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ulmont posted:In the Bujold universe in question, children are commonly gestated in vats and opening is referred to at least once as decanting. That's from Brave New World.
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# ? Feb 9, 2021 22:39 |
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# ? Jun 13, 2024 05:29 |
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Lottery of Babylon posted:That's from Brave New World. Did Huxley use the decant term? It's been a while.
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# ? Feb 9, 2021 23:04 |
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ulmont posted:Did Huxley use the decant term? It's been a while. "Decanted" is the standard term used throughout BNW, they use it the way we would use "born".
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# ? Feb 9, 2021 23:11 |
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Lottery of Babylon posted:"Decanted" is the standard term used throughout BNW, they use it the way we would use "born". Fair enough.
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# ? Feb 9, 2021 23:22 |
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Ccs posted:While I was searching for a new fantasy series to read I came across "The Empire of Silence", which was pitched as a sci-fi combination of The Name of the Wind and Dune. Most people have given it good reviews but there's one observant goodreads reviewer who noted how much the author lifted. Ironically, this author actually has released his third book in the series, but since his series will apparently be 5 books perhaps he will pull a Rothfuss eventually. I read part of the first book when it was first released and it was incredibly unoriginal. It was also just poorly written, repeating the same things over and over, like hope you enjoy reading about how the main character is taller than most people but considered short for someone who is an aristocrat. The book also does this really weird thing where the main character becomes a gladiator, it goes over his first battle in the arena and then skips his entire career. This might make sense if the book had some kind of momentum to the story where it needed to move on to the next thing, except then it just starts farting around at his new job where he's companion/tutor to the teenaged kids of a rich guy.
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# ? Feb 10, 2021 20:00 |
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muscles like this! posted:I read part of the first book when it was first released and it was incredibly unoriginal. It was also just poorly written, repeating the same things over and over, like hope you enjoy reading about how the main character is taller than most people but considered short for someone who is an aristocrat. The book also does this really weird thing where the main character becomes a gladiator, it goes over his first battle in the arena and then skips his entire career. This might make sense if the book had some kind of momentum to the story where it needed to move on to the next thing, except then it just starts farting around at his new job where he's companion/tutor to the teenaged kids of a rich guy. Yeah I'll be skipping it, I don't have the patience for a 5 book series, especially not one that decides to crib from Rothfuss' ponderous sentences.
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# ? Feb 10, 2021 20:35 |
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My favorite review of Empire of Silence is a rabid Rothfuss fan complaining:quote:A lot of descriptions felt over the top and melodramatic for me. For example, the first two lines of chapter 13 were:
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# ? Feb 10, 2021 22:48 |
i'm more furious than ever because that's a sentence that actually means something and carries a mood
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# ? Feb 10, 2021 23:01 |
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The bells rang the stones? That's some bell.
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# ? Feb 10, 2021 23:04 |
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Patware posted:i'm more furious than ever because that's a sentence that actually means something and carries a mood "Deep as the cracking of stones beneath the earth they rang." That's a really rough sentence that reads as a first pass of someone trying to impart gravitas. If I were to do a quick edit to it, chop off "they rang" and if necessary shift that to a following sentence. Without context the whole sentence feels off. The imagery that it is attempting to call would fit in something like NK Jemisin's Broken Earth series since those are intrinsically tied plot and theme to the movement of the earth. For a space faring odyssey book it feels weird. Mind you, it is still is better than half of Rothfuss' middling prose but that is damning with faint praise.
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# ? Feb 10, 2021 23:11 |
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Patware posted:i'm more furious than ever because that's a sentence that actually means something and carries a mood I was filled with fury, like an icicle dropping on an unclear day, this wannabe writer, who wanted to be a writer so badly he actually wrote, unlike my hero who is a writer who hasn't done any writing in a decade, had dared to use overly dramatic language. Verboten! I exclaimed, slamming the keys in a syncopation like the sweet rhythm that I imagined he imagined when he imagined his beloved D*****, so clever, the name change, I thought, changing my mood as I neared the end of my review in one part, a rejection a renunciation and a rebuke. I knew I'd done the sort of service that nice guys like me were never rewarded for, warning fellow enthusiasts away from a pale imitation of a man who was definitely not pale, but hale, preventing a sale.
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# ? Feb 10, 2021 23:17 |
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The bells rang deep and wide as autumn's ending.
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# ? Feb 10, 2021 23:17 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:The bells rang deep and wide as autumn's turgid ending.
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# ? Feb 10, 2021 23:36 |
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Benson Cunningham posted:The bells rang the stones? It’s just saying the bell’s sound is deep as the sound of the earth moving. Kind of a weak bit of language since it can easily be misinterpreted to mean the bell was causing the earth to shake.
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# ? Feb 10, 2021 23:36 |
trying to figure out if people thought i was defending the other mediocre writer or actively praising him instead of just wanting to push a rothfuss fan into some mud
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# ? Feb 10, 2021 23:44 |
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Beware "the gerund of x" similes. They'll make you think you're good at writing. As surely as the demuring of fantasy women pours forth from your thoughtful pen, they'll make you think that.
