Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2d ago
Ghost Story is, thus far, my favorite Dresden Files novel. Together with Changes, they're a hell of a one-two punch!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2d ago
Aww hell, I was mixed up, the book I was thinking about was Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving a Relationship With a Narcissist--sorry about that! I'm actually not familiar with the Neapolitan series.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2d ago
Ooh, I've thought about checking that one out, but I keep telling myself to read at least the really interesting parts of my backlog first.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
5d ago
The government is also looking to borrow to keep programmes going, instead of socking away the surplus for a rainy day as had originally been the plan, as well as the usual budget over-runs (the health service is a constant black hole of sucking up money and running out and needing more):
In other news, Captain Renault is shocked-shocked!-to find that gambling is going on in here!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
5d ago
Wow, thanks! Talk about ask and ye shall receive!
ETA: link says the post is deleted, suspect that a mod needs to approve it, cough cough. Pretty please?
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
5d ago
UPDATE: I've been advised that the good folks over at rDrama are brigading the survey, so I've closed it. I'll have to see if there's any way to exclude the troll responses from my analysis.
Rats. I was looking forward to the results and the ensuing discussion, too!
Tried Recursion by Blake Crouch two weeks or so ago, which was an extremely fast paced and not-all-too-deep mind-bendy read where the stakes increase astronomically towards the middle and end of the book, sort of like the kind of thing a turbo-charged Christopher Nolan would write if you plied him with a lot of LSD and crack. There is one Big Lie you have to believe in order for the book to make any sense at all, and towards the end of the book the characters completely overlook a relatively obvious solution to the main conflict of the story after over a hundred years of iteration, but if you can accept that the story's good fun.
I was not a particular fan of that book, and you've amply described the reasons why, though I'll add that I'm not generally a fan of using present tense for fiction, either. There are special circumstances where it's just fine to do so, of course, but for me, it didn't work in Recursion and ended up being One More Thing that annoyed me about the novel.
Cured: the Tale of Two Imaginary Boys by Laurence Tolhurst.
Side note: I thought that Alanson said that he was wrapping up his Convergence series, but evidently not.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
10d ago
Haha, of course, that makes much more sense in retrospect than the idea that you were talking about Tom Ford the fashion guy!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
10d ago
I've been more than a little surprised that no-one here in This Fine Establishment has done a post noting the parallels between Ford and Trump, but of course, it's always possible that it was already done and I just wasn't around for it at the time.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
13d ago
Good question! With my usual caveat that my bar for decent reads is not very high, the answer for the past couple of years, at least, has been way too much LitRPG, though urban fantasy (when done right) is a perennial favorite, as is old-school sci-fi and fantasy in general. If you're looking for a specific genre, I can talk more specifically about what I've been reading in those departments, but without knowing any more detail, recent reads that I've enjoyed would be the Unbound series by Nicoli Gonnella (LitRPG), the Noobtown series by Ryan Rimmel (humor/LitRPG), The Assembly series by Steve McHugh (Urban Fantasy/Vampires), the Book of the Dead series by RinoZ (LitRPG/necromancer), absolutely everything by Nathan Lowell (all Slice-of-Life/Setting Things Right, mostly merchant marines in space), the He Who Fights With Monsters series by Shirtaloon (LitRPG), The Hollows series by Kim Harrison (Urban Fantasy), and of course, my only must-read author, The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, which is also urban fantasy.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
13d ago
Over the years, I’ve grown increasingly uncharitable towards people rushing to bat for alleged victims online.
Strongly agree. In the past several years, I've twice been close to a situation where wannabe White Knights went nuclear on innocent situations, to the detriment of the people accused specifically as well as the community in general. One was a belligerent and protracted comprehension fail, while the other at least had the excuse of having his own trauma distorting his thinking, but in both cases, the alleged threat to Teh Children™ was, IMO precisely nil, and I felt bad for the mods that had to clean up that mess, which is, of course, easy to say since I was one of them.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
13d ago
A much younger me once made the same financial bet for the same reason.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
14d ago
Alanson is a great story teller, he's especially good with the fun and witty banter between the main character and the foil of the moment, but his twists and turns can be great as well. My older brother actually introduced him to me because I had talked about how I was reading a lot of military themed sci-fi, enough that Columbus Day sounded like a dozen other novels I had read and I wasn't really that into reading yet another one, but I eventually got around to it, and whoa did that ever go six different kinds of sideways fast, and I've been enjoying the ride ever since!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
16d ago
Dead World: Convergence book 6 by Craig Alanson. Other than being thoroughly annoyed by the, bad habit he's picked up of, placing out of place commas, in his sentence structure and much of his dialogue, I'm enjoying it thus far.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
16d ago
Because I refuse to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited and instead buy my Kindle books so that the authors can actually at least attempt to make a living, I used to see that stuff pop up on Kindle Countdown deals all the time and yeah, it's eye-opening for sure.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
16d ago
Never heard of the Protomen, but now I'mma have to check them out. Somewhere in the detritus of all of my old files I have a copy of some group that I swear called themselves Project X that covered all of the music from Mega Man 2. So I've got that going for me.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
17d ago
Congratulations on getting that far! I think the best I've done is halfway so far, and that's been over a decade now. I have a new idea brewing, but IDK if it'll ever amount to more than a few chapters because despite telling myself to write first, edit later, I can't even write more than a few sentences at a time without going back and tweaking something. Sadly, that's a significant improvement from my worst!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
18d ago
Hmm, any thoughts on how its "open world" compares to similar games like GTA/SR or Elder Scrolls games? Asking because I kinda feel like if I were to spend a few dozen hours just appreciating the beauty and depth of the game world then I might be reasonably happy with it, and you do make the side quests sound good enough for the purchase.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
18d ago
I haven't really been gaming for some years now, but I'm strongly considering picking up Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition from GOG on sale and giving it a whirl. Been a fan of the cyberpunk genre ever since it became a Thing, and AFAICT it actually grew into a good game years ago, so why not?
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
18d ago
Yep.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
18d ago
Agreed, for me, it still had a few great moments, but as an individual novel it's not much. The tone was a little too crapsack/gritty, there was negligible character and relationship development, and the majority of the book was preoccupied with side quests and meta level exposition that took too much away from the main plot of the novel itself, stretching it too thin and making it feel forced. I think Dinniman is definitely aware that this is a Thing that is happening with his series, as he said something to the effect that he understood how authors got bogged down in their own works in the afterword, which of course immediately made me think of ASOIAF, (though it would have easily been just as applicable for other sprawling series like, say WoT,) but it's clear that the world that he's building took precedence in this particular book and the characters were just along for the ride.
I swear I answered this yesterday, but it appears my post never made it. Anyway, it's The Minority Council: Matthew Swift Book 4 by Kate Griffin. For those interested, I greatly enjoyed Cured and would recommend it to any fan.
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