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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2208 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 30, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I finished al-Ghazali's Banes of the Tongue, which was well worth the read. I can dimly see some aspects of Islam, and in particular the hadith "Beware of the believer's intuition because he sees by the light of God" has caught my eye. There is a sense of leaving uncovered what God has covered and not speaking about what doesn't concern you; in particular, if one is gossiped to, the gossip says more about the gossiper than the one who is spoken about. It has kindled an interest in ways of knowing which might arise from an Islamic mindset.

What is forbidden is supposition [about another's alleged evil ways], and supposition is an expression of what the soul believes is reliable, and the heart inclines toward. God says, O you who have believed, avoid much negative assumption. Indeed, some assumption is sin [Q. 49:12]. The reason for its unlawfulness is because the secrets of the hearts are known only to the Knower of the unseen, so it is not for you to believe in another’s wickedness unless it is disclosed to you by observation and cannot be explained away.

The book is quite comprehensive, talking about things like arguments, joking, praising or being praised, and I'm sure to be revisiting this often.

I decided to see what web serials were all about and picked up A Practical Guide to Evil. I've read the first two books (which is like one sixth of the whole story) and I'm done with it. I ain't reading a series that is more than five times longer than War and Peace unless it is at least twice as good. And this book is not.

At its heart, PG2E is a YA novel with obvious influences: you can see when the author channelled GRRM, Yudkowsky, Rosenfelder. And it could've been a good YA novel if it had a good editor that was willing to do two things:

  • get rid of sixty percent of the text
  • bring the quality of the prose of the first chapters to the level of the latter ones

I understand that both goals are really hard if not impossible to achieve when you are self-publishing your work chapter by chapter, but I am not satisfied with the quality of the final result at all. I'll give Mother of Learning an honest try next to see if the genre is salvageable.

Are web serials for people that read a lot and like reading the same thing?

Oh, and I got through How Not to Write a Novel. The authors spent too much effort on writing excruciatingly bad examples. I would prefer if they actually used fragments from real novels as examples and spend their effort on explaining less obvious problems than "don't make your characters too perfect or completely pitiful".

I would prefer if they actually used fragments from real novels as examples and spend their effort on explaining less obvious problems than "don't make your characters too perfect or completely pitiful".

You're essentially asking that they wrote a different book. The introduction is pretty clear that the point isn't to turn the reader into the next Hemingway, but merely to keep him from being among the countless thousands whose work never gets a second look from a publisher because it's so bad. There are no actual novels with this stuff (or at least very few), because manuscripts with these kinds of non-subtle mistakes don't get published, and things that don't get published aren't readily available for reference. It's similar to how I can tell a few war stories from my old job, but I'd be reluctant to write a book full of them because I'd want to get all of the details correct and I'm not in the habit of hanging onto files from jobs I no longer have. I doubt the authors hang on to rejected manuscripts, but they've probably seen enough patterns to be able to explain the mistakes. So they can't just quote passages verbatim. There's also the fact that exaggerated examples make better teaching tools than subtle ones. If I'm trying to explain to a beginner how a synthesizer works and what all the buttons and knobs do, I don't explain resonance be making a slight adjustment (as I might when putting a sound together); I explain it by cranking it up as high as it will go without the sound breaking up, then turning it down again.

There are no actual novels with this stuff (or at least very few)

There are many more than just a few. Most of this catalog would do: https://372pages.com/about.

If you're looking for a shorter (aka 'get to the good part before I've read a whole novel') web serial work, some options:

  • Kitty Cat Kill Sat. Writing and pacing is a little flaky, but the overarcing plot and core idea are pretty good. Check out the first two chapters; if they don't stick with you, the full story won't do any better.
  • Forge of Destiny is a more conventional giant super-arc. The first book stands alone pretty well and basically feels like a Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone-level book for its setting. You do miss out on some of the writing high-notes -- a later character is Ragyo Kiryuin as something approximating a good guy, and despite that paradox the text does it well enough that I could hear Ragyo's theme song -- but you can easily set it down there and feel like you've got a good outcome.
  • Beware of Chicken's in a similar boat, except I'd honestly recommend setting the series down after the first big bad evil guy gets splattered. Plot and theme quality drops pretty dramatically.

Are web serials for people that read a lot and like reading the same thing?