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# ? Feb 10, 2021 23:56 |
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The bells rang with the fury of a silence in three parts.
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# ? Feb 11, 2021 00:03 |
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Reddit actually produced something entertaining. Kingkiller fan predicts the Act 4 and 5 of Shakespeare plays. quote:The Scottish Play
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# ? Feb 11, 2021 00:49 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I found some leaked excerpts of The Doors of Stone (sorry, can't say where), and holy poo poo, I can't believe how wrong we've been. Rothfuss is a legend. This is going to be incredible. Yeah this guys source is legit. My uncle works at Patrick Rothco and he has the Doors of Stone and says it’s really good and it’s almost finished and you can read it on the PlayStation 5 too. He said I can read it when he gets back from Canada which coincidentally is where my girlfriend lives (she goes to another school, modeling school, no you can’t talk to her).
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# ? Feb 12, 2021 17:05 |
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Are you mocking me? That reads like a troll post, and I am no troll. The Doors of Stone is nothing short of a miraculous achievement, as rich and powerful as the settling of summer mists on a deep, unrippled lake.
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# ? Feb 12, 2021 18:01 |
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Go away Patrick
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# ? Feb 13, 2021 00:09 |
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Ccs posted:Reddit actually produced something entertaining. In a world where tons of people on r/wallstreetbets just watched their retirement and life savings go up in smoke for the sake of a meme stock and refusing to not be a "hodler" r/kingkiller still manages to have the most absolute morons still believing in a fairy tale and incapable of the slightest amount of introspection.
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# ? Feb 13, 2021 16:00 |
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You clearly haven't heard about Star Citizen.
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# ? Feb 13, 2021 17:26 |
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Inspector Gesicht posted:You clearly haven't heard about Star Citizen. By this point the amount of money that has been set on fire makes it more analogous to a religion. Kingkiller is just like every goofy cringe tiktok of a guy thirsting over a sexy video or something but instead of a model or celeb is a fat old 40s man with crumbs in his beard smirking about what he technically did or didn't say.
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# ? Feb 13, 2021 17:34 |
Rothfuss had a beauty in three parts, like watching Gamestop stock rise.
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# ? Feb 14, 2021 02:40 |
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Poking about Goodreads, guess who has 2 of the top 3 "Best Fantasy Books of the 21st Century": https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/88.Best_Fantasy_Books_of_the_21st_Century
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# ? Feb 14, 2021 05:03 |
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Hughmoris posted:Poking about Goodreads, guess who has 2 of the top 3 "Best Fantasy Books of the 21st Century": The thing that pisses me off most about this - why the gently caress are we still pretending that Fantasy comes in "books"? The unit of modern fantasy is the series, that's how people read them, that's how people talk about them. You wouldn't give Scorsese two Oscars, one for "the first half of The Departed" and another for "the second half of The Departed".
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# ? Feb 14, 2021 10:57 |
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Strom Cuzewon posted:The thing that pisses me off most about this - why the gently caress are we still pretending that Fantasy comes in "books"? The unit of modern fantasy is the series, that's how people read them, that's how people talk about them. You wouldn't give Scorsese two Oscars, one for "the first half of The Departed" and another for "the second half of The Departed". Precisely for the reason of flooding lists.
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# ? Feb 14, 2021 11:47 |
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This list is proof that democracy doesn't work.
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# ? Feb 14, 2021 15:31 |
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Strom Cuzewon posted:The thing that pisses me off most about this - why the gently caress are we still pretending that Fantasy comes in "books"? The unit of modern fantasy is the series, that's how people read them, that's how people talk about them. You wouldn't give Scorsese two Oscars, one for "the first half of The Departed" and another for "the second half of The Departed". I wouldn't give Scorcese anything for that bloated turd. Imagine if authors won prizes for "adapting" foreign language novels by making them longer and less coherent. Well ok, someone can probably think of an example or two like the Hunger Games.
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# ? Feb 14, 2021 16:29 |
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Strom Cuzewon posted:The thing that pisses me off most about this - why the gently caress are we still pretending that Fantasy comes in "books"? The unit of modern fantasy is the series, that's how people read them, that's how people talk about them. You wouldn't give Scorsese two Oscars, one for "the first half of The Departed" and another for "the second half of The Departed". I mean it’s more like film series. Star Wars is a series but I can’t rate Empire lower just because Episodes 1-3 and 9 are bad.
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# ? Feb 14, 2021 17:44 |
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Lol at most of them being children's books
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# ? Feb 14, 2021 23:36 |
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Terror Sweat posted:Lol at most of them being children's books Huh, weirdly, as you go down the list you see a pretty clear link to number of reviews vs rating. Almost like the top books are just the ones with enough of an insane fanbase to spam 5 star reviews in the hundreds of thousands.
