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@Fleur de Lis  
I’ve read it. It’s not bad.

I read Ender’s Game in college. Not sure why it has its reputation. It was a significant step below the other sci-fi touchstones I read at the same time. Ender’s weaponized autism didn’t scan, and the whole Hogwarts in space concept was retarded, as was the unnecessary subplot regarding his siblings taking over the Earth using an Internet the size of an irc channel. The war at the end was incredibly bad. They chose him because he was a l33t gam3r, and put him in charge of a battle that he didn’t know was real. No shit he’s going to throw away lives and ships. Being good at Starcraft doesn’t mean you know anything about tactics. He just had the Hollywood autism to figure out the meta faster for whatever game he was playing.
 
Orson Scott Card is really weird with all the naked kids, too. It just kept happening every few chapters.

Who here has read Mark Danielewski books other than House of Leaves? The only other one I’ve completed is The 50-Year Sword (assuming you don’t count The Whalestoe Letters as a fully separate book)

@UrbanMysticDee  
Sifting unrecycled e-waste from landfills to harvest the gold in the components. At this point, there’s more gold in dumps than still in the ground.

@ANoobis  
There’s a garbage mining industry?

 
I just finished reading The Golden Chimney by Elizabeth Gerberding. It’s about a young man in San Francisco who buys the nearly expired lease to a defunct gold works. His plan is to strip the interior of the gold works to harvest the gold that would be spilled during operation. A lot of the plot involves him weathering the ridicule and jealousy of other people who want to see him fail.
 
It makes me think of the speculative garbage mining industry.

 
I finished reading this book a few days ago. It’s supposed to be a tie-in to the Tim Burton Planet of the Apes movie, but actually has extremely little to do with it. It’s not bad, but the apes and reference to the movie could be completely cut out and the main story wouldn’t change.  
The story begins right after Mark Wahlberg in the film goes missing. His spaceship, the Oberon, tries to find him and crashes on an unknown planet. The planet is home to extremely hostile bugs later named Brax. The small colony of surviving crew of the Oberon eventually wipe out the Brax. Then a genetically altered Chimp who was also one of the survivors stages a takeover of the colony with other apes.  
This last part is very rushed and kind of out of nowhere, the apes weren’t seen as being mistreated by the humans during the bulk of the story. Just suddenly at the end one of the human characters turns out to be a twist villain who was trying to murder the genetically altered ape.  
Okay book, lame Apes tie-in, uninteresting characters for the most part.

Since I wasn’t happy with the original ending I thought up what I’m calling a “magic bullshit” ending, because it requires some last minute power to be pulled out of nowhere to defeat the villain. I can write pages and pages on why neither of the endings work, but I think it’s best to just run with it knowing that it doesn’t make any sense.
 
I also Latinized all the chapters:
 
Prologus:  
Et In Arcadia Ego
 
Meditatio Prima:  
Ruina
 
Meditatio Secunda:  
Coruscum
 
Meditatio Tertia:  
Somniis
 
Meditatio Quarta:  
Genium Malignum
 
Meditatio Quinta:  
Dies Irae
 
Meditatio Sexta: Prima Variatio: (AKA “The Original Ending: Patroclus Dies First, then Achilles”)  
Libera Me
 
Meditatio Sexta: Secundo Variatio: (AKA “The Magic Bullshit Ending”)  
Iuvenis Essemus
 
Epilogus:  
Meum Arbitrium Est

@ThatJewAsshole  
Power levels are based on human (or alien equivalent, I guess) sacrifice. Someone who accidentally sacrifices a handful of people to get powers is no match for someone who deliberately sacrifices an entire planet.

@UrbanMysticDee  
Is the villain some kind of Lovecraftian entity then?

Power Rangers SPD Supermagneti  
Power Rangers SPD Play-a-Sound  
These books suspiciously omit the Yellow Ranger! She’s a major character from Episode 1,it’s not like she wasn’t initially part of the show. Even stranger,is the amount of focus on Doggie and Sam,Doggie doesn’t get ranger powers until about halfway through the series,and Sam comes in later too,and isn’t nearly as prominent character as Z,the Yellow Ranger. Why? What? Huh?  
Both books also mention A-Squad,a group of Rangers who are only important twice,in the first episode and the last episode.  
Why was Z so shafted?  
Even other books push her to the side,the only one that doesn’t is the old UK Annual.  
The new comics haven’t gone deep into SPD,but she has shown up there.  
I’m so confused by this,why was Z specificly left out of these books?  
I can’t find any answers.

I’m thinking the ending is kind of stupid. The problem is there really is no way even 7 super powered humans can defeat the villain. All they can do is delay the inevitable. At some unknown point in the future this problem will arise again, all of existence will be threatened, new people will have to face the same enemy, the entire conflict in the story solves nothing.
 
What was 7 year old me thinking? I don’t know, but whatever it was was enough to shelve the story for 25 years.

@Dex Stewart  
Thanks for that, I appreciate it.

Coming up with characters. In addition to the three main characters there has to be six other humans with powers, up to six non-powered counterparts, and who knows, let’s say ten supporting characters each for backstories most of which will never make it into the book (which means I can just number them and only come up with names for characters who actually get mentioned), plus anyone who appears on the side as randos, NPCs, whatever you want to call them, so the present world appears full.
 
So far out of say 160-200 people who make up this world I’ve got 11.
 
I’ve come up with loads of characters before, it’s work but it’s not a problem.
 
