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site posted:in my experience, extending this into hyperbole of people's real position (the acknowledgment of the bad to move beyond it and its baggage) is mainly an excuse to say it's they're wrong and not have to deal with it. it's okay to just say that tolkien's writings were a huge influence on the genre, and also that it's okay for current fantasy authors to not use the racial stereotypes of tolkien's material even though it's now considered archetypal That's literally exactly what I'm trying to say
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Jan 21, 2023 21:08
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I think it's important to remember that outside of Tolkien, a lot of people we consider extremely influential in the sci-fi/fantasy genres from the 1930s to the 1960s and some of the 70s, were published in genre fiction magazines, and would gain prominence due to the readership sending in fan letters which would then amplify those individual authors. There was a level of incestousness to it as well, as authors who became prolific and profitable in those magazines would often then communicate with each other and develop friendships, and basically help boost each other's work. It was a massive boy's club and often came down to nepotism and internal drama forming an ebb and flow of opportunity for them. There are a lot of terrible authors who became incredibly influential as a result, and even though their contemporaries may have been doing the same thing but better, they're the ones who got credit because through chance they caught notice. It's not an absurd thing to say that much of our canon of genre fiction is basically entrenched purely through perpetuating the memetic idea that they're important. The era of sci-fi and fantasy mags was basically a proto-Twitter. They were popularity contests, and if you managed to get your submission vetted, and enough dorks to latch onto some glimmer of creativity in your work, you could become a future God of science fiction. This is really stark when you compare people like Ursula K. Le Guin, an astonishingly intelligent and prescient author, to writers like L. Ron Hubbard, who managed to gain a large readership even pre-Scientology despite being absolute garbage.
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Jan 21, 2023 21:10
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unknown butthole posted:That's literally exactly what I'm trying to say ah well i misunderstood your initial comments then. sorry
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Jan 21, 2023 21:13
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I think it's really sad people judge writers by their writing and not the writer picture in the back or front or wherever. Anyway I like Dresden Files. Oh looks like there's two I haven't read, rad. edit: Also the phrase "don't judge a book by it's cover" is the stupid what with that being the point of a cover. Duck and Cover fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Jan 21, 2023 |
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Jan 21, 2023 21:22
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Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:I disagree with that. It's a very common assessment of his work, but I don't think it's true, he's not Joyce or Faulkner or Hemingway, but his prose was functional towards its purposes and he managed to imbue the trilogy with an emotional core that you just can't manage unless you have some ability. It's sure as gently caress better than the vast majority of fantasy fiction which is a dreadful genre for the most part. Joyce is probably the worst writer that has ever existed, but I'm not sure if that's because of his actual writing talents or because gaelic is the language equivalent of 10,000 nuns scratching their nails across an endless blackboard forever e: Actually I hate Hemingway too  These writers all suck. I've never read anything by Faulkner but that's b/c I have no interest in anything from the American South, but in general "classic literature" is bad, just like classic rock, oldschool rap, retro video games, etc.
deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Jan 21, 2023 |
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Jan 21, 2023 21:29
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deep dish peat moss posted:Joyce is probably the worst writer that has ever existed, but I'm not sure if that's because of his actual writing talents or because gaelic is the language equivalent of 10,000 nuns scratching their nails across an endless blackboard forever They're all extremely good writers and have basically shaped modern literature. If you've read Cormac McCarthy, you have read something heavily inspired by Faulkner.
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Jan 21, 2023 21:35
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I started to read Blood Meridian once but I think I made it like 10 pages in before setting it down and never picking it back up.
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Jan 21, 2023 21:36
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QuarkJets posted:When it came out that Sunless Sea and Cultist Simulator were made by a sexpest I don't recall anyone talking about "separating" those works from their awful creators, a lot of people dropped those games without question. He wasn't even part of the Fallen London (Failbetter) team anymore so Sunless Sea should have been in the clear but that didn't seem to matter It’s because those games were bad
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Jan 21, 2023 21:40
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Blue Raider posted:It’s because those games were bad Sunless Sea is basically Sid Meier's Pirates with better story hooks, except it punishes you for trying to do boring merchant trader poo poo and rewards you for being a swashbuckling explorer who bangs squid persons
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Jan 21, 2023 21:46
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Note: I don't think I read good authors all that much though, I read a lot of surreal postmodern bimbos, here's my newest/most recent reads bookshelf   
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Jan 21, 2023 21:48
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QuarkJets posted:Sunless Sea is basically Sid Meier's Pirates with better story hooks, except it punishes you for trying to do boring merchant trader poo poo and rewards you for being a swashbuckling explorer who bangs squid persons I played it. It’s bad
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Jan 21, 2023 21:49
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imagine holding more than one thought in your head at a time
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Jan 21, 2023 21:51
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The only thing I ever heard about Sunless Sea was "Goddamn this game is too slow/boring". There's still far too much AAA Gatcha/GaaS and indie trash out there to give a poo poo about some random idiot's twitter account. Blessed be the gamer whose favorite genre is so oversaturated that he can afford to care about that crap.
