Reviews for December 2024
The Intercessor says "Ho, ho, ho!"
Regrettably, I spent too long Christmasing and reading The Gunslinger and another King entry to do much this month, but the reviews that are here are fairly meaty. Enjoy!
★: A Man on the Inside
*: Saving the Bluenette, The Chessiad, Denial
Previously, on Record Crash:
A Man on the Inside★
I had been hearing some buzz about this show on social networks. I usually ignore that shit, like with Arcane, with everyone whining about the ending while I stay clueless and immune to propaganda. But this one has Ted Danson, the man who carried The Good Place and Bored to Death and also probably carried Cheers until it spun off into the far better Frasier where he didn’t appear—you get the gist.
It’s a Trojan horse. The trailer looks like a weird Hallmark comedy about the power of love or something. At best it could be a No Murders in the Building. But just like The Good Place looks like sitcom trash and it’s actually about philosophy, The Man on the Inside is a pretty hardcore meditation on the elderly and death. It doesn’t pull any punches, and I almost cried.1
Ted Danson acts as well as you expect, switching between funny clown and Emmy winner from one scene to the next. The rest of the cast is alright too, especially considering how all the best actors should have retired by the point they become eligible for this. And the Waitress from Always Sunny is here for some reason?2
One last positive. Unlike most Netflix trash, this show nails the pacing. Single sitting binge, zero issues keeping my attention, mostly through good acting and characterization instead of cheap tricks and cliffhangers. A rare non-scifi, non-fantasy, non-anything absolute recommendation from this blog, but here it is. It happened.
When I Win I Will Take What’s Mine
I recently reviewed When I Win the World Ends, Bavitz’s Pokemon fic. This is Recursive Fanfiction of that, which is great, we could always use more recursion.
Let me get out the positives out of the way first: the author is clearly experienced or at least aware of cool competitive tactics, and chose some great ones to portray. I actually think many battles might be less important from a characterization standpoint, but they’re more engaging on the mechanical level.
I don’t want to spoil too much, but here are a few examples: a really nice twist on the infamous level 1 Rattata FEAR strategy, one fight that reads like speed chess to the audience’s bafflement,3 a coding error in the original games replicated by the simulators… in general, the author plays with obscure interactions far more often than the original fic (which saved the one truly “meta” tactic for the final battle).
Of course, the original didn’t have the excuse the fic does: this is a self-insert character who has actually played Pokemon Showdown and the official games, though that’s as far as his meta knowledge goes. A player dropped into a deconstruction of the game he used to play. The Most Evil Trainer with minor changes.
That’s the twist of this review: Most Evil Trainer is really the main point of comparison here, not When I Win. It’s funny, because based on some early details for WIW I assumed that one would end up unwittingly plagiarizing it due to similar theming. I ended up being right in a slightly different context.
Our protagonist here is an older man named Holiday,4 with a perfectly crafted team he cares little about and enough edge to fill a stadium. His goal? Winning a specific fight for leverage, so he can meet a legendary and go home. Barring the level of caring he has for his Pokemon, it’s a carbon copy of MET.
Most Evil Trainer’s biggest flaw is that it doesn’t properly present why the hero wants to go home so badly,5 and the same applies here. Holiday just seems whiny, trying to bruteforce an exit from a near-utopia, as more likable characters like Cynthia and Red get in his way. Toril and Aracely (the previous main characters, who are extremely OOC here)6 had far more relatable and believable motivations, and a single chapter gave them more depth than Holiday gets in twenty-eight.
By the end of the fic, this is my full take on him:
He’s an alcoholic.
He doesn’t care about his Pokemon, but also, he’s just deluding himself about not caring?
He’s suicidal, but also, he’s not?
Maybe it’d be tolerable if he showed additional, more likable characteristics. I, Jaune,7 for example, made you root for the guy even if he was a failed drunk, because he was funny and desperately trying to bond with people. I don’t know what rooting for Holiday would even mean. The guy’s only legible goal is ending the fic you’re reading,8 and all your favorite characters hate him.
And the fic you’re reading is a stumble, decent early on but getting increasingly worse until you’re glad it’s over by the end. I’m using so many external comparisons because it’s hard to enumerate what even happens in these 60k words, beyond sections ripped from “canon”. Little that matters to the point of the fic, I guess.
