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[Frumple]

That's Dead Tired down. Slim 98k words, the tl;dr is tweed suited Vecna with a fondness for bad puns runs roughshod over the world, murders the gods, and then decides to take a nice long nap. Cue two thousand years later when rando adventurer wakes them up (and gets grafted with a large, opposite gender, cat, ultimately flipping their expression to "maid") and they find out the world has genre shifted from system enabled D&D expy to system-disconnected xianxia, leading magic bone daddy on a vaguely bemused jaunt to figure out what exactly happened while they were napping.

Pretty fluffy for something with a three plus figure body count in under a hundred thousand words. Writing's overall okay, occasionally amusing enough. Be interesting to see where it goes in the future, ha.

[Jimmy]

That's Dead Tired down.

Have you been following Beware of Chicken? It's a beautiful xianxia parody with the MC as a down-to-earth foil to the over-the-top genre tropes that pursue his existence in middle-kingdom-land. I liked Dead Tired for the same reason as this one, that it looks at the xianxia world through a set of outsider's eyes and calls bullshit on all the 'heaven-defying-impossible-existence' tripe that everyone else seems to accept as true. Except, instead of being an OP undead wizard, he's just a Canadian dude that wants to own a farm, build a house, marry a cute girl, and raise a family. Of course, his chicken happens to be a true xianxia protagonist, and the POV shifts are hilarious.

[Frumple]

Hadn't even seen it yet, heh. My RR search filter is basically "gimme everything over 200 pages", sometimes with the litrpg tag added... and I've tended to avoid anything on RR with the sexual content warning, ha (there's been exceptions, but I've found there's no better, more consistent, indicator there's going to be something horribly wrong with a work on RR than that). I'll go ahead and toss it into the tab pile, tho'.

e: Anyway, Blacksmith of the Apocalypse. Casual 105k words. System apocalypse, crafter(-ish; they've arguably had more impact setting things on fire with smithing kit so far) person, writing okay, plot pretty slow/low-impact! MC still hasn't actually met anyone else from their home planet, ha. Made early, fairly immediate from reader perspective (though time-skipped, so for MC a few weeks), decision to promptly bugger off the death world his home planet had become, which is pretty unusual for these types of things.

Any case, feels like it's not even to a particularly interesting point yet and just starting to clear the setup period. Into the RSS feed it goes!

[Vector]

Does fanfiction count as a book?

Fic is fine for purposes of the challenge! I guess as a guideline for everyone we shouldn't link to or talk about the lewd stuff (y'all know what I mean). Probably also shouldn't link to anything on AO3 due to its general horniness as an archive. Keep it gen.

Not that I object, heh. It totally counts r.e. word count being ~valid~ etc. but we're not allowed to have a fanfiction thread and I want to respect that.

[Caz]

...Does the word fanfiction really make the average person's mind go to porn? Man, I've been reading the wrong stories.

I'm halfway through an actual paper book in... a month. Getting into new stories is like pulling teeth atm. I have so much writing that I'm ignoring already and reading fiction just reminds me of it. >:l

[Vector]

...Does the word fanfiction really make the average person's mind go to porn? Man, I've been reading the wrong stories.

Yeah, I just wanna be more safe than sorry. It's no comment on you as a reader, just setting up a general guideline

[delphonso]

...Does the word fanfiction really make the average person's mind go to porn? Man, I've been reading the wrong stories.

My mind goes to "fan service" which can be lewd, but not necessarily so. Anyway, I suppose it counts it you think it does, right? I read Shadows over Innsmouth again, but since it's so short, I won't count it for my own total.

[Doomblade187]

Eh, AO3 does a good job tagging usually. It's typically when other fanfic sites get involved that it gets messy. That said, I"ve been keeping up on some nice long fanfics for miraculous ladybug recently, and EGS is rolling onwards as always. Demon Street is finishing up too, it'll be nice to see that wrap up.

[Frumple]

...Does the word fanfiction really make the average person's mind go to porn? Man, I've been reading the wrong stories.

