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Sisal Two-Step posted:Ah whoops, that was my bad. I fixed it. ah! thx, also lol at the quotes
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Jul 7, 2021 11:45
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It was a dark and - finally, for the first time in a week- not at all stormy night when I finally searched out the previous years entries for the Bulwer-Lytton Writing Contest, whereupon I was seized by a sudden urge to re-read The Eye of Argon, here, kindly hosted by the website of Ansible magazine, and from there perusing their most recent issue I discovered a most remarkable fact! Not only is John Norman still alive, he's just turned 90 and published his 36th (!) Gor novel.
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Jul 9, 2021 08:18
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Perhaps more tangential than topical, a article from a few years back about Andrew J. Offutt, writer of fantasy, science fiction, Conan, and 400-some porno novels, who was motivated to start writing by the poor quality of erotica in the 60s. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/magazine/my-dad-the-pornographer.html quote:In the mid-1960s, Dad purchased several porn novels through the mail. My mother recalls him reading them with disgust — not because of the content, but because of how poorly they were written. He hurled a book across the room and told her he could do better. Mom suggested he do so. According to her, the tipping point for Dad’s full commitment to porn, five years later, was my orthodontic needs. quote:Dad soon began publishing with Orpheus, which paid him $800 a book. He invented John Denis, based on his favorite Reds players, Johnny Bench and Denis Menke, and switched to Midwood for more money. After a falling out with an editor over a title change, he returned to Orpheus. Later, Orpheus became irritated with Dad and stopped buying his work. Curious about the changing market, he read a dozen recent Orpheus books. Dad believed he’d influenced the industry to the point where his style was consistently copied, the proof being that other authors had begun writing knowledgeably of the clitoris, which he believed he pioneered. This upset him to the point that he decided to trick the editor into buying his work.
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Jul 9, 2021 10:14
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The man who invented the clitoris in 1973
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Jul 9, 2021 10:30
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HelleSpud posted:It was a dark and - finally, for the first time in a week- not at all stormy night when I finally searched out the previous years entries for the Bulwer-Lytton Writing Contest, whereupon I was seized by a sudden urge to re-read The Eye of Argon, here, kindly hosted by the website of Ansible magazine, and from there perusing their most recent issue I discovered a most remarkable fact! Also check out the Lyttle Lytton contest, which has a length cap on entries. I often find them funnier than the Bulwer-Lytton winners, and Adam Cadre has some good commentary for each year: http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html
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Jul 9, 2021 12:22
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OwlFancier posted:The man who invented the clitoris in 1973 o7
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Jul 9, 2021 12:38
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C.M. Kruger posted:Perhaps more tangential than topical, a article from a few years back about Andrew J. Offutt, writer of fantasy, science fiction, Conan, and 400-some porno novels, who was motivated to start writing by the poor quality of erotica in the 60s. Ed Wood spent most of the last decade of his life writing porn stories and books too.
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Jul 9, 2021 13:59
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OwlFancier posted:The man who invented the clitoris in 1973 It was kind of traumatic to have that installed at age 8, not going to lie.
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Jul 9, 2021 16:03
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i imagine it also sucks if it comes preinstalled & you didnt want it
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Jul 9, 2021 16:36
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OwlFancier posted:The man who invented the clitoris in 1973 
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Jul 9, 2021 16:38
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Carthag Tuek posted:i imagine it also sucks if it comes preinstalled & you didnt want it My parents wanted me to have every opportunity, so when they heard about this new technology, they signed me right up.
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Jul 9, 2021 18:25
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quote:writing knowledgeably of the clitoris Tbf this is still a problem for a lot of writers. I recall one example that made the Twitter rounds, where a sex scene went something like, "He slid both thumbs into her clitoris and pulled it wide open."
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Jul 9, 2021 20:32
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wheatpuppy posted:Tbf this is still a problem for a lot of writers. I recall one example that made the Twitter rounds, where a sex scene went something like, "He slid both thumbs into her clitoris and pulled it wide open." good lord 
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Jul 9, 2021 21:12
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remember the sex scene where the author describes the woman's hymen breaking as a snapping sound like a sausage casing or a balloon or something? i think it was posted in this thread a ways back but i can't find it.
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Jul 9, 2021 21:35
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Carthag Tuek posted:i imagine it also sucks if it comes preinstalled & you didnt want it most commonly it's not that installation that's the problem, it's the driveway that it's parked in that's the issue
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Jul 9, 2021 21:44
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neongrey posted:most commonly it's not that installation that's the problem, it's the driveway that it's parked in that's the issue i think i get that. thank you
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Jul 9, 2021 23:04
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Here's a thread about some badly updated book covers https://twitter.com/Java_jigga/status/1417929596733825026?s=19
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Jul 22, 2021 04:24
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Hard disagree. The modern cover is generic but the old cover is generic in the style of the time: floating heads looking at nothing, vague scenery. There's little there that reflects on the actual book.
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Jul 22, 2021 07:12
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Am I wrong for liking the minimalist covers? I think the old covers look dated.
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Jul 22, 2021 07:56
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At least the new covers mostly don't have naked ladies plastered on them for no apparent reason other than "hey nerd, look at this book". Way too many sf/f book covers from the 70s-90s were just blatant horny-pandering.
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Jul 22, 2021 08:11
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I really like the new (I guess) minimalist Dune covers, personally. The older covers are a'ight, but the new ones are quite striking.
