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General Battuta posted:The characters get even flatter in the last book!  holy poo poo I laughed out loud
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Jul 23, 2022 17:31
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RDM posted:I didn't get past 3BP so I don't know about the rest of the series, but my recollection is that I found 3BP irritating cause I thought the science was lovely. A chaotic system doesn't mean unknowable chaos, just that you have to keep updating your predictions with new observations. The solvability of the three body problem is really not important, that whole section is the history of the trisolarian race. I was more bothered by the fact that the website for the VR game is called threebody.net or something like that yet the protagonist has a big Eureka moment figuring out that the game is showing a world orbiting a triple star. Like, if it's supposed to be a big reveal just name the website something else? I don't know.
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Jul 23, 2022 17:54
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I've got one more car ride left in my current audio book then I'm making another run at The Colour of Magic. I bounced off the first paperback in the 00s, and Discworld is probably the biggest acclaimed english fantasy series I haven't read in my life. I loved Good Omens and even briefly played a MUD rpg in the setting ages ago but just never got around to reading the books. I've got higher hopes this time since there's a re-recording of the series coming out this year and next with Bill Nighy (as Pratchett doing footnotes & narration), Andy Serkis, Indira Varma, Peter Serafinowiz (as Death), plus some others I haven't seen around as much. The Witches line and Wizard line are released so far with the Death ones coming in October and ending with Tiffany Aching and the Guard next spring. I'm looking forward to it. I even reread some Fritz Leiber a couple years ago so maybe I'll get some references (I saw a few redditors say to skip the early wizards books because they reference/parody old fantasy too much).
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Jul 23, 2022 21:36
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Colour of magic is broad fantasy parody, it's quite funny if you're in the mood but it's lacking a lot of the humanism and characters of later books. Something like mort might be a better intro. Still ok, though idk how they handle the footnotes in audio they are fairly common and wordy
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Jul 23, 2022 21:47
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Yeah, The Colour of Magic isn't *bad* but it's not even in the top 20.
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Jul 23, 2022 21:50
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Cold Iron (Masters & Mages #1) by Miles Cameron - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079L5669Y/ The Crack in Space by Philip K Dick - $1.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LVR6UK/
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Jul 23, 2022 21:55
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My other choices were Equal Rites and Small Gods since I wanted to get the redone audiobooks and some aren't released yet. I still have a few audible credits so I'll give one of those a try if Colour doesn't grab me. I'll pick up Mort when that bunch releases in October. edit: I checked a few reviews and didn't see any comments on the footnotes but apparently they have Bill Nighy doing those (apparently in character as the Voice of Terry Pratchett), while someone else does the bulk of the rest of the book and a few people do distinct voices (like Serafinowicz as Death). I'll report back once I've listened some. bagrada fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 23, 2022 21:57
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bagrada posted:I've got one more car ride left in my current audio book then I'm making another run at The Colour of Magic. edit: DEFINITELY GET SMALL GODS
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Jul 23, 2022 21:59
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When I listened to Small Gods, the footnotes just seemed like part of the narration to me and were read out wherever the asterisk appeared. I don't know if the narrator made any kind of vocal shift and I just didn't notice or what, but I was listening while driving so it admittedly didn't have my full attention. A little less annoying than having to tap each footnote while reading on a Kindle, honestly. E: Maybe it was Eric Mercury Hat fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 23, 2022 22:00
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Small gods is one of the best stand alone books, get that.
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Jul 23, 2022 22:34
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The footnotes in the new ones are actually very bad and I hate them to the point that it spoils the audiobooks for me. They do a "glingle-lingle-lingle-out" noise, then a pause, then read the footnote, then "glingle-lingle-lingle-in", then a pause, then continue the body text. It murders the timing of the jokes.
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Jul 23, 2022 22:37
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Generally the thread consensus for best Discworld starting place has been Guards, Guards, but there's lots of good options.
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Jul 23, 2022 22:56
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emanresu tnuocca posted:I was more bothered by the fact that the website for the VR game is called threebody.net or something like that yet the protagonist has a big Eureka moment figuring out that the game is showing a world orbiting a triple star. Like, if it's supposed to be a big reveal just name the website something else? I don't know. Wasn't it a double star and a planet, together making the titular three bodies? I don't remember much about the book.
