JaymesRS

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-pope-could-it-be-american-cardinal-robert-prevost/

Robert Barron, bishop of the Diocese of Winona–Rochester in Minnesota, was appointed less than a week ago by President Trump to the new White House Commission on Religious Liberty. This week, however, he was at the Vatican with hundreds of other prelates as the cardinal electors gather for the conclave to choose a new pontiff.

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"Cardinal George of Chicago, of happy memory, was one of my great mentors, and he said: 'Look, until America goes into political decline, there won't be an American pope.' And his point was, if America is kind of running the world politically, culturally, economically, they don't want America running the world religiously. So, I think there's some truth to that, that we're such a superpower and so dominant, they don't wanna give us, also, control over the church."

Chicago Pope proclaims he's "on a mission from God", looking to "get the band back together."

The late 90's to early 2000s were a terrible time on the internet in many ways and yet in may others it was the best of times.

Can we just pick up and move King's Island and Cedar Point somewhere better?

Sadly I fully expect to hear that parroted from family soon.

An older acronym for the same thing, BSABSVR

Both Sides Are Bad So Vote Republican.

Though I tend to skew more towards her fantasy than her horror, T. Kingfisher is one of my favorite authors that I've just discovered more recently

I have the same struggle. By the time I hit my flow, the story is over and now I have to start over.

The challenge with LitRPG is the same challenge with fanfic. They are written and just put out into the aether for fans. The good ones are most often from people who are experienced writers and used to dealing with power creep and resisting putting in every joke or reference you can think of.

My favorites are Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinnmann and This Trilogy is Broken by JP Valentine. Ready Player By Ernest Cline is mostly 70s-80s reference fan service but mostly holds up. There are some from the 70s and 80s that are prototypical of the genre where people enter some sort of VR like Tron or their D&D setting and some of those are solid. He Who Fights with Monsters gets a bunch of recommendations typically but it struggles as time goes on.

So far I've enjoyed all of Novik's works that I've read.

Weird attempts at character voices can tend to take me out of audiobooks too. I think there's a good balance somewhere between one reader doing all voices and the audio play-style ones for some books where in the future one could have effectively studio artists like the ones they used to sit in on albums to handle parts like that in books without the entire thing having to be a different person for each character.

I've now tried a few different LitRPG books and almost universally that's been my experience, "you have a really good core, but you really needed someone to help you refine this". It can be frustrating.

I haven't read any Lecke yet, but I have a few on my TBR, is there a better one to start with?

It was anything but typical.