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I really dislike how HPMOR has sort of, I don't know, seemingly set this standard for what fan appreciation should be in the eyes of a lot of people. For example, fanfiction. It's like it turns self-inserts from something that was once a laughable thing where you would be mocked for into this thing where it's fine providing you go, oh, no, this is an AU Harry. It feels like a lot of fanfiction has set about trying to 'fix' the work the author puts out, all the while jamming in pop culture references flavored with 'I've only ever watched anime' dialogue and actions. This is, of course, excepting the utterly bizarre fact that he wrote this without reading, understanding or particularly caring about Harry Potter. You see it with Wildbow's Worm stuff, too. It's a superhero universe that feels really unique and modern with a cast of interesting characters - but the fans only care about how uber the protagonist is and writing AU fanfic (or crossover fanfic or fetishbait fanfic). Admittedly, I was only really active in fandom circles over a decade ago (on Spacebattles, funnily enough), but it's like seeing the next generation and wondering what's going on. It astounds me that people actually like Yudkowski or think he's particularly interesting. Seriously, Roko's Basilisk?
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Jan 5, 2017 14:57
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Dienes posted:This is especially sad, since a big part of the story is how the MC's power is kinda wimpy compared to the people that can shoot lasers, be invincible, turn into dragons, etc. They love it so much, and yet miss the point. It does make me wonder what the Worm re-edit will look like, given that the fanbase is hugely those sorts of people. Tunicate posted:I never really understood the idea that having essentially perfect perception miles in radius was wimpy. Well, her power was never quite perfect perception in the beginning, that's what it became later. Initially, it was just 'bug control in x radius', which then became 'bug magic', which then became 'bug magic AND perfect perception/multi-tasking'. Like how Tattletale went from having a power that could be stymied by wrong input or assumptions, then she becomes a walking deus ex machina plot device. That's kind of what happens with the whole text, really. Interesting street-level ideas get blown out to ridiculous extremes due to unending, ceaseless escalation towards the cosmic-scale. And a lot of the ideas - for example, the unwritten gun rule - fail to survive any scrutiny and get handwaved with 'a conspiracy from outside time and space made things that way'. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Jan 6, 2017 |
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Jan 6, 2017 00:43
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Eh, the comparison doesn't fit. Magneto's power is some kind of absurdly potent control over and awareness of magnetic forces. At its basic level, being able to manipulate electromagnetism is far more potent than 'controlling bugs in a 6-block radius'. Taylor's strength comes from her ability to think around situations and apply her power to soft targets (sometimes literally). For example, shoving bugs inside Armsmaster's helmet. As a whole though, Taylor is one of the poorer parts of Worm and part of that is because her ability to think around problems is replaced by just being able to magic up things with her bugs and/or the post-hoc justification that her power is actually some kind of super administration ability. edit: Similar to the WoG justification that Dragon's power isn't the fact that she's an AI or a Tinker who can reverse-engineer existing technology, she's a Thinker who can make Tinker equipment. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Jan 6, 2017 |
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Jan 6, 2017 04:32
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divabot posted:The ones who bothered with Pact and Twig have mostly thought he did better with those. Pact had another amazing world but it had way more fight scenes and non-stop escalation. I liked the world of Pact much more than the story. Couldn't get into Twig. quote:I expect Worm 2 will be as if millions of fanon voices cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. It'll be the indie equivalent of the EU decanonisation. Absolutely. It'll be fun to see. quote:The author specifically doesn't want such a thing available as he fears it being bootlegged. And that it'd affect the ability to get Worm published. It would probably also suck to have a 'super first draft' of any published story out there. I remember John Dies at the End pulling the (somewhat superior) version from the web when David Wong got it published in print.
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Jan 6, 2017 10:21
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Unironic use of the word Omake outside of its proper context. Weeaboo! Weeaboo!
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Jan 9, 2017 09:26
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divabot posted:Still common on fanfiction.net and of course on SpaceBattles, which is ahhh weeaboos from shore to shining shore. Spacebattles actually used to have fairly high standards, back when it was more about the fictional versus debates than the fanfiction (Hollewanderer, who I think is the fanfiction mod, was basically taught fluent English by many of the members, for example). It nosedived sometime around 2005-2006 (the admin team even put up a big WE ARE NOT 4CHAN, STOP POSTING IMAGE MACROS announcement) but it never really recovered. It astounds me that the place still exists, really.
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Jan 9, 2017 09:53
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divabot posted:(which formed when SB's owner was AWOL and the site was literally not working properly) Happened many times through SB.com history.
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Jan 9, 2017 10:06
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Tiggum posted:What the gently caress does this mean? I think he's saying that a professional editor has never told an author that an antagonist is too much of a threat to the protagonist of any given story.
