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That comma is completely superfluous. The way to fix it would be to italicize the titles, which is the right thing to do anyway.
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# ? Sep 19, 2017 16:58 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 20:04 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:That comma is completely superfluous. The way to fix it would be to italicize the titles, which is the right thing to do anyway. Thank you, both are great options I'll keep in mind for the future.
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# ? Sep 19, 2017 17:06 |
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Hey, I just found this thread and I have a contribution to make. Sorry if it's been mentioned before. It's Cybermancy by Kelly McCullough, and I picked it up at a thrift store for fifty cents. It has a gloriously awful tagline: "Hades has a hell of a firewall." It's about a hacker/mage named Ravirn (his name was actually Raven but his grandmothers, The Fates, took that name from him when he did something bad, probably in the book this one is a sequel to - it's called WebMage but I haven't looked for it too hard), in a world where hacking and magic and Greek myths are all blended together in some kind of modern fantasy. I'll just quote from the back of the book:quote:Magic has gone digital in the twenty-first century, and Ravirn is a sorcerer with a laptop - otherwise known as his shape-changing best friend. There was one bit that I thought was kind of neat (still awful, but less so than playing cards with the three-headed hound who guards the underworld), and it's when he's in Hades, sneaking around the offices of the damned or something, and gets spooked by someone following him. Then a nearby computer lights up and a chat program starts sending him messages. It's Persephone, and she communicates through IM because her voice is too much for mortals (or near-mortals or whatever the gently caress Ravirn is) to bear. Ravirn begs her to say something to him, and she eventually relents and does so, and he immediately gets super-depressed and nearly suicidal because of it. I thought it was one of the few times the character actually seems like he's in trouble. Every other time, he's just cocky and sure that all of his unstated backup plans will work out (and they usually do). Of course, he gets out of that situation too, and soon returns to being a cocky rear end in a top hat. I haven't finished the book, or even picked it up in a few months, but when I found this thread, I remembered it and thought it was perfect for you goons. I'm hoping at least one of you has either heard of or read this book (or the previous one).
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# ? Sep 19, 2017 22:03 |
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beats for junkies posted:Hey, I just found this thread and I have a contribution to make. Sorry if it's been mentioned before. It's Cybermancy by Kelly McCullough, and I picked it up at a thrift store for fifty cents. It has a gloriously awful tagline: "Hades has a hell of a firewall." It's about a hacker/mage named Ravirn (his name was actually Raven but his grandmothers, The Fates, took that name from him when he did something bad, probably in the book this one is a sequel to - it's called WebMage but I haven't looked for it too hard), in a world where hacking and magic and Greek myths are all blended together in some kind of modern fantasy. I'll just quote from the back of the book: Oh yeah, I read both and the 2 or 3 sequels. There's some prime poo poo in there like; His love interest is his cousin but she vetrays him. So instead his love intest is one of the Furies who falls in love with him after like the 3rd time they're supposed to hunt him down for being such a cool superhacker. At one point he gets sucked into a different technomagic world with Norse mythology instead of Greek stuff. Where he promptly just spends the whole book being a poo poo and eventually leaves but his Fury girlfriend stays so she can be a real girl instead of a Fury. He becomes some kind of minor chaos god named 'Raven' because of loving course he does. Godhood includes a minor pocket dimension with an enslaved Satyr who wears hawaiian shirts and talks like a surfer bro. With an amazing mansion that's just so cool and has a hacker cave. His familiar is a laptop/imp and at one point he gets a huge powerup by becoming a quantum compter.
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# ? Sep 19, 2017 22:21 |
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Runcible Cat posted:James Bond vs Cthulhu is loosely what Charles Stross' 2nd Laundry novel was going for (the first was Harry Palmer vs Cthulhu). The Laundry novels are fun, at least as far as I've read; I'm a couple behind. I just thought Charles Stross was a mediocre writer until I very loosely scanned the Sci-fi subreddit a bunch of times for recommendation (stuff that was like "I want a near future novel set in North America" in terms of vagueness) and saw him popping in to pimp himself or fight someone who didn't like him in like 70% of the threads on the sub.
