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Larry Parrish posted:you can just use the cloud reader which is acceptable. personally i read them on my phone. frankly it sounds like you're torturing yourself with this weird method, and i don't even know why you're doing it. quote:i don't like drm either but in this case we literally aren't buying it so who cares. i could sort of get it if we were talking about buying books but we're not.  Like I get that if you have Prime or whatever KU books are free-to-borrow, but I don't (see above re: how few books I buy on Amazon) which means that in order to read these books I do, in fact, have to buy them.
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Aug 18, 2022 16:51
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Gaiman is probably down as trans because the moon is a terf. Edit: transphobic
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Aug 18, 2022 16:52
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:That's where Ethshar shines best I think, just folks trying to cope with magical poo poo that's gone down. One thing I also like is that the magical poo poo is basically like the weather for us - there's nothing you can really do about it in the grand scheme except try to cope with it. There's no Cock-ring of Power or Sword of Sado-masochistic Truth to fix things/beat the Dark Lord/etc. And that's true even on a smaller scale. There's nothing that Valder can really do about Wirikidor's enchantment to fully "solve" the problem, but he was lucky enough to meet a powerful, kind and grateful Wizard Lady who gave him eternal youth as a workaround.
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Aug 18, 2022 16:56
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It always makes me laugh how Book Twitter is collectively incapable of separating "author depicts homophobia/racism/ableism/etc in their work" and "author endorses the bad poo poo depicted in their work" from each other. I get not wanting to read a book that depicts those things but I feel like that's the point of content and trigger warnings. Though I suppose there are more than a couple of people on that list where they uh, did endorse those views. I just think, in general, thinking that "book depicts thing I don't like or find offensive" automatically equals "author is a problematic human being" is a shockingly lazy and juvenile way of viewing books and literature in general. Like if you're an avid reader I don't think it's asking a lot of you to do some critical thinking. Reserve these kinds of burn-down lists for authors that are demonstrably terrible human beings imo, like MZB or Scott Card or yeah, the weirdly absent Piers Anthony. edit: also I get what they're saying but it made me lol that "noir" was included as a reason for at least one author, I feel like that's even more demonstration that this kind of list is put together by someone just judging every book through an arbitrary purity-test framework. There are plenty of reasons noir as a genre and a movement was/is problematic, but show some basic intellectual analysis and list those instead of just going "uhh idk this genre is bad because someone told me it is" MockingQuantum fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Aug 18, 2022 |
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Aug 18, 2022 16:58
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Also for some reason that list mentions Coraline I got nothing for that one OP clarified that those example texts are "most notable work," not the offending text. Which adds another level of amusement for me.
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Aug 18, 2022 17:02
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If your list of authors to not read includes Flannery O'Connor and Virginia Woolf, you should seriously reconsider your criteria.
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Aug 18, 2022 17:03
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If you check her profile her "books read in 2020" is 100% YA/romance and nothing else. It's so close to parody I'm a bit suspicious of the account but I've also heard book twitter is a horrible dumpster fire.
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Aug 18, 2022 17:51
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day-gas posted:also
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Aug 18, 2022 18:34
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My favorite mention on that list is Shakespeare.
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Aug 18, 2022 18:36
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Is that the same list that used to have the horrible racist Tacitus?
