The Slow Regard of Silent Things is a novella about Auri from the Kingkiller Chronicles. There's not really a plot. I loved it.

I/O Revision II, a visual novel. It has been translated, though unfortunately I can't link to the translation. The story is unusual, and very, very hard to explain without spoiling it; let's just say that if you like Greg Egan's works, there's a good chance you will like this.

So I just finished reading Fate Stay Night, and I feel hungry for more, but its sequels are a lot more silly and laid back, and what I want isn't the easy familiarity of characters whose tales are already told, but the poignant drama and character development, and the poetic narrative delivery, that I'd never experienced before. Does anyone here know stories that have this type of heart-gripping-ness?

My group finished our Summer season last week: * Akuma no Riddle: awful, the worst show I've watched all the way through. Incoherent setting, implausibly stupid characters, cheap and mistake-ridden animation, and an ending that's actively hostile to the rest of the show. * Knights of Sidonia: half good, quite hard sci-fi, half staid harem antics. My friend insists on comparing it to Attack on Titan, which I don't think is entirely fair (Sidonia has a coherent setting that drives the plot while being amenable to reasoning), but it shares that series' problem of a boring perfect protagonist. There are some questionable aspects to the ordering and where time is spent (it feels like the series is trying to establish a B-plot about Sidonia's history and an ongoing conspiracy, but it never quite connects to anything else), but the main plot is solid and the fight action is a lot of fun. It's done in all-3DCG, which makes the robot fights look great and the people look weird (I quite like it, but I know some people who hate the look). I do recommend it, but it's got plenty of flaws. * Katanagatari - talky action with a weird visual style. The overarching plot doesn't really click IMO, but the episodic "get to know a person, fight them, do something clever and take their sword" is plenty of fun, and together with the high production values I'm happy to recommend it. * Toradora - a rewatch of a series I counted among my favourites. It holds up - a story of teenage love, discovering what you want and learning how to relate to your family, with a good sense of humour and a very satisfying conclusion by anime standards. But it definitely has its flaws; the pacing is off (the first ~9 episodes are basically establishing, which is way too long, and the twists crammed into the last two episodes should be spread out a bit more; by modern standards the whole thing drags), and the second half in particular is structured as a bunch of specific-character arcs that don't entirely c

The new Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works TV adaptation by Ufotable is only 5 episodes in but so far it's an amazingly good adaption of the VN. (From what I hear, previous adaptations weren't too good). Important elements are preserved, long-windedness is reduced (although the show is willing to take its time and rarely feels rushed), and the new added scenes complement the existing ones nicely. There are also some nice callbacks to Fate/Zero that (naturally) weren't in the VN. The animation is incredible, perhaps the best I've seen in TV anime, and a step up from the already high level of Fate/Zero. Highly recommended if you have any interest in the Fate series.

* Kill la Kill: confusing, but I think I liked it.

Ongoing webcomic Strong Female Protagonist has impressed me so far. I recommend reading all of what has currently been drawn of it.

Ice-Bound: A Novel of Reconfiguration is an upcoming indie game combining an iPad app and an augmented reality-enabled print book by Aaron A. Reed and Jason Garbe. Ice-Bound is a novel about an AI recreation of a struggling writer, brought to life to finish his now-legendary novel. The player looks at the printed compendium via their iPad to unlock the hidden reality between the lines; at the same time the pages that the player shows to AI writer that 'lives' in the iPad determine the story that he will write. It is running a Kickstarter campaign that ends today; all the funds will go towards a print run of the print book. The list of backers includes all the usual suspects of the tiny world of interactive fiction, which is kinda sad at the same time, as I believe this kind of project deserves wider publicity. Help spread the word by upvoting: r/kickstarter, r/indiegames, and especially r/writing (look for post on 'Upgrading prose')

Peter Singer investigates a basement flood (comic)

Bloggers go here? Over at Dale Carrico's mostly neglected blog, he posts: http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2014/11/among-sooper-brains.html Of course, Elon Musk's ability to make money from scratch doesn't seem problematic when progressives want to shake him down for some of it at gunpoint. And also: http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2014/11/space-is-too-hard-for-money-grubbers.html Which shows non sequitur thinking and an ignorance of history. A lot of problems look really hard, and a lot of people fail at them, as they explore the solution spaces to try to find ways to solve them. When someone stumbles on a feasible solution, from a kind of hindsight bias we tend to forget about the failures and take the success for granted.

Great comment; wrong thread.

More than a year ago, I read Mortal, a My Little Pony fanfiction with transhumanist themes, and liked it. I recently found out about a short sequel, Mother of Nations, which I also read and enjoyed. If you read Mortal and enjoyed it, you will probably like Mother of Nations. Mortal has been discussed on LessWrong before, here.