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Man the whale mothers really don't mesh well with TDTCB, which is weird because I'm sure Bakker had them in mind (as ridiculous as they may be). It's kinda funny to read child Kellhus imagining a beautiful woman's arched back, or seeing adult Kellhus use his nail of heaven sex moves, when he has in fact never met or had sex with a human woman until TDTCB
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Jun 12, 2016 08:28
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Achamian and Mimara went on a quest to find the home of the Dunyain, and when they got there it was totally destroyed. Mimara can view objective morality and the Consult have a prophecy she's important. Esmenet hosed everything up back in the capital and there was an attempted coup, now the Fanim are invading. One of her kids died, she's obsessed with her 'normal' kid who is actually a total sociopath. The Ordeal isn't designed to ever come home, Kellhus sent some hostages to the Nonmen but the Nonmen have already sided with the Consult. To survive they're eating Sranc and are probably all going to go insane.
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Jun 15, 2016 18:05
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The series is purposefully hideous and misogynistic because it wants to make a critical argument about the nature of oppression, belief, and society, and then accidentally hideous and misogynistic on top of that because Bakker's by his own admission not very good at writing about women or anything to do with sexual violence. The guy believes men are intrinsically aroused by rape and that he has to provoke the acknowledgment of this reflex by writing sexy rape. It's really amazingly creative and excellent at some poo poo (the deep history of the setting, the handling of sorcery, the crunchy interplay of personalities and intrigues in big political realignments, everything to do with Golgotterath and the No-God, the battles, the Nonmen/elves) and just totally laughably awful at other stuff. It's not an easy mediocre, it's got a lot to recommend it, even if Bakker's understanding of neuro/psychology is pretty 101. But it's the definition of a marmite series. I'm really excited for the next one, I can't wait for more hosed up metaphysics and gigeresque Consult.
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Jun 29, 2016 23:38
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Boing posted:I always wonder why people say this. None of the neuro/psychology in his books leaps out at me as being especially wrong, but I've not read anyone who digs as deep or as well into the philosophy of neuroscience or the psychological problems with freedom. The short version is that I was a social neuro oh god why I am in a phd program what's wrong with my life guy at NYU for a while, and Bakker deals with neuroscience and psychology in a very basic way. He's interested in the psychological ramifications of the illusion of pure agency, but nothing he writes about is really grounded in the specifics of science. He writes about psychology the way gurus write about quantum theory. I say this with good confidence because I just reread all the PoN books, and Kellhus' capabilities are pretty Freudian. He imputes subconscious desires and fears from facial microexpressions, reveals them, and uses them as levers. He's capable of modulating his own voice and expression to create emotions through feedback. He analyzes structures of tradition and belief and figures out how to exploit them to ratchet up his own authority. And that's...pretty much it. The Probability Trance is awesome but pure fantasy. The problem with all of this is that it's a very old conception of how social neuro works, individual-to-individual or individual-to-crowd effects, and twenty years of brutal and often depressing research suggests that Kellhus has completely overlooked the very area he needs to master - the real 'darkness that comes before', the unconscious brain subsystems that deal in primes, statistical prototypes, and preconscious framing. Peter Watts is an example of someone who's much crunchier (and much more radical) in how he handles neuro. Kellhus would be hosed if he met some scramblers, because scramblers are better-researched  Neuropath is a good point to critique. It's a whole book predicated on this dire dread argument that clearly bothers Bakker deeply: the idea that we're Just Brains, and as we begin to modify those traits we've previously treated as fundamental, we'll open up horrifying new vistas of exploitation and brainfuckery. But the argument Bakker's so afraid of has been obvious for decades: it's like watching an author panic that relativity implies our futures are fixed. Yes, you can be compelled to do things while believing they're volitional! Yes, your beliefs and actions are strongly influenced by priming and context! So? He ends the book where an interesting book would begin. His terror is deeply conservative - knowledge and change will erode traditional mores and turn us all into serial killers. Bakker specifically believes that men will use science to oppress women more, and that women are being conditioned into obeying. The dude once pointed out that women in the West had escaped genital mutilation only to seek out voluntary labiaplasty, wasn't this a sick irony? No, man, those are not the same thing at all. Kellhus is another example (one I'm more willing to forgive because he's just a rhetorical device). Kellhus apprehends the hidden causal pathways behind individual belief, and manipulates them to achieve power. But Bakker should know from even a cursory study of culture-gene coevolution that Kellhus is totally hosed, and in fact, he even makes the argument as to why Kellhus is hosed - but applies it only to Esmenet! Cultural norms serve as a safeguard against exploitation of the