The Last Roundup - An Alternative Featured Box · 8:06pm Sep 14th, 2014
Hi guys. These days, in these troubled times of "The Featured Box is full of more whirling debris than a Category 5 Hurricane," it can be hard to find good stuff to read. Sure, you can always check the Featured Box, but honestly, who has time to figure out if the stuff in there is good? Nobody, that's who. Moreover, the Featured Box itself has a few issues of its own. Mostly notably the following:
-Stories that will get featured: Popular Stories.
-Stories that may or may not get featured: Good Stories.
There’s nobody to blame for this. It’s an automated system, and like all soulless machines, it has no concept of taste. My thought here is: “We’re human. We have tongues. We can taste better than that. Better than some evil machine! Let's stop complaining about the box and start figuring out how we can improve on it!"
So, with that in mind...
I present to you all The Last Roundup. And the basic premise here is that we're a bunch of people who'll dig through the stories of the past couple weeks or so, and put up a handful of the ones we thought were good/enjoyable/worth reading every Sunday. Think of it as an alternative Featured Box. One that looks to showcase stuff that's worth your time, as opposed to merely showcasing what's been most popular lately.
(Source credit to the incredible MrPoniator)
And no, don't worry--we're not Equestria Daily. We're not The Royal Guard. We're not here to tell people if a story's objectively good or bad or be a showcase for the fandom's greatest accomplishments since the beginning of time. We're just a bunch of folks with reasonably good taste who've banded together to make you some recommendations on what's worth reading from recent stories. Take that as you will.
For more information on what the whole thing is, who we are, and to keep abreast of future features and developments, check out our group here, and associated links:
The Last Roundup
The Last Roundup FAQ
Suggest Stories for the Next Post!
With that out of the way, here's our debut post, consisting of a bevy of recent stories we thought were worth reading, plus Wildcard Slots (which are stories that are not NECESSARILY new, recent, or good, but we thought were interesting enough to be worth a look). Keep in mind that this something of a rough, and that we had to build the below post without the assistance of suggestions from readers on what to check out.
Little Deceptions by Taranth
Blank Slate is the greatest thief of his generation, ready to pull off the heist of a lifetime. But you have to get up pretty early in the morning to get one past the pony who defines when ‘early in the morning’ is…
My Domestic Equestria by Pascoite
Just the typical adventures of my four-year-old son with his ponies.
Forbidden Melodies by Regocomics
Preparations halt when Princess Celestia forbids the playing of the Equestrian national anthem at a concert after a copy of its original is discovered to still exist. Despite her warnings, Octavia Melody endeavors to uncover the truth.
Any Cost by Anonymoose
Cadance is the Alicorn of love, but was does that mean if she doesn't have her true love with her?
The Malignant Magnet by Derpyland
An evil magnet attacks Equestria. After it sets the Moon on fire, Celestia outsources the problem to Twilight. But how do you win a fight with a magnet?
WILDCARDS
Queen of Queens by JawJoe
Chrysalis strives to be remembered.
Wildcomments: GOOD STUFF, if a bit older than two weeks.
Diamond Tiara Gets Filthy by The Elusive Badgerpony
Can Filthy Rich resist the temptations of his smoking hot daughter, or will he succumb to her vixen ways?
Wildcomments: A surprisingly dark (and almost creepy) study on Diamond Tiara's character and the horrors of incest, which also masquerades as a clopfic.
And that's it for this week, folks. Be sure to check back on the group next Sunday for next week's post if you think this is a cool deal. Or just check the feed, if you're following me. I'll be doing weekly crossposts on these every Sunday. Feel free to ask any questions you have about the whole schtick if you want to know more.
Have a nice day!
I am the best possible thing ever for this group.
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Hope this does awesome things.
Wasn't that supposed to be what The Royal Guards were going to be?
Ooooh, this is an interesting project indeed. I'll keep my eye on it.
So it's like a Seattle's Angels for slightly newer stories, but including ones that get popular/featured?
I'm on board with this.
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I shall eagerly stare at my screen until next Sunday rolls around.
2454806
No. TRG was, no matter what it may have claimed, trying to be EqD on FimFic. There is no guarantee of excellence here, like there is (supposed to be) at TRG and EqD. There is no feedback from the group given to authors, and you're not allowed to submit your own stories. It's more like SA than it is TRG/EqD.
2454812
Kind of.
Ok I'll bite
2454798
no one loves you
not even your mother
2454806
Potentially yeah. But TRG and EQD are both backlogged with queues (through no real fault of their own) and thus inevitably the stories are new-ish but a month or so delayed.
2454812
Probably a more apt comparison. Like SA, it's just a bunch of guys/gals making recommendations, with no self-promotion allowed. SA focuses on fics that are old, have low viewcounts, and preferably haven't been featured elsewhere. Last Roundup focuses on stuff that's only a week old, possibly two (so that it remains topical) and which doesn't care if it was featured or not (finding new stories that missed getting featured is good too, but sometimes Feature Box stories truly are good).
