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Drunken Baker posted:This is what delights and infuriates me about crap books/films/whatever. You get an idea like RPO and it is done so, so terribly. But it gives you a little spark of insight and inspiration because it COULD be the bedrock for some really fascinating fiction. The same thing happened for me in Name of the Wind (or perhaps the sequel, I don't remember). At one point the protagonist has money troubles while at the magic academy and meets up with a loan shark who's a former student and runs kind of a black market for magic stuff. And right there I got a glimpse of the potential for an actually interesting story told in the same world. A story about a wealth of incredibly useful knowledge jealously hoarded away by a privileged group, a student falling through the cracks of their ridiculous standards and finding her own way of getting back at them, all the ways that magic is actually changing life for the regular people on the ground, all that good stuff. But no, instead we're stuck with Captain Awesome's story about loving all the sex ninjas, pursuing the most boring romance in the world, and stumbling into seemingly every single important prophecy and event in the world because of course he does.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 12:49 |
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# ? May 17, 2024 17:39 |
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I got "In the balance" by Turtledove a couple of years back (for pretty much the same reason I got "Watch on the Rhine" - nazis fighting aliens). It's the first in a series of books. For those who don't know, the premise is that aliens have been planning an invasion of earth for like the last thousand years. The invasion fleet arrives expecting to face off against knights on horseback, but instead finds itself in the middle of WWII. So now the nazis, the commies, the chinese, the japanese, the yanks and the brits all have to team up to fight evil alien invaders! And it's so loving badly written. Now, mind, it's not the frothing rant that "Watch on the Rhine" is. It's just...boring. Every character is a one-dimensional stereotype. Every non-american character exists only to contrast themselves and their nation against the US. Two german officers will be talking and constantly go "Let us drink beer and eat bratwurst, as is the way of us orderly germans, unlike those free-spirited americans who only drink coca-cola and eat hamburgers". I can't even remember who any of the characters were. There's the german noble officer, the chinese peasant girl, some russian farmer and they're all constantly inner-monologueing how they sure aren't like those americans. The only good bit in the book is when the germans fire off a round from the Schwerer Gustav railway cannon against a alien landing site. The aliens send up advanced countermeasures designed to knock out guided missles...which does jack all against a solid 7-ton lump of metal coming barreling out of the sky.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 13:21 |
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Oxxidation posted:today i learned about rupi kaur and i wish i hadn't Did you read this article from the Cut? quote:“I will always go into a used bookstore,” she says, even when she’s working. “I’ll collect a lot of covers that inspire me — whether it’s the paper inside, whether it’s a font, so then later I can be like, okay, how’s mine going to look?” quote:On a cart at the Strand, Milk and Honey sits alongside Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit, and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates. Kaur read half of Between the World and Me. “I had to take notes,” she says — it was “more academic” than her typical reading. Recently she got Notorious RBG, and she’s been enjoying that. quote:“This guy is the best,” she says, noticing an edition of Kafka’s complete stories; she’s referring to Peter Mendelsund, the book’s designer. “The dream is to have him design my next book.” His work, she points out, translates well across media — to different sizes, to posters, to digital. When people bitch about millenial bullshit, they're bitching about Rupi Kaur
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 14:32 |
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zoux posted:Did you read this article from the Cut? That's what clued me into her, yes. quote:Earlier in our conversation, Kaur’s constellation of gold rings caught my attention as she was speaking; I compliment them, and she thanks me. “This one I got when Milk and Honey reached number one on the New York Times list,” she says, indicating an emerald on her left middle finger. “I got this one in Oakland, and then this one I got when I finished writing the manuscript, and then this one was for selling over a million books. And then this one I got after I got all these and was like, oh, I’m just allowed to buy them now for no reason at all.” I shouldn't be surprised, someone like her comes along every few years.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 14:35 |
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Mr. Sunshine posted:I got "In the balance" by Turtledove a couple of years back (for pretty much the same reason I got "Watch on the Rhine" - nazis fighting aliens). It's the first in a series of books. For those who don't know, the premise is that aliens have been planning an invasion of earth for like the last thousand years. The invasion fleet arrives expecting to face off against knights on horseback, but instead finds itself in the middle of WWII. So now the nazis, the commies, the chinese, the japanese, the yanks and the brits all have to team up to fight evil alien invaders! Actually, that's one of Turtledove's better series. He peaked super early and has been spiraling downwards ever since. There's so much outright offensive alt hist schlock out there (such as Watch on the Rhine) that he's spent his entire career coasting on the merits of being able to string together words about nazis without accidentally turning into unironically pro-fascist propaganda, regardless of the quality of his writing.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 14:54 |
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I believe Turtledove's chief controversy was how he always turned Mormons into suicide bombers or something like that; he certainly did in Timeline-191, which is the only long series of his that I've read, but I don't know beyond that. Most of Timeline-191 is pretty lazy in the sense that it's more or less a search and replace of the eastern front in World War II that replaces Nazi Germany with the Confederates and the Soviet Union with the USA. For example, the Confederate invasion of Ohio that starts the Second Great War is code-named "Operation Blackbeard", corresponding to Operation Barbarossa (which means "red beard" for anyone unfamiliar).
