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Lemon-Lime posted:The only surprise here was that he was fired from GOG at all since the "assume their gender" tweet and the follow-up calling the existence of trans people a "debate" were both posted by CDPR proper and not this guy, so he's an exact fit for their corporate culture. but they make good video games it absolves everything they made the witcher 3 etc. Or so it goes in the Witcher 3 thread when that stuff comes up. As for Hambly, if his "case" makes it to court I'm sure it will be as hilarious as when ComicsGate's Dickie Meyer's does.
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Dec 8, 2018 23:28
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theironjef posted:The ennie podcast nomination thread is going. As always its local favorites Grognard Files and KARTAS walking away with tons of nominations. System Mastery did get a nod so now I'm curious. If we make it past the judges awareness that we think 4e isn't trash, are they going to send us a request for a 15 minute reel? God I hope so. what thread? Also, Chaosium is revoking its license from the French translator because they haven't paid royalties for 2 years. https://www.chaosium.com/blogstatement-about-ditions-sansdtour
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Dec 8, 2018 23:56
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clockworkjoe posted:what thread? http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?655415-Taking-nominations-for-best-RPG-Podcasts-of-2018!
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Dec 9, 2018 00:06
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It took 2 years for them to do that? What, did they only pay royalties once a year?
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Dec 9, 2018 00:40
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Lemon-Lime posted:The only surprise here was that he was fired from GOG at all since the "assume their gender" tweet and the follow-up calling the existence of trans people a "debate" were both posted by CDPR proper and not this guy, so he's an exact fit for their corporate culture. "We were hoping for a slow, steady drizzle of diarrhea into the punchbowl, rather than the discrete, indiscreet turds he produced."
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Dec 9, 2018 00:51
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Joe Slowboat posted:Speaking of Howard, are people here into Swords Without Master? I'm gonna get a chance to play in a play-by-prose hack at some point and I'm super excited. Had the chance to play it at a con a couple times. Didn't quite get the whole picture since somehow each time our dice were so poo poo-hot we never failed a roll, but it was a good time all the same.
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Dec 9, 2018 01:06
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Kwyndig posted:It took 2 years for them to do that? What, did they only pay royalties once a year? Entirely possible, it's far more common for royalties to be calculated over a time period and paid in one big batch than for people to literally transfer over little bits of cash to licensors every time they make an applicable sale.
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Dec 9, 2018 16:02
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Warthur posted:Sorry, but there's ample poo poo in Howard where his racism is 100% overt, and it's spread throughout his canon widely. You can't separate his work from his racism without coming to a highly deficient and incredibly narrow view of his work, just like if you judge Lovecraft based solely on, say, From Beyond. You're probably right, it's been a long time since I did an extensive read of stuff like Conan and that was well before I was aware of that kind of thing as I am now. I guess I'm coming from the view that a lot of Howard by-blows of barbarians with mighty thews has overcome their racist origins, while a lot of core Lovecraftian material still seems blithely mired in it. Not to say there aren't issues with modern fantasy in general in that regard, but it's less likely to outright have a racial slur in a monster's name. But generalities like that aren't terribly useful anyway, so I'm letting it go.
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Dec 9, 2018 17:06
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Hmm, sounds like this Lovecraft fella might have been pretty racist. Not sure though. Need some more convincing. I don't know if it has come up much but I imagine that part of why Lovecraft in particular has been milked so hard is that Lovecraft died intestate before the Disney-induced eternal recurrence of copyright law, and he produced a body of work with some real depth to it. Indeed it is a shame he did not write more Dreamlands stuff because that was bordering on an entire mythical world like Middle-earth and so forth. Anyway, that meant that his poo poo was public domain and could be freely pillaged for parts in a way that (for instance) Doc Smith's work, which was broadly contemporary, could not. I think even Howard had some kind of literary estate, didn't he? But if Lovecraft had one it was brief and was held by Derleth for a while and then lapsed into the public domain.
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Dec 9, 2018 23:18
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"Royalty-free, completely fleshed out setting" explains the uptick in popularity more than anything else.
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Dec 9, 2018 23:39
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So blame Disney, because now nothing else will ever enter the public domain.
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Dec 9, 2018 23:49
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Terrible Opinions posted:So blame Disney, because now nothing else will ever enter the public domain. 
