LLSix posted:

Just reread the first three Rivers of London books. Do they get better?

I don’t have any complaints about the plots or characters. I rather like them! Grant’s morality and wokeness are a refreshing change of pace. But they’re very much detective novels with the characters wandering from place to place and tediously building evidence. On a second read, they have been very slow paced. Even the magic and fight scenes generally failed to excite me. I was initially planning to get the fourth book right away, but now I am not sure.

Up Circle posted:

Battle Ground gave me a headache. Just too much. Not even a bad book. Just way too much, even if it had lots of individually good bits. I'm mostly a sucker for seeing the big important people do big epic things in appropriate situations. 350 pages of battle scenes was just too much though after the previous book, and the Fomor are still utterly uninteresting.


The intensity of the animosity feels totally out of place, especially Ramirez taking the effort to spy on Dresden. If I remember that bit from Peace Talks correctly.

Up Circle posted:

I was planning to write a huge post about how Marcone is in fact, the real hero of Chicago after he answers Dresdens challenge by leading half the army around the city, but then he has a coin lmao why. oh my god i hate power creep so much.

LLSix posted:

Just reread the first three Rivers of London books. Do they get better?

I don’t have any complaints about the plots or characters. I rather like them! Grant’s morality and wokeness are a refreshing change of pace. But they’re very much detective novels with the characters wandering from place to place and tediously building evidence. On a second read, they have been very slow paced. Even the magic and fight scenes generally failed to excite me. I was initially planning to get the fourth book right away, but now I am not sure.

LLSix posted:

Just reread the first three Rivers of London books. Do they get better?

I don’t have any complaints about the plots or characters. I rather like them! Grant’s morality and wokeness are a refreshing change of pace. But they’re very much detective novels with the characters wandering from place to place and tediously building evidence. On a second read, they have been very slow paced. Even the magic and fight scenes generally failed to excite me. I was initially planning to get the fourth book right away, but now I am not sure.

Hub Cat posted:

Nah, the books stay pretty grounded on the police work and low on flashy magic.

MonikaTSarn posted:

Thinks certainly do get a bit more fantastic in later books, things like the the pregnant river goddess.

Waltzing Along posted:

I'm not far in but have come to the conclusion that this serious would have been loads better if Harry had just hosed Lara years ago. Every single scene with the two of them is just constant eye-loving and I'm sick of it.

"Lara was bleeding everywhere and was bruised up but I still wanted to gently caress her! And then midget snuggled up against me and I got hard. But Lara walked by and I came so hard Molly called me Darth Vader."

Everyone posted:

Except that she's a powerful White Court vampire so it'd be safer to gently caress an electrical outlet. Feel free to do it if you don't care that much about your life or free will. Harry clearly does.

For my part I look at the various descriptions of Lara as a version of the gun porn in action movies (where the camera lovingly examines the various weapons). The point is that the hot body in the slinky clothes? That's her weapon. That's what she uses to kill you. When, you know, she's not using knives, swords, guns, etc to also kill you.

Khizan posted:

Marcone was always going to take a coin. It became inevitable as soon as he signed onto the Accords. How else is he going to get the strength to stand as Lord of Chicago in his own right? All his supernatural muscle was rented from Odin, and that's just not a real tenable longterm position. He needs some sort of real personal power to fill his role, because without it he's hideously vulnerable to the Code Duello. Without it, what happens when somebody calls him out? Is he going to send up a purely mortal guy against a wizard? Hire a Valkyrie as a champion? No, he needs power of his own and there's only a handful of sources he could get it. The only two that come to mind immediately are the Swords and the Coins, since becoming a Knight would be counterproductive to being the lord of your own territory, and the Swords are clearly out.

Everyone posted:

I suppose I can see that. Still, figure that Rudolph will probably end up getting away with it under the law (no body, no bullet, Harry was the only witness) - but only under the law. I think Freydis survived so I wouldn't put it past her to crush Rudy like a bug. Hell, even Marcone respected Murphy. I think Rudolph is in for a bad time. It wouldn't surprise me if Rudolph woke up in a hospital to find Marcone and Gard there in a Butcherverse version of this awesome scene from Person of Interest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yvhMyr_7fY

Drone Jett posted:

I agree with this, but it was also a foreseeable outcome of Even Hand, or whichever Marcone story had him barely survive a mid-grade Fomor noble sorcerer sent to kill him in one of his strong points. He won, but it used a lot of resources and required him to retreat to a prepared position. The price of independence from the coin was looking increasingly like death.


In a world with Kincaid none of these other people are a threat to Rudolph.

wheatpuppy posted:

You have just reminded me, we never did find out where he was, did we?

Drone Jett posted:

Kincaid There's a short story where Ivy fires him because she knows he took the contract to kill Dresden. So that's why he's not with her in Battle Ground, no idea where he is now, but presumably as a former right hand man for Drakul he'll come into that storyline in the near future.

Kloaked00 posted:

So I feel like there were big hints as to who Mac really is, but I couldn’t put the pieces together.

Kloaked00 posted:

So I feel like there were big hints as to who Mac really is, but I couldn’t put the pieces together.

biracial bear for uncut posted:

That makes a lot of sense given the idiotic poo poo Butcher said about COVID-19 and China.

