>>25054058
Oh, I’m glad people still remember my story. Someone made a really beautifully formatted version of it a few years back, I will try to find it later. It may be in the archives. It made my day to see this

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>>25054058
>the best of &
Have you read anything else from the best-of, or did you only come across it as an image? In my mind it feels like the peak form of a creepypasta, though I dunno if I'm likening it to creepypasta just because it leans on the terminally online imageboarders angle.

Pic related (Pinakes) is my favourite from the same anthology.

There are also a lot of old /lit/ projects here
https://lit.trainroll.xyz/wiki/Collaborative_Works
but quality is not guaranteed.

>>25054277
No shit, I made the version in the OP, which I re-edited/-designed from & (different editor). I tried to contact the various authors and you were one I never found, so feel free to shoot me an email at unofficial.drivel@gmail.com if later you want to chat about it. The copy from the OP pic is from
https://the-best-of-amp.github.io/
and the PDF is free there, plus print copies. Your story is online here too:
https://the-best-of-amp.github.io/writing/the_only_computer_crime_for_which_theologians_are_consulted.html
If you want how it originally appeared in & it's in here:
https://lit.trainroll.xyz/images/e/e0/Lamp011.pdf

A lot of people really really liked yours, and it was one of the guaranteed best-of entries when I started on the best-of. Way back when your piece first released I think I posted that it reminded me of the priest's sermon on Hell in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

>>25054306
Thank you anon! Sorry for being so hard to get in touch with. I used a burner email which I forgot to check for years at a time. My bad. Thank you for all your hard work, man. I’m very flattered. I will email sometime soon.
>I posted that it reminded me of the priest's sermon on Hell in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Funnily enough I hadn’t read it when I wrote that story, but I had read some 19th century Catholic tracts for children about hell (lol) which I’m sure were informed by the same milieu which Joyce lived through. There’s a scene in the movie ‘The Devil’s Playground’ where a priest uses the same analogy of a bird brushing against a sphere as large as the sun. I wonder if it was a widely used thing

Anything good ever come out of those /lwc/ threads?

>>25054327
>the same analogy of a bird brushing against a sphere as large as the sun
Something similar shows up in this Built to Spill song (but a feather instead of a bird)
https://youtu.be/cnU-2R4ohiE
so it seems like it was a popular enough concept/phrase to last, but I've got no clue when it would have originated. What were the Catholic tracts? and how'd you come across them? Another good source of hellish imagery would be the Monk; it's got a description of Satan I found menacing in a similar way to the Hell description in Portrait.

Also, have you ever read Amygdalatropolis? I've had a friend loan me a copy and insist I read it, and I know it deals with deranged imageboard stuff, but not anything spiritual (as far as I know). I imagine some commonalities with your piece. (Now that I think about it, the framing of the hell streams as an inevitable source of corruption from being online captures the essence of exposure to gore, CP, etc. without having to deal with them explicitly. That's a very cool approach.)

>>25054331
I've never read any, but the winners of the last few are compiled here:
https://mega.nz/folder/usNllbQC#yWk55Mj355BvqwtUrfbYeg

>>25054354
Interesting. I’ve never heard this song before. Thanks
>What were the Catholic tracts?
It was this little pamphlet by a Catholic educator appropriately named Fr. John Furniss. The descriptions of children being tortured are particularly unsettling - I feel bad for the kids who had this stuff read to them…
https://www.saintsbooks.net/books/Fr.%20John%20Furniss%20-%20The%20Sight%20of%20Hell.html
I think I came across this while watching a debate between William Lane Craig and an atheist - one of the few occasions I think where WLC got visibly flustered. I’m not really into the debatebro stuff but I was reading a lot of Biblical analysis at the time and I must have stumbled across that video. I’m glad The Monk seems to be getting popular on /lit/ lately too. It’s a fun little book.
>Amygdalatropolis
I haven’t but I did hear about it. I’ll check it out. It does seem like something that would appeal to me. And thanks - you’re right that it’s kind of a distillation of the phenomenon of people getting exposed to fucked up stuff online - it’s sort of that human experience pushed to its conceptual limits. I wonder if it’s a more universal thing now than it used to be too, or if it’s just changed its presentation. Old internet shock sites vs Twitter algorithm just showing random normies like Africans getting their heads cut off and shit. I’m heading to sleep now but I’ll keep this thread open. Goodnight

>>25054058
Obvious that this is the amp faggot using this thread to promote his gay ass book while pretending to be a fan. Kill yourself.

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>>25054662

>>25054695
Kill yourself.

>>25054741
Will you be mad if I don't?

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Has anyone bought/read "A Short Fiction Anthology"? It was a best-of made from the three Flash Fiction Anthology releases, but the editor never released it digitally.

>>25054277
One of the best from the & collection. Do you plan to write again? I would love to read more of your work.

>>25054277
Have you published anything else, anon?

>>25054306
I only saw that image by itself. Haven't read the best of but will check it out, thank you (and thanks for the links)

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>>25054306
This is a really beautiful intro

>>25055683
Stop samefagging and kill yourself.

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>>25054058
Here's one I liked from Pinecone.

>>25055461
No problem. The Lit Quarterly is another high quality /lit/ mag you can find on the Collaborative Works page; those guys actually paid accepted authors, though I dunno how many submissions they were getting in the first few issues. It presented as way more professional than other /lit/ projects, for better or worse. And if you want somewhere to start with them, one of the editors told me his favourites a while back:
>Swallow, Countdown to Harvest, Damned Machine, Waiting for the Waves at Bohai, Two Birds in the Earthset, The Siren, The Ratline, A Marvellous Punkah-Wallah, Smoking in Bed, The Guy, The Normal Guy Died, Trotsky, and How I Miss That Sea That Was Stolen From Us

>>25055683
First anyone's said that about the introduction. I appreciate it.

>>25054384
Thanks for the link, and I agree with you about exposure to extreme material is probably way more prevalent now, but I'd imagine there's still a difference in mindset between the average internet user and the one who falls down a rabbit hole. The opening is way larger than just gore threads now for sure (more entrances to the same cavern), but the ones it really impacts will be those that choose to look for more and for whom it's not just a conversion from horrific to mundane but something they desire. Not necessarily sexual, but that's the angle I first encountered: guys on /b/ saying they got hooked on harder and harder stuff, or the fetishists of places like DeviantArt who are absorbed in completely absurd forms of pornography. One of the best-of pieces, Jibaku, kind of covered the latter two categories, though it's more of a comedic, shitpost-y (pretty stupid) piece and I've had a lot of doubts about having included it, but it still captures something of the type that has completely fallen off.

>>25054277
I remember this article too actually, it must have been a few years ago already? Excellent piece of writing anon don't ever stop.

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>>25054058
Picrel has its share of flaws but it's worth the read.

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The greatest tap tap section of (the first tap tap half of) the tap tap Legacy of Totalitarianism in a tap tap Tundra.

>>25056445
Kill tap tap yourself.

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>>25056512

>>25054354
>Also, have you ever read Amygdalatropolis? I've had a friend loan me a copy and insist I read it, and I know it deals with deranged imageboard stuff, but not anything spiritual (as far as I know). I imagine some commonalities with your piece.

This is a trope now of almost everyone here. It's boring. The conglomerate is trite, wasteful and spiteful of the religious explicit dumbasses who are most often good people. It shapes us for the round hole being the small square that fits, it is just so a story to avoid the excessively deterministic or the abstract hell. I don't know why it sticks, that Conservative hidden behind the curtains (he's a fucking faggot and moves around like a pedo boyscout leader). Anyhow, it's not for me.

>>25056596
I have no idea what you mean.

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>>25055931

why does not /lit/ has any magazine yet?

>>25058275
>he doesn't know

>>25058275
where is it then?