group's commons by free-rider sociopaths. You can be as clever, calculating, and individually brilliant as you please, but you're up against thousands of years of a massively iterated security system that deploys ingroup-outgroup cues to confine individual agency to socially useful roles. Kellhus wouldn't make it because he believes that mastery of antecedents can achieve mastery of outcomes, when the great lesson of social psychology is that significant behavioral antecedents cannot be influenced by the individual. Good luck presenting the brain's inferential subsystems with thousands of stimuli over dozens of years to re-weight implicit prejudices, my dudeyain. Also, whale mothers, lol Bakker's great at writing fantasy that feels as horrible, sweeping, and soul-searing as the Bible. He's a really unique author. His interest in the philosophy of the self-as-caused allows for an awesome ~magic system~ and fantastic villains. He doesn't have much of interest to say to the neuroscientist or the psychologist, because he's following a very deep and very well-explored track. A Prince of Nothing interested in cutting-edge psychology would His Blind Brain Theory is the syllabus summary of an undergraduate class. It's the beginning of modern neuroscience, not the end. e: it strikes me on reflection that Bakker's terror of the ramifications of neuroscience is a philosopher's terror. He's afraid of losing concepts like intentionality that are important to philosophical discourse, but which never mattered to the scientists. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Jun 30, 2016 |
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Jun 30, 2016 15:51
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Also on reread the second trilogy sucks because two of the three major POVs are incredibly boring. Achamian's thread owns though.
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Jun 30, 2016 16:05
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mcustic posted:Depends on whether you consider Sorweel a major POV. Because if you do, than we disagree. The whole "Sorweel meets world" part is handled really well and still lingers with me years after reading, and the tension stemming from Kellhus' inability to read him I found quite exciting. I did like that scene! That scene was cool. I find most of his perspective really dull, though, and I think that's coming off the first trilogy, where we had: the most violent of all men delusional god emperor delusional god general mentat jesus chubby apocalypse sorcerer prostitute spy who got shortchanged by the writer guest appearances by the prince of piety, chief bathrobe of the scarlet spires, a gently caress bird, and the death-swirling omniscient POV and, uh, serwe Now we've got: poo poo herder prostitute empress who refuses to be as competent as her historical antecedents achamian + mimara's elf drugs death march
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Jun 30, 2016 16:44
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I don't really know  We just read a shitload of papers.The thing about psych is that it's rotten with bad statistics and underpowered experimental designs. As a rule of thumb, don't believe anything you read in a single paper. Focus on the stuff that's been replicated over and over again. My work was about racial bias in police shootings and the control of preconscious bias, so I know a lot about the implicit association test, affect misattribution, and poo poo like that. The study of how social forces alter our split-second decisions without our awareness.
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Jul 1, 2016 06:00
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Three books of "Esmenet could be so smart and effective with some education and respect" and then we get a 'frantic' 'shrill' mom empress who can't handle a fat senator. I think Bakker said this was part of his master plan to show how hard it is to escape structural sexism but it's boring to read and I don't believe it.
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Jul 3, 2016 17:22
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And it's all poo poo to read. With luck TGO will do something interesting with Sorweel and the flat Empire storylines. (Sorweel is pretty much guaranteed good because of Ishterebinth). Unless you want to posit that the metaphysics of bakkerplanet extend beyond enforcing lesser moral worth on women into actually making them less competent, Esmenet had everything she needed to be an interesting dynamic character. Bakker just isn't interested in writing that.
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Jul 5, 2016 00:34
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~my children~
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Jul 5, 2016 05:07
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Bakker's not helpful in starting discussions because he hasn't said anything new to scientists. He's a philosopher and what he thinks of as a Big Deal is the demolition or marginalization of the philosophy of mind by neurosciences. That's only important if you're invested in philosophy of mind or lay theories of cognition. Lay speculation on how the mind works is also irrelevant. No number of blog discussions will make any progress. A better grasp of experimental statistics is what the field needs right now. Bakker's a popularizer, although not a very good one, because his treatment is so shallow. I've been rereading the series and while I generally think the first trilogy is pretty great, it's astounding how many times he repeats "people think they know why they do stuff, but actually, they don't! How crazy is it to confront the true depth of an action's causal history?" Read Bakker for the superb tone of deep abominable history and killer war-slash-intrigue. Dude knows how to make a world feel big and old and interesting.