That's part of it. A lot of the big web serials are huge, update faster than all but the most productive conventional writers, and leave the author space to test ideas that you'd have trouble publishing or having recognized anywhere.

It's also just a broader option. The approach has a lot more space than even Kindle Unlimited-focused sales, and vastly more than conventional publishing. Worm's starter 'novel'-worth, or Edge Cases might have been able to get a conventional publisher, but if so only for the same reason that A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet would, and probably only after loading up thirty or forty heavy-handed hints for the main twist; something like Blue Core (cw: don't recommend) or Contention just wouldn't happen.

That said, there's also something interesting specific ritual of the long-form story with a scheduled release and regular in-progress discussion that's become far more available to this genre at the same time that its conventional media competitors dropped it. Reading With This Ring every morning or Ar'Kendrythist every weekend lets you think about what's coming up or what the deeper meaning of a plot point is in a way that fixed stories don't really do anymore, between normalized binge-watching for television or an emphasis on closed novels in written media. I don't think I'd have examined Jinyu's arc in FLCL Progressive without someone else asking and having a week to think on it, for example.

It's also just a lot more monetizable. That's a mixed blessing, of course. Some authors definitely get brain-cored by the internet or be driven nuts by the pressure and immediate stochastic feedback, but some people do thrive in that environment. For readers, you can end up a whale just trying to follow three or four series, be stuck knowing there's a hundred-plus chapters of a story that'll get in normal publication sometime, or find that a series you loved got dropped close to a major climax.

I didn't like Mother of Learning. It's literally just Time Braid*, but worse†.

If you want the best the web novel medium has to offer, I'd recommend Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales‡.

* Zorian is Sakura, Zach is Naruto, Red Robe is Sasuke, QI is Orochiramu, they are all trapped in a one-month time loop that ends with an invasion, etc.; it's obvious once you know Domagoj Kurmaic listed Time Braid as one of his favorite stories on FanFiction.Net.

† Mother of Learning is slower, the fights are less exciting, the characters are flatter, and there is less fanservice.

‡ Unless glowfic counts, in which case I'd recommend Project Lawful by Eliezer Yudkowsky (LessWrong) and Kelsey Piper (The Unit of Caring).

MoL is totally DnD progression-fantasy as applied to Naruto. This is completely different from TB, which functions first and foremost as a fanfiction.

Both of them keep the fun, evocative magic framework, and both replace the dogshit shonen treadmill with something more compelling. But TB relies on familiar characters (and the resulting divergence). I don't think it would be remotely coherent without canon knowledge. This is fine, this is good! Naruto has some generational character designs, and riffing on them gives the author all sorts of interesting options.

MoL is playing the worldbuilding game, not the character game. The characters exist to explore this spin on a fantasy kitchen sink, which is why they can be so forgettable. It's not better so much as it has a different, parallel appeal.

And yes, Worth the Candle does both, which is why it's the best.

I didn't like Mother of Learning. It's literally just Time Braid*, but worse†.

Well, I have zero interest in reading Naruto fan-fiction, so there you have it. Loved Mother of Learning and especially its pacing. Would like to read it for the third time soon. Tried the audiobook and unfortunately the quality and narration are pretty bad.

I'd recommend Project Lawful by Eliezer Yudkowsky (LessWrong) and Kelsey Piper (The Unit of Caring)

To someone who just specifically listed "get rid of sixty percent of the text" as something that would improve most web fiction?

To someone who just specifically listed "get rid of sixty percent of the text" as something that would improve most web fiction?

A lot less than 60% of Project Lawful needs to be cut. My guess is 40% of Eliezer's text and 10% of lintamande's. The graphic BDSM scenes are identified as skippable and worksafe summaries are provided. The existence of the BDSM scenes is genuinely justified by character development - they are not gratuitous. (Lintamande is a technically better writer than Eliezer, and the driving force of the second half of the saga is the contrast between the two authors' views of what rationalists winning actually means.)

Well, what part of planecrash would you cut, exactly? The decision theory lectures? The polyamorous BDSM orgies? Those are not filler; they are the core of the story!

This template just keeps on giving. Imagine being the dude who drew the original "virgin vs chad" or Wojak or trollface. It's overwhelmingly likely your greatest achievement, but people around you either don't care or don't believe you.