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Jul 23, 2022 23:11
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Small Gods is fantastic and a very good in to the Discworld verse. I'd also suggest Guards! Guards! though I don't think it's as good a book. It gives you the start of the Watch plotline. Stuff with Death is also a pretty good way in.
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Jul 24, 2022 01:40
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I started with Colour and it was fine. Might be because I had enough passing familiarity with the genre that the jokes didn't seem too obscure. Later Discworld books were better, though.
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Jul 24, 2022 01:54
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I read all of Discworld in order but I didn't really love the series until Small Gods which is still one of my favorites. But I also read the books when I was younger and wasn't as familiar with what the first books especially were parodying.
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Jul 24, 2022 02:00
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ringu0 posted:Wasn't it a double star and a planet, together making the titular three bodies? I don't remember much about the book.
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Jul 24, 2022 02:08
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I'll grab Small Gods next.Rand Brittain posted:The footnotes in the new ones are actually very bad and I hate them to the point that it spoils the audiobooks for me. Just got to the first one. I thought it was a magic spell going off. After the very long footnote ended, I immediately had the physical urge to look back on the nonexistent page to remind myself where it left off. I'll stick with this audio book for Colour at least.
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Jul 24, 2022 02:10
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I wish Kindle had footnotes-on-hover but I guess they don't want to implement fancy stuff that won't work on cheap kindles. Kindle books feel like a really bad format for anything that isn't plain text with minimal formatting.
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Jul 24, 2022 03:47
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ringu0 posted:Wasn't it a double star and a planet, together making the titular three bodies? I don't remember much about the book. DACK FAYDEN posted:They're literally from the Centauri system, it's a binary star with a third smaller star orbiting. (and so technically yeah it's a four body problem but the planet's mass is negligible compared to even Proxima Centauri) Also they’re called the Trisolarans…
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Jul 24, 2022 04:09
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DACK FAYDEN posted:They're literally from the Centauri system, it's a binary star with a third smaller star orbiting. (and so technically yeah it's a four body problem but the planet's mass is negligible compared to even Proxima Centauri) It's one thing to have science fiction be badly written fiction, but the least you can do if you name your book the three body problem is get that part of the science right, goddamn.
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Jul 24, 2022 04:55
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It's called the Three-Body Problem because that planet had three adaptations of Stephen King's The Body and thus three Wil Wheatons and Corey Feldmen running around causing chaos.
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Jul 24, 2022 05:08
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TOOT BOOT posted:I wish Kindle had footnotes-on-hover but I guess they don't want to implement fancy stuff that won't work on cheap kindles. Kindle books feel like a really bad format for anything that isn't plain text with minimal formatting. What gen Kindle do you have because that's been available for a while on the different ones I've owned.
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Jul 24, 2022 05:43
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On my kobo it seems to vary, some footnotes will pop up in a little box, and others will warp me to the end where they all are and then I have to page back to my spot.
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Jul 24, 2022 05:53
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It's neat that two books I've been digging into (Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis and Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky) have a speech that's translated into another culture's language, transcribed twice on the page, once from a familiar secular-materialist perspective and one from the alien culture's.
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Jul 24, 2022 05:54
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I was thrilled by The Three-Body Problem but for some reason I lost steam like, halfway thru The Dark Forest. Maybe I'll get back onboard if the series overall is worth it.
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Jul 24, 2022 06:21
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:What gen Kindle do you have because that's been available for a while on the different ones I've owned. I mostly use Kindle Cloud Reader which it feels like Amazon hates.
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Jul 24, 2022 08:55
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I thought it was called the Three Body Problem because that is an actual mathematical phenomenon where at the moment there are more than two bodies things become almost impossible to predict? So I guess it is named after the phenomenon not the Centauri system.
