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Just read https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/cade_04_23/ because someone in the feeds was talking about CYOA-format stuff in fiction, and ouch ouch ouch
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May 30, 2023 22:28
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Does anybody know of any other resources like the Baen Publishing Free Library? These are the kinds of books I would find at the spinner rack at the local gas station back in the early 90s and I am a fool and want to ruin those memories by revisiting them.
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May 30, 2023 22:38
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Watership Down by Richard Adams - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002NXOQF2/ The Blade Itself (First Law #1) by Joe Abercrombie - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TOT9LDK/ New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KT7YTO6/ Kings of the Wyld (The Band #1) by Nicholas Eames - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KT7YTXW/
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May 30, 2023 22:54
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pradmer posted:Kings of the Wyld (The Band #1) by Nicholas Eames - $2.99 Am I allowed to read this?
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May 31, 2023 00:20
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Remulak posted:#1 bestseller in Men’s Adventure Fiction! e: Mind you, the #2 in the same illustrious category is this gem: https://www.amazon.com/Homecoming-Harem-Fantasy-Bakers-Book-ebook/dp/B0C4NQHCJ5/ref=zg_bs_10159267011_sccl_2/143-9743958-2105539?psc=1 e: ...And then you get The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay at position 5, wedged between "harem" and disaster novels. The list was clearly compiled by a deeply disturbed algorithm. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 00:28 on May 31, 2023 |
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May 31, 2023 00:23
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I'm not sure if "Men's Adventure Fiction" is a euphemism but roughly half the people browsing that category are going to be disappointed one way or the other
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May 31, 2023 00:29
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 lol
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May 31, 2023 00:39
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Clark Nova posted:I'm not sure if "Men's Adventure Fiction" is a euphemism but roughly half the people browsing that category are going to be disappointed one way or the other When I think of "men's adventure fiction," I think of hardboiled shootemup series in the vein of Mack Bolan and the Destroyer. It looks like Amazon has, cough, broadened the boundaries of the category.
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May 31, 2023 00:49
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Based on the genre name I'm imagining novels about Great Men Doing The Hard Things Women Are Too Soft For. On the surface the characters are homophobic but the books are inadvertently extremely homoerotic. To test this theory I'm going to buy that book.
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May 31, 2023 01:19
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Huh. Men’s Adventure originated as a post-war pulp magazine genre.
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May 31, 2023 01:27
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anilEhilated posted:Wouldn't bother, it's not very good. It's extremely mid and the sequel is worse.
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May 31, 2023 02:00
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Marsupial Ape posted:Huh. Men’s Adventure originated as a post-war pulp magazine genre. So yeah I’m now mad that noir is tinged with John Ringo stuff by association. Seriously, harems? Seems haram.
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May 31, 2023 02:10
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May 31, 2023 02:16
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Rzzzzz!
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May 31, 2023 03:29
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Selachian posted:Rzzzzz! I understood that reference
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May 31, 2023 05:56
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I liked KotW myself. It's basically middle aged adventures going on a rescue mission long after they retired. The world setting has the various adventurer groups kinda like rock stars with groupies and parades and giant crowds. If that sounds interesting, go for it. If it doesn't, save the 3 bucks.
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May 31, 2023 06:51
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Absurd Alhazred posted:But writes all his blog posts like terrible Twitter threads people post twitter threads because nobody clicks links on twitter but will read ungodly long twitter threads
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May 31, 2023 07:29
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:I liked KotW myself. Yeah, it wasn't a masterwork of the age by any means but it was fun and full of goofy Spinal Tap Fantasy cringe humor and decently heartfelt by the end. The sequel is definitely mid as hell though.
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May 31, 2023 08:29
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Will Wight, the guy who writes Cradle (which has occasionally come up here), is giving away all his ebooks for the next 24 hours. Traveler's Gate Trilogy - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CCBXYZ Elder Empire Trilogy (Shadow) - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CCVM2J Elder Empire Trilogy (Sea) - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074C78XPJ Cradle - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0753FP6SP The Last Horizon - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C11YDHB8 Cradle is the main thing, it's a westernized version of Xianxia, which is a Chinese high fantasy genre where martial artists can eventually punch god in the face. Last one out of 12 is out in like a week. Traveler's Gate is a bit closer to typical fantasy adventuring, following the chosen one's friend. Elder Empire is eldritch horror fantasy with a weird dual trilogy structure where each book has a counterpart from the other side happening at the same time. The Last Horizon only has one book out, it follows a wizard-with-a-gun type of guy as he puts together a team to pilot an ancient spaceship.