I've not yet made it through the whole story, which logically does undermine my criticisms of it ... except perhaps for this specific criticism ...

I didn't like Mother of Learning. It's literally just Time Braid, but worse. It's slower, the fights are less exciting, the characters are flatter, and there is less fanservice.

As a person who has read Time Braid literally half a dozen times (though not within the past few years) and counts it as his favorite book ever (very possibly with rose-tinted glasses), I think this is too harsh an assessment. Not everything needs to be up to eleven all the time. Call Mother of Learning relaxing rather than plodding.

I'd recommend Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales

I want the best medium-length web novel medium has to offer. Wales is good, but if I remember correctly, he's not known for brevity.

If it has to be original, I quite enjoyed Ra. The author is better known nowadays for his Antimemetics Division SCPs.

I also stand by Wildbow’s work. Twig is his best character writing, in my opinion, but it wasn’t nearly as condensed as I remember.

There’s really something to be said for reading those as they come out. I’m currently keeping up with Flower that bloomed nowhere, which is far far too meandering to recommend in this case. Still, it’s convinced me that it’s carefully planned to come together. The Blemished Age is much tighter but also unfinished.

Ra

Hm. I completely forgot about the book, even though it hasn't been so long since I read it. And I feel similarly about Antimemetics and UNSONG. I read those, and it was fun while I read them...but in the end, nothing stuck. They left no impression. And I say this as someone who extensively, obsessively thinks over, re-reads and researches what he reads. Rationalist fiction is completely ephemeral to me. I suspect it has something to do with them trying to be too clever, and failing to build upon truly universal themes in favor of overly complicated, completely overengineered gimmicks that end up being broad but shallow. Or maybe they're just mediocre writers whose prose isn't up to snuff.

If it has to be original, I quite enjoyed Ra.

So did I.

There’s really something to be said for reading those as they come out.

I really dislike ongoing series. Having to shift from binging to waiting is my least favorite part of the reading experience.

Wales actually has a handful of great short stories. IMHO they're better on average than his long fiction!

Also, although I loved Worth the Candle, it's long and some of its twists and turns are controversial. IMHO every revelation was utterly sensible in hindsight and made a good story even better, but de gustibus non disputandum, and I recognize that if I didn't like a major twist after I'd read 200-odd chapters to get to it I'd be massively disappointed.

You might try his The Metropolitan Man. Fan fiction, but a great combination of clever reconstructions and deconstructions that lead to unique differences from the canon. 80k words, so more "short-length web novel" than medium-length, though.

I really liked The Metropolitan Man. The Terminator fanfic was terrible, though.

Link to his website

AO3 link for easy downloading

You might try his The Metropolitan Man. Fan fiction, but a great combination of clever reconstructions and

Seeing the Wales discussion, I was going to mention Metropolitan Man. Quite possibly my favorite Rationalist story, not least because it's one of a handful of well-made art pieces that I love for very clearly elucidating a perspective I strongly disagree with. It's simultaneously the best argument for and against Rationalism that I've seen.

very clearly elucidating a perspective I strongly disagree with

I'd love to find out what you're talking about here. The obvious candidate that jumps to mind is Lex Luthor's rational but ultimately self-destructive analysis of Superman-as-existential-threat but although that's one of the most fascinating parts of the book, it's a classic villain elucidating a perspective that even the author, albeit non-clearly, disagrees with and once I start thinking of less-obvious candidates ... well, I don't mean "what are you talking about?" in the idiomatic "you sound crazy" sense, but in the literal "there are like five things you could be talking about but I'm not sure which it is" sense.

Is there author commentary somewhere? My read was that Luthor did the rationally-correct thing, that the benefits of Superman weren't worth the existential risk, and the ambiguity just drives home the idea that Rationalism is a gamble, and the best you can do is make smart bets. In what sense would Wales disagree with that position?

What were the other five things? I really ought to read it again.

I haven't read author commentary, so you could be right. My read is that Luthor might have been doing the rationally-correct thing in a world where only Superman exists, but in a world where Superman is just a single example of a whole class of existential threats (which is likely from Luthor's perspective, a priori, and which would be certain if this universe actually matched the DC universe, and which arguably includes Luthor himself futzing around with Kryptonian technology), the risk of Superman turning on us if left alive is less than the extra risk of meeting others among those threats without Superman to help.

