DeadmansReach posted:

Wait, wut?

Alaois posted:

I like to interpret his posts the same way he seems to "interpret" media

Alaois posted:

I like to interpret his posts the same way he seems to "interpret" media

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Lol, Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a bad book with silly politics. You might as well get upset over someone calling A Kingdom Besieged: Book One of the Chaoswar Saga poo poo.

Back on topic, I'd like to name Guy Gavriel Kay's novels except for maybe Last Light of the Sun as terrible. The sad thing is that they shouldn't be. Kay is a rare genre writer who can really tell stories about adults and their concerns. He can bring distant worlds and cultures to life, and he always has some interesting insight to offer, and his humanist ideals really come through.

The problem is that he can't write. His prose is bad, he's excruciatingly unsubtle, and recycles the same narrative, thematic, and character beats from book to book. And that makes them almost more terrible than just regular bad novels, because it's so tragic to see the good book struggling to escape its shell.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

You seem like a fun person.

CharlestheHammer posted:

I take it you haven't read Lamps posts before, he is like a blander mechagodzilla or whatever he is called.

Alaois posted:

Except he has a massive stick up his rear end about what he considers to be "proper criticism", while his criticism is the most shallow, banal poo poo in the world.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Lol I'm sorry for implying that the Chaoswar Saga was poo poo. I never read it, I just thought the title was hilarious. I didn't know it was so close to your heart.

Or was it Kay?

Alaois posted:

I can't settle down! Squeegle has invaded my nightmares and only Steve Dark can save me!

Xarbala posted:

He's not wrong, but most people just sort of accept that about Lamps and move on.

Alaois posted:

CSI co-creator Anthony Zuiker's Level 26: Dark Origins is amazingly awful, but don't take my word for it, watch the trailer to see for yourself! And that's not the only video, cause this is a diginovel.

VanSandman posted:

Shhhh, I lurk PYF for the unexpected meltdowns over trivial poo poo. Don't ruin this for me.

Alaois posted:

CSI co-creator Anthony Zuiker's Level 26: Dark Origins is amazingly awful, but don't take my word for it, watch the trailer to see for yourself! And that's not the only video, cause this is a diginovel.

queserasera posted:

With hyperlinks in the text, no less. I remember flipping through it at the library. It was kinda like reading a mid-90s point and click adventure game with Quicktime video cutscenes.

There was also that piece of trash J.J. Abrams co-wrote where the REAL story was marginalia written by two different people in a library book. Gimmicky garbage.

queserasera posted:

With hyperlinks in the text, no less. I remember flipping through it at the library. It was kinda like reading a mid-90s point and click adventure game with Quicktime video cutscenes.

There was also that piece of trash J.J. Abrams co-wrote where the REAL story was marginalia written by two different people in a library book. Gimmicky garbage.

Pastry of the Year posted:

He's busy, but I can have Tom Clancy's Net Force there in twenty minutes

The_White_Crane posted:

_{I kind of enjoyed the early ones in that series.}

Plorkyeran posted:

We need a PYF PYF Grudges thread.

Pistol_Pete posted:

quote:

Typically, the rest—nearly 60 million Europeans—were known as Hans, Jacques, Sal, Carlos, Will, or Will’s wife, Will’s son, or Will’s daughter. If that was inadequate or confusing, a nickname would do. Because most peasants lived and died without leaving their birthplace, there was seldom need for any tag beyond One-Eye, or Roussie (Redhead), or Bionda (Blondie), or the like.

Their villages were frequently innominate for the same reason. If war took a man even a short distance from a nameless hamlet, the chances of his returning to it were slight; he could not identify it, and finding his way back alone was virtually impossible. Each hamlet was inbred, isolated, unaware of the world beyond the most familiar local landmark: a creek, or mill, or tall tree scarred by lightning...

In the medieval mind there was also no awareness of time, which is even more difficult to grasp. Inhabitants of the twentieth century are instinctively aware of past, present, and future. At any given moment most can quickly identify where they are on this temporal scale—the year, usually the date or day of the week, and frequently, by glancing at their wrists, the time of day. Medieval men were rarely aware of which century they were living in. There was no reason they should have been. There are great differences between everyday life in 1791 and 1991, but there were very few between 791 and 991. Life then revolved around the passing of the seasons and such cyclical events as religious holidays, harvest time, and local fetes. In all Christendom there was no such thing as a watch, a clock, or, apart from a copy of the Easter tables in the nearest church or monastery, anything resembling a calendar. * Generations succeeded one another in a meaningless, timeless blur...