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Jan 21, 2023 21:52
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Murakami sucks so much rear end
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Jan 21, 2023 21:55
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Yeah he's the Surreal Postmodern Bimbo in the OP. I really like some of his work though particularly his short stories. After Dark and Dance Dance Dance are cool. And some parts of Kafka on the Shore are incredibly cool. But other parts of it are incredibly bad.
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Jan 21, 2023 21:56
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Gaius Marius posted:Murakami sucks so much rear end 
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Jan 21, 2023 22:06
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FoolyCharged posted:The artist's ideology always is a part of their art, though. Prove it
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Jan 21, 2023 22:15
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deep dish peat moss posted:I started to read Blood Meridian once but I think I made it like 10 pages in before setting it down and never picking it back up. Hey thread ur rear end is showing
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Jan 21, 2023 22:16
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Gaius Marius posted:Murakami sucks so much rear end 
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Jan 21, 2023 22:17
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fridge corn posted:Hey thread ur rear end is showing turn it on
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Jan 21, 2023 22:18
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if you buy any video game made by a large enough team, chances are real good you're supporting at least one person who is a bad person, probably more than one person. Separate that!!!!!
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Jan 21, 2023 22:19
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I have a degree in literature and haven't read a single Murakami book lol I see no reason to change that.
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Jan 21, 2023 22:20
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Sunless Seas/Sky makes me cranky because it could have been a prettier, cooler world, Escape Velocity and fun instead it was way too slow and not fun. Cultist Simulator is barely a game.
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Jan 21, 2023 22:20
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I read Norwegian wood and it made me want to never read any murakami again
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Jan 21, 2023 22:21
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Most of the time when someone says "separate art from artist" what they mean is "ignore that it was made by a bad person" or "like it anyway". You do the former at your peril, but the latter is perfectly reasonable. Art is big and complicated and affects us on many levels. You can like poo poo made by monsters but it's important to fully understand whether, how, and where their monstrosity shows in their work. A lot of you are reducing this to weird consumerism and it's so much bigger than that. You should obviously be pirating stuff made by bad people, as well as most stuff made by good people probably.
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Jan 21, 2023 22:24
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fridge corn posted:I read Norwegian wood and it made me want to never read any murakami again That one is not only really bad, but also entirely unlike anything else he has written. That one is like a weird Celebration of the Boomer romance novel thing. But almost everything else he writes is weird surreal metaphysical mumbo jumbo that's very non-Boomer. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Jan 21, 2023 |
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Jan 21, 2023 22:27
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deep dish peat moss posted:That one is not only really bad, but also entirely unlike anything else he has written. That one is like a weird Celebration of the Boomer romance novel thing. But almost everything else he writes is weird surreal metaphysical mumbo jumbo that's very non-Boomer. What murakami would you recommend if I hated Norwegian wood
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Jan 21, 2023 22:32
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I'm not sure I would recommend Murakami because there are a lot of valid things about his books that people hate. But I enjoyed After Dark, which is fairly short (200ish pages) and a good look at what Murakami's writing is like (hard to follow and regularly doesn't even try to make sense  ), and iirc doesn't contain any cringey sex stuff like many of his books do. but be warned that it has no traditional "ending" and makes no attempt to wrap things up for you at the end. It just kind of ends abruptly b/c the entire point of it is following these characters through one night, and their story doesn't conclude within that night. It got panned in reviews largely because of that.I think Kafka on the Shore is my personal favorite overall but it's also very divisive and definitely has some incredibly cringy parts. e: I mean I think there's still a lot of like, symbolic resolution and stuff in After Dark - the themes of the book do wrap themselves up if you read between the lines, but the actual story of the characters it follows is not concluded. He's definitely a love it or hate it kind of author and if anything (other than Norwegian Wood because it truly is very different from the rest) doesn't grip you it's probably best to just avoid him. You need kind of a whole lot of suspension of disbelief with him because suddenly out of nowhere you'll get to a passage where it's like, okay now some animal spirit came out of nowhere and teleported everyone to a weird dream forest and they never get back to whatever they were doing before that, even though the entire book before now was grounded in reality and nothing like that was foreshadowed. The stories make little sense but they're v. emotional journeys through a lot of overwroght flowery prose. and I think something I appreciate about his writing (which is also something others hate) is that he has a way of taking the petty "oh boo-hoo, woe is me" story of an individual and portraying it as this psychic world-ending tsunami. And his characters are whiny babies a lot of the time. But also a lot of his stories are about youth and how confusing the world is the first time you experience everything, so it feels appropriate and sets the mood well (imo). deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Jan 21, 2023 |
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Jan 21, 2023 22:39
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His nonfiction book on Aum is actually pretty good, although I'm unsure If I ever finished it.