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# ? Sep 19, 2017 22:24 |
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Zore posted:Oh yeah, I read both and the 2 or 3 sequels. There's some prime poo poo in there like; So I'm probably better off not finishing this or trying to find the others then, got it. I don't remember Cerice being his cousin, unless it just isn't brought up in Cybermancy. And as far as Raven's web-goblin thing, I actually wanted to kind of like that little dude, mostly because he seemed to like taunting Raven, the super-cool never-lose hero of everything ever, and those kind of characters should always have other characters making GBS threads on them. I got the book because it looked like dumb fun - cyberpunk but with Greek mythology! But Raven is just such a never-do-wrong 'antihero' (because he swears and is running away from his Fate to be a magic hacker and... help his girlfriend with her dissertation?) that I disliked him immediately, and wanted him to fail at every opportunity. Probably not what the author intended. My bookmark is about a third of the way through the book, and looking back a few pages to figure out what was going on, Raven and Cerice are equipping items before they leave for a mission to go visit the... Fates, maybe? Someone that Cerice wants to dress fancy for. And, well... okay, here: quote:"All the usual pomp and circumstance," I said, referring to my late family's fixation on the proper protocols and fancy dress. I guess I should be glad that it's only really wordy descriptions of Greek mythology Shadowrun rather than some of the other things that showed up in this thread. I mean, he's got Kevlar AND a matching helmet! Fifty Farts has a new favorite as of 00:03 on Sep 20, 2017 |
# ? Sep 20, 2017 00:01 |
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Bamabalacha posted:I just thought Charles Stross was a mediocre writer until I very loosely scanned the Sci-fi subreddit a bunch of times for recommendation (stuff that was like "I want a near future novel set in North America" in terms of vagueness) and saw him popping in to pimp himself or fight someone who didn't like him in like 70% of the threads on the sub. I wouldn't call him mediocre, I was pretty shaken by A Colder War. He can write supernatural horror in a way that's deeply unsettling. Live servitors under transient control, the vivid mental image of ancestral monsters being paraded on truck trailers on the Red Square like just another weapons system (covered with tarps as if it's not obvious to everyone that one, they're living beings, and two, that they don't belong in this world) has never left me I disliked the Laundry series because it so often is an excuse to indulge in his worst writing vices. For example, while A Colder War is about scientists and military men lying to themselves that ancient evil magic can be rationalized, explained, controlled, bent to human will - exactly what, by definition, you cannot do to something that's evil or magic - the Laundry series is about those same character types, doing the same things, except here they're a hundred percent right and magic is just a branch of computer science, and magic artifacts are mass produced and weaponized, and you control demons by electrifying a pentacle like in the dumbest penny dreadfuls. That real life tragedies, like the death penalty in China or the Holocaust, are dragged into it is just the bad tasting cherry on top
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# ? Sep 20, 2017 02:20 |
One I pulled for an order tonight at work, and I thought the blurb was so bad it belonged here: The Selection. From the Amazon listing (bolding mine): quote:Prepare to be swept into a world of breathless fairy-tale romance, swoonworthy characters, glittering gowns, and fierce intrigue perfect for readers who loved Divergent, Delirium, or The Wrath & the Dawn. Like that main character's name.
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# ? Sep 20, 2017 10:01 |
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# ? Sep 20, 2017 10:48 |
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If it's a competition... can't she just throw it? Do the Selection losers get Lottery'd to ensure a good corn harvest?
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# ? Sep 20, 2017 11:11 |
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taiyoko posted:One I pulled for an order tonight at work, and I thought the blurb was so bad it belonged here: The Selection. Reminds me of Cryptonomicon, which also had a character named America Shaftoe, who usually went by Amy. But her grandfather also named her father "Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe", so it's really more of a case of a mildly insane family.
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# ? Sep 20, 2017 12:37 |
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Antivehicular posted:If it's a competition... can't she just throw it? Do the Selection losers get Lottery'd to ensure a good corn harvest? From what I understand, it's a chance (possibly the only one) for a contestant to escape poverty. Hunger Games meets the Bachelor and all that. With so many things in this thread, it's a seed of a good idea grown to predicable conclusions.