Isn't it against the rules to link to mature stories from blog posts?
2454913
Was a mature story linked? :V
2454908
But you are my mother. ;-;
Holy shit, why has no one thought about that before, you sir, are amazing
and I think you might do more work then knighty ever did
Personally, I think people spend too much time complaining about the feature box. Yeah, being featured isn't necessarily an indicator of a story's quality, but so? Just look at the movie box office list, or the Top 40 radio list, and so forth. Popularity isn't the same as quality (and it doesn't help that quality is very subjective anyway). It's sort of how the world works, for better or worse.
That said, I think the Last Roundup is a pretty swell idea.
A feature box that doesn't exclusively showcase dreck? I like the idea of it (even if I think something like this needs needs to be more regular that once every couple of weeks), but I'm not sure what it really brings to the table in its current format. It can't hope to give the authors the same amount of exposure without being on the front page, and it can't promise readers the same level of quality that they could get from The Royal Guard or Seattle's Angels. As-is, it's just TRG-lite.
2454950
People can be conditioned to accept mediocrity, and even enjoy it, sadly enough. Meanwhile, quality stuff gets overlooked, because no one puts forth the effort to shove it down people's throats.
2454979
*shrug* For all its exposure, getting featured by SA is a bump of only 150 views or so. Not sure what a TRG bump gets ya. My two bits, but I see it as more about the readers having another (ideally) trustworthy source to turn to for recurring story recommendations. The people who like it, follow it. That sorta thing.
I understand you're using your human taste to select these, but I'd also appreciate human explanations for why they're here. As is, it's an alternate list of stories that seems, once again, arbitrarily selected by some arcane and unknown process.
Also, it's harder to
complaindiscuss the selections when we don't have your reasons for selecting them.2455029
But the thing about the feature box is that it's actually probably more for the author than it is for the reader. A reader already has plenty of sources to find quality stories. Seattle's Angels, the Royal Guard, Equestria Daily, the Canterlot Archive, review bloggers, FimFiction groups, the list goes on forever. A reader looking for quality stories goes anywhere but the feature box, because as is frequently pointed out, the box measures popularity, not quality.
The feature box's true purpose, I'd argue, is the sheer exposure it gives. However brief it may be, a feature means instant popularity for many stories. The feature box is there for the author, to get them views, to get their story out there, and to get their name known, for however much value there is in that. And this, to me, is why I can't see much of a point to this.
A feature box that doesn't grant a spike in views isn't a feature box at all. It's another reader-oriented fic recommendation service. And those are good. There's nothing wrong with those. Lord knows, I read plenty and always appreciate such services. But we already have several of them on this site alone, and I'm not sure what making another such service just with lower standards can add.
I don't meant to be pessimistic, but I think that this is destined to satisfy no-one.
2455114
Agreed.
Last Roundup deviates from SA, TRG, EQD, and RCL in that it almost-exclusively focuses on week-old stories, so it has a niche. Will that niche be meaningful enough to justify the group? Well, we hope so, but we'll just have to see what readers think after a few weeks.
2455099
TRG-style, two-sentence explanations might be feasible. SA-style, three-to-five paragraph reviews would not, for a weekly feature.
2455179
I guess we'll just wait and see how this plays out. I hope that I'm wrong and that this new feature proves a worthy addition to the site.
2455179
I read your comment, but...
It's still essentially like Seattle's Angels and other similar groups of that nature, but for stories that are more "fresh" than others.
For what it's worth, I avoid the feature box like its weaponized VX.
Good stories may get featured in the featured box, so there's no reason to avoid it completely. Likewise, TLR might feature crud, since they list no genres or criteria in their selections. Also unlike the f_box, there's no Mature filter to keep incest clopfics off the TLR front page.
It's another resource, and free of course, so it's worth checking out.
Well, opinions on the feature box and the utility of various recommendation avenues aside, that was a pretty easy decision to join.
I like this idea. Curious to see how it turns out.
2454914
Tricky, tricky.
Now, how about we get knighty to make a module for this instead of keeping this to groups. That'd be cool. This is a solid idea. Hopefully it holds.
Nice. So what's your policy on clop and/or mature stories? I only read immature stories.
2456874
To quote the FAQ:
Mm, I like it, but genre tags would be appreciated.
I read Diamond Tiara Gets Filthy at the recommendation of this and similar posts, but I have to say, I disagree with what folks have said about it. They talked about how it was an examination of how messed up it was, but... I didn't get that vibe from it at all. It was a straight up clopfic which was using the idea of the forbidden to make it more erotic. I didn't get the feel that it was something else masquerading as a clopfic at all; it was just a clopfic.
That isn't a bad thing - it was decently written and all that - but I was disappointed that it wasn't what was advertised by all the folks promoting it.
Well, glad to hear it won't be anti-clop which a lot of Anti-Featured-Boxers seem to be when they bitch. But I appreciate the variety and look forward to future suggestions.