On 11/22/2023 10:41 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

In article <07acc1d7-184a-4874-ae0b-13460af7f99dn@googlegroups.com>, Ahasuerus <ahasuerus@email.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 10:25:16 PM UTC-5, Ted Nolan
<tednolan> wrote:

In article <91db0501-aae1-47e8...@googlegroups.com>,
Ahasuerus <ahas...@email.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 9:48:35 PM UTC-5, Ted Nolan
<tednolan> wrote:

In article <ujme5i$1irs7$1...@dont-email.me>,
Lynn McGuire <lynnmc...@gmail.com> wrote:

"Taylor Varga" by mp3.1415player

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/taylor-varga-worm-luna-varga.32119/
[snip-snip]

I looked at the site and it wasn't clear to me how to proceed. I
certainly don't want to read hundreds chapters in a browser.

It it collected into an epub somewhere on the site?

Step 1: Access https://fichub.net

Step 2: Enter the URL listed above, i.e.

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/taylor-varga-worm-luna-varga.32119

into the box which appears at the top of the page and click "Export"

Step 3: Wait for a few seconds while the Web site generates EPUB/MOBI/PDF >>>> files

Step 4: Click "Download as EPUB"

Step 5: Profit

The site can also be used to generate EPUB files for other fics. It's not as
robust as FanFicFare (available either as a standalone tool or as a Calibre
plugin), but it's easy to use and it works with FanFiction.net, which

doesn't

play nice with most WebToPub tools.

Cool, that seems to work..

Thanks!

Worm has come up here several times, and it sounded both interesting and >>> too unrelievedly grim for me, so I may try this though girding up for
length can be daunting sometimes (though I am reading One Piece..)

*Taylor Varga* is primarily an "OP [overpowered] fix-fic" with an ever
increasing amount of slice of life and self-congratulatory content.

The nice thing about the fic is that it's kind of "front loaded". The first few
hundred K are slow, but they include a reasonable amount of character
development, some action, and some munchkining with the powers. Then
things become progressively slower although they never quite grind to a
halt.

If you had read *Worm*, I would recommend trying *Taylor Varga* with the
proviso that, even if you like the opening arcs, there is a good chance that >> at some point you will drop the fic because of the ever slower pacing and
the amount of mutual back-patting. As long as the reader is OK with that, it's
a perfectly harmless way to spend some time.

Since you haven't read the *Worm* canon, I am not sure how well it will work >> for you. Part of the attraction of fics like *Taylor Varga* is that the reader
gets to compare how badly everything went in the canon with how well
everything goes in *TV* and its ilk. If anything, things go *too* well most of
the time and characters often act in an unrealistically nice and conflict-free
manner. Some readers even call them "plastic".

Hmm. Thanks for the analysis. That leaves me kind of ambivalent, but
we'll see.

I found Worm to be very icky and depressing, I did not make it past the
second chapter. I find Taylor Varga to be interesting and over the top.
Ahasuerus is right, Taylor Varga basically a feel good story. Still,
I *like* feel good stories.

Lynn

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 11:41:24 PM UTC-5, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

In article <07acc1d7-184a-4874...@googlegroups.com>,
Ahasuerus <ahas...@email.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 10:25:16 PM UTC-5, Ted Nolan ><tednolan> wrote:

In article <91db0501-aae1-47e8...@googlegroups.com>,
Ahasuerus <ahas...@email.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 9:48:35 PM UTC-5, Ted Nolan
<tednolan> wrote:

In article <ujme5i$1irs7$1...@dont-email.me>,
Lynn McGuire <lynnmc...@gmail.com> wrote:

"Taylor Varga" by mp3.1415player


https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/taylor-varga-worm-luna-varga.32119/

[snip-snip]

I looked at the site and it wasn't clear to me how to proceed. I
certainly don't want to read hundreds chapters in a browser.

It it collected into an epub somewhere on the site?

Step 1: Access https://fichub.net

Step 2: Enter the URL listed above, i.e.

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/taylor-varga-worm-luna-varga.32119

into the box which appears at the top of the page and click "Export"

Step 3: Wait for a few seconds while the Web site generates EPUB/MOBI/PDF
files

Step 4: Click "Download as EPUB"

Step 5: Profit

The site can also be used to generate EPUB files for other fics. It's not as
robust as FanFicFare (available either as a standalone tool or as a Calibre
plugin), but it's easy to use and it works with FanFiction.net, which >doesn't
play nice with most WebToPub tools.

