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The Honorverse's main villain nation for the first half of the series are evil because they have welfare. Full stop, that's their entire Villain Reason, that they spend on welfare and thus they are required to constantly conquer to make more money because no state can have welfare without it consuming the entire budget and also it literally makes people bloodthirsty evil monsters to the point that the hereditary politicians fearfully refer to people on welfare as The Mob.
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Jan 1, 2020 01:02
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Kesper North posted:"The abolishment of the Basic Living Stipend and the Economic Bill of Rights saw the revival of the Havenite industrial infrastructure as the Dolists were required to work for their survival. Axel Lacroix stated that his parents had regained their self-respect. (HH11)" It may surprise you but they eventually turn into literally Soviet France during the Terrors where they decide the only way to break the evil hold of WELFARE!!! on the nation is to nuke the government and institute the Terrors and established Commisars and also everyone calls each other Comrade.
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Jan 1, 2020 02:32
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Groke posted:He was a regular on rec.arts.sf.written back in the day. So was James Nicoll, for that matter. I actually read Ryk E. Spoor's stuff when I was younger. I did a serious double-take the first time I saw Grand Central Arena in a bookstore and recognized his name.
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Jan 20, 2020 13:38
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Groke posted:I've read quite a few of his books and generally find them to be good fun. Dude has an infectious enthusiasm about stuff he's interested in, and that's what he likes to write about, so. Yeah you can really see it in Grand Central Arena. I honestly should be reading more of his stuff. Even picky me enjoyed GCA.
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Jan 21, 2020 01:30
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Ornamented Death posted:It's a lot better. Common wisdom holds that it's best to start here and skip the first two books. I found it to be loving terrible. Also I hear common wisdom say it's best to skip the first THREE books and start at Summer Knight. Summer Knight is better, but I still didn't like it.
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Feb 17, 2020 21:05
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90s Cringe Rock posted:uncommon wisdom is when you skip the dresden files and go straight to the dresden files crossover fanfic. Would those be BETTER or WORSE than Dresden Files?
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Feb 17, 2020 21:10
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Gnoman posted:The sexism in Dresden drops off dramatically after the first two books (which, not coincidentally, is when the books started being written after the first one was published), while fanfic authors have a tendency to insert massive amounts. Even the first two probably don't have as much sexism as the fanfics, and something like 80%+ of the sexism in the Dreseden Files is concentrated in books 1 and 2 as long as you don't decide it is there and start manufacturing it yourself. No it really doesn't. And the sexism in the first two books are crazy high to begin with. Like having a character in the second book whose entire purpose is for Dresden to call her a 'bitch' over and over because haha get it she's a werewolf? Dresden is the worst.
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Feb 18, 2020 00:56
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Evil Fluffy posted:That movie is a high budget XCOM Let's Play where someone beats it via savescumming and then ends the LP as they start New Game+ and it's fun to watch despite Tom Cruise being an insane cultist. For all that Tom Cruise is an insane cultists, he's legitimately a great actor, so it's not surprising.
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May 6, 2020 03:33
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90s Cringe Rock posted:The security officer from Marathon. Funnily the security officer from Marathon is a combat android in disguise.
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May 10, 2020 18:46
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General Battuta posted:Baru 2 is on sale on the evil website for who knows how long, just $2.99 So I went to get it on this sale and it turns out in some comatose moment I already purchased this book I assume when I got the first one for free from Tor. Oh well, maybe I got it on sale, maybe not. I don't feel bothered.
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May 21, 2020 04:18
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StrixNebulosa posted:My brother's birthday is upcoming and while I have some gifts lined up for him, it never hurts to check: are there any cool books about dragons? And I mean: dragons as main characters, dragons as badasses, dragons as a central focus. He doesn't mind if they're evil, but he wants them to be cool alien-esque scaly winged badasses who influence the plot. One of his favorites is Deathwing from the warcraft universe, for an example. I know this is late but I always liked the Enchanted Forest books by Patricia Wrede. The first one is Talking To Dragons (though it was apparently rewritten to be read last at some point because it's chronologically the last book) and is about the son of the protagonist of the prequels. They are good and have good dragons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dealing_with_Dragons
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Jun 10, 2020 21:34
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Kings is a pretty good book. The sequel is pretty good as well. Well worth the 2.99 price. I saw what was before the mod edit. Please don't be like that, Stupid_Sexy_Flander.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:55
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Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:Yup, got all 3 of the 5th ward series. Pretty good books! Have all the Garretts as well. It happened just now, probably in response to me reporting it. Thank you. This is better than you being probated.
