|
Tried reading a.dragonlance novel once and after like 50 pages of Gimli/Legolas banter I noped the gently caress out and clearly made the right decision.
|
#
¿
Aug 21, 2020 03:09
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 01:39 |
|
|
Empty Sandwich posted:Oh, it's the opposite. That bumper sticker is aggressively mediocre. In retrospect the signs of humanity's impending doom were all there.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2020 06:25
|
|
|
like wolverine's claws but in boner form
|
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2020 10:56
|
|
|
Galewolf posted:Larry Elmore Why do I have this vague sense that I remember that name for reasons other than d&d art?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 23, 2020 12:53
|
|
|
I remember WTFing at that once and someone rushed to defend it saying 'actually it was a key element of the plot' as though that doesn't make it worse.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2020 12:31
|
|
|
This is getting a little SF (no actual magic apart from shot that would befiddly as all hell miraculously working on the first try), bit haveany of you read Leo Frankowski's Conrad Stargard novels, It's alternate history/time travel in which a 20th century engineer is transported to 13th century poland a few years before the mongols arrived. The first thing he does is gently caress children, and this is a thing that keeps coming up. I finally noped out near the end when there was a tribe of Indigenous people in the Amazon who were described as childlike and who all wanted to gently caress the protagonist. The author was a piece of work extreme MRA type whose house may have been worse than Groverhaus. He married a Russian lady, moved to Russia, and creeped on her daughter in his blog. He died not much later. Coincidence?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2020 12:50
|
|
|
baw posted:also how about bad covers of good books
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2020 13:34
|
|
|
What is the consensus on Robert E Howard? I mean on the subject of publication order not matching chronological order. (Dude was possibly more racist than Lovecraft, but it came through differently in his writing.) Also, i remember liking Robert Asprin as a kid, but it has been a loooong time. Maybe I should reread and see if it holds up. They're short.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2020 01:43
|
|
|
I couldn't stand Dragonlance, but I read a little Forgotten Realms. The Harpers series, particularly. Each was a self-contained reskin of The Hobbit.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2020 01:45
|
|
|
Imagine a perfect shitposting forum where everyone is happy posting and reading bad takes all day long and there is no hardship or cringe drama of any kind, but this forum has one tiny thread where one poster has to put up with people making GBS threads on Ursula Le Guin.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2020 07:33
|
|
|
No Pants posted:i'm channeling the book barnyard poster who tried to read the dispossessed and had to put it down SHAKING with RAGE because she obviously had no understanding of the immaculate science of economics His money is now her money. What more is there to understamd?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2020 10:30
|
|
|
I just started rereading the first Robert Asprin 'Myth' book, and it definitely fits into that category. I have noticed the following so far: The aforementioned casual misogyny is pretty mild thus far but I have vague recollections of some characters who would fit that description better. It's very uh...early YA in writing style, I guess. Straight to every point, light on figurative language which is only in the dialogue. Maybe I liked it because of how easy to read it was. Very genre-aware, almost fourth wall breaking without quite doing it. Puns mostly limited to the title. Hints of hard right politics dropped here and there.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 28, 2020 14:12
|
|
|
Got through the 2nd Myth novel. They aren't as bad as I feared but I am picking up on something teenaged me didn't notice. Only two in so far but what I remember of book 10 followed this pattern. Everything is going great until the protagonists suffer a setback in the first chapter or two. Conflict is established basically out of nowhere. Conflict is mostly resolved by Skeeve in a more or less uninterrupted stream of successes, a little bit at a time, everything goes right for him. He isn't really portrayed as a mary sue character wise, but plot wise oh my yes. One unresolved problem holds the protagonists back from victory. This is solved by deus ex machina, but one that is foreshadowed earlier. So it's a bunch of lovely writing nonos, but mitigated a bit.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2020 01:17
|
|
|
ChubbyChecker posted:yeah, if you're not a linguist, pseudo-english names work better than gibberish apostrophe salads A while back my bilingual preschooler started making up new names for herself. They were weird and didn't really resemble any naming paradigm I was familiar with, and few of them have any connection to any language that I can find. Phonologically there are features kind of between Chinese and English. But it is all nonsense; phonologically consistent nonsense though. If I ever write a fantasy novel I am using those names or ones built like them.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2020 03:22
|
|
|
Bismuth posted:Yeah Orcs are sexy now, glad writers are catching up Ever play Shadowrun: Hong Kong?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2020 11:52
|
|
|
Colonel Cancer posted:That's the one with a goon orc who lives in the trash? Manic orc dreamgirl rat shaman
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2020 13:32
|
|
|
Bismuth posted:Sorry I was really high when I posted that, I was trying to think about the implications as in, what would the least bad way to do that be, like how do you have a creature with a rate of ageing that doesn't line up with humans be in a relationship in a non creepy way. I know we've all sort of accepted "500 year old elf/vampire/whatever falls in love with teen/YA human" thanks to its prevalence in media as "normal" but its always seemed equally weird and creepy to me as would a human and some creature that matured at 2-4x our growth rate. If you dont accept human growth rates as some kind of base for "normal" a lot of popular fantasy relationships start getting way weirder. I don't think many people call Aragon/Arwen creepy, so clearly the answer is to have both the characters be grown adults by the standards of their species.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2020 01:57
|
|
|
Ween's song "She Wanted To Leave" comes to mind. It has the proper ending for such a story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd5vQWYjUxs
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2020 02:19
|
|
|
The Ranger posted:Today I'm reminded of the existence of the Dragonlance short story (from one of the "Tales" anthologies) where a small amount of industrial-strength magic love potion powder somehow ended up in a batch of beer at the Inn of the Last Home. Cue an evening of drunken revelry where everyone goes insane with lust and jealousy and it ends up in a giant violent blacked-out-to-gently caress bar orgy. Hey, have you ever read Patrick Suskind's "Perfume?"