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Jan 9, 2017 10:10
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divabot posted:This is approximately correct. The explicitly pornographic one is Questionable Questing and if you read it you get everything you deserve (you can't read the NSFW section without being logged in). The other one is Sufficient Velocity, which forked from SB in 2014 when SB was literally not working properly. All three now run XenForo with approximately the same extensions, and the community floats between the three. All three are dominated by Worm fans. I thought I was going completely mental when I saw that SB.com has, like, upvotes now on posts.
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Jan 10, 2017 13:12
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Doctor Spaceman posted:I know fanfic is by definition allowed to change elements of canon but it's worth pointing out that Transfiguration in HPMOR works nothing like it does in the books / movies (including Partial Transfiguration being a thing that happens multiple times). I'm trying to dredge up a series of posts I made in, I think, GBS with Crows or Pick about the generational shift in fan works where older fanfic writers would try to change as little as possible whereas the younger generation seems to have no qualms about upending everything and 'fixing' things. Self-Inserts used to be laughed at but now SI AU is a term used by a lot of fanfic writers and you get more writers, like Yud, who openly admit they don't know much, if anything about the universe beyond names and character traits, so they set it in a high school or something. Unfortunately, the posts are all gone, it looks like.
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Jan 12, 2017 03:13
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reignonyourparade posted:Even though I disagree with 90% of Yud's view on the matter, yeah, I really don't see anything wrong with "Fanfiction as argument with the creator." I think it's somewhat childish to take someone's work and basically misinterpret it to argue your own points. You can get away with it if you have a deep knowledge and appreciation of the source material, I think, but Yud clearly doesn't.
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Mar 18, 2017 05:46
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NihilCredo posted:Parents, talk to your kids about astronomy before someone else does. Someone has to have the Tim and Eric bit on hand, the one where they shine lights through a kid's window late at night against the wishes of his parents so they can teach him about the stars.
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Mar 19, 2017 13:58
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I've always thought it pretty indicative of immortality-seeking when it is the domain of almost every villain in popular media. "I don't want to die" or "I want to stop someone I love from dying" or "No one should die" always leads to ruin. It's one of those things that always seems to sound like a noble goal to people who are overly idealistic. Wouldn't it be good to stop people from dying? But you know what happens to a world in which no one dies? The same thing that happens to your body. Cancer.
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Apr 9, 2017 07:55
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:We wouldn't even make it to overcrowding. We'd hit economic and social collapse within a couple of generations. You think the Millennial job market is hosed now, wait until you see what happens to the generation that's born after the generation that literally never retires, ever. No, that wouldn't happen, you stupid pro-deather, society would ~*~magically change~*~ to make immortality a net good. Don't ask how society changing would alter things that are actually finite like, say, living space, and let's not get started on things it'd exacerbate like anthropogenic climate change and resource consumption. And the generational shift from when people die? No, wouldn't happen. Democracies of the eternal voter wouldn't result in any problems. More importantly, people getting really mad about the existence of death as a concept wouldn't get even more weirdly Goonish about it when death becomes rarer, assuming the immortality isn't perfect immortality. "If you argue that it is inevitable for robot-body hard drives to crash, then you're arguing pro-death! PRO-DEATHER!" If you say anything else, you are *checks notes* "arguing in favor of the existence of death just to make sure you're on the opposite side of him on as many issues as possible". You know, as opposed to just thinking that death is a part of life and you're going to die eventually and not counting on some kind of weird magical thinking to save the entire human race and form a glorious utopia should we find some kind of cheap, easily-produced and distributed strong immortality drug tomorrow. If we lived for two-hundred years or five-hundred or a thousand and if death only came from violence or Super AIDS, it'd still be a mark of immaturity to argue that anyone who accepts death as a concept is pro-death. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Apr 9, 2017 |
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Apr 9, 2017 23:32
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Tiggum posted:This argument works on literally anything. All you're saying is "progress is bad because bad things might happen and maybe we wouldn't be able to come up with solutions." You remind me of an old man I used to talk with. He was adamant that no matter how bad it got, no matter how much of the permafrost was melted away, no matter how many species went extinct, no matter how much of the oceans were acidified, that "someone, somewhere" was going to develop a golden bullet to fix and even reverse climate change because that's what science does. Like scientists are wizards who will pull humanity from the brink. Same thing here. 