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Harry is even more of a nerd than most. His job is magic and his hobby is also magic. Locking himself in the basement and not showering for a year after Susan got vampired is just icing on the cake.
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Mar 12, 2013 06:11
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Thunderfinger posted:Here's a cool Dresden cosplay pic I found in the PYF thead: Brandon Sanderson, is that you?  Eh, maybe the resemblance was better on recollection. Tunicate fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Mar 20, 2013 |
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Mar 20, 2013 21:32
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r0ff13c0p73r posted:So doing a reread of Cold Days and when Harry goes to talk to Mother Winter, Mother Summer says that she lost her cane Could this be a reference to the blackstaff? There's a quote from Jim on the official forums that rules it out.
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Mar 23, 2013 18:38
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Fried Chicken posted:Really? I assume it from a post-Cold Days statement, link please? Only thing I recall about the Blackstaff is that the original owner wants it back very very badly, and that came from a Changes interview. Okay, it was a signing question. Jim told him that if the fan wanted to figure the blackstaff out, to look at Celtic lore around 1065 AD. That kind of implies that it isn't something made out of whole cloth. Fanspec puts it as the staff of Dagda "This great staff that thou seest,’ said he, ‘has a smooth end and a rough end. One end slays the living, and the other end brings the dead to life.’" In myth it was loaned away by the original owner. And by loaned I mean stolen.
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Mar 25, 2013 08:19
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Mouse is a Foo-dog. He's not even remotely Celtic. From the reddit AMA: quote:Q:Is mouse a Foo dog or a Temple dog? My understanding is that Foo dogs are Tibetan celestial beings, and Temple dogs are Foo dogs crossed with mortal canines (possibly multiple generations removed). quote:Q:This question contains a spoiler for my favorite character, Harry's badass best friend Mouse, so be warned.
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Mar 26, 2013 03:56
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electricsugar posted:Thanks for the feedback guys. I'm pretty sure Butcher intends to make it obvious that Dresden has some biases and issues with ladies. He's rather a flawed protagonist in that respect.
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Mar 29, 2013 22:17
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ConfusedUs posted:That's a fun interview! Things with those guys aren't always fun and games though.
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Apr 10, 2013 05:50
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Deadbeat posted:I'm re-reading Cold Days and there's just one thing I don't completely get. I'm guessing this is a Thief of Time scenario. These horrible evil beasts are going to ride out at Armageddon, yes, but nobody ever specified which side.
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Apr 11, 2013 04:30
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Oh, and then watch the TV series, and react to each of the episodes! (Don't actually watch the TV series)
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Apr 26, 2013 22:44
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ConfusedUs posted:Give the second Laundry Files book another shot. It takes a bit to get rolling, but once it does, it's amazing. It has the best plot device ever. Thing is, it really feels like Stross is trying too hard to be 'geek hip', and he repeatedly makes dated references that were never really funny to begin with. I think he calls his iPhone a 'Jesus Phone' like at least twenty times, and that's kinda the trend through the whole book.
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Apr 30, 2013 17:56
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That's not a bad theory at all.
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May 11, 2013 03:31
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Can I recommend Tea With the Black Dragon? I'm not really sure if it's urban fantasy, but it's quite good.
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Jul 3, 2013 02:28
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I dunno, if some species is very different from humans, you'd expect that individual variations in temperment wouldn't be picked up on if you didn't spend a lot of time with them. All dolphins look basically the same to anyone not a marine biologist... so you wouldn't expect for someone to be able to appreciate the subtleties of, say, Palainian culture beyond 'wow those guys are cowardly'.
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Jul 11, 2013 21:21
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Fried Chicken posted:But the issue there is if they are that different, why are they interacting with the protagonist? They have to be similar enough that their motivations either aid or conflict with the hero's so it means they can't be that radically divergent. If your aliens are methane breathing Jovian inhabitants, why does the SS Goodship care? They won't invade our planet, we won't invade theirs, and technology is so different there is no trade, so what role do they have in the story? Having people with wildly different priorities and abilities should make trade work better, since they'll value something highly that you don't care about, and vice versa. I don't really see what's 'racist' about having aliens with wildly different physiologies and psychologies. If the Chmmr have attention spans significantly longer than humans, maybe sitting around for hours watching a flower bloom is super interesting in a way that doesn't really appeal to humanity. That difference'd translate into far longer drawn out meetings and slower (but possibly more sensible) decision-making, with Chmmr accountants being the best in the galaxy (or something). The fact that it's necessitated by their imperfectly fused silicon-and-mechanical neural harness shouldn't change anything.
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Jul 12, 2013 07:49
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Dravs posted:That's it, just finished Cold Days.. *boosh* Have you read the spinoff short stories yet?
