Internet Fiction

[№56]

This is a thread for fiction written about the internet. Stories that are either set on the internet, involve the internet as a major plot point, or are significantly informed by internet culture. Being published on the internet is a bonus. Non-fiction is allowed, as long as it's creative and not just another straightforward opinion piece or technical article.
I'm interested in seeing obscure stuff - works written by genuinely "online" people that take on the weirder side of the web and that aren't aimed at the Facebook-browsing general audience. I know there are a number of popular recent novels about the internet, but as far as I can tell they're all focused on social media and how it is...le bad. Maybe that's an unfair judgment, but I really have no interest in reading about the internet from the perspective of someone who has a blue checkmark on twitter and feels the need to write about the internet out of some sense of social responsibility. I want to read internet fiction written by the kind of people that only appear as characters in these mainstream books. I want raw, realistic depictions of online life written by people who aren't afraid to get as stupid or disgusting as they need to portray the internet as it actually is. I want read stuff that you can't understand unless you spend a lot of time on the internet.
Here are a few examples of what I have in mind:

• The Gig Economy - Zero H.P. Lovecraft
  • A short story about cryptocurrency, memetics, and Landian cosmic nightmare capitalism set in the very near future and written by an edgy twitter guy. It's not a perfect story, but it is a great example of what I think internet fiction should be from a stylistic and thematic perspective. Despite how esoteric the story gets its depiction of the internet and internet-based technologies feels very believable.
• False Kotatsu - Medical Dragon
  • Another short story. This one is a postmodern take on the plight of the western anime fanbase, kind of like Welcome to the N.H.K. It's not very long and clearly unfinished, and I can't tell whether that was a deliberate decision by the author or if they just ran out of steam. Either way, it's very well written and worth checking out if you're an anime fan.
• The Legend of "bob's game." - Robert Pelloni (PDF available here)
  • The self-published autobiography of indie game dev and lolcow Robert "Bob" Pelloni. If you're not already familiar with the story of Bob's Game, this video does a good job of summarizing it. Like most commentators, the creator of that video only references the autobiography as proof of Bob's egomania, but the book itself is actually interesting enough to be worth reading on its own (although it does degenerate into incoherence near the end.) It's a raw look into the mind of a early-2000s nerd who is trying to cover up some real psychological issues by acting crazier than he really is, the kind of personality you see everywhere on the internet.
• The Last Binge Ever, Volumes 1 and 2 - Londonfrog
  • Two years' worth of repetitive and nearly identical 4chan posts about the struggles of being a "blackpilled ugly beta nofriends loser autist" written by the same anonymous poster. Individually they're not that interesting, but when collected together and read back-to-back they turn into a bizarre performance art piece. Imagine writing a long blog post about how you're a hopeless loser but will totally start turning your life around tomorrow. Now imagine posting it to a literature/finance/fitness board (never /r9k/, where you would expect this kind of thing) where it will get deleted for being off-topic almost instantly before anyone can reply. Then imagine doing the exact same thing the next day. Imagine doing this almost every day for over half a decade. I'm stretching the definition of "fiction" by including The Last Binge Ever on this list but I think it's worth sharing because, to quote Dostoevsky, "such persons as the composer of these [posts] not only exist in our society, but indeed must exist, considering the circumstances under which our society has generally been formed."
• Densha Otoko - Hitori Nakano
  • Densha Otoko / "Train Man" isn't as obscure as the other books on this list, and I haven't actually read it. I did see the movie, but it was really mediocre and the only thing I remember about it was the main character wearing a pretty cool Zeta Gundam t-shirt in a few scenes. Still, it's worth including because it's the only mainstream novel I know of to be based entirely on a series of posts made to an anonymous imageboard. In that sense, it's the polar opposite of The Last Binge Ever and proof that there might actually be an audience for the cyber-epistolary novel genre.
• _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9
  • A long-form creepypasta that was published as a series of comments on unrelated articles linked to reddit. The coolest thing about it, and the reason I'm adding it to this list, is the format. The plot is internet-relevant too, but despite a strong start falls apart near the end.
• GPS - Alfred North Shitehead
  • GPS is far and away my favorite book on this list, but it's also the hardest to recommend. It's unapologetically edgy and the plot is so dependent on /lit/ in-jokes that it's probably incomprehensible to people who didn't spend the past five years lurking 4chan. Despite that, or maybe because of that, it's the best "internet novel" I've ever read. Unlike the other books /lit/ has generated over the years (The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra, Hypersphere, etc.) GPS isn't just a shitpost. Once you get past all the stupidity there's a surprisingly intelligent examination of what it means to be counter-cultural in a hyper-connected online world lurking underneath.

