Ellen Kuhfeld wrote:I ran "properties" on my stored fanfic. There are 2.94 GB there, 36,440 files in 3701 folders. I've read almost all of it, and some of the better ones twice. The biggest one I've read twice is "Desperately Seeking Ranma" by PixelWriter1. FFnet says it's up to 1,426,632 words. There's the usual overhead of disclaimers and comments, but not much of that. It is a fukufic.
I have a friend who's read it twice, and curses me for introducing him to such a time-sink; but he just can't help himself. I'm afraid to start re-reading Taylor Varga by mp3.1415player. It's ove two megawords, though the commentary and omakes are a larger part of this one. This one is a Worm fanfic, crossed over with a deservedly short-lived and little-known anime called Luna Varga. One of the goals of fanfic writing is, of course, to do better than the original. I dug up the original for comparison. The fanfic does it better.
Ellen Kuhfeld wrote:Worm is, of course, a long and grimdark web novel. There are a lot of fanfics subverting the grimdark. Taylor Varga is one of them. Some of the omakes have been spun off as stories in their own right -- one of them ends (for now) with Herminone Granger auditing the books of Asgard because The Varga thinks Odin has busy fingers around interesting artifacts.
But we're talking re-reading. When I feel a story is finished, very fine, and worth re-reading, I put it in a special folder called "Good'n'complete". That one only has 78 MB in it. That's something like 2 1/2 percent. But as Theodore Sturgeon said, "90% of everything is crap."
slickrcbd wrote:I decided to reread an old classic recently, specifically Benjamin Oliver's "Nuke 'em Till They Glow"
http://florestica.com/boliver/nettg/index.htm
I remember that over 20 years ago I found it to be a hilarious crack fic that I enjoyed. I recall it was one of those that you just couldn't put down.
However today I found parts of it to be a slog to get through, especially the super-long chapter 9, which is where I left off.
Was the story never that great in the first place, or is it just a factor that I'm not in my late teens or just turning 20 (I don't recall if I read it in the late '90s or 2000, the awards mentioned on Florestica suggests I was in my early 20's, but I thought I read it in 98 or 99) but am now over 40 and my tastes have changed?
Just wondering if anybody else finds that stuff they read when they were 19 might not be as great as they remember when they are now 42 (well, on the 8th).
As far as I'm concerned, Agatha Christie is not to be read. It's a minority opinion, but she does not vary her books in a way I can appreciate.
Spica75 wrote:Worm, quite frankly SUCKS. But it's spawned lots of decent fanfics so i can aknowledge that upside at least.
Ellen Kuhfeld wrote:I can guarantee I still like Forbidden Planet
The same as Harry Potter. You can't make me touch the books themselves but I have read tons of HP fanfics. Surprisingly, there are many good, novel-sized HP fanfics in Russian.
Also, I read too many Worm fics to the point I can't look at them. Also had to unsubscribe from Tailor Varga apologizing to mp3.1415player because he always stretches a good thing too much and it becomes a slog. His *beginnings* are awesome, but...
One of my favorite films even at is is horribly slow-paced and has blaster bolts moving criminally slowly. When was I introduced to it? I think it was around the age the tv6 channel owner bought old Hollywood films (1930s-40s old) in bulk and flooded the channel with these black-and-white films. Was quite fresh stream of something never seen before at the beginning of the post-soviet turmoil. I lament they do not show these films anymore.
Anyway, I think Forbidden Planet got slipped in somewhere in there.
I just... There was too much. And my understanding of what is a good fanfic changed. Looking back I now see Ranma fanfiction was a phenomenon of the early Internet where many writers were making horribly OOC Ranmas in name only.
I think the biggest issue though is that worm as a setting is so absurd that anyone who prefers "amusing" over "grimderp" and still tries to retain canon baseline as Mpi does, it just requires so much overpoweredness that it ends up problematic to write.
I never really enjoyed "Forbidden Planet" like I did Star Wars, Star Trek, or Babylon 5; yet most people I know who liked Star Trek, Star Wars or Babylon 5 rave about it.
I too burned out on Ranma 10 years ago. I think I burned out on Harry Potter two years ago.
I'm currently on a Worm kick, but I came late to the party.
Some things are more believable than people realize. Just about everything related to Taylor's experience at Winslow excluding The Locker incident is extremely believable. I can relate to similar experiences.
However, once she was hospitalized, that's when it became unbelievable. Maybe her father settling so quickly and easily because he didn't know about the ongoing bullying campaign is why they went back to business as usual, but even in the school I attended the police would have been called and the school would have taken action to protect from lawsuits.
Other than that, everything else was believable, including the meeting where they blew off Taylor's evidence. Been there, done that in almost exactly the same way in the mid-'90s.
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