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I have horrible taste and am reading more web novels than books now but sometimes the writing gets to me. Recently I think it was The Hedge Wizard where everyone is screaming, sometimes more than once in a paragraph. No one shouts, yelps, bellows, or grunts... just screams. Edit: Not even a shriek in surprise. Kyoujin fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Jul 16, 2021 |
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Jul 16, 2021 06:26
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As someone who has been on a strict update schedule for about 6 months now, I can say from experience that people are lucky fast serials have punctuation at all, tbh. Having to grind out a chapter on a week when the enthusiasm just isn't there turns your brain into soup.
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Jul 16, 2021 07:00
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Kalas posted:Legend of Randidly McUberskills BOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM and so I immediately notice when some other writer has cribbed from it (lookin' at you, primal hunter)
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Jul 16, 2021 15:43
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Feeling like the last chapter of Worth the Candle is a significantly weaker ending than the penultimate one.  Needs one of those warnings like the end of The Dark Tower got. "This is completely unnecessary unless you are terminally r/rational poisoned".
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Jul 16, 2021 17:15
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Feeling like the last chapter of Worth the Candle is a significantly weaker ending than the penultimate one. 
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Jul 16, 2021 17:29
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🕯 rip henry
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Jul 16, 2021 17:41
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Feeling like the last chapter of Worth the Candle is a significantly weaker ending than the penultimate one. Are you a Patreon backer or is it posted somewhere besides Royal Road? I just binged the entire thing and am on the cliffhanger.Incidentally, binging this story is a terrible way to read it. It is very clearly written to be released and read in several-chapter batches with weeks between releases, and blitzing through all of those big beats one right after the other was pretty exhausting.
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Jul 16, 2021 19:38
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Backer. He usually goes public with it a few days after it goes up on the patreon, I think.
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Jul 16, 2021 20:44
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I really enjoyed WtC. It was a fun ride.
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Jul 17, 2021 15:51
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Yes, that was exactly the ending I expected, and... done reasonably well, for what it was. Well done, that bloke, for writing and ending a story. I liked it.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:32
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One thing that bugs me when it shows up in writing is when someone says "I nervously bit my lip until it bled." I don't know if my lips are just made differently than other people's, but lips are very sensitive and it hurts like hell to actually bite them (much less hard enough to bleed). It's not like biting a piece of beef jerky or something.
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Jul 17, 2021 18:30
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Ytlaya posted:One thing that bugs me when it shows up in writing is when someone says "I nervously bit my lip until it bled." I don't know if my lips are just made differently than other people's, but lips are very sensitive and it hurts like hell to actually bite them (much less hard enough to bleed). It's not like biting a piece of beef jerky or something. I think your lips are different from mine at least. I have often done that.
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Jul 17, 2021 18:36
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Is it metaphorical? You probably don't get so mad you spit blood or have constant nosebleeds around women either.
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Jul 17, 2021 19:25
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The ending to Worth the Candle was exactly what I expected it to be and I wish I hadn’t read it. ”Hello, it’s me, God, here are the answers to all of the questions” is so, so much less satisfying than ending on “now I have finally said goodbye to my friend”. WtC’s audience is generally the kind of people who really want all the answers, though, and it really is the kind of story where all the answers are always spelled out, so I didn’t expect anything different.
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Jul 17, 2021 20:28
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Scaevolus posted:Is it metaphorical? You probably don't get so mad you spit blood or have constant nosebleeds around women either. It seems to be pretty literal because characters in first-person will be like "suddenly I tasted blood because I had been biting my lip hard in nervousness" or whatever. And according to the post below this is apparently a thing that can actually happen: Sibling of TB posted:I think your lips are different from mine at least. I have often done that.
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Jul 17, 2021 20:48
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My lips get dry a lot and, when they do, chewing on them makes them bleed a little bit. It's really unpleasant so I always have some lip balm handy.
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Jul 17, 2021 21:20
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Yeah, it's less biting down and more pinching and chewing very thin strips of flesh. It's an anxiety thing in some people.
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Jul 17, 2021 22:02
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Stumbled across Breaker of Horizons and it’s actually pretty good! It mashes a bunch of tropes together (invasive litrpg system, cultivation, monster protagonist) and comes up with something pretty original. It’s very combat-heavy and not a whole lot of character interaction, but the combat is real meaty and the narrative glue between fights paints a good picture and drives the story forward pretty decisively.
