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I never actually read the original story, but there's something very... telling? Frustrating? Tedious? About the way that the reaction to it and the discussion surrounding it has played out almost entirely over Twitter, the worst possible place to discuss anything related to identity politics.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 04:35 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 04:42 |
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mllaneza posted:Enjoy this link to someone writing 15 years after the book Not Getting It. Lol this is great. It refuses to accept that a metaphor or simile can be anything other than rigidly accurate and completely misses the point of comparing the sky to a dead television channel: it's a world utterly consumed by technology, a sentence that seems written by somebody whose first instinct is to analogise the natural world to the artificial world. edit - further lol at every one of his commenters disagreeing with him, and his assertion that Gibson is a good writer because his Alien 3 film could have been the best in the series because "Hicks was the hero, Ripley was barely in it" freebooter fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Jan 17, 2020 |
# ? Jan 17, 2020 04:47 |
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freebooter posted:
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 05:34 |
https://twitter.com/clarkesworld/status/1217905100565381120
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 08:35 |
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Wow, so she had to out herself as trans because of an outrage mob. Great stuff.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 09:28 |
The more I read about it the more loving God awful the whole situation is.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 10:26 |
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freebooter posted:edit - further lol at every one of his commenters disagreeing with him, and his assertion that Gibson is a good writer because his Alien 3 film could have been the best in the series because "Hicks was the hero, Ripley was barely in it" Which is looking even dumber as a take now Gibson's Alien 3 has been adapted.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 10:41 |
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mllaneza posted:The most famous line in the book, the very first one in the book, is "The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel." Thanks to the march of time and technology, that is now a cloudless-sky blue. Neuromancer is now a message of hope. I'm pretty sure there's a term for this kind of thing, where the meaning of a phrase changes over time because the thing it's referencing changes, but I cannot think of what it is to save my life and it's bugging the poo poo out of me. Anybody know it, or am I just crazy?
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 10:51 |
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semantic drift
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 12:13 |
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'dollars to donuts' used to be very generous odds for a wager...
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 15:25 |
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Stop the sensitivity wars. That man just had heart surgery and had to type all that crap. I hate 2020 internet. Let's go back to bbsing. MartingaleJack fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Jan 17, 2020 |
# ? Jan 17, 2020 16:27 |
BananaNutkins posted:Stop the sensitivity wars. That man just had heart surgery and had to type all that crap. I hate 2020 internet. Let's go back to bbsing. what in the world are you trying to say here
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 16:29 |
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Black Griffon posted:what in the world are you trying to say here I think maybe he's a veteran of the Psychic Wars from the other side, they called it something different
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 16:43 |
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~ATH0,,,,,,,khkhhkKHJKJHKLllkl;kl;kNOCARRIER
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 17:10 |
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Black Griffon posted:what in the world are you trying to say here Forgot to quote the pertinent post in my post ; ;
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 18:59 |
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What's really confusing the gently caress out of me is that - somewhat atypically - all my SF-reading trans friends have said they really loved the story and that it spoke to them and their experience, even to the point of showing it to family members and partners to provide basis for discussion. I also had a number of female friends comment that they felt it was absolutely written true to a female voice. I'm not gonna pretend I have the basis to understand what the issues are with the story, but the trans community itself seems remarkably divided on it, and I haven't actually seen the side that hates the story present what their problems with it are. Is that something anyone here might be willing to lay out for me?
