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When people say they're writing a book, all of the poo poo that this person is saying is more than just writing is implied!
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Mar 5, 2024 11:54
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I would simply hire a ghostwriter.
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Mar 5, 2024 12:13
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Platystemon posted:I would simply hire a ghostwriter. Even if he's too proud to have someone else actually write the thing, his publisher will have excellent editors and assistants at their disposal. If he asked for help he'd get it, and having a good writing assistant was clearly a huge boon for the first three books The fact that he doesn't do this is even more baffling when you consider that he came from TV writing, a highly collaborative environment
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Mar 5, 2024 12:18
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He has a "team" now though?
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Mar 5, 2024 12:45
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I’d just poo poo it out as fast as possible whether it be with help or not and go gently caress off being rich. Least then you wouldn’t have people keep pestering about finishing them for the rest of your life.
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Mar 5, 2024 12:58
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Collateral posted:He has a "team" now though? His personal assistant mostly helps him wipe and shower though, so I'm not sure how it helps with writing... maybe he also bakes lemoncakes?
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Mar 5, 2024 13:20
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He should hire ghostwriters but he won't! I don't know why! Maybe he already hired some and was never happy with their output. Maybe the ghostwriters keep telling him they're 70% done and the book might be out this year. Who knows.
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Mar 5, 2024 13:45
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If this person loves long, descriptive paragraphs about nothing of interest then they are in for a world of wonder if they ever start reading LitRPGs on Kindle Unlimited.
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Mar 5, 2024 18:15
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Evil Fluffy posted:LitRPGs I'm afraid to ask
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Mar 5, 2024 18:33
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Platystemon posted:George says that maternal mortality is lower in Westeros than in real medieval societies thanks to the work of the Maesters. GURM does not understand how medieval societies really work except at superficial level. And his stories aren't really medieval, they're early modern. He's dumb.
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Mar 5, 2024 19:38
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:GURM does not understand how medieval societies really work except at superficial level. And his stories aren't really medieval, they're early modern. Just in case anyone missed it, actual historian Bret Deveraux did a mutli-part, several thousand word breakdown about how the Dothraki are loving **dumb** : https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/ He's got a bunch of others too.
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Mar 5, 2024 19:41
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Tarnop posted:I'm afraid to ask I'm pretty sure this refers to a harmless thing, namely stuff written by people who confuse a setting for a plot. They spend all their time writing out the details of their world and forget to write a story set in it. Basically they want to be writing RPG sourcebooks not novels.
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Mar 5, 2024 19:43
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LitRPG is a genre, it's basically fantasy except it explicitly works on video game logic and characters do numerical damage and level up. Some are literally about a video game, others just have the mechanics.
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Mar 5, 2024 20:04
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Well poo poo 
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Mar 5, 2024 21:14
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Jonas leaned towards Jane and asked for a kiss. Unfortunately, he rolled a 2 so
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Mar 5, 2024 21:24
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:GURM does not understand how medieval societies really work except at superficial level. And his stories aren't really medieval, they're early modern. One of George’s all time quotes was the one where he was bragging about how his world is realistic and specifically “in real life the spunky young girl doesn’t just get away with being sassy to a price. The prince just rapes her!”
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Mar 5, 2024 21:46
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Xiahou Dun posted:Just in case anyone missed it, actual historian Bret Deveraux did a mutli-part, several thousand word breakdown about how the Dothraki are loving **dumb** : https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/ But I still maintain that Jon's and to a much larger degree Dany's plotline were a mistake, even in the first three books. Their tone is more of a high fantasy adventure and almost by design cannot lead to a satisfying conclusion in comparison to the rest of the books. Either you have plot arcs that fizzle out as people die from a toothache or whatever, or characters gain plot armour making the tone wildly swing around. Neither work as an actual story.
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Mar 5, 2024 23:05
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pidan posted:LitRPG is a genre, it's basically fantasy except it explicitly works on video game logic and characters do numerical damage and level up. Huh. Something out there for everyone I guess
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Mar 6, 2024 02:10
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Kylaer posted:I haven't read the third hedge knight short story, or any of the World Of stuff Dunk's very bullheaded loyalty overwhelming Brynden's attempt to be coy was hilarious. Arbite fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Mar 6, 2024 |
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Mar 6, 2024 12:17
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Xiahou Dun posted:Just in case anyone missed it, actual historian Bret Deveraux did a mutli-part, several thousand word breakdown about how the Dothraki are loving **dumb** : https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/ Yeah I like this guy a lot, especially his article on how much GURM messes up medieval religion and faith. GURM things dark = realistic, and while history can be super depressing at times, he also cuts out a lot of things humans did to try to make things better time and time again. His whole idea that Maesters would lower maternal mortality is just bonkers too, it's assuming doctors automatically are going to superior to midwives. The real reason maternal deaths dropped wasn't because doctors took over the process of births, it was because of antibiotics and blood transfusions that just weren't available in the Middle Ages or before the 1900s. The medicalization of birth was actually accompanied by a whole slew of horrific practices that didn't make a difference at first believe it or not. If the Maesters don't have antiobiotics and blood transfusions the rate isn't dropping period.