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 15:16 |
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Wheat Loaf posted:I believe Turtledove's chief controversy was how he always turned Mormons into suicide bombers or something like that; he certainly did in Timeline-191, which is the only long series of his that I've read, but I don't know beyond that. Most of all of Turtledove's writing is a lazy search and replace. To be fair it's not like he singled the Mormons out, he pulls out the suicide bomber card in every asymmetric war (including the humans vs. aliens one, and a couple other conflicts in the same series as the Mormons.) And almost all of his books are about asymmetric wars.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 15:23 |
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zoux posted:Did you read this article from the Cut? This sounds like something from F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 15:25 |
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zoux posted:Did you read this article from the Cut? Y'all know I'm a gentle-hearted man but I want to give this dumdum a loving swirly
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 15:38 |
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Hello I'd call my oeuvre "Poetry for Basic White Girls"
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 15:40 |
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Turtledove is probably best known for The Road Not Taken, a short story that's probably the best you're gonna get because it's not expected to have much solid characterisation. That's the one where aliens who have antigravity technology allowing for FTL travel and every other aspect of their technology and culture stuck in the Napoleonic era trying to invade contemporary Earth. (There was a SNL sketch with more or less this premise which may or may not have been inspired by it) There's some fun ideas to it in that apparently while a bronze-age civilisation can figure out antigravity and FTL, apparently the technology is so different and weird that the scientific method is an active impediment to figuring it out, and as a result civilisations that do tend to abandon it or stagnate because they can just fly around and drop things on people. The logic on that is probably questionable, but it's a good enough reasoning for a technological disparity.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 15:44 |
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Brass Key posted:^^^ Sweet Jesus that's full of some real gems. Because these are mostly teenagers and this is the equivalent of a high-level martial arts student beating up some children who just signed up for classes
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 16:11 |
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Because these are mostly teenagers and this is the equivalent of a high-level martial arts student beating up some children who just signed up for classes Yeah, that whole essay is pointlessly cruel.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 16:22 |
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zoux posted:Did you read this article from the Cut? Don't judge a b actually you know what gently caress it don't even care about the content of a book
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 16:22 |
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Oxxidation posted:Yeah, that whole essay is pointlessly cruel. Much of the old TvT thread's anger seemed rooted in not realizing a lot of their targets were actual children Not ALL of them, which is why it was generally okay and funny when they focused on the military fetishist who'd washed out of the actual military or that one guy who was really obsessed with creating self-insert fanfic where he had sex with black women in the age of dinosaurs, but enough of them that it got weird.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 16:33 |
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The meaner those threads got, the worse, but there was also some real joy. Whether Mills College Anime Club was written by a 13-year-old or a 30-year-old, it brought everyone together. Edit: also KIKEN Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 16:58 on Oct 5, 2017 |
# ? Oct 5, 2017 16:54 |
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Well now I feel bad, I just skimmed the essay for bad poetry. In payment, have some more poems that are basically just tweets.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 17:07 |
Brass Key posted:Well now I feel bad, I just skimmed the essay for bad poetry. She could make a poem that's literally water is moist like me --rupi kaur And get a million loving likes.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 17:17 |
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Folks the term twee bullshit has come alive and stalks the earth
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 17:23 |
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dril is the poet of our time.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 17:34 |
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Inescapable Duck posted:dril is the poet of our time. tbh "I will face god and walk backwards into hell" is a more evocative image than any rupi kaur poem and it's prefaced with "if the zoo bans me for hollering at the animals".