Pokemon’s plot is underbaked in every way (characterization, worldbuilding, plot…), so any change authors make is usually for better. Whenever the comparison to the far more concrete When I Win The World Ends is inspired, this recursive entry comes out the clear loser.9
Ultimately it’s a curiosity I wouldn’t recommend reading in full, and only to fans of both Pokemon and the original fic, if they must know what a recursive self-insert starring a thematically-clashing overpowered battler would look like.
The Ultimate Hope
Around here I’m getting into a trilogy of recommendations given by Record Crash commenters, people who you’d expect to have statistically great taste. These recs have more variety10 than my “““random””” pick method where I end up reading four Worm fics a month, sure, but they also contain a lot of crackfics with little substance.
This is one such. If you’ve played Danganronpa 1 (and in order to read this, you must have), this is that story, if every single attempt to get the characters to actually murder someone failed. The villain is going insane trying to get the game back on rails, but keeps screwing up and giving them more reasons to become friends and avoid despair.
It’s on the “sensible chuckle” level, sometimes. It’s still pretty one-note, predictable, and nothing to write home about.
A Century into the Past
Just like LOST fics, I look forward to a “country sent into the past” AlternateHistory fic that doesn’t become mired in boring-ass logistics.11 Secondarily, I want it to not have the worst writing ever.
This one succeeds at not having the worst writing ever. By default, to be exact, since that one Second Sunrise fic I reviewed still exists.
It’s got more characterization, but it’s cracky and over the top to the point of borderline racism? Our protagonists, at least before I dropped the story, are five members of the Chinese Politburo, with names redacted to… avoid libel, I guess?12 It makes things hard to follow.
(Redacted) #1, "Bullshit...how can the rest of the world simply vanish ? It was still there a week ago."
(Redacted) #2, "The evidence so far, strongly suggests that we are in...1915."
(Redacted) #3, "Oh. Fuck...there goes our plan to grasp the West by the economic balls, and milk the stupid bastards dry."[…]
(Redacted) #4, "Hold on - Wait a sec, let me think...those psychopaths are still mostly confined to the North American continent right now – the Americans, I mean. We can probably pull out of that Tibetian [sic] money sink without having to fear the Americans funding a regime change on our doorstep, or 'containing' us into total collapse any more."
It’s only sort of funny, for a hot minute, but as foreshadowed, war logistics rear their ugly head. At least Taiwan (from that other fic I read) is a tiny island, but China has all the advantages in the world to easily take it over. Once the other world powers know who they’re up against, any novelty is gone.
Just once, I want one of these fics with a protagonist or protagonists I actually want to succeed, with villains that are faceful instead of faceless, and dynamics that aren’t “which vehicle is best according to leaked War Thunder forum documents?”.
Saving the Bluenette*
This one was good. I’ve started discovering there’s a whole incestuous Madoka fanfiction fandom that doesn’t even know Fargo exists.13 I think you can probably tell whether a random story belongs to one side or the other by asking a question: is Madoka (the girl) smart? Canon Madoka is a fucking idiot. So is Sayaka. Fargo gets this.
This fic doesn’t, and the character wank is annoying, but it doesn’t matter. We’re in Homura territory now, and the title is clickbait.
The plot is nothing out of this world. There’s a concept in the original anime wherein Madoka is getting more and more powerful whenever Homura travels back in time and tries to save her again, because of some nonsense karma transfer mechanics. But Madoka doesn’t want to be a magical girl, Homura agrees, yet they need a super powerful Madoka to defeat the final boss that shows up at the end of every timeline… or do they?
Homura realizes she can just make Sayaka more powerful instead. Sayaka never regrets being a magical girl, and Homura doesn’t really give a shit about her anyway. What follows is an entertaining time loop story where Homura has to learn the basic skills of diplomacy in order for anyone to trust her plan. There’s some fun munchkinry and strategizing along the way.
I think the latter aspects get a bit too silly and theme-clashing,14 and the fic is a bit too inside baseball in general for a general recommendation, but I think Madoka fans will enjoy this.
The Chessiad*
A webcomic with audience interaction (via Tumblr asks). A chessboard in the middle of a game, but some pieces are aware of the World Beyond. Shit happens.
I’m in the uncomfortable position of recommending this to most people, but not to myself??? It’s weird.