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Jul 18, 2013 19:29
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Dravs posted:"Hells Bells" I'm fairly certain one of the last three books is going to be named 'Hells Bells', so...
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Aug 13, 2013 18:50
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It made me want to slap Jim Butcher around the face after hearing that too many times
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superstepa posted:I've been reading through dresden files non-stop in the past couple of weeks (Just finished summer knight and waiting for my death masks library hold to go through) and I'm surprised by how much I'm enjoying it. Fool moon is generally regarded as the worst book - it's a rehash of Storm Front's structure and kinda loses momentum a few times.
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Sep 5, 2013 07:34
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Stroth posted:It's already been pointed out that The Book of Swords is unlocked. Here's the wiki link for the Twelve Swords of Power. Look up Woundhealer, that's the one that was used in the book. Imagine what you could do with that. Then look at some of the others. Specifically, look at Farslayer, Shieldbreaker, Soulcutter, Mindsword and Doombringer. Now try to imagine a situation that you couldn't solve using them. So why didn't the first person who thought to grab a spikard end up ruling the world?
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Sep 9, 2013 15:24
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All you really need for an apocalypse is a few poorly-written nanobots.
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Sep 9, 2013 17:36
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WarLocke posted:Hello second book plot point. Well, everyone's already able to pull out the
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Sep 9, 2013 18:20
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:And Lily was a Changeling to begin with and Chose her Fae side. She didn't so much Choose as having the choice made for her when she got the ladyship. quote:Yeah and before she produced it Maeve was hiding the gun somewhere. Whereever it was there was probably some contact with her skin, It had to have been made of some composite. It doesn't have to be nonmetallic, just nonferric. Heck, even though we don't use it anymore, gunmetal is copper (88%), tin (10%), and zinc (2%). Tunicate fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 19:47
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Also who knows what Lea was up to when she prepared Molly as a vessel.
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Sep 14, 2013 00:07
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Revenant Threshold posted:I can understand just having an actor playing him, CGI costs being what they are (or were). But you could still have a Bob-ish character. TV Bob retains the condescension, but that's it. I liked TV Bob, and I liked the hockey stick.
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Sep 16, 2013 23:30
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SerSpook posted:I honestly think the Dresden Files could make a pretty awesome and faithful TV show. Each book, at least in the beginning, be like a three or four part story arc. Cover the first three books in the first season, maybe even the fourth and fifth book. Any of those three would be great season finale points. Special effects could be a problem though, but honestly the Dresden Files aren't super flashy all the time. It's more like occasional instances of awesome magic stuff happening in each book. Besides, Dresden says that magic looks 'like bad cg'.
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Sep 17, 2013 00:06
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The Parasite is obviously the so-called 'subconscious harry'.
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Sep 19, 2013 21:59
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"And if he is Harry, wouldn't that suggest that Harry eventually learns how to time travel?" Butcher said he's treating the laws of magic as a checklist, so...
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Oct 1, 2013 04:41
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Just started reading The Incrementalists. It's pretty good.
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Oct 3, 2013 16:44
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Demonreach and Rashid had a relationship of some kind, and it was heavily implied that he is the reason Demonreach has a limp. That's confirmed by Jim as a red herring. It's actually the glaciers that carved out the great lakes that did it, apparently Tunicate fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Oct 3, 2013 |
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Oct 3, 2013 22:13
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ConfusedUs posted:The Oblivion War is one of the most interesting ideas in all of Dresden, while simultaneously being the most difficult to write about. To the point where Ivy's massive involvement will probably never get mentioned in a dresden novel.
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Oct 30, 2013 19:20
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The Puppy Bowl posted:I read Backup, when was Ivy brought onto it? It's not from Backup. It's something Jim mentioned on his forum. I'm pretty sure this will never make it into the actual Dresden Files since Harry has no idea the Oblivion War is happening, along with everyone else. So I'll share it here.  The Archive was constructed /for/ the Oblivion War. Specifically. Yes, the Archive (and Ivy, the two aren't really divisible) know about these forgotten beings. The Archive is in essence the keeper of the dead, where they are concerned. Once the archive believes one of them has been consigned to oblivion, she holds on to the memory of that being briefly, for another thousand years or so, watching for any mention of that being in print in an effort to make sure that she is the /last/ person alive who remembers whichever hideous entity has been consigned. And once the safety period has elapsed, and the Archive is confident that no one else remembers, she deletes the memory from the Archive. Bad guy, /gone/. She also tries to keep track of the enemy players in the Oblivion War via watching for communications and so on. When she finds a trace of them, somewhere, she lets a cell of operatives (like Lara and Thomas) know what's up, through a blind drop, and sends them off to handle the problem. The Oblivion War is a huge, /slow/ thing. Stuff happens every few decades, at most. That's why the Archive was created--to be an immortal awareness, something that could track and intelligently direct responses to the enemy in a war happening on an almost geological scale. All that other stuff she says the Archive is for? Smoke and mirrors.