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Jul 18, 2021 00:16
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I've been enjoying Outcast in Another World Despite the generic title it has been pretty interesting with a human transported to (early setting spoilers)a fantasy land where the other races genocided humans a decade prior. It has lit rpg elements but not too heavy outside of the full character sheet posted at the end of chapters in spoiler tags.
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Jul 18, 2021 00:27
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Ytlaya posted:One thing that bugs me when it shows up in writing is when someone says "I nervously bit my lip until it bled." I don't know if my lips are just made differently than other people's, but lips are very sensitive and it hurts like hell to actually bite them (much less hard enough to bleed). It's not like biting a piece of beef jerky or something. I bite my lips/cheeks so hard they bleed like, every night, while asleep.
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Jul 18, 2021 01:00
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Anyone know if Mother of Learning has an audio book? The google results I am getting are confusing.blastron posted:Stumbled across Breaker of Horizons and it’s actually pretty good! It mashes a bunch of tropes together (invasive litrpg system, cultivation, monster protagonist) and comes up with something pretty original. It’s very combat-heavy and not a whole lot of character interaction, but the combat is real meaty and the narrative glue between fights paints a good picture and drives the story forward pretty decisively. I’ve been enjoying that as well, but the MC is weirdly dickish. Not consistently so, but it feels like every so often the author wakes up on the wrong side of bed and suddenly decides to have the MC do something evil.
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Jul 18, 2021 02:35
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LLSix posted:I’ve been enjoying that as well, but the MC is weirdly dickish. Not consistently so, but it feels like every so often the author wakes up on the wrong side of bed and suddenly decides to have the MC do something evil. that's just how cultivation protagonists are. stories where the protagonist isn't randomly a dickhead are basically considered inversions of the genre simply because of that one change
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Jul 18, 2021 02:42
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blastron posted:Stumbled across Breaker of Horizons and it’s actually pretty good! It mashes a bunch of tropes together (invasive litrpg system, cultivation, monster protagonist) and comes up with something pretty original. It’s very combat-heavy and not a whole lot of character interaction, but the combat is real meaty and the narrative glue between fights paints a good picture and drives the story forward pretty decisively.
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Jul 18, 2021 03:39
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LLSix posted:Anyone know if Mother of Learning has an audio book? The google results I am getting are confusing. It might have some terrible fan audio book, but Mother of Learning hasn't been published yet, so there isn't an official one. (although, I kind of doubt it would get one unless the published version does really well.)
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Jul 18, 2021 04:00
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LLSix posted:Anyone know if Mother of Learning has an audio book? The google results I am getting are confusing. Apparently Jack Voraces was putting out chapters as a free podcast; but seems to have abandoned the project. There are three chapters posted on castbox and that seems to be it.
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Jul 18, 2021 04:30
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https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/comments/l1bpr7/mother_of_learning_audiobook_good_news_and_bad/
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Jul 18, 2021 11:08
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Feeling like the last chapter of Worth the Candle is a significantly weaker ending than the penultimate one. Also, to be clear, it sounds like the dungeon master is just Alexander Wales, the author, right? He's talked about Joon being a kind of self-insert before IIRC, and the DM has some obvious parallels to Joon.
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Jul 18, 2021 21:45
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Cicero posted:It's that the ending of Worth the Candle is very Worth the Candle. It would've been out of place if you didn't have a chapter like that, I think. It does sound like that’s what’s implied, but I don’t think we can actually assume it’s true. The DM talks about how there are very close parallels between his history and Juniper’s backstory, but unless the author comes forward to talk more about his own past then we really can’t know. Did Alexander Wales really write Worth the Candle as a way to process the death of a friend, castigate himself for his sins, and work through his mental issues? I don’t think we’ll ever know, no matter how hard the comments section pushes, unless the author truly wants to step forward (or the people he based Juniper’s backstory on do it for him).
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Jul 18, 2021 23:09
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After the many years of people speculating that that was exactly what was going on with WtC, it would be deeply funny for Wales to have written a chapter explicitly stating that it's all a story written by a guy trying to work through some poo poo, but like, as a joke. Supreme shitposting energy, that. e: Just for you guys, I went to the discord to see what he was saying about it and he quoted this reddit comment he'd made:  It doesn't address the question directly, but I don't see how what he says here makes any sense if Cicero is wrong. KOGAHAZAN!! fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Jul 18, 2021 |
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Jul 18, 2021 23:25
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That’s pretty conclusive, then!