You can probably tell that this list is heavily influenced by my personal taste and internet-browsing habits. I made this thread because I want to hear some alternate opinions on what should be included in the "internet canon." I've always wanted to try putting together a list along these lines to counterbalance the mainstream conception of internet fiction mentioned above, but because my own experience with the net is fairly limited opening the topic up for discussion seemed like a good idea.
So, let me know what you think. What is "internet fiction" to you? What deserves to be added to the list? What kind of out-there, cutting-edge stuff is getting overlooked right now?

Thanks to @Remember_Summer_Days and @lain is here for their feedback in putting this together. I know I said I'd make this post a long time ago, but I didn't forget about it.

 

[Titus]

I was actually thinking of writing something like this.
Reading GPS rn and I'm liking it so far. First novel I've read in a long time. The 4chan and >reddit comments make the dribble from the manuscript go down smoothly.

 

[GhostInTheMachine]

Thanks, this is a very nice collection. I have myself wondered about the lack of truly online literature, literature written by people who have really experienced the online world, who really have something to say about it, truly capturing the experience of being alive in these strange times. Sadly I have nothing to add as of now. But would hate to see this thread die a premature death. This thread deserves to be on the "hidden internet" forum of Agora Road.
The only thing I do have is this very /lit/-specific, 21st century parody of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape letters; It is a short fragment and should really just be a shitpost, but somehow I found it unexpectedly touching.

Spoiler

 

[redacted345]

Thanks for the recs N56, spent the whole night and this morning reading the bob kickstarter. Just read until half and then skimmed when it devolved into the egomaniacal schizo rambling.

Shit it was rough, I've already knew about Bob's Game from a Zero Puntuaction video but I didn't knew it was that bad. The fact you're reading it all in a probably failed kickstarter post makes it worse, as you know that the whole thing is not going to end well. Also fun that he crossed paths with Tim Rogers, the now popular long essay reviewer.

He really had it good at some point living alone with his girlfriend and playing games while working in his own. It seemed like a nice comfy thing, but he was too nuts and addicted to shit.

It's from 2014 I wonder how did he end up, he probably has a lolcow thread in kiwifarms. I wonder if bob's game ROM is available in coolroms or some other rom sites.

Some selected quotes:

Spoiler

"The truth about humans is that we are all in a giant psychic dog pile, scrambling to tear each other down and claim the throne."

"I was going to Hell. It was a real place- It was in my own mind."

"I knew the product had to sell itself, knowing that my game was the first and only puzzle game objectively better than Tetris."

"The truth is, I did create a huge and awesome video game. I guess I had a story to tell. Maybe I was used as a messenger, here to warn a new generation in a time when almost everyone will be exposed to a digital plague of endless filth."

"My Dad seems to think I'm gay, maybe from the DDR" (@LostintheCycle)

"Once when I was in my early teens I masturbated in a hotel hot tub. Sorry about that. I got past a certain point and my judgment went out the window. I hope whoever used it after me absorbed some youthful mana and restored some vibrant lustre to their skin"

 

[SomaSpice]

I just ordered "No Tiger" by Mika, which was described to me by a friend as bizarro fiction by an anime addicted twittard. The synopsis on Amazon reads:

A girl is under fire from terrible psychic weaponry. Lizard women fornicate under corroded skylines. Gore & bodypower is the present order. Identity fragmentation within forever violence. Evil bodies cannibalized in the space of hostile entities. NO TIGER is sending urgent transmissions from the infinite battlefield. It wants to communicate something to you. Standby.

Here's the top review:

Short review for people who are more normie and just looking at books on amazon: it's chillingly emotional and loud experimental poetry. I don't know how to drill it down any more than that.

