I have a Spanish and an English version. The book is maybe too old, dense, and long for me to attempt reading in Spanish or even going side by side. The English version I have is from John Rutherford and it’s pretty great on its own.
1 Like
so it’s not just jrpgs
3 Likes
Don Quixote pretty much is a JRPG
9 Likes
Recently blasted through Joy Williams’s short story collection, Taking Care. It’s very good. I love the ambiguity with which she writes and the many dissociative states her characters find themselves. I then saw that she wrote an essay about McCarthy’s latest (and last) set of novels, so I read those too because I wanted to read what she thought about it. As a rule, I avoid reading about a thing before I engage with it. Anyway, I liked it. I think that he mostly avoided writing women his whole career for good reason- he’s not very good at it. I haven’t read all his stuff, just Suttree and Blood Meridian, but this strikes me as maybe his most spiritual book. Some of the physics/maths stuff was over my head, I suspect it may be a bit over his head too. I don’t know why he chose to use a beautiful, precocious girl as the mouthpiece for his thoughts. It feels… trite, I guess? I liked Stella Maris a whole lot less than The Passenger. It feels real underwhelming after all of The Passenger’s fun McCarthy stuff like the long descriptions of dudes doing things or winding dialogues full of dialect and character. It’s zanier than most of his stuff, it feels Pynchon-y a lot of the time in fact. Especially the Thalidomide Kid and his horts. It’s probably his most accessible book, while still expecting you to pay attention. What a way to go out.
6 Likes
My boss loaned me this, after gushing about it a lot. It’s honestly not much more than new-agey “be receptive to the universe” stuff but there’s a few lines here and there that feel like they would have made a killer AIM away message circa 2001.
4 Likes
2 Likes
just crossposting this here because I will shamelessly promote this anthology
5 Likes
(Okay, this cartoon is pretty bad, but I like when he’s reading the book)
I’m still reading Don Quixote and I’m now over two thirds through the whole work. The second book is outstanding. The first book exists as a successful published work within the world of Don Quixote. There’s an incredibly detailed wedding complete with competing poems and a punchline where a man retorts “Ingenuity! It was ingenuity!”
I’m really feeling the need to go backwards and forwards with this text, reading The Golden Ass and then Tristram Shandy. It’s such a tragedy that Welles could not complete his film.
4 Likes
Finished Doom Guy: Life in First Person, John Romero’s autobiography and I am pleased to say it wasn’t at all annoyingly written or unwarranted feeling. It’s a good story about the games he developed and his life. Interesting reflective chapters on his mistakes running Ion Storm, expanding id while Carmack was making the Quake engine, and how Blackbroom was inevitably fumbled. For me, it was enlightening to hear about Romero’s design process. He has shared his rules for making Doom and Quake maps before, but there is a decent portion of some chapters in this book which are just about how he draws a room or imagines getting from one place to another. I re-played Doom while reading this and got a better appreciation for the “abstract level design style” he talks about in this book, but found it mostly in the levels that people adopted from Tom Hall, who is continuously described in the book as not having had the vision to make good Doom levels… so that is an interesting bit of friction that goes beyond the book. Anyway, it is well worth it and especially so if you ever read Masters of Doom and wanted a version that went deeper and was not written like a Rolling Stones cover story or an ur-The Social Network tale.
I am going to read Scarydarkfast next… no idea what that’s gonna be like. But I also ordered the first two Doom novels when I read in the wiki page for E1M4 that the swastika shape in the map is commented on by the character.
The first Doom novel references the swastika-shaped structure, when Fly discovers “several Cray-9000” computers had been placed together to create “a freakin’ swastika”. He was unsure whether it was created by the alien invaders as a scare tactic or as a joke by certain UAC workers.
Sounds incredibly stupid. I’ll crash through these trash books fast, like speed-eating a kitkat bar or something.
I also ordered a book on Elvis Cinema and Pop Culture, which is the only non-hagiographic book I could find that treated the 31 Elvis movies I am watching as something of like a sociological topic rather than fandom material or brainless nonsense.
