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BIGFOOT EROTICA posted:Not gonna ask about spoilers but I’m real curious how you became a beta reader. Short answer: Nepotism. Long answer: Friend by marriage, attended his wedding.
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May 15, 2019 05:44
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I read October Man over the weekend. It was excellent. Not the best thing in the series or anything -- the main characters are very german and lack Peter and Nightingale's flair -- but entertaining. Mostly worth reading for the German perspective on Aaronovitch's setting. Anyway, really came here to post this: https://twitter.com/Ben_Aaronovitch/status/1129407678042771456
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May 20, 2019 15:18
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Oh, so Ghosts of Gotham is connected to the Faust-verse after all (or at least the Faust-multiverse). Didn't expect that after what I'd read going in. Wonder if it'll actually properly cross over. I loved Wisdom's Grave, so hoping it'll happen. That's a really strong run by Schaeffer now. Hopefully he knows what he's doing with Harmony Black and it won't break the streak.
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May 20, 2019 16:52
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Junkenstein posted:Hopefully he knows what he's doing with Harmony Black and it won't break the streak. He's said that he's changed up his approach to Harmony Black now that he isn't beholden to a publisher with the series, so I'm cautiously optimistic.
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May 20, 2019 19:18
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Junkenstein posted:Oh, so Ghosts of Gotham is connected to the Faust-verse after all (or at least the Faust-multiverse). Didn't expect that after what I'd read going in. Wonder if it'll actually properly cross over. I loved Wisdom's Grave, so hoping it'll happen. It's not according to his blog: quote:(Long story short, all the Daniel Faust and Faust-adjacent series are in the First Story continuity, while Gotham and its followups are in the new, unconnected Secret History universe. And as for the Charlie McCabe books…well, that’ll be a challenge for sharp-eyed readers to figure out sometime next year.)
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May 20, 2019 19:24
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Dilber posted:It's not according to his blog: Yeah, that's why I was surprised to see The Lady in Red, the King of Lament, the smell of roses.....
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May 20, 2019 19:38
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Junkenstein posted:Yeah, that's why I was surprised to see The Lady in Red, the King of Lament, the smell of roses..... Similar imagery and archetypes but I don’t think they were actually those characters. Post-Wisdom Graves Spoiler: The Faustverse is heavily Judeo-Christian influenced with only a smattering of characters that might not have come from the Goddess of the Universe or her sad offspring. The enemy and the Rakshasa are the only ones I can think of but they might be easily explained in a future book. Gotham has a very different mythology so far. Magic is abundant and doesn’t immediately appear to be coming from the same tainted (or now pure) source as Faustverse. Hekate and her daughters have strong similarities to the lady and the Cutting Knives but seem to be something else so far. So far we’ve seen more Greek/Roman influences than Judeo-Christian. I don’t think the creature on the other side of the portal was a king either. Just some kind of anti-life being.
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May 25, 2019 00:00
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Lawlicaust posted:Similar imagery and archetypes but I don’t think they were actually those characters. Yeah, it absolutely doesn't fit at the moment, based on what we learn in Wisdom's Grave, but the little things seems a bit more than easter eggs to me, especially since they're directly related to multiverse poo poo like the smell of roses when portals open. The antagonist says he's going to become the Prince of Lament and one of the ships in Bring the Fire belongs to the King of Lament. Seems an odd choice if they're not related.
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May 25, 2019 11:41
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My theory (also post-Wisdoms Grave spoilers): The caretaker in Heaven says that Sophia left for a while, and speculates that she "stepped sideways into some other multiverse" before she came back and was murdered. Structurally, the Faustverse is Gnostic/Judeo-Christian with the exception of the rakshasa (and Naavarasi has lied about so much poo poo at this point that nothing she says can be trusted) and one lone actual goddess, the Lady in Red. While the Ghosts-verse, on the other hand, is basically Greek: the Greek gods, muses and myths are all real there. I think the two settings are side by side, walled off from each other. Sophia either created the Gotham-verse when she went wandering or she found it already there, visited, and left again. Hekate and the Lady in Red are the same person, and the reason she's unique in the Faust multiverse is because she's not a native: as the goddess of witches, she found a way to breach the wall between settings the same way Sophia did, maybe by following Sophia's trail. Schaefer being Schaefer, he wrote an entire sequel to Gotham, decided it sucked, and threw it in the trash to start all over again. The new book is a stand-alone with new characters set in the same world, and he updated his blog with a synopsis: "The working title (which will probably get changed) is The Hungry Dreaming, in which a modern-day investigation into the byzantine bureaucracy of New York’s Emergency Management Department leads to a conspiracy with its roots in the American Revolution. It involves Alexander Hamilton (and his true, secret mission at the Battle of Yorktown), the Culper spy network, the execution of Benedict Arnold, a renegade goddess, and the power of truth in a post-truth world. (And if your reaction to that is “but Benedict Arnold was never executed,” you are correct. Or are you?)" Also the new Harmony book has been totally finished for months but he can't release any self-pubbed stuff within X months of his trad-pubbed books because contracts, so he has to sit on it for now, and the new Faust is with his editor.
