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Arivia posted:oh is sanderson going to have to step in after another fantasy author dies before finishing their epic I mean, GRRM might be able to keep stalling until nobody cares enough to bother before he pops his clogs, but as you point out it's worked before to great applause.
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Aug 3, 2020 15:00
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Arivia posted:oh is sanderson going to have to step in after another fantasy author dies before finishing their epic Yeah probably. I'm an optimist in that I think there will be one more Gurm-written book in the series. There won't be two.
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Aug 3, 2020 15:01
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A terrible failure of googling when writing historical fiction. https://twitter.com/DanaSchwartzzz/status/1290099395220799488
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Aug 3, 2020 15:52
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I met Boyne in person a year ago. He is... a writer. Finished the first draft the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in a week with no research, which has earned him some ire: https://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2010/03/boy-in-striped-pyjamas-by-john-boyne.html His coming-of-age YA novel is about a boy whose sibling comes out as a transgender girl. It has the unfortunate title "My Brother's Name is Jessica". He defended it with various shields like "Don't like, don't read". Has done himself no futher favors by supporting JK Rowling.
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Aug 3, 2020 16:35
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Djeser posted:I remember hearing that the ending of the show got changed from what they'd planned to do because some people on Reddit had, one thousand monkeys on typewriters style, guessed what the ending was going to be, and they couldn't let it not be surprising so they changed it. I think this was Westworld, not GoT, though I may be wrong. Strikes me as the height of petty idiocy to get mad because people guessed your foreshadowing, so you make your ending something no one predicted and thus makes no sense.
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Aug 3, 2020 16:49
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If you put a bunch of spicy chilis into a dye....would the clothes become spicy? 
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Aug 3, 2020 17:27
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I think this was Westworld, not GoT, though I may be wrong. It was, and it was really stupid that they changed it, figuring out something and being right is an enormous payoff for that sort of fan.
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Aug 3, 2020 17:36
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It's more important to shock and surprise the audience with your ending than it is to have it make sense, I guess.
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Aug 3, 2020 17:43
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GreenMetalSun posted:Yeah, that's what blows my mind about all the people having meltdowns about how 'the books wouldn't dooooooo this to us!!!!' The problem with GOT isn’t what happens in the show it’s that once they run out of book content the pacing just disappears. Like they got an outline but you need to embellish an outline or it’s going to be unsatisfying. The last few seasons feel like they just put the outline into a script. GRRM has his own issues but failing to make something meaty isn’t it
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Aug 3, 2020 17:43
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Literally all the big twists of the last four seasons were heavily foreshadowed in the books to the point that people guessed most of them years ago. When there's a decade between books you've got plenty of time to analyze, re-re-re-read, and speculate.
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Aug 3, 2020 18:00
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Captain Monkey posted:It was, and it was really stupid that they changed it, figuring out something and being right is an enormous payoff for that sort of fan. Also iirc it wasn't like the most popular fan theory or anything, it was just one among a whole bunch of theories, but because someone had come up with the answer they'd planned, they had to change things to be more surprising. This is particularly silly when you consider that stories only have so many possible ways they can conclude. While there's technically a vast possibility space, that space gets smaller and smaller the further into a story you get. I think of it as similar to a musical phrase--yeah, you could make the last note be any note you want, but there's only going to be three or four that properly conclude the phrase. A story can end any way the writer wants, but when you get down to it, there's only going to be a handful of options that make sense with the rest of the story.
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Aug 3, 2020 19:14
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I met Boyne in person a year ago. He is... a writer. Finished the first draft the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in a week with no research, which has earned him some ire: https://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2010/03/boy-in-striped-pyjamas-by-john-boyne.html Yeah, it seems the dude's entire thing is writing books about topics he's incredibly unqualified to write about, and then getting super salty when people point out his dumbass mistakes. Also he's apparently very quick to sue people who publicly criticise him, while also being a signatory on that big "We are super concerned about cancel culture and free speech" Harper's letter a few weeks back. 