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Jul 7, 2016 17:22
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the trump tutelage posted:I don't understand this criticism. It's like pointing out that Lord of the Rings didn't break new ground in the field of linguistics. That's a fair comparison! I'm responding to the idea that Bakker's work is good because it offers the reader insight into modern cognitive theory. It doesn't - it's about neuroscience the way Dune is about environmentalism. That doesn't stop it from being good in other ways.
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Jul 7, 2016 17:56
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I'm reading the end of White Luck Warrior and I just realized the inchoroi are literally the aliens from Independence Day 
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Jul 7, 2016 17:59
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One time Bakker said he wanted to be like Nabokov and I think he would be a wonderful subject for a sequel to Pale Fire in which someone feverishly tries to self-publish The Unholy Consult on the kindle
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Jul 9, 2016 06:21
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Yeah Ishterebinth owns. The prose gets a little sloppy during the descent but it's just so huge and hosed up. This book is miles better than the previous two so far.
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Jul 15, 2016 03:51
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The pitch of a chapped marmoreal rind
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Jul 16, 2016 03:36
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Mimara is actually the only one so far the Eye sees as holy, but the Consult have prophecies about her and people with the Eye tend to give birth to dead babies.
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Aug 12, 2016 23:31
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Achamian isn't exactly a white dude though.
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Aug 26, 2016 16:50
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That reminds me, did we have any hints about the existence of the Tall before this book? I remember loads of nonman heroes wrestling dragons and poo poo, but I don't remember any hints that they were literally Very Large Nonmans
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Nov 1, 2016 20:25
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Rime posted:This author was gifted an unnatural way with words. The ground pitched a chapped marmoreal rind
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Dec 2, 2016 06:33
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Okay remind me (TGO spoilers) did Kellhus make any attempt to translocate the nuke before it went off? A couple horizons could have done it. Maybe it's too big and effortful even for reddit jesus
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Jan 18, 2017 23:38
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I enjoy the (accidental?) double meaning in the thread title. Truly nothing better
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Jan 19, 2017 01:03
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Number Ten Cocks posted:Or it could be based on real world biological sex differences and distributions of various traits. 
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Jan 20, 2017 23:19
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Number Ten Cocks posted:If you believe that more strength and endurance are better than less and that a better chance of being a genius outweighs a better chance of being a retard despite similar means, then males are objectively better than females. I don't think there's a good argument for the second, but the first principle surely isn't controversial? Hahaha ok dude. I'm sure men are objectively better at everything and it makes sense women would serve them, after all there's a fractional and barely statistically detectable difference in intelligence distribution and men are better at physical tasks that aren't childrearing, surviving with scare resources, getting old (grandmothers are literally the reason humans have long lifespans), enforcing social norms and peacekeeping as they do in most premodern societies, or any of that useless poo poo. "males are objectively better than females" 
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Jan 20, 2017 23:33
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Number Ten Cocks posted:I bow before the collective horror of SA before too much reality, but I did predict something like the whale mothers role for female dunyain because it seemed the logical outgrowth of their philosophy applied to our current reality. It's faster to breed your super race if you divide roles like that, I just wasn't sure Bakker would have the balls to do it. Kudos for that, even if the physical sexual dimorphism went into WTF LOL territory. It isn't remotely faster and makes no sense because (sorry if I shock you with too much reality) men's and women's brains are so close to identical that we neuroscientists can't even agree if there are detectable differences. Good luck breeding your super race without active, agile, socially engaged women - you'll all end up loving morons.
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Jan 20, 2017 23:36
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The curse of Bakker threads is people who go full  without a lick of actual training in neuroscience or evopsych.
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Jan 20, 2017 23:37
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It's lucky that women have a special woman chromosome onto which we can load the genes for being super fat and fertile without tainting our blond blue eyed sons. Wait poo poo hang on
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Jan 20, 2017 23:39
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It's not faster at all. Let me be clear: the reason it works for the Dunyain is because Bakker wanted it to work. That's it. You are trying to make this work in real life and it doesn't: it topples into farce at the slightest logical examination. Set aside the fact that men and women are near identical and you couldn't possibly breed one sex into a sessile tank without doing it to the other. You actively would not want to. But first let's take a step back here: you aren't talking about a eugenics program. You said that the objective moral inferiority and subjugation of women was justified in the real world due to the (again) objective superiority of men. Do you stand by that?
