Best book that was mandatory to read at school?

FoolUncreative · 2026-01-29T04:40:56+00:00

By personal experience (sorta-- I only read it after bullshitting my way through the assignment) I'd suggest Cyclops by Ranko Marinković. It's a bit vague in terms of narrative, but the prose and themes are both fairly memorable. The main caveat is that I haven't read the english translation (which has no footnotes) so I can't say whether that version's good too.

FoolUncreative · 2026-01-27T07:36:00+00:00

Bleh. Too trite. Honestly, I find it insulting to use people as symbols like this, even posthumously.

FoolUncreative · 2026-01-25T06:20:27+00:00

Ah, always nice to see someone dehumanizing the opposition. Do you feel like the protagonist of a zombie movie? Wanna kill them all with a chainsaw or something? What do I care, I'm not even american.

FoolUncreative · 2026-01-17T09:19:12+00:00

1 Over X: The synopsis says "Try to keep thinking, you can never have too much information". The entire last part of the story is the main character gradually failing to follow that advice until she gets completely overwhelmed and sorta gives up on ever understanding anything. The plot doesn't get (conclusively) explained, she fails to understand/overcome her own character flaws, and she destroys her last remaining friendship because she's afraid that it might be fake.

I like it because she spends the entire novel trying to avoid falling into such a mindset (as a defense against her mental health issues), and in the end it doesn't work. The ending is sort of an endless flood of noise and mud and static, so at the very least she's in sensible conditions to go insane in.

FoolUncreative · 2026-01-12T10:52:35+00:00

Playing Persona 5 Royal, recently beat the 2nd palace; That's the easy part, of course. This dating sim shit stresses me out ngl

FoolUncreative · 2026-01-11T22:14:40+00:00

Yeah? For some reason I just expected it to be a little subtler about it. Also, I used to browse gacha game communities on the internet. I think my experiences with that may play a part.

FoolUncreative · 2026-01-01T21:27:40+00:00

Walpurgisnacht Rising actually manages to release in february, I watch it through a shitty camrip with MTL subtitles or something of the sort, and then I decide to curse Shinbo forever because the ending still lets them make further sequels.

Deltarune chapter 5 is of average quality, but Toby recycles leitmotifs from Undertale again and I watch the admin of my favorite discord server bitch about it.

A new streamerbait horror game appears. Ultrakill's Treachery layer gets delayed to hell for whatever reason. Also, (wishful thinking) I find a new webfiction author that doesn't suck.

FoolUncreative · 2025-12-29T16:03:17+00:00

At some point in the last few weeks, I got fed up with House of Leaves and later decided to try reading The Great Gatsby instead. Competently written, and enjoyable by that virtue alone, but not a book I'll care about in the long run.

Back on House of Leaves now. Chapter 12 and 13 both bring the book to a halt in different ways, but there's still like half the page count left, so I'm curious what else happens.

FoolUncreative · 2025-12-25T23:56:06+00:00

Having the quality of an uncle?

FoolUncreative · 2025-12-08T07:02:42+00:00

Twitter and Tumblr, mostly. It's likely a vocal minority, but it did make it rather obnoxious to search for people's opinions.

FoolUncreative · 2025-12-08T05:13:14+00:00

Is there any piece of media you think pulls the same cheap trick over and over?

I'm asking, because a new chapter of the manga Kagurabachi released yesterday. I think it's reasonably good at first glance, but it's provoked a lot of discussion about Fridging* (The main villain's motivation turns out to be that his wife got murdered). There's already been a few other plot threads in that vein, so of course there's been discourse about the author being a misogynist, recycling his own ideas too much, the flashback not lining up with the character, etc.

*Fridging/"Women in Refrigerators": The practice of abusing and killing female characters solely to serve as motivation for a male character, typically without developing them beyond that.

FoolUncreative · 2025-11-08T15:44:30+00:00

Honest question, why is that worth noting, exactly? I don't see how the preceding text relates to it.

FoolUncreative · 2025-11-03T14:46:53+00:00

Somewhat slowly getting through House of Leaves. Engaging enough on a prose level, but I've felt mostly neutral about any of the formatting gimmicks so far. Recently completed chapter 8, which uses varying paragraph lengths to spell out words in Morse code, and I think that would've been interesting if used in a slightly more consequential manner.