'If we all become immortal, society will magically create a solution'. There's this idea that scientists can just magic up utopian strong immortality if enough people believe in it and you're an idiot to argue that it 1. might not be possible and 2. even if it was, there are huge other factors to think about. What, you're so worried about dying and being remembered only as SA Poster Tiggum that you need to get this vehement over it? It's weird! Come up with a solution, then, if I'm being so obstinate and my objections are so obvious. What do you do when people don't die? Let's assume the world up is made up of people who hit their prime and stop aging (let's say 25) and our medical technology has advanced to such an extent that even grievous wounds can be healed immediately and all sickness is a thing of the past, which seems to be the world some posters in this thread will expect to magically happen because it is "progress". As I said, accepting the possibility of death is the sign of a mature person. It's a sign of the immature person that equating someone accepting death as a part of life is arguing for death. It's a very surreal thing to see people insisting that immortality - something that'd utterly alter human nature to an extent that it'd dwarf any other discovery in human history - would just be something like the telephone. Oh, people will just adapt. We'll figure out a "solution" to this, because we believe in the deified Science. We will slay the dragon named death with the weapons granted to us by Science, and I hope no one wonders what it reveals about the author's insecurities that they wrote death up as a terrifying beast that eats people at random. Let me know when they cure entropy, human nature, fix up things so our planet can support the people we have even now, implement progressive social welfare to account for the conditions we're facing with the labor market right now, find some new way of accounting for the generational culture shift that arises from old people at the top dying, and, while we're at it, create some kind of working FTL engine so we can spread our numerous trillions out across the stars and I'll start taking the claims of people who get so hysterical about dying somewhat more seriously. As it is, it's watching like watching people seriously consider a magic bullet that'll end all of society's woes, because that's the root of all evil: people get old and die, people get sick and die, people die and no one's going to remember me. Really, what is this than another form of the Singularity Will Address All Our Issues forever that people adored in the 90s? It's bullshit future-fetishism and to laugh at someone like Yud, despite him being a total idiot, and then turn around and go "Actually, if you argue against immortality you're an idiot" is like the height of irony. edit: haha guys, that Yud and his thanatophobia - but if you don't argue for the immortality cornucopia you actually want to murder people and are a pro-deather who doesn't believe in science like me, the rational goon Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Apr 10, 2017 |
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Apr 10, 2017 06:50
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Jazerus posted:you're the one being bizarrely vehement hth 
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Apr 10, 2017 06:55
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Tiggum posted:It's not about not accepting the possibility of death, it's about not accepting the inevitability of death. Saying that death is actually good and necessary implies that there is a good and right time to die. If so, when is it? What's the cut-off age at which we no longer offer medial care? When do you want to die? Death is inevitable, though? You are going to die. Everyone you know is going to die. Whether that's tomorrow in a freak car accident, in ten years from heart disease, in sixty in your sleep, or a hundred when a hard drive consciousness backup fails, a thousand when a freak Gamma Ray burst takes out the Earth, a few million when the Sun goes nova... Everything dies. Even if we had 99.99% perfect hard drive backups, like you raised earlier, that's still 0.01% of people who are going to 'die'. And, given enough time, all things resolve to one. Sure, if you think we're going to solve the laws of physics to render death no longer inevitable then, okay, whatever, I guess we'll say death is no longer inevitable. But at that point you're indulging in fantasy, not hoping for any real sort of conversation or dialogue. Pretty weak 'gotcha' questions, though. Again, like I said, apparently if you accept death, you either want to kill people or want to die yourself. It's just as ridiculous as Yud's notion that if you believe in the afterlife you should kill people.
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Apr 10, 2017 15:48
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Tiggum posted:You can acknowledge that death is extremely likely without going to the crazy extreme of accepting it as inevitable. If you think death's inevitable then you may as well just kill yourself right now, there's no point in prolonging it. Who gave Harry Potter an account?
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Apr 11, 2017 07:46
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I exercise 2-3 times a week and eat as healthy as I can and I can safely say that doing it out of 'not wanting to die' has never entered my thought process. I'm not Chris Traeger. Doing it because it means I might enjoy a better, longer life at my prime? Sure. Doing it because it makes me look better? Okay. Doing it because it makes me feel better? Yeah. But that's the thing, Tiggums. You don't understand that extending age/lifespan isn't extending healthspan isn't immortality. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Apr 11, 2017 |
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Apr 11, 2017 07:51
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I'm not even sure what rationalfic is. Whenever someone tries to explain it to me it always seems to be a story where the protagonist just kind of coasts through things by thinking Rational Thoughts and there are maybe some very video-y game-y elements.
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Aug 30, 2017 05:25
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quote:The figure who'd just staggered into the Great Hall appeared to be Mr. Filch... I always love this stuff in writing. Can't say it was Mr Filch, gotta try and make it sound 'intelligent'. It appeared to be Mr Filch and, indeed, as it turns out, it was!
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Apr 25, 2018 09:28
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Shinji causes Third Impact early the one time he tries to 'man up'. He flat out says something like: "I don't care what happens to me or the world, I'm going to save Rei!" However, it appears to be stopped before the world completely ends. But when he wakes up [x amount of time] later, the world is utterly devastated, half the cast is dead, and everyone blames him. The exact circumstances are dubious but it seems unlikely he was the guilty party.