The Chessiad doesn’t just wear its inspirations of its sleeve, it frequently references them by name. The author makes it clear that this is a spiritual sequel to Problem Sleuth★ and the general MS Paint Adventures genre. As a medium, we usually call it “Fanventures”, but this reaches the absolute maximum closeness to the original that you can have without being written by Andrew Hussie.
And therein lies the problem. I already read Problem Sleuth★. This isn’t written by Andrew Hussie. It’s a pale imitation. It WILL impress the hell out of anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, which probably includes you (🫵). But I was just kind of bored, at times even offended. It’s driving the Homestuck* Act 6-shaped stake deeper into my heart.15
Denial*
Why alt-power when no-power do trick?
Denial boldly asks that question. We (and I mean me) have of course already read plenty of no-power Taylor Worm fics, like Internship. But this one doesn’t really play the concept straight, it’s a comedy of errors, a farce that the main character actively works to stop.
You see, Taylor knows she has no powers, but she keeps accidentally defeating supervillains by trying to run away, and people stop believing her when she says it was all luck.
Her powers must have some antimemetic effect that merely makes it look like she retroactively got lucky. No normie would ever beat Lung. It avoids descending into crack—for example, Lung himself knows Taylor is a weak idiot, but no one can know he was defeated by a weakling, so he intentionally helps build up her legend. The PRT stays clueless.
I found the story pretty funny, if a bit dated. Like this author’s note:
You all know Levi is coming and it always seems like so many fics die after or during an Endbringer attack. Things change too much; everything is destroyed and the story just sort of peters out. I obviously want to avoid that so I've been spending a lot of time thinking carefully about what'll happen.
The story “petered out” one chapter later.
The concept didn’t have legs and I feel it ended when it should have, really, but that itself makes it a short, fun read, if you’re not tired of Taylor Hebert yet.
Star Trek: Lower Decks
This show has just been cancelled after five relatively successful seasons. But you know how streaming is, if you’re not catching new subscribers they have no reason to order new content.
I recently reviewed Prodigy, which is another cancelled Star Trek cartoon that couldn’t be more different from this one. Lower Decks is aiming for a weird fusion of Rick and Morty fans and Star Trek nerds, a far older-on-average audience. It trades gross shit for constant references to better Trek media, which is not as annoying as it sounds. I know you’re imagining Ready Player One, but these four main characters are all effectively history nerds and refer to in-universe events and characters in a more diegetic way. They’re trying to write a love letter to the franchise and, while they resort to cheap memberberries a lot, they also walk the walk in some episodes.
I think the trailer above explains it, but the plot is following the four lowest ranked ensigns of the lowest ranked starship in the fleet. We usually track the flagships in other shows, this is about the losers who get the worst missions, like ferrying low ranked diplomats or catching mildly dangerous alien creatures. Each episode is twenty minutes, so the plotlines shouldn’t be as deep as the ones in 40-50 minute shows, but they try their hardest to cram things in by speaking really fast, a trait that is lampshaded in the inevitable live action crossover episode.
Did I enjoy it? It’s weird. I lazily watched the five seasons mostly emotionless, like when you leave something on in the background.16 Episodes are never terrible, and if they are they at least end soon, but quality is really uneven, presumably because at least one writer in the room sucks. The season finales in particular tend to fall a bit flat as they try to be epic without fitting the medium or genre, and there’s an annoying tendency to have “morals” in the episodes that the characters need to say out loud twice, a missing trait in the actual show for kids. Lower Decks has some landing heartwarming moments, but it is at its strongest when it’s just trying to be funny.
HOWEVER. As I watched the final season weekly and learned it was ending, there was a switch flipped in my mind, and I suddenly couldn’t get enough of it. I actually started a rewatch and I’m already halfway through season 3, laughing more often than before. What is it, sudden nostalgia? Did I hit my head and accidentally reach the optimal IQ range for the show? I really can’t explain it, so I can’t recommend it outright. It certainly didn’t get good forty-five episodes in.
I have to leave the review on this unsatisfying note, sorry. Do let me know if you have a more objective take on this.
The Whispering Earring
Just a really solid, very short sci-fish story by Scott Alexander about an earring that gives really good advice. Classic Black Mirror premise, and very relevant to these modern days… not much else to say about something that’s probably under 1000 words though.
Metalocalypse
The Venture Bros fans kept shilling this show to me, so we had to try watching the first season. It’s about an over-the-top metal band which is so popular it almost controls the entire world.