IIRC the other big perspectives that might engender disagreement (or stronger disagreement, when there's disagreement presented in-story):

Luthor's characterization here was excellent, and Superman's good, but my only concern with the story is that I think Lois feels like more of a stretch vs her canon characterizations.

It was just too implausible that Kryptonians would look perfectly human but have superpowers, and something like the "spider-eel" form was necessary to keep the story rational.

Superman arguably should be obeying virtue ethics, even if the consequentialist outcomes of that allow for horrors, because the risks of him becoming less virtuous (or, as it turned out, of being perceived as less virtuous) are even greater.

"Clark Kent", though, is a weird and probably suboptimal compromise between the suffering that could have been prevented via extra time spent as Superman and the suffering to Superman himself (and to others if he snaps) if he couldn't even pretend to be a regular person.

More comments

Okay, yeah, if you want brevity, then webfic is probably the wrong medium for you.

On the other hand, I feel like a lot of the complains about how long web novels are comes from a category error?

They are absurdly long compared to individual books, but they aren't unusual by the standards of sagas like Harry Potter or Narnia. Some of them are even internally divided into books (Worth the Candle, Mother of Learning, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, etc.).

But people are still treating them like someone dropped a one-million word book on their shelf, instead of a series.

I would prefer if they actually used fragments from real novels as examples and spend their effort on explaining less obvious problems than "don't make your characters too perfect or completely pitiful".

Sounds like a great way to make a lot of enemies in the publishing industry.

Just use dead authors. Roughly anything from 1900 to 1960 is modern enough to be readable but old enough that the writer is gone.

But a lot of the examples of bad writing they cited were distinctly modern ones, whether at the stylistic level or in terms of plot construction (e.g. the array of plots that no longer work since the invention of the mobile phone).

Also anything where the badness stems from the author being immersed in therapy culture and/or lefty politics without realising that the rest of the world isn't. Which is about a third of the book.

I think the legal term is "public domain"?

Criticism, review and parody are fair use, so a version of How Not to Write a Novel which used real excerpts would almost certainly be legal even if the books being panned aren't public domain. But that "almost" is probably enough to make it unpublishable.

I fucking wish, but no. With the passage of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, American copyright extends to 95 years from the date of publication. As for other public domains, the US uses trade deals to continually force countries to expand their copyright terms, such that life of the author + 70 years is now the standard.

I got through How Not to Write a Novel. The authors spent too much effort on writing excruciatingly bad examples. I would prefer if they actually used fragments from real novels as examples and spend their effort on explaining less obvious problems than "don't make your characters too perfect or completely pitiful".

Me, I loved the excruciatingly bad examples. It's what I was there for. But yes, a lot of the problems were very obvious, but I figured it was written more for the "so you're just now trying to write and have written your first book" crowd, rather than the "experienced writer looking to hone their craft".

for the "so you're just now trying to write and have written your first book" crowd

That's literally me, and I still found it insufferable.

If you interpret it as mildly misogynistic mockery of bad fiction by women (which it mostly is, because the vast majority of wannabe novelists are women and most of the errors it calls out are either directly female-coded or characteristic of female-coded genres) it is a lot more sufferable.

I'll give Mother of Learning an honest try next to see if the genre is salvageable.

Obligatory complaint: Web serials constitute a publication method, not a genre. I also abandoned A Practical Guide to Evil after skimming the first two books and seeing nothing that interested me, but I've enjoyed many other web serials, including Mother of Learning. See also The Three Musketeers and its sequels, which originated as non-web serials.

It's technically a publication method, but it also becomes a genre by coevolving with its target audience.

See also The Three Musketeers and its sequels, which originated as non-web serials.

As always, I feel a need to advertise the excellent Sienkiewicz Trilogy, which was also originally serialized in a newspaper.

For mother of learning, FWIW I enjoyed the audiobook.

Are web serials for people that read a lot and like reading the same thing?

I remember very well the discussions of procedurally generated game (civ/xcom etc) style gamers vs well-crafted short story (say, portal) style gamers. It's a mentality thing; I can understand both of them very well.