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Mar 6, 2024 16:41
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Yeah I like this guy a lot, especially his article on how much GURM messes up medieval religion and faith. GURM things dark = realistic, and while history can be super depressing at times, he also cuts out a lot of things humans did to try to make things better time and time again. I think you got things kind of garbled. The initial spike in maternal deaths after the medicalization of births was from doctors cross-contaminating, as noted by Semelweiss. Once people started washing their god drat hands it went way down, well before the invention of antibiotics. (And blood transfusions are actually pretty old : once you get decent tubes, it's not hard. The hard part was figuring out blood types.) (I'm sure Kylaer will yell at me if I'm wrong.) I don't actually mind unrealistic things in fantasy books, that's kind of the point. I just loving hate the trend of faux realism grim dark dirt farmers based around bullshit Victorian-era history.
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Mar 6, 2024 16:59
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I mean all the bad things GRRM describes did actually happen in European history, more or less. But they're a highlight reel of Bad Things that happened over a period of hundreds of years (and some of them may be made up / exaggerated). And ASOIAF compresses them to happen to a handful of characters in a period of maybe 20 years, and all of it is real, and they all act as if this is just the normal state of the world. And, well, fiction is supposed to be a bit exaggerated compared to reality. So why not make it exaggeratedly grimdark. But realism it is not.
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Mar 6, 2024 17:38
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I read a paper once on the whole "medicalization of birth" thing in the 19th Century. It was a feminist piece on "old wives' tales" where they pointed out that midwives, while they didn't know what bacterial infection was, knew from lots of experience that you don't stick your hand in a corpse and then go deliver a baby. They had practical knowledge compared to the abstract knowledge of the male profession which forced them out. And this is only something a teacher told me back in high school, I never researched it myself, but he said once we did learn about germs and poo poo, doctors went in the opposite extreme and kept babies in isolation, which was just as fatal because you do need some contact. pidan posted:I mean all the bad things GRRM describes did actually happen in European history, more or less. But they're a highlight reel of Bad Things that happened over a period of hundreds of years (and some of them may be made up / exaggerated). And ASOIAF compresses them to happen to a handful of characters in a period of maybe 20 years, and all of it is real, and they all act as if this is just the normal state of the world. People today seem to have some very smug belief in our own complete moral superiority. Everybody in the past was stupid and violent, all the time, every time. I agree stories don't have to be realistic, especially when it comes to things like military details. (somebody once told me boiled leather as armor would never be used in a world where plate exists?) That means nothing to me or to most people, I imagine. But GRRM's "psychological realism," his attempt (largely successful, IMO) to create very believable, three-dimensional characters, makes folks think that the rest of what he is doing is also realistic. Helped along by that aforementioned smug belief that everyone in the past was a loving bloodthirsty lunatic, of course. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Mar 6, 2024 |
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Mar 6, 2024 18:02
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Why... why would a midwife be sticking her hand in a corpse, precisely? Is that part of the midwifery or just a hobby of hers? I think the corpse-to-birth fomite pipeline is pretty unique to early doctors.
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Mar 6, 2024 18:16
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Yeah I like this guy a lot, especially his article on how much GURM messes up medieval religion and faith. GURM things dark = realistic, and while history can be super depressing at times, he also cuts out a lot of things humans did to try to make things better time and time again. The maesters are absolutely not portrayed as 18th-19th century doctors. They are represented as being quite knowledgeable about medicine and if they don't explicitly have germ theory, they at least are well aware of the importance of hygiene and disinfection, which are way more important than antibiotics or blood transfusions. Their array of fantasy medicines also seem to be reasonably extensive and effective. If anything they're physicians inspired by Galen and Hippocrates, plus more centuries of trial and error and some additional medicinal plants. Of all the things to complain about in the setting, the maesters don't even make the list in my opinion. They're a perfectly acceptable inclusion in a realistic-ish fantasy. It's all the other stuff that batters away the claims to realism.
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Mar 6, 2024 18:38
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Xiahou Dun posted:Why... why would a midwife be sticking her hand in a corpse, precisely? Is that part of the midwifery or just a hobby of hers? That's the point, they only tended to births. They had no other duties outside of taking care of the mother and child and thus avoided the problems of early doctors, who thought they could do everything. quote:In Europe, when physicians were finally able to wrest obstetrics from the monopoly of the midwife, the result was an epidemic of death for the mothers. The cause was puerperal, or “childbed,” fever, which afflicted women by the thousands across European cities in the nineteenth century. This fever was produced by the unclean hands of the birth attendant, and although midwives at the time were just as ignorant as physicians about the bacterial sources of disease, they had the advantage over physicians in that they saw no other patients and thus were unlikely to carry germs from dying patients to the absorptive tissues of the open womb. But the insistence by physicians at the time that it was the midwife who was “ignorant and dirty” and that women would be safest in their hands at the public hospitals resulted in their unwittingly causing the death of generations of women. If you or anyone else is interested, the paper in question: https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-conten...apterpdf.pdf%22
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Mar 6, 2024 19:09
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NikkolasKing posted:That's the point, they only tended to births. They had no other duties outside of taking care of the mother and child and thus avoided the problems of early doctors, who thought they could do everything. Okay, but you said : NikkolasKing posted:I read a paper once on the whole "medicalization of birth" thing in the 19th Century. It was a feminist piece on "old wives' tales" where they pointed out that midwives, while they didn't know what bacterial infection was, knew from lots of experience that you don't stick your hand in a corpse and then go deliver a baby. They had practical knowledge compared to the abstract knowledge of the male profession which forced them out. "Practical knowledge" is very different from "it's a moot point because they only ever saw one patient at a time".