Maybe, just maybe, this was good back in 2006. Unlike VB, this has aged like milk and was super derivative even then. It wouldn’t be out of place in the bad parts of Newgrounds, with its shitty animation, pointlessly extreme gore, and, especially, all the stoner humor that isn’t actually funny.
There are some good parts, but the hit rate is bad, almost down to random chance. I probably really enjoyed a couple episodes of season 1 and that’s it, out of twenty. Much like Lower Decks, this is packed with references, usually oblique, to existing metal bands, members and events. Much unlike Lower Decks, I missed them all because I don’t really listen to metal.17 This hole wasn’t made for me…
Young Celestial Wizard
A very frustrating story. Halfway through it, I was ready to give it a star.
Imagine that, a star, to a Celestial Grimoire story. How the fuck would that happen?
Well, the story has some genius ideas. Our protagonist (the canonical Harry Potter) gets access to the Grimoire when he’s still a baby. One of the powers he gets is danger sense. He grows up as a child knowing that everything around him can easily kill him. This fucks with his brain development, and we get a very strange child by the time we see him again.
An actual use of the Grimoire that doesn’t break the story, and instead makes it better? The fuck?
Some other cool aspects:
Very in-depth worldbuilding about the history of magic, going deep into real life Platonism, alchemy, etc. This writer did his research.
There are stations of canon, but since we follow Harry as a kid in Hogwarts18, they’re the stations of the mobile game that deals in this time period, Hogwarts Mystery. I actually played a bit of this back when I came out, and its incorporation was a pleasant surprise. There’s virtually no fanfic of this, and while the plot of the game sucks, it’s a nice addition to break up the Grimoire-focused parts and give kid Harry something to do.
Good characterization. I like how the Hogwarts professors become his family, and Harry in particular has his fucked up worldview he has to slowly disassemble.
The writer actually gets annoyed that his main character might get too powerful too fast and changes the Grimoire rules to trigger every 6000 words instead of 1000. He also tries to write over the most repetitive parts of it.
How would this turn to shit? Go look at the first point of the list again. That aspect soon takes over the entire story. Walls upon walls of text as Harry travels with Nicolas Flamel (long story) across the world, investigating old ruins and whatever. He gets angsty about it. The plot becomes a glorified worldbuilding document, and nothing ever happens. Boo to that.
The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen
The new nostalgebraist story! A surprise drop on Christmas, and about Christmas. In a massive contrast to his previous work, the ending is good and everything else is annoying, the realization of every NB fan’s monkey’s paw wish.
I didn’t like it. It’s my new least favorite novel by him, even. Spoilers ahead, beware.
Summarizing the plot is easy: an ambiguously prophetic-or-schizophrenic low functioning autistic child19 (the titular Herschel) deals with coming out of his shell as a self-appointed Messiah. Most of the time we’re stuck in his head as he delivers grandiloquent and endless monologues about how he remembers another existence before he was born, and how there’s an Adversary in this world that wants to make everyone else forget, how he’ll resurrect the dead… then he becomes obsessed with Santa Claus and tries to embed him into his philosophy.
Some of this is obviously reminiscent of The Northern Caves, and people have made the comparison, but I think it’s a different beast. I guess if we were in Salby’s head it would read like this, but there’s a reason why we weren’t in Salby’s head: crazy people are boring to read, to me, at least.
Nostalgebraist certainly tries his hardest to entertain the reader, with some of his most flowery writing so far that kind of falls flat on me, the perennial webfic reader, but in the end your brain is telling you all you’re reading is pointless. Even if our schizo teen was right about his prophecies that he keeps repeating with slightly different wording (this is NB’s most “needs an editor” story by far, and considering TNC is right there that’s saying something)…20 so what? The story is about a prophet being right and automatically winning? He has his setbacks, sure, but they don’t make his previous litanies of self-assuredness less annoying.
Breaking up these endless insisting-upon-themselves viewpoint chapters are his sister Miriam’s narration as she tries to assemble our guy’s papers. She has her own story going on. She’s a bit more interesting, but… maybe unwittingly21 has a worse version of Harper Praise’s storyline in Cockatiel x Chameleon, with not much novelty to add.22 Her story is about media in a way that clashes with Herschel’s own themes, and synergy is never reached.23 By the end of the plot I was just wondering why she was there at all.
