So, something I've talked about in the past is the continual downward pressure on the market value of written fiction and the limited things we've done to do our part in combatting it... There is a TON of written fiction out there, and the body of written fiction is growing at an unfathomable rate as new authors continue to add to it.

One of Cirsova's goals was always to "regress harder." Not in the "we're not woke" sense, but people on the right always wanted to retvrn but to yesterday, when things were only a little less bad. Cirsova emerged as a reaction to the Sad Puppies and Brad Torgersen's Nutty Nuggets

https://twitter.com/ArchivistPulp/status/1875955705691459704

"Where were the nuggets, Brad?" For all of the rah-rah, the Sad Puppies slates displayed a lack of the extremely sexist and racist tropes their enemies accused them of indulging in: Where were the strongjawed chads saving scantily clad space princesses from spear-chucking aliens?

Okay, so, a big part of the problem isn't so much that the big stores don't have the stuff [they often do], it's that there's a disconnect between how they organize their books and where people think the books should be+various surprises [like popular authors being out of print]

https://twitter.com/GreeneMan6/status/1871359525573541960

Big book stores don't have a general fiction section; they break up things along whatever lines the publishers tell them, even if it makes books harder to find. Recently, I tried to pick up some Dick Francis books for my mom. Is he in fiction? Mystery? Thriller & Suspense? No...

Dragonlance is trending because people are saying "we must retvrn (to the thing that sent D&D down this road in the first place)" Look, I get it. I, too, loved the Dragonlance books when I was a little kid, but the modules sent the game down a very rigid story-driven path while the books and setting itself stripped out almost all of the weird kitchen-sink elements that were baked into 1e.

Okay, so, after this thread, @archon asked if I'd live tweet a read of his new comic, Ascendant: Star Spangled Squadron.

I said "sure," and he shot me a copy.

So, let's get to it!

https://twitter.com/cirsova/status/1802828453890437130

@archon First off, the PDF has not been flattened, so my attempt to copy the cover has been foiled!

Let's try again!

all right. i'm gonna do it. i'm gonna read Isom.

i confess, so far, i have only seen parts taken out of context that specifically highlight the "bad" parts.

no one was able to tell me what is good about it, so i'm gonna have to see for myself.

let's do this. i've been memed into noticing

i can't help it at this point

Something I've observed and repeated is that most people's idea of "Tolkienian Fantasy" and the modern state of the fantasy genre is actually Warhammer filtered through the lens of Warcraft.

https://twitter.com/overunderwriter/status/1789081592121495861

Warhammer had a lot of fantasy races that were surface-level Tolkien, but included a lot more weird fantasy and Sword & Sorcery elements + fantasy 30 Years War.

One of the major reasons heavy-hitter OSR types hate @JohnsonJeffro and the #BROSR is that their message doesn't move products. Quite the contrary. @JohnsonJeffro Take Tonisborg. It's a "lost" OD&D module that was "rediscovered" and "recreated" through notes from the 70s when Griff was pushing a conventional play narrative countersignaling Jeffro.
#TonisborgTruth

not to dunk [it's a moot], but i think it's a problem that american creators look at manga as a solution in these broad and sweeping ways that are largely inaccurate; the real differences are how manga is marketed and distributed
{parallel timelines, timeskips, reboots below}





What's seen as mainstream western comics [they're not] are actually these tiny fragments of a mega story which encompass the near totality of the publisher and the brand's output, yet they're kind of cast out there in isolation.

One of the things that's hardest for indie authors and indie publishers is the lack of an indie review sphere that is divorced from the writing and publishing sides. We need more reviews from people who are neither aspiring indie authors nor editors. A lot of author reviews tend to be tinged with "how would I, as an author, have done this differently?" Writing reviews as an editor, I feel like I'm giving notes on a job interview [even though I actively try to avoid approaching stories I'm asked to review that way]

"Not only did the Earth Federation violate the Universal Century charter, and it was a good charter, written by good people, but they lied about it. They lied about charter and what was in it, can you believe it? I wouldn't lie to you about something important like that." "Does this dress make you look fat? Is my butt too big? Sure, I might lie to you about that, but NEVER about the right of Newtypes to seek self government out of the grasp of these big globalist elites. They didn't want you to know your rights, and that's very wrong."

Finally getting around to reading the trade of near post-Crisis Suicide Squad. It's pretty good, but the main things that I keep coming back to is how it kind of pisses on the Silver Age Suicide Squad. Also, it really makes me wish that Codename: Danger had more than 4 issues. Codename: Danger predated the Post-Crisis Squad by a couple years. Its premise was an international private merc/detective agency with caped assets around the world that could be brought in for missions.

Here's a question we actually get a lot: "what do you mean by 'don't use tabs for indentation?'"

In Word processing programs, you CAN use tabs to create indentations at the start of paragraphs, but this creates an extra character that we have to manually remove when we put 1/? the text into our style-sheets for formatting.

Most word processing programs these days allow for style-sheets that include automatic indentation that are not created by either tab or space characters. 2/?