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Maybe everybody already knows this but I just read it in the LRB and found it new information, and immensely funny:quote:Nationalist English historians and novelists alike have treated defeat at Hastings as an emotional trauma. Tolkien notoriously took the Norman Conquest so hard that he avoided every connection with French: ‘Bag End’ is a defiant response to the imported phrase ‘cul-de-sac’, which angered Tolkien every time he saw it on a street sign. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n23/tom-shippey/men-who-keep-wolves
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Dec 8, 2020 07:26
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Eh. I'm sure there are a few cranks, and Victorians going to Victorian, but I really don't see many people in modern Britain who have any great feelings about who won as Hastings.
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Dec 8, 2020 13:20
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Deptfordx posted:Eh. You've never spoken to a Brexit voter...
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Dec 8, 2020 13:24
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They care about immigration, EU laws, national sovereignty. In catastrophically misinformed ways, but nonetheless. Nobody bar a tiny fringe cares about who won at Hastings and have never given it a moments thought.
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Dec 8, 2020 15:14
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I'm obviously being a poorly informed American about this, but if the Brits are upset that they lost to France a thousand years ago, isnt that sort of assuaged by Agincourt and Shakespeare immortalizing Henry V?
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Dec 8, 2020 15:42
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Eason the Fifth posted:I'm obviously being a poorly informed American about this, but if the Brits are upset that they lost to France a thousand years ago, isnt that sort of assuaged by Agincourt and Shakespeare immortalizing Henry V?
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Dec 8, 2020 16:12
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McCoy Pauley posted:Can anyone recommend any KJ Parker novels that are like the short stories in Academic Exercises related to the Studium? I really liked 16 Ways, which I presume is set in the same world as much of the rest of Parker's fantasy, since Saloninus is mentioned, but I particularly like the short stories in Academic Exercises featuring people from the Studium, which were a little different from 16 Ways. Anything else by him that directly relates to the Studium and its members? Yeah these were my favorite bits of Parker writing. I even wrote an entire fantasy novel with a similar premise and then when I read Academic Exercises I was like "Ah! He already wrote it, just as a bunch of short stories!" The "magic" system is so good and there's so much potential within the strange bureaucracy of the Studium. I wish he'd return to it. The Folding Knife mentions some of the same places as Academic Exercises, but no magic to be found.
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Dec 8, 2020 16:20
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Eason the Fifth posted:I'm obviously being a poorly informed American about this, but if the Brits are upset that they lost to France a thousand years ago, isnt that sort of assuaged by Agincourt and Shakespeare immortalizing Henry V? Really, that's just one Frenchman fighting another one, if you think about it.
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Dec 8, 2020 16:21
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I don't think I've ever in my entire life met anyone who cares other than perhaps around the time of the World Cup, maybe? It always gives me a sensible chuckle when I see an England fan all done up as St George whenever we play Germany.
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Dec 8, 2020 17:04
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Ccs posted:Yeah these were my favorite bits of Parker writing. I even wrote an entire fantasy novel with a similar premise and then when I read Academic Exercises I was like "Ah! He already wrote it, just as a bunch of short stories!" The "magic" system is so good and there's so much potential within the strange bureaucracy of the Studium. I wish he'd return to it. Thanks. Next up for me is his collection "The Father of Lies," which I'm hoping will check some of the same boxes Academic Exercises did -- at the least it has some more Saloninus stories, so that should be good. I'm going to check out the Scavenger and Fencer trilogies at some point as well. It just doesn't seem that there are any actual Studium novels, from what I can tell. Which is too bad -- I would definitely read anything else by Parker that was in the vein of those magic-focused stories from Academic Exercises. I want more weird, inexplicable stuff with the rooms.
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Dec 8, 2020 17:09
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90s Cringe Rock posted:This is a dismal loving island. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Really, that's just one Frenchman fighting another one, if you think about it. 
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Dec 8, 2020 17:33
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McCoy Pauley posted:Thanks. Next up for me is his collection "The Father of Lies," which I'm hoping will check some of the same boxes Academic Exercises did -- at the least it has some more Saloninus stories, so that should be good. I'm going to check out the Scavenger and Fencer trilogies at some point as well. It just doesn't seem that there are any actual Studium novels, from what I can tell. Which is too bad -- I would definitely read anything else by Parker that was in the vein of those magic-focused stories from Academic Exercises. I want more weird, inexplicable stuff with the rooms. Yeah I liked Father of Lies, just not as much as Academic Exercises. I tried reading the Scavenger trilogy and got really bored, so that's put me off Parker for the time being. I'll probably pick up one of his newer books in the future.
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Dec 8, 2020 18:50
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https://twitter.com/dedbutdrmng/status/1336370692347092998
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Dec 8, 2020 19:06
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Eason the Fifth posted:I'm obviously being a poorly informed American about this, but if the Brits are upset that they lost to France a thousand years ago, isnt that sort of assuaged by Agincourt and Shakespeare immortalizing Henry V? The kind of person who thinks that way wouldn't care if we beat the French hollow in every war since 1066. They consider victory to be England's rightful due, and are angry that the natural order was upset even once.