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Jul 14, 2020 23:16
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Silver2195 posted:Counterpoint: Asimov didn't write books about how fascism and incest are good, actually. Probably, but I don't think Heinlein was an actual sex pest like Asimov.
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Jul 16, 2020 18:34
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So I was stumped at how I was gonna read something good at work today since I only have an MP3 player that takes txt files. I asked General Battuta if he could help with txt files of his books (I own them on kindle, or well, my PC), but he wasn't able... But then I remembered I had a Kindle Fire someone gave me. So I dug it out, got it charged and had a fantastic time at work with The Traitor Baru. It's such a great book, it's a shame I only got in about thirty pages (busy work day). So thanks again, General!
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Sep 6, 2020 23:54
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ToxicFrog posted:You've already found a better solution, but for future reference, Calibre will convert other ebook formats to plaintext. The formatting is likely to get kind of mangled, though. No kidding? That's actually fantastic to know. Thanks!
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Sep 7, 2020 05:04
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I'm reading the first one of these now - The Traitor Baru Cormorant - because of all the recommendations I've seen. Avoiding spoilers for the rest of the trilogy has been tough since it seems like I'm the last goon on the forums to pick it up. But I'm enjoying it. I just started too! Wanting to save it as something to read at work is the worst idea for me so I might just end up finishing it today on my off-day.
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Sep 7, 2020 21:10
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General Battuta posted:Buy my book!!!!! Buy Baru indeed. I've been saving them for work days where I just have to sit on my rear end all day doing nothing, but those are only like once a week and so I'm just tempted to read the books no matter the time as I've enjoyed them that much. I've been writing my own book, and Baru reading time is going to cut into that!
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Sep 17, 2020 11:02
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Today I finished Traitor Baru. drat. What a ride. I immediately jumped into Monster Baru. Well-titled.
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Sep 28, 2020 08:43
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Silver2195 posted:Yeah, and that's the key to The Eye of Argon's appeal. It's not bad in the sense of being unreadable, it's bad in the sense of being unreadable without laughing. This sets it apart from a lot of other supposedly so-bad-it's-good writing, at least IMO; I find My Immortal unreadable, for instance. I know that this is ten pages late but the podcast 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back did a let's read of both of these books and they had a blast with them. They actually did think Eye of Argon was very charming and enjoyable.
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Nov 14, 2020 20:53
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General Battuta posted:I'm sorry, it's just a weird thing to hear. I don't know how I could 'overtly' be mapping a story to something I don't know anything about. I'm not sure how you even map a story to Crusader Kings which has no real coherent narrative. It's like saying your story maps 1:1 with Civilization 2.
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Nov 22, 2020 06:16
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The Chad Jihad posted:I mean the author can try to deny it but its basically all laid out plain as day Okay, fine. So it is a 1:1 of Crusader Kings 2.
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Nov 22, 2020 10:36
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The ending of Ready Player Two is a loving trip. SPOILING IT HERE DO NOT CLICK IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO KNOW you wish to know after everything that goes on Wade finds a magic wand that resurrects anyone any ever put on the SAO Full Dive Nervgear knockoff as an immortal AI and he sends AIs of all the main characters and everyone ever into a spaceship and sends it off to colonize a planet and also they're going to live in their own personal OASIS forever.
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Nov 24, 2020 11:21
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Happy Landfill posted:These loving books man. Like, everytime I think to myself, "maybe I'm wrong, maybe these books actually are the satire I kept hoping it would be and I'm just overexaggerating how bad they are" and then he just up and includes this poo poo with no further introspection. I try really hard not to be that person that judges people too harshly for liking a certain book, or whatever, but man do I take great issue with all the people who declare Cline to be a smart writer. Also Wade and Sam named their kid 'Kira' after Halladay's girlfriend..
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Nov 24, 2020 13:14
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Strom Cuzewon posted:So this is just SOMA, right? But I'm assuming minus any contemplation about continuity of self and the nature of conciousness. Just upload yourself into the magic brain bank whoopiedoo? nine-gear crow posted:The only question I have is does this world-altering paradigm shift take place over the span of a page and a half at the very rear end end of the book like it does in Armada? Also way to trap all your friends in Digital Hell, Wade. So is AI evil then, or is it actually super cool and good? What's your thesis here, Ernie? It's basically SOMA, yes. It does have continuity of self, in that the AI versions are distinct individuals from the originals. In fact the entire epilogue is written from the perspective of AI Wade on their spaceship talking endlessly about how amazing it is to be an AI and giving a rundown on what happened while they were flying off in space cuz they were swapping emails with their original selves.
