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Ghost Leviathan posted:Unfortunately this isn't a unique experience; a lot of children of boomer parents never got taught any skills as adults went smoothly from 'You're too young, you'll just mess it up' to 'You're old enough that you should already know this'. Narcissists especially are indifferent to or threatened by people learning skills and developing, but love, love berating people for failure. that is exactly why it hurts to hear, i’ve lived it, yeah anyway sorry for the bad snipe
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Jan 26, 2021 14:05
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Mokinokaro posted:Yeah the 2nd or 3rd book makes it obvious to the reader though the characters never learn the truth. I was surprised when they did the Shannara TV series they didn't go with Word & Void instead of diving straight into the fantasy stuff.
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Jan 26, 2021 14:22
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Mokinokaro posted:Brooks just is an average writer though. Not sure he belongs in this thread. Fair enough, I suppose I wouldn't call it 'terrible,' but I think it got a lot of positive press that it didn't really deserve. IMO weirdo poo poo is better than boring poo poo.
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Jan 26, 2021 20:46
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John Lee posted:
Darrell Sweet is (was) a fine illustrator and loved to haul out all the colors but couldn't paint expressions worth a drat. Just slew a dragon? Capturing space parasites? Charging through an interdimensional portal, bowie knife drawn? Welp, just another day at the office. The classic wheel of time cover where Rand is heroically holding aloft a mighty artifact, the Horn of Valere, and looking mildly annoyed at it. so, perfect for Shannara
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Jan 26, 2021 21:01
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nishi koichi posted:getting back to books, i recently learned of “chrome” by george nader (actor guy), and i’m interested in it as a piece of gay sf history, but i’ve heard it’s pretty dreadful I don’t care how bad this is, I want to read it
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Jan 27, 2021 00:01
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nishi koichi posted:this is incredibly depressing to hear, because i’m the patient tutor-type to my friends, and everyone should have that. i sincerely love teaching people. i’m sorry that happened to you The guy who wrote this was in The Robot Monster.
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Jan 27, 2021 00:13
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Stuporstar posted:I don’t care how bad this is, I want to read it oh, absolutely. i just wish they weren’t so drat expensive online. The Vosgian Beast posted:The guy who wrote this was in The Robot Monster. that’s exactly how i found it!
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Jan 27, 2021 00:16
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nishi koichi posted:oh, absolutely. i just wish they weren’t so drat expensive online. Yeah, that price is a huge yikes for a pulp novel, drat
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Jan 27, 2021 00:21
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Stuporstar posted:I don’t care how bad this is, I want to read it
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Jan 27, 2021 00:27
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Sham bam bamina! posted:According to the Goodreads reviews, it's set in a world where feminism and miscegenation have made a degenerate "genetic hash" of humanity. Oof, that’s a huge yikes Guess I’ll stick to Chunk Tingle
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Jan 27, 2021 00:30
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Well, sure; it's obvious that robust recombination of a large genome with high selective freedom for both sexes will produce garbage compared to a tight genetic bottleneck controlled by perverse factors. Just look at the Habsburgs, or the English bulldog
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Jan 27, 2021 00:33
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Meanwhile in Amazon's reviews...Alison posted:5.0 out of 5 stars Lucas posted:4.0 out of 5 stars
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Jan 27, 2021 00:34
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Sham bam bamina! posted:According to the Goodreads reviews, it's set in a world where feminism and miscegenation have made a degenerate "genetic hash" of humanity. yeah, absolutely dire. i’m still curious, but not 43 dollars-and-up curious; if i’d found it in a bin for a couple bucks, i’d still go for it
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Jan 27, 2021 00:35
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PYF terrible book: there’s one sexy nurse but at least she’s hiding a gun in her boobs Also... helicopter bondage? Like, someone tied up in a helicopter, or... ?
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Jan 27, 2021 00:37
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e. ^^^^ sonuva gun get outta my head! PYF terrible book: there’s one sexy nurse but at least she’s hiding a gun in her boobs
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Jan 27, 2021 00:37
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I looked up Chrome on Goodreads and decided to see what the negative reviewer wrote about other things. Well, she's rated Great Gatsby two stars and a bunch of Star Trek tie-in novels five stars. Hmm.
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Jan 27, 2021 00:41
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Gatsby does suck, though. That and Wuthering Heights are my two least favorite required reading books, and I at least enjoyed most of them.
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Jan 27, 2021 01:18
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Antivehicular posted:Also... helicopter bondage? Like, someone tied up in a helicopter, or... ?
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Jan 27, 2021 01:23
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I looked up Chrome on Goodreads and decided to see what the negative reviewer wrote about other things.
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Jan 27, 2021 01:29
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DACK FAYDEN posted:My guess is someone suspended and bound, like hanging from the ceiling or something. From a ceiling fan.
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Jan 27, 2021 01:42
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So it looks like Chrome is on the Internet Archive, of all places. https://archive.org/details/chrome00nade There are arbitrary limits on how many can read it at once, I guess. You can "borrow" it an hour at a time or you can download a DAISY file if you have a device that can read DAISY files. It's not a great option, but it's an option.