Cool, that seems to work..

Thanks!

Worm has come up here several times, and it sounded both interesting and >> too unrelievedly grim for me, so I may try this though girding up for
length can be daunting sometimes (though I am reading One Piece..)

*Taylor Varga* is primarily an "OP [overpowered] fix-fic" with an ever >increasing amount of slice of life and self-congratulatory content.

The nice thing about the fic is that it's kind of "front loaded". The first few
hundred K are slow, but they include a reasonable amount of character >development, some action, and some munchkining with the powers. Then >things become progressively slower although they never quite grind to a >halt.

If you had read *Worm*, I would recommend trying *Taylor Varga* with the >proviso that, even if you like the opening arcs, there is a good chance that
at some point you will drop the fic because of the ever slower pacing and >the amount of mutual back-patting. As long as the reader is OK with that, it's
a perfectly harmless way to spend some time.

Since you haven't read the *Worm* canon, I am not sure how well it will work
for you. Part of the attraction of fics like *Taylor Varga* is that the reader
gets to compare how badly everything went in the canon with how well >everything goes in *TV* and its ilk. If anything, things go *too* well most of
the time and characters often act in an unrealistically nice and conflict-free
manner. Some readers even call them "plastic".

Hmm. Thanks for the analysis. That leaves me kind of ambivalent, but
we'll see.

Ultimately, Wildbow (John C. McCrae) was trying to recreate the default "superhero comics" universe monistically, i.e. using the notion that all observed phenomena are reducible to a single cause or principle. It is inherently hard to do for two reasons:

* "superhero universe logic" is something that was created for children and doesn't make sense when you are an adult
* superhero universes that exist for more than a decade or two tend to accumulate a lot of superpowers and super-threats with irreconcilable
origins. Consider the variety of different sources of power in the DC/Marvel universes: radioactive spiders, aliens, gods, magic, mad scientists, etc.

Wildbow's answer to these problems was clever, but he had to create a
complex secret history and add layers of obfuscation in order to make it
work.

The other aspect is that, as one Wildbow fan wrote a while back: "He [Wildbow]'s an emotional dominatrix and I love it". It's not for everyone.

*Worm* fics tend to concentrate on a subset of the issues explored in the *Worm* canon. Some are interested in character trauma. Some are after
"cool powers". Some are "fix fics".

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Ahasuerus <ahasuerus@email.com> wrote:

Wildbow's answer to these problems was clever, but he had to create a
complex secret history and add layers of obfuscation in order to make it work.

The other aspect is that, as one Wildbow fan wrote a while back: "He [Wildbow]'s an emotional dominatrix and I love it". It's not for everyone.

The recent essays he has posed after the end of _Pale_ are interesting -
he mentions _Worm_ as being based on "writing what you know" :)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:

"Taylor Varga" is a fan fiction fantasy story inspired by "Luna Varga",

But do either of them ever say "I kill you filthy, Varga"...

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On Friday, November 24, 2023 at 11:30:37 PM UTC-5, David Duffy wrote:

Ahasuerus <ahas...@email.com> wrote:

Wildbow's answer to these problems was clever, but he had to create a complex secret history and add layers of obfuscation in order to make it work.

The other aspect is that, as one Wildbow fan wrote a while back: "He [Wildbow]'s an emotional dominatrix and I love it". It's not for everyone.

The recent essays he has posed after the end of _Pale_ are interesting -
he mentions _Worm_ as being based on "writing what you know" :)

High school bullying is prominent in the first few arcs of *Worm* and
Wildbow has written about his experiences with bullying -- see https://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/x4uk7j/i_have_zero_compassion_for_that_subhuman_shit_and/imyf19h/
starting with:

I was bullied, and in my teens/early twenties I counseled struggling
disabled kids, a good chunk of whom were bullied, sometimes badly.