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Dec 8, 2020 19:23
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I have never ever met someone who genuinely cared about our historic wars with the French aside from gentle ribbing Or should I say... with ourselves???
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Dec 8, 2020 21:39
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I try and crowbar this in all the time, but I love how little of a poo poo every french person I know gives about Agincourt. Most of them don't even know about it! Because it may have been a momentous victory for England, but from the French perspective its one defeat from that time England spent a hundred years failing to conquer them.
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Dec 8, 2020 22:08
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Our ridiculous nationalists get really excited still about the one time we won the football World Cup back in 1966. *Really* excited, that we won *once*, almost sixty years ago.
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Dec 8, 2020 22:13
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I just like the idea of a gentle old man going for a walk and then biting through his pipe stem in a rage after seeing "cul-de-sac" on a street sign
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Dec 8, 2020 23:29
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Really, that's just one Frenchman fighting another one, if you think about it. bit like that one battle between the dutch, english, german, scots army, representing a german fighting against a franco-italian usurper backed by french and irish troops fighting alongside more scots* *this might get you glassed north of the tweed
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Dec 8, 2020 23:42
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I try and crowbar this in all the time, but I love how little of a poo poo every french person I know gives about Agincourt. Most of them don't even know about it! Because it may have been a momentous victory for England, but from the French perspective its one defeat from that time England spent a hundred years failing to conquer them. Not to get all "Demographics is destiny" but it's interesting how recent the population of each country being equivalent is. It's barely a century old, rough parity kicked in around 1900 swinging slightly either side since. As recently as the Napoleonic wars France had 3 time the population of the UK. Go back as far as the 100 years war and it was 4 times and you could make argument (the stats get obviously hazier) for 5 at other times. There's a reason France was the big dog of Europe for so long. Medieval France held about a quarter of the population of Europe, and it took centuries for that advantage to dwindle.
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Dec 9, 2020 00:15
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There might be a better thread for this, but people are active here - General Batuta and other published authors here: my spouse is taking their writing more seriously, are there any writing organization apps that work well for you? They're trying scrivener and living writer right now.
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Dec 9, 2020 01:16
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Silly Newbie posted:There might be a better thread for this, but people are active here - I use Papyrus. It's a relatively new app and, unfortunately, subscription-only. I found Scrivener to be a bit too clunky and unintuitive. Papyrus isn't as powerful as Scrivener but it has a lot of good stuff baked in (whereas I found Scrivener a little lacking if I didn't want to do it all myself). As an app, it's a lot cleaner and neater, quick and responsive, and I've found the way it sets things out (such as chapter listings and other screens for, say, character or research notes) far better to use and bounce between than anything else I've tried.
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Dec 9, 2020 01:57
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A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea #1) by Ursula K Le Guin - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008T9L6AM/ Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008LV8TSU/
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Dec 9, 2020 02:35
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Silly Newbie posted:There might be a better thread for this, but people are active here - I personally like to use Microsoft Word with an absolute dog's breakfast of dozens of pages of notes, outlines, and swathes of writing that I've cut but don't want to delete entirely at the bottom of whatever I'm currently working on.
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Dec 9, 2020 02:40
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Silly Newbie posted:There might be a better thread for this, but people are active here - Scrivener is the best I've found, particularly for something long and structurally complex. Moving around large chunks of text in Word is wretched, and I'd never touch the program except that publishing makes me. tiniestacorn fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Dec 9, 2020 |
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Dec 9, 2020 03:06
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freebooter posted:I personally like to use Microsoft Word with an absolute dog's breakfast of dozens of pages of notes, outlines, and swathes of writing that I've cut but don't want to delete entirely at the bottom of whatever I'm currently working on. This is what I used to do, and I think one of Papyrus' advantages is that it feels like Word with a bunch of stuff to make it easier to move around chunks of text, keep your notes easier to access, and so on.
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Dec 9, 2020 03:27
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tiniestacorn posted:Scrivener is the best I've found, particularly for something long and structurally complex. Moving around large chunks of text in Word is wretched, and I'd never touch the program except that publishing makes me. I did an 1100 page novel in Scrivener for my MFA, but switched to using Word with individual files for each chapter, and then generated a new file per chapter per draft. It turns out that when working with writing partners and critique deadlines, the individual word documents were much, much better than Scrivener. However, if a person plans on writing a full novel without getting critiqued during the process, Scrivener is great.