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Jan 21, 2023 22:54
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You can also try to do more to support people who are good. I bought new copies of the entire Metal Gear Solid franchise when Hideo Kojima killed Shinzo Abe
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Jan 21, 2023 23:18
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Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:They're all extremely good writers and have basically shaped modern literature. If you've read Cormac McCarthy, you have read something heavily inspired by Faulkner. I've tried to read McCarthy several times but that man's crusade against punctuation of any stripe has lead to me just writing him off as some dude that probably wrote some cool stuff that just isn't for me.
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Jan 21, 2023 23:26
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QuarkJets posted:You can also try to do more to support people who are good. I bought new copies of the entire Metal Gear Solid franchise when Hideo Kojima killed Shinzo Abe 
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Jan 21, 2023 23:27
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Omg shut the hell up and talk about Galaga or something. Remember Galaga Legions back in the PS360 era? That was rad. It revolutionized the Galaga formula by giving you THREE ships. Not two, three. And you could have each shooting in a different place.
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Jan 21, 2023 23:28
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deep dish peat moss posted:I'm not sure I would recommend Murakami because there are a lot of valid things about his books that people hate. But I enjoyed After Dark, which is fairly short (200ish pages) and a good look at what Murakami's writing is like (hard to follow and regularly doesn't even try to make sense Killing Commendatore was great but it was also extremely bad. It's hard to recommend Murakami
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Jan 21, 2023 23:37
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Lil Swamp Booger Baby posted:I think it's important to remember that outside of Tolkien, a lot of people we consider extremely influential in the sci-fi/fantasy genres from the 1930s to the 1960s and some of the 70s, were published in genre fiction magazines, and would gain prominence due to the readership sending in fan letters which would then amplify those individual authors. There was a level of incestousness to it as well, as authors who became prolific and profitable in those magazines would often then communicate with each other and develop friendships, and basically help boost each other's work. It was a massive boy's club and often came down to nepotism and internal drama forming an ebb and flow of opportunity for them. There are a lot of terrible authors who became incredibly influential as a result, and even though their contemporaries may have been doing the same thing but better, they're the ones who got credit because through chance they caught notice. It's not an absurd thing to say that much of our canon of genre fiction is basically entrenched purely through perpetuating the memetic idea that they're important. The era of sci-fi and fantasy mags was basically a proto-Twitter. They were popularity contests, and if you managed to get your submission vetted, and enough dorks to latch onto some glimmer of creativity in your work, you could become a future God of science fiction. fuckin Ben Bova
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Jan 21, 2023 23:38
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I sometimes get stupidly mad that new good things will never get the recognition that old mediocre or even bad things enjoy. How many games made today will ever be as well known as loving tic tac toe? Infuriating!
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Jan 22, 2023 00:27
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deep dish peat moss posted:Note: I don't think I read good authors all that much though, I read a lot of surreal postmodern bimbos, here's my newest/most recent reads bookshelf Ugh. 1Q84 is loving terrible. I got it because I was in the mood for something else, but only made it halfway through before just giving up on it. I think I gave it to someone else when clearing out some old books. fridge corn posted:What murakami would you recommend if I hated Norwegian wood Probably something that isn't written by murakami.
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Jan 22, 2023 00:41
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Phigs posted:I sometimes get stupidly mad that new good things will never get the recognition that old mediocre or even bad things enjoy. This is actually a huge pain in the rear end because serious conversations about how gaming has evolved over the years will literally just boil down into "Everything old was better." line of thinking and it gets so utterly mindless that people start calling the inventory system or combat in Fallout 1 and 2 good just because they're old and thus must do everything perfectly even though those aspects of the games have aged like poo poo and were never good to begin with. If I hear "modern games just care about realistic graphics" one more time I'm gonna poo poo myself, people were saying the same exact poo poo back when Quake II unveiled colored lighting.
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Jan 22, 2023 00:42
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galagazombie posted:Omg shut the hell up and talk 
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Jan 22, 2023 00:45
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They're training to be a policeman
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Jan 22, 2023 01:08
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