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May 25, 2019 12:54
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StonecutterJoe posted:My theory (also post-Wisdoms Grave spoilers): The caretaker in Heaven says that Sophia left for a while, and speculates that she "stepped sideways into some other multiverse" before she came back and was murdered. Structurally, the Faustverse is Gnostic/Judeo-Christian with the exception of the rakshasa (and Naavarasi has lied about so much poo poo at this point that nothing she says can be trusted) and one lone actual goddess, the Lady in Red. While the Ghosts-verse, on the other hand, is basically Greek: the Greek gods, muses and myths are all real there. The man is a machine. How does he pump out so many words? And they are still high quality.
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May 25, 2019 18:13
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I don't know anything about the metalore stuff, but I finished Ghosts of Gotham and really enjoyed it. Although I preferred the parts before the supernatural stuff started happening.
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May 29, 2019 09:17
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Scorchy posted:I don't know anything about the metalore stuff, but I finished Ghosts of Gotham and really enjoyed it. Although I preferred the parts before the supernatural stuff started happening. He's got a noir-y non-supernatural book coming out soon (because of course he loving does), so that bodes well for that I guess.
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May 29, 2019 11:37
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So good omens has landed and apparently so has the first few episodes of the Rook
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Jun 1, 2019 12:53
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Sloth Life posted:So good omens has landed and apparently so has the first few episodes of the Rook Google says The Rook is still a month away.
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Jun 1, 2019 13:07
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Sloth Life posted:So good omens has landed and apparently so has the first few episodes of the Rook Watched it last night. It's pretty good. I think Amazon's binge it all at once structure doesn't work as well for building buzz as once a week releases.
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Jun 1, 2019 14:19
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Megazver posted:Google says The Rook is still a month away. You are right, 30 June, I'm sorry. Good Omens: I'm charmed by Aziraphael. Not a Tennant fan. Lots of "Hey! It's that Guy/Gal" going on which is fun. Surprised by some of the star power they managed to get. Sloth Life fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Jun 1, 2019 |
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Jun 1, 2019 19:00
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I was a little wary of Good Omens (it's been one of my favorite books for something like half my life) but I thought it was, while not perfect, very good. And I am a Tennant fan but Michael Sheen's performance as Aziraphale was probably my favorite thing in the show.
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Jun 3, 2019 18:28
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Sheen was perfect. Tennent was good. Third episode, which opened with a bunch of vignettes about the two, was my favorite part.
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Jun 3, 2019 18:32
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Trailer for The Rook is out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeREWeYsvls
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Jun 4, 2019 18:04
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thrawn527 posted:Trailer for The Rook is out. Looks alright to me. Is that handsome black dude supposed to be Conrad Grantchester? And did I miss Alrich? I really want to see what they do with him. His casual, yet overwhelming, weirdness is one of my favorite things from the book. There's always something off about him in every scene. Sometimes it's his hair, sometimes his clothes, sometimes the fact that he's "casually ripping the arms off".
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Jun 4, 2019 18:26
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Achievement Unlocked: We Liked That Version of Mad World, Too Use a slower, gender-screwed version of a song for your drama trailer It looks fine, it'll probably be fine. I wonder if this'll be one season and done or if they're going to do Stiletto next.
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Jun 4, 2019 19:44
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It looked like a gritty, dark version. I enjoyed the whimsy as much as anything else and this looks like it’ll be...unwhimsy. It’ll be need if they use the video files in place of her infodump binders.
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Jun 4, 2019 19:56
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IDK if Starz just has a particularly lovely style of trailer, but the tone seems completely wrong. Hopefully it's not lovely.
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Jun 4, 2019 20:16
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Not weird and supernatural enough, imo. Though hopefully they are just saving the good stuff?
