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Do you prefer the extended summer thread format? This poll is closed. |
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126 | 44.21% |
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| I'm Scottish |
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New Fudge Release! Hey guys, absolutely delighted to announce that now there is a frankly ridiculous amount of stock available on my website, and I'd greatly appreciate help with stopping my house turning into a Fortress Of Fudge! (It'll only attract wasps..) Right now I've just put a whole collection of lovely treats up, with one particularly special experimental flavour! Flavours available now are: Love-Or-Hate - Some said it couldn't be done. Many said it shouldn't be done. But we've done it anyway. Marmite and fudge, together at last in a sweet/savoury treat that is absolutely bursting with umami and flavour. Will reward those who dare give it a try! Peanut Butter Crunch Lemon Meringue Pie Bakewell Tart Chocolate and Chilli Whisky and Candied Ginger Salted Caramel Eton Mess Chocolate Orange Unicorn Barf Dark Chocolate Original Vanilla Veganilla Vegan Cookies Vegan Biscoff All fudge is sold in bars of c.100gr at £3.50 per. As always, use the goon code 'Roastbeefisbest' at checkout to get 5-for-4 on all flavours. Please note, all stock will be taken offline at midnight on sunday 18/07 for a stockcheck and upcoming event, so make sure to get your orders in before then! Find us at https://www.fudjit.co.uk Happy fudging, people!
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Jul 13, 2021 18:18
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Camrath and the
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Jul 13, 2021 18:30
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south park is a real tough one to adequately describe/discuss for me because I really want to hate it outright for a lot of the lazy/cheap/both sides are wrong/outright bigoted takes but I can't because sometimes they put out some good stuff and once in a blue moon it's loving great and I feel a weird sense of guilt for enjoying it As folk mentioned, beavis and butthead managed it far, far better, and the return season was excellent. In a different vein, the spinoff of daria was really well received as an awkward late teen on banks/culture, I really wish I could delete it from my head and read it again to experience it afresh and I can't think of any other book series I would want that ability for
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Jul 13, 2021 18:37
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I wasn’t going to buy more delicious fudge as my wife and I don’t need the sugar or calories but she looooves peanut butter…
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Jul 13, 2021 18:38
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Chubby Henparty posted:I think the only book that ever gave me as big a physical reaction as WF was Goodnight Mr Tom. It has been a long, long time since I've thought about this but I remember reading the book when I was in the 4th grade in the US (age 10 or so). I remember at the time the book being unlike anything I had ever read and it dealt with topics that I didn't see in other of my childhood books. There were two other books that left an impression in my mind but I can't remember the names: one involved a boy finding a "time egg" in his backyard that let him move forward/backwards in time and the other was about a child from an alternate dimension falling through a dimensional portal into our world.
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Jul 13, 2021 18:39
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therattle posted:I wasn’t going to buy more delicious fudge as my wife and I don’t need the sugar or calories but she looooves peanut butter… The peanut butter crunch is particularly good. Shot through with honey roast nuts to cram as much nutty goodness in as possible. Nuts.
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Jul 13, 2021 18:42
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Beefeater1980 posted:My first experience with Banks was the Wasp Factory, which, well, that’s a book alright. Same, my English teacher recommended it to me when I was about 15. She was cool as hell.
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Jul 13, 2021 18:43
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DesperateDan posted:south park is a real tough one to adequately describe/discuss for me because I really want to hate it outright for a lot of the lazy/cheap/both sides are wrong/outright bigoted takes but I can't because sometimes they put out some good stuff and once in a blue moon it's loving great and I feel a weird sense of guilt for enjoying it South park has been going for something like 25 years at this point and like all things it has had its extreme highs and extreme lows. What I will say is that I have never laughed as hard at a tv show as I did during the Good times with weapons episode. Which came out 17 years ago.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:02
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Antigravitas posted:I'm not sure there's really much of a shift there. Or if there was, not a lasting one. Space Elon Musk in Surface Detail (2010) is back to being utterly irredeemable, and the pro-hell politicians are basically conservative stand-ins including ranting about how people are inherently sinful and bad and that's why severe punishments must be handed out or society will collapse. Consider is pretty darned dismissive of the peace faction and has the following presented as an objective statement of fact: quote:She left instructions that she was only to be revived once the Culture could statistically 'prove' the war had been morally justified; in other words, when sufficient time had passed—peacefully—for it to be probable that more people would have died in the foreseeable and likely course of Idiran expansion than had in fact perished during the war. She was duly awoken in 1813 AD along with several million other people throughout the Culture who had stored themselves and left the same revival criterion, most with the same feeling of grim humour as she had. More broadly the Culture wins the struggle in Consider through its intrinsic superiority as a mode of civilizational organization - much the same as the subsequent Player. In Excession however a force from literally beyond time and space shows up to karmically deliver an object lesson in humility. Never mind the Affronters: even the universe itself is determined to punish Culture hawks.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:04
