Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,174
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member, Administrator, Moderator
- Games I like
- Sundry, mostly board
- Books I like
- Science fiction, fantasy, some historical fiction
Comments
-
> @NeilNjae said: > "Childish" or "pulpy"? A genuine question. I agree that this isn't deep literature with finely-drawn nuanced characters. But is simple, direct melodrama always "childish"? There is, I think, a…
-
> @Apocryphal said: > The original 'eastern elites' LOL. > (populist conservatives in the US and Canada try to whip up followings by blaming everything on the 'eastern elites' who run the government. I first heard the term out of the mout…
-
(Quote) Right, I see what you mean now! Interestingly, I am just reading Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, where non-family relations are foregrounded. This is especially true between Achilles and Patroclus, where there is a "brothers in arms…
-
(Quote) It's a classic problem with many novels from other cultures! - Russian novels in particular are often made opaque to the British or north American reader because of the different names and titles that the same person can legitimately be call…
-
(Quote) Typically with stories from China, Japan and similar cultures, social structures and signals are so embedded in the language that the reader or listener can tell immediately the relative perceived rank of two people meeting. There are obviou…
-
> @BarnerCobblewood said: > While I liked the names, I found that they did not help me visualise the moves of the fight, as much as the level of the fight and fighters. Like @Apocryphal I found the fights quite abstract, and so very stressful…
-
(Quote) Kind of like rock-paper-scissors but with more permutations and less randomness?
-
(Quote) This came out in the small amount I read of She Who Became the Sun, where a famine in the land as a whole was attributed to the corruption and weakness of the emperor in particular and therefore the government he had set up.
-
Commenting so I get to read other responses. I'm especially interested in how, and indeed if, it's possible in a game to move away from goal-oriented models of progress towards the IMHO rather different aims of this kid of martial art. A Hero Born …
-
Loved it! Again (as with the previous discussion starter) it reminded me very much of my very limited explorations of Taoism. It's never just about fighting, or breathing, or sex, or whatever - ultimately it's all about immortality. Contrasting wit…
-
Loved the names, and the implication that the reader would be able to imagine the scene unfolding (of course I couldn't, but it didn't matter). It did remind me of the Tai Chi forms which (long ago) I dabbled in. For me the use of this terminology m…
-
Agreed about the gender roles -in She Who Became the Sun the female protagonist only gets anywhere at all because she assumes her brother's identity and the prophecy which had been spoken over him - as a girl, she did not merit any prophecy at all. …
-
I liked the idea (and I have no idea if it in any sense reflects the reality of the time) that there were all these different schools, all with varying social / spiritual / idealistic practices. Spurred on by this book, I started watching some of t…
-
I'm not sure he's flawed as such - surely a flaw would be if he soaked up all the training and then went round mugging old ladies for spare cash, or something? He certainly isn't meeting the trope of being innately able to master all the stuff from…
-
Very true about driving the plot. But I wonder when you say "Western ideas of loyalty and duty" if you are really meaning "modern Western ideas of loyalty and duty". Probably back in the 1300s or so then family duty wold have bee…
-
I wasn't bored by the book and there was never a time when I thought about abandoning it. So that was clearly a plus. I guess looking back at it you're right - some of the developments seemed a bit random at the time and I suppose were there either …
-
I'm fine with that
-
All: I have set up a new discussion area under the monthly lot for August for The Buried Giant and added the usual back cover blurb as a discussion. Feel free to set up notifications if you use them.
-
> @WildCard said: > Thanks for thinking of me, but I still don’t have the capacity. I’ve been the only one in my office the past year. I’m hiring two staffers who will start on Aug. 1, and things will loosen up for me after that. Seems sta…
-
Didn't we read that together a while back - @Apocryphal maybe led it?
-
So @clash_bowley , you ok for September? Meanwhile I'll set up a discussion area for Buried Giant and will post here when that's done
-
:) still time to catch up!
-
Hi all, we're 2/3 of the way through June now so heading towards @NeilNjae leading discussion on A Hero Born in a couple of weeks' time. After that, July is Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear, led by yours truly. In the normal course of things it w…
-
(Quote) Well yes there is that - as a rule it's a place I avoid :)
-
That's a good point to bring up - in my understanding, "natural justice" is not only about retribution for wrong doing, but also reward for right doing. For example "it was only right that they helped her rebuild the house, after all …
-
(Quote) That's a really interesting observation - so Whatitsname is a bit like a hive mind or collective rather than an individual, despite its outward superficial appearance of being a person.
-
Just pondering here, as a result of @BarnerCobblewood 's comments about playing in one's homeland. Is a lot of gaming done in worlds which one can imagine to be simpler than one's own? Like classical or medieval, for example, albeit with magical ele…
-
> @BarnerCobblewood said: . After I finished it I read somewhere that there was quite an editing job on the translation, presumably to make it more palatable for English readers, so I do wonder what the differences in Arabic were. Something I…
-
I wonder if Ahmed Saadawi is intending to make a comment about the attempted gluing together of factions. Whatitsname was glued together like that, and in some respects thinks of himself as the ideal Iraqi citizen because of that. But the glue is ba…
-
(Quote) A similar background for me, but I'm not so sure. In a post-Einstein world, I am at total liberty to tell the story that my viewpoint does not move and everything else does - so long as I am also willing to pay the cost of vastly more comple…