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# ? Sep 20, 2017 12:39 |
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taiyoko posted:One I pulled for an order tonight at work, and I thought the blurb was so bad it belonged here: The Selection. I'm getting a serious Modelland vibe from that description.
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# ? Sep 20, 2017 12:48 |
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Not sure how, but you linked the wrong episode. Here's the actual one about that book.
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 07:51 |
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Only book I ever threw away because it was so bad was "Watch on the Rhine". It had John Ringo's name on the cover, but it was actually written by some other rear end in a top hat. I bought it because I needed something to read on the train, and the premise of "Nazis in 1000 ton tanks fighting aliens" seemed gloriously ridiculous. WotR is a sequel to some other Ringo book(s) about evil aliens invading earth, which I haven't read, and it opens with the EU parliament watching footage from a Washington DC devastated by the aliens. We're talking full on terminator-style fields of skulls and poo poo. And the POW character for that scene is a french politician ruminating about how pleased she is with seeing the USA hosed over. Anyway, the EU states decide that, hey, maybe we need to have a plan for defending ourselves from the evil aliens. Only, of course, the weak, liberal, feminized, politically correct europeans are no longer able to muster the will or the ability to fight for their very survival. What to do? Well, luckily, there are also some friendly aliens who want to help humanity out! They have super-technology, but can't fight the evil aliens themselves, for plot reasons. The Germans then round up every surviving member of the SS from old folks' homes from across the country, use friendly-alien-super-tech to restore them to youth, and reinstate the Waffen SS divisions complete with black uniforms, nazi symbols and banners, the loving works. Oh, and they get equipped with 1000 ton super tanks by the friendly aliens. All the SS soldiers are portrayed as simple patriots wanting to defend their country from destruction. No mention of the holocaust, war crimes, racism, genocide or any hint of nazi ideology. The only exception is a single "rotten egg" who joined the SS only so that he could rape foreign women. The enemies for the first half of the book are not the evil aliens, but rather pacifists and leftists who are irrationally upset that Germany has brought back the loving Waffen SS. A riot breaks out outside the SS base, instigated by degenerate homosexuals, feminists and "pacifists" - who are hypocrites that are only unwilling to use violence against aliens bent on humanity's complete destruction, but won't hesitate to use violence against other humans who only want to save the human race. I stopped reading after that part. What is it with right-wing rear end in a top hat writers and portraying their ideological enemies as completely insane lunatics willingly and knowingly trying to destroy everything that is good and just? Okay, when your protagonists are the loving Waffen SS I understand that you have to bend reality to gently caress and back to make your antagonists look bad, but come the gently caress on!
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 09:11 |
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that'd be Tom Kratmann, another guy who uses the same vanity press that Ringo uses and writes other not-at-all disguised Nazi glorification fiction
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 09:14 |
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Mr. Sunshine posted:The Germans then round up every surviving member of the SS from old folks' homes from across the country, use friendly-alien-super-tech to restore them to youth, and reinstate the Waffen SS divisions complete with black uniforms, nazi symbols and banners, the loving works. So out of all the military formations of the 20th century, they went with the one that consistently got their asses handed to them when faced with any real opposition. Amazing.
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 10:23 |
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Cornwind Evil posted:Not sure how, but you linked the wrong episode. Here's the actual one about that book. Mr. Sunshine posted:What is it with right-wing rear end in a top hat writers and portraying their ideological enemies as completely insane lunatics willingly and knowingly trying to destroy everything that is good and just? Okay, when your protagonists are the loving Waffen SS I understand that you have to bend reality to gently caress and back to make your antagonists look bad, but come the gently caress on! Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 13:29 on Sep 21, 2017 |
# ? Sep 21, 2017 10:51 |
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Alaois posted:that'd be Tom Kratmann, another guy who uses the same vanity press that Ringo uses and writes other not-at-all disguised Nazi glorification fiction What's even better is that Kratman was a Lieutenant Colonel in the US army, and was apparently the director of Rule of Law for the "Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute".
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 11:01 |
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Kratman looks like the lead henchman who'd get sliced up by Steven Seagal in a one-sided knife fight in a 90s action movie.
