I and perhaps other LessWrongers would appreciate reading your review (of any length) of the book, since lots of us loved HPMOR, the Sequences, etc, but are collectively skeptical / on the fence about whether to dive into Project Lawful. (What’s the best way to read the bizzare glowfic format? What are the main themes of the book and which did you like best? etc)
I loved Project Lawful/Planecrash (not sure which is the actual title), but I do hesitate to recommend it to others. Not everyone likes their medium-core S&M with a side of hardcore decision theory, or vice-versa. It is definitely weirder than HPMOR.
Something that threw me off at first: it takes the mechanics of the adapted setting very literally (e.g. spell slots and saving throws are non-metaphorical in-universe Things). That’s not normal for (good) game fanfiction. The authors make it work anyway—perhaps because clear rules make it easier to produce solvable puzzles—but it took some getting used to.
The glowfic format is strange, yeah, but it doesn’t read much different. It does make for a clearer delineation of character perspectives (e.g. compared to an omniscient narrator), and the portraits/icons carry more weight than one might expect. The main drawback I noticed was that, without chapters, clear “you can stop reading and go to bed” breaks were sometimes quite far apart.
(also I had to take Stylus to the CSS to render it comfortably readable, but that’s every site on the internet these days)
Good to know there’s demand for such a review! It’s now on my todo list.
To quickly address some of your questions:
Pros of PL:
If the premise I described above interests you, then PL will interest you.
Some good Sequences-style rationality.
I certainly was obsessed reading it for months.
Cons:
Some of the Rationality lectures were too long, but I didn’t mind much.
The least sexy sex scenes. Because they are about moral dilemmas and deception, not sex.
Really long. Even if you read it constantly and read quickly, it will take time (1.8 million words will do that).
I really have to read some authors that aren’t Yud. Yud is great, but this is clearly too much of him, and I’m sure he’d agree.
I read PL when it was already complete, so maybe I didn’t get the full experience, but there really wasn’t anything all that strange about the format (the content is another matter!). I can imagine that *writing * a glowfic would be a much different experience than writing a normal serialized work (ie dealing with your co-authors), but reading it isn’t very different from reading any other fiction. Look at the picture to see the POV, look at who’s the author if you’re curious, and read as normal. I’m used to books that change POV (though usually not this often). There are sometimes bonus tangent threads, but the story is linear. What problems do you have with the glowfic format?
Main themes would require a longer post, but I hope this helps.
Convincing depictions of how people with very weird and evil ideology can have at least seemingly consistent worldview, be humans and not be completely insane.
Stuff that might be good for some and bad for others:
It’s Yudkowsky’s work and it feels. Some people like the style of his texts, some don’t.
Sex scenes (not very erotic and mostly talking)
Re-construction of Pathfinder game mechanics in setting
Math classes (not the best possible explanations, but not the worst either)
A lot of descriptions of “how everything works on dath ilan”
Bad stuff:
It’s isekai (it’s bad if you’re allergic to this genre)
It’s very long
And in some places it could be shorter without losing anything (but, I think, nothing as egregious as school wars in HPMOR) (but if you don’t appreciate the point about “thought processes of smart characters”, then it could be much shorter without losing anything in most places)
My question is, Can I download an offline copy of it—either text or spoken audio?
The audio consists of 195 episodes, each of which can be individually downloaded, but can I get it as a single audio file (of duration 150 hours or so)?
(Alternatively, you could open each glowfic thread, select “show flat” or option like that, then print/parse the resulting page, obtaining a few PDFs which can be merged afterwards.)
I and perhaps other LessWrongers would appreciate reading your review (of any length) of the book, since lots of us loved HPMOR, the Sequences, etc, but are collectively skeptical / on the fence about whether to dive into Project Lawful. (What’s the best way to read the bizzare glowfic format? What are the main themes of the book and which did you like best? etc)
I loved Project Lawful/Planecrash (not sure which is the actual title), but I do hesitate to recommend it to others. Not everyone likes their medium-core S&M with a side of hardcore decision theory, or vice-versa. It is definitely weirder than HPMOR.
Something that threw me off at first: it takes the mechanics of the adapted setting very literally (e.g. spell slots and saving throws are non-metaphorical in-universe Things). That’s not normal for (good) game fanfiction. The authors make it work anyway—perhaps because clear rules make it easier to produce solvable puzzles—but it took some getting used to.
The glowfic format is strange, yeah, but it doesn’t read much different. It does make for a clearer delineation of character perspectives (e.g. compared to an omniscient narrator), and the portraits/icons carry more weight than one might expect. The main drawback I noticed was that, without chapters, clear “you can stop reading and go to bed” breaks were sometimes quite far apart.
(also I had to take Stylus to the CSS to render it comfortably readable, but that’s every site on the internet these days)
Spoiler free again:
Good to know there’s demand for such a review! It’s now on my todo list.
To quickly address some of your questions:
Pros of PL: If the premise I described above interests you, then PL will interest you. Some good Sequences-style rationality. I certainly was obsessed reading it for months.
Cons: Some of the Rationality lectures were too long, but I didn’t mind much. The least sexy sex scenes. Because they are about moral dilemmas and deception, not sex. Really long. Even if you read it constantly and read quickly, it will take time (1.8 million words will do that). I really have to read some authors that aren’t Yud. Yud is great, but this is clearly too much of him, and I’m sure he’d agree.
I read PL when it was already complete, so maybe I didn’t get the full experience, but there really wasn’t anything all that strange about the format (the content is another matter!). I can imagine that *writing * a glowfic would be a much different experience than writing a normal serialized work (ie dealing with your co-authors), but reading it isn’t very different from reading any other fiction. Look at the picture to see the POV, look at who’s the author if you’re curious, and read as normal. I’m used to books that change POV (though usually not this often). There are sometimes bonus tangent threads, but the story is linear. What problems do you have with the glowfic format?
Main themes would require a longer post, but I hope this helps.
My opinion, very briefly:
Good stuff:
Deception plotline
Demonstration of LDT in action
A lot of thought processes of smart characters
Convincing depictions of how people with very weird and evil ideology can have at least seemingly consistent worldview, be humans and not be completely insane.
Stuff that might be good for some and bad for others:
It’s Yudkowsky’s work and it feels. Some people like the style of his texts, some don’t.
Sex scenes (not very erotic and mostly talking)
Re-construction of Pathfinder game mechanics in setting
Math classes (not the best possible explanations, but not the worst either)
A lot of descriptions of “how everything works on dath ilan”
Bad stuff:
It’s isekai (it’s bad if you’re allergic to this genre)
It’s very long
And in some places it could be shorter without losing anything (but, I think, nothing as egregious as school wars in HPMOR) (but if you don’t appreciate the point about “thought processes of smart characters”, then it could be much shorter without losing anything in most places)
(Done poorly)
My question is, Can I download an offline copy of it—either text or spoken audio?
The audio consists of 195 episodes, each of which can be individually downloaded, but can I get it as a single audio file (of duration 150 hours or so)?
There is a epub version at https://www.mikescher.com/blog/29/Project_Lawful_ebook.
(Alternatively, you could open each glowfic thread, select “show flat” or option like that, then print/parse the resulting page, obtaining a few PDFs which can be merged afterwards.)
I thought this review was fine: https://recordcrash.substack.com/p/mad-investor-chaos-woman-asmodeus