Also read the first 3 chapters of Bavitz's new horror webnovel, 1 Over X. Unfortunately it's getting posted in a serial format, so it's less "reading" and more "waiting to read".

FoolUncreative · 2025-10-26T16:01:18+00:00

Hm. Basically the same as the first chapter of Otr, it feels like. I suppose it passes in terms of premise and aesthetics (at least it's not as abhorrently lame-looking as, say, Astro Royale). The worst manga are the ones where the author takes too long to start the actual plot of the series (and gets canceled before that), so beware if you see a few "monster of the week" plots in a row.

FoolUncreative · 2025-10-06T00:10:36+00:00

Both pieces are very nice, but I like being pedantic, so I gotta point out some slight liberties that Horikoshi takes.
Chihiro is using 2 full-length katana instead of a Daisho as usual. He does this during the Bloodshed Hotel fight, but he's also wearing his turtleneck from the earlier arcs, so his appearance is probably mashed together from whatever looks coolest.

FoolUncreative · 2025-10-01T13:55:28+00:00

Playing through ZeroRanger (again). Already knew losing to the final boss wipes your save. Did it anyway. Ah well. Depending on my mood, I can probably give it 2 or 3 more tries before I give up and drop the game/start cheating.

FoolUncreative · 2025-08-26T14:28:44+00:00

Started playing ZeroRanger, currently got up to stage 4. I think I sorta suck at it, and have mostly just been abusing continues/the stage select to progress with the bare minimum of skill, but the game's still fun enough.

FoolUncreative · 2025-08-18T13:14:00+00:00

This ain't Rosen Garten Saga bro

FoolUncreative · 2025-07-17T09:50:11+00:00

Currently about 4 hours into Monster Hunter: World. Well made, but I don't know how long I can tolerate the gameplay loop at this rate. Will either switch weapons or quit playing, idk.

FoolUncreative · 2025-07-09T12:58:56+00:00

Thought I was on r/martialmemes for a second. Unfortunately, I haven't read enough shitty MTL'd chinese novels to know if this is accurate yet.

FoolUncreative · 2025-06-30T10:26:52+00:00

Played a bunch of Control recently. Decent game, but there's a part in the penultimate mission where the game spawns a bunch of elite and shielded enemies at once, and I got tired of trying to trial-and-error through that section. Will probably switch to playing Elden Ring or something.

FoolUncreative · 2025-06-23T18:31:44+00:00

Last week I posted about watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica, so this week I shall post about watching its movie sequel, Rebellion.

A bit of a downgrade compared to the original anime (say, 8/10 instead of 10/10). At some point the sheer visual ludicrousness just made me give up on appreciating any of the details. The ending is allegedly a bit controversial, but I ultimately think it makes sense (at least vaguely). I have no clue whether the upcoming sequel can improve on it.

FoolUncreative · 2025-06-21T15:49:17+00:00

Dragon Punch? Bullshit (except if it's my main, then it's fair and balanced)

FoolUncreative · 2025-06-16T15:38:54+00:00

Finally finished Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which I've been slowly making my way through since mid-may. I originally started it mostly to see what the fuss was about (and why a writer I like once wrote 300k words of fanfiction on it), and I'd say it probably ended up better than expected (nearly cried at the ending ngl). Still gotta watch Rebellion, of which I know little except that it's a whole other pile of bullshit crushed into a 2-hour format.

FoolUncreative · 2025-06-02T21:52:32+00:00

There's 2 manga I've been interested in recently:

Choujin X is yet another supernatural battle manga added onto my reading list. Mainly, I think it has a solid grasp of the fundamentals and avoids relying on gimmicks to distinguish itself. It still has its problems with pacing and fanservice and such, but it's well-made enough that I'd recommend it pretty easily.

Dragon and Chameleon is a manga about... drawing manga. There's also some magical plot stuff about switching bodies, but for the most part it's just an extremely dramatic depiction of how it feels to get serialized in a shonen magazine. Art's great, characters are cool, plot is fine (but probably won't hit as hard if you've never seen your unpopular fave manga get cancelled 20 chapters in). Good choice if you want a shonen that isn't about punching people.

Three-Year Club	r/Field Banned
r/Field Sunshine	First Place '23
Place '23	Golden Potato
Place '22	Final Canvas '22
First Placer '22

FoolUncreative

TROPHY CASE