Game News Big Huge RPG is Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

[ironyuri]

I think I want to marry Lesifoere

 

[Lesifoere]

I'm sorry, but your inability to detect trolling and sarcasm indicates you have no worth as a human being.

And yes, there are some objective standards; prattling about how everything is subjective and no opinion can be wrong or dumb is silly. Even the most inbred basement dweller probably realizes that Salvatore is vastly inferior to, say, Oscar Wilde.

 

[whitemithrandir]

.. those with shitty tastes.

See, that's exactly what I mean. "Taste(s)" being the operative word and "shitty" the subjective bit.

There's nothing subjective about the shittiness of Salvatore's books.

You don't look at a piece of grass and go "this grass is subjectively green", you go "hey look, this grass is green".

The fact that a particular blade of grass gives off a particular reaction when struck with photons is a fact of the objective reality. Roses are red. Violets are blue. Salvatore books are total shit.

Seriously. It's in the bible. Go look it up.

.. I don't imply that people with different tastes forfeit their right to exist, let alone have an opinion. You're becomming the skyway of literature.

... with that said, it's OKAY to enjoy shitty books, and you know what, I think you can like whatever the fuck you want, as long as you keep that shit to yourself.

After all, if we waged genocide on everyone who liked the taste of shit, then where would I go to find masturbatory material along the lines of 2 girl 1 cup?

 

[AlaCarcuss]

I'm sorry, but your inability to detect trolling and sarcasm indicates you have no worth as a human being.

Looks like I trolled you pretty good though....

And yes, there are some objective standards; prattling about how everything is subjective and no opinion can be wrong or dumb is silly. Even the most inbred basement dweller probably realizes that Salvatore is vastly inferior to, say, Oscar Wilde.

You know, you're right. I can't believe I made such a faggoty, PC post - fuck'em... fuck'em all, excuse me wile I die like the rest!

 

[oldschool]

Fuck Oscar Wilde, is all I'm sayin.

 

[SCO]

you know i've read pretty much everything there is to read from the fantasy/sci-fi settings. Right now i have 3,128 thereabouts books the vast majority of which are some kind of fantasy or sci-fi. I think i read about 80% of that.

I've read everything with some semblance of acceptability from true blood and catherine asaro (romances lol) to Alice Sebold and Paul Auster, passing through derivative hacks that do FR to original well written derivative stuff like Bujold, from the paranoid strange bad stuff of Cyteen to the new weird, classic 50's era ADVENTURE IN SPACEEEEE, sprinkled with some quality thrillers like Tomas Perry (fantastic) to some selected historical novels & mysteries.

I've found i don't have much of a critical taste. If you look for it, you can find something to like in almost all books. The tragedy is not branching out and realizing that there are many good things out there.

 

[SCO]

You can even find something to like in stupid Paul Auster books lol

 

[Elwro]

Oh boy, I read his "Music of Chance". It was quite interesting for a while, but then he decided "ah, what the heck, let's get this over with" and simply killed all the characters in a car accident. (Spoilarz.) Because, you know, actually developing a good conclusion to a book is a difficult task...

 

[Longshanks]

Fun fact: King was going to bin his manuscript for Carrie, the one with the telekinetic girl who went insane, but his wife rescued it from the trash and sent it out. Or something like that.

Also, I didn't much care for The Left Hand of Darkness, but that's neither here nor there--there's a reason I recommended Birthday over it. Anyway, if you're interested in getting back into fantasy books that don't suck, I've got a handy little list of authors to try: China Mieville, KJ Bishop, Jeff VanderMeer, Catherynne M. Valente, Nicole Kornher-Stace. Did you ever give Tanith Lee a whirl? What about Zelazny's Lord of Light?

Mieville? Really? For someone with self-declared high standards, this is a surprising recommendation.

 

[SCO]

I read the new york trilogy and moon palace. Still traumatized after 10 years

 

[SCO]

Fun fact: King was going to bin his manuscript for Carrie, the one with the telekinetic girl who went insane, but his wife rescued it from the trash and sent it out. Or something like that.

Also, I didn't much care for The Left Hand of Darkness, but that's neither here nor there--there's a reason I recommended Birthday over it. Anyway, if you're interested in getting back into fantasy books that don't suck, I've got a handy little list of authors to try: China Mieville, KJ Bishop, Jeff VanderMeer, Catherynne M. Valente, Nicole Kornher-Stace. Did you ever give Tanith Lee a whirl? What about Zelazny's Lord of Light?

