Continuing on very slowly with Sword and Citadel by Gene Wolf
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glad to hear others think this first part has a lot of padding and that the second half I’m about to reach may be better about that. I really found Fellowship engrossing basically the whole time. I found myself caring about scenery description in a way I rarely give a shit about. And the characters had lots of moments to express themselves, even though, actually, I’d say character is maybe the weakest part about the writing in these books.
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Yeah I definitely appreciated the padding more on my second read through. If a character is going to walk a hundred miles, Tolkien is going to tell you something about what the character saw during each one of those miles.
The Two Towers definitely gets better.
But I’ve also been reading some modern game studies books, like Braxton Soderman’s Against Flow: Video Games and the Flowing Subject and now Patrick Jagoda’s Experimental Games, and I NEVER want to read another anlysis or The Stanley Parable ever again. That said, these books are heady and good.
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I thought Shelob was a smokin hot babe, and now I’m reading this book and it tells me she’s an ugly ass spider???
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things always like that, remember Adria in Diablo?
‘I sense a soul in search of anwsers’ then she’s an ugly ass spider demon thing 10 years later
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it really depends on if you’re a spiderfucker or not, I hear
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Your post title…yup…
well, that being true depends on if you’re a spiderfucker or not, I hear
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This is one of the funniest books I’ve read in a while and I think most people here would enjoy going into it blind
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jackie is a very good friend and i second this recommendation
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I don’t feel like it sticks the landing but I had a good time with it.
I ended up explaining the plot of it to my classroom of post office recruits because they had everyone talking about TV shows or something as an ice breaker and I wasn’t watching anything at the time and the instructor kinda sarcastically asked if I had read any books recently and I was like, ‘Well, actually…’
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Finished “The Left Hand Of Darkness” which I liked a lot, thought it had a compelling narrative.
Had also finished Sarah Pinker’s “Sooner or Later everything falls into the sea” which was a really good selection of sci-fi short stories.
Going to finish Borges’ “Labyrinths” next and then start actually going through my books, now that I’ve gotten back into the habit of reading.
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recently read Jazz Is by Nat Hentoff which is a classic set of interviews / bios with jazz musicians. found it valuable but not quite as good as Thinking About Jazz which is a much more in depth exploration of the musicians’ mindset.
also read Death by Video Game by Simon parkin which purports to understand why ppl are so obsessed with video games to the point of dying in internet cafes. It’s very much a broad level survey of different types of gamers and won’t have anything new for you if you’re on this forum and have encountered a variety of games/gamers in your life.
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finishing up death by landscape, and it is honestly entering my pantheon of ‘shit u have to read to understand… what it means to be me…’
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it’s the real deal
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Reading “What Color Is Your Parachute” more as a guide to what works and what language to use in the fucked up world of job hunting, disagreeing with a lot of it. like this here
there isnt an invisible counter that, if you get enough rejections, youll get closer to a job offer. this is the kind of magical thinking everyone expects you to embrace
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Not Wikipedia!
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i knew this was a Fallacy of some kind but I forgot which one
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It reminds me that one hypothesized reason humans are inclined to repeatedly commit certain standard fallacies is because it’s actually useful to think about things incorrectly in many real-life situations. In this case if you actually believe it, it helps keep spirits up as you persist on something you’re forced to do.
I assume that’s the reason a lot of the extremely popular self-help books are full of obvious wrongness, e.g. Dave Ramsey’s advice for getting out of debt, PUA advice, etc.
Personally I think it’s possible to both avoid obviously irrational beliefs and also avoid despair, but it’s a whole different variety of books that help make progress on that.
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