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30.5 Days posted:WOAH WOAH HEY WOAH Also if I recall all of the veterans Carl has talked to have been really "I can't tell you why, but don't take any deal they offer you unless you absolutely have to" implying there's something odd going on and they're blocked from talking about it in a way that's clearly foreshadowing.
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Apr 9, 2022 16:31
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Haystack posted:So, what have you folks read lately? Any gems? Turds? I-enjoyed-reading-it-but-I'm-exactly-singing-its-praises? I went on vacation and decided to subscribe to KU and load my kindle up with free books to minimize the risk I would spend my vacation doing anything actually enriching. Blessed Time: Protagonist goes through mandatory adulthood system initialization and gets an ability that lets him go back in time 5 years. Decides not to use it because he doesn't want to go through childhood again, fate laughs and his city gets razed by an invading army a year later. In my experience there's really two kinds of time loop stories, the Mother of Learning type where it's all about the protagonist becoming more powerful and learning about the world, and the Re:Zero type where it's all about the the timeloop being an excuse for the protagonist to suffer. This one was more the former, and really just dissimilar enough to MoL to not feel like it's the same story with different names. I found it inoffensive enough (though I often wanted to yell at the protagonist for stupid choices) to read the first two books, which finished off the story neatly, then book 3 jumps way into the future with a completely new plot, which makes me suspect the author exhausted their original concept but the series was successful enough to want to keep writing. If you read MoL and wanted more, this might be worth checking out. If you haven't read MoL, it's much better than this was. Nice Dragons Finish Last: Shadowrun style near future "Magic Returns" story where the protagonist is a dragon (I like dragons and MCs who are them). I was a little worried about the title but it is in fact a reference to almost all dragons in the setting being complete assholes, while the protagonist is actually the odd one out by being nice. And not just normal human nice, either, at one point he starts working a magical pest control job but struggles for money because he keeps releasing the animals somewhere safe instead of turning them in for the bounty (since they'll be killed for their magical parts) because sure, that magic dire badger tried to gnaw his arm off, but it really just wants to live a normal magic dire badger life. Despite this all he manages to succeed and become important, eventually saving the world as protagonists do. Or I assume he will since after four and a half books I temporarily set it aside to read something else, as the end was in sight and I was no longer kept curious about where things were going. I was somewhat annoyed by the books having a device where he is being (knowingly) lead by the nose by a character that can see the future and thus it's pretty obvious things will always work out in the end, but I suppose that's just an in world justification for plot armor. Overall a pretty good series if you want Urban fantasy dragons in a Shadowrun style setting. This Quest is Bullshit: A very lighthearted LitRPG series about a character with a quest to go buy a loaf of bread, only to find that bakeries burn down and flour stockpiles vanish whenever she enters a town. The first three books in the series are honestly quite enjoyable banter and hijinks, then the fourth book appears to remember there was supposed to be a plot and races to finish everything up (which it does relatively neatly, if hastily). Despite the short description this was probably my favorite of the three, it very much feels like the adventures of a RPG campaign party, except more witty. Possibly my favorite part was the MC managing to join the super elite guild so exclusive they haven't accepted any new applicants in 50 years only to find it's now a retirement home for elderly but overpowered adventurers. And if you're going to write a LitRPG you might as well take advantage of it for cool powers and explosive growth. Next on my list, Gods of Blood and Bone by Azalea Ellis. I may report back. Bremen fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Sep 7, 2022 |
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Sep 7, 2022 16:08
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Anias posted:Gods of blood and bone was strange but not bad. I liked a lot of the things it did, but wanted it to focus on different things than it eventually settled on. Looking forward to trip reports. I just finished it and odd describes it well. I'm not sure I'll finish the series - it's not that it's bad but I have so many other KU books competing for my interest. I picked it up because I've greatly enjoyed the webserial A Practical Guide to Sorcery by the same author, but Gods of Blood and Bone didn't hook me like that story did.
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Sep 9, 2022 22:08
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Anias posted:I read Gods of Blood and Bone et al first, and avoided APGtS based on that, I may have to give APGtS another look. Guess it goes on the "to be read in the future" pile. Here's what I said about APGtS in the webserial thread. I don't know if it's for you, but it's definitely very different from Gods of Blood and Bone: quote:So, for a completely different take on broke mage with financial trouble, I've recently been catching up on A Practical Guide to Sorcery (not to be confused with that other Practical Guide).