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Nov 25, 2020 01:51
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teamcharlie posted:With the exception of a failed attempt to be trans-/gay-/nonbinary-friendly (it's not nearly as hostile as some people make it out to be, but it's certainly not up to date and definitely still problematic), pretty much every overblown general criticism leveled at Ready Player One (whether you agreed with them or not about that book) is a thousand times more accurate when leveled at Ready Player Two. Excuse me? Pretend I posted the scene where the protagonist of RPO pats himself on the back repeatedly for 'not caring about the package' of the female lead, right in the middle of the scene where he has a meltdown at her, demanding that she tell him whether or not she is 'biologically female' and super specifically female 'from birth' and absolutely not someone who changed her gender, or 'Hairy-Knuckled Chuck', to use another Clinean phrase. He claims he'd be fine with her if she was Hairy-Knuckled Chuck, but still must absolutely know if she is a 'real woman' or not. That's pretty drat hostile.
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Dec 3, 2020 02:17
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teamcharlie posted:I was referring to the failed attempt to be trans-/gay-/nonbinary-friendly in RP2, not in RPO. There's a different scene in RP2 where apparently he's watched a lot of gay porn and is now kinda into it if the person he thinks is sexy is packing, but not enough for that to go anywhere. Maybe read the rest of what I quoted. You claimed that the accusations were overblown in RPO, and it was only RP2 that was that bad. But RPO was actually worse is what I was getting at! RP2 was cringy as hell and dumb, but it did briefly try. RPO was just plain awful without even bothering. Make no mistake, RP2 really bad, but RPO is just as bad if not worse. freebooter posted:Laura Hudson has posted her review of RP2; her hatchet job on Armada is one of my favourite pieces of commentary about geek nostalgia culture. Not wrong, and yet, also way too kind about RPO.
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Dec 3, 2020 12:46
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navyjack posted:Northworld by David Drake is a retelling of the Eddas in power armor. I really have come to the conclusion that "X Retold As Scifi" is the worst thing ever.
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Dec 6, 2020 02:20
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I use Papyrus. It's a relatively new app and, unfortunately, subscription-only. I found Scrivener to be a bit too clunky and unintuitive. Papyrus isn't as powerful as Scrivener but it has a lot of good stuff baked in (whereas I found Scrivener a little lacking if I didn't want to do it all myself). As an app, it's a lot cleaner and neater, quick and responsive, and I've found the way it sets things out (such as chapter listings and other screens for, say, character or research notes) far better to use and bounce between than anything else I've tried. Maybe I should get one of these sometime. I've just been using Notepad. It served me for one book at least.
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Dec 14, 2020 03:50
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C.M. Kruger posted:Isekai fiction has some distinct differences from portal fantasy though. Primarily portal fantasy generally uses a framing of at least some sort of two-way travel between the worlds, even if it's just a "get back to earth" end goal. Isekai almost always have the protagonist die and be reincarnated in that world, with no real hope of return, and often no desire to do so because it's some power fantasy for teenagers/depressed otaku where they're the hero now despite being a loser in their previous life or slavery is legal or whatever. The kind you talk about is in fact very new and isn't even all that iconic. Hell the genre is named after the Tenchi spinoff where it's a portal fantasy type. The originator in Japan for the genre is Aura Battler Dunbine, which is distinct because there's both back and forth travel and also the fantasy world the protagonist is sent to is the afterlife. And Earth is the afterlife of the fantasy world. It has a cool arc where the militaries of both sides gets sent to Earth and they slug it out in a battle, discovering that their fantasy mecha and ships are actually immensely more powerful on Earth, akin to slugging it out with nukes. Kchama fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Jan 2, 2021 |
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Jan 2, 2021 01:02
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Yeah her disabilities are such that like, I can believe her when she says that.
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Jan 2, 2021 10:56
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Thought it said 'Bone Doll's Twin' at first and was about to rush to mention how disappointingly non-LGBT that one was despite the premise.
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Jan 31, 2021 10:53
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PupsOfWar posted:rothfuss is a big name in various niche nerd circles that overlap with goondom I'm glad that the Kusuha Mizuho Health Drink came from someone's real experiences. But yeah he made it big despite being a very mediocre writer and is extremely arrogant and stuck-up about how writing and how he 'crafts every letter perfectly' and so rejects minor things like being edited and also writes extremely sloppily because he's actually just cramming a bunch of short stories together, so in one bit the writing style completely changes and forgets that you actually know who Kvothe is because he put the first short story he wrote of Kvothe in the middle of the second book. EDIT: Quote is not edit.