My actual thoughts. As someone who has been a cumbrained tankie adjacent trans woman for a long time now but who has always been at the edge of those communities and never quite felt welcomed or invited or spoken to, it was fascinating not only the specific, raw images and feelings contained in this book, which at once evoke all the osmosis of things ive seen from the outside peering in, and yet also manages to draw out a sense of longing, mania and pain that is so specific and personal. There is a tragic universality to these words and to their chaotic assemblage, at once possessing a certain agency that we believe we give ourselves when we know a hell of a lot about the Syrian Civil War or w/e, but also a sense of helpless, gnashing desire. I told myself "it is probably insulting to go nuts telling the author what you think her work is about" because I'm neurotic, but I went and did it anyway because I can't help myself.

I feel like I'll need to reread specific entries in order to say more about them, but I also feel a sense of anxiety about annihilating the purely, amorphously emotional reactions I had to it and trying to make "more sense" out of something which is so like, earnest. I felt it under my skin and I want that to be enough.

I'll post my thoghts here once I read it, as I think it fits the bill of "significantly influenced by internet culture"

 

[lain is here]

Glad you put this together! Sorry for replying so late, for some reason I never got the notification for it and May's been a tough month irl, so this is the first I'm seeing it. Reminds me that when I have time I need to get back to reading GPS

 

[№56]

Thanks, this is a very nice collection. I have myself wondered about the lack of truly online literature, literature written by people who have really experienced the online world, who really have something to say about it, truly capturing the experience of being alive in these strange times. Sadly I have nothing to add as of now. But would hate to see this thread die a premature death. This thread deserves to be on the "hidden internet" forum of Agora Road.
The only thing I do have is this very /lit/-specific, 21st century parody of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape letters; It is a short fragment and should really just be a shitpost, but somehow I found it unexpectedly touching.

Spoiler

View attachment 62448

I've seen those Screwtape posts before, they're great. There are definitely a lot of individual posts out there that have enough literary merit to stand on their own, but I made a point of not including stuff like this on my list because I wanted to focus on short stories/novels/works of comparable length. Maybe that was a mistake, it excludes a lot of quality content.

The fact you're reading it all in a probably failed kickstarter post makes it worse, as you know that the whole thing is not going to end well. Also fun that he crossed paths with Tim Rogers, the now popular long essay reviewer.

The Bob's Game Kickstarter actually met its funding goal and the game did get released, but it's hard to think of it a success because the finished product ended up being so different from everything Bob had initially shown off. He wiped his website of game-related content not long afterwards, and now his only internet activity comes from updates to robertpelloni.com that he periodically deletes and replaces with something different. Last time I checked there was nothing there, now there's a long, disorganized rant where he disowns everything he has previously posted to the internet and encourages the reader to convert to Christianity. Here are some revealing excerpts:

"Just forget all of it. I wanted to find something good in video games but I don't think there is anymore. Just be kind and respectful to everyone and generous to others. Don't do drugs and stay off the internet porn. Listen to your parents. Read the Bible and go to Church. Go to community college or take online classes on Coursera or something and get a certificate. That's probably good. Don't take anything I say too seriously, I'm just some idiot."

"May God have mercy on my soul. It was an accident. I'm sorry. I'm not good. I was lampooning game and tech conferences. I was fascinated with Nintendo and DDR so much as a kid. I wasn't trying to hurt anyone, I was trying to do something good. I just made a spooky thing to be dramatic. But it wasn't really supposed to be that serious and then I gave up on my own game to make a statement and do right with it."

"I was just trying to push myself hard and write whatever came to mind. A lot of it is probably stuff I dreamed or made false memories of. And it was all wrong, it was just garbage crap posting. It was unfinished and incomplete. It also got copied and probably edited by trolls. It was never meant as anything more than a journal, or testament, of my own experience. Please disregard it entirely."

"I need to be very clear that my dumb blog thing was just a list of sins. I absolutely renounce all of it. So don't ever do any of that stuff, I was just being honest about how my mind worked at times and the dumb mistakes I did in life."

It is really sad, but it sounds like Bob is in a better place now than when he wrote his autobiography. The fact that he seems to be less active on the internet now is definitely a good sign.
As for Tim Rogers, there are a number of old YouTube videos out there showing the two of them hanging out. This one is pretty great:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqTkqnhgWO0

I just ordered "No Tiger" by Mika, which was described to me by a friend as bizarro fiction by an anime addicted twittard.