Basically this is the culmination of seven independent stories that are only given passing mention (except the narrator’s story, which we see in more detail) so the characters feel like real people and not cut-outs, where only one or two characters from each are drawn together because they are needed as sacrifices by the villain, who is the only non-human character (although it may have been human at on point, who knows).

@FeatherTrap  
Heres an individual volume on Amazon, but its used and quite pricey. Id reccomend ebay or Alibris,which is a really usefull way to find rare books.

@ThatJewAsshole  
Doubtful, it’s a really old book. If they even print The Woodland Folk at all anymore, it’s probably some lower-quality bastardised version, and I can’t see any link at all mentioning the anthology book I had.
 
As much as I would love to have a proper copy again, I think this is one of those things where I need to accept it’s probably gone forever.

@FeatherTrap  
Maybe you can find it on Amazon.

I suppose this is the best place to talk about this, I can’t find a more appropriate thread for it. I just rediscovered something from my childhood, and it feels like some kind of divine revelation right now. O.O
 
 
Recently, I’ve been having these flashbacks to a book I remember having when I was younger, I’m talking around five years old. It had lovely watercolour illustrations, the kind that you could look at for hours because they where so pleasing on the eye, and they really helped bring life to the story for my young mind.
 
The book was an anthology series with a loosely connected overarching plot, about gnomes and fairies getting into hyjinks with forest creatures, with some life lessons like learning to appreciate what you have, finding the best qualities in everyone, and so on.
 
And then there where these dragons that lived nearby in a place called Dragonland, they were really cool and I think they played a huge role in why I find dragons so awesome today (that and the Spyro series, of course).
 
Gradually, the story started to veer away from loosely connected slice of life, and into a more serialised arch when an evil gnome captured a dragon and did some experiments on him to turn him into a winged, fire-breathing servant to cause mayhem.
 
And it led to an escalating series of events involving a dragon child being kidnapped and forced to use his magical fire to heat a gnome forge, and that nearly resulted in a war between the Forest and Dragonland. That was one of my favourite parts, because-and I shit you not-it had fully illustrated army lists, like some colourful kids version of a Warhammer Codex.
 
…and this whole time I thought I made it up, cause I could never find it again.
 
 
Well guess what? I just did. It’s called Woodland Tales, a collection of stories of The Woodland Folk series by Tony Wolf. After all these years, I can verify that it actually did exist and wasn’t just a fever dream I made up as a child.  
And now I’m really mad that my Mum gave the book away because I was getting too old for it, because I swear that book was so good and my flashes of memory of it where driving me mad.

 
Flatland is an interesting read. It acts as a satirical critique of Victorian society, but also serves as a remarkably forward-thinking exploration of the concept of a metaverse.

Just started Fagles’ translation of Homer’s Iliad. Having a good time.

I only have about 30 pages written and already I’ve got 2 sequels lined up. I don’t really want to write them, but inspiration compelled me to write this and the previous book, so who knows what will happen. Technically they’re prequels, I guess, which each one going further back in time. Part 2 is the Christian founding of America and the true history of slavery and part 3 is the myth of the Spanish Inquisition and the Black Legend. I’ve encountered so much fake atheist American history that I feel compelled to write what really happened.

Look at that, the new book is an introduction and 6 chapters, just like the last one! Who’s betting this one will also be about 230 pages and not the 100 or so that I had originally hoped it would be? I already have about 20 pages written so far and I’m not anywhere near 1/5 done. This time I think I’ll set the price a little higher.
 
I’m already doing this one differently. There will be a select bibliography, but there won’t be 30 pages of references at the end since most of this stuff I’ve already written from memory, these books have just gotten the ideas flowing. The few quotes I use will just be cited in footnotes on the bottom of each page (the first one is my main man Nietzsche and is public domain anyway). I also want to include an index, which I didn’t get to include in the previous book due to time constraints.

Imma have to put the horror story on hold. I was just struck with clarity and inspiration and I’ve written about 8 pages so far about atheism in America and how only by returning to Christianity can the West (and by extension humanity) be saved. I’ve got 4 chapters outlined already. I’m just stream-of-consciousness-ing this so far, I might not even put references at the end and just do this all off memory. I want to crank out at least 100 pages and publish this by the end of the month.

I have to rethink the book. The only scene so far that I actually wrote is where they kill the sheriff’s deputy and take his car and weapons to pin the killings on him, because a crooked cop who goes off and kills people, especially in this age, is very believable. Originally they were just going to dispose of the body, but that wouldn’t work because then he’d be thought of as a victim too (which he is). His body has to be put somewhere at the end of the story to be found so that he can be blamed for everything, but he has to be made to appear to have died in some way that would just leave a skeleton, otherwise people would know that he was innocent because he’d obviously died before all the other victims as evident by his decayed body. The only thing I can think of is for him to start a fire and die before managing to escape. He’s not going to commit suicide by jumping in a vat of chemicals, that’s stupid. The only way would be for him to die in a fire.
 
This does kind of work, because I can’t nuke the town, but there has to be some big event at the end. But what? What’s big and dramatic for a small town of very rich people where a whole lot of them can die all at once?
 
I know in the fake reviews I said this was like Neon Demon + 120 Days of Sodom, but it really started out as Life is Strange + Natural Born Killers (and I’ve had this idea swimming around my head since about 2016), so a lot of people have to die at the end to be true to the source material.