In general, I wondered why most other characters existed. Herschel’s friend Frederick makes for fun scenes, as his nice attitude and higher-functioning behavior helps bring Herschel out of his brain and into the outside world. Miriam does it too, I guess, but those chapters focus more on Miriam’s attitude towards him. Their mother seems to add nothing except a forced dramatic moment to trigger a change in Miriam, and her own plotline fizzles out. Frederick’s father gets a big introduction after an even bigger buildup, but his personality affects absolutely none of the rest of the plot. This applies to Herschel’s teachers as well. Frederick’s friends are just There.
You’re left with an impression that Herschel is the only person that matters, especially during the final arc, but solipsistic stories are bad. I don’t like them.24 As someone who owns a big Discord server I’ve dealt with my share of schizophrenic people, and I have to say fictionalized versions of them are not all that fun to read either. It’s not a “depressed writer” type of character, but it’s still in the general category of “perfect accuracy will lead to a bad story, so if that’s your goal just don’t write about this”. You won’t be the one that finally makes it work.
I’ve touched on the final arc, and I maintain it’s good. The second to last chapter is amazing and almost made me change my mind on the whole story.25 However, after the honeymoon period was over, I realized it’s only so amazing because I had to sit through 20 chapters of overbearing repetitive internal monologues setting it up. You could trim down the earlier chapters and keep it working, I think, but I also think nostalgebraist will never do it based on The Northern Caves’ diner arc still existing.
So, is it worth reading? It’s “only” 190k words,26 and it was fairly addictive when I thought (correctly, I guess?) it was going somewhere. But I would not reread this in a million years, and I think that’s a sign that you could do better things with your time.
Am I wrong about Apocalypse? Am I wrong about choosing to read Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series plus Dark Tower accessories as opposed to six RWBY fics about Jaune banging everyone? This is your one chance to tell me, by clicking that orange button or whatever color that will be if I ever get the chance to customize things properly. Substack customization is so bad you have no idea.
Barring a sequel hook that kind of shits on the premise a bit. But if I’m honest I’ll probably watch a second season of this, so I can’t blame them.
The only point where the show lost me a bit was when her family was introduced, because I thought it was about to become yet another boring family drama sitcom. They only stay relevant for that single episode, thank god.
I don’t know if Bavitz has read the fic, but he should compare the Red fights and take notes.
I initially didn’t understand the name, but I learned it’s the writer’s online handle after he reached out to me (he saw I mentioned the fic on Twitter). Thankfully “Makin” sounds like more of a real name in case I ever feel like writing a gimmicky self-insert.
This is part of the backloaded characterization, and we can’t forget momentum falling off a cliff after the tournament ends. I still can’t believe the fic’s perfectly split in two: the Good Part and the Boring Part. Writers really need to learn to stop when they’re ahead.
The entire fic has an aura of flimsiness beyond the poor grasp on the characters.
Slowly, incredibly slowly, and as steady as his frostbitten hands would allow him, Holiday brought his Rotom phone up into view, and snapped a picture. His mind briefly thought of releasing the Rotom, but Rotom made for use in technology were functionally useless in battle.
Rotoms aren’t “made”, they’re not Porygons. Similarly, the author seems unaware Hisui and Sinnoh are names for the same region at different points in time, and this keeps coming up.
Admittedly this has the worst first chapter of all time. It’s an acquired taste.
This isn’t automatically bad, because the Homestuck Epilogues executed it correctly. It’s non-automatically terrible here though.
As I read WIWIWTWM (it’s pronounced “fhqwhgads”), I was often feeling forgiving towards the many weird choices and technical mistakes, because it really read like someone’s first piece of fanfiction ever. It wasn’t.
I WILL eventually try that gay fic about Legend of the Galactic Heroes, I promise. The right time will come.
Most LOST fics become mired in the logistics of Kate’s boring ass.
Charitably, this is some AlternateHistory rule and not the writer being a coward.
I believe the best fic to come out of this group is generally accepted to be How the Questing Beast Chased, and Caught, Her Own Tail, which I cannot read until it’s crossed 70k words. Not without breaking the King’s Pact that binds me.
(Update: this is wrong, apparently the Questing Beast author is friends with the Fargo author. I guess Bluenette is the best example then, or I’m just making shit up.)