If you've found a world you like, then why not try to enjoy as much content as possible inside of it? This is especially true for cozy-fiction, where you not just not expect, but not even want complex plots and dark, irreversible developments. I think a lot of people could basically go their entire life listening, say, an hour each evening set in a cozy-fic universe that appeals to their personal taste.

The opposite, a serious story with a clear beginning and end, high stakes & drama, is of course also very appealing. But by its nature you can't just relax and get that every night; At some point it's over and you have to find the next story. Often, you'll have to pay new money, start a new story with lots of promises, spend mental capacity to learn the world, but in the end it does not deliver and you get the worst of all worlds.

So if your life is already pretty busy, your money is constrained and you just want to relax anyway in the afternoon/evening, this kind of content - web serials, ultra-long tv shows and procedurally generated games - starts to become more and more appealing.

So if your life is already pretty busy, your money is constrained and you just want to relax anyway in the afternoon/evening, this kind of content - web serials, ultra-long tv shows and procedurally generated games - starts to become more and more appealing.

I observe that this varies a lot from consumer to consumer.

I have little wasteable free time, so I choose to spend it with procedural games that I know to be up to my standards, or at least seem like they will make for something that has a chance of reliably delivering a challenge evening after evening, rather than consume one narrative game after another the quality of which might vary wildly (and is usually disappointing). But I have friends who, when they have little time, would say that they have no time to learn the rulesets of complex games, and would rather play one narrative game after another, since they're usually mechanically simple and generic.

TV can go hang though. It's all terrible.

Rome and The Sopranos are both pretty good though I'm not a fan of HBO's "Obligatory tits in every episode" MO.

I'll give you Rome, but that was a long time ago.

They both were.

I'm trying to think of anything since and can't, really.

I didn't mean to discount The Sopranos; I elided it because I've never seen it. Probably never will; it's not really a topic I'm interested in.

But yes I agree with your assessment, as far as Rome is concerned. I watched Rome and was done with TV. That was very much peak television and I entirely quit the medium since.

I remember very well the discussions of procedurally generated game (civ/xcom etc) style gamers vs well-crafted short story (say, portal) style gamers. It's a mentality thing; I can understand both of them very well.

I can understand this for games (I have 450+ hours in CK2, 250+ hours in HoI4, 1100+ hours in EU4 and 300+ hours in EU5, God knows how many hours in pre-Steam Dwarf Fortress, in TTDPatch and a couple of MUDs), but overlong TV shows and books fill me with dread. I guess the difference is that in a game it's me puttering about, while in a show I have to watch someone else waste my time.

Of all the web serials I've read, I don't think even one approached War and Peace in terms of production value per chapter, for what it's worth. Then again, I didn't like War and Peace and liked most of the web serials. Maybe I'm giving Tolstoy too much credit, the joke goes he was paid by the word.

I didn't finish PGtE either, felt too sloggy. Mother of Learning I liked, even though the prose is obviously second-language English (thankfully not as bad as Reverend Insanity).

Web serials are, I suppose, for the same people who like TV shows over movies. They like the setting, might as well watch the events unfold for 60 hours (12 books) instead of 2 hours (1 book) where all the scenes and character interplay would be necessarily compressed.

(Funny enough I dislike TV shows, primarily because they consume my time at a fixed rate. A web serial I can just readingspeedmaxx.)

I think a TV show that goes for just one, or a couple of seasons is the perfect size. Long enough to avoid shortcuts necessary to fit the plot into a couple of hours, but not too long to start accruing unnecessary padding.

Limited series like Shogun and North and South are almost always better than regular TV shows which have 22 episodes per season and an explicit goal of staying on the air as long as possible.

Something interesting happened to anime. In the 1990s, most animes were double cours, 24-26 episodes. These days the standard is a single cour, 12-13 episodes, then maybe a second cour a few years later if your are lucky. On the one hand, this means a lot of stories are never fully adapted and the anime ends up being an advertisement for the manga or light novels. On the other hand, when an anime does manage to adapt a whole story into a single cour, the results are great; all the filler is stripped away and the story consists of only the essentials.

Haven't you enjoyed any sit com, procedural, or other long form fiction where it mostly consists of "monster of the week" with the meta progression mostly being getting to know the characters a bit better?

I have, but I haven't enjoyed one for maybe a decade. Since my kid was born, I'd guess.

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