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 11:04 |
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There's a running undercurrent in politics, which American liberalism hasn't really done anything to discredit, that conservatives, authoritarians and fascists are Hard Men who Make Tough Decisions and are Decisive in a Crisis Situation, who will sometimes do mean things and look scary but they'll have your back when the big scary bad guys show up, while liberals and pacifists are silly hippies who okay to tolerate when everything's sunshine and roses but are a liability whenever things get scary, so you need to shut them up so the Tough Men Can Take Charge. (Communists tend to be an aberration in this regard, usually seen as corrupted by wicked, inhuman, false religion) It's never been easier to demonstrate how wrong that is after Charlottesville, but I don't think it's going to go away easily.
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 14:02 |
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At the time people used to think Nazism was bred from cold robotic logic(The Great Dictator's speech makes this point multiple times). Now of course, we know they're hysterical crybabies lashing out at random targets they blame for their own dissatisfaction in life. Also, if anyone's to blame for the rise in "political correctness", it's probably the Nazis. The horrible poo poo they did made society want to pivot right the gently caress away from them. Without Hitler, who's to say how long "milder" forms of racism would be totally acceptable? I mean, more than it is now, which is depressingly "still too much". TenCentFang has a new favorite as of 16:19 on Sep 21, 2017 |
# ? Sep 21, 2017 16:17 |
I've finished Handbook for Mortals. At no point does it get any better, and almost nothing of importance happens. I'm going to do a new thread on the Furlites of Aroriel. God help us all, for we sink into oblivion in the end.
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 18:24 |
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Comrade Koba posted:So out of all the military formations of the 20th century, they went with the one that consistently got their asses handed to them when faced with any real opposition. Amazing. Yeah, if I had to pick one group of elderly WW2 vets to give magic super youth to in order to fight a vastly superior enemy it'd be Red Army guys or Poles. You know, dudes whose war was at least half spent totally outgunned with bad supply and dire conditions like we'd probably be stuck with. Or the Brits. Or anyone, really, other than the guys who lost and were the closest mankind ever came to true evil.
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 18:27 |
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chitoryu12 posted:I've finished Handbook for Mortals. At no point does it get any better, and almost nothing of importance happens. My chyric gland swells at this news.
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 18:28 |
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hackbunny posted:I wouldn't call him mediocre, I was pretty shaken by A Colder War. He can write supernatural horror in a way that's deeply unsettling. Live servitors under transient control, the vivid mental image of ancestral monsters being paraded on truck trailers on the Red Square like just another weapons system (covered with tarps as if it's not obvious to everyone that one, they're living beings, and two, that they don't belong in this world) has never left me You've missed the fact that in the Laundry they're still lying to themselves. The "magic" is neither science or magic. It's what happens when you drag something from a universe with very different laws of physics into your own. The result is a destruction of science and sanity. At the small scales the laundry practices this effect can be controlled and weaponised. But the final result is that our universe of relative sanity is entirely arbitrary and fragile. The "magic" works via temporarily destroying your own universe's laws. You can't actually study or quantify that. It's the absence of quantifiability that makes it work. It removes the rules, doesn't change or add to them.
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 18:30 |
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Has there been a book like Watch on the Rhine done competently? I'm a fan of "summoning the Deep Ones to stop Cthulhu" stories and they all suck. Like eating your favorite treat not realizing it's stuffed with something disgusting and now it's running down your shirt.
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 18:36 |
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Darth Walrus posted:My chyric gland swells at this news.
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 18:52 |
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chitoryu12 posted:I've finished Handbook for Mortals. At no point does it get any better, and almost nothing of importance happens. I need link.
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 18:55 |
Proteus Jones posted:I need link. DACK FAYDEN posted:Is this the shartball book? Prepare for shartball.
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 18:55 |
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Thank you from the bottom of my
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 19:59 |
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queserasera posted:Has there been a book like Watch on the Rhine done competently? I'm a fan of "summoning the Deep Ones to stop Cthulhu" stories and they all suck. Like eating your favorite treat not realizing it's stuffed with something disgusting and now it's running down your shirt. I assume you've read A Colder War?