There’s one device Homura comes up with that allows the magical girls to rapidly press grief seeds against their skins whenever they run out of magic, allowing for increasingly strong final attacks without the danger of turning into a witch.
For instance, the author noticing they were using the wrong sprite for one of the characters for multiple pages and fixing it in without going back and retconning the changes into previous panels kind of sets it in stone that they don’t have Hussie’s (initial) love for detail.
Except I cannot do that at all. Even total shit must get my full attention.
Even the metal fans didn’t really enjoy watching S1 during our 2024 rewatch, don’t get me wrong. Superfans claim it gets better later, but I know they have not rewatched it recently and I found a lot of people saying S1 was the best season because it had “the least lore”. In my view, adding lore to Metalocalypse might be the only way to make it worse.
He can’t stay with the Dursleys because another one of his early powers is turning into an Eagle, and he just flies away whenever he feels in danger, which is all the time.
Some of the strongest writing and maybe the most tangible contribution to the medium is about this, how it feels to live with a mentally ill person like Herschel and how it feels to grow up as Herschel. Unfortunately I don’t think this conceit meshes well with how nostalgebraist decided to end the story, so I wouldn’t recommend it based on that.
According to him:
I wrote this in a little less than 8 months, while working full-time and dealing with various personal stuff. I have been pulling at least one all-nighter a week for the last several weeks to get this done and I pulled two consecutive all nighters on Dec 23rd and 24th.
No one forced him to do this to get the story out on Christmas! Ignoring the fake deadline and spending some additional time on editing might have palliated the macro and micro issues of the story. There’s no way the rushing helped, there’s only one Andrew Hussie.
I think she was also a take on female autism, where girls often “camouflage” as allistic people. Hell, the […[…[[]]] thing made me think of personas within personas, just in programming notation. Not remotely as interesting as Herschel regardless.
I’ve been reading some reactions on Tumblr and no one else seems to think this, so I might just be underthinking it?
It’s almost pathetic when it tries to build a connection, with Miriam thinking her video essayist boyfriend might have gotten along with Herschel if only she had tried harder. The two never meet, and it feels very forced when these lines come up.
Update: A couple days after I wrote the review, I found this quote in one of the boyfriend’s essays:
For the one broadcast that goes out to all.
“And becomes our life.
“Not the life that we might have chosen for ourselves. But another life, one that is chosen for us.
“Chosen by the broadcaster, whose understanding outstrips ours completely.
This is in retrospect some direct foreshadowing on what ends up happening on the AI front. So there is at least a small connection, but I missed it.
“I don’t like them” = “they’re bad” because this is my blog. I really wish I could pull out the red text only witches, the Pope and Santa can use…
Massive spoilers ahead. It’s kind of a fucked up Spielberg’s A.I. mixed with K-PAX in my view. I’ve seen some other interpretations that the entire story never happened and the anachronisms are hints that it’s all a poor simulation, but I don’t think so. I believe most of the chapters do happen in the real world, until Herschel jumps off the balcony. His nachlass eventually makes it to the AIs after they process the entire US and get to Miriam. They later simulate Herschel with the nachlass “past the jump” in order to give him a happy ending + the validation they want, reverse Roko’s Basilisk in a way, reward the one guy who was trying to immanentize the Santatron.
And this makes Herschel more right than he knew when he armored himself in his own writings. They were protecting his soul. He even foreshadows this by saying the important part of the crown was creating it, not wearing it. For all we know, Madeleine’s stolen crown was also processed by the AI and it helped make the Herschel simulacrum a slightest bit more accurate.
I think this is fairly straightforward, but just like with Miriam, everyone thinks it has to be more complex than it is. I highly doubt nostalgebraist was going for “the whole story was a simulation!!111” because it’s $CURRENT_YEAR.
Almost Nowhere is not that much longer and it felt endless, but it helps the events in Herschel are very easy to follow, just really wordy.
Out of interest, do you accept recommendations? If so, the two free online works I feel compelled to recommend to everyone are the webcomic It Hurts!! (http://gobolatula.com/ithurts/) and the video game Anthology of the Killer (https://thecatamites.itch.io/anthology-of-the-killer).
This is the weird place of the internet where I can imbibe on (both!) worm and fanventure fanfic, and also get recommended rare non-scifi, non-fantasy, non-anything absolute recommendations like Man on the Inside. Your musings on Lower Deck are delectable as well.
The Chessiad is great, thank you.