Gnoman posted:

There was a screenshot of Butcher's social media that purported to show him being skeptical of the entire thing. Despite being posted the same day it was dated for, it could not be found on any of his social media accounts.

Jim Butcher on April 6th posted:

Dead from poor isn’t any better than dead from virus.
The problem with the shutdown is that it also kills people, with economics: your chances of death go up 63 percent if you’re unemployed, and a simple analysis of insurance tables suggests maybe 4K people die in the US every year for each percentage point of unemployment.
(Some suggest this number is as high as 40k, but that appears to be based on data from the 60s and early 70s, which is at least as old as I am, but maybe I’m insufficiently informed. The takeaway here is that everyone agrees that there is a positive correlation—they just disagree as to the degree.)
So unemployment, in the past couple of weeks, has gone from 3ish percent to 10 percent. That’s a 7 point increase in unemployment, which means that between TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND AND TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY THOUSAND *PEOPLE* have died or will die, already, here in the US, FROM THE CURE. IN ONLY TWO WEEKS OF LOSS. And more and more people will die from the cure as the economy continues to collapse—and if it goes too far, the inevitable collapse means we’ll be socially distancing with crossbows and flamethrower guitars.
We’ve just sacrificed tens of thousands of mostly lower-class Americans to give us a chance to save hundreds of thousands of covid victims. It’ll just take a while to set in, and when they die, they’ll do it almost invisibly.
BUT. Covid is also a deadly bug. Probably would kill a couple million people if we didn’t do anything, maybe as many as 10m-20m, absolute perfect storm, worst-case scenario.
Those are big scary numbers, but here’s the simple truth: we are going to win the war against the virus, period. It’s just a matter of when.
It is therefore unarguable that if we don’t find a way to change course, at some point we’re going to be issuing an economic death sentence to more people than we save from the virus—and since those people are mostly coming from the poorest sections of society, it’s kind of important that we don’t turn a blind eye to their suffering by ducking all moral responsibility for their plight. The lockdown is like chemo—sure, it fights the cancer, but it ain’t exactly kind to the rest of you while it does so.
The problem is, how do you decide when to stop the chemo? It’s not like there’s any kind of precedence to look to for guidance. (China is clearly lying about its numbers, and it shares little commonality with the US, socially or economically anyway.)
So if you’re someone thinking “they just want profits over saving people’s lives!” maybe consider that if the US economy crashes, conservatively, hundreds of thousands of Americans will die. Tens of millions more in foreign nations will die in the chaos of the power vacuum and from lack of US support. Maybe look into how bad things got during the Great Depression. How hard it was, especially on children. Our much more central role in the global economy will make it that much worse for that many more people.
And if you’re someone thinking, “There is no good reason to be doing this, this thing is just a flu,” well, you need to go over some basic medical theory and look at some historic records of the horrors of pandemics. NYC treated Covid like it was just a flu for a little too long and the bug is hammering them now. They’re expecting considerable chaos as it gets worse.
We can’t hide from this until a vaccine comes out. It just isn’t gonna be possible. Society will break down first. Sooner or later, we are gonna have to go out again.
So I guess it’ll all come down to timing. Where is the sweet spot where we maximize the number of lives saved? Where the ultimately limited and descending curve of covid fatalities meets the ascending and unlimited curve of economic fatalities? God knows. We’ll have to guess.
What I do know is this: Sitting at home forever isn’t an option. If the economy isn’t rolling again in the next few months, wildfire covid is going to be our fourth or fifth biggest problem. And even if we restarted it this second, a lot of people are gonna die economic deaths anyway as a result of the fallout.

Soysaucebeast posted:

This is the screenshot. From what I recall, Butcher acknowledged it was legit, but then also came to the realization that he was wrong and needed to learn more about everything. But that was six months ago in this hellworld, so I could be misremembering and it could be fake.

Edit: I just went scrolling through his dang Facebook feed to February (dang it's a pain to go back eight months) and I didn't find the above post, but I did find this. It's the only non-meme Covid related post he's had in the last 8 months. It's a little 'both-sides'y but it's definitely not the worst take I've read.

Wizchine posted:

I've had the displeasure of reading a Larry Correia book. Butcher's sins have been overblown in this thread.

Gnoman posted:

There was a screenshot of Butcher's social media that purported to show him being skeptical of the entire thing. Despite being posted the same day it was dated for, it could not be found on any of his social media accounts.

PST posted:

He absolutely went covidiot. He was doing it both on his facebook, and other people's. The first post that got widely shared was deleted, but the topic continued in another thread:

https://www.facebook.com/519982123/posts/10157155553362124/?d=n

I've not seen him walk it back, then again i've not seen him walk back the transphobia support either (though that one was about his sister being a transphobe rather than him outright saying anything himself).

Hub Cat posted:

I think Butcher has the level of dumbass opinions that I personally can't financially support or recommend him, but I don't feel he rises to the level of notorious shithead like Rowling or Piers Anthony where I would feel the need to actively denounce him.

Everyone posted: