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It's nonfic fanfic. Battle With Me: Pokémon XD's a critical analysis of Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness. It's my attempt to do a text-based Level With Me, an analysis/Let's Play hybrid run by Robert Yang. Robert Yang actually teaches game design at NYU game center; thus, I'm studying up. CH4 in...

Yesterday: @namohysip's "In Beta". Recommended; builds up tension well in a "relevant to real life" sort of way. Scratched my personal itches; if you like the fics I like, you'll probably like "In Beta". Today: Research papers on gaming taxonomies. So far, I've read primary sources on Bartle's...

Quiet forum lately. Guess I'll explain some research I've been reading. Today's topic: nostalgic's effect on music tastes! Do you like that song because it's good, or do you like it because it's nostalgic? So far, I've read "Music and Emotions in the Brain: Familiarity Matters", "Berlyne...

"On Writing Well" by the late great William Zinsser. It's on writing well. Nonfiction, specifically. My current "fic" is nonfiction; thought I'd study up. The book's the most quotable I've ever read, yet can't be summed up in one quote. Zinsser writes economically, never wasting a word. Any...

A looooooot of articles about community moderation. Heard whispers there was a recruiting drive coming soon, so I figured I'd school up on the subject. First up: "Should Forum Moderators Be Paid? Some Don't Even Want To" by Cecilia D'Anastasio. Been a fan of her work ever since got an interview...

The Prelude to @Beth Pavell's The Long Walk, and I finished Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly (link to .pdf). Working on a review for The Long Walk's Prelude, so in the meantime, I'll share a quote from Needlessly...

2018 Ig Nobel Prize-winning paper Assessing the calorific significance of episodes of human cannibalism in the Palaeolithic by James Cole, published in Scientific Reports: "Finally, the values in Tables 1 and 2 are for raw meat only. There has been much recent interest in how cooking can...

"HIM" by @canisaries and "The Last Question" by Issac Asimov. Stories don't share DNA in any way, but HIM provoked a knee-jerk reaction I'm trying to clense before giving a review. Also, I've been unusually active on these forums for not having any ongoing fics and I'm trying to keep my literary...

Software Quality at Top Speed by Steve McConnell. For fun. I'm weird. Did you know developing rushed software causes you to spend more time fixing bugs post-release than you saved by rushing? In the long run, it's far more time efficient to just get a reliable codebase to build from before...

J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories. A 27-page essay in defense of the fantasy genre. And I'm not sure what to make of it. But also... I'm reading this with baggage attached. I've never liked Tolkien, partly because of the verbose writing style which is definitely a matter of personal taste...

I am so with you on 'The Lord of the Flies'. I've tried to start that book myself, but the opening is so mind-numbingly slow. It's just talking and no one doing anything. And I get that's the point; "doing nothing" is probably not a good idea when you're in a life-or-death survival situation...

I just realized I take ~1 hour each day to read the news. I mean, I knew I was doing it. But I never considered it a form of reading. But I get the vast majority of my news in text, which means it's by definition reading. Which means the news might be influencing my tastes in reading. And not...

Been rereading...well, everything. Actually, just re-consuming any media I believe may have had an influence on my writing style. First up, and arguably the best book on my shelf of only four books: Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar...: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes by Thomas...

Weird question: what is it about "on a Kindle format" that makes you happy? It's not something I've experienced, and I have my own theories on why you might feel this way, but I'd rather not play armchair psychologist. It's an interesting perspective to me, and so I want to hear more about it...

Four days, no sharing? I'll right then, I'll double post. I'm halfway through George Orwell's Politics and the English Language, origin of the phrase "All issues are political issues." That's a belief I share and recently discussed, so I figured I'd research the quote's context. And what I'm...

Can Pikachu die? Online fan conspiracy theories and the Pokémon gaming universe by Dr. Lincoln Geraghty of the School of Film, Media and Communication. Published in Journal of Fandom Studies, DOI 10.1386/jfs.5.1.3_1 I cannot make this up. Actually a decent primer for various fan theories, but...

I read Lord of the Rings fan fiction, as written by an A.I.: The A.I. in question is GPT-2, product of OpenAI, a "non-profit research company investigating 'the path to safe artificial intelligence,'" according to this story about the AI in question from Ars Technica (editor is bugging out...