I could go on but the whole book is like this. I love the image of the peasant venturing a few fields too far from home, becoming hopelessly lost and wandering the country forever.

Mr Enderby posted:

btw, A World Lit Only by Fire also claims that peasants didn't wear any clothes in the summer.

quote:

THE DARK AGES were stark in every dimension. Famines and plague, culminating in the Black Death and its recurring pandemics, repeatedly thinned the population. Rickets afflicted the survivors. Extraordinary climatic changes brought storms and floods which turned into major disasters because the empire’s drainage system, like most of the imperial infrastructure, was no longer functioning. It says much about the Middle Ages that in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent. Most others were in such a state of disrepair that they were unusable; so were all European harbors until the eighth century, when commerce again began to stir. Among the lost arts was bricklaying; in all of Germany, England, Holland, and Scandinavia, virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries. The serfs’ basic agricultural tools were picks, forks, spades, rakes, scythes, and balanced sickles. Because there was very little iron, there were no wheeled plowshares with moldboards. The lack of plows was not a major problem in the south, where farmers could pulverize light Mediterranean soils, but the heavier earth in northern Europe had to be sliced, moved, and turned by hand. Although horses and oxen were available, they were of limited use. The horse collar, harness, and stirrup did not exist until about A.D. 900. Therefore tandem hitching was impossible. Peasants labored harder, sweated more, and collapsed from exhaustion more often than their animals

chitoryu12 posted:

Also his justification for peasants walking around naked in the summer is that medieval people had no sense of self, or ego. Everyone but nobles went around with just a single name, with a nickname if they needed further identification, and would just take a surname from their occupation if necessary. He believes that the casual "anything goes" spelling utilized was due to medieval people literally not giving enough of a poo poo about their identity in the mortal world to care. As such, they had so little care for themselves as individuals that they also had no sense of privacy and would go dicks out whenever they felt like it.

chitoryu12 posted:

He said that "prosperous peasants" lived in a single room in a large building that also included the farm animals' pens and feed storage, and everyone in the family slept on a communal bed of vermin-filled straw and even had sex among everyone else. Travelers who stayed the night would be invited to sleep in the pile.

Meanwhile, the regular peasants slept on the bare dirt and spend 1/3 of their lives in famine so severe that they'd have to sell all their belongings and live naked for a while until they could buy clothes, and travelers, strangers, and execution victims would regularly be cannibalized. He also somehow thinks that dinner was always at 10:00 AM and supper at 5:00 PM despite peasants living entirely outside of time.

This is a rabbit hole worth reviewing.

quote:

THE DARK AGES were stark in every dimension. Famines and plague, culminating in the Black Death and its recurring pandemics, repeatedly thinned the population. Rickets afflicted the survivors.

C.M. Kruger posted:

Pick posted:

Ha ha and I really enjoyed your shrimp experience, it's the one Comedy Goldmine I go back to again and again.

Xarbala posted:

Link Link

Tunicate posted:

Wow that's a weird as gently caress fantasy setting.

CharlestheHammer posted:

It's weird peasants couldn't use their ability to transcend time to get out of their poverty.

lovely world building always ruins any fantasy series.

Tunicate posted:

Wow that's a weird as gently caress fantasy setting.

quote:

He said that "prosperous peasants" lived in a single room in a large building that also included the farm animals' pens and feed storage, and everyone in the family slept on a communal bed of vermin-filled straw and even had sex among everyone else. Travelers who stayed the night would be invited to sleep in the pile.

doodlebugs posted:

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3770505&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=29#top

Strategic Tea posted:

So in a way, we're right back to Thomas Kinkade's gently caress Cabin

Xarbala posted:

hey thanks

That started out alright, and then Palpek bust into the thread like fuckin gangbusters holy poo poo

C.M. Kruger posted:

The military history thread has recently been talking about A World Lit Only By Fire, which seems to be a suitable candidate for this thread.


I could go on but the whole book is like this. I love the image of the peasant venturing a few fields too far from home, becoming hopelessly lost and wandering the country forever.

quote:

In particular, Adams pointed out that Manchester's claims about diet, clothing, and medieval people's views of time and their sense of self all ran counter to the conclusions of 20th-century historians of the Middle Ages. Manchester’s views on the transition from medieval to modern civilization, though they were popular in the 19th and early 20th century (and still are current in some segments of contemporary culture), have long been rejected by professional scholars in the relevant fields. Despite this, the book is often taught at the beginning of College Board's AP European History class.