Wildbow wrote *Worm* in his 20s, so it was recent experiences at the
time.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 12/8/2023 7:39 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:

On 11/22/2023 9:25 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

In article <91db0501-aae1-47e8-96bb-72d563290f5bn@googlegroups.com>,
Ahasuerus  <ahasuerus@email.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 9:48:35 PM UTC-5, Ted Nolan
<tednolan> wrote:

In article <ujme5i$1irs7$1...@dont-email.me>,
Lynn McGuire <lynnmc...@gmail.com> wrote:

"Taylor Varga" by mp3.1415player

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/taylor-varga-worm-luna-varga.32119/

[snip-snip]

I looked at the site and it wasn't clear to me how to proceed. I
certainly don't want to read hundreds chapters in a browser.

It it collected into an epub somewhere on the site?

Step 1: Access https://fichub.net

Step 2: Enter the URL listed above, i.e.
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/taylor-varga-worm-luna-varga.32119
into the box which appears at the top of the page and click "Export"

Step 3: Wait for a few seconds while the Web site generates
EPUB/MOBI/PDF
files

Step 4: Click "Download as EPUB"

Step 5: Profit

The site can also be used to generate EPUB files for other fics. It's
not as
robust as FanFicFare (available either as a standalone tool or as a
Calibre
plugin), but it's easy to use and it works with FanFiction.net, which
doesn't
play nice with most WebToPub tools.

Cool, that seems to work..

Thanks!

Worm has come up here several times, and it sounded both interesting and
too unrelievedly grim for me, so I may try this though girding up for
length can be daunting sometimes (though I am reading One Piece..)

I am trying to read Worm now, really really dark so far.  I have gotten about 100,000 words in, only 1.58 million words to go.
   https://parahumans.wordpress.com/

[It looks like my 2023-12-08 response didn't make it to Eternal
September and possibly other Usenet servers, so I am re-posting it below
using an ES account.]

100K words in is around Arc 4-5, right? Bakuda? I would recommend
sticking with it until the end of Arc 8, which is roughly 18% in. The
very end of Arc 7 clarifies what's been going on and Arc 8 is a major inflection point. Things change quite a bit after that. Some later arcs
have very dark moments and I almost set *Worm* aside at one point, but
Arc 8 was ... something else. One of the most impressive long fights in
all of science fiction, even though you won't find out what it was
really all about until almost the end of the serial.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 12/8/2023 8:08 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:

On 11/22/2023 8:41 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:

"Taylor Varga" by mp3.1415player

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/taylor-varga-worm-luna-varga.32119/

...

I have now read several other Taylor Hebert stories by mp3.1415player
and really enjoyed them all so far.  None of them are finished,
he/she/it always writes themselves into a corner and is not interested
in getting out since there are always other stories to write.

Taylor creates the ability to store items in a massless timeless pocket
using a toolbox from her great uncle...

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/great-grand-uncle-schimmelhorns-toolbox.106361/

Taylor becomes a DARPA scientist by inventing practical antigravity...

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/distance-learning-for-fun-and-profit.84773/

Taylor creates a race of five foot tall bug biped four armed tinkers
using her bug parahuman powers on a group of Praying Mantises...

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/bugs-in-the-system.116868/

You can see all of the mp3.1415player at:

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/search/15773428/?t=post&c[content]=thread&c[nodes][0]=2&c[nodes][1]=15&c[nodes][2]=94&c[nodes][3]=95&c[nodes][4]=157&c[users]=mp3.1415player&o=date

[It looks like my 2023-12-08 response didn't make it to Eternal
September and possibly other Usenet servers, so I am re-posting it below
using an ES account.]

I am trying to think of other Worm fan fics that would be at least
somewhat similar. Scanning https://wormstorysearch.com/?direction=desc&is_nsfw_eq=any&limit=20&page=1&searching=true&sort=stories.rating
I think I can recommend:

* Memories of Iron (Tony Stark merges with Taylor; if you like it, the
author, "becuzitswrong", wrote 3 other Worm fics of comparable quality,
with *Railgun* arguably the weakest of the quarter)
* Refusing the Call (Taylor as an unwilling magnet for multiversal powers)
* Denial (everyone thinks that Taylor has powers, much to her distress)
* How to Train Your Endbringer (Taylor controls the Endbringers)
* Manager (Taylor manages powers)
* Path to Munchies (Taylor with a food-flavored Path to Victory power)
* Special Edition (Taylor sells precognitive information online)
* There's No Way My New Little Sister Can Be The Simurgh!
* Kill Them All (Taylor with Gamer powers; if you like it, the author
has written a number of other Worm fics of similar quality)
* Toaru Majutsu no Taylor-chan: A Certain Mythic Archmage (Taylor as a Pathfinder Level 20 Wizard with 10 Tiers of Mythic Archmage)