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Dec 9, 2020 06:40
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freebooter posted:I just like the idea of a gentle old man going for a walk and then biting through his pipe stem in a rage after seeing "cul-de-sac" on a street sign Tolkien was apparently not just a gentle old professor. 30 seconds of googling yields this quote: excerpt from Humphrey Carter's "J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography" "He could laugh at anybody, but most of all himself, and his complete lack of any sense of dignity could and often did make him behave like a riotous schoolboy. At a New Year's Eve party in the nineteen-thirties he would don an Icelandic sheepskin hearthrug and paint his face white to impersonate a polar bear, or he would dress up as an Anglo-Saxon warrior complete with axe and chase an astonished neighbour down the road. Later in life he delighted to offer inattentive shopkeepers his false teeth among a handful of change. 'I have,' he once wrote, 'a very simple sense of humour, which even my appreciative critics find tiresome.'" - Carter, p. 134
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Dec 9, 2020 09:37
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I read This Virtual Night, which is the 22-years-later sequel to This Alien Shore by C.S. Friedman. I wouldn't call it as disappointing as The Wilding was in contrast to In Conquest Born, but it was definitely not as good. I also don't love This Alien Shore quite as much as In Conquest Born so my expectations were a lot lower. Broadly speaking, This Virtual Night was a fairly generic sci fi story set in the same universe as This Alien Shore. Not much (any, really) exploration of Gueran society or culture, no new Hausmann Variations. I would call it a sequel with a bare connection to the plot of This Alien Shore but not really much connection to the overall spirit. Whatever made Friedman such an inspired writer in the 90s seems to have mostly dissipated.
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Dec 9, 2020 17:40
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Danhenge posted:I read This Virtual Night, which is the 22-years-later sequel to This Alien Shore by C.S. Friedman. I wouldn't call it as disappointing as The Wilding was in contrast to In Conquest Born, but it was definitely not as good. I also don't love This Alien Shore quite as much as In Conquest Born so my expectations were a lot lower.  That really sucks, as she was one of my favorites in the 90s.
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Dec 9, 2020 17:51
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StrixNebulosa posted:
Yeah, agreed. It's not a bad book, it's just like regular sci fi. It would be totally serviceable as a non-sequel. The writing is still quite good and there were a few moments where I legitimately read too late because I wanted to see where the narrative was going. It's just not wildly imaginative like In Conquest Born, Madness Season, This Alien Shore, and the Coldfire books were. In that sense it mostly suffers as a consequence of the comparison to This Alien Shore, rather than being kind of a mess like The Wilding.
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Dec 9, 2020 18:17
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Silly Newbie posted:There might be a better thread for this, but people are active here - I think Scrivener is really strong if you want to do something really complex or interrelated, if you want to save tons of research, you can also tie it in with Aeon Timeline if you're doing a mystery or something with really complex and exacting scheduling. Scrivener also exports to kindle and stuff really well, some people buy it expressly for that purpose. That being said it is a kind of daunting to learn and overwhelming, and for almost everyone, Scrivener has a lot of features you won't use. This is true of word as well but it's much more hidden.
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Dec 9, 2020 18:32
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Drone Jett posted:I mentioned Dave Duncan and his A Man of His Word series a few days ago and thought to refresh my memory on these since it's been a long time since I read these as a teenager. I recall finding the worldbuilding interesting but the characterization and plot less so. I feel obligated to respond here, since I read and loved it (sequel too, really) some 15+ years ago. It's exceedingly rare that anyone else knows about the series, but it's always the first thing that springs to my mind when people start discussing fun magic systems.
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Dec 9, 2020 20:15
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darkgray posted:I feel obligated to respond here, since I read and loved it (sequel too, really) some 15+ years ago. It's exceedingly rare that anyone else knows about the series, but it's always the first thing that springs to my mind when people start discussing fun magic systems. I've started rereading it and my hazy recollections are making it easier going this time than I remember the first time. I do very much enjoy how he parcels out the gradual discoveries of how the magic system and magical regulation work, complete with inaccurate information given to the POV characters at various stages.
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Dec 9, 2020 22:58
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2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01A6E8EQ6/
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Dec 9, 2020 23:51
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Went back to Riddley Walker after falling away from it and read through in a white heat to the end. What an incredible book. Even if I did have to read most of it out loud to myself in a dodgy country accent.
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Dec 10, 2020 01:15
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HopperUK posted:Went back to Riddley Walker after falling away from it and read through in a white heat to the end. What an incredible book. Even if I did have to read most of it out loud to myself in a dodgy country accent. I keep meaning to reread that (but I keep acquiring new stuff too). It is amazing.
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Dec 10, 2020 13:39
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The Peripheral (The Jackpot Trilogy Book 1) by William Gibson - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00INIXKV2 Agency (The Jackpot Trilogy Book 2) by William Gibson - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B072NXSB14 I liked both books a lot, though #2 does feel a bit rushed at the end.
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Dec 10, 2020 17:39
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darkgray posted:I feel obligated to respond here, since I read and loved it (sequel too, really) some 15+ years ago. It's exceedingly rare that anyone else knows about the series, but it's always the first thing that springs to my mind when people start discussing fun magic systems. I think I read the sequel series but I don’t remember it that well.
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Dec 11, 2020 07:12
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I use Papyrus. It's a relatively new app and, unfortunately, subscription-only. I found Scrivener to be a bit too clunky and unintuitive. Papyrus isn't as powerful as Scrivener but it has a lot of good stuff baked in (whereas I found Scrivener a little lacking if I didn't want to do it all myself). As an app, it's a lot cleaner and neater, quick and responsive, and I've found the way it sets things out (such as chapter listings and other screens for, say, character or research notes) far better to use and bounce between than anything else I've tried. Typical goon, likes writing in Papyrus.
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Dec 11, 2020 12:04
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