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Dec 9, 2018 23:59
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moths posted:"Royalty-free, completely fleshed out setting" explains the uptick in popularity more than anything else. It's also very deliberately an early example of a "shared universe". The Mythos is basically an invitation to all Lovecraft's literary friends to write what they wanted into it and to make little knowing winks at and references to each other, and even the idea of it as something fully defined and systematized rather than just a loose affiliation of "use each other's spooky names for weird stuff" is more a product of Derleth than Lovecraft himself. At any rate, you're hardly going against the spirit of his work by telling your own stories with his building blocks, and even applying a radically different morality and ideology than Lovecraft's own to "Lovecraftian" fiction has been done before, and done often, by people who were personally close to the man. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Dec 10, 2018 |
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Dec 9, 2018 23:59
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Terrible Opinions posted:So blame Disney, because now nothing else will ever enter the public domain. Actually, from what I hear, things are going to enter the public domain in 2019, because the Copyright Extension Act of 1998 expires and it's almost definitely too late for them to try to ram an extension through. We'll see, I suppose.
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Dec 10, 2018 00:34
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Roland Jones posted:Actually, from what I hear, things are going to enter the public domain in 2019, because the Copyright Extension Act of 1998 expires and it's almost definitely too late for them to try to ram an extension through. We'll see, I suppose. The end of the freeze on copyright next year will only have an immediate effect on some old stuff no one really gives a huge poo poo about, like the original music to the Charleston. Mickey has until 2029 for them to pass another bullshit extension, though Pete I think is up in 2025 so I'd expect it by then.
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Dec 10, 2018 01:21
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Under the law that existed until 1978 up to 85% of all copyrighted works from 1990 might have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2019.
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Dec 10, 2018 02:14
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I think part of the popularity of Cthulhu RPG's was the uptick in retro nostalgia and Chaosium being too incompetent to cash in on it. Chaosium's history over the last 10-20 years has been coasting, dropping the ball now and then, until very recently. If Chaosium had done a better job, I don't think we would have had as many games.
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Dec 10, 2018 04:31
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Boltzmann brains is just the engineer's version of René Descartes's evil demon argument, and most of the scariest deep time-seq stuff is just existentialism for engineers. In fact, you can describe a large part of the Cthulhu fear as a fear of existentialism.
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Dec 10, 2018 05:41
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Howard's first stories about Conan were published in 1932, and he committed suicide in 1936. As a result, the body of his work related to that character is fairly limited; even adding more recently published works that were not originally printed during his lifetime, the entire Howard Conan can fit into a reasonable-sized volume or two; 21 complete stories (17 published while he was alive), and a dozen or so fragments that have been published posthumously, often with additional work by other authors. But L Sprague de Camp and Linn Carter re-worked and re-published his works for decades after his death, and of course, they and others wrote a huge body of additional Conan content under the license, especially comic books. As a result, it's often hard to have a conversation about Conan and the Hyborian Age setting with folks who have read a significant amount of this other work... and even when discussing Howard's original stories, many people have read only re-worked versions, or a mix of re-worked and as-originally-published versions. Personally: When I was a teenager, I read a lot of my stepdad's 1970s-edition Conan novels, which included only edited Howard and posthumas de Camp and Carter content. I also picked up a fair number of the comic books from the 1980s, mostly published by Marvel, and of varying quality ranging from acceptable to poor. A few years ago (I think about 3), I decided on a whim to grab a recently published anthology consisting of nothing but Howard's original content, as originally published or (when available) his manuscripts prior to re-edits done by Weird Tales etc. after his submission. I am otherwise not an expert on Howard - I've read almost nothing of his other work. So, I don't feel much qualified to talk about exactly to what degree Howard was racist, or to construct a fair argument for or against such a stance someone else might take, in particular Warthur, who sounds to me to be much better informed. I do think it's interesting and worth mentioning, though, that the Age of Hyboria setting that Howard created was not invented wholecloth from his own mind. Howard was interested in history and historical settings, but stymied in his ability to research them properly by the facilities available to him near his relatively rural Texas home. But Howard was aware of a... I'm not sure whether to call it a conspiracy theory, or myth, or what, but basically decades (I believe 1880s, but I don't find a clear reference with a couple minutes of googling) before Howard was writing, there was a sort of cultish alternative-history theory passed around by various crackpots and even published in some various obscure counterfactual/revisionist histories that proposed a forgotten age that preceded the earliest known civilization at the time (I think Egypt, ignoring the Indus Valley or Mesopotamian, but don't quote me on that). This earlier age purported to account for and give an explanation for various historical mysteries and difficulties of the time; things like, why are there white people here and black people there, and how could the greeks have been so advanced when the (so-called) dark ages were so backwards, etc. etc. And, critically, an origin for the Aryan people separate and better than all the other people. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan#Before_the_19th_century describes some of the origins of that term that fed into myths and alt-histories Howard would have been at least peripherally aware of. Howard knew or at least suspected that stuff was bullshit, but he wanted to create a mythical prior age that would "feel" more real, because it would relate in terms of names and cultural touchstones to real cultures and places that his readers would have heard of. I think it's abundantly clear that he was not presenting any of this as an actual argument in favor of those old theories; like I said, he was actually interested in real history and was not trying to revise it. That does not excuse the inherent racism backed into the setting, of course. But I do think it's probably incorrect to say that Howard was actually, seriously trying to convince people that (for example) black Africans had more recently descended from apes than white Europeans, or that native Americans had somehow been in the region of modern-day Ireland or shared recent ancestry with the ancient pictish people. He was rather I think just doing fantasy worldbuilding, with little care for the racist implications, undoubtedly because he assumed (entirely correctly) that neither his editors nor his readers cared either. I think Howard sits in a different category than Lovecraft mostly in that Lovecraft's writing exposed either an agenda, or his personal racist fears; whereas Howard was more just leveraging an inherantly racist alt-history as a useful starting point for a fantastic world containing "darkest africa" type places at the periphery of his ancient rotting kingdoms, which in turn were at the periphery of the new, golden-age (but utterly doomed) white-people civilizations at the center-west of his single, sprawling continent. I don't know if it really matters much whether someone's racism is malicious or casual; perhaps it matters more what sort of effects it has, rather than the original intent. I'll leave that for other people to figure out. For my own part, I think it says something different about Howard as compared to Lovecraft... maybe, although as I said at the beginning, I'm not enough of an expert on the rest of Howard's writing to feel very secure in that position. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Dec 10, 2018 |
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Dec 10, 2018 07:57
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Leperflesh posted:I do think it's interesting and worth mentioning, though, that the Age of Hyboria setting that Howard created was not invented wholecloth from his own mind. Howard was interested in history and historical settings, but stymied in his ability to research them properly by the facilities available to him near his relatively rural Texas home. The Romans. He thinks the Romans had never faced a shield wall formation before. Which is utter nonsense, given that the Roman Army was based around shield walls, mass produced shields for optimal shield wall tactics, and probably the most famous Roman formation (the testudo) is based on a shield wall, and the Romans would have prior to facing the Picts and Vikings have not only fought a whole bunch of those "Aryan" cultures but also fought the odd internal civil war. Nobody should have been more used to facing shield walls; it's what they are drilled for. I am not as convinced as you are that Howard knew that all those antique racial theories were bullshit, mind. He goes into that Aryan stuff in a broad enough range of his other work that I genuinely don't think he was just using it for worldbuilding purposes. If it were just an idea he were playing with for the purpose of building the Conan setting and its prequels and sequels, he'd have set it aside and used entirely different ideas in building other settings, but he just keeps coming back to it constantly. At the very least, if he didn't seriously believe it, he pushed it hard enough and over a wide enough span of his work that if he didn't at least wish it were true on some level, then the fact that he kept harping on about the concept is a bit weird. I mean, sure, pulp authors recycled material for the sake of cranking out stoties nice and quick for them to sell, but even if Howard was defaulting to regurgitating this stuff to fill out a word count from time to time, I think you can still read a lot into the sort of stuff he defaulted to under such circumstances.
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Dec 10, 2018 13:48
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Terrible Opinions posted:So blame Disney, because now nothing else will ever enter the public domain. So, fun fact: this is actually untrue now! Those who have been following this have reported that there is no evidence of Disney gearing up for another fight over it at all. If nothing is passed by January, public domain begins its march again. It is currently theorized that this is because after SOPA/PIPA, no one wants to piss off the public like that again, so Disney's decided to give up on that particular fight and focus more on creating or controlling new IPs.
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Dec 10, 2018 14:33
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The state of media has also drastically changed since the nineties. Legacy IPs just aren't valued the way they once were and (especially in Disney's case) the older stuff has been sidestepped by parody and disparate derivation. The smart media companies have diversified their properties instead of trying to make circus tents out of decades-old bullshit. (I'm looking at you, the charred remains of what used to be Paramount.) I am weirdly excited at the notion that Star Wars may be Public Domain in my lifetime.
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Dec 10, 2018 15:01
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Zurui posted:. The smart media companies have diversified their properties instead of trying to make circus tents out of decades-old bullshit. (I'm looking at you, the charred remains of what used to be Paramount.) https://twitter.com/ParamountPics/status/1072128809019813889
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Dec 10, 2018 15:36
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The darkest timeline.
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Dec 10, 2018 16:04
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LongDarkNight posted:The darkest timeline. I've always said the problem with Sonic was that he wasn't built like a muscly little baby.
