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Apocryphal
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- Apocryphal
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Comments
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Also, when I access this site on my PC or phone, it’s puts all the most recent activity at the top of the front page, just under the pinned threads. All I need to do to read recent activity is swipe up one finger. Threads with new activity are one c…
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I’ve been tied up lately but will try to do when I get home from work. Since you are a mod you have the power to make categories, yourself, FYI.
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We _are_ supposed to be casual...
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Funny. I never noticed how awkward the word ‘awkward’ itself looks. Is there a name for that? When a word looks like it’s meaning?
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Art, in general, doesn’t make much economic sense. The value of art is rarely related to its appeal, the value of its materials, or the skill or education of the artist. This is rather the same in both worlds. The art pieces of Goldsworthy or Jim De…
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Thanks for the comments - glad to know I'm not alone in these opinions! And @WildCard , people often say The Affirmation is priest's finest novel.
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Or "I read it vortically".
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MARCH 2021 A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest, 1977, 224pp. An early novel by Christopher Priest, featuring some of his familiar themes and in particular the theme about not knowing quite which is more real - the real world or the imaginary on…
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Ditto.
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The bit about traces and being tied to a place made me think about ancient Egyptians and their connection to the river. I had read that even when they travelled, they wanted to come home before dying so they could be buried on the other side of the …
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You mean that if he had such an easy time obtaining the map, why wouldn’t these things be floating all over the internet by now? Maybe it was a fake. We don’t know.
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@WildCard That's an interesting take. We have two 'authors' to choose from in the Archipelago - Chaster Kammeston and Moylita Kaine. Kaine, we have been told, has reasons to be anti-military. Kammeston seems to be for himself, but has ties to Bathur…
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It’s an interesting idea that the world might describe the psyche, but I don’t know enough about the structure of the mind to comment. I suspect the world-building is not _that_deep. That we have an archipelago that is geographically in the middle a…
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(Quote) As I said, I think The Lord of Mystery is Priest himself! Is this a coincidence? https://www.chrispriest.com/
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The second review was written by Ursula K. LeGuin and published in The Guardian. I think it's more reflective of how many club members are receiving the book, and you may hear some familiar sounding comments in here. I myself was first drawn to this…
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Since we are, now pretty well 'Half Completed', I thought I'd share a couple of reviews I found. The first was published in the LA Review of Books and written by Paul Kincaid, who has written some award-winning non-fiction books about Science Fictio…
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Some great points and questions, most of which I’ll need to respond to later. For now: The money Yo got to lease the island came from a Lotterie Collago grant. It was mentioned much earlier, in another chapter, that some of these installations ca…
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I never thought about dementia in these terms before, so thanks for sharing.
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(Quote) I don't think so. Bathurst seems to have weaknesses, though he's probably oblivious to them. And all we know about how great he is is what's written in this guidebook - the same guidebook that described KERRITH SINGTON as a 'vicious killer' …
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(Quote) Next week's entry is another short story (about 40 pages long) and it seems to be about attempts at mapping by means of drones, so I expect we may get more detail on this.
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Not more damage - but they seem to be equally reckless with respect to the individuals around them. I suppose the only difference is the degree of scale. I wonder if there's an interview with Priest that covers this somewhere?
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Some impressions I'm getting: War: It's senseless. It's impersonal. It seems to be a force in its own right. We never hear of the causes for this war - just the methods, and the impacts on individuals. Artists: The Tunnelers, Bathurst, and the mim…
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I think I read that Pratchett said this was the first Discworld plot that wasn't just a vehicle for jokes. Doing a coming of age story in RPGs is certainly possible. What are the advantages? Framework for one - the coming of age story is about lear…
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This is a great question. I need to think about it a bit. The system would certainly be something like what I described in another answer, where people could quote lines of notable text. For plot structure, I can't see myself repeating the plot of …
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Something like The Dying Earth RPG would certainly work. Discworld doesn't strike me as a fighty world, nor a world in which the grit and details particularly matter. But is is a setting where observation and dialogue really matter. So I think you w…
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Leaning on well-worn tropes is part and parcel of the RPG experience, so I do see this as a way in. Tropes allow us to communicate a lot in a short time, so they're useful at the table, especially when the group needs to make up a lot (setting eleme…
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Well, I think it's mostly a fun fantasy romp through a coming-of-age story, but it does have a little more to offer because it's also a satire. And as a satire, it asks us to examine a few things about our society, about the fantasy genre, and I sup…
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Slamming a glass sheet in front of Commis on the path is a pretty clear reference to how Commis dies. But why is the apparatus a piece of glass on not a mirror or a door? I suppose because glass works better in the path scene than a mirror wood, and…
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Good points, and two details I missed.
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I'm ready and looking forward to it!