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Jan 20, 2017 23:51
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What happens if you decide to keep your women pregnant all the time so you can toss out the babies you don't want: your eugenics program doesn't go any faster and you lose half your effective labor and half your candidates for intellectual greatness. Eugenics is difficult because of generation times and limited gene pools - producing more babies at a given stage doesn't do you very much good, because progress happens by selecting for the traits you want and breeding towards them, and you can't speed up the process of sexual maturity. You can (as in many premodern societies) have women always pregnant to compensate for (in this case artificially) high infant mortality. But how in the world would that lead to axolotl tanks? Pregnant women are surprisingly active, and most importantly, they model lessons for human infants - who, thanks to gene/culture coevolution; are wired to mimic the competent and confident. Why rip them from their mothers and raise them separately? You're wasting half your population'a labor. Even a constantly pregnant female population can and should be educated to the same standard as the males, because this is net better for your breeding program! They can do useful things! And how the gently caress do you identify the smart women to breed if they're all caged in a rape room? Even in an underground maze there's a ton of work to be done. Crops to raise, maintenance, cleaning, food and textile preparatiom, teaching, calculation - pregnant women can do all this poo poo without slowing down their birth rate. It makes no sense in the real world. It's purely done for artistic effect. If Bakker really wanted to be clever he'd realize that the Dunyain should enforce selective infanticide! Keep only the cream of your men, but keep all the women. Maintain a 1:10 gender ratio, evolve into an ant colony. Bakker couldn't write that, though.
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Jan 21, 2017 00:11
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Number Ten Cocks posted:Im not talking about physical breeding into whale mothers. I'm talking about generational size and the undesirability of grating right that reduce birth rates. The advanced sexual dimorphism is absurd, I agree with that. You'd pick a cutoff age for assessment, keep the smartest and strongest and keep them constantly pregnant, kill the rest. Same for the men, but they spend their time in training and thought not hindered by pregnancy or infant rearing. You're better off with 15 kids per generation and women doing no meaningful training than 3 kids per generation and something closer to equality. Two 140 IQ parents need to have A KOT of kids to get a yield of 130+ and start moving that mean you're regressing to. I'm guessing you don't have any math to back this up: you're just guessing? If you're right, why hasn't natural selection pushed humans this way over our millions of years of culture-gene coevolution? Spoiler: because you're wrong. Extra kids per generation will not improve heterozygosity and will not make generation times any faster. You did in fact say the moral inferiority of Earwan women was due to the objective superiority of men in the real world. This is pretty far off right. If you want a preview of where your ideas are headed, check out some purebred dogs!
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Jan 21, 2017 00:45
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There's a flashback to his training in the original three where he compares a glacier to a beautiful woman so I guess he likes some whale mothers more than others?
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Jan 21, 2017 17:38
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Au contraire, Bakker probably had this planned since the start of the second trilogy! (I don't think he figured it out in the first, because there are no hints and Kellhus' reactions to women don't make sense for a guy who has only banged sessile wombsacks.) Part of Bakker's thesis is that posthumanism and accelerating human control over the mind and body will make the future more 'pornographic' — he sees men imposing their desires on womens' bodies and minds (he does not see women using any of this expanded somatic access for self-liberation, because he thinks that's naive, much like the idea of a prostitute becoming a successful empress, or women fighting on the front lines even in highly patriarchal cultures, or much else that, weirdly enough, actually happened on Earth!) So the whale mothers are part of his effort to say that the logical endpoint of transhumanist Dunyain thought is also deeply misogynistic. In much the same way that the cybernetic and Gigeresque inchoroi are, to him, inevitably misogynistic: they're phallic and they love to rape stuff, a task that, to Bakker, can't be achieved by space vaginas. There are no female inchoroi (or, if there are, they're not marked: all inchoroi we see have clamshell heads and giant space penises). There are no female Dunyain. There can't be, because Bakker thinks men will reduce women to sex objects. There are no female nonmen because the inchoroi struck at their reproductive ability and they all died of womb plague. You see the same thing in Neuropath (which I loving despise): the neuropaths are transhumans modified to be amoral and pragmatic. What does the male neuropath do? He runs the whole book's plot with a complex scheme of kidnappings designed to impart a lesson about the phenomenology of the mind. What does the female neuropath do? She seduces the protagonist, manipulates him with sex, attempts to interrogate the male neuropath by loving him, becomes overwhelmed by how awesome it is to have uninhibited sex, crashes, and dies. Again, a