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Mar 6, 2024 19:13
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Xiahou Dun posted:Just in case anyone missed it, actual historian Bret Deveraux did a mutli-part, several thousand word breakdown about how the Dothraki are loving **dumb** : https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/ He spent more time thinking about the Dothraki than GRRM.
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Mar 6, 2024 19:47
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Midwife discussion is as useless as nipples on a breastplate and half as pleasurable
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Mar 6, 2024 20:00
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Xiahou Dun posted:Why... why would a midwife be sticking her hand in a corpse, precisely? Is that part of the midwifery or just a hobby of hers?
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Mar 6, 2024 20:20
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Xiahou Dun posted:I think you got things kind of garbled. The initial spike in maternal deaths after the medicalization of births was from doctors cross-contaminating, as noted by Semelweiss. Once people started washing their god drat hands it went way down, well before the invention of antibiotics. (And blood transfusions are actually pretty old : once you get decent tubes, it's not hard. The hard part was figuring out blood types.) (I'm sure Kylaer will yell at me if I'm wrong.) Yeah, I got that mixed up. Kylaer posted:The maesters are absolutely not portrayed as 18th-19th century doctors. They are represented as being quite knowledgeable about medicine and if they don't explicitly have germ theory, they at least are well aware of the importance of hygiene and disinfection, which are way more important than antibiotics or blood transfusions. Their array of fantasy medicines also seem to be reasonably extensive and effective. If anything they're physicians inspired by Galen and Hippocrates, plus more centuries of trial and error and some additional medicinal plants. I guess the biggest problem I have with the Maesters is that GURM clearly separated the scholarship/schooling from his fantasy catholic church to make it into its own thing. That's one of the least problems with how he portrays religion of course.
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Mar 7, 2024 02:40
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Why on Earth do any of these fools profess faith in the Seven when every other religion has literal wizards running around, George? Catelyn sitting there hoping the Mother will save her grievously injured son when she knows 100% that the Many-faced God also has an interest in death, and more importantly, an active cult with wizard powers.
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Mar 8, 2024 12:52
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Someone stubbornly sticking to their faith for solutions when more practical ones exist is pretty realistic, though. How many stories came out in the last few years of people soundly rejecting modern medial science when they got covid and "leaving it in God's hands"?
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Mar 8, 2024 15:02
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soviet elsa posted:Why on Earth do any of these fools profess faith in the Seven when every other religion has literal wizards running around, George? the reason irl would just be "because she is a devote Seventian", so that's a bit harsh a judgement
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Mar 8, 2024 15:03
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Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball, is dead. GRRM still lives.
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Mar 8, 2024 15:04
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Kylaer posted:Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball, is dead. GRRM still lives. god is dead
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Mar 8, 2024 15:24
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soviet elsa posted:Why on Earth do any of these fools profess faith in the Seven when every other religion has literal wizards running around, George? Because GURM is a lapsed Catholic and lets his own experiences biases bleed into his writing. That's why the Faith of the Seven is largely represented by ineffectual Septons who are either child-diddlers (according to Tyrion) or power-hungry individuals, or religious zealouts (Like the Lannister kid who joins the Faith's armed wing. It's also why except for Catelyn, the majority of character POVs don't really believe, and for those characters who do, it's usually seen in a negative light. Crazy Joe Wilson fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 15:24
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Anders posted:(insert random affc/adwd chapter here) is as useless as nipples on a breastplate and half as pleasurable
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Mar 8, 2024 17:29
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:Because GURM is a lapsed Catholic and lets his own experiences biases bleed into his writing. That's why the Faith of the Seven is largely represented by ineffectual Septons who are either child-diddlers (according to Tyrion) or power-hungry individuals, or religious zealouts (Like the Lannister kid who joins the Faith's armed wing. Yeah that's what gets me is like, I am among the rare internet people who is genuinely religious, and he just fails so hard at writing a religious person. We do in fact have rational thought, and if there's demonstrable powers everyone else has, well, things are getting rethinked! In Cat's defense I suppose she's undead before most of the real magic poo poo starts happening in plain sight.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:32
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People today still believe the Earth is flat and that evolution is a lie. There’s a wide spectrum of religious beliefs and reasons to adhere to those beliefs. Gurm’s world isn’t any weirder or more illogical than our own, at least in that regard.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:49
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