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Jul 19, 2021 00:19
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Just wanted to also say that Worth the Candle is my favorite fantasy work and just an incredible achievement. Oh, there are still problems in there, sure, but given the kind of story it was going for I'm blown away that it turned out as well as it did. "Author self-insert isekai LitRPG with lots of meta-narrative" in the average case would likely be a steaming pile of poo poo. But then again I like it when stories go weird and meta in a way where it gets very hard to predict what's going to happen, so WtC is basically perfect for me.
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Jul 19, 2021 01:38
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Now that it's over, what's your favorite WtC person/monster/place/object/mechanic? I'm partial to Actual Cannibal Shia LeBouf as a deadly serious instance of spooky ghost stories, but the antimemetic stuff was fun too. Sanderson would come up with one magic system from WtC and write a book around it, Wales just drops it in then goes "eh it's too broken, exclusion zone".
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Jul 19, 2021 06:47
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I really liked dwarf culture and Grak's arc/companion quest. I think the author did a fantastic job of remixing standard dwarf tropes in a way that felt real. You can see some of the common themes, but they're taken seriously, not just played for laughs. Also liked the take on unicorns, and the barbaric corpse fuckers becoming highly civilized/internationalized was a cute little sidenote.
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Jul 19, 2021 06:58
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Scaevolus posted:I'm partial to Actual Cannibal Shia LeBouf as a deadly serious instance of spooky ghost stories, but the antimemetic stuff was fun too. i thought this was maybe the best part of the whole story, yeah. i dropped it a while ago but i do think there were a lot of fun and cool ideas in WtC, i just don't like the way it handles the main character like...at all. he's a pretty decent person who's constantly told by everyone else that he's kind of a piece of poo poo, until fenn dies and then he is actually not a good person, at least for long enough that i dropped it. given the context of the story being even more self-insert-y than i had realized (i definitely didn't realize that arthur was basically a real person for example), i think that maybe the author simply assumed that joon being lovely, weak, poor at interpersonal relationships, etc. was so self-evident that he didn't realize that within the story there was really not a lot of evidence that any of that was true, until suddenly he's acting really lovely seemingly out of nowhere. like fenn writes that letter that's delivered to joon post-mortem, and basically assassinates his character really hard. and then the points that she brings up about him in this character assassination seem to suddenly become things that are factually bad about him, rather than having always been that way.
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Jul 19, 2021 07:14
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I'm honestly a big fan of Fel Seed. It started off as a vague threatening thing in the background that Juniper didn't want to talk about, then it kept getting built up as this increasingly large threat until we finally get an explanation, but then we actually get to see the Fel Seed Incident and it's even worse than the explanation, and then after a ton of gearing up to kill him it turns out that he's actually completely unbeatable and kills Juniper, and then finally, when he's ultimately defeated in round two, he's erased from existence so completely that he takes Juniper's memories of the Fel Seed Incident along with him, erasing Juniper's greatest regret as a GM. I also like the concept of exclusions, especially when that concept is played straight and we get both descriptions of how much more magical the world used to be as well as how much worse the world becomes as more things get excluded, like when rune magic gets excluded and soul bottling no longer works.
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Jul 19, 2021 07:28
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I stole so many ideas from WTC for my RPG campaign.
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Jul 19, 2021 13:11
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I'd do the same. Especially that loving unicorn. Creepy rear end mother
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Jul 19, 2021 19:49
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I read all of what's written so far of Only Villains Do That. It's not bad. I don't like it as much as I liked the first several arcs of The Gods Are Bastards, but it's a decently compelling narrative and a few of the side characters are loads of fun.
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Jul 19, 2021 21:29
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The premise was fun, but the author lost me somewhat. Not terribly interested in him exploring his second-hand PTSD and I'm growing increasingly tired of the whole Prostitute Liberator plotline.
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Jul 19, 2021 21:41
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Megazver posted:The premise was fun, but the author lost me somewhat. Not terribly interested in him exploring his second-hand PTSD and I'm growing increasingly tired of the whole Prostitute Liberator plotline. That's actually half the reason I'm interested in it at all. It's satisfying to read a story about someone dealing with the psychological consequences of being a murderhobo for once.
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Jul 19, 2021 22:18
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