Here are the first two paragraphs of the last listed fic:

"It was a perfectly ordinary mid-January night in Brockton Bay. The moon
was shining, the drunks were singing, evil was flourishing as good
people did nothing, thieves thieved, hussies hustled, druggies drugged,
and one of the boats in the Boat Graveyard was loudly crushed to
destruction as chunks of glowing hot volcanic rock and clumps of ash
pounded down on the rusting metal, the hot slag falling from the air and showering violently on anything in an area 40 feet wide followed by
heavy volcanic ash that reeked of sulfur, like the particularly
cinematic result of a volcanic explosion.

The fact that Brockton Bay did not have a volcano is at best a minor bit
of useless trivia."

You can find each fic's location at https://wormstorysearch.com

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 12/19/2023 10:38 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:

[snip-snip]
Arc 8 [of _Worm_ was something else.  I was going to shut it down at midnight,
ended up reading until 3 am, was really late for 830 am church in the morning.  Yes, the fight was something else.

Glad you liked it! There are some other impressive fights later in the
story, but only the final fight comes close to Arc 8.

I am ashamed of Armsmaster [spoilers snip]

If you re-read the second meeting with Armsmaster, you'll notice that he
is not a particularly stable person and that the PRT treats him accordingly:

I had to put up with two days of losing command of my team, two days

where they confiscated my Halberd and power armor! I was interrogated,
all my equipment taken apart and checked!

There is a reason for it, but it won't become apparent until much later.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

On 12/29/2023 3:46 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:

On 12/19/2023 9:26 PM, Ahasuerus wrote:
...

I am trying to think of other Worm fan fics that would be at least
somewhat similar. Scanning
https://wormstorysearch.com/?direction=desc&is_nsfw_eq=any&limit=20&page=1&searching=true&sort=stories.rating
I think I can recommend:

* Memories of Iron (Tony Stark merges with Taylor; if you like it, the
author, "becuzitswrong", wrote 3 other Worm fics of comparable quality,
with *Railgun* arguably the weakest of the quarter)
* Refusing the Call (Taylor as an unwilling magnet for multiversal
powers)
* Denial (everyone thinks that Taylor has powers, much to her distress)
* How to Train Your Endbringer (Taylor controls the Endbringers)
* Manager (Taylor manages powers)
* Path to Munchies (Taylor with a food-flavored Path to Victory power)
* Special Edition (Taylor sells precognitive information online)
* There's No Way My New Little Sister Can Be The Simurgh!
* Kill Them All (Taylor with Gamer powers; if you like it, the author
has written a number of other Worm fics of similar quality)
* Toaru Majutsu no Taylor-chan: A Certain Mythic Archmage (Taylor as a
Pathfinder Level 20 Wizard with 10 Tiers of Mythic Archmage)

Here are the first two paragraphs of the last listed fic:

"It was a perfectly ordinary mid-January night in Brockton Bay. The moon
was shining, the drunks were singing, evil was flourishing as good
people did nothing, thieves thieved, hussies hustled, druggies
drugged, and one of the boats in the Boat Graveyard was loudly crushed
to destruction as chunks of glowing hot volcanic rock and clumps of
ash pounded down on the rusting metal, the hot slag falling from the
air and showering violently on anything in an area 40 feet wide
followed by heavy volcanic ash that reeked of sulfur, like the
particularly cinematic result of a volcanic explosion.

The fact that Brockton Bay did not have a volcano is at best a minor
bit of useless trivia."

You can find each fic's location at https://wormstorysearch.com

I just finished the excellent "Memories Of Iron [Ironman]"
   https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10230499/1/Memories-of-Iron
and "A Propensity For Wrath" by becuzitswrong.
   https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11449804/1/A-Propensity-For-Wrath
and

Unfortunately, both stories are unfinished.  And I found out that the
author becuzitswrong passed away in 2016 of a heart attack.  Sad, very sad.

Glad you liked them! True, they are unfinished, but "Memories of Iron"
went on hiatus right after the end of Arc 1, which was a decent stopping
point. It's more than you can realistically expect from most works of fanfiction -- of the 13,996 Worm fics listed by wormstorysearch.com only
1,922 are finished.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)