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Dec 10, 2018 16:57
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His arms are blue
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Dec 10, 2018 16:58
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Are they finally going to ruin Sonic?!
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Dec 10, 2018 17:52
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This looks just horny enough to work.
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Dec 10, 2018 17:54
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Warthur posted:I am not as convinced as you are that Howard knew that all those antique racial theories were bullshit, mind. He goes into that Aryan stuff in a broad enough range of his other work that I genuinely don't think he was just using it for worldbuilding purposes. If it were just an idea he were playing with for the purpose of building the Conan setting and its prequels and sequels, he'd have set it aside and used entirely different ideas in building other settings, but he just keeps coming back to it constantly. It's certainly possible you're right. I think he wanted to create a space in human history for ancient civilizations that he could define and toy with, and once he found one, he stuck with it, for good or ill. And I'm not trying to claim he wasn't aware of some of the implications - it's too much of a stretch to read him describing how various different populations of humans ascended from and then fell back into physical apehood in his setting and think it never occurred to him that being more recently evolved from apes would be an insulting idea - but I don't think that stemmed from any sort of agenda of his. He just thought it'd be evocative, and underline his central thesis that man's natural state is lawless barbarism, an edgy idea that he (correctly IMO) figured made his stories more surprising and thrilling to his audience. We were talking earlier about how Lovecraft's "we are tiny and the universe is full of ancient horrors" idea isn't really all that scary to us now, and maybe this is a similar sort of thing: to a 1930s audience, "all we have built will inevitably crumble because civilization is inherently corrupt" isn't all that different.
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Dec 10, 2018 18:09
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Are they finally going to ruin Sonic?! It should be fine. Sonic is both fast and, occasionally, furious, so we’re in good hands.
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Dec 10, 2018 18:29
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Is it just me or does Sonic have Deegansnout.
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Dec 10, 2018 19:02
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Sonic's always had that.
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Dec 10, 2018 19:14
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He's had the mouth on one side of his face, yes, but he hasn't had an actual snout like that key art looks to be giving him. They're literally casting him in the worst possible light.
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Dec 10, 2018 19:19
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Lovecraft's work was copyrighted; his aunt's basically licensed the rights to Wandrei and Derleth so they could publish his stories through Arkham House, and it's been somewhat murky since then whether they really had the rights to like enforce copyright against other publishers and so on, though for a long time they did. His stuff finally did go public domain in like 2012 or so, though I don't think the rights had been vigorously enforced in the preceding decade or two.
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Dec 10, 2018 19:47
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Kurieg posted:He's had the mouth on one side of his face, yes, but he hasn't had an actual snout like that key art looks to be giving him. Honestly I think the most unsettling thing is the backlit hairs on the headspikes Are they flesh-lumps with long hairs running down them lengthwise? Are they just made of hair? What the gently caress is going on this year?
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Dec 10, 2018 20:54
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Were his arms always blue?
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Dec 10, 2018 21:34
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Are they finally going to ruin Sonic?! Uh, Sonic '06 already happened.  Bedlamdan posted:Were his arms always blue? No, they're usually light skin color (at least in the old Genesis games, See: Kurieg's avatar.) E: Yeah, looking at the newer games this looks to also be the case Foolster41 fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Dec 10, 2018 |
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Dec 10, 2018 23:04
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They've only been blue in the Sonic Boom related media.
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Dec 10, 2018 23:11
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 Hmm
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Dec 10, 2018 23:54
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Leperflesh posted:But Howard was aware of a... I'm not sure whether to call it a conspiracy theory, or myth, or what, but basically decades (I believe 1880s, but I don't find a clear reference with a couple minutes of googling) before Howard was writing, there was a sort of cultish alternative-history theory passed around by various crackpots and even published in some various obscure counterfactual/revisionist histories that proposed a forgotten age that preceded the earliest known civilization at the time (I think Egypt, ignoring the Indus Valley or Mesopotamian, but don't quote me on that). This earlier age purported to account for and give an explanation for various historical mysteries and difficulties of the time; things like, why are there white people here and black people there, and how could the greeks have been so advanced when the (so-called) dark ages were so backwards, etc. etc. And, critically, an origin for the Aryan people separate and better than all the other people. I think that's "Lemuria"? It started off as a "hey are lemurs here but also way over there with nothing to connect them but water? Must have been some sort of land bridge that sunk!" but then some clever-clogs figured out plate tectonics and all that jazz, so this hypothetical subcontinent/land bridge became part of some mystic woo nonsense.
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Dec 11, 2018 00:01
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