Rob’s Comments (group member since Jul 06, 2012)

Rob’s comments from the The Sword and Laser group.

Our January 2022 pick will be Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

Let us know what you think about the pick

Sheila Jean wrote: "Thanks again for organizing the team, Rob. Great to see our participation grow!"

agreed!

Thanks. I wish I had some clout to promote things better. I think a few of the teams were doing final day pushes for donations (certainly Patrick Rothfuss was), but I'm pretty happy with how well our team did with just my occasional updates here and on discord.

We finished 9th on the leaderboard (albeit pretty far behind the top groups) but only like $300 behind /r/fantasy

Oddly enough despite the campaign ending some teams are still getting in money and that money still appears to be getting matched.

Not sure what's going on there.

Then again I had someone donate over $300 to our 2020 team page sometime last week, and I'm not sure how that works.

I guess even after a campaign "ends" you can still keep donating to it.

Not sure if that person will be included in the drawing for the prizes though.

Welcome back Gaines

Thanks to 34 donors, we've had our best year yet. Not only did we break our previous high of 30 donors, but we also broke our previous donation amount by just over $450 for a grand total of $6,203!

Thanks again to everyone who donated to our team.

With just about 1 day left we matched our donor count (30) but exceeded our donation amount: $5,886. Not sure if we can make it to $6000, but right now they seem to still be doing matching, so we'd really only need another $57 (I think).

Either way I appreciate all the support big and small this year.

Oh and if you haven't heard Patrick Rothfuss is going to read the prologue to The Doors of Stone on his twitch channel: https://blog.patrickrothfuss.com/2021...

I finished Leviathan Falls. While not my favorite book of the series, I found myself looking for excuses to keep listening and I thought they did a good job sticking the landing.

I have a bunch of audiobooks in my backlog to get through, I opted to do Cytonic next. I'm hoping for some lighter/fast reads to round out the year.

Thanks to the 25 people who donated (and a good amount of match) we've now exceeded our stretch goal of $5000!


I'm once again blown away by everyone's generosity. As we enter the final few days of the fundraiser our last stretch goal would be to exceed last year's donations of $5,746 and/or 30 donors....

That means another 6 people and another $622. Even if we've reached our peak for the year thank you all again!

We are up to 23 donations for a total of $4,860

That means with about 5 days left and we're only $140 short of our $5k stretch goal (and $705 behind /r/fantasy).

Thanks to the 14 who already donated. We have blown past our goal (especially with all the match). So now we're just trying to as Veronica put it on twitter:

kick everyone's butts... for CHARITY!

In particular I always want to do better than /r/fantasy even though I think they are much larger than we are.

I believe they will be recording tonight instead.

Trike wrote: "Does it make the group stats look more impressive if people over-perform? Because that’s a fun wrinkle, too."

No, because for every person that overperforms there are 1 or more who underperform.

We've never actually hit our "goal" number of books. This goal is changing rather frequently too for some reason. Typically it's because someone new joins the challenge I think. We always seem to add new people every month.

This year there was a month where our goals actually dropped, so I think people were adjusting their goals down.

Honestly I just look at the challenges as another reason to talk about our reading, but in the broader sense.

Ian (RebelGeek) wrote: "Did you read all the short stories & novellas too?"

Not this year because I read most of them last year. I managed to get them all from the library and had previously avoided them due to the cost/length ratio.

I will pick up Memory's Legion when it comes out though. I may redo all the stories at that point. I haven't decided.

Some are better than others, and most are skippable in terms of the larger story.

I think 2 most important ones are:

The Churn (which is also my favorite of the bunch) before reading Nemesis games
Strange Dogs before reading Tiamet's Wrath

All the others add some depth to the world/characters but don't really do any critical world building.

Whatever works for you. For me I arrived at 25 by figured I'd average 2 books a month and liked the roundness of 25 better than 24.