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ronya posted:In Excession however a force from literally beyond time and space shows up to karmically deliver an object lesson in humility. Never mind the Affronters: even the universe itself is determined to punish Culture hawks. Yeah that part is great, as advanced as The Culture are, they couldn't even begin to contemplate what was going on with the Excession. My favourite part about Banks is when he leaves something hanging for you to imagine, just a background detail with infinite possibilities. Some chapters throw out multiple per page, ideas that for other writers would be entire books, for Banks it was just a small detail in a larger plot.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:09
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I think I've asked this before but unfortunately it's such a generic plotline nobody was able to identify it, but I'd love to find a book my English teacher gave me in primary school to keep me quiet at the back of the room, but I'll give it another go. The first bit of the book was a sort of generic Blyton-esque "kids have an adventure in the countryside" type tale until they find a wall covered in warnings that the ground beyond was poisonous or otherwise dangerous and that nothing could live beyond it - but they see a squirrel going merrily on its way over the fence without dying, so climb over it themselves and discover that on the other side of the wall (which was also covered in warnings of death if it was crossed) was a city full of people just going on with their lives but believing that something (a nuclear war maybe?) had left them as the last people living on earth. I can't remember what the payoff was because to be honest I got bored with it and stopped reading it at that point, but I'd be sort of interested to give it another go now.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:10
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Don't know what that is but the Identify That Book thread in TBB has a pretty good hit rate: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2704537
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Jul 13, 2021 19:14
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https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/ That subreddit has a similar function if goons fail you. I've had them identify movies that I saw one scene of on channel 5 20 years ago.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:20
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stev posted:I do remember reading it and wondering if there was some sort of point that I was missing. At least American Psycho beats you over the head with its satire in between the vomit-inducing bits. not entirely relevant but fun: American Psycho is not satire. Bret Easton Ellis is just so ridiculous that a normal, well-adjusted brain decides it's satire. Like Heinlen and Starship Troopers. He kept made a big point of this when he was out campaigning for Trump and a lot of the interviewers didn't know how to deal with it.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:46
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ronya posted:Consider is pretty darned dismissive of the peace faction and has the following presented as an objective statement of fact: A fact as presented by the Culture. These are the people who, if you protest their meddling, will sit you down and explain to you how, actually, they are mathematically and objectively right. "Ethics? Oh, we solved that several thousand years ago  "That's a thing Banks constantly chafed against, and which makes the books so interesting imo. I do think you are meant to feel unease with how smug these assholes are even as you admit that living inside the Culture would be a sweet deal. I think there was a Guardian interview with him where he effectively admitted the Culture was a bit sus (on purpose?) but he'd still want to live there instead of earth. The peace faction gets poo poo on in Excession as well by the way. Like when they get taken as POW: quote:The girl was indignant with a kind of ferocity probably only somebody from the Peace faction could muster in such a situation. ‘But we’re the Peace faction,’ she protested for the fifth or sixth time. ‘We’re . . . we’re like the true Culture, the way it used to be . . .’
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Jul 13, 2021 19:46
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ronya posted:a parade of gloating evil-doers gloating evilly is an interesting way to describe Azad - that certainly seems to be the most common reaction to them, and it's how I saw them when I first read the book god knows how long ago. One of the complaints that comes up most about the book is that Azad is too one-dimensionally evil. Banks definitely does have a thing for writing OTT grotesquely monstrous villains - The Algebraist comes to mind. But I read it again recently and I couldn't help but see Azad as an exaggeration of our world, not just an unpleasant fantasy - a difference of degree not nature. The gender stuff is the clearest example but I couldn't help but read Azad (the game) as a satire of liberal meritocracy - a game that anyone can theoretically win that just so happens to perpetuate the system that produced it and which is inaccessible and incomprehensible to the vast majority of the population, whose basic assumptions are so ingrained that living outside the game is unimaginable. Gurgeh comes across as a lot more naive than most Culture protagonists (e.g. not knowing what the secret police are), and though that might be because Banks still hadn't completely established the baseline knowledge level of your average Culture citizen, I assumed it was meant to provoke the question 'would a fully automated luxury gay space communist be any less horrified by us?' sorry for continuing Culture chat
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Jul 13, 2021 19:46
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Azad might have seemed OTT when it was written but if anything now it just seems too on the nose.
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Jul 13, 2021 20:00
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feeling very weary of charlatans, dont think there much i can do right now though. these companies selling test and release kits are scum.
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Jul 13, 2021 20:02
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I’d happily live in and be an agent of the culture tbf
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Jul 13, 2021 20:03
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Hot take fresh from the Take Foundry: The Empire is the British Empire; Azad is Cricket.