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# ? Sep 21, 2017 20:14 |
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queserasera posted:Has there been a book like Watch on the Rhine done competently? I'm a fan of "summoning the Deep Ones to stop Cthulhu" stories and they all suck. Like eating your favorite treat not realizing it's stuffed with something disgusting and now it's running down your shirt. The Milkweed Triptych by Ian Tregillis sort of fits the bill of what you're looking for. Book blurb: When the Nazis start running missions with people who have unnatural abilities—a woman who can turn invisible, a man who can walk through walls, and the woman Marsh saw in Spain who can use her knowledge of the future to twist the present—Marsh is the man who has to face them. He rallies the secret warlocks of Britain to hold the impending invasion at bay. But magic always exacts a price. Eventually, the sacrifice necessary to defeat the enemy will be as terrible as outright loss would be. It goes sort of how you'd expect.
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# ? Sep 22, 2017 00:20 |
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Jew it to it! posted:The Milkweed Triptych by Ian Tregillis sort of fits the bill of what you're looking for. I had to decompress a bit after Bitter Seeds. That ending...
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# ? Sep 22, 2017 00:24 |
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Jew it to it! posted:The Milkweed Triptych by Ian Tregillis sort of fits the bill of what you're looking for. This sounds awesome, thanks for the suggestion.
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# ? Sep 22, 2017 00:38 |
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Inescapable Duck posted:There's a running undercurrent in politics, which American liberalism hasn't really done anything to discredit, that conservatives, authoritarians and fascists are Hard Men who Make Tough Decisions and are Decisive in a Crisis Situation, who will sometimes do mean things and look scary but they'll have your back when the big scary bad guys show up, while liberals and pacifists are silly hippies who okay to tolerate when everything's sunshine and roses but are a liability whenever things get scary, so you need to shut them up so the Tough Men Can Take Charge. I'm reminded of something that was written in one of the Creative Convention's stories, I think: there's this brief musing about the Cold War and a theory that at the deepest, blackest part of Realpolitik, both sides had to have people who were willing to launch nuclear missiles without even a second's hesitation, who had to wholly understand what they were doing for maximum efficiency and just not care in any way they were condemning countless millions to horrible death, that they were potentially destroying the world, that as long as when it was over if you had two people and the other side had one, you won. In essence, both sides had to have monsters, because they were certain the OTHER side had monsters. And considering that if you go back and study things at the time and how little each side actually knew about each other (both were under the absolute certainty that the other side would strike first, and it seems that outside of a small group of people in the Soviet Union, neither side expected or was prepared for the sudden and complete collapse of the Union, which is even more shocking considering that the United State's whole basic strategy during the Cold War was (in theory) to keep it contained until it did just THAT), you can sort of see the logic of needing monsters on chains. That logic, however, is incredibly easily twisted to self-justification, and ultimately, what nearly all people who see Hard Men As A Good Thing really want is to do whatever they want without fear of consequence while being told they're right. It all comes down to mental masturbation.
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# ? Sep 22, 2017 01:25 |
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chitoryu12 posted:I've finished Handbook for Mortals. At no point does it get any better, and almost nothing of importance happens. I'm sure there's a better way to seek penance for whatever horrendous sin against God you've committed than this public self-flagellation.
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# ? Sep 22, 2017 03:01 |
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Chuck Buried Treasure posted:I'm sure there's a better way to seek penance for whatever horrendous sin against God you've committed than this public self-flagellation. Some folks inherit reading glasses Ooh, they send you down to the Book Barn, Lord And when you ask them, "how much should we give?" Ooh, they only answer more, more, more Keep it up Chitoryu, you're doing a public service and I appreciate it.
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# ? Sep 22, 2017 03:30 |
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Jew it to it! posted:The Milkweed Triptych by Ian Tregillis sort of fits the bill of what you're looking for. I really enjoyed that series. It's a premise that could go off the rails easily, but Tregellis has a knack for knowing exactly how far he can push it.
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# ? Sep 22, 2017 03:30 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 20:04 |
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# ? Sep 22, 2017 03:59 |