I'm backing it. Very exciting!
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Got sidetracked on The Crystal Shard. I'm enjoying it, but I picked up a copy of Hawk & Moor by Kent David Kelly. For those unaware (as I was before stumbling upon it last week), it's a look at the people behind D&D, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. I'm about 80 pages into it so far, and I really like it. It's less about game design and more about the designers, although the author makes a fair amount of speculation on possible influences on Gygax in the early part of the book. I'm thinking I'll be finishing this before going back to other books.
Splash effect was bad
I haven't gotten around to watching Final Wars yet. I think I've got it somewhere on DVD, but there are so many old-school ones that I haven't seen yet. I feel like I should watch those first.
The Transformers films would be sooooo much better if they were edited down about 30-45 minutes each. The last one was ridiculously bloated. I didn't even mind the obscenely obvious product placement. It was just too overstuffed with plot.
Gaming stores selling used rpgs at full retail. Granted 2E D&D matetial is still somewhat popular. Yet selling a used 2E boxed sets at 46$ is a rip-off imo. I might as well buy the PDF and print it out on my own. Then they wonder why their used 2E stuff is not selling as well as it could. My grievance? Actually finding a store that sells used RPG's in my area. There's ONE, an hour and fifteen minutes away. I'm trying to find a decent copy of 1st edition AD&D books to run some of the classic campaigns, and coming up with squat. Go go rural living.
This guy wants details
See, if it's bad Arnold movies we're talking about, then I love Last Action Hero. It's awesome, and it manages to be both a typical action movie and a commentary on action movies, at the same time! I love it.
The only reason I wouldn't want Sean Bean is because all I'd see is Sean Bean. I enjoy his performances, but he's almost too iconic now. I haven't even seen him in Game of Thrones (not my cup o' tea), but between 006 in Goldeneye and Boromir in Fellowship of the Ring, he's got a certain persona he replicates. I enjoy it, but you could say it Bean done before. <(o.0)>
I agree with a lot of the points here, but even the last few books had a number of WOW moments for me: Spoiler:
- When Demandred arrived with the army of Sharans through the massive gateway that spread across the battlefield. I really have an epic picture in my head of that moment. - The closing of the Bore. I really liked the description of Rand weaving closed the hole in the Dark One's prison. I finished the series last year, and those are the two that still stick out in my mind. Maybe that's not much, but they were satisfying to me.
The books get longer, but the series slows down a lot as the books get on. I think the whole chronology of the series is only something like 3-4 years. I think the trouble will be keeping it from feeling like a clip show of events. It was one of my few complaints with Jackson's Lord of the Rings adaptation. His travel montages failed to convey the long passages of time it took for the Fellowship to cross Middle-Earth. I could see a similar problem happening in Wheel of Time.
I finished an audiobook run on WoT last year (I think), and I'm not sure if I'm excited for this. I've come to look at the series as being mature enough for typical high-school/college age readers, but it's tone and content never rise above that. I really enjoyed the series at that age, but I've since realized a lot of the characters and relationships are quite shallow; there is little "real life" about their interactions. I would also be nominally concerned about what direction the producers take it. If it tries to be a Game of Thrones clone, I expect most of the females in the series to be rudely exploited. Jordan included plenty of nudity in the books, but I'm not sure it was ever meant to be titillating. All of the actual hook-ups were done "off-camera." So, I guess we'll see.
Read "The Hound" to aloud to my partner. I got a response along the lines of, "Well, that was freaky." There's a definite jump in the level of macabre compared to the preceding Lovecraft works. In the scheme of the greater mythos, even though I didn't like the wordier style of previous stories, they do help ease a reader into the setting. I think if "The Hound" had been the first one I'd read, perhaps it would have been a bit much right off the bat.
Ended up inserting "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" before "The Hound," after having found a better list for the mythos chronology. I could certainly tell it was one of his earlier stories, as it was stylistically closer to the other early tales than what I'm seeing reflected a couple years later in "The Nameless City." Most of the tale is spent describing the great decadence that was found in the city of Sarnath. I suppose one could look at it like watching a great painter craft a beautiful fresco, only to have him take a knife to it at the very end. I did find myself wishing there had been a bit less time spent on the descriptives, and a little more on the details of how the city fell. The ending came off feeling very rushed, and that's a pity. To the member that asked if I've read Umberto Eco, the answer is I have not. I saw the film version of In the Name of the Rose, and I believe I read his essay on Superman, but that's really been my only exposure to him that I can recall. He's an author that interests me, but I think he's probably pretty far down on my priority list.
Yeah, I mean, I got used to it after a while. It's just that it was off-putting to begin with, and the book didn't overcome that deficit quickly enough for me to bother finishing the book. It felt vaguely reminiscent of Newspeak. Thanks for the heads up on Dune. It's not going to be immediate on my list after Lovecraft, so I have some time to mull over how much of it I want to dive into. If I find it as you suggest, where Dune is really the only worthwhile of the lot, I'll move on to other things. I'm actually hankering for some sword & sorcery, so I'm looking into the early Forgotten Realms books on eBay. I haven't decided if I want to start at the very beginning of the fiction with Darkwalker on Moonshae or jump into the more widely known Icewind Dale Trilogy with The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore.
Well, to be honest, I've seen both the movie and the mini-series of Dune at some point (can't remember if I got all the way through the mini). I think that makes it harder to jump into because there's already some knowledge of the story to come spoiled. I think it's the same reason I have trouble reading Tolkien, in that I saw the Lord of the Rings movies first. I would like to come back to Dune, though, as it's a pretty sprawling series, and I don't currently have something like that on my plate. A few months ago, I finished doing the audiobooks for The Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan. That took me about a year to get through, and I'd like something equally involved. As for Ancillary Justice, one of the early things that really put me off was the inner monologue about gender not being relevant, and then proceeding to just refer to every character's pronoun as "she." It felt shoehorned in as an attempt to be current-culture relevant, and that annoyed me. I don't mind playing around with social concepts in science fiction, but if you need to preach at the reader almost directly like that, I feel you're doing it wrong. It was the same criticism I had with Ready Player One, where at various points it just felt like the author, Ernest Cline, wanted to really make sure his readership didn't miss his point on issues of religion and sexuality. It was so on-the-nose, but given the Mary Sue nature of that whole book, I wasn't really surprised at the choice to broach the topics in that manner. It's why I feel so refreshed reading Lovecraft right now. Sci-fi (or the macabre) should be a challenge to read, but those other books really felt dumbed-down.
I'm reading some H.P. Lovecraft aloud to my other half. I picked up the three volumes from Penguin Classics, and so far I've been enjoying them. I've only read a small sample of stories previously, and this time I plan to work my way through all of the Cthulhu mythos by publication order. I only had one volume to start with, so I read some non-mythos tales, namely "The Tomb," "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," and "The White Ship." I received my other two volumes yesterday, so I read "The Nameless City." Next is "The Hound" and "The Festival." What I like about Lovecraft is the strength of his vocabulary. It probably borders on verbosity, but it's refreshing to read some fiction that stretches my brain a bit. Before this, I'd started reading Dune by Frank Herbert, but it didn't really grab me straight off (though I plan to give it another go somewhere soon). Before that, I'd tried reading Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie, but found it to be a slog to read with nothing vaguely interesting occurring in the first 50 pages. I haven't the foggiest how this won a Hugo award. I'm going to require a real dearth of material to tackle it again. |