Oct 30, 2020 21:31
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