#an initial review

[ah0yh0y]

greywaren: an initial review

finished greywaren and i feel so flat??? like 

that was a shit resolution

barely any plot points were tied up

the whole nial lynch redemption really pissed me off because the fact that niall loved declan all along shouldn't negate the way declan felt all these years and the fact all this was what it took for declan to go back loving this man what 

ALSO MOR AND FENNIAN LIVING AT THE BARNS IN THE END mor wanted to kill ronan?????????? ike declan doesnt take offese to that IT ALL FEELS SO WRONG ////

MATTHEW???? MATHEWW MY BELOVED WAS ODNE DIRTY LIKE hes just WALKED BACK??? where's the complexity of mister impossible?????? where's the true conversations about being dreamt and the implications of that. we ahs that lovely scene in mister impossible where mathew is rightfully pissed because hes dreamt and lied to and in greywaren we had matthew pissed because of the whole sweetmetal thing BUT IT NEVER GETS TOUCHED ON AGAIN?????? AT ALLLLL????? like he goes with bryde and like roasts him and then falls asleep and then just WALKS BACK SKIPS TO 4 YEARS LATER????

also sick of the whole person/thing being dreamt used as a catch all plot device ITS EVERYWHERE it seems to really serve no purpose anymore like thematically EVERYONE IS DREAMT NOW I GUESS at least ronan didn't end up dreaming himself 

there isnt the lingering effects of their actions the consequences of the past yknow 

 hennessy and ronan weren't responsible for the apocalyps -  the only brown guy was who was built up to be a major villain at all and was like mentioned like a bit in the first book to establish a motivation for carmen farook lane liek??? the moderators did not deserve that much screentime kavinsky was more interesting than nathan 

also i really hate epilogues with time skips that arent usually done well i  would have prefered a couple of months late thing so we can see the work in progess happiness this feels too neat with a bow feels like something that would be a short story

JORDAN HENNESSY DESERVED MORE PAGE TIME 

but like the carmen and hennessy stuff was great tho 

tldr.:book was rushed , so many things were just magically fixed and restored and i would have preferred a harder slope, jordeclan wedding best bit Matthew deserved better , declan deserves better and honestly SO MID and disappointing  gonna reread mister impossible to regain my sanity

[ssaseaprince]

I think with all the self-awareness Hannibal has, he doesn't actually know himself very well. That is a big reason why he is so obsessed with Will's view of him because he's never had someone who could give him an accurate reading of himself. There are things we all are unaware of that we do, and most of us can rely on others around us to point it out. But Hannibal has never had that. Even with Bedelia, she responds to what he tells her and what she guesses, but she is not able to truly read Hannibal either. Will is the only one who can. Hannibal is curious about himself, and Will is the only one who can tell him the things he does that he doesn't realize. He is the only one who can give him a genuine perspective. When the average person is discovering/questioning themselves and their identity, they can go to therapy, they could talk to their friends, Hell, they can go get drunk at a bar and talk to the bartender. Hannibal has no one who knows him and nobody who could give him any kind of self insight. Except Will Graham.

[the-kipsabian]

[askmovieslate]

Mod Notes:

She rolled a 3.

Not very good.

It's OK, her luck is pretty high. She'll be OK.

[yasmeensh]

Paleolithic Media Catalogue

Hello everyone :) Short story first: When I began brainstorming for my prehistoric story, I started wondering what other prehistoric fiction there is out there. I was not familiar with it and have not seen much. That's when I started my grand literature review and began a search for what fiction exist out there. I wanted to know what kinds of stories are being made with this time period. What are the common themes or recurring ideas (I found lots of humans and dinosaurs works. And time travel). Since I've had a growing collection on my computer, I decided I should keep on enlarging it and put it online. It's nowhere near complete. I'll slowly keep accumulating the collection as I find more. I only have fiction books and comics right now. I still need to work on the film section.

You can access the blog here!

***

As for where I am in my reading, the one's I've finished reading are Earth's Children series (book 1-4. Dropped it afterwards lol. I made a post on with fanart) Dance of the Tiger and it's sequel Singletusk (They were good! I'll upload my review on the blog), and Sisters of the Wolf (It was ok!). I got my hands on The Inheritors and excited to start reading it. I REALLY want to read the Shiva trilogy, but I found no PDF online... and it's out of print :( There is certainly old copies on ebay. And I want to read Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. There seem to be lots of good books out there.

[stoshasaurus]

i still cannot fucking draw feet and refuse to learn.

anyway, more work with poses and an experiment with cell shading and some half-tone brushes i have. this one actually turned out decent, the hands most of all.

[milf-harrington]

the fact that steve harrington has such a fancy house but then just. doesn't have a porch gets me every time

[followerofmercy]

I'm starting my goodreads review era and I'm just copy/pasting what I said about Murderbot here

I don't think Murderbot is the single most groundbreaking story discussing what it means to be a person without being human, but it's certainly one of the more entertaining ones.

I've talked about this a lot with my friends and I love this series because it's an incredible... sensory experience? I rarely enjoy first person narration, but the way Murderbot's mind works is simultaneously so strange and so relatable that I can't help but get sucked in. For one, I think I have a bit of aphantasia or something. I do not think in images. Murderbot doesn't either. Its narration follows the information that it decides is important, which does not include lengthy descriptions of surroundings and people's physical features. You'll get whether someone is a threat or not, maybe a gender and sometimes a skin tone. This is great for me, who would not process it anyway, but it's a sticking point for the people I know that Need the visual.

Because of the lack of extraneous information, the pace is incredible. Being a partially organic, mostly machine entity, Murderbot is always doing something - usually multiple things - such as rewinding and reviewing the recording of the conversation that happened seconds ago to mentally facepalm for the stupid shit it said, watching its Emotional Support Soap Opera, hacking into secure systems to download more soap operas or evaluating its surroundings for potential threats.

It also responds hilariously to its severe social anxiety. Mild spoiler At one point it's so uncomfortable making eye contact that it turns to face the corner and are having a conversation