FYI, the entire book is available as a free PDF via the author's twitter page (their actual tweets are protected, which isn't that surprising.)
I appreciate you sharing this because it's exactly what I wanted to hear about when I asked for recommendations that came from parts of the internet I wasn't familiar with. I skimmed through it, and to be honest, I didn't like what I read that much (kneejerk dislike of free verse poetry + too nihilistic) but I'm still interested in hearing your thoughts.

 

[Titus]

@№56 I'm a little over a hundred pages into GPS. It is honestly pretty boring and repetitive now. Does it get better?

 

[№56]

@№56 I'm a little over a hundred pages into GPS. It is honestly pretty boring and repetitive now. Does it get better?

Probably not, if you don't like the first half you're not likely to enjoy the second half any better.

 

[vect0r]

The Hidden Webpage by Jared Roberts​

The Hidden Webpage is one of my favorite pieces of internet fiction (and specifically horror fiction) I've read so far though it is a long read. Essentially, the main character is lured down a nostalgic rabbit-hole-type mystery and their reality is slowly lost as you continue reading. I'll add that it's slowly paced but very satisfying as you read the MC uncover details overtime. That being said, it's been quite a while since I last read it.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson​

(Honorable mention. A little bit mainstream. Not exactly written by an "online" type but is different from the rest of the mainstream internet fiction)
Snow Crash is a classic and is also where the word "Metaverse" originated from. The Metaverse takes the role of the internet in an Anarcho-Capitalist America. A modern comparison for the Metaverse would be VR chat but obviously much more sophisticated ( Zuck's Metaverse is barely comparable). It gets somewhat philosophical but I won't elaborate.

 

[redacted345]

I had a blast reading a couple of the other internet fiction entries. I'm putting down some scrambled commentary. Thanks again guys for the list.

Spoiler: False Kotatsu

Postponed readng False Kotatsu as I was too lazy to sign up in what it looks like a fanfiction site. Also I wasn't entirely sold in the "western Welcome to the NHK" description.

But I got surprised it's very good and compelling. Funny and depressing at the same time. The dave ramblings really nailed it and I know I'll go back from time to time to them.

As one review pointed in the smashwords page, the rushed ending fits. That the whole thing crumbles speaks of the exhaustion of storytelling itself, a deflating of fantasy.

You really get the senstation reading that this guy is on the verge of fully grasping the hikkikomori/anime fantasy addiction, and that the story will carry to some groundbreaking conclusion...just for the veil to dissipate and see that he is for the long run.

Is the author active somewhere? his smashwords page has a @medicaldrgn twitter in case anyone wants to check out.

Spoiler: sidenote: Welcome to the NHK

And btw, sometime ago I recall reading that Tatsuhiko Takimoto, writer of the original Welcome To NHK light novel, got back to his magnum opus with a sequel. Can't find where now -I think one of his jp blog posts, Google Translated- but I recall reading something along the lines that he was still a hikikomori, he really hadn't learned from his own story and used the earnings from it to cruise by*...

...which shouldn't be a problem right? I mean, sounds like a fucking dream. Make the quintessential work about a growing problem in your country -and now the world-, and then just lock yourself comfy with the earnings. Just happens the subject of your work was about not doing that.

I downloaded Welcome To NHK with Edonkey at 17. It was great and turned out to be very prescient, predating even web 2.0 Internet. They really made loneliness and agoraphobia into a seasonal anime. They dissed mmorpgs, lolicon -pedophilia- obsession, suicide, piramid market schemes?. It was fun and depressing, the music was great I still listen to Hitori Bocchi from time to time.

Also he nailed it at the main turn point of the series, when Sato runs out of money and has to go into the street looking for work. "Why is somebody a hikkikomori? Because he can. It's a luxury". Watching countless shitty VICE/BBC hikkimori documentaries makes me wonder if japanese institutions got that point clear.

Still a part of me felt that the whole thing, by neccessity of being a light novel/manga/anime, had to be somewhat bullshit. And by "had to be", I mean its deuteragonist, Misaki-chan, a 16 pubescent virginal girl obsessed with fixing your life banging at your door. I know, It's a romance anime, there might be no other way to convey this in the genre, but as I said above it's the quintessential anime about being a hikkikomori...

