Things I Like
Also known as "a monument to my bad taste"Table of Contents
Modern Cannibals
Modern Cannibals
by Bavitz
This is one of my favorite stories.
Recommending a "Homestuck fanfiction" as one of my favorite stories may not give me a whole lot of credibility. In fact you might be running away screaming right now. But trust me when I say 1. you don't need to be a Homestuck fan to read it and 2. it's good. I swear I haven't read Homestuck. I'm not a Homestuck. I'm not one of "them".
I can sense your doubt, so here is a random Goodreads review that says it better than I could:
Amazing work. There are a bunch of themes, to single out some, it's about the vicissitudes of attempting to connect to people via fandom and creation and consumption of fiction, as well as a coming-of-age story detailing the pain of disintegrating relationships. The writing is virtuoso, full of verbal sparkles, with a number of very different voices, and it is highly entertaining on a paragraph-to-paragraph basis; when humor is called for, it's funny, when honesty and poignancy is called for, it delivers as well.
With freestyle verbally acrobatic reflective ironic works ("postmodernist" stylistically, you might say), I would say there are two great risks: one is that all the cleverness actually turns out to be a chore to read, the other one is emotional sterility resulting from the inability of conveying thoughts with an honest intent. "Modern Cannibals" avoids both with ease.
You don't need to know anything about Homestuck to read this story. Even the author said so.. Please someone read this story I'm so lonely please wait where are you going
Authors
Disclaimers:
- I like some authors on this list more than others.
- If an author isn't on this list, I don't hate them. But I can't list everyone or we'd be here for a while. Sorry, fans of [insert author not mentioned here]
Famous People
Vladimir Nabokov
Read: Lolita, Pale Fire, The Eye, The Luzhin Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, several short stories. Wingstroke is underrated. Pale Fire is probably my favorite book, especially because of Brian Boyd's insane conspiracy theories.
James Joyce
Read: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, not Ulysses because I'm lazy.
Thomas Pynchon
Read: The Crying of Lot 49, literally nothing else because I'm lazy.
SOMEDAY
Don DeLillo
Read: Cosmopolis, White Noise.
William S. Burroughs
Read: Naked Lunch. Whoops, sorry.
Less Famous People
Iain M. Banks
Once I binge read all the Culture novels over a holiday weekend and then fell asleep and dreamed I lived there. Imagine how sad I was when I woke up.
Disclaimer: I am not Elon Musk or Grimes or Jeff Bezos and anyone who believes AI utopia could happen within their lifetime probably needs to quit LessWrong. But if you want escapism value, you can't beat this series.
My personal ranking: Player of Games and Look to Windward are the two best novels. Surface Detail comes close. The others are fine, but I wouldn't reread them. Everyone loves Use of Weapons, but I wasn't a fan.
Thomas Ligotti
Read: too much to count. Sorry.
Shoutouts to I Am In Eskew, which introduced me to his stories. I read the transcripts for I Am In Eskew instead of listening to it because I have no patience, and still enjoyed it. It's the best horror podcast I know.
Shirley Jackson
Read: The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Lottery and Other Stories.
Will Wiles
Read: Care of Wooden Floors, The Way Inn. The Way Inn is great. Love sentient locations, eldritch hotels, the skewering of corporate sensibilities, etc.
Jeff Vandermeer
Read: the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation is the best by a long shot, didn't like Authority, Acceptance is fine). The Ambergris trilogy (Shriek: An Afterword is the only good book, the short stories are mixed, hated Finch). Borne. The Weird, which he helped put together, if that counts. Annihilation and Shriek: An Afterword are my favorite books of his.
Hiron Ennes
Read: Leech, their first and only novel as of my writing this. Must-read for people who like hiveminds. Cool protagonist.
Stephen Chapman
Read: The Troika, the only novel he wrote. Great weird fiction. Look at the blurb.
Beneath the glare of three purple suns, three travelers—an old Mexican woman, an automated jeep, and a brontosaurus—have trudged across a desert for hundreds of years. They do not know if the desert has an end, and if it does, what they might find there. Sometimes they come across perfectly-preserved cities, but without a single inhabitant, and never a drop of rain. Worse still, they have no memory of their lives before the desert. Only at night, in dreams, do they recall fragments of their past identities.
But night also brings the madness of the sandstorms, which jolt them out of one body and into another in a game of metaphysical musical chairs. In their disorientation and dysfunction, they have killed each other dozens of times, but they cannot die. Where are they? How can they escape?
(Disclaimer: main villain is cheesy. But the first half is worth it alone. Have a little shrine to Alex in my head.)