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Jul 24, 2022 10:15
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Strategic Tea posted:I thought it was called the Three Body Problem because that is an actual mathematical phenomenon where at the moment there are more than two bodies things become almost impossible to predict? So I guess it is named after the phenomenon not the Centauri system. IIRC the novel takes a few liberties and says Alpha Centauri has a full trinary star system which causes hellish, unpredictable stellar events as a result of the three body problem
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Jul 24, 2022 10:18
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TOOT BOOT posted:I wish Kindle had footnotes-on-hover but I guess they don't want to implement fancy stuff that won't work on cheap kindles. Kindle books feel like a really bad format for anything that isn't plain text with minimal formatting. Modern ebook formats (such as EPUB3; not sure if any Kindle format supports this) actually support "real" footnotes, where it appears on the bottom of the page that the footnote marker is on and automatically spills over to the next page if it's too long, giving you basically the same experience as reading them in a print book. In my experience most books are not properly tagged to take advantage of this and you end up with footnote-on-tap anyways, though. E: it occurs to me that I don't know if the stock Kobo firmware supports this properly either, it might just convert them all to footnote-on-tap. Koreader supports it though.
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Jul 24, 2022 12:19
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my favorite is when you hit a footnote in basically any ereader app, and it warps you to the back of the book where they're all crammed together and you read like 4 spoilers before finding it in this list. i really liked that one (ya? maybe?) book about uh... bartmaeus? i don't remember, it was about urban fantasy demons spying on eachother in england and prague in poo poo. it was a long time ago. anyway, it made HEAVY use of footnotes. would probably be completely impossible to enjoy as an e-book at the current quality standards. probably same with house of leaves, but a pdf would make more sense for that anyway
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Jul 24, 2022 13:16
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Larry Parrish posted:my favorite is when you hit a footnote in basically any ereader app, and it warps you to the back of the book where they're all crammed together and you read like 4 spoilers before finding it in this list. i really liked that one (ya? maybe?) book about uh... bartmaeus? i don't remember, it was about urban fantasy demons spying on eachother in england and prague in poo poo. it was a long time ago. anyway, it made HEAVY use of footnotes. would probably be completely impossible to enjoy as an e-book at the current quality standards. probably same with house of leaves, but a pdf would make more sense for that anyway can confirm the Bartimaeus books on Kindle drove me insane with the footnotes. it's one reason i haven't done a reread of pratchett in years, footnotes on Kindle just plain suck I would so much rather they just appear on the current page with the asterisk, at least make it an option, even if you wind up with a page that's two sentences, an asterisk, and a footnote
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Jul 24, 2022 19:55
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Speaking as a really good ebook maker, most ebooks are poorly made, partly because people don't care and partly because basically every piece of ebook reading software has some critical thing it doesn't support that makes trying to do anything complicated a fool's game.
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Jul 24, 2022 20:17
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Is the Burroughs’ Barsoom cycle worth reading? I generally like pulp, Dying Earth, Lovecraft, etc.
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Jul 24, 2022 20:49
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Larry Parrish posted:my favorite is when you hit a footnote in basically any ereader app, and it warps you to the back of the book where they're all crammed together and you read like 4 spoilers before finding it in this list. i really liked that one (ya? maybe?) book about uh... bartmaeus? i don't remember, it was about urban fantasy demons spying on eachother in england and prague in poo poo. it was a long time ago. anyway, it made HEAVY use of footnotes. would probably be completely impossible to enjoy as an e-book at the current quality standards. probably same with house of leaves, but a pdf would make more sense for that anyway That series was really good, I feel like it ended with demons unionising? Maybe not, was a long time ago.
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Jul 24, 2022 21:04
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I read A Memory Called Empire and it was pretty good. Some interesting tension in a space opera taking a critical view of empire rather than simply reveling in it. The aliens are a deus ex machina, even though it is set up pretty much from the start; I don't get why anyone was prepared to believe the ambassador about them without proof, but then again I guess the solution the emperor comes up with relies more on the ideology of the empire than any actual evidence.
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Jul 24, 2022 21:09
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sebmojo posted:That series was really good, I feel like it ended with demons unionising? Maybe not, was a long time ago. I was like 11 or 12 when I read them so I really don't remember much except for the footnote thing lol. Including a really long one with the protagonist bragging that his brain can multiplex
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Jul 24, 2022 21:31
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ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:Is the Burroughs’ Barsoom cycle worth reading? I generally like pulp, Dying Earth, Lovecraft, etc.
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Jul 24, 2022 22:08
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AngusPodgorny posted:As someone that also likes pulp, I think so. I'd put Burroughs' fast-paced-adventure style closer to Vance than Lovecraft. Good description. They're fun, quick reads and stop when you get bored.
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Jul 24, 2022 22:56
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The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman - $2.99 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009NFHF0Q/
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Jul 24, 2022 23:06
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