I've been reading the stuff since the 90s; it does because the reputation is deserved

Fairness, though AO3 specifically is indeed pretty horny. Plenty of stuff on it that's clean, but... yeah.Though uh, Royal Road* is, too, so... I'unno. Extra fairness, it's kinda' hard to avoid stuff that ain't, really. Even if you're sticking to print or classics or something there's the entire romance/thriller genre pool and stuff like Lady Chatterley's Lover.

I'd at least avoid linking to anything specific that would, y'know, violate forum TOS, ha.

* E: I was curious enough to actually check, since the site makes it easy to half-arse a
check: It's about 22% smut by title. 386 pages of works with the sexual content tag, 1299 pages without. Actually kinda' surprised, I figured the ratio'd be more tilted naughty. Be interesting to see what the word count difference is, but its search doesn't make that easy so eh.

[Cthulhu]

I'm tripling up: Science Fictions, Programmed to Kill, and about to start Manufacturing Consent.  A book for every mood.

Science Fictions is good, book about the replication crisis.  Lots of fun examples of shenanigans by scientists, as well as honest mistakes, p-hacking, various conscious or unconscious cheats scientists use to get results they can publish even if the results are worthless, and a good discussion on the incentive structure that produces bad studies and how we might change those incentives.

Manufacturing Consent is some Chomsky book about mass media, I don't really know anything about it which is why I decided to read it.

Programmed to Kill is uhhhhhhhhhh.  It's by David McGowan, semi-famous conspiracy guy, one of the pioneers of the 9/11 conspiracy shit.  It's not about 9/11 though, it's about serial killers primarily.  Most of it looks like bullshit, a lot of it is verifiably bullshit, and there's a few more interesting tidbits scattered throughout

[Caz]

I never could find anything worth reading on AO3, the tag system didn't really make sense to me and it had a lot of weird crossovers and people who didn't seem to have the ability to form sentences. Fanfiction.net has pretty good search settings, usually if you filter out anything under 50k words or so you lose most of the crap stories right away. Still got to do a lot of sifting, though it's pretty clear after the first chapter how the quality of the writing is going to be.

Reading hack is to go into a good author's favourite stories and find new things to read from there. Good writers tend to have good taste, I guess.

I used to betaread/edit for folk on there a long time ago but I am far too lazy for that now.

[Jimmy]

I'm personally not bothered by adult content in an otherwise decent story. Of course, I want a story with a strong plot, good grammar, and interesting characters. So long as it has that, I'm fine if the author includes sex, drugs, and rock and roll violence.

That said, I've never gotten into AO3. I agree that navigation is just too difficult. Besides Royal Road, the best other compilation of online fiction I've found is StoriesOnline. Even though they mostly cater to sexual content, they've got a decent archive of low to no sex stories, with some damn good classics hosted from over a decade of creator content. One of my favorite authors is Lazlo Zalezac, and I think it's about time to read The Millionaire Next Door again.

[delphonso]

Programmed to Kill is uhhhhhhhhhh.  It's by David McGowan, semi-famous conspiracy guy, one of the pioneers of the 9/11 conspiracy shit.  It's not about 9/11 though, it's about serial killers primarily.  Most of it looks like bullshit, a lot of it is verifiably bullshit, and there's a few more interesting tidbits scattered throughout

I completely understand the appeal of semi-plausible bullshit. This sounds like a fun read.

[Cthulhu]

It is "fun," though some of it is too close to suggestions of actual spooky shit for comfort.  The basic idea of the book is that elite satanic cults (think pizzagate/qanon) use ritual abuse to turn people into hypno assassins, and the concept of the serial killer as a lone manic killing people because he's crazy was created to cover up this activity.  That's a fun idea for a horror movie, or like a Call of Cthulhu adventure, but come on man.  That shit ain't real.

His fixation on satanic cults leads him to miss the much more obvious angles there.  Like, you're telling me satanic ritual abuse didn't really happen, it just turns out that a therapist can implant someone with false memories of horrible crimes and use them to defame innocent people and ruin their lives, and I'm supposed be reassured? 

[Frumple]

Salvos! 121k. Baby demon zerg larva does litrpg baby demon things and grows up to be a person and stuck outside hell and vaguely confused by all the people things! Fairly quick moving so far, also just reaching the point of, like, expanding the scope of things or moving beyond the beginner village type thing or whatever. RSS'd pretty cheerfully.