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# ? Feb 15, 2021 01:31 |
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So Rothfuss had a stream the other day where he was a little more honest about how things are going with the third book. Apparently it took like 8 or 9 years to write the original big draft that was then split into three books, but the draft changed so much for The Name of the Wind and even more for it's sequel that the third is just a mess of tangled threads that no longer refer to anything. And now so much time has passed since book 2 was written that it's even harder to figure out how to change what's left of the original book 3 to mesh with all the new material. I don't know if he'll ever actually manage it. Putting aside that the pacing doesn't allow for it, I think 10 years of not writing would rust up someone's skills to an incredible extent. And if he is actually as obsessive as he claims, I think it would be difficult to deal with reading the result of a decade of idleness and trying to edit that into something he's happy with. Still, I'm sure his editor would happily give him notes on any work in progress chapters. If he ever shows them to her. Ccs fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Mar 19, 2021 |
# ? Mar 19, 2021 19:42 |
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Dude had nine years to polish his garbage and after all that time that's his reasoning? It'd be sad if it wasn't so damned pathetic.
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# ? Mar 19, 2021 19:50 |
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Honestly it sounds like misery. Sunday night homework blues for your entire life.
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# ? Mar 19, 2021 19:53 |
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So he admitted he's been lying constantly about having a draft finished, including the one he tweeted a pic of? gently caress him he's realizing his goodwill fron 2006 is gone and is scrambling to avoid any consequences.
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# ? Mar 19, 2021 19:55 |
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pentyne posted:So he admitted he's been lying constantly about having a draft finished, including the one he tweeted a pic of? "That's totally a finished draft, except none of it is usable anymore because my editors had to rip apart everything in my first book to make something remotely cohesive, and in the 14 years since I have done nothing to make it into a viable part three."
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# ? Mar 19, 2021 20:16 |
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So, going by the timeline 2006- Rothfuss sells the "book" and who knows if it was the trilogy draft or the final cut of book one 2007- Name of the Wind is released 2011- Wise Man's Fear In 5 years, he went from a doorstopper of a draft into two complete books with the third one left. Since then 2014- Slow Regard of Silent Things i.e the magical pixie dream girl rape story 2013 &2014- Bast novellas That's just book writing related to his only original idea. The rest of it is as follows - starting and running a charity that raises money for another charity but takes a cut to pay salaries to his friends and six figures in rent to a building he owns - starting or appearing frequently on podcasts - hopping onto tons of D&D podcasts - taking any crpg work he can get, including being rebuffed when trying to offer his writing expertise - writing Rick and Morty comics - constant day long twitch Q & As Any one of those things would've been fine on its own (except the charity) but taken together it's a pretty clear pattern of him just loving off to do whatever he wants and putting no effort into his vaunted "masterpiece". In fact, the most common thing he's said about it is maybe he'll need to make it four books, and that it's just the prequel trilogy to the 'real' trilogy and other fart-huffing grandiose statements. He's been living off of 10 years of hype with nothing to show for it, finally ate poo poo for the first time professional in his life when his editor outed him as doing nothing, and his first response was to basically claim the book was being worked on to perfection and to wait. His idiot r/kingkiller fans eagerly lapped it up at that time. Now he's coming out with yet another walk back statement playing down his own lack of work trying to present it like it was something beyond his control. The excuse pattern has reached a point where everything he comes out to say should basically mean he's repudiated the last 7-8 years of things he said about the book as outright lies. This is like textbook manipulation, offering apologies that seek to elicit sympathy for his struggle while minimizing the fact he's lied for the entire time, openly mocking people who questioned him, and probably just being a poo poo human being in general. He's played up his writer struggles and mental health too as a tool to deflect criticism, so he can gently caress off extra hard for using that excuse and still trying to pretend like he's been putting in work when people like Scott Lynch disappeared for years, and finally came back to freely admit their mental health issues and that they did no work at all on their books during that time. Just to show how completely insane his fans are, this is his exact words quote:“The way that I write is largely implicit because if I wanted you to know more, I would’ve written it in the book. What I want you to do is wonder. And I have left treasure in there for people who want to wonder...and then wander...and then delve and theorize and bicker. I wrote this book not to be read the first time—that’s almost a byproduct. I wrote the book for people reading it a second time, so they go “oh, I couldn’t understand it, but now...”. and they loving love it. Apparently now unfinished series with abstract mysteries are special categories of great writing. pentyne fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Mar 19, 2021 |
# ? Mar 19, 2021 20:23 |
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# ? Jun 13, 2024 05:29 |
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Ccs posted:And if he is actually as obsessive as he claims, He's not, otherwise he'd have at least tried to make poo poo like Taber and the Fake Ruh stuff fit their books instead of being stapled on like they were. Rothfuss is a hack and a fraud who got super lucky just like Stephanie Meyer did with Twilight only I don't think Meyer considers herself God's gift to literature like Rothfuss does. e: At least Harry Potter, for all it's hosed up faults, is actually written in a way to appeal to kids so it's not too hard to see how that caught on without people realizing that the HP world is extremely bad and even "good" wizards are, at best, magic Illuminati Nazis who occasionally feel bad for their 'lessers'. Evil Fluffy fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Mar 19, 2021 |
# ? Mar 19, 2021 20:58 |