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Rapacity posted:Kill Jeff Bezos please there’s a million different ways to say someone sucks liquid poo poo without resorting to bloodthirsty and ghoulish posting, please knock it off
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Sep 14, 2020 21:21
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Haha yeah please don't  post about literally the most objectively evil man alive. (He could literally end world hunger but he doesn't want to. He would still be filthy rich after doing it.)
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Sep 14, 2020 21:32
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its bad posting
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Sep 14, 2020 21:56
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Ferrets Everywhere posted:Why is “1984” such a cultural touchstone when, to me, it seems like such a direct copy “The Iron Heel” and why is this never discussed? No clue on how to answer your question, I'd never even heard of the Iron Heel. Great book, thanks for mentioning. Only issue is that on my kindle I thought i had 10% of the book left, but it was just all the footnotes. I wanted to keep reading.
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Sep 14, 2020 22:25
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I read the latest dresden files novel and, I'm 16 deep in these now so I knew what I was getting into. I prefer to imagine people reading these still are largely in the same boat of just trying to ride it out to see what happens. Like one third of the book is explaining the power levels of various characters/groups and how they relate to each other. My reading interests have changed a great deal in the 6 or 8 years since the last one of these but these books can't even be entertaining shlock anymore because they're crushed under the weight of their own mythos. I imagine this was true before and I just didn't notice. I'm still gonna read the 3 that are left probably because I'm dumb as poo poo and gotta finish what I started.
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Sep 20, 2020 04:27
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Children and man-children love books with world-building and/or character-building. Congratulations on growing up? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 20, 2020 04:48
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Children and man-children love books with world-building and/or character-building. Congratulations on growing up? Why are you referring to women as children?
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Sep 20, 2020 06:01
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This is a book adjacent question, I hope this is the right place for it. I am going on a trip soon and want to get ebooks and audiobooks for it, but I realized I don't particularly want to buy them from any of the usual places. Apple orchestrated a price fixing ring to artificially inflate the prices of early ebooks. Amazon treats its employees horribly (source: one of my friends works in an Amazon warehouse). Barnes and Nobles has always been bizarrely overpriced. Where do you get ebooks/audiobooks from?
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Sep 21, 2020 23:13
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Sep 21, 2020 23:24
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LLSix posted:This is a book adjacent question, I hope this is the right place for it. Some libraries have pretty good selections, so I recommend starting there if you have a card. You can sign up for a free month of Kindle Unlimited and you might find something worth reading.
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Sep 21, 2020 23:38
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LLSix posted:This is a book adjacent question, I hope this is the right place for it. There's some independent publishers I like to buy from like Verso, but outside of that, and donate to the authors.
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Sep 22, 2020 01:29
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LLSix posted:This is a book adjacent question, I hope this is the right place for it. I'm not like an expert on their business practices, but Kobo seems like the best bet if you want to avoid Amazon and B&N. Prices seem similar enough to Amazon on a cursory glance.
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Sep 22, 2020 02:44
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What's the link to the discord? I didn't find it on page 1 of this thread or the monthly book, where i expected it to be. also, may as well ask, is it active enough to merit joining and participating?
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Sep 22, 2020 02:50
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Help me decide what to stick with & read out of the 4 books on my desk: Dune because I've never read it (never been big sci-fi reader beyond handful of classics/LOTGH kicked off a sci-fi watching interest for first time) and I kind of want to know book 1 before going into the film in December. Dostoyevsky's The Devils or re-reading The Brothers Karamazov (it's my favorite novel and only read it all the way through once, albeit spaced out over long period of time). John Steinbeck's East of Eden which like The Devils I have had in my 'collection' for long period of time and never read it, was a good friend's favorite novel.
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Sep 22, 2020 04:26
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Read East of Eden first, throw away Dune, keep the other two for later.
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Sep 22, 2020 04:33
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Mr. Nemo posted:What's the link to the discord? I didn't find it on page 1 of this thread or the monthly book, where i expected it to be. Mr. Nemo posted:also, may as well ask, is it active enough to merit joining and participating? Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Sep 22, 2020 |
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Sep 22, 2020 06:31
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Read East of Eden first, throw away Dune, keep the other two for later. I'd say keep Dune, but East of Eden is an all-time great book, read that right away.
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Sep 23, 2020 21:48
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Dune is mostly good when you are 16 and smoke a ton of weed and the secret of Arrakis blows your mind man. It's also the worst written popular scifi book ever. Just watch Lynch Dune 
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Sep 23, 2020 23:06
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Lynch Dune is mostly good when you are 16 and smoke a ton of weed and the secret of Arrakis blows your mind man. It's also the worst written scifi movie ever. Just read Dune
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Sep 23, 2020 23:18
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finest cloudmilk diamonds
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Sep 23, 2020 23:37
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As long as we can agree that they should read East of Eden right away.
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Sep 24, 2020 03:37
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Thou mayest read East of Eden first.
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Sep 24, 2020 14:19
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Bond in Casino Royale is massively incompetent and even completely incidental to the plot.