Kelly Link
Read: Get in Trouble, Magic for Beginners. Her short stories are mixed quality, but the best are very enjoyable. Eerie, tying together disparate elements in a way that hints at an unrealized significance. Favorites are "The Specialist's Hat" and "Stone Animals".
Leila Slimani
Read: Chanson Douce (translated as Lullaby or The Perfect Nanny). Starring good ol' modern isolation, alienating work relations, familial dysfunction, mental illness, etc. English translations are clunky, but helped to supplement my horrible French.
Garielle Lutz
Read: Partial List of People to Bleach. "I wish I could inhabit my life instead of just trespassing on it."
Web Authors
Hey, you see everyone listed in this section? You can read their stories for free! Wowza!
Technically you can read all the above novels for free too if you pirate them with libgen.is, but that is illegal and I do not condone illegal activities crime is bad
Bavitz
Read: Everything. One of my favorite authors.
Scott Alexander Siskind
Read: All of his Slate Star Codex short stories. Too much of his nonfiction. Never got around to Unsong. He has some weird opinions, but his fiction is worth checking out.
Souvarine
A very cool and underrated author. This section was too long, so I moved it to a separate page. The OFFICIAL SOUVARINE APPRECIATION PAGE.
Also:
- Whoever wrote _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9 (aka The Interface Series), a serialized weird fiction story told in Reddit comments. Creepy fun. Also complete, and the author has vanished off the face of the planet.
- All the people who write for The SCP Foundation. I still check back for new stories periodically.
- Wildbow: Web author. Of the five web serials he's finished, I've read Worm, Pact, and Pale. All are very long, and mixed quality. I like Pact the best, but wouldn't recommend it unless you're really interested.
- Bogleech: Web author and cartoonist. Made Awful Hospital, a grotesque and delightful interactive webcomic in the vein of Homestuck. Unlike Homestuck, I've actually read it. It's great and I recommend it to anyone with a strong stomach. Currently unfinished, though.
- Abbadon: Webcomic artist. Made Kill Six Billion Demons. Epic weird fantasy webcomic with Hindu and Gnostic influences. Currently unfinished.
Interactive Fiction
I have an Interactive Fiction Database account. Check out IFDB if you like interactive fiction. But if you do, you probably know about IFDB already. Anyway my reviews aren't that good.
Games
My three favorites:
The Beginner's Guide
by Davey Wreden
I watched someone play this on Youtube years ago and loved the story. Never actually played it. Now I haven't looked at it in ages, so if it's worse than I remember it being, blame my past self.
That said, Pale Fire is one of my favorite books. This is basically the video game equivalent of Pale Fire.
The End Is Nigh
by Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel
At turns funny, morbid, and incredibly personal. It's so nonchalantly cheerful about the dead corpses and flesh tumors blobbing around that you can't help but be cheerful, too.
Rain World
by Videocult
The story happens to line up almost perfectly with my own interests. It's got a post-apocalyptic industrial setting and transcending worldly desires and escaping your earthly suffering and flooding the planet with the weight of past sins and AI societies and weird Buddhist inspired spirituality and yadda yadda. Anyway, I have hundreds of hours on this game.
Also: Disco Elysium, Pokemon Showdown plus various Pokemon fangames, Brogue. I've played Brogue on and off for years and won less than ten times. It's free and available online. Check it out it if you have time to burn.
Movies
I rarely watch movies, so this is a short list.
Melancholia
Directed by Lars von Trier
The ultimate depression movie. I have Thomas Ligotti on my author list, so it's not a surprise I like this movie.
Skinamarink
Directed by Kyle Edward Ball
Haven't watched it. But I did read Bogleech's review. He made it sound like the best horror movie of all time.
The Truman Show
Directed by Peter Weir
Decent movie, great meta elements. Not sure if I would watch it again. Maybe I just put it here so I could include two movies I've actually watched?
Also: vewn makes great short animations. Twins in Paradise is my favorite animation of all time. Everything she makes is free on Youtube, so go check it out.
Music
The Youtube channel called SiIvagunner uploads exclusively meme remixes of video game music. They do this once every few hours, meaning you never run out of new content.
Like a cultured person, I listen to this in my free time and not much else.
OK, some extras
- Machinarium OST by Floex (Tomas Dvorak)
- Manifold Garden OST by Laryssa Okada
- Monument Valley OST by Stafford Bawler, OBFUSC and Grigori
- The Binding of Isaac: Antibirth OST by mudeth
- Rain World OST by James Primate
- The End is Nigh OST by Ridiculon
The OSTs listed above are instrumental. La Femme's music isn't, but I think they're decent. Call it a holdover from the years I spent learning French in middle school.
Congrats! You reached the end!
Unfortunately, there's nothing here. No reward for getting through it all.
Woe is you.