So yeah, then having the author come out of his hole a decade later to do the whole reboot/sequel thing "Hey guess what! I'm still a hikki and I need money so NHK IS BACK" feels eerie. Hopefully I'm just being a pessimist and doing some convoluted depressing framing of all. Maybe he has a point to make.

*Been some time I've read about this and can't find the source in my phone.

Spoiler: londonfrog/GPS

The londonfrog posts I don't enjoy too much as it puts me in a doomscrolling state but nevertheless are mesmerizing for his original way of fuckin up.

His retarded cosmopolitan binges -his main schtick- don't make sense. He gets a 2nd job at some point to continue his premium binging which is a very NEET backwards behavior. Leaving aside the issue of not eating healthy, I would have imagined that eating cheaply would develop by instinct if you despise retail working that much.

Also his gym stats: "squatting almost 350 lbs for 5 reps" that's ~180kg, doesn't sound something a bloat could squat.

His dissing of history books and reading altogether is funny, it's like the realistic depressing version of Mark Corrigan from The Peep Show. It's relatable also, I feel like that at points like I'm cramming bullshit in my head which doesn't stick anymore /unless/even if/ I read it 10 times.

Does anyone know what has been of him? there was Vol 3 and 4 in the making supposedly , but I would imagine you guys would have gotten ahold of them if that was the case.

I skimmed GPS, as I'm lazy to read the deranged chunks of text, it's too much for me. Still once I got some shallow gist of it made me laugh with Cheeky Git and the whole soupeur thing -is that a /lit meme don't tell me that's a real community hahhahah-.

 

[Brapuccino]

cool thread and I'll be reading all these eventually.
A long time ago I had an idea to write either a script to a movie or a comic strictly about basement dwelling rejects that lived on the internet and frequented an image board, aliens would come and kidnap all humanity but because they were in their basement during the abduction they'd be fine, so they'd talk over the internet and eventually agree to meet up and save the world.
Looking back on the idea it's kinda silly but I don't know, I might still give it a shot, could be fun. I've been thinking of writing short fiction and posting it on my website.

On another note, film director Shunji Iwai made a website called Lilyholic which was a sort of online-novel where he'd post as each of his characters interacting in this text board dedicated to fictional artist Lily Chou-Chou. Eventually he turned that into a film, but I always thought the idea was really cool. People would get the chance to post in it along with the characters and be a part of it. The site came out in like 2000 and there's still people posting on it lol

lilyholic/bbs

 

[№56]

The Hidden Webpage by Jared Roberts​

The Hidden Webpage is one of my favorite pieces of internet fiction (and specifically horror fiction) I've read so far though it is a long read. Essentially, the main character is lured down a nostalgic rabbit-hole-type mystery and their reality is slowly lost as you continue reading. I'll add that it's slowly paced but very satisfying as you read the MC uncover details overtime. That being said, it's been quite a while since I last read it.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson​

(Honorable mention. A little bit mainstream. Not exactly written by an "online" type but is different from the rest of the mainstream internet fiction)
Snow Crash is a classic and is also where the word "Metaverse" originated from. The Metaverse takes the role of the internet in an Anarcho-Capitalist America. A modern comparison for the Metaverse would be VR chat but obviously much more sophisticated ( Zuck's Metaverse is barely comparable). It gets somewhat philosophical but I won't elaborate.

I just finished reading The Hidden Webpage, it was fantastic. The author took unsettling experiences most internet users have (having your online identity fragmented across multiple platforms, not being sure of whether the person you're talking to is real, finding out that an old site/user has been wiped from the internet, realizing that all you're doing in real life is staring off into space, etc.) and exaggerated them until they became a horror story. Very creepy and surprisingly believable because of this, despite some of the creepypasta-ish details.

It's been a long time since I read Snow Crash, but I remember liking it. I don't think it deserves all the credit it gets for predicting the internet - some of the details are correct, but others aren't. The same goes for other pre-2000s books, there were a number of authors that saw what was coming but I don't think anyone got it quite right. I'm reading Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner right now (might make a post about it when I'm done) and it comes really close, despite being written in the 60s and being inspired by television instead of computers, but there's a lot of stuff that still feels like a product of the time the book was written.