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Jul 22, 2021 09:28
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Yeah, I'm half and half - those old Earthsea covers by Pauline Ellison kick the poo poo out of the modern hawk clipart one, for example, but the modern abstract-y ones like the Snow Crash one absolutely slap. Hot take: there are good artists and designers and poo poo ones in any era! :shock: I love Bill Sienkewicz's Dune comic cover  but all true Dune covers are by Bruce Pennington. Sorry, but it's incontrovertibly proven by the fact that the series went to poo poo as soon as it stopped having Pennington covers. QED.
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Jul 22, 2021 09:49
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A lot of this is driven by "oh, but the old covers are a classic!" Yeah, because those are the ones you saw in the library as a kid. The Hardy Boys covers sucked poo poo. They were made to sell by the standards of the time then, and the new ones are made to sell by the standards of the time now. This is especially evident in the Artemis Fowl cover, where when Artemis Fowl was actually the hot poo poo in YA novels, there was a lot of skeuomorphic covers to make books look like they were old fantasy tomes and poo poo. Most of the D&D 3.5 sourcebooks I had as a kid did that style too. But now, since so much more book sales are done online, a cover that's a flashy attention getter at a book fair doesn't look as interesting on Amazon. And since Percy Jackson has much more current cultural cache, they've updated the cover to be a little more focused on Modern Boy Protagonist Plus Magic. Most of the original covers in that list are just as of their time as everything else and even big-name authors frequently don't get to choose how their covers are done, so the ones that people have nostalgia for are no more part of an "original vision" of the author than the new ones.
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Jul 22, 2021 10:16
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I'm remembering the old SF magazines where they'd get some cover art in then grab a passing author and tell them to write something to match it.
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Jul 22, 2021 11:09
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The Lone Badger posted:I'm remembering the old SF magazines where they'd get some cover art in then grab a passing author and tell them to write something to match it. Or those classic SF book covers from Christopher Foss, featuring titanic robots and spaceships battling each other. Meanwhile the book is about a mopey detective in a subterranean city, or a group of psychologists talking endlessly. Thinking Asimov here.
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Jul 22, 2021 12:34
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Cobalt-60 posted:Am I wrong for liking the minimalist covers? I think the old covers look dated. No at all. The old covers look like uninspired movie posters, where the artist slaps a set of disconnected images together and calls it a day. I really hate that cliche of disembodied heads / figures looking into the distance. Like, what does it mean? There are characters in this book and they will look at things?
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Jul 22, 2021 12:36
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nonathlon posted:Or those classic SF book covers from Christopher Foss, featuring titanic robots and spaceships battling each other. Meanwhile the book is about a mopey detective in a subterranean city, or a group of psychologists talking endlessly. Thinking Asimov here. My life became inordinately better once I realised I could just buy books of Christopher Foss art and imagine the narrative myself.
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Jul 22, 2021 12:52
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If we're talking bad covers, i have to bring up this cover of Little Women I found once. It's just a normal edition of Little Women, despite what the Maoist imagery would lead you to believe. Honestly I think it wraps around from bad all the way back to amazing.
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Jul 22, 2021 12:52
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Don Gato posted:If we're talking bad covers, i have to bring up this cover of Little Women I found once. That's awesome. In the same vein, this classic cover for 1984: 
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Jul 22, 2021 13:17
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Good book covers are the ones that look  when airbrushed on the side of a van
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Jul 22, 2021 13:21
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Which is better?
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Jul 22, 2021 14:09
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Tiggum posted:Which is better? Famously, Colin Greenland's Take Back Plenty had a stocky, rough-and-tumble black mechanic as heroine who was pictured on the cover as a glamorous blonde Caucasian in a skintight space suit. Thinking about it, it was probably repurposed art but otherwise the artist never read even page 1.
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Jul 22, 2021 14:14
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The second option, clearly! Gave us such classics as Discworld's Josh Kirby covers, and this.
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Jul 22, 2021 14:17
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IIRC the original releases for the Wheel of Time had a goofy thing for the first couple of books where the cover artist kept adding in a character that didn't exist into scenes.
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Jul 22, 2021 14:35
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On Wheel of Time that was due to edits. Originally there was at least one extra character Jordan decided to edit him out but nobody passed that along to the artist. If it had been 5 books in there'd have been a great joke about the artist just not believing Jordan would ever cut a useless character. Edit: did a quick google and it was Dannil that was supposed to go along with them instead of staying in the village. Darkhold has a new favorite as of 15:12 on Jul 22, 2021 |
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Jul 22, 2021 14:57
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That's not to say that Darrell Sweet's Wheel of Time cover art was, y'know, good or accurate to the books in any other respects either.
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Jul 22, 2021 15:20
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I'll give the last book credit as, while the lettering is rather busy, the image doesn't suck. The previous artist died. The same deal happened with Pratchett's books.
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Jul 22, 2021 18:52
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Tiggum posted:Which is better? The latter is irritating if you're deeply invested in the character/series but is otherwise pretty funny. I always think of the Mega Man box art depicting a swollen, confused larper with a pistol
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Jul 22, 2021 19:40
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I'll give the last book credit as, while the lettering is rather busy, the image doesn't suck. what is he even supposed to be doing? that's such a goofy pose
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Jul 22, 2021 21:50
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Stexils posted:what is he even supposed to be doing? that's such a goofy pose +1 Sword of Vogueing
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Jul 22, 2021 22:11
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