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May 3, 2018 04:00
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What makes a 'good writer' is absolutely more subjective than what makes a 'good golfer'. You can easily make the argument that Yud is a good writer: he can string sentences together and tell a story, there's not many grammar/spelling flaws, he has a big following, etc. But you can also argue that he is a really bad one, too. You can learn all the rules of writing and write, and I reckon being able to do that with consistency (and a lucky break or two) would make you a Stephen King, Lee Child or Dan Brown. But the more you read, and write, the more you realize that there's more to writing than knowing and applying rules. It's about that voice, that spark, the hard to pin down quality that makes something capture a reader. I read and review a lot of web serials and there's heaps that can turn out functional sentences, plots, characters, and so on -- but they lack that spark. edit: But then there's Ernest Cline who proves that you don't even need to know or care about the rules of writing, too. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 04:40 on May 19, 2018 |
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May 19, 2018 04:37
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Children, relax! Both of the stories can be bad!
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Jul 29, 2018 01:34
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End of Shoelace posted:- the author accidentally uses a first person pronoun, referring to himself, when writing harry during an erotic situation with tonks I love it.
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Aug 7, 2018 01:36
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Doctor Spaceman posted:The dude did leave a basilisk lying around the school. Who? Roko?
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Aug 9, 2018 09:48
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is tiggum really, actually arguing he's a p-zombie
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Nov 20, 2018 07:15
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the prose is appalling
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Dec 19, 2018 06:57
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divabot posted:there's a common thing amongst HPMOR stans that (a) it nerdsnipes them so totally that they literally think it's the best book ever written in important ways (b) they haven't read many other books do not get me started on worm DACK FAYDEN posted:I did not like Worm but everyone who isn't me seems to, should I give it another shot when the author is done with the remastered-or-whatever edition it's not being remastered. situation bleak. last word (from the man himself) was that wildbow has hired a ghostwriter to write a new version of worm. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Aug 20, 2019 |
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Aug 20, 2019 04:53
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like, you can't seriously argue worm was well-planned from the very start when it's a story that has a two-year timeskip in between paragraphs in a story that, until that point, has consisted of about eight weeks of time. during the writing of worm, wildbow said he planned only one chapter ahead, and it's pretty clear when you go back and read it. you get whole arcs, like arc 7, that exist for no real reason and could be safely cut in their entirety for any 'revised' format (you could make a slick YA trilogy out of arcs 1-8, basically.) but the benefit wildbow had was an actual decade of worldbuilding notes and previous ideas. i liked it well enough to read it twice and then do a retrospective on the first eight arcs but, man, the dissonance between the story-as-is and the fandom version of it is really something. i personally think it's really interesting that the story Worm is not what the fans like, but the world of worm. it's why there's so many fanfictions which tell the story but differently. really, wildbow could probably make a killing if he just leaned into what he was good at and put out a collection of Worm RPG Sourcebooks and maybe a collected novella of the best interludes. on the other hand, at least it's not ward. speaking as a web serial writer man, the trajectory of worm -> pact -> twig -> ward, and the interplay between author, work and fandom, has been really interesting to see from the perspective of a reader and someone who can peek 'behind the curtain.' like, the whole thing that happened with browbeat is fascinating. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Aug 20, 2019 |
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Aug 20, 2019 05:05
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divabot posted:Worm is a cosmic body horror story packaged as a superhero story. Pact and Twig go straight for the horror angle, Ward goes straight for the horror and sometimes remembers it used to be a superhero story. Also inconsistent with Worm. no endbringers have a galaxy's worth of mass within their body and you're going to like it, divabot
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Aug 20, 2019 10:22
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Roadie posted:"Real people" is a stretch. Worm strains like hell to try and justify things like why no civilians ever just shot any of the not-actually-super-tough villains, why people with superpowers wouldn't just get big bucks jobs in search and rescue or industrial resource extraction, why the government puts up with any of this poo poo instead of dropping a Hellfire missile on the head of supers who cause trouble, etc. There was a comment I saw recently that was: See, Worm is a real, sober, serious, super-realistic and intelligent sci-fi deconstruction at what would happen if people started getting superpowers*. * - in a world where a multi-dimensional god-creature and a nigh-omnipotent Illuminati basically work together to make everyone act out comic book tropes.
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Aug 20, 2019 11:58
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YaketySass posted:it's just sci-fi Madoka Or the original outline of Mass Effect, where the Reapers were using the minds and innovations of the galaxy to try and calculate a way to stop heat death.
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Aug 21, 2019 00:29
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oh my god
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Aug 31, 2019 01:48
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I am reminded of that awful Salvation War series. is that the one with the progress missile hitting satan in the chest
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Sep 9, 2019 09:37
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Cardiovorax posted:Not sure how having it in ebook format would be any worse than already having it published for free on the internet for years not anyway. Hell, JDatE got published twice.
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Sep 10, 2019 14:33
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