Is the author active somewhere? his smashwords page has a @medicaldrgn twitter in case anyone wants to check out.

As far as I can tell they've either vanished from the internet or are no longer using that handle. I don't think they've done much to promote their work, the only reason I know about it was thanks to having a brief interaction with them (at least I think it was them) on 4chan a number of years ago. I'm glad people are enjoying it.

is that a /lit meme don't tell me that's a real community hahhahah-.

It's real. The joke comes from a post claiming that the title of "dark academia" personality and small-time lolcow R.C. Waldun's book, "l'academie," was actually taken from a slang term for urinals popular in the French gay community. That's the kind of incomprehensible reference I was referring to in my original post.

 

[remember_summer_days]

Ok, finally gonna reply to this thread. Thanks to N56 for making it!

I gotta say I'm not well-versed on internet fiction since it's a decentralized genre, in a way I feel like it's too broad to be useful, kinda like saying European fiction. Sure you can sort of throw the term out there and expect to be talking about something, but what really matters when you talk about European literature is the specifics and not the general idea of European Fiction. Or idk, maybe I'm off my base here. What I'm trying to say is, the term may be too broad.

Anyways, what I've been interested in is in the idea of an 'internet gothic' genre, basically all the good themes of gothic literature (Be it classic gothic or southern gothic) but in the landscape of internet degeneracy. The idea of Gothic is very comfortably tucked in within the nexus of the internet. The gothic novel concerns itself with moral degeneracy, decadent systems, individual alienation from the wider society, queer and grotesque happenings. The modern equivalent of a decadent, dusty and freakish cathedral or a southern plantation might as well be an abandoned internet forum. Hopefully a forum that's also into cannibalism or something.

As for my contributions for this thread, You Will Never be Forgotten by Mary South. This one is good but it's a bit too millenial-ish, too middle class american mom for me. Still, it's probably the closes I've seen to the idea of Internet Gothic being realized, maybe Zero H.P Lovecraft but as the OP has pointed out, his stories aren't really about the internet even if they are clearly influenced about it. You Will Never be Forgotten is a collection of short stories about the internet. Including a forum for getting lobotomized, the story of a google moderator that spends her days moderating gore, a group of old men who do sexual roleplay online... My main criticism is that the stories never seem to escape the liberal paradigm of what's acceptable, in a way it feels like the author was castrating herself to explore more complicated and enthralling ideas. Overall would recommend if you wanna read internet fiction.

There's also Out There by Kate Folk, never read this one but it's often brought up in the same convo vein as You will never be forgotten, and pointed out as another internet gothic book. And by reading the Amazon synopsis, yeah I can tell they're gonna be similar. And I can also tell they're both written by liberal woman lmao. Kinda funny how both books have stories about the evils of Russian trolls, wonder where they got that from.

Attached to this post is the 'official' lit registry. Basically authors that are known to frequent /lit/, though not all of these are about the internet, they're all from the perspective of people who browse /lit/ and hence 4chan. You might find something that peeks your interest in there. There's also &amp and Tales of the Unreal. Again, not everything in here is about the internet, but it's all made from /lit/ people.

There's also Confederacy of Dunces, not internet since it was written in the 1950s, but it might as well be lmao. The characters are the 1950s equivalent of 4chan/twitter discussions.

Some others I know off but never read:

Finally some Good News by Delicious Tacos.

The Sluts by Dennis Copper.

Cybergypsies by Indra Sinha. Apparently this one is really good.

Digital Sunset by kaixxa bautista. Unless you're an evil person who uses adblock on agora road and makes agora chan cry, you would know this one is advertised on this website lol.

Also I tried my own internet gothic story, it's on issue 15 of &amp, the story is called Skype

 

[SomaSpice]

Digital Sunset by kaixxa bautista. Unless you're an evil person who uses adblock on agora road and makes agora chan cry, you would know this one is advertised on this website lol.

Pretty sure its just google ads' algorithm guessing what things you're probable to buy. I got advertized this shirt:

In any case, nice reccs summer. I'm still waiting for my copy of no tiger to arrive...

 

[BlackControlBoxer]

I really like this one and it would be a master piece but it has a bad case of "writer on cocaine inserting his own depraved sex ideas into it"

https://mogami.neocities.org/files/prime_intellect.pdf

The parts that relate to prime intellect and what living inside the internet would really entail are top tier though, ignore the gross sex stuff and its a good book.
It gets a bit Ted K towards the end.