5 Likes
The Doom novels rule. They are written by this guy
and expand the fiction in weird sci-fi directions after he runs out of ways to semi-sardonically describe Doom maps in text (“If there was a red keycard anywhere on that level, I’m a purple-assed baboon”). The Mormons defend a fortified SLC against the gold flag-flying IRS troops of the demon-corrupted American government. Like if John Milius wrote videogame novelizations
8 Likes
He also does real journeyman’s work doing things like explaining what a berserk kit is, why the zombie troopers in the game shoot you with pistols but appear to be carrying rifles, what it feels like in detail to walk through toxic sludge, how you can carry 50 rockets for a launcher, etc etc. Also the protag has a platonic lady bestie who is described extremely erotically but whose juicy lady bits are saved for an invented character in a later novel, no touchy for badass protag man. The author poured a lot of effort and psychosexual issues into it and it’s extremely respectable imo
7 Likes
Reading Goncharov’s Oblomov, he’s just like me FR, except we’re completely different
1 Like
I’m almost finished reading Light by M John Harrison. It took me a few chapters to start enjoying it, but once I read the words “transformation dub, saltwater dub” I was basically in. In recent years it has grown ever more apparent to me that a huge portion of the art I like is attempting the infinite, impossible task of comprehending the 20th century. The immense density of world-significant events entangled in confusion, lies, secrets, mystery, and the pure noise of advertising, entertainment etc is like a cloak that suffocates the entire world. True knowing is literally impossible. This book feels like it explodes this immense web and sends it flying across space and time. The way it displaces 20th century images, language, symbols etc and remixes them into this unknowable intergalactic culture reveals the truth of the entire mess. There is no meaning. There is no truth. It has been withheld from us by people who probably don’t even know the truth themselves. It was really freeing to read this and let this collage of defamiliarised words melt all over the page, blurring the image completely. It’s not world-building. It’s, like, world-shuffling.
I definitely feel like my lack of literacy in science fiction is stifling my understanding of where this book is coming from, what context it exists in etc. Like all I could say about its lineage is that it’s like, post-Gibsonian? But that’s why I’m posting this because I know there are some real heads on this website.
It is pathetically heterosexual and racist tho. But what could be more 20th century than that.
8 Likes
gibson is post-harrisonian not the other way around
4 Likes
this is exactly why i wanted to post about this book lol
1 Like
MJH’s works are mostly preoccupied with a sort of rejection of comforting escapes from the horrors of modernity, particularly the desire to escape to another world entirely; there is only the world we inhabit and the horrors we create, there is no frontier beyond that, there is no getting out of the world we live in. He reserves most of his ire for the essentially fascist character of the british middle class (as exemplified by Kearney in Light)
4 Likes
The first DooM novelization has this bizarre dedication:
Dedicated with lust to Camille Paglia, who smokes the same cigars as Fred Olen Ray
8 Likes
I always felt like this sets the stage really well for knowing what your getting into with the doom novels
7 Likes
Yeah this is a gonzo reading experience. It’s not a demonstration of expert writing ability or anything like that, but it does do something kind of fascinating with the way ab Hugh is telling an immersive story from the perspective of a character within the UAC base, but sometimes describes it as it literally appears to players of the game and how it would appear without the abstraction as a person within the world. It almost has a verve about it that is kind of giddy, ragged-on-fumes quality which is edgy in a cool way, but the serviceable plot about getting my god damn (not) girlfriend back!! keeps the reading experience grounded in camp.
But like… look at this weird part where there’s maybe a bit of institutional critique about the relation between military and commercial spaces
I was indeed at the nuclear plant level; above me was the hanger, while still below was the Toxin Refinery–didn’t that sound appetizing–Command & Control, the labs, Central Processing, and MIS. Jesus… only six more levels to clear; I was afraid it would be thirty! Funny how what I was seeing triggered memories of malls and shoppers. Best not to dwell on that…
It’s surprising and both obvious you’d find something like this written in a 1995 novelization of a storyless videogame. It’s basically the thesis of that one video by the boring pop game studies scholar youtube essayist Jacob Geller which goes into why schools these days are designed like FPS levels. I’m serious that a lot of game studies people have talked to themselves into basically making it impossible to see games in the same naive but honest light that people whose first games were those made in the 80s and 90s, where a higher degree of abstraction was accepted in representation and mechanics because realism was too expensive or impossible. Basically, Jacob Geller should have saved himself the time and read DOOM instead.
It’s just as good to go back to the old games as it is to watch early 20th century film and see what people without any impression of the possibilities of the medium were doing with cameras and editing. I am hopeful that these Doom books may offer a glimpse at how people used to look and think about games.
5 Likes
whenever i watch starcade and see how the hosts describe whats going on in the arcade games on the show without using any established videogame jargon i think about this
3 Likes