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Jul 13, 2021 20:04
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Antigravitas posted:A fact as presented by the Culture. These are the people who, if you protest their meddling, will sit you down and explain to you how, actually, they are mathematically and objectively right. "Ethics? Oh, we solved that several thousand years ago
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Jul 13, 2021 20:08
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This isn't related to anything but if anyone ITT is looking for a fun videogame to play, they just released the 4.10 version of Warzone 2100, which is free and open source. If you played it as a kid it's better than it was, and the headline feature of 4.10 is the new campaign balance and it's actually really fun, genuinely a great videogame and it's free, you can probably spend a good number of hours going through the campaign, and the music is stuck in my head to this day. https://wz2100.net/
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Jul 13, 2021 20:08
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OwlFancier posted:Idrian culture wars take place for about 100 years between the late 1200s to the late 1300s  My mind has been blown. e: by the way I thought you didn't "do" fiction? Is it just that you never watch any fictional TV but you do read fiction books?
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Jul 13, 2021 20:17
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Spangly A posted:not entirely relevant but fun: American Psycho is not satire. Bret Easton Ellis is just so ridiculous that a normal, well-adjusted brain decides it's satire. Like Heinlen and Starship Troopers.
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Jul 13, 2021 20:17
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:
I read a couple of the culture books back when I did still read or watch stuff. In all honesty they didn't really click on the whole, I like the concept but I don't really enjoy the writing. Also they seem pretty miserable which is offputting. Read consider phlebas, the player of games got... some distance through excession and just didn't like it so I stopped. I don't at all dislike fiction it's specifically the format of books and TV that I find a bit hard to stick to.
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Jul 13, 2021 20:26
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Spangly A posted:not entirely relevant but fun: American Psycho is not satire. Bret Easton Ellis is just so ridiculous that a normal, well-adjusted brain decides it's satire. Like Heinlen and Starship Troopers. A major plot point is that Patrick Bateman has no idea what his job is. How is it not satire?
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Jul 13, 2021 20:31
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jiggerypokery posted:A major plot point is that Patrick Bateman has no idea what his job is. How is it not satire? Yeah I feel like it's more likely that he no longer understands his own work because he's utterly deranged. I was about to reference the chapters composed entirely of cold, matter of fact lists of music and sport references as proof it's satire but then I remembered Ready Player One exists. 
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Jul 13, 2021 20:38
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OwlFancier posted:This isn't related to anything but if anyone ITT is looking for a fun videogame to play, they just released the 4.10 version of Warzone 2100, which is free and open source. If you played it as a kid it's better than it was, and the headline feature of 4.10 is the new campaign balance and it's actually really fun, genuinely a great videogame and it's free, you can probably spend a good number of hours going through the campaign, and the music is stuck in my head to this day. This sounds great and I’ve been looking to scratch the rts itch. If we got a Ukmt clan going I’d be very down
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Jul 13, 2021 20:58
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To be fair to Spangly maybe what they meant is that like Starship Troopers, the film version transformed the basic gist into something that is more or less a comedy, which the book definitely isn't. But saying it's not a satire is a pretty bizarre take
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Jul 13, 2021 21:04
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Gato posted:is an interesting way to describe Azad - that certainly seems to be the most common reaction to them, and it's how I saw them when I first read the book god knows how long ago. One of the complaints that comes up most about the book is that Azad is too one-dimensionally evil. Banks definitely does have a thing for writing OTT grotesquely monstrous villains - The Algebraist comes to mind. But I read it again recently and I couldn't help but see Azad as an exaggeration of our world, not just an unpleasant fantasy - a difference of degree not nature. The gender stuff is the clearest example but I couldn't help but read Azad (the game) as a satire of liberal meritocracy - a game that anyone can theoretically win that just so happens to perpetuate the system that produced it and which is inaccessible and incomprehensible to the vast majority of the population, whose basic assumptions are so ingrained that living outside the game is unimaginable. a key plot point is the reader's ambiguity as to whether the eponymous game 'works' in its conceit of identifying the superior ideology, or whether it's just a game. For the viewpoint character Gurgeh, he wins the game in the end by playing as the Culture in the game (specifically emphasized to be a militant, assimilationist Culture that triumphs through the productive superiority of cooperative intelligence - a very specific political philosophy, rather than a generic brand of anarchism) it can be read as a critique of meritocracy, certainly, but I would say that this reading doesn't mesh well with the emperor being set up as the ultimate reification of Azad ideology as the final opponent- an Azadian who takes the game entirely seriously, rather than his plotting minister who does regard it as a cynical façade re: the parade of cackling evil, it's most noticeable in the attention devoted to vivid descriptions of macabre torture etc. - compare the Affront, who are equally luridly described as the incarnations of a holocaust, pain, fear, cruelty, etc. but all of their tortures are given a clinical detachment. Compare the hunting scene in Player vs Excession. And of course a viewpoint character becomes an Affronter by the end. ronya fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Jul 13, 2021 |
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Jul 13, 2021 21:32
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The book of American Psycho is weird, because it is just a rich guy banging on about rich guy problems and saying he's a psychotic killer that you start to doubt him, so by the time you get to the first kill, it's genuinely uncomfortable. In that respect it's impressive to write something like that where you know the character's secret from the get go, but it's still shocking.
