A few years ago /lit/ used to produce an anarchic and eclectic literature review called & (pronounced 'lamp'). Sadly it ran out of steam as most of the core contributors moved on to other things but it was a really entertaining and at times surprisingly ambitious project. Now a few people have put together a best of compilation. Sadly it eschews the seizure-inducing design language that was the signature of classic & in favour of a sort of take-me-seriously black-tie monochrome. But there's definitely some stuff worth reading in here, and it serves as a capstone on one of the more interesting productions to ever come out of an anonymous imageboard. It's my hope that if this board ever grows big enough it's the sort of thing we might be able to emulate. > Download link > https://mega.nz/file/SsdExRIb#vCbGiROPo3ykstNMeMafJGP5sKW82UzxsXq29wcezG0
Just re-read 'The only internet crime for which theologians are consulted', one of the more famous pieces in here as I recall. More interesting not for its theological content but as a sort of gentle satire of imageboard culture and the way that academia interfaces with it.
>>1381 (OP) Thanks! I've been toying with the idea of making my own magazine, mainly by translating other people's work and sending it to people that didn't ask for it. This is going into my project folder.
>>1419 I only have ideas, and the ability to translate and design! I like the idea of a dirty zine with unseen/unknow literature sent to unsuspecting readers. I read somewhere that Debord and the Lettrist Internationale used to brodcast their work like that, paper-spamming literary institutions of their times. >>1426 Nice! If you go the open-source way, you might as well use Scribus, which is made for desktop publishing. Beware: it has a distinct 1990s feel, but it is maintained and allows for professional work.
>>1427 I installed Scribus actually but it looked a bit intimidating and I dislike Qt UX. my thinking was that for the first issue i might just try and solicit contributions to fill one side of A4 and I think Inkscape is enough for that. if the project gets some legs then I guess I will learn Scribus :p I didn't know that about the letterist international but it's 'on brand', as they say.
>>1428 Yes, it looks weird, but it's deceiving. As often with old software, once you know what to ignore, it is easy to use. Inkscape is good for everything. Above a certain number of pages, it becomes tedious, that's all. So you are actually considering a magazine too. What kind of material would you want? Because I have some essays, Lit salon has an active discord with several fiction writers (very interesting ones), and I can think of several other sources for texts and pictures. Should we discuss this and make it one project? I mean, ideas can grow stale. Might as well plant them now that we have them.
>>1430 The idea of the magazine would be to publish short fiction, essays, poetry, and criticism from Petrarchan users and adjacent spaces (rsbc, rswc, /wg/, lit salon). It would also be really nice to interpolate this with virtual art and cartoons. We already have some great art being posted on the various threads here and it's a shame for that stuff to get killed by the thread cap. I'm definitely keen to collaborate on this because I want it to be a community project like & was on /lit/ and also because I have fairly limited abilities as a designer :^) Please get in touch on discord @jfawley and let's talk more.
I will do a proper announcement next week but in the meantime if anyone is keen to submit to the mag you can email [email protected]
Hey, I'm the guy who made the best of &. Cool to stumble upon it here, and thanks to whoever posted it. There's also a proper site for it at https://the-best-of-amp.github.io/ with links to whatever the latest version of the PDF is (corrections to typos, etc.), online copies of the entries, and the page for ordering in print (it's as cheap as possible with a $0 margin). Pic related is the whole thing as an illegible gif. >>1431 I'll second the earlier recommendations for Scribus, as I made the best-of with it. There's a steep learning curve to Scribus, and lots of rough edges, but it gives you a lot of tools to work with. I'll shoot you an email (from [email protected]). >>1520 Sweet.
Thank you for sharing it. I think the black and white makes sense for a retrospective edition, and considering that the creator of the Best Of isn't the original creator.
>>1394 Honestly, the thing that stuck to me most about that story was the ending line. It really makes someone think about their place in the world. What's also interesting is the lack of explanation for hell streams. If I lived in that world, I'd send programmers to try to uncover what was broadcasting those streams.
>>1394 >>1739 I think Computer Crime is interesting beyond its premise for being what feels like a very successful and mature form of a creepypasta, and there's no doubt it's good in its own right, but to me it doesn't really stand out in the best-of. Something like Dog Killer fulfills what I want from something adjacent to horror, and does it much more succinctly, though it's a much different kind of story. Anyway, I don't agree with the take on it being a satire of the academic appraisal of imageboard culture; the pseudo-report format is only a framing for the story. For all the things a board-user (especially someone who browsed /x/ and /b/ at the right times) is going to recognise, the framing peels that back a bit, and lends genuine credibility to the severity of the streams. It also saves the story from having to be from the perspective of a board-user, so we're seeing the horror contrasted between clinical detail and visceral experience, which leaves the horror more implicit. The story doesn't place you directly in the shows of someone watching hell streams, but inherently makes you imagine yourself as someone who might stumble upon them. Pic related is a screencap of the story from the best-of for anyone curious who's too lazy to go through the pdf. I have a folder of all the stories in image format here: https://mega.nz/folder/ix8xWRKZ#6-gM0aINGDCWuperJMcmKA
6 thoughts and Esoteric Epstein worship both made me lol. I like the shorter form ones that almost read like 4chan posts.
I also liked Proven until Guilty Innocent. We're all a bunch of animals. As others in this thread have remarked, computer crime was a great read. Re-read Dog Killer just now too. On my first reading, I hated it because even the thought of a sweet, innocent animal getting put down in a painful way brings be a lot of anguish. But upon rereading I realize now that it's a fantastic piece of writing. The ending bit describing dog heaven blew me away. That said, in the digital version of the file, the one that I read, it seems like there were some syntax errors or maybe I just got filtered. When the dog killer describes Janie the dogs death, he seems to switch between male and female pronouns. Caught me off guard, didn't know what to make of it. I wrote one of the stories included in this best of compilation. To be considered close to the same level as some of these writers is an incredible honor, one that I'll cherish for quite some time.
>>2271 The pronoun switch was left deliberately, though I don't know if it was originally done deliberately. I was on the fence about correcting it, but I couldn't convince myself that it wasn't done by the author to add to the disorientation of the piece, so I left it as-is; I read it as the dog killer blurring events. I'm not sure it reads better that way, which probably should have been the first priority, but oh well.