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Sep 26, 2020 11:56
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That's funny because I just finished le Carré's novel The Looking Glass War. After his previous book got him all this fame and acclaim he was a little upset that people didn't get his subtle message that spies were stupid and incompetent and not heroic and cool in any way. So he made up a new fictional spy agency and wrote a bleak novel where they do all this incredibly stupid bumbling poo poo that gets people killed and accomplishes nothing. Something that just knocks you over the head with no subtlety. Predictably, everybody hated it and nobody learned a lesson.
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Sep 27, 2020 03:13
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Is the protagonist worried that his super sex cock penus won't work anymore unless he fucks his colleague toot sweet? Out of all the really stupid poo poo in the book what struck me as the most stupid was that Bond had no idea that wanking exists 
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Sep 27, 2020 05:07
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Is the protagonist worried that his super sex cock penus won't work anymore unless he fucks his colleague toot sweet?
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Sep 27, 2020 06:32
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Nah everybody in my book was motivated by nostalgia, trying to secure funding from the government, and trying to prove they could still do stuff even though they were old. I liked Looking Glass War, le Carré does that kind of character well, the retired spy who comes back because of a sense of duty and also for the excitement, and then he’s out of his depth and betrayed and it all goes to hell. Like they guy in Tinker, Tailor. Isn’t it the same thing with the main character in the Spy Who Came In From the Cold?
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Sep 27, 2020 08:41
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Is Vladimir Volkoff on the radar of people who read spy novels?
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Sep 27, 2020 10:29
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https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1310250039021899777?s=20
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Sep 27, 2020 17:09
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Not sure if this is the right place for this, but the group/site Distributed Proofreaders just turned 20 years old. I've been sporadically active there for 17, and there are 'teams' of Proofreaders, including a Something Awful one. That team is mostly dead, and would love to get some goons back on there. The site is primarily page by page proofing and formatting of out of copyright books. All sorts of genres, languages. About 1100 people active a week, and around 200 books a month kicked over to Project Gutenberg. There are rounds, with skill tests between grades of proofer/formatters, and a wee forum to chit chat stuck on the backside. One of the optional rounds is smooth reading, where you just read the ebook and look for errors. I really dig finding weird old history or travel books, nonfiction, and learning tidbits. There is pretty much every conceivable genre. If you're interested, head over to Distributed Proofreaders team is called SA Goons.
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Oct 1, 2020 18:18
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Yoooo Louise Gluck won the Nobel. I love that woman.
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Oct 8, 2020 12:57
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For a while now I've wanted to make a good digital copy of The Swiss Family Robinson to replace my beloved, but on the brink of complete disintegration, hardback from my childhood. After rummaging around I found that Project Gutenberg has a relatively recent version, donated by the (apparently now defunct) Pink Tree Press, edited by Anne Wingate. This is a new English version based on a synthesis of existing English translations to restore much of the material that is commonly abridged. Sounds great! However, the actual details of the ebook are maddeningly inept! It looks like Gutenberg may have actually converted it from whatever the original format was (epub? html?) to plaintext and then back again, or something of that kind. Whatever the reason, it's a mess: - italics are rendered with <angle brackets> in the frontmatter and omitted entirely in the main body - quotes are rendered with `backquotes and apostrophes', nested quotes with "double quotes" instead of ‘these’ - footnotes are a * followed by the actual footnote text as an interstitial paragraph, rather than using intradocument links or EPUB footnote annotations - several parts of the front matter are duplicated - formatting on the epitaph poems is completely hosed - and lots of paragraphs have hard linebreaks inserted in them, often in the middle of dialogue. As for the footnotes themselves, there's some editorializing going on there that kind of bugs me. Like, basically the footnotes come in four flavours: - clarifications of the text, i.e. for terms that have changed meaning since it was written or are no longer in common use, such as noting that "lumber" is used in the sense of "bulky objects placed in storage" rather than "milled wood", or that "a la fourchette" is an archaic French idiom meaning to eat food using your fingers rather than cutlery. (Some of these are unnecessary, I think; upon finding a small furred creature with webbed claws and a duck-like bill, I think the footnote declaring it to be a platypus is superfluous.) - clarifications of the setting, such as noting that watered wine is a universal drink in this era as untreated water is often unsafe, or that all Swiss men were expected to own, and be competent with, a firearm - equivalencies with other translations, by (when a character is first introduced) listing other names they might be known by (e.g. Jenny is Emily in some versions) - snarkily pointing out the author-narrator's mistakes, such as when he contradicts his earlier statements, engineers a solution to a problem that would not work in real life, or suggests that pineapples grow on vines or sugarcanes can be tapped for syrup. And I feel that #4 there doesn't really add anything to the book. My original plan was to edit the epub to re-instate the chapter headings that the PTP edition removes (the editor sounds proud of this in the foreword, the monster) but it's rapidly turning into a complete overhaul of it.
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Oct 8, 2020 19:21
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From what I recall there were numerous different editions of Swiss Family Robinson. Id suggest tracking down an ebook of the precise edition your childhood copy followed. Edit: quote:Over the years there have been many versions of the story with episodes added, changed, or deleted. Perhaps the best-known English version is by William H. G. Kingston, first published in 1879.[1] It is based on Isabelle de Montolieu's 1813 French adaptation and 1824 continuation (from chapter 37) Le Robinson suisse, ou, Journal d'un père de famille, naufragé avec ses enfants in which were added further adventures of Fritz, Franz, Ernest, and Jack.[1] Other English editions that claim to include the whole of the Wyss-Montolieu narrative are by W. H. Davenport Adams (1869–1910) and Mrs H. B. Paull (1879). As Carpenter and Prichard write in The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (Oxford, 1995), "with all the expansions and contractions over the past two centuries (this includes a long history of abridgments, condensations, Christianizing, and Disney products), Wyss's original narrative has long since been obscured."[1] The closest English translation to the original is William Godwin's 1816 translation, reprinted by Penguin Classics.[2]
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Oct 8, 2020 19:43
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:From what I recall there were numerous different editions of Swiss Family Robinson. Id suggest tracking down an ebook of the precise edition your childhood copy followed. I am aware of that (and alluded to it in my post). My childhood version is the "Books, Inc" Art-Type Edition, which doesn't come with any information about the translation, but based on comparing it to older Gutenberg editions it is almost certainly W.H.G. Kingston's abridged 1849 translation of Mme. de Montholieu's French translation of the original. What interests me about the Pink Tree Press edition, however, is that it is not the version I grew up reading, although it follows Kingston's translation very closely: Foreword posted:[...] most modern editions omit an incredible amount even of Kingston's translation by making small cuttings here and there, some of them maddeningly inept. The Editor's Cut edition from Pink Tree Press has been based on, and compared with, no fewer than five previous editions, all of them out of copyright. Most, though not all, of the cuttings have been restored. The material that continues to be omitted is of little imaginable interest to anyone other than a scholar of nineteenth century literature. And based on spot-checking against both the hardcopy on my shelves, and the Kingston version on Gutenberg, there is indeed restored material there not present in the Kingston translation (or at least, the printing of it I'm familiar with). So, I would quite like to read the PTP edition specifically; it's just a shame the ebook is so poorly put together.
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Oct 8, 2020 21:37
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The very early Project Gutenberg texts sometimes had problems, due to '1 pair of eyes' (and not, say, an actual editor). In 2003 you could just scan, proof, format at upload a book on your own. I project managed 5 or 6 books, and it's a hell of a lot of work. Distributed Proofreaders developed first scripts, then actual software, and now most books have three unique proofers, 2 unique formatters, a project manager, who may or may not be the post processor too. Most of the scans are internet harvested, vs me, with my scanner, drinking and trying to get the text off of the deep gutter to be grabbed by OCR. Anyways, if that vs sucks, flag it on PG and it will be redone, replaced. A title like that will sail through, vs the insect ecology translation from French I am currently puttering around on.
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Oct 9, 2020 14:28
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Arkhamina posted:The very early Project Gutenberg texts sometimes had problems, due to '1 pair of eyes' (and not, say, an actual editor). In 2003 you could just scan, proof, format at upload a book on your own. I project managed 5 or 6 books, and it's a hell of a lot of work. Distributed Proofreaders developed first scripts, then actual software, and now most books have three unique proofers, 2 unique formatters, a project manager, who may or may not be the post processor too. Most of the scans are internet harvested, vs me, with my scanner, drinking and trying to get the text off of the deep gutter to be grabbed by OCR. Yeah, I think I assumed that PTP gave the book to Gutenberg in digital format and it got mangled by PG's postprocessing, but on reflection, in 2003 it may have been donated as a hardcopy and scanned in, right? I was reading ebooks then but they weren't nearly as commonplace as they are now. quote:Anyways, if that vs sucks, flag it on PG and it will be redone, replaced. A title like that will sail through, vs the insect ecology translation from French I am currently puttering around on. I'll do that, then. Thanks. I've already done a lot of work on my copy, but the cleanup changes (restoration of italics and accented characters, fixing the poetry and paragraph formatting, properly annotating the footnotes, fixing quotes) aren't well separated from the for-my-personal-enjoyment changes (deleting/editing footnotes, copying in some footnotes from other editions, reinstating the chapter headings).
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Oct 9, 2020 17:05
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Safety Biscuits isn't going to have time to run the Secret Santa this year, so if anyone is interested in helping with that, PM me.
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Oct 10, 2020 15:22
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https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/1315061434259312640?s=20
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Oct 10, 2020 23:53
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Is Vladimir Volkoff on the radar of people who read spy novels? Never heard of the guy fwiw
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Oct 11, 2020 18:56
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Syncopated posted:Never heard of the guy fwiw Yeah he seems to be one of those guys that was a best-seller in the 70s or 80s and now no-one remembers him. Only came across one of his novels by accident at the Red Cross flea market for 2 or 3€ and looked him up. Sic transit gloria mundi I guess.
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Oct 11, 2020 19:04
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