For my own personal challenges, I'm finished with:


Personal: 27/25 (108% complete)
Sword: 10/5 (200% complete)
Laser: 14/5 (240% complete)

I finished reading 2 sci-fi books and 1 fantasy book this month. I caught up on the expanse just in time for Leviathan Falls. I also read the first non-audio book in several months because Reaper came out.

I finally finished my personal challenge and am currently on target to exceed it by a decent amount (percentage wise). At this point I'm glad I aimed very low but still exceeded those goals. I'm kind of hoping to finish with 30 books for the year, but I'm not going to kill myself to do it.

In addition to Leviathan Falls I figure I'll get 1 maybe 2 more audio books which would give me 30. They may both be Sci-Fi too, which is really unusual for me. I'm typically far more fantasy. I'm sure next year will end up more of a normal mix for me though.

November Results:

Sword Challenge
Total Participants: 145 (+2)
Total Read: 3,478 (+294)
Average Books Read: 24 (+2)
Total Committed: 3,967 (+17)
Average Books pledged: 27 (-1)


Laser Challenge
Total Participants: 146 (+3)
Total Read: 2,956 (+236)
Average Books Read: 20 (+1)
Total Committed: 3,619 (+22)
Average Books pledged: 25 (0)

Mark wrote: "so I won't complete the challenge this year. Concentrating on reading has been difficult. For 2022, I'll lower my expectations and drop counting short stories. I was going to drop the short story challenge this year but I kept it when there was an early flurry of shorts that were cataloged in Goodreads. I still think the challenges are helpful even if I don't complete them"

Sounds like you're at where I was last year.

I've joined several discord servers that overuse notifications such that I've either had to quit them or mute them which is effectively the same thing.

So I always try to limit it to 1 notification/month. There are a few times when I'll do more than that (like March Madness) but for some people even 1 notification/month is 1 too many so it's hard to get the right balance no matter what.

I'm the opposite though. As discord has become more active, I've posted here less.

My main issue is I'm always on discord, but between the awful goodreads phone app and now the changes to the email notifications I find it a lot harder to keep up with things here.

But we have something like 850 discord members and nearly 23k members on goodreads, so I feel like I have a better chance of reaching more people here (although I suspect if I could properly compare user activity it's probably similar in both places and likely some of the same people driving conversations in both places).

We've only had 20 views on this thread so far. Last year was about 75 and in 2019 it was 130 so I think traffic and/or interest has gone down.

Either way I consider this year a success and it's only day 2!

Hopefully we can reach a few others who are interested.

I read the original foundation book when we did it for S&L, but never continued with the series. I don't have appleTV so I haven't been watching the show at all.

I still need to do the second Jade War book (which I own). I've spent the last several months just on the Expanse though.

You're welcome. Thanks again for participating!

I totally spaced on including this in the December newsletter, so now I'm not sure how much word will get out in time.

The last 2 years I think I was able to setup the team page ahead of time, so I could include info in the newsletter but not this year. I probably should have just made this thread ahead of time since I'm able to change the vanity url to be the new campaign each year.

Also, Tom & Veronica said they were good with us doing this again, but I haven't heard back from them on promoting it on the Twitter account and/or the next podcast yet. I'm also not sure if the next podcast will be out prior to the end. It probably will be, since it runs for 2 weeks.

I spammed the discord server right after making this thread, but I didn't get any kind of feedback there.

In the last 2 years we averaged roughly 28 donations, and right now we're only at 8. But it's only the second day. So hopefully we can reach those other 20 or so people before the campaign ends.

We have however already exceeded our goal, and with the match, we're more than double. So that's really great. I debated raising the goal to $2000 this year, but I kind of prefer to aim low and overshoot rather than trying to push for more.

When you remove the matching (which isn't always active) we've averaged about 3000 the last 2 years. We had more donated in 2019, but less match so our total last year was slightly higher.

I'm debating if I should send a quick Group message here on Goodreads too. I don't want to spam people with messages or make anyone feel like they are being asked to donate. I just want to remind people who are already inclined to donate that the campaign is going on and we have a team again.