theme in Bakker's work: women are overwhelmed by lust, men resist and analyze it. Esmenet mourns that she's always reduced to the whore, and, unfortunately, it's because that's Bakker's plan for her: even when she's Empress of the Three Seas she can only think about her kids and fumble her way back into a brothel. Bakker's somewhat unfortunate illustrative example was "in some cultures, women are circumcised to control their sexuality. Now, in the west, women volunteer to get labiaplasty to make their genitals more appealing! Culture is driving women to obey men's pornographic desires!" Dude, uh, must have missed the bit where the plastic surgeon leaves you your clitoris. Like I mentioned above, dude should have thought about eusocial insects while figuring out the Dunyain. Kellhus could have been one of only a few breeding males in a population of almost wholly women — sensible if you're gonna strongly select for traits each generation, since for purposes of grasping the absolute a male mind is just as good as a female mind, but you're limited by uteruses more than you are by sperm. You want to keep only the cream of the male crop. Once he's done his duty, Kellhus is disposable and could be sent off to find Dad without much risk to the breeding plan. This post makes me feel gross
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Jan 24, 2017 08:11
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I was pacing the halls of Atrithau contemplating the knowledge of pure meaning when my senses were assaulted by a hideous Mark. Whirling I saw a velour-robed Schoolman. Impossible! As I summoned my wards the man said, "Yo momma made a pit of her womb so deep they call her Mom-Uirokas." Desperately I focused on the simple truth of the geometric point. But the sorcerer's chapped lips chuckled "Yo momma so stupid she thinks skin-spy can cover up her herpes" and I was confronted with the knowledge that my disgrace was anticipated in ancient counsels where men's honor was bound to the grace of their mothers. My world pitched as the nimil-chained wizard cried "Aurang left yo momma's house so ashamed and hosed up he ran up to me saying, 'who am I? what do you see??'" And I wept as I accepted the busting of my soul.
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Jan 25, 2017 17:45
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Deep within the halls of Ishual I oversaw the birth of the latest Candidate. From the scents and issues of the pregnancy I had determined the sex of the boy. But when the child slid from the whale-mother it was at a time unanticipated by the evidence, and beneath the natal filth he wore a robe of thick cloth. Improbably, the child spoke. "Look here," he burbled, "buncha nerds so cloistered they think a clitoris is a property of the soul's will to become self-moving. Hey! You! You spend twenty years studying how passions move peeled-up faces?" And I saw in his bloodied face the words 'and yo cock so little they call you the Death of Girth.' I fell into the Probability Trance to explore the causal origins of this event, but everywhere I turned I saw a man with nimil-jeweled teeth hooting "They say an Anasurimbor will come at the end of the world, so I guess the Second Apocalypse goes down after three pumps". And I felt the Absolute escape me forever.
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Jan 25, 2017 17:59
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For sure. Curious whether we'll get any more on the dude, he's pretty enigmatic for being such a key historical player.
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Jun 9, 2017 14:36
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Upon a moment's reflection I think you would have a really, really hard time finding a major character in this series who hasn't been cucked.
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Jun 10, 2017 05:39
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In the same way there are no female Inchoroi. Bakker doesn't really conceive of female sexuality as something active and agentic.
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Jun 19, 2017 02:19
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I'm not entirely sure how the High Priestess of Yatwer fits into this, mind. "Soft earth, plowed deep" or whatever. Neither active nor agentic.
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Jun 19, 2017 04:50
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Rime posted:I would suggest that Bakker never considered female nonmen sorcerers in the context of the lore, because he killed them off at the very start and their role in the narrative was encapsulated in that death. Do we even hear about any female nonmen at all, outside of the womb-plague and how that loss destroyed the entire species? Should we? Would that progress the narrative? In what ways? Ah those crazy Tumblr derived opinions!!! Read the books, you goof. There's a bunch of crazy poo poo going down before the womb plague, mostly around Arkfall. Any female Quya heroes would've been important there and probably pretty helpful too. This is one of those things like Kellhus comparing a glacier to a woman where it's just a hole in the story. (Did the nonmen grow Tall before immortality? Does the narrative around Arkfall suggest they have big ol giant men already? Do sranc grow Tall?  )This reminds me, I saw a theory suggesting the womb plague was genuinely meant to help and the inchoroi just hosed up, is there any strong textual support for that?
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Jun 20, 2017 14:43
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kcroy posted:what is this crap. EAMD (ever amazon manufactures delays)
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Jun 29, 2017 01:13
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