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Aug 18, 2022 18:51
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Danhenge posted:My favorite mention on that list is Shakespeare. Finally someone with the courage to cancel Shakespeare
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Aug 18, 2022 18:51
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Kipling? A racist? Say it ain't so 
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Aug 18, 2022 18:59
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anilEhilated posted:Is that the same list that used to have the horrible racist Tacitus? Ahhh thank you, I was trying to remember which long dead Roman was on that list. https://theliteraryphoenix.com/code-red-problematic-authors/
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Aug 18, 2022 19:40
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cptn_dr posted:This might be an odd request, but does anyone have any recommendations for anything — novels or short stories — that share an aesthetic with this very particular genre of filk? lol getting Dr. Demento flashbacks Maybe Happy Snak by Nicole Kimberling? Or the Solar Queen series from Andre Norton, starting with Sargasso of Space? I've not read either but Sargasso is in my to-read short list while Happy Snak has just sat on a wishlist so I can remember it if I see it anywhere or if it goes on sale
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Aug 18, 2022 19:46
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Tars Tarkas posted:lol getting Dr. Demento flashbacks I've read both of those (and I think I still have a library-remainder hardcover of Sargasso of Space from my youth on the shelves somewhere). No idea it had sequels (or that it was written by Norton under a pen name). Happy Snak is a mellow feelgood book about running a fast food joint on a space station while also getting tangled up in alien politics and religion. Sargasso is mostly about exploring mysterious alien ruins (planetside) that turn out to have a space pirate infestation. I don't think either of them really vibe with "Sam Jones", although I did enjoy them.
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Aug 18, 2022 19:58
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PeterWeller posted:If your list of authors to not read includes Flannery O'Connor and Virginia Woolf, you should seriously reconsider your criteria. Well, now we finally know who's afraid of Virginia Woolf.
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Aug 18, 2022 20:21
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Problematic author: Alaa al-Aswany, DDS Reason: Defined "good" teeth as "white, straight"
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Aug 18, 2022 21:08
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zoux posted:
Judging by their twitter bio, the person who wrote this list is 20 years old. They may not even know Piers Anthony exists. And you seem to have misread the list -- they're calling out that awful Marion Bradley Zimmer. I also liked the inclusion of Any Rand, which I assume includes our Rand Brittain. Needless to say, I now feel incredibly old, but I am comforted by the hope that in, oh, five or ten years, the list writer will look back at this and go into an agonizing full-body cringe. Selachian fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Aug 18, 2022 |
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Aug 18, 2022 21:13
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Groke posted:Also you get Cara Gee being awesome. hobble hobble GRAB hobble hobble hobble BLAM BLAM BLAM hobble hobble hobble
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Aug 18, 2022 21:21
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Selachian posted:Judging by their twitter bio, the person who wrote this list is 20 years old. They may not even know Piers Anthony exists. Yes I understand that but by placing John Green on the same list as HItler you are in a way equating their flaws which is absurd. IDK what John Green even did that was bad besides writing maudlin YA teen dramas. His youtube history crashcourses are great!
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Aug 18, 2022 21:24
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Also for some reason that list mentions Coraline I got nothing for that one
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Aug 18, 2022 21:28
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cptn_dr posted:This might be an odd request, but does anyone have any recommendations for anything — novels or short stories — that share an aesthetic with this very particular genre of filk? Have you tried reading the Traveller RPG novel written by one of Traveller RPG's founders? Marc Miller/Agent of the Imperium is pretty decent; it's a pretty good cross spectrum of what you could encounter in the Traveller setting. Finally the main character in AotI has a hilariously on-point name. Jonathan Bland, lol. off-topic: humanity having one skillskit/ability that allows them access to a intergalactic federation. Alan E Nourse, the guy who wrote Bladerunner, posited that humanity would have a unique ability at medicine, since humanity is extremely nasty with an even nastier pollution and plague filled past. Also, link when that book twitter person finds out that Sax Rohmer existed. Talbot Mundy and Dean Ing too. quantumfoam fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Aug 18, 2022 |
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Aug 18, 2022 21:28
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Selachian posted:Judging by their twitter bio, the person who wrote this list is 20 years old. They may not even know Piers Anthony exists. I get blamed for most things. Anyway, yeah, this person is a literal child and should be ignored rather than made main character of Twitter for today before any more trauma happens.
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Aug 18, 2022 21:30
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zoux posted:New exhaustive list of "problematic authors" just dropped on book twitter Either I'm already on their block list or they have covered up the offending tweets
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Aug 18, 2022 22:07
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they went private
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Aug 18, 2022 22:12
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cptn_dr posted:This might be an odd request, but does anyone have any recommendations for anything — novels or short stories — that share an aesthetic with this very particular genre of filk? Thanks for all the suggestions, friends. Gonna go raid my local second hand bookshops this weekend and grab a bunch of the Cherryh I know they've got, and see what else I can track down.