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Oct 30, 2013 20:08
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By the way, if you watch this Q&A, Jim Butcher explains exactly what went wrong on the TV series.
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Nov 2, 2013 03:37
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Stroth posted:Yeah, I have to agree with you there. They're supposed to be these incredible manipulators, and we certainly get told that over and over, but the closest we come to actually seeing it is Lara hammering Harry's 'chivalrous idiot' button over and over. It's not exactly impressive. Well, that and controlling a significant fraction of the US Navy offscreen.
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Nov 4, 2013 08:20
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The Puppy Bowl posted:It makes sense that it could be tricky to "show" less overt attributes but that doesn't change the fact that Butcher never demonstrates most of the white court's power, he just tells us about it. It would not of been too difficult to say set Dresden up for a murder and have the charges simply disappear and only later we find out its due to white court influence. That is a bad example but some similar display of manipulative power that isn't just a discussion of it. Like having a navy carrier group diverted to save his friends?
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Nov 4, 2013 17:39
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Wade Wilson posted:He's the one that gave Demonreach it's limp, so you know he's got the chops to seriously gently caress some poo poo up when it comes down to it. Actually, that was a glacier.
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Nov 4, 2013 20:30
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Yay Pudding! posted:Re-watching the tv show because I'm bored, and I have to say Paul Blackthorne is almost dead on for the actor. I wish the tv show would have gotten some steam, because it really isn't that bad compared to what is on tv now. I had fun comparing book to show. In the show, Bianca is a merger of Susan and book Bianca. Red and black courts exist, but the differences aren't explained. They did some leg work to do some world building, but never got to pay it off. I like to think of the show as an alternate universe version of Dresden. It's funny watching the early episodes of the show and thinking how comically easy it would be for contemporary Harry to get out of it. It's fun how the books do a good job of progressing Harry. In Fool Moon when he's trapped by tough werewolves, he's pretty much completely screwed if not for the intervention of his friends. If Cold Days Harry was in that situation, he could have hosed up all those guys easily. The only thing that has stayed the same is Harry's ego, poo poo talker to the end. Now he can back up his poo poo talking, before he had to scrape by on luck. It's still fun because he ends up finding himself in worse and worse situations. I kind of want to try reconstructing the original show's script - they initially just did a hackjob by changing character names, so it seems like it'd be possible to recombine them.
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Nov 6, 2013 06:25
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Yay Pudding! posted:I think the show basically did Storm Front and Fool Moon with some minor differences, then after that it went off the rails. It will never happen, but if HBO or Showtime decided to make a series out of this it would be loving awesome. Personally, I love how everyone consistently underestimates Harry, and then he drops the loving hammer. Hard. Harry is a guy that makes a point of maximizing comic booky bullshit to strategic effect. The way he does it is also great. He can be in an un-winnable situation and talk his way out of it. He is a max level poo poo talker, and that is a fun character to watch. I linked an interview with butcher a bit upthread. The gist of it is, they had a guy in charge who previously worked on DS9, and they had the scripts written up as a long continuous arc... then two weeks before production started, SyFy meddled, and suddenly Dresden TV was now being run by a guy from Charmed. Who decided that people didn't like plot arcs, and only wanted episodic poo poo. They protested that the scripts were already written but - not to be deterred - he just told them to change the names and castings.
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Nov 6, 2013 07:17
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BrooklynBruiser posted:So I'm reading Changes, and when (spoiled as a courtesy to Lyer) the Grey Council shows up at Chichen Itza, someone uses fuego as a fire spell. Any thoughts on who? It's not a fire spell. It's a Spanish order to open fire.
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Nov 10, 2013 05:33
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Best example is summoning up a demon instead of looking in the phone book.
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Nov 12, 2013 20:24
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404GoonNotFound posted:Jim's never mentioned them so no, it's probably just a fan thing. He responded to Harriedwizard a couple times on twitter, but it's pretty obviuosly nonofficial.
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Nov 18, 2013 05:28
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Ramadu posted:How the hell does this one work? As a guess... AT fields are actually mobile thresholds, evangelions are giant mecha made out of cloned angel parts because conventional technology is hexable, and the big egg proto-angel creatures are faerie-queen class entities which caused the same scale of devastation when imbalanced?
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Nov 21, 2013 08:23
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