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 19:06 |
BananaNutkins posted:Forgot to quote the pertinent post in my post ; ; I had a bit of a knee jerk reaction to be honest, I understood which post you were referring to, but I assumed the worst of intentions. With some distance, I'm still struggling to see which viewpoint you're advocating, but in any case I'm with the author. Speaking as a non-binary person, for what it's worth Well. Yep! Ok.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 19:31 |
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Kesper North posted:What's really confusing the gently caress out of me is that - somewhat atypically - all my SF-reading trans friends have said they really loved the story and that it spoke to them and their experience, even to the point of showing it to family members and partners to provide basis for discussion. I also had a number of female friends comment that they felt it was absolutely written true to a female voice. I'm not gonna pretend I have the basis to understand what the issues are with the story, but the trans community itself seems remarkably divided on it, and I haven't actually seen the side that hates the story present what their problems with it are. Is that something anyone here might be willing to lay out for me? Some of the tweets linked from the F770 post earlier in this thread do a better job of laying it out than I will here, but the tl;dr is: - the story is full of stuff that's right out of common TERF rhetoric like "scientists are transing your children", persistent confusion between gender and sexuality, etc - it also falls flat in a few ways (the supposedly post-gender, post-binary society that enabled the basic conceit is undermined by stuff like the paragraph that talks about how easy it is to figure out someone's gender based on what they're wearing; the amount of dysphoria you would experience when you're not a helicopter is barely touched on) which make it seem like the TERF talking points are the point of the story and the rest was just backfilled to support them - there's also a weird aside where it basically says "are you a trans person fighting for your rights? well this is your fault" - the title immediately primes people to read all of the above in the worst possible light I'm willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt when she says this was a well-intentioned attempt to reclaim the meme that went badly wrong, and I hope she's doing ok, but I'm not at all surprised that a lot of people found it unpleasant or hurtful, or were concerned that it was just giving ammo to shitheads. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Jan 17, 2020 |
# ? Jan 17, 2020 20:07 |
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ToxicFrog posted:Some of the tweets linked from the F770 post earlier in this thread do a better job of laying it out than I will here, but the tl;dr is: Thanks! I read that thread but you laid it out in a much more ingestible way.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 20:55 |
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I was just linked to a short story anthology themed about robots and it drops in March and the author list is real interesting: Featuring stories by John Chu, Daryl Gregory, Alice Sola Kim, Rich Larson, Ken Liu, Carmen Maria Machado, Ian R. Macleod, Annalee Newitz, Suzanne Palmer, Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Alastair Reynolds, Kelly Robson, Sofia Samatar, Rivers Solomon and Peter Watts.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 22:09 |
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Victory Unintentional. And they're like, well, you do you guy.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 23:33 |
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StrixNebulosa posted:I was just linked to a short story anthology themed about robots and it drops in March and the author list is real interesting: Well this has the potential for some serious tone whiplash. Is an interesting list though.
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# ? Jan 17, 2020 23:52 |
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I'm starting to work on my review of last years` Analogs (to the level of deciding which I'm voting for in the AnLabs, and like I promised, maybe I'll talk about them here, too), and I'm also reading this year's Jan/Feb, which features "What if a 90s internet atheist updated her vocab for 2020 and wrote a book about schools?". One thing I will say about the AnLabs is that they need to unify Novellas and Novelettes because they barely have any novellas and two out of the three this year were Adam-Troy Castro's, and both of them were really meh. I think they had a similar problem last year. Meanwhile Probability Zeros get nothing.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 02:48 |
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StrixNebulosa posted:I was just linked to a short story anthology themed about robots and it drops in March and the author list is real interesting: Jonathan Strachan gives good antho. I preordered that one when Amazon recommended it too.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 09:58 |
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I just noticed that each of the books in The Voidwitch Saga trilogy by Corey J. White is on sale for $1.99 each on Amazon Kindle store. The first one, Killing Gravity, was a free book from Tor ebook club back in 2018. 1. Killing Gravity: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MYM808E 2. Void Black Shadow: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0756JCH2F/ 3. Static Ruin: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DC56PNP
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 19:34 |
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quantumfoam posted:That is sad. I don't even understand how those two are so completely dogshit at writing
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 19:36 |
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finally managed to read through the whole three body problem series holy smokes existential dread
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 20:15 |
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mewse posted:I don't even understand how those two are so completely dogshit at writing Well, Kevin J Anderson seems to have Sanderson qualities in churning out books at least. The only series by him I read I finished mostly out of curiosity how the train wreck would end.