Perestroika has a new favorite as of 19:26 on Aug 3, 2020 |
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Aug 3, 2020 19:20
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Djeser posted:Also iirc it wasn't like the most popular fan theory or anything, it was just one among a whole bunch of theories, but because someone had come up with the answer they'd planned, they had to change things to be more surprising. the best way to do a twist is for the reader to see it coming one page before the characters do
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Aug 3, 2020 19:37
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I remember the boy in the Striped Pajamas having a part where the German protagonist somehow mistakes Fuhrer for Fury despite being a German and presumably not knowing a single word of English
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Aug 3, 2020 21:24
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Indomitable, by WC Bauers. The author lists "reading military science fiction" as one of his interests, but apparently limits himself to the stuff from the 1980s, where the Hero runs, screaming, to the middle of the battlefield and then stands there, screaming, while waving his machine gun back and forth and using up a million bullets before needing to reload, presumably while screaming some more. Either that, or he really wanted to annoy anyone with actual military experience. Red flag that I should have paid attention to: Protagonist is named Promise Paen (pain); a comic-book name is never a good sign. Red flag #2: On her first day in charge of her company, she makes the guy who referred to a rifle as a gun spend a full hour running laps in his undies, clutching his crotch with one hand and a (borrowed, because he left his in the barracks) rifle in the other, chanting the line everyone remembers from Full Metal Jacket. Instead of working on, say, his marksmanship or his ability to run in formation without becoming hypnotized by the rear end of the soldier in front of him. Oh, yeah, the author refers to them as both "soldiers" and "Marines," which is sure to start a few flamewars. Since my military experience consists solely of watching cheap action movies, I'm sure I missed at least half of the things Our Heroine does wrong. I am at least aware that tactics have been improved since 1850. This is book number 2 in a planned series. During the course of this novel, Our Heroine gets her rear end handed to her in all four conflicts, including getting her staff sergeant killed during a training exercise. She ends the book with about 50% of her 40 Marines dead and half the rest in the hospital. During the flashbacks/thinking episodes, we learn she had at least 50% die in the first book, too. And keeps getting promoted, despite killing off Space Marines by the dozen, including their incredibly complicated and expensive armor. In the first book, she's a sergeant who gets promoted and sent to Officer School at the end. In this book, she's a brand-new lieutenant and gets recruited into the elite Space Recon force at the end. One thing I did get a kick out of was that the male author decided the best way to avoid looking like he was dwelling on female anatomy too much was to just add a passing reference to her being "flat on top" so he didn't have to deal with female underwear.
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Aug 4, 2020 21:13
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FreudianSlippers posted:I remember the boy in the Striped Pajamas having a part where the German protagonist somehow mistakes Fuhrer for Fury despite being a German and presumably not knowing a single word of English Was it an English-speaker saying "Fuhrer"? Then it's understandable because it sounds a lot more like the English word fury than the German word führer (as spoken by someone who speaks German) about 100% of the time.
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Aug 12, 2020 12:36
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GoodyTwoShoes posted:Indomitable, by WC Bauers. The author lists "reading military science fiction" as one of his interests, but apparently limits himself to the stuff from the 1980s, where the Hero runs, screaming, to the middle of the battlefield and then stands there, screaming, while waving his machine gun back and forth and using up a million bullets before needing to reload, presumably while screaming some more. Either that, or he really wanted to annoy anyone with actual military experience. Either that or he didn't list playing FPSes.
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Aug 12, 2020 13:02
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It's years since I read the book but his father is a Nazi commandant so presumably they're German. He also mistakes Auschwitz as "Out-With" I get that he's eight years old and it's supposed to reflect his innocence and lack of understanding of what is going on but it's still a bit contrived FreudianSlippers has a new favorite as of 13:06 on Aug 12, 2020 |
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Aug 12, 2020 13:03
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FreudianSlippers posted:It's years since I read the book but his father is a Nazi commandant so presumably they're German. wät
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Aug 12, 2020 13:05
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Who is this clown and which front-page articles did he write?
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Aug 12, 2020 13:05
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I haven't seen any mention of Graham Hancock. I've actually read two of his books The Sign and the Seal and Fingerprints of the Gods. I couldn't tell you which is which (there's a lot of overlap) but among his more thoroughly researched claims are: - Moses was a wizard, or maybe just an engineer - So was Jesus - the Ark of the Covenant was a nuclear reactor He also wrote about Crust Displacement Theory, and inspired the Roland Emmerich documentary 2012 He admits to drinking a lot of ayahausca.
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Aug 12, 2020 15:50
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Scott Lame posted:I haven't seen any mention of Graham Hancock. I've actually read two of his books The Sign and the Seal and Fingerprints of the Gods. I couldn't tell you which is which (there's a lot of overlap) but among his more thoroughly researched claims are: And "hey, so you know, all those cool ancient monuments weren't built by the brown people who actually live there they could obviously never do that". Though he's "ancient world civilisation" rather than "aliens!" AFAIR.
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Aug 12, 2020 18:07
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CharlestheHammer posted:The problem with GOT isn’t what happens in the show it’s that once they run out of book content the pacing just disappears. D&D literally told their assistant to write an episode and then just used that script. The problem is much less with the outline or source material and absolutely the 2 showrunners being wildly incompetent and lazy.
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Aug 12, 2020 19:34
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3D Megadoodoo posted:Who is this clown and which front-page articles did he write? John Boyne - you may remember the name from his recent "historically accurate, thoroughly researched" book where someone dyes cloth red using a recipe ripped from the newest Zelda game.
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Aug 17, 2020 14:05
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ookiimarukochan posted:John Boyne - you may remember the name from his recent "historically accurate, thoroughly researched" book where someone dyes cloth red using a recipe ripped from the newest Zelda game. Maybe trying to transition into the Ready Player One market?