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 17:54 |
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Uh, Rupi Kaur's poetry is actually Very Important because she's Not White.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 18:43 |
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I don't want to know any more about this woman than I already do but it def looks like she's spent her life from college onward busily exploiting racial and feminist narratives to boost the numbers of her armada of social-media followers and then siccing them on her brainless books to drive up sales and visibility. The business of publishing is a brutally cynical one. Oxxidation has a new favorite as of 19:30 on Oct 5, 2017 |
# ? Oct 5, 2017 19:06 |
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Brass Key posted:tbh "I will face god and walk backwards into hell" is a more evocative image than any rupi kaur poem and it's prefaced with "if the zoo bans me for hollering at the animals".
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 19:48 |
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chitoryu12 posted:She could make a poem that's literally water is the essence of wetness
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 19:48 |
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So. Farewell then
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 20:21 |
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Brass Key posted:tbh "I will face god and walk backwards into hell" is a more evocative image than any rupi kaur poem and it's prefaced with "if the zoo bans me for hollering at the animals". I look forward to telling my irradiated mutant children that yes, I actually was around when the true master of the english language was in his prime
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 20:24 |
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dril is a true genius, and I hope that he gets his due a hundred years from now.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 20:41 |
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I like David Weber books but I am so sick of the phrase "bomb-pumped x-ray lasers"
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 20:43 |
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Brass Key posted:Well now I feel bad, I just skimmed the essay for bad poetry.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 20:45 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:The meaner those threads got, the worse, but there was also some real joy. Whether Mills College Anime Club was written by a 13-year-old or a 30-year-old, it brought everyone together. In retrospect I'm a bit embarrassed to have taken part in a lot of those threads, but I'll always have a soft spot for "~Anime is the tie that bind us~". quote:Edit: also KIKEN I remember guy who wrote that one was the same guy who wrote the most infamous Troper Tale of all, which lovingly boasted about how he was probably the youngest person ever to suffer from having a "berserk button" because "He broke 33 pencils in his life, and had a good friend break two of those pencils because they were too hard."
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 22:21 |
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Wheat Loaf posted:In retrospect I'm a bit embarrassed to have taken part in a lot of those threads, but I'll always have a soft spot for "~Anime is the tie that bind us~". That kid sounds inhuman.
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# ? Oct 5, 2017 22:52 |
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I am... the NDODE
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# ? Oct 6, 2017 00:52 |
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I don't get the rupi kaur hate, although I was clueless as to who she is before now. Her work doesn't stand out to me and feels mundane, although the formatting is of some interest. [quote="“Oxxidation”" post="“477084802”"] I don’t want to know any more about this woman than I already do but it def looks like she’s spent her life from college onward busily exploiting racial and feminist narratives to boost the numbers of her armada of social-media followers and then siccing them on her brainless books to drive up sales and visibility. [/quote] I mean how else does a young millennial market themselves? Seriously, is she genuinely deluding people by leaning on social justice in her work/social media persona then turning around and being exclusionary/hypocritical? edit: thank you for posting the article below, this is what I'm talking about. My disdain for her is found. SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL has a new favorite as of 13:47 on Oct 6, 2017 |
# ? Oct 6, 2017 02:54 |
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I'm not invested in this beyond having looked at her poetry, but here's an article that talks about her use of 'collective trauma'.quote:While more female South Asian voices are indeed needed in mainstream culture and media, there is something deeply uncomfortable about the self-appointed spokesperson of South Asian womanhood being a privileged young woman from the West who unproblematically claims the experience of the colonized subject as her own, and profits from her invocation of generational trauma. There is no shame in acknowledging the many differences between Kaur’s experience of the world in 2017 and that of a woman living directly under colonial rule in the early 20th century. For example: neither is any more "authentically" South Asian. But it is disingenuous to collect a variety of traumatic narratives and present them to the West as a kind of feminist ethnography under the mantle of confession, while only vaguely acknowledging those whose stories inspired the poetry.