Mieville? Really? For someone with self-declared high standards, this is a surprising recommendation.

Too communist for the codex.

 

[Lesifoere]

Fun fact: King was going to bin his manuscript for Carrie, the one with the telekinetic girl who went insane, but his wife rescued it from the trash and sent it out. Or something like that.

Also, I didn't much care for The Left Hand of Darkness, but that's neither here nor there--there's a reason I recommended Birthday over it. Anyway, if you're interested in getting back into fantasy books that don't suck, I've got a handy little list of authors to try: China Mieville, KJ Bishop, Jeff VanderMeer, Catherynne M. Valente, Nicole Kornher-Stace. Did you ever give Tanith Lee a whirl? What about Zelazny's Lord of Light?

Mieville? Really? For someone with self-declared high standards, this is a surprising recommendation.

Lol here we go again.

Mieville's got more ideas and interesting shit going on in one page of his Bas-Lag books than most SF/F writers manage in an entire career. As long as he doesn't shit socialist manifesto all over his books, he's great. He's a better prose stylist than Tolkien (but then, most authors are), and of course he's dimensions above the likes of Salvatore.

Too communist for the codex.

I know, right? Completely predictable.

 

[SCO]

This is my collection now:
http://encodable.com/cgi-bin/filechucke ... e=list.txt

I'm not exactly highbrow.

 

[nomask7]

If you look for it, you can find something to like in almost all books.

The more you look for something to like in a book, the more you are actually looking for something to like in your own memories and the ways you can combine them. It's exactly analogous to projecting your own qualities on animals, which also is something leftists do a lot. There's the irony: they think they are the most empathic and altruistic humans on earth, but they are actually the most hopelessly narcissistic, seeing themselves in everything they see, and loving everything because in everything they can see only themselves. Funny manboons.

I'm still ignoring you little man. Actually i did you a disservice before. I was confusing you with sheek.

But i don't care for you either.

Silent, dog! I didn't write this post because I wanted to talk to you. Private messages are for such purposes, and as you've noticed, I haven't sent you any.

 

[SCO]

I'm still ignoring you little man. Actually i did you a disservice before. I was confusing you with sheek.

But i don't care for you either.

 

[ironyuri]

I still want to marry Lesifoere.



Also re: criticisms of Tolkien - the beauty of Tolkien is not in his prose or his mythos but in his work as historical literature/mythopoesis and in his work as a linguist.

By far one of the most interesting aspects of his works is the creation of languages. He created his worlds to furnish his linguistic interests with a space in which they could live and breathe.

Anyway.... all of your tastes are shit. Go read Thomas Mann you manboon scum.

 

[circ]

This is my collection now:
http://encodable.com/cgi-bin/filechucke ... e=list.txt

I'm not exactly highbrow.

Books suck, but I do have a few on the shelf, no ebooks on the comp atm.

The Laser Guidebook, second edition. Everything you wanted to know about laser physics basically.

Computing for Biologists. Some BASIC programs I think.

TekLords - William Shatner. I have a bunch of TekWar tv-series on cd's and some comics too, but just the one book.

Star Trek Memories - William Shatner again. Bill tells the ins and outs of what happened on and off the set during the 60's. Great book.

Some Doug Adams book about his holistic detective.

Neuromancer - William Gibson. I've read it twice over the years and I'm still confused about the plot.

Stainless Steel Rat and other short stories - Harry Harrison. Good book. I was going to pick up the SSR books but then I noticed 2000AD had done them in comic book form with art by Ezquerra.

Cabal - Clive Barker. Can't remember if the book or movie was better.

Dune, Dune Messiah, etc - Frank Herbert.

Permutation City - Greg Egan. Last book I bought, probably over 10 years ago.

I was also going to at some point pick up Effinger's Marid trilogy but it was always out of print.

Some PKD ebooks somewhere.

