It got finished by Brandon Sanderson in case you weren't aware, using Jordan's notes, after being chosen by Jordan’s widow. That was one of the major elements propelling Sanderson to fame.
My understanding is that Sanderson managed to tie up most of the loose ends and get back to the main characters pretty well, though I never finished the series myself. I have a sort of affection for the later books just because with Rand they go into character/political territory that ordinary fantasy (and indeed Dark Fantasy which has its own genre constraints) never actually has to get into, but I have to admit that my rereads usually stop at the end of book 5.
Corvos
20hr ago
To be fair, Jordan was well aware he might not be able to finish the series himself, and planned it carefully and left all his notes so another writer could do the job. ( @RoyGBivensAction ).
Corvos
20hr ago
You would know better than I, I'm afraid, but I'm interested to learn.
I think it's really more about the the sound itself
I considered that but assumed that the association was Germanic/Anglo -> short and harsh (German tends to sound harsh to English ears) not the other way round. It's quite possible I was mistaken, and the 'nigger' pair backs up your hypothesis since obviously they are both latinate.
Corvos
20hr ago
Much of it, and of course because for 400 years classical education has been an indicator of the upper classes. I was being descriptive, not prescriptive.
Generally I'd say that in English, the more germanic/Old-English something sounds, the earthier and rawer the tone. The more Romantic, the more austere and polite.
Thus troons/trans, cunt/vagina, shit/excrete, fuck/copulate, etc. Nigger/negro have the same root I know, but at least in the modern day the Latin niger is usually pronounced with i-as-in-eye, and a soft g. That may be to stop it sounding less like the slur, of course.
Corvos
1d ago
I was speaking more broadly. It’s annoying to have to hack Elden Ring and disable online play, risking a ban, because I want to try it with DLSS5 and anti-cheat prevents all modding.
Corvos
1d ago
I honestly don't get why devs in general don't allow you to choose between starting the game in anti-cheat mode or free-for-all mode, like Halo: Master-Chief collection does. Seems like the fairest solution.
(Putting aside the financial incentive in this case. The Helldivers 2 micropayments model is trash).
The OP contains an archive link dated prior to any of this drama, with statements proving that the texts were an accurate representation of their beliefs.
Ah, you mean this. Yes, then it certainly seems fair to indict them on the basis of their own statements. Though IMO the senders of those fake letters should be prosecuted; politics is dirty enough without false flags going up every which way.
Corvos
2d ago
This is silly. If you set up a propaganda organisation pretending to be the UK labour party, and you send out flyers in broken English saying "vote Labour for the sake of the coming caliphate" that doesn't make it true that Labour is a muslim extremist party. Even if some Labour councillors genuinely think this.
It may be true anyway. The attitude of trans campaigners has been closer to that letter than I'd like. But fake evidence is not evidence.
Corvos
3d ago
Less than you think. Parents can be introverts as well, or misfits in other ways.
Corvos
3d ago
That's a fair point, but Japan is such a strong outlier in terms of how people treat houses that it strengthens my suspicion that this attitude is a temporary aberration. I hope you're right.
Corvos
3d ago
Japanese people don't value housing as an investment as much
I disagree that this is a cultural issue. There is a very very good reason people don't like buying houses > 30 years old: they're considerably less earthquake-proof + more likely to have wooden structural elements that may be damaged from earthquakes + humidity.
That to my mind is a temporary factor. It's entirely possible that the current culture shifts considerably now that anti-earthquake tech has got good enough that you can broadly assume buildings are going to hang around for 100 years.
Briefly:
- Calling it ideological is also just historically accurate. Pre 2010 men generally just put hot women in their games because they liked to and their audience liked them to. There was no pre-gamergate movement I’m aware for making girls hotter in video games. There was a movement for making them diverse, less monoracial, and less attractive, to get gaming away from young men, even if they didn’t use those words.
- Yes, I’m flattening here for the sake of the metaphor, with inevitable distortions.
- Like I keep saying, “ fun is another lever that creators use to determine the experience they want you to have” isn’t strictly speaking wrong but it’s a very dangerous way of thinking. It signifies that you are losing your perspective on the fact that you are trying to make people enjoy themselves in a way they pay money for. It is, in its way, an extremely narcissistic impulse.
The professionalisation of specialised career paths, the proliferation of games designers and university courses and YouTube lectures, the idea that success or failure boils down to implementing your ‘vision’ instead of entertaining your customers is I believe the main reason why games have started to struggle. You see it in poetry, you see it in art. They slowly get strangled as they pander to the visions of increasingly segregated artistic communities over pleasing an audience/patron. Then they start needing subsidies from said community to survive because there isn’t enough of an audience left to fund it organically, and then it’s all over.
The end point of that logic is modern literary fiction and it's so laser-focused on 'realism' that they deliberately deprive you of any aspirational figure. Every book is about foreigners, cripples, trans, peasants, adulterers and the depressed, and nobody gets a decent plot or anything to look up to.
Taking off my cheeky hat, though, I would say two things:
- What you are describing is, I believe, a taste profile. It's a common one, mostly female though only mostly, and is developing into what some call "Bookclub Lit". I believe that it's a very positive sign we now have something to call this genre because it allows us to be honest about the fact that this is a genre like 'seinen' rather than just 'great literature' and to be honest about the artificialities and tropes of said literature. (Corrolary: what I was describing is a taste profile too, but it's very widespread amongst young men who are basically the audience for PC and console games, and more universal because it's closer to base appetites).
- I am not actually arguing for nothing but hot teenagers. I am saying that when you start asking questions like "Is making every woman beautiful a non-ideological choice" it is like asking Do Games Have To Be Fun? It's a valid question but you are in danger of overlooking some pretty fundamental elements of what appeals to people. Doesn't mean you shouldn't, and if you're making your own private thing you can do what you like, but if you are making a sequel to a beloved franchise and you are deliberately reducing its appeal then you should ask yourself why you're doing that and you should IMO have some fairly compelling artistic answers.
For a non-sexy version of this question, I don't know if you've come across Hollow Knight: Silksong? The long-awaited sequel to beloved indie hit Hollow Knight. In this case they asked themselves "Should games be fun?" and came to the conclusion that their game is about a society that bleeds pilgrims dry pursuing a hopeless goal, and so their game should be really really hard and punishing and make you wonder why you're bothering. Unsurprisingly, most people really didn't like it. Fans of Hollow Knight like myself had waited a decade and got something miserable and unfun, and the very limited artistic merit of the scenario did not even slightly make up for the fact that the thing was viscerally frustrating in a not-good way.
Or:
Art: 3/10
Visceral fun: 8/10
is fine,
Art: 6/10
Visceral fun: 7/10
can be a fair tradeoff for the right audience,
Art: 8/10
Visceral fun: 3/10
is likely to go down badly. Especially as a sequel to something that was Art: 6/10 Visceral fun: 8/10.
Taking your game from being pretty & fun to less pretty & fun, without having a compelling (to your audience) artistic reason for doing so, is just shooting yourself in the face.
Corvos
4d ago
It took a while. I'll avoid spoilers since you didn't read it yet but the plot picks up once she gets back to her mentor and gets a new mission. It's not just a totally different book stapled on.
Because people like looking at gorgeous women, the same way they like playing games that are fun. Is making games fun an ideological choice? You can argue such a case, and the more arty critics sometimes do, but it requires blinding yourself to a fundamental reality about what players want and how the world is.
Corvos
4d ago
Eh, I liked the last third best. It's pretty awesome world-building, and less nail-biting than the first two-thirds. And
Corvos
6d ago
If American aid is seen as conditional, it will be appreciated.
Do you, as a question of fact, believe that Europe appreciates American... aid more now than it did five years ago?
Very interesting, if true. And an example of recursive improvement of AI along a totally different axis, since the interpretability pipeline uses agent driven investigations.
If it disproves the ‘AI is a shoggoth’ theory it will be massively consequential.
Corvos
10d ago
Reddit has recently ended login-free read access to the site
Yeah, I'd forgotten about this. I'm not participating if I need to connect my contact details.
Corvos
11d ago
Yes. Even if you take the anarchist position, there's a big difference between making the screen display "Pwned" or whatever, versus doing malicious criminal damage.
Your tastes are your own, but I think lots of people don’t particularly need or want deep or mastery-based gameplay. Myself included.
If you’re mostly there for the story, gameplay is basically something to keep your hands busy and get the plot pacing right. It should look good and feel good (ME1 doesn’t really pass that test) without being too deep or intimidating.
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