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Sep 10, 2022 22:44
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Not a book review, but I just went to cancel my Kindle Unlimited subscription (I'd only gotten it to cover my vacation) and it popped up with a "special offer" to get 3 months for the price of one if I wanted to stay. Probably they're hoping I forget to cancel, but I thought I'd mention it in case anyone else wants to try their luck.
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Nov 14, 2022 02:52
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DACK FAYDEN posted:You're not using it because it's backed by the full faith and credit of Uncle Sam, though, you're using it for the same reasons the original Fallout used bottle caps. (later games introduced "clear out this bottle cap production plant" etc) If the currency is imposed by a ruler, it'll be something they can control. So not dollars that everyone already has and the ruler can't make more of. If the currency is used by traders or local farmers or whatever, they won't want it to be something people already have sitting around because they don't want anyone to go "Wait, you'll take (x) for food? I've got a ton of that I don't want anymore, give me everything you have" which just leaves the trader screwed. So again, not dollars; bottlecaps at least have the advantage that few people have large numbers of them sitting around, but they aren't great either. I remember in The Postman (the book) they used two dollar bills and half dollars because they were convenient but not something many people had large quantities of. But come to think of it I haven't seen either of those in a long time.
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Jan 15, 2023 17:18
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Telsa Cola posted:Except if you can trade dollars for food or ammo or medicine it's not probably something you are going to want to get rid of all at once, because you can use it for future purchases. And the trader can adjust prices accordingly even if that was the case. Just because one trader starts accepting formerly worthless dollars doesn't mean they all will. If there's a government, sure, the government can make it law that the dollar is legal currency, but in this scenario there either is no government or they're a warlord with no interest in forcing a currency they don't control. So... if I'm a trader I can just wake up one day and decide I'll start accepting dollars. Maybe I even know how much old money everyone has so I price things at something ridiculous, $500 for a flat can of coke, so that even if everyone spends all their money they can only buy half my merchandise. Everyone proceeds to do so. I then go to a farmer and say "hey, I want to buy some of your corn to sell, I'll give you this huge stack of dollars" and he goes no. I try to tell him that he can use those dollars to buy more flat coke from me, but he doesn't trust me and knows the dollars that might get torn up by rats so he just trades the corn for the flat coke. The other merchants will never agree to take USD because they know I have all of it. The end result is that I am out half my merchandise and only have a big pile of useless money to show for it. So there's no reason for an independent trader to do this either. There is basically no value in deciding to prop up a currency everyone else already has in large quantities.
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Jan 15, 2023 21:18
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Cicero posted:I'm going through Re:Monarch right now and it kinda feels like a cross between Cradle and Mother of Learning? The protagonist and plot both feel driven like Cradle (albeit not quite to the same extreme), and there's the time loop/mystery aspect like Mother of Learning. The characters don't have the same likable sitcom quality that Cradle does, though. But the writing level is definitely very high for progression fantasy, it feels like roughly published author level, pretty much never have to roll my eyes at stupid rear end dialogue or prose. I kind of divide time loops stories into two categories. You have the Groundhog Day stories where time keeps repeating on its own, the story usually mainly focuses on character growth/progression, and the goal is finding a way out of the loop. Then there is a second type based around an anime called Re:Zero, where the time resets every time the main character dies, the story tends to focus on the MC suffering and dying over and over again, and the goal is finding a way to survive the usually horrific events about to happen. Mother of Learning is the first type and Re:Monarch is, as indicated by the name, the second type. I'm generally not a fan of the second type, they honestly come off as glorifying way too much in the MC suffering for me to be happy with them. They almost by definition have to be really dark in order to create a situation the MC can't survive with one or two runs worth of foreknowledge. That said, I will admit that you're right that the writing level for Re:Monarch is quite high for a Webserial turned TU book and for those that are fans of the second type of story it's probably a good choice. Bremen fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Jan 20, 2023 |
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Jan 20, 2023 17:11
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Gwaihir posted:+1, Yeah, Glynn Stewart cranks out an absolutely insane amount of writing, and it's all pretty respectably enjoyable. All the Duchy of Terra books kind of follow the same formula and I dropped them after awhile, but I had a lot of fun with the first few.
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Jul 11, 2023 20:38
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Darth Walrus posted:Here's hoping that their design for Lindon is thuggish as gently caress. Would be interesting to see how he looks beating up 12 year olds for the tournament.
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Dec 18, 2023 20:12
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30.5 Days posted:That's interesting, tower of Somnus has the same premise and I enjoyed it They're very different stories, for what it's worth. Stray Cat Strut is more a semi-comedic cyberpunk story with the premise of "what if aliens let humans gun down zerg for points to buy supertech equipment."
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Feb 22, 2024 04:04
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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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