 

[Gosling]

Mieville is a rather mediocre writer with a very rich imagination. And he's extremely butthurt too, kinda like Lesie.
Vandermeer isn't even a writer, he's a post-post-modern text-designer or something. And it's always amazing to see how self-important and self-absorbed these people feel "revolutionizing" the genre.
Is Mieville really more original than Tolkien, Peake, Vance, Stapledon, Dick, Ellison, Burroughs, Pepperstein, even Jeff Noon or John C. Wright? Can he hold a candle to Pynchon? Why is he cited in every thread about sf or fantasy? Because he's in opposition to Terry Brooks?

 

[Lesifoere]

What, so you think anyone who doesn't like Tolkien is butthurt? Bawwww harder, fanboy. He's cited because he can actually write, and out of all the new weird people he's probably the least pretentious (blah blah I just like to write monsters, aren't they cool etc).

Tolkien personifies mediocrity perfectly, though! And just like Bioware/Bethesda, he attracts en masse people who lap up the mediocre, the familiar, the banal. Dude's a great linguist and scholar. Shitty, shitty writer, and I'm not sure why you'd even bring him up when talking about "originality" because really.

Vandermeer isn't even a writer, he's a post-post-modern text-designer or something.

Are you serious? VanderMeer's produced plenty of conventional prose and linear narrative. Redding is teh hard?

 

[Gosling]

Are you serious? VanderMeer's produced plenty of conventional prose and linear narrative. Redding is teh hard?

Reddinng isnt teh hard, redding shit is.
I must confess I've only read two books by him: Veniss Underground, which is beyond shit: pretencious self-indulgent crap, and the worst thing of all - boring and bland (i know you love it btw); and I own the first edition of City of Saints and Madmen which is kind of neat but "it's an object, not a book". Are his later works any different?
I don't have anything against Vandermeer personally, but I think he will never achieve true greatness, and with time will remain just another curiosity on some geek's list of top 100 forgotten weird writers. (which is already a compliment) I mean even Alasdair Gray is more "literature" compared to Vandermeer, even if there are no real points of comparison between the two.

And Mieville not proselytizing in his interviews? Nigga please. Maybe it's his interviewers' fault asking him questions like this - but he's been rather vocal about his opinions about modern fantasy.
It does them all a lot of good from a marketing standpoint though, so it's understandable.

 

[Volourn]

"What... exactly is "true greatness"?"

Stephen King.

 

[Gosling]

What... exactly is "true greatness"? And it's funny you bitch about pretension, seeing as babbling about "true greatness" either as reader or writer is as pretentious as you get.

So "true greatness" and "literary merit" are pretentious wankers' terms. Are you by any chance trying to tell me that all RPGs books are good for what they are? Please explain, this is very important in a Salvatore thread.

Also what Volly said.

 

[Lesifoere]

"Literary merit" is a much more neutral term. "True greatness" is pompous and aggrandizing, and a phrase I only see wannabe-to-mediocre academics or, yes, pretentious wankers use.

Try not to dodge the question: how do you define "true greatness"?

Are you by any chance trying to tell me that all RPGs books are good for what they are?

Redding is teh hard, right? Just a few posts ago I was pointing out that saying everything is subjective is fucking dumb.

 

[Gosling]

"Literary merit" is a much more neutral term. "True greatness" is pompous and aggrandizing, and a phrase I only see wannabe-to-mediocre academics or, yes, pretentious wankers use.

Try not to dodge the question: how do you define "true greatness"?

"True greatness = Being art = Having high literary/artistic merit" as opposed to expertly done mediocrity.
Are you arguing semantics because you've nothing to say? Do you really think that "artistic merit" is a much less arbitrary term than "true greatness"?

Are you by any chance trying to tell me that all RPGs books are good for what they are?

Redding is teh hard, right? Just a few posts ago I was pointing out that saying everything is subjective is fucking dumb.

It just seemed strange that you resort to "extreme" judgements when speaking about books you don't like while insta-pedalling back and resorting to "pretentious terms are pretentious" nitpicking defence when we started to talk about your favourite writers. I was just curious to see such an inconsistency in your opinion.

 

[Elwro]

Is Mieville really more original than Tolkien, Peake, Vance, Stapledon, Dick, Ellison, Burroughs, Pepperstein, even Jeff Noon or John C. Wright?

Peake and Noon, two names which didn't come up yet. Both great writers. Without Peake there'd be no Mieville or Vandermeer, I think (yeah, exaggerating perhaps). Noon was great in some books (Vurt, Needle in the Groove); too bad people stopped buying and he stopped writing.