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Aug 18, 2022 22:28
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Rand Brittain posted:I get blamed for most things. Yeah. It also seems really clear that they haven't actually read a great deal of the stuff they're talking about.
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Aug 18, 2022 22:48
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The Last Policeman (#1) by Ben H Winters - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0076Q1GW2/ The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault - $3.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DCGJ6XQ/
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Aug 18, 2022 23:18
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Neil Gaiman for transphobia When TERFs were trying to pretend Terry Pratchett would have been on their side, Neil Gaiman was one of the first people to stand up and say "No, he was my friend and I knew his views, and he absolutely wasn't a loving transphobe." (Paraphrased, obvs)
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Aug 19, 2022 02:09
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ToxicFrog posted:If Amazon is now selling DRM-free epubs, that would make things a lot easier, although it doesn't seem like it's possible to tell what format a book is in just from the store page. So the DRM option is something that is determined by the publisher, not by Amazon. There's an option called "Enable DRM on this Kindle eBook" that you answer "Yes" or "No" to when you upload your book to Amazon KDP during the publication process. It's set to "No" by default so most publishers don't anymore (I think Tor did some testing around this to see how much of a difference it made and found it didn't, hence why they don't enable DRM), only the super paranoid ones, and in any case, stripping DRM from an ebook isn't exactly difficult so imo it's not really worth the bother of enabling it. Since about August last year, Amazon has moved away from the .mobi format and requires publishers to upload epub files. They then convert the epub automatically to the proprietary .azw3 format (yes very dumb). So yeah, when you download it, you still have to convert it with something like Calibre to a normal epub format to read on a non-Kindle device. Re: the second point, I mean, yeah, it's kind of counterintuitive, but there are ways to word it so it doesn't sound quite so...you know. Something like "Hey I came across your book thanks to X, but noticed I couldn't get it on my <insert non-Kindle ereader of choice>. Would you ever consider it making your books available from <insert retail outlet of choice>, or maybe your own website? I'd love to support you directly!" will usually get you a polite response (at worst, they'll just ignore you) that might range across the following:
But yeah. It doesn't hurt to let them know. Deciding whether or not to be exclusive to Kindle is one of the bigger publication decisions around, and it's something that can be re-evaluated every 90 days (the length of each exclusivity period). If they don't know there's a demand for their books outside of the Kindle store, they can't factor that into their decision-making.
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Aug 19, 2022 02:24
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Years late to the party but just finished Gideon and Harrow. God drat they were good. I am now in the mood for more weird fantasy sci fi mashup unknown power etc. I know the next book isn’t far off but is there anything of a similar vein? I’ve always liked the idea of starting fantasy then oops all sci fi.
