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NeilNjae
About
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- NeilNjae
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Comments
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Good to see you back, @Ray_Otus !
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I've not heard of The Broken Sword, but it sounds interesting. Piranesi is on my to-read pile, so I'll be reading it anyway. A discussion here could be good. So, my vote's for Piranesi, but I'd be happy with either.
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(Quote) I was skimming it. I didn't dig into it as deeply as I would if I were taking the game to the table. It was a fault of not reading closely.
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(Quote) Thanks for the corrections, and apologies for not being on top of all the details. I will admit, I was confused why the Take the Lead seemed to apply to songwriting. My reading of the cards was they mainly applied to the situation outside th…
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Sad to say, Vance is back to his usual tricks. This time, the rape is on an industrial scale. I'm out.
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(Quote) I pretty fundamentally disagree with this. I think you're familiar with the arguments on both sides, so I won't repeat them here. (Quote) But. looking at High Strung, there are very few decisions to be made in a performance. By my reading, …
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(Quote) Interesting. Can you make objective criteria for aesthetic judgements? As for aesthetics in board games, one that springs to mind is Kingdomino. You have to arrange dominoes, making large contiguous areas. You get bonus points for "ple…
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(Quote) I've played it a lot, and really like it. The Legacy games are even better, and well worth picking up. Relating it back to RPGs, many RPGs assume party-based play, where the PCs cooperate to achieve joint goals. What violence there is (phys…
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(Quote) Except... we have better tools for dealing with fights, rather than singing or racing. First, there's the investigation of the opponent to find their weakness, and then sorting out how to exploit that. In the fight itself, we follow the acti…
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(Quote) I'm running a Mouse Guard game at the moment, so... The game emphasises that all the PCs are in one team, cooperating with each other to do good. It also makes you think about obstacles that aren't just about violence and fighting (such as n…
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I'm glad people picked up on this. This comment on the meaning of life is why I thought the book worthy of a read by us (a silly Adams pastiche may have been amusing, but not satisfying). As people have said, it's an entirely secular world, but that…
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Nudging the discussion back to the original question, what role do the arts have in the context of fascism and authoritarianism? Is the celebration of joy and creativity and diversity important? Are they important as a wide social movement, or as an…
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(Quote) I can't disagree. I found the Douglas Adams caricature tiring, but I think she toned it down as the book progressed (or perhaps I got used to it). As for the absurd characters, she made a ploy for a sensible one with Oort in his persona as …
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I've put some questions up in the Space Opera category. I'm keen to hear your thoughts!
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I'll post some discussion points over the weekend. It'll be interesting to hear what people think!
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(Quote) A quick search failed to turn up any sites of "SF book reviews by Black/PoC reviewers." It would be interesting to see what they thought of the book. (Quote) Yes. The conversion mostly suppresses memory, so Hoa's narration to to b…
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(Quote) Mathematician's autocorrect.
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The Broken Earth trilogy has a lot to say about racism and living under the oppression that it causes. Do we think it has anything important to say? Should we look at the books differently given the prominence of the BLM movement? I'm a white UK-re…
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(Quote) Yes, it is a good article. Perhaps it's one I should have kept in mind more as we were doing the slow read: bringing out some of those themes might have given us more to discuss. One thing that's strong in the books is the notion of changes…
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(Quote) The destruction of the world (of Syl Anagist) was caused by ordinary, boring, mundane racism and genocide. Utterly banal. I don't know if it's important in the novel that the problems were caused by exactly real-world problems, or if the sto…
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I think Essun matured a bit in this book, or perhaps she just started her transition into something other than human. She seemed less vindictive in this book than previously, but also more detached from the people around her. I was a bit disappoint…
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(Quote) I think we're in whole-hearted agreement on all of these points.
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@RichardAbbott , we have different interpretations of the stories. In Earthsea, the high kings have been gone for a long time. Certainly outside living memory, perhaps several centuries (Wikipedia suggests "several millennia"). The rule o…
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The comments remind me of two things. The "world is magic" is similar to how things work in Glorantha. Communities and their bonds are just as much entities as heroes and dragons, and both affect and can be affected by magical and mundane …
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Good thoughts about names. Yes, I liked how the mages were referred to by their homes, as a way of de-humanising them in that scene. They weren't really participants in the events of Ogion's death.
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That interpretation of Handy seems entirely consistent with what's in the book. It could well be the interpretation we're meant to have.
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(Quote) I think it's a transition from a stable but unhappy state to a better one. After all, Gont was in large part controlled by selfish lords and powerful gangsters. The assertion of "rule of law" should improve things, even if the tran…
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It was more his role in the book. Handy was involved in the initial attempted murder of Therru, but he's the one who tried to get help for her. And why was he trying to kill an infant dragon in the first place? He spends the rest of the book pursuin…
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(Quote) This is very true. The world, and the power structures in it, are shaped by men. The malign power of Aspen, Handy and Spark. The benign power of Ogion and Lebannen. There's nothing in the book to suggest that this will change, only that wome…
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(Quote) And in the UK. They need to be sheltered against south-facing walls, but they grow and fruit here.