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Jul 13, 2021 21:39
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I always just assumed the tedious consumer sections in American Psycho were meant to bore the reader so they skipped forward to get to the violence, making the reader complicit in Bateman's whole twisted thing. Which is kinda genius and satirical whether or not the author agrees
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Jul 13, 2021 21:45
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Camrath posted:New Fudge Release! One bit of feedback - my parents like your chocolate orange fudge, but don't like the big slices of orange. They'd certainly be up for a pure, unadulterated version.
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Jul 13, 2021 21:49
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quote:Conservatives urgently need to change their attitudes towards people taking the knee, an influential Tory MP has said amid an angry backlash against the government over the racist abuse of England footballers. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/13/leading-tory-mp-says-party-must-change-attitude-on-taking-the-knee They are having a meltdown. I am so here for this.
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Jul 13, 2021 21:53
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Camrath posted:New Fudge Release! Interesting! Gonna have to try that marmite fudge
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Jul 13, 2021 22:02
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jiggerypokery posted:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/13/leading-tory-mp-says-party-must-change-attitude-on-taking-the-knee shame they'll resolidify into something harder than diamond as soon as election season rolls around
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Jul 13, 2021 22:11
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ronya posted:a key plot point is the reader's ambiguity as to whether the eponymous game 'works' in its conceit of identifying the superior ideology, or whether it's just a game. For the viewpoint character Gurgeh, he wins the game in the end by playing as the Culture in the game (specifically emphasized to be a militant, assimilationist Culture that triumphs through the productive superiority of cooperative intelligence - a very specific political philosophy, rather than a generic brand of anarchism) I don't think the fact that the emperor genuinely is a very good Azad player necesssarily means it's not a valid critique of meritocracy. after all, many of the "winners" of our world's "game" are intelligent and talented people. The point is that they wouldn't have been winners if, to paraphrase Stephen Jay Gould, they had never made it out of the cotton field or sweatshop. The emperor takes the game entirely seriously because he's oblivious to the class and gender privilege that have enabled him to take it seriously. that said I think you're right that the victory of Gurgeh as embodiment of the Culture probably does undermine this reading, since it's presented as proof of the Culture's superiority and is taken as such in-universe, therefore validating the game. I suppose the conclusion I'd have liked to see would be Gurgeh somehow facilitating the victory of the female player he encounters earlier, and Azad collapsing from the contradictions, but now we're in fanfic territory and I'm not disagreeing that Azad is vividly evil, I'm just speculating whether all the gruesome stuff is a deliberate sleight of hand to focus the reader's attention on the more obvious evils instead of the banal, background evil of a hierarchical society (which is exactly why the drone shows Gurgeh the torture channel, because he otherwise wouldn't get it), in order to set up a later comparison to Earth which admittedly never comes. I'm probably projecting my own reading too far. the comparison to the Affront is well made, and to bring it back to the start of this discussion I think the shift from the outright condemnation of Azad to the more ambivalent position on the Affront probably does reflect a shift in Banks' politics.
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Jul 13, 2021 22:28
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Fudge status: ordered.
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Jul 13, 2021 22:41
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If you want to read the player of games as a critique of meritocracy I would suggest that the takeaway is that their society puts someone at the top who is actually extremely committed to and very good at the thing that dictates rank in that society, but that the ultimate criticism is that that thing is entirely stupid and pointless Which is to say yes, the society selects for the person with the greatest merit by its own metrics of merit, but what it considers meritorious is actually bad and dumb. Which I think pretty effectively points out a problem with the concept of meritocracy which is that merit is entirely subjective and that it is particularly prone to drifting the more stratified your society is. If your society fetishizes the concept of merit then eventually merit is quite likely to become the ritualized measurement of itself, and nothing more. Which I think is pretty visible in our society with poo poo like IQ scores and rich people culture, ignore whether or not you are doing anything worthwhile, focus instead on the things that you can argue represent a metric of your merit. Gurgeh in that reading illustrates the ridiculousness of it, yes he is very good at the game and can beat the people whose entire society is based around it, but it doesn't really matter, he's just a celebrity who is good at games, culture society can produce someone who can demolish the entire azadian concept of merit just by accident. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Jul 13, 2021 |
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Jul 13, 2021 22:41
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therattle posted:Fudge status: ordered. Order status: received.  Thanks to everyone who has ordered so far!
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Jul 13, 2021 22:53
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