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Aug 19, 2022 02:35
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As far as I know Gaiman-related discussions of transphobia amount to a game of telephone from some conversations about Sandman where the original discussion was "it's alright handling, especially for something of its era written by a cis man, but some of the satire of TERFs in it falls flat nowadays, since it focuses on specific neopagan TERFs from such a specific time and place; the ideology stuck around but the specific people didn't, so it becomes harder to decipher what he's talking about". And way down the wire it became "CIS MAN WON'T STAY IN OWN LANE, GIVES TERFS A PASS"
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Aug 19, 2022 02:45
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Leng posted:I'm gonna have to come back and drop thoughts on Iron Widow later when I'm not on my phone. Okay, so long thoughts incoming on Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhou. Unresolved Textual Tension, who usually has a lot of good takes on books that I agree with, totally hated it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vlolpo8osw). They thought it was a shallow take on feminist themes and also that it's harmful wish fulfilment. They kept trying to critique it from a place of "the book is setting up a morally grey character who doesn't perceive herself to be morally grey, who is going on a villain arc and it's very problematic casting said character as the protagonist" and this is bad because they interpreted the book's thesis as "good people are born that way and everything they do is good". They wanted more nuance to the characters, more time developing character arcs and relationships, more depth in how the feminist themes were portrayed and explored, more reflection and internal conflict from the protagonist on their choices, etc. Normally I would agree with all that, but they didn't consider the cultural context of it. So as someone who has that cultural context, I think they completely missed the fact that this book is not intended to be a deep exploration of feminist themes, despite how it is marketed. The overt and explicit statements of feminist themes are window dressing for the real theme of the book, which is the intergenerational trauma inflicted by a very specific cultural experience—at least, as somebody with that lived experience, that's what I took away from it. Right from the beginning, the tone and character and plot promise in Iron Widow was very clear to me that this is gonna be dark wish fulfilment of the East Asian model minority kid breaking every single rule, written or unwritten, there is and giving zero fucks about it. No, this reimagined Wu Zetian is not meant to be a hero: she begins with plotting murder and ends with committing war crimes. The same story written differently could easily be a villain arc—that's the point. This Wu Zetian is designed to be the ultimate self-insert for any East Asian kid who ever got told off for daring to be angry about something and wanting to unleash that anger but never had the courage to do it. She's a vessel that takes up every shred of resentment and guilt and shame and lack of self-worth that the target reader has ever experienced and felt as an East Asian kid who could never live up to the impossible standards set by their family and culture and crunching it all into a ball and hurling it with the force of a canon back in the fictional stand-ins with a giant "gently caress YOU". So yes, the world building is set up to be the absolute worst patriarchal society imaginable. And yes, there's no explanation for how Wu Zetian became such a woke feminist in that setting. I read both of these things as deliberate authorial choices. The point of the protagonist being loudspeaker blaringly rousing rally the masses feminist speeches and spending no time doubting her worldview is for the sake of allowing the self-insert experience, to give the target reader the experience of having a voice that they don't have in real life in a way that forces the way the rest of the world is built up to acknowledge that voice. This is a world that contains all of the cultural trappings that the target reader grew up with with a story designed for the protagonist to tear it all apart and burn it down while laughing maniacally and dancing like a mad person the whole time. The reason Wu Zetian and the other main characters spend zero time regretting their actions and experiencing zero comeuppance for some of the horrific things they do is because for the target self-insert audience, you spend 95% of your brain space mired in regret in real life. So you read this book and vicariously live out this dark wish fulfilment fantasy unfolding in its pages dressed up as avenging justice, revelling in how Zetian goes about destroying a world that is built to be all of the worst things about this culture, which is your own culture that you both love and hate beyond words, and you're positively ecstatic at the lack of regrets and consequences for unleashing all of that rage against the cultural traditions that have made your head and sense of self-worth into a toxic mess. You get to the end and it's absolutely therapeutic. And then you put the book down, having experienced catharsis, and go back to being a model member of a model minority instead of doing things which have far more harmful consequences in real life. Anyway, even if you don't have all that cultural baggage, it's a still solid read overall. The last third of the book takes a real swerve and feels rushed, with the various payoffs on things foreshadowed all unfolding one after another, but it didn't bother me too much beyond an eyebrow raise here or there. The tone of the dialogue is jarring at times, some of it is like reading characters sniping back and forth via tweets, but if you already know Xiran from their YouTube channel or Twitter, that won't be a surprise (and might be a feature for you). There are lots of little Easter eggs embedded for anyone familiar with Chinese culture, myths and legends. It's a fun, fast-paced read sci-fantasy revenge story with cultivation magic fuelled mecha battles and a poly romance. I don't think I liked it enough to read it again, but I did have fun on my first read through, and whenever the sequel ends up coming out, I'll probably check that out too.
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Aug 19, 2022 02:57
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Sonderval posted:Years late to the party but just finished Gideon and Harrow. God drat they were good. I am now in the mood for more weird fantasy sci fi mashup unknown power etc. I know the next book isn’t far off but is there anything of a similar vein? I’ve always liked the idea of starting fantasy then oops all sci fi. Ventus by Karl Schroeder is a single volume standalone fantasy/sci-fi epic that I really, REALLY enjoyed. It opens all fantasy and... yes. Oops all sci-fi.
