I think that the main barrier is that I have no idea how to read this book.
It looks like a forum to me. Do I read all the posts, or are some of them comments from readers? Do I need to pay attention to usernames, post times, history of each comment?
There are no reader comments—this is a “glowfic”, the whole thread is the story. Each “comment” is a portion of the story. You need read it all.
You do need pay attention to the usernames because they often identify which character is speaking (e.g. “Keltham”, or “Carissa Sevar”), and an approximation of their facial expression via the graphics.
(The post times and history of each comment are not important in-story, the “history” are just edits made to that story portion, the post times are just when it was posted)
One of the authors is “Iarwain” (who is EY) the other author is “lintamande”.
Good questions! It’s a forum with posts between two users “Iarwain” (Yudkowsky) and “lintamande”, who is co-authoring this piece. There are no extraneous posts, although there are (very rarely) OOC posts, for instance announcing the discord or linking to a thread for a side story.
In each post, either user will post as either a character (ie Keltham, Carissa, and others—each user writes multiple characters) or without a character (for 3rd person exposition). I usually use the avatars when possible to quickly identify who is speaking.
You don’t need to pay attention to history or post time, until your catch up to the current spot and start playing the F5 game (they are writing at a very quick pace).
I think that the main barrier is that I have no idea how to read this book.
It looks like a forum to me. Do I read all the posts, or are some of them comments from readers? Do I need to pay attention to usernames, post times, history of each comment?
There are no reader comments—this is a “glowfic”, the whole thread is the story. Each “comment” is a portion of the story. You need read it all.
You do need pay attention to the usernames because they often identify which character is speaking (e.g. “Keltham”, or “Carissa Sevar”), and an approximation of their facial expression via the graphics.
(The post times and history of each comment are not important in-story, the “history” are just edits made to that story portion, the post times are just when it was posted)
One of the authors is “Iarwain” (who is EY) the other author is “lintamande”.
Good questions! It’s a forum with posts between two users “Iarwain” (Yudkowsky) and “lintamande”, who is co-authoring this piece. There are no extraneous posts, although there are (very rarely) OOC posts, for instance announcing the discord or linking to a thread for a side story.
In each post, either user will post as either a character (ie Keltham, Carissa, and others—each user writes multiple characters) or without a character (for 3rd person exposition). I usually use the avatars when possible to quickly identify who is speaking.
You don’t need to pay attention to history or post time, until your catch up to the current spot and start playing the F5 game (they are writing at a very quick pace).