 

[remember_summer_days]

My first time seeing Tales mentioned randomly in the wild. What a heartfelt surprise! I wrote HMS Mariana for that book, and I've written a lot for Unreal in general. They're great guys, but it's a shame that the house has recently devolved into into bizarre internet doxxing drama (if you've visited any &amp or Unreal threads on /lit/ recently you know what I'm talking about.) Also coincidentally, I'm in &amp issue 015 as well. I wrote Incident as well as Decision-making risks and benefits. If anyone wants to either buy a copy of Tales of the Unreal OR read the free pdf available on the unreal website (https://unrealpress.com/tales-of-the-unreal/) I'd love to hear fresh thoughts on my story. Always nice to absorb feedback.

On an unrelated note, Del Tacos' Finally Some Good News is a great book, although it fits snugly into the genre of internet books clearly written by an office worker in their 30s who writes in lulls at their day job as a way to day dream and not kill themselves from boredom. For other examples see any book by Ogden Nesmer. The plot is funny enough, but what really shined for me is Del Tacos' wonderful prose. There are some lines which I think about on a regular basis years after having read the thing. Like the rusty nail digging into to girl's palm in the treehouse, or the starving protagonist being able to "taste the grass the cows ate" while eating processed jerky sticks.

Lmao bro, fo we know each other? I'm both the /wg/ and &amp discords. Just did a review of Eggplant btw, it's here on this forum.

I remember Decision Making, it was a fun read that tapped on the trope of free will as a sort of illness. Sure you can make your own decisions, but mostly for trivial, state-approved stuff, like choosing your favorite cereal or flavor of coffee. True free will is discouraged. At least that's how I saw it. If I had any criticism, is that its a story about ideas rather than people. But I mean, it's really short so you did the best you could in that space.

 

[remember_summer_days]

My first time seeing Tales mentioned randomly in the wild. What a heartfelt surprise! I wrote HMS Mariana for that book, and I've written a lot for Unreal in general. They're great guys, but it's a shame that the house has recently devolved into into bizarre internet doxxing drama (if you've visited any &amp or Unreal threads on /lit/ recently you know what I'm talking about.) Also coincidentally, I'm in &amp issue 015 as well. I wrote Incident as well as Decision-making risks and benefits. If anyone wants to either buy a copy of Tales of the Unreal OR read the free pdf available on the unreal website (https://unrealpress.com/tales-of-the-unreal/) I'd love to hear fresh thoughts on my story. Always nice to absorb feedback.

On an unrelated note, Del Tacos' Finally Some Good News is a great book, although it fits snugly into the genre of internet books clearly written by an office worker in their 30s who writes in lulls at their day job as a way to day dream and not kill themselves from boredom. For other examples see any book by Ogden Nesmer. The plot is funny enough, but what really shined for me is Del Tacos' wonderful prose. There are some lines which I think about on a regular basis years after having read the thing. Like the rusty nail digging into to girl's palm in the treehouse, or the starving protagonist being able to "taste the grass the cows ate" while eating processed jerky sticks.

Also, the Anomaly creepypasta is def S tier imo

 

[WhoGoesThere]

Lmao bro, fo we know each other? I'm both the /wg/ and &amp discords. Just did a review of Eggplant btw, it's here on this forum.

I remember Decision Making, it was a fun read that tapped on the trope of free will as a sort of illness. Sure you can make your own decisions, but mostly for trivial, state-approved stuff, like choosing your favorite cereal or flavor of coffee. True free will is discouraged. At least that's how I saw it. If I had any criticism, is that its a story about ideas rather than people. But I mean, it's really short so you did the best you could in that space.

Lol I'm in those discords as well yes. What a mindfuck. Truly the internet is like 200 people max. I've yet to read anything else in issue 015 tbh. Actually I'm also looking forward to reading the new &amp issue.

 

[remember_summer_days]

Lol I'm in those discords as well yes. What a mindfuck. Truly the internet is like 200 people max. I've yet to read anything else in issue 015 tbh. Actually I'm also looking forward to reading the new &amp issue.

I have the same username on those discords. So hit me with a PM anytime lol