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Jun 4, 2019 20:30
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It really sounds like they're trying to make all of the Checquy's agents out to be some flavor of psychic instead of magical, which is... not good, considering one of them being a straight up vampire is a core conceit of the book. The Checquy is supposed to be way, waaaaay beyond "the farthest reach of human biology".quote:Is that handsome black dude supposed to be Conrad Grantchester?
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Jun 4, 2019 21:27
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navyjack posted:It looked like a gritty, dark version. I enjoyed the whimsy as much as anything else and this looks like it’ll be...unwhimsy. It’ll be need if they use the video files in place of her infodump binders. Old Kentucky Shark posted:The Checquy is supposed to be way, waaaaay beyond "the farthest reach of human biology". To me, these both read as compulsory concessions to the medium. Whimsy is tough to sustain in serialized drama, especially when it's attempting to counterbalance more serious elements. What often results is clunky tonal dissonance. As for toning down the supernatural, that screams budget limitations. It's a lot cheaper to cut the giant flesh cube and have most of the power usage present as actors grimacing and emoting really hard.
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Jun 5, 2019 14:06
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Finally decided to sit down and knuckle through the faust larger series, and I'm not far into Harmony black - hope it improves because it's *really* not pulling in my attention.
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Jun 5, 2019 16:18
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What I don't get is the trafficking angle. Quote: "like all rare and valuable things, EVA's are being trafficked." It's been a while since I read the book but that was never a real thing was it? I hope this doesn't mean they're skipping over the Grafters.
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Jun 5, 2019 17:59
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Wahad posted:What I don't get is the trafficking angle. Quote: "like all rare and valuable things, EVA's are being trafficked." It's been a while since I read the book but that was never a real thing was it? I hope this doesn't mean they're skipping over the Grafters. It was there. The phony Estate was acquiring kids (both with and without powers) through illegal means. It wasn't called trafficking, but it was trafficking.
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Jun 5, 2019 18:13
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ConfusedUs posted:It was there. The phony Estate was acquiring kids (both with and without powers) through illegal means. It wasn't called trafficking, but it was trafficking. Ooooh, right. drat, I didn't even think of that. I guess the fact that the trailer said it made me think they were gonna put more of an emphasis on it, but I guess that's not the worst thing.
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Jun 5, 2019 18:24
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tithin posted:Finally decided to sit down and knuckle through the faust larger series, and I'm not far into Harmony black - hope it improves because it's *really* not pulling in my attention. Harmony Black is easily the worst of all Schaefer's series; something he largely blames on publisher interference making him add a bunch of stuff (a romance angle, etc) that he didn't want to add.
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Jun 5, 2019 18:31
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I like the Harmony Black books but lady autist lead character, lady beast co lead is a hard sell outside of paranormal romance.
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Jun 5, 2019 19:59
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tithin posted:Finally decided to sit down and knuckle through the faust larger series, and I'm not far into Harmony black - hope it improves because it's *really* not pulling in my attention. Harmony Black is easily skippable imo
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Jun 6, 2019 00:12
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It might help to read Harmony to understand why Jessie can go head to head with Nyx but other than that, you could probably skip most of it.
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Jun 6, 2019 01:27
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Wisdom’s Grave is definitely not skippable
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Jun 6, 2019 01:35
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Fallom posted:Wisdom’s Grave is definitely not skippable Same goes for the Revanche Cycle, because the payoff in Wisdom's Grave loses a bit without that backstory.
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Jun 6, 2019 13:15
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How heavy is Wisdom's Grave on sex scenes? I remember Schaefer being really bad at those.
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Jun 6, 2019 19:14
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anilEhilated posted:How heavy is Wisdom's Grave on sex scenes? I remember Schaefer being really bad at those. There's some BDSM stuff but it's mostly foreplay with fade to black before the actual sex. Unless I just skimmed them and don't remember the details.
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Jun 6, 2019 19:16
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There is a new mercy Thompson book out, and she's back on form after a few slightly disappointing ones. The "not like other girls" trope is still strong but it's a fun read.
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Jun 8, 2019 09:24
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I'm 5 books through the Rivers of London series (boy those are fun reads), and I was curious- is the implication supposed to be that Lesley teamed up with the faceless man in book 3 or 4, or that she was working for him all along? I originally assumed that she'd been turned sometime during the night witch book (since she told their captors to call the faceless man before executing her), but a friend of mine assumed that she was a mole from the very start, since it's kinda weird that she taught herself lux after seeing it once or twice.
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Jun 9, 2019 14:06
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