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Jan 27, 2021 01:43
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it’s always in the first place you should have looked  thanks
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Jan 27, 2021 01:50
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Sham bam bamina! posted:There are several negative reviews, some of which go into substantial detail about these, uh, qualities, which are mentioned in a few of the neutral reviews as well. To clarify, I'm not disagreeing with her or defending anything in a dead guy's smutty sci-fi book I'm never going to read. I don't doubt it's misogynist as all hell and probably racist too. I'm just noting something I found amusing. Vincent Van Goatse has a new favorite as of 01:53 on Jan 27, 2021 |
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Jan 27, 2021 01:51
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Someone remind me to read it in three months when the semester's over, thanks.
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Jan 27, 2021 01:52
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I read the first two Shannara series back in my early teens. I've read worse. Plus the two middle books of the second series, a quartet, had a pair of pretty cool 'death lands'. One was a dead city being roamed by a giant mantis monster while a giant worm with petrifying fluids burrowed around underground, and the other was one of the better 'deadly jungles where everything might kill you' locations I've read. I also remember random details like the main villain of Book 3 of Series 1 having gnomes as their minions, which just made me picture a horde of lawn ornaments, and in Book 2 of the same series we had the classic "hero boy gets sweet on pure hero girl" trope, except at the end the hero girl had to sacrifice herself to save the world, so he turns to the other girl, the tough thief, and basically goes "Well, that sucked. Want to hook up?" and she's like "YES!" and their kids are the protagonists of the next book. I am probably misremembering those. Or, considering this thread, completely remembering them correctly.
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Jan 28, 2021 10:15
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That sounds about right. I tapped out of Shannara after the third series, the one with the airship and the villain is the hero's sister. I realized he was just using the same stock characters in each one, just in different generations, and running them through slightly different stock fantasy plots. Not the worst stuff I've ever read, but I wanted a bigger meal. I'll still take Terry Brooks any day over Terry Goodkind, though.
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Jan 28, 2021 14:26
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I'm in a bad book club that just started on Wizard's First Rule, and one thing I've already noticed about Goodkind that people don't tend to bring up is how cheap and flimsy everything feels, like a B-movie. Something about his prose really makes it feel like I'm watching something like Hawk the Slayer instead of reading a book.
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Jan 28, 2021 16:00
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I'm in a bad book club that just started on Wizard's First Rule, and one thing I've already noticed about Goodkind that people don't tend to bring up is how cheap and flimsy everything feels, like a B-movie. Something about his prose really makes it feel like I'm watching something like Hawk the Slayer instead of reading a book. There's a definite shallowness to the world-building that is in no way made up for by fun action or anything else. Is your ba book club just really hardcore, or is First Rule not as stupidly long as I remember it being?
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Jan 28, 2021 17:10
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there wolf posted:There's a definite shallowness to the world-building that is in no way made up for by fun action or anything else. Is your ba book club just really hardcore, or is First Rule not as stupidly long as I remember it being? It's less a book club per se than one person reading horrible garbage to the rest of us in voice chat every Sunday. We went to Goodkind for a change of pace after two volumes of a singularly vile litRPG.
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Jan 28, 2021 17:35
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I'm in a bad book club that just started on Wizard's First Rule, and one thing I've already noticed about Goodkind that people don't tend to bring up is how cheap and flimsy everything feels, like a B-movie. Something about his prose really makes it feel like I'm watching something like Hawk the Slayer instead of reading a book. Hey now, Hawk the Slayer isn't great but it's hardly fair to compare it to Goodkind. At least Hawk the Slayer is fun despite or because of the silliness (Jack Palance is supposed to be his brother? gently caress it, let's go with it). Sham bam bamina! posted:It's less a book club per se than one person reading horrible garbage to the rest of us in voice chat every Sunday. We went to Goodkind for a change of pace after two volumes of a singularly vile litRPG. I'm reading some reviews of the first book in that link and uh... wow. It just sounds dull. I'm gonna be honest, I like RPGs and fantasy fiction, but litRPG just kinda baffles me. I did "like" this review though: A Goodreads Review posted:The only reason why I’m giving 2 stars is because I really enjoy stories heavily based on RPG systems and fast developed through and through. Also the author drops a five-star review to announce an updated version of the book. I understand the Goodreads community does things differently, but I still don't understand why they use the rating system the way they do.