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Aug 19, 2022 02:58
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Sonderval posted:Years late to the party but just finished Gideon and Harrow. God drat they were good. I am now in the mood for more weird fantasy sci fi mashup unknown power etc. I know the next book isn’t far off but is there anything of a similar vein? I’ve always liked the idea of starting fantasy then oops all sci fi.
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Aug 19, 2022 03:36
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Super confused re: ebooks. I have a Boox Nova3 Color (I love this device) and I buy all my books outright from Amazon without using the Kindle Universe subscription. I use the Kindle app to read them. I'd prefer to buy from another vendor but everything is already there and I know authors get paid regardless. Can I get a yes or no if I'm doing this wrong?
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Aug 19, 2022 03:58
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Leng posted:Iron Widow Yeah, this all reads as a fairly accurate assessment. Iron Widow Pros: Extremely Self-Indulgent Wish Fulfillment Extremely Snarky Very anime, somewhat goofy mecha Iron Widow Cons: Extremely Self-Indulgent Wish Fulfillment Extremely Snarky Very anime, somewhat goofy mecha I didn't care for it, but I imagine it's an excellent time for the right audience.
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Aug 19, 2022 04:01
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Whale Vomit posted:Super confused re: ebooks. if you're reading you're doing it right
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Aug 19, 2022 04:07
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StrixNebulosa posted:Ventus by Karl Schroeder is a single volume standalone fantasy/sci-fi epic that I really, REALLY enjoyed. It opens all fantasy and... yes. Oops all sci-fi. RDM posted:Darkwar by Glen Cook Seconding both of these. Leng posted:So the DRM option is something that is determined by the publisher, not by Amazon. There's an option called "Enable DRM on this Kindle eBook" that you answer "Yes" or "No" to when you upload your book to Amazon KDP during the publication process. It's set to "No" by default so most publishers don't anymore (I think Tor did some testing around this to see how much of a difference it made and found it didn't, hence why they don't enable DRM), only the super paranoid ones, and in any case, stripping DRM from an ebook isn't exactly difficult so imo it's not really worth the bother of enabling it. Contrast, say, Kobo, or Google Play Books, which will say "download format: EPUB 3 (Adobe DRM)", or "download format: PDF (DRM free)" or what have you. quote:Re: the second point, I mean, yeah, it's kind of counterintuitive, but there are ways to word it so it doesn't sound quite so...you know. Something like "Hey I came across your book thanks to X, but noticed I couldn't get it on my <insert non-Kindle ereader of choice>. Would you ever consider it making your books available from <insert retail outlet of choice>, or maybe your own website? I'd love to support you directly!" will usually get you a polite response (at worst, they'll just ignore you) that might range across the following: 
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Aug 19, 2022 04:10
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Sonderval posted:Years late to the party but just finished Gideon and Harrow. God drat they were good. I am now in the mood for more weird fantasy sci fi mashup unknown power etc. I know the next book isn’t far off but is there anything of a similar vein? I’ve always liked the idea of starting fantasy then oops all sci fi. I just started reading Gideon on the recommendation of a friend, and while the setting and story so far are pretty interesting, I’m finding myself getting quite irritated by the prose style, where Muir combines super obscure “vocabulary words” with 21st century slang and also made-up SFF jargon. It just doesn’t feel like it adds up to a natural voice, I guess it feels “forced.” Does that style change beyond the first few chapters, or will I just have to get used to it to enjoy the books? E: and the similes, good god! From the page I’m on: “Coupling him to Harrow had been rather like yoking a doughnut to a cobra.” Good lord, that makes absolutely no sense. Is it like a meta thing where you’re supposed to understand something about Gideon by the way she uses this stilted, desperate-to-impress language, and I just need to read more to figure out what that is? smug n stuff fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Aug 19, 2022 |
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Aug 19, 2022 04:15
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