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Aug 17, 2020 14:12
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Game of Thrones cut out a major character from the books whose actions probably would make the same ending make sense in the books.ookiimarukochan posted:John Boyne - you may remember the name from his recent "historically accurate, thoroughly researched" book where someone dyes cloth red using a recipe ripped from the newest Zelda game. It's comical how little research he did for his most famous book. The Holocaust is probably the subject I've read the most about but even an average person would have to pick up on how ridiculous it is to have the kids of an SS commandant (or poo poo any German) not know what Jews are. I mean pretty much everything in the book is wrong but that's so obvious I can't believe the book reviewed well at all. quote:[T]hat addressed supposed inaccuracies in my novel which, of course, was a work of fiction...and therefore by its nature cannot contain inaccuracies, only anachronisms, and I don’t think there are any of those in there. No John that isn't how it works. Groovelord Neato has a new favorite as of 17:50 on Sep 1, 2020 |
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Sep 1, 2020 17:22
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Groovelord Neato posted:Game of Thrones cut out a major character from the books whose actions probably would make the same ending make sense in the books. I'm curious. I didn't watch the show and gave up on the series a couple books ago. Which character?
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Sep 1, 2020 19:31
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I'm curious. I didn't watch the show and gave up on the series a couple books ago. Which character? The kid from Essos who claims to be the grown-up baby Aegon (supposedly not killed by the Mountain by being switched with a peasant baby) who leads an army to Westeros before Daenerys. Fake Aegon or Faegon as the fans call him. Groovelord Neato has a new favorite as of 19:45 on Sep 1, 2020 |
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Sep 1, 2020 19:35
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ookiimarukochan posted:John Boyne - you may remember the name from his recent "historically accurate, thoroughly researched" book where someone dyes cloth red using a recipe ripped from the newest Zelda game. The part that struck me about this is that to copy that down and not at least think there might be something off with ingredients like "Keese wings" and "Octorok tentacles" is if you're really rushing and just copy and pasting it and not even paying attention to what you C&P. Which is revealing as to process.
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Sep 1, 2020 20:05
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I finally, sadly have an actual contribution to this thread: Robert Nye's Falstaff. I've been on a Shakespeare kick recently and saw this in the Wikipedia article about Sir John Falstaff, one of the Bard's most famous creations. The Wikipedia article on Robert Nye notes that it won two apparently-major literary awards on publications and Anthony Burgess called it one of the 99 best novels published since 1939 in company with 1984, Catch-22, Gravity's Rainbow, A Confederacy of Dunces, and others. High praise. It's supposedly Falstaff's dictated autobiography and it takes less than ten chapters to turn the character Orson Welles called Shakespeare's greatest creation into an incestuous pedophile. Was every English artist of the 1970s a pedophile or does it just seem that way? More fool me, I kept reading and more absolutely awful sex scenes followed (at least, I assume they were awful since I skipped them) mixed in with lots of toilet humor (a whole chapter about farts, and while that might sound appealing to some of you from this description, it's just tedious and unfunny and uninteresting). Oh, and there's some wonderful anti-Irish stereotyping complete with them depicted as potato-obsessed a century before Columbus's voyage and two centuries before the potato even became a common crop in Ireland. Oh, and from what I can determine Nye plagiarized at least part of his book from an 1858 fictional biography of Falstaff which is funnier in every way.
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Sep 18, 2020 04:32
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:an 1858 fictional biography of Falstaff Tell me what this is called then and where to find it.
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Sep 18, 2020 05:17
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The Lone Badger posted:Tell me what this is called then and where to find it. Robert Barnabas Brough's The Life of Sir John Falstaff.
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Sep 18, 2020 07:06
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Terry Goodkind passed away at 72. Remember the good times in The Sword of Truth like the evil chicken, the crowd of unruly pacifists, and the moment our hero broke a girl's jaw with a flying kick.
Inspector Gesicht has a new favorite as of 08:28 on Sep 18, 2020 |
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Sep 18, 2020 08:25
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From everything I've heard about chickens, I can absolutely believe evil would manifest as one.
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Sep 18, 2020 08:46
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Ghost Leviathan posted:From everything I've heard about chickens, I can absolutely believe evil would manifest as one. Chickens are fine, it’s turkeys that will manifest the ultimate evil.
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Sep 18, 2020 13:31
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Because I'd only seen that picture of him with the ponytail I figured he was in his 50s or something.
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Sep 18, 2020 15:04
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Groovelord Neato posted:Because I'd only seen that picture of him with the ponytail I figured he was in his 50s or something. I kind of had him eternally locked in as a dude who was in his 30’s but looked like he was in his 50s.
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Sep 18, 2020 15:08
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Inspector Gesicht posted:And the moment our hero broke a girl's jaw with a flying kick. To be fair, it wasn't like he (the hero) did that on a whim. Though with how much Goodkind embraced objectivism and its whole 'No emotions, only logic' thing you'd think it would be something the hero would deeply regret later, Thomas Covenant style.
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Sep 21, 2020 06:49
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Cornwind Evil posted:To be fair, it wasn't like he (the hero) did that on a whim. Wizard's Rule #whatever: DeSeRvE vIcToRy
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Sep 21, 2020 08:03
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Wizard's Rule 0: The protagonist is a (quasi)Objectivist Uberman, so everything he does is Right, regardless of how convoluted the reasoning needed to retrospectively Just realized this, and now the books make a lot more sense. (Well, self-consistency)
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Sep 22, 2020 06:11
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