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May 31, 2023 08:29
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Awesome! Thanks for the heads up. Always looking to add potentially cool books to the library, especially free ones. Oh yea, Battle Mage Farmer has the latest book out, #5. KU or you can buy it. Author is Seth Ring if you wanna check it out. It's sort of like Beware of Chicken but a lil more action adventurey.
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May 31, 2023 09:15
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Kestral posted:I've had the Vlad Taltos books on my to-read list for years, but I have absolutely zero interest in Trotskyite politics. There's (unfortunately) no Trotskyite politics. It's a decent fantasy series, but mostly notable for inverting the usual elf-human relationship.
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May 31, 2023 10:59
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zerofiend posted:It's extremely mid and the sequel is worse. mfw the Kings of the Wyld (or maybe the sequel) has a 'The Cake is a Lie' joke 
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May 31, 2023 11:11
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NoneMoreNegative posted:mfw the Kings of the Wyld (or maybe the sequel) has a 'The Cake is a Lie' joke How does it compare to the memes of the locked tomb?
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May 31, 2023 12:08
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jackofarcades posted:people post twitter threads because nobody clicks links on twitter but will read ungodly long twitter threads If somebody's already reading your blog, they don't want to read your Twitter thread. Also, even as Twitter threads go, his are terribly written.
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May 31, 2023 12:21
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silvergoose posted:How does it compare to the memes of the locked tomb? The Locked Tomb series at least has the excuse that the whole society was founded by a bunch of lovely millenial nerds.
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May 31, 2023 12:24
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Groke posted:The Locked Tomb series at least has the excuse that the whole society was founded by a bunch of lovely millenial nerds. I know I'm just curious about the delivery of the cake lie one.
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May 31, 2023 12:30
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Cicero posted:Will Wight, the guy who writes Cradle (which has occasionally come up here), is giving away all his ebooks for the next 24 hours. Elder Empire imo is his best written series. I actually like that series more than Cradle. I mean, it's pirates vs ninjas in a Lovecraftian apocalypse. You can read the series in any order and it will work, though I personally I started with Shadow and went in parallel through the trilogy. Traveler's Gate has giant anime swords and a fun inversion on the Chosen One trope. I read the sample for The Last Horizon and didn't vibe with it though maybe I'll give it another shot.
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May 31, 2023 12:31
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mllaneza posted:And poo poo, who isn't pro-worker? In this genre?
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May 31, 2023 13:35
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Authors are notoriously petit-bourgeois
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May 31, 2023 13:43
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Modern authors might be getting a bit less petit-bourgeois given the evolution of the publishing world, but yeah. Midlist fiction authors are generally not considered a part of the vanguard. e: also, sci-fi and fantasy has a dichotomy where you have strongly conservative to outright reactionary traditions as well as a whole lot of stuff (especially in sci-fi) that's to the left of center to out and out utopian left-liberalism. Musta been wild in the 70s, for example, when you've got a much smaller universe of writers with LeGuin, Moorcock, and Butler on one side and Heinlein, Bradbury, and Asimov on the other. e2: and of course, some of those authors, like Phillip K. Dick, have variable or idiomatic ideologies. habeasdorkus fucked around with this message at 14:24 on May 31, 2023 |
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May 31, 2023 13:57
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Just look where modern authors stand when there are copyright conflicts, what their basic instinct is.