|
|
#
¿
Sep 9, 2020 02:48
|
|
|
Books that would be good with less child rape: The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2020 06:29
|
|
|
Re: harry turtledove: I liked Clash of Arms http://www.starshipsofa.com/blog/2013/07/30/starshipsofa-no-300-harry-turtledove/
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2020 10:17
|
|
|
Was it a thing in library classification before that? I think it was but I am not sure.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2020 04:23
|
|
|
Every third BBS user in the 90s went by Drizzt or Raistlin.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2020 10:48
|
|
|
there wolf posted:Wait this reminds me, did anyone every read any of the MythAdeventure books? They were like a slightly less creepy Xanth. I just thought of it because the girl in them was named Tanda, T-and-a, get it? I legit never noticed that. Reread a few. I think I am done. They are really dumb.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2020 10:13
|
|
|
My favorite magic system is the Unwords in Dan Abnett's inquisitor novels. One of the antagonists is trying to master the use of these magic words, sounds that basically just do magic, generally destructive. The user can kill someone with a word, but it will (presumably only if they haven't mastered them) gently caress them up, and one character speaking unwords had their lips shredded by it.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2020 10:49
|
|
|
The Moon Monster posted:Didn't the Kender die from a poison needle trap when opening a chest? If I'm remembering correctly and that was a thing I guarantee it was a dice roll. That sounds like an approach to story telling which COULD produce good results, if allowances were made for moments when it wouldn't work, and momentum always maintained. I mean that's basically how the Mad Max movies work. Dude does something risky, sometimes dude fucks it up for no apparent plot reason. (Though sometimes it's world-building reasons). For that matter, I can think of a few actually good books where someone seems like they're the big deal in the book and they just eat poo poo out of nowhere, but the story carries on without letting up; not necessarily as if it didn't happen, but immediately and forcefully with the consequences of that event...even though the plot could have proceeded more or less the same had the event not happened. Jaidee in "The Windup Girl" is what I've got in mind. Failed a bureaucratic power play roll, even though it looked like he could have gone through to the end.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2020 09:21
|
|
|
Hey speaking of Paolo Bacigalupi, anyone read The Alchemist? Magic is banned because using it causes 'bramble,' a thick deadly suffocating thicket of thorns that covers most of the land to grow. A magic user invents a machine to destroy the bramble. The mayor and his men take it to use it so that they are able to use magic at will, while continuing to use the law to round up and kill anyone who dares use magic themselves.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2020 11:38
|
|
|
Flared Basic Bitch posted:I’m apparently the only person on the planet that liked Market Forces, so definitely read that too. You're not. Definitely do. Some absolutely brutally lines in that book.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2020 06:29
|
|
|
I tried reading the first Kvothe book, couldn't make it fifty pages. Correct me if I am wrong, but that was one of those thousand page doorstops, right? The torrent of crap in all genres released a thousand pages at a time in the 00s onward makes me set a hard limit of 600 pages without compelling reasons to exempt something.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2020 11:15
|
|
|
ClamdestineBoyster posted:Mensa people are stupid af that’s the point I was trying to make. They crave the pure democracy of a clown planet and the purest sacrifice of all knowledge at their core. Yet they succumb to the intoxicating ethers of they’re own rear end and mistake the nurturing bosom of science for their own mother, suckling at the most sober druggie as the light at the end of their tunnel, but the light is just a mirror of them in clown makeup.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2020 13:45
|
|
|
Good fantasy novels: Iain M Bank's 'Inversions'
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2020 10:30
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 01:39 |
|
|
PetraCore posted:It kind of sounds like Rothfuss needed to not plan to write a trilogy, and should have just written a single tighter plotted book about a shithead wizard and his conveniently cool retellings of stumbling rear end-first into problems. Everything has to be a goddamned trilogy to get published tho. LOTR was a trilogy and people just love that word. Trilogy. Look how many clubs, resorts and poo poo are named 'Trilogy.' Things that reduce my willingness to read a novel: Is part of a trilogy Has more than 600 pages Has a title in any way inspired by whatever book is currently in the pop culture spotlight Jacket copy deacribes it in a way that makes it seem like whatever book is currently in the pop culture spotlight
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2020 06:24
|
|