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Jan 31, 2021 10:59
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quantumfoam posted:Ok. My definition of awful author behavior has repeatedly been reset by reading the SFL Archives. To be fair I was just talking about why his writing instead of his personal conduct. Rothfuss also runs a charity that does some shady things like pay his own company (that is to say, a company that is made up of him and nothing or no one else) 90k a year on 'rent', and there's umm... stories going about of him basically using conventions to get sex including one I remember where he went from that grinning jolly image he presents to everyone to the sneering rage when a fan turned him down for sex. And well, it's pretty much tolerated and not very openly spoken of for similar 'big author' reasons. So he seems fairly in line with some bad people, even if he's not like, Harlan Ellison bad. Kchama fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jan 31, 2021 |
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Jan 31, 2021 20:28
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jng2058 posted:Rothfuss strikes as the kind of guy who enjoys being a Writer more than he does actually writing. I keep seeing him on YouTube and at cons (back when cons were still a thing) and the like, but very rarely doing anything besides being a nominally famous writer. His big claim to fame publisher-wise was that he had his trilogy pre-written, so that there wouldn't be years-long wait between each book because they'd all obviously just need editing and that's it. That was his original pitch. It turned out how lied pretty big about that.
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Jan 31, 2021 21:09
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90s Cringe Rock posted:I think I missed this story. I don't know if I want to know. It's been a bit but if I remember correctly he invited her back to his room for 'ice cream' and when she turned him down, not being hungry, he made it very clear that he meant 'sex' and when she refused that he flew into a rage.
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Jan 31, 2021 21:34
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tiniestacorn posted:I also did this. Same. It's because the classic masquerade masks are like that. General Battuta posted:Me too! But it's whatevs. It doesn't really hurt it to be the other way around, yeah, so it doesn't bother me to see that interpretation of it. quantumfoam posted:Welcome to the 1990's version of that. Yikes! At least in Rothfuss's case he does not seem to be up to any hanky panky with his editor, as she ended up revealing not that long ago that despite Rothfuss talking about how 'close' he's been for ages, she's literally never seen a single word on book 3.
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Feb 1, 2021 22:29
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Ccs posted:It’s really, really hard to write quick-witted comeback jokes in a fantasy setting. Most humor depends on a shared reference pool; common dialect not just of word but gesture and inflection; cultural context. That’s hard to reproduce outside our world. I agree with this entirely. Hell, my favorite character in all of fiction is very heroic and tragically flawed both as his entire plot is that he's a heroic figure who was secretly captured and mind-controlled with a geas that requires him to have some malicious reason for everything he does to drive him to hurt others, but the story has no issue putting him into situations where he suffers comic and pratfalls when he manages to elude his geas for a bit to do or say something truly kind, which becomes a lot more tragic when the geas is revealed to the reader. Also I've been writing my first book series and I am terrified of anything to do with humor as I feel that any kind of joke I'd put into prose would be extremely unfunny, because what works for joking around in real life is very different from prose in a story.
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Feb 2, 2021 18:54
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FewtureMD posted:What character is this? Because that plot sounds legitimately fascinating to read. Ingram Plisken from Original Generations on the PS2. He's actual the protagonist of the previous game in the franchise. It's a visual novel + a strategy game. The aliens who wish to make humanity into their janissaries kidnapped a bunch of humans and mind-controlled them into acting as the 'alien invaders' and also geas'd Ingram into being the 'true leader' of the fake alien invasion. So he was tasked with preparing an army of humans with advanced technology to be integrated into the fake aliens. But he twists his orders to make them too strong to be taken by force by focusing all of their anger and rage on himself, through manipulating them emotionally by making himself seem suspicious and cruel so that when he reveals himself they'll be even more enraged that they saw the signs but still trusted him because of his cause. And this was buoyed by the moments of true kindness that he managed to let slip out, which attracted people to him as a leader and a close friend, so they'd feel even more betrayed and fight even harder to get defeat the 'aliens' to get to him. But despite his 'resting evil face' and cold-hearted pragmatism liked to present, the story had no problem putting him into comic situations, like when he was asked to taste-test someone's awful-tasting health drinks. He had heard the rumors but still guzzled it down and told her it tasted great. And then collapsed from the awful taste the moment she was out the door and is unavailable the next time they deploy. He's just a well-balanced character with a lot of good scenes and is able to help bring out character growth the entire time he's around. I admittedly was a bit reluctant to actually give more details because it was from a game but whatever, he's someone I'm very fond of and am not actually reluctant to say that.
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Feb 3, 2021 19:28
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Harlan Ellison was an impressively awful person, who if you wrote a 'fiction' book about nobody would believe.
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Feb 9, 2021 16:32
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