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>>25058275
>>25058295
There have been about a dozen since /lit/ was created. Look under "Anthologies and periodicals" here (WIP):
https://lit.trainroll.xyz/wiki/Collaborative_Works
There have also been a few anthologies made up of the winners of a writing contest that's been held every month for about the last year, with some info on that page under "/lit/ winners club".

>>25058373
>&
>2025
what did I miss?

>>25059004
Not much. A pretty much empty July issue with only three real entries, maybe 4k words total. Then a December issue whose only meaningful entry was a worse re-print of a story from the Lit Quarterly. The threads were pretty short/empty without much said; the last one died in less than a day, though it looked like it auto-saged.

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>>25054058

>>25059203
The fall off of & needs to be studied. The last three issues were comically bad.

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>>25059262
There's too much to say about &, but I'd say the root problems had all been seen in /lit/ mags before. Pic rel is an exchange from 2012 about the April Reader. Nothing new under the sun.
>I can't help but feel the more TAR professionalizes, the more it loses any unique character and becomes generic
>I guess the idea about a year-end "best of" collection kinda died. I understand if you feel you don't have the manpower to deal with it, but something like this would really build up hype.
>I always felt most of /lit/ was more interested in the novelty of a zine than writing per se
>it's unfortunate to admit but in order to gain readership it needs to be more than a /lit/ ezine, which would alienate the initial reader base. Do they want to be a /lit/-zine and suffer with varying quality works or do they want to be good and piss people off in the process?
What went wrong with & is too much to distill to one line, but the change in readership and contributors was part of the end.
A good literary magazine is not a good /lit/ magazine, and it's very easy to be bad at both.

I'd like to live in the alternate timeline where & ended at issue 014 and the best-of didn't take two years of shitflinging to appear (even if ultimately I'm happy with the best-of).

>>25055931
Oh, cool, it's nice to see that someone remembers my story all these years later. This was actually the very first thing I ever got published by anyone, anywhere. Unless I count a poem I got published in a children's anthology when I was a kid.

>>25058231
And there's the other thing I'm known for! Though it feels like it's been memoryholed these days.

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Video City from Pinecone 10000

>>25059730
The best-of was the beginning of the end. It ruined the mag. If the best-of never happened, & would’ve stayed in the anonymous spirit of /lit/ instead of being killed by drama and shitflinging.

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Third Worst Thing from the Metric 01
This one is good because he says "poo poo" and "nigga."

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>>25055931
Taking from the editor's favourites:
Swallow from the Lit Quarterly, Winter 2020

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The Siren from the Lit Quarterly, Spring 2020

I quite like the publication of the thread where I demonstrated how he rapes his sister, Phoebe.

>>25054058
The Jon Kolner short story/ riddle playing off of Borges’ Cult of the Phoenix. Please rate and give feedback. It’s the only thing I ever wrote. Generally I don’t like writing stuff unless it is a parody or references already existing stuff I enjoy, in this case Borges.

>> I have created a riddle based on the Borges’ story the cult of the Phoenix. This one symbol is ubiquitous and you likely are familiar with it while not giving it much thought. This symbol is very powerful and I will give you some clues so you may decipher what it is

>this symbol is owned by the world’s most powerful men. This class of men (who share this symbol) is the richest and most powerful in all of history and yet most who own this symbol live in poverty
>this symbol is hated by half of Asians and yet loved by the other half
>This symbol is both loved and hated by those who own it. Some would get rid of it if they could despite it being a symbol of power as stated above. People who want to get rid of this symbol are generally seen negatively.

What am I?

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>>25061844

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The Ratline from the Lit Quarterly, Spring 2020

Whatever happened to Unreal Press? Are they still around?

>>25064121
I hope they are. They published a short story of mine and I'd love it if the archives of it were available.

>>25064121
>>25064128
The first few are in here:
https://mega.nz/folder/2gsHSSbA#Sl46P4LljGlk9mnpAf3Mlw
and they keep an archive of the Tales stuff on their Substack.