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Jan 31, 2021 02:45
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catlord posted:I'm reading some reviews of the first book in that link and uh... wow. It just sounds dull. I'm gonna be honest, I like RPGs and fantasy fiction, but litRPG just kinda baffles me. The Idle System is dull, but it's also tremendously stupid and evil. It's a fascinating combination of bird-brained and lizard-brained; you get the sense that the only thing holding the author back from a killing spree is the challenge of tying his shoes.           I'm hardly scratching the surface here. Just about every chapter has something spectacularly terrible to gawk at, at least when the pages aren't choked with reams of updates on all the stats (like "Blood's Capacity" and "Elbow Joints' Toughness") that protagonist John – who dubs himself "A Selfish Punisher" – is leveling up. (At one point, he has to spend months making roots of chi grow out of all of his body parts to level up, which is about a page of text, most of which is a list of stats, that gets copied and pasted for each individual part of his body.) There's a yearly fighting tournament with thousands of entrants in which 90% of the fighters get murdered outside the arena routinely, thanks to Pegaz's shaky grasp on math. There's a part where John has to turn his knees into water to attack the fire demons. There's a part where he goes Super Saiyan and turns into a tornado of black flames with a pair of machine guns that he materializes with magic even though he's spent the past hundred pages mowing down thousands with finger guns. One of the first things John does in the first volume ("book" is an unduly charitable word here) is get so mad after getting stuck under the carcass of a Continuous Bear he killed that he immediately spends the next two years exterminating the entire species from the Loose Forest and eating their skeletons to level up (he disables the Taste skill whenever he eats unpleasant things that level him up). We didn't get to volume 3 (The Birth), but that's the one where he learns the Forbidden Cultivation Technique, which is excruciatingly roundabout sex scenes that level him up. You might assume that the business with the Sin system reflects a stunted but recognizably human fixation on morality or even spirituality, but it's just a pompously named abstract number that lets John know if he can get away with killing people to level up. (He does!) It isn't remotely worth reading the rest of these myself, but I'm still disappointed that we're getting out of this rabbit hole. Nevertheless, I look forward to our journey into Westland, the Midlands, and whatever other -lands may await within Goodkind's bountiful pages. Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 11:09 on Jan 31, 2021 |
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Jan 31, 2021 10:46
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They only good litrpg books are the Caverns & Creatures series by Robert Bevan, and that's because the characters are all assholes who knows they are trapped in an rpg (complete with scrolls that tell them their stats, etc). It's basically just frat level humor amongst elves and werewolves and vampires and gnomes. It's also hilarious.
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Jan 31, 2021 11:34
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MfGrAEd_E8
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Jan 31, 2021 16:40
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Well, that's because litRPG is an irredeemable form of writing. I consider litrpg to be "just" one more of those "popular in amateur writing" genres where the choice of the genre gives you 90%+ of the book and you just fill in the blanks like a long-form Mad Libs. I've only read stuff other people have recommended to me as "oh everything else sucks but this one is really good I swear", and at this point I'm not confident every author, or most authors, even wanted to tell a story. Neil Breen's movies are probably the closest thing in fiction to litrpg in quality of execution, but even he seems to have something to tell, even if it's some poorly-paced LSD-trip raging against the machine. I thought about giving out some disrecommendations but naming & shaming amateur authors who probably had to pay to get their book published is a bit mean. Naksu has a new favorite as of 19:45 on Jan 31, 2021 |
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Jan 31, 2021 18:15
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Do Do they e eat the
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Jan 31, 2021 22:59
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Naksu posted:I consider litrpg to be "just" one more of those "popular in amateur writing" genres where the choice of the genre gives you 90%+ of the book and you just fill in the blanks like a long-form Mad Libs. I've only read stuff other people have recommended to me as "oh everything else sucks but this one is really good I swear", and at this point I'm not confident every author, or most authors, even wanted to tell a story. That's a good way to describe it. I always figured one of the defining qualities of fan fiction is that the world and characters were already assumed, so the author could skip the set up and world building, moving immediately on to their story of how Picard romancing Harry Potter.
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Feb 1, 2021 08:48
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Well, that's because litRPG is an irredeemable form of writing. I'm confused. Isn't this supposed to be a joke? It might not be particularly funny but I don't get the level of contempt. It is supposed to be humorous right?
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Feb 1, 2021 08:56
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Regarde Aduck posted:I'm confused. Isn't this supposed to be a joke? It might not be particularly funny but I don't get the level of contempt. It is supposed to be humorous right? Oh, honey. No.
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Feb 1, 2021 09:09
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It's like isekai without the self awareness or justifying gimmick.
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Feb 1, 2021 09:20
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Regarde Aduck posted:I'm confused. Isn't this supposed to be a joke? It might not be particularly funny but I don't get the level of contempt. It is supposed to be humorous right? Going back to my first point, the idea of John killing everyone with magic finger guns seems like it has to be a joke when I describe it that way to emphasize its absurdity, but that's not how Pegaz writes it. He writes a slog of a chapter about John's laborious trial-and-error process of working out the specific mechanics of shaping a bullet out of magic, determining how many units of Life Power to put into it for range and accuracy, and practicing the attack on rocks and wild apes (he beat a horde of apes to death with his fists at the end of the previous book). At no point is the reader picturing anything but finger guns, but Pegaz never explicitly describes that image, which is what the punchline would be if it were a joke. The joke that he does write is a smarmy throwaway line about John naming the attack "Bullet" instead of "Heavenly Penetration Bullet Mach 1", and then it's back to the stone-faced slaughter. Ghost Leviathan posted:It's like isekai without the self awareness or justifying gimmick. Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 10:33 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 09:47
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