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# ? Oct 6, 2017 03:07 |
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Djeser posted:I'm not invested in this beyond having looked at her poetry, but here's an article that talks about her use of 'collective trauma'. From the same article: quote:This is not the only censure Kaur's work has been subject to. Satirical tweets, which have racked up hundreds of likes, imply that Kaur’s work is formulaic, shallow, and lacks true poetic talent. Her readers, however, do not mount a defense based on the quality of Kaur’s language; rather, they cite her openness about personal trauma in response to critiques of her work, suggesting that such honesty, particularly from a woman of color, exempts her from accusations of superficiality. That the debate has divided itself in such a way is a direct result of the poet’s own self-presentation: Whether on social media or in her poetry, Kaur has consistently marketed herself as an authentic writer who produces art free of artifice, and so any discussion of her work inevitably falls along these lines. Pretty much what I figured. She's not an author, she's a brand, and commands the same slavering knee-jerk loyalty.
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# ? Oct 6, 2017 03:16 |
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khy posted:I like David Weber books but I am so sick of the phrase "bomb-pumped x-ray lasers" I tried to read Weber's Honour Harrington but ended up dropping it about three books in because his antagonists just suck so much. Not just "suck" in the way they're written, but in that they're simply bad at everything. Every time we get a glimpse into their world, we're told how their politics suck, their society sucks, or their military sucks. When we get a PoV character from their side, they usually think about how much their side sucks and how they hate it, but they still fight for them out of some atrophied sense of patriotism or simply inertia. At that point, it doesn't really feel so much like our protagonists heroically struggling against overwhelming odds, but more like them beating up a retarded child. This was particularly apparent in the third book: The so far mostly cold war finally goes hot, and we get the first serious clashes in what has been hyped up as the both inevitable as well as utterly decisive showdown between the two major power blocs. And what happens? The antagonists instantly lose on every front in ridiculously decisive ways, and their government immediately collapses. That just kind of killed any sense of having stakes or a struggle.
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# ? Oct 6, 2017 07:54 |
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Perestroika posted:I tried to read Weber's Honour Harrington but ended up dropping it about three books in because his antagonists just suck so much. Not just "suck" in the way they're written, but in that they're simply bad at everything. Every time we get a glimpse into their world, we're told how their politics suck, their society sucks, or their military sucks. When we get a PoV character from their side, they usually think about how much their side sucks and how they hate it, but they still fight for them out of some atrophied sense of patriotism or simply inertia. Well it's all Horatio Hornblower and Nelson except IN SPAAAACE and if all you've ever read about Napoleonic naval warfare is novels where the handsome British captain captures half the French/Spanish fleet singlehanded you'd end up writing the bad guys and stupid cannon fodder too. Weber is a terrible writer is what I'm saying here, and it almost goes without saying those books turn up everywhere on TV Tropes.
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# ? Oct 6, 2017 09:01 |
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Oxxidation posted:Pretty much what I figured. She's not an author, she's a brand, and commands the same slavering knee-jerk loyalty. Correct, and people who consciously and calculatedly make themselves into "brands" need to be messily shat upon from a great height.
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# ? Oct 6, 2017 12:28 |
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# ? May 17, 2024 17:39 |
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Oxxidation posted:Yeah, that whole essay is pointlessly cruel. It's not like the anecephalic baby thing where goons hounded a grieving couple - tropers put there stuff out there and attempted to argue for why their stuff was superior to other poetry. Aside from the TVTropes bashing, I think it's a nice little demonstration of why some poems work and others are garbage. Would probably improve a lot of high schoolers output.
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# ? Oct 6, 2017 12:42 |