Bay 12 Games Forum

... I nominate the Bay 12 community as a whole. If you haven't been kicked out or ran off yet, you're doing something right.

MLP counter-suggestion: Friendship is Adventuring. Link is to mid-thread (but to an index), and I don't think I've seen a compiled, non-forum version around. Still, both excellent and long. Snapping up those two, though, definitely.

Nobody Dies [...] Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time

Read 'em both, both excellent, heh.

That said, other than Vejitasei Ascendant being unfinished, I have to say that it's mostly decent.  I have memories of Dominion Reprise being good, but it was so long ago that I don't remember very well.

Will check 'em out. Th'latter is pinging my memory for some reason, hrm. Stuff being unfinished isn't much a barrier to me (Outside of lingering desire).

If you ever see any good Death Note fanfic at all, point me to it.  I've been hoping for years, but it seemed to be a sort of fandom flash in the pan, and then just about everyone got bored of it.

I don't think I've even seen it crossed over with anything decently, but I haven't exactly looked. The stuff we got on cartoon network a few years back was pretty nice, but my fanfic-seeing eye screamed "nonsensical yaoi incoming" at me just looking at it.

If you liked death note itself, though, th'manga Akumetsu might ping your interests, if you haven't devoured it already. It was pretty nice.

(Harry Potter-wise: I forgot to add that Backwards with Purpose, and that trilogy in general, is also solid stuff.  Worth your time.)

It was I think it's been a while since I've read it, though, I think. Long enough I can't actually remember if I've read it or just something similarly named, heh. Maybe a re-read.

Almost tempting to start a fanfiction thread (or at least necro the one that's probably somewhere in the forum*). Only problem is then I'd feel compelled to make a comprehensive suggestion (cum this-is-what-I-managed-to-actually-finish-reading) list, which would probably take days and have a freakishly huge amount of titles in it.

*E: There's actually only two fanfiction threads, both specifically dedicated to ff.n, at least going by the thread title. Nothing on fanfiction in general. Hrm.

Anything over 100k words that doesn't involve completely nonsensical same-gender pairings. Sensible ones are fine (I think I've ran into three that were readable!), but the stuff where they take folks in th'original series that blatantly hated each other and throw 'em in bed... makes my brain melt. Tend to just overtly avoid yaoi stuff, because most of what I've attempted to read was just... bad. Bad by fanfiction standards*. E: Which isn't to say I haven't/wouldn't read stuff that's good, just that I don't bother trying to sift through it anymore

... mostly just a size thing, though. I've been dipping down to 60k over the last year or so, but anything smaller than that tends to... not last very long. Th'100kers like to disappear into my brain overnight, heh. That and basic grammar. Punctuation, yanno'? I've been meandering through fics long enough that properly used commas, periods, etc., are like sunbeams parting a cloudy sky and the world bursting into divine chorus.

Fandoms themselves, I regularly read... uh, a couple dozen? And happily branch in to stuff I don't actually know jack about. Good readin's good reading.

*For folks that aren't familiar with fanfics, take this illuminating quote: "[Finding good fanfiction] is like looking for a needle in a needle stack, only the whole thing is covered in shit and everything is on fire." Mindless yaoi stuff tends to throw in some arsenic or something to the mix. Mind you, mindless non-yaoi stuff does the same thing, but th'yaoi is somehow more prolific.

S'been more around 16 or so (emphasis on the so) hours, here, I think. Is 11 PM here, been getting 504s since around 8-ish AM, maybe a bit earlier.

I'd look up some statistics but I haven't a clue where to find any meaningful ones (and I'd rather not go digging through wikipedia right now). Really, whenever this stuff comes up there's always people asking for statistical backing and pretty much no one provides (and the statistics that are cited are often called insubstantial or corrupted or whatever, regardless of what they say). Honestly, the best I've heard is that the correlation is "inconclusive."

I'd have to dig up m'last psych book to hunt up the info myself, or possibly e-mail the teacher. Basically, the research that's been done has consistently shown that they can't show any evidence of a meaningful catharsis effect, especially over any lengthy amount of time. There is (in some cases, but not all) a temporary effect, but the folks (plural, unrelated to each other) doing the studies (same as the folks) found that consuming vs. not consuming so-called cathartic material didn't have a notable difference in incidences of violence.

Basically, violent people are going to be violent regardless of choice of entertainment. Other environmental considerations are considerably more influential (which is to say influential at all.).

Total agreement re: Obfuscation and difficulty of access, though. It's not uncommon for the genuinely important stuff to be buried in a research journal or under mounds of field-specialized language, when it's available to the public at all and not recorded under shit-poor methodology. Of course, things recorded under said methodology tend to be wrong, as well.

 I'd still trust something peer-reviewed and supported by multiple studies than just about any damn thing else, but it can be bloody hard to get to, sift through, and then meaningfully interpret that stuff.

S'a reason an informed constituency is a necessary component to a functioning bottom-up government, but that bloody well doesn't make being one of those (not that I claim to be, bleh) easy

I'd still be surprised if there turned out to not be a correlation, but yes, I have nothing to back up my claims that there is a correlation.

The catharsis thing particularly was one of those things th'psych teacher I had apparently liked to drop on classes to emphasis the importance of research and double checking things that "make sense"*.

*Tangental, but as a philosophy student, "makes sense" is one of the most untrustworthy things in existence. If all you can use to support something is "it makes sense," you're probably making unfounded (or at least unanalyzed, which is almost as bad) assumptions somewhere along the line. I'm always immediately and powerfully suspicious of when I find myself thinking or writing that

Hey, at least they think the potency-needing figure in the child's life is watching TV with the kids.