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 21:25 |
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I accidentally read a romance novel via Tor's "free ebook a month" thing. It was Acheron by Sherrilyn Kenyon. For some reason it was 1800 pages. The first half of the book was in ancient greece/atlantis and was kinda OK but the entire thing was just the title character being tortured over and over again. The second half of the book was in the present day, eleven thousand years later(???), where the title character falls in love with a mortal woman who is completely unlike anyone else who's ever lived - she's nice to him. The most notable part about the second half was how it exposed how the author has bad taste about everything in the real world. She describes these punk rock clothes that Acheron wears and they sound so dumb like something a teenager would wear, he seduces the mortal woman by singing her a Nickleback song, he rides a fuckin busa, bro e: hahaha if I had been paying attention they offered a 2nd one of her books that I'd never read mewse fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Jan 18, 2020 |
# ? Jan 18, 2020 22:54 |
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mewse posted:The most notable part about the second half was how it exposed how the author has bad taste about everything in the real world. She describes these punk rock clothes that Acheron wears and they sound so dumb like something a teenager would wear, he seduces the mortal woman by singing her a Nickleback song, he rides a fuckin busa, bro https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/williamson/2019/05/16/sherrilyn-kenyon-poisoning-author-jailed-tennessee-court/3671663002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/ente...oks/1884678001/ Everything about her is WILD
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# ? Jan 18, 2020 23:01 |
accidentally reading an 1800 page book sure is something
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# ? Jan 19, 2020 00:04 |
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mewse posted:The most notable part about the second half was how it exposed how the author has bad taste about everything in the real world. She describes these punk rock clothes that Acheron wears and they sound so dumb like something a teenager would wear, he seduces the mortal woman by singing her a Nickleback song, he rides a fuckin busa, bro
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# ? Jan 19, 2020 03:38 |
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You know what's near Acheron? LV-426. Dust off now and nuke the site from orbit...
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# ? Jan 19, 2020 04:14 |
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The attack helicopter story is still available on the wayback machine. I reckon it's pretty good.
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# ? Jan 19, 2020 04:54 |
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Graydon Saunders has just released A Mist of Grit and Splinters, book #5 in his Commonweal series. If you're not familiar with it, the first book is The March North, and is best described as granite-hard military fantasy. They're heavy on the worldbuilding, heavy on the logistics, and replete with show-don't-tell. I think the best indicators for liking it would be liking Watts or Rajaniemi, who similarly omit a lot of context and expect the reader to keep up.
coffeetable fucked around with this message at 13:37 on Jan 19, 2020 |
# ? Jan 19, 2020 13:34 |
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coffeetable posted:Graydon Saunders has just released A Mist of Grit and Splinters, book #5 in his Commonweal series. If you're not familiar with it, the first book is The March North, and is best described as granite-hard military fantasy. They're heavy on the worldbuilding, heavy on the logistics, and replete with show-don't-tell. I think the best indicators for liking it would be liking Watts or Rajaniemi, who similarly omit a lot of context and expect the reader to keep up. Is he good like they are? I really like both those writers, but I'm worried that you're comparing them on the axis of "doesn't excessively world build" but I'm worried that on the "prose is good" axis you're not saying anything.
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# ? Jan 19, 2020 15:17 |
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pseudanonymous posted:Is he good like they are? I really like both those writers, but I'm worried that you're comparing them on the axis of "doesn't excessively world build" but I'm worried that on the "prose is good" axis you're not saying anything. Prose is average, first book is basically black company analogue. Second and third is Harry Potter meets Minecraft in the most boring way. Oh, and Saunders is self published.
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# ? Jan 19, 2020 15:39 |
What's my next Sanderson if the first I've read is Elantris?
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# ? Jan 19, 2020 15:50 |
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Cardiac posted:Prose is average, first book is basically black company analogue. Agreed with all of this other than the "most boring way" part. quote:The March North is set in a world where the written word has been around for perhaps a hundred thousand years, or perhaps even longer. Where magic has incessantly shaped and reshaped the environment (geological and biological). Where you cannot understand this world without knowing of magic and its history; it would be like trying to make sense of our world while ignoring the existence of grasses.
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# ? Jan 19, 2020 15:51 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 04:42 |
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ulmont posted:Agreed with all of this other than the "most boring way" part. God that review is loving insufferable.
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# ? Jan 19, 2020 15:53 |