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May 31, 2023 14:55
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"Please don't take away my scraps of income?" Copyright sucks but it is necessary to survive because we live in a hellscape. Nobody should have to pay the man for oxygen, but it still ain't right to crimp someone's breathing tube and then say "why are you mad, the oxygen breathing tube is an unjust construct and you are supporting it". I got some unexpected royalty income that let me move out of a roach-infested shitheap into a less lovely place with working lights and no mold. I shouldn't have to get paid royalties to do that, but until there's some other way to get decent housing, I need the royalties. e: as another example, the ability to buy fairly cheap and lovely but still medication-covering health insurance when I was a full time writer let me get meds I needed to live and work; it wasn't as good as having actual single payer health care, and everything about it was designed to grind your face into your own poverty right down to having a special payment URL you had to type in manually, but it was sure better than nothing
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May 31, 2023 16:31
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I don't give a poo poo if someone who can't get my books any other way goes to, uh, other methods. But I need to get paid for my work because currently society does not provide any other ways for me to survive and continue to work. If it did, that'd be great.
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May 31, 2023 16:37
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Copyright in creative artistic works is probably the most defensible property right, from a philosophical / ethical perspective. You're reaching into the invisible aether and plucking forth that which, except for your act, would never have existed. Even with something like a patent, someone else probably would have invented it at some point. If Tolkien doesn't write though, no hobbits ever.
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May 31, 2023 16:46
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General Battuta posted:I don't give a poo poo if someone who can't get my books any other way goes to, uh, other methods. But I need to get paid for my work because currently society does not provide any other ways for me to survive and continue to work. If it did, that'd be great. Taking the perspective of the selfish rear end in a top hat consumer, I want Baru 4. If some "information wants to be free!" poo poo-stain pirates Baru 1-3 to the point that you stop getting royalties so you have to work 72 hours a week to keep yourself in food/clothes/shelter/medicine, I'm not going to get Baru 4 because you'll be too exhausted to write it.
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May 31, 2023 18:40
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Petit-bourgeois authors keep wanting things like "to not have to run a patreon and a blog and a podcast and publish 5 things a year and do permanent tours of cons and still get a deal for an hbo miniseries in order to not have to work full time at another job or marry rich to survive in modern society." They should be honored I gave them a 3.5 star review once I downloaded their book from an open calibre library I found in 15 seconds on google after learning about it in a $2.99 kindle sale. Just look at how they all turned on poor defenseless Disney after the mean bully Alan Dean Foster wanted a free paycheck even though they totally legally purchased the rights, but not responsibilities, to his books. Kirkegaard was right; the base instincts of the petit-bourgeois are spiritless and empty.
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May 31, 2023 18:49
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Copyright in creative artistic works is probably the most defensible property right, from a philosophical / ethical perspective. You're reaching into the invisible aether and plucking forth that which, except for your act, would never have existed. Eh, I dunno. I've heard on good authority that feeding art into a blender and producing derivative slurry for eternity to bankrupt actual creatives is the real most defensible right. Maybe we can put the question to some sort of testers, which will hunt for the answer to this quandary. Anyway, I'm also reading Greg Egan, and boy, "A Kidnapping" sure hits different these days. I'm glad I learned this guy and Greg Bear aren't the same person after all.
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May 31, 2023 20:02
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General Battuta posted:I don't give a poo poo if someone who can't get my books any other way goes to, uh, other methods. But I need to get paid for my work because currently society does not provide any other ways for me to survive and continue to work. If it did, that'd be great. As someone who preorders your work as soon as it's announced, I would actually give you more money for your books than the list price if I could. If you had a Patreon I'd throw money at that too. Your work has a lot of value and I want you to succeed. Reckon there's at least a few other folks itt who feel similarly.
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Jun 1, 2023 01:07
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I will literally never forget the low-level dude in Difference Engine that had stubble from shaving his head as an attempted match of some combination of rich people’s receding hairline and tonsures. At the time my immediate boss was trying to Dude fired me (for good unrelated reasons) not long after I told him this. But this job and the one before working for another cokehead (Rocky Aoki) whose nepobabies I can’t ignore set me on my current Maoist trajectory. That’s not even counting the time before that wherein being at a competitive college on a national merit scholarship put me up against (it was against I was so naive I thought it was with) kids that were richer and more entitled than I could ever dream was possible. Even after meeting the Aoki kids.
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Jun 1, 2023 03:44
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"Weasels ripped my flesh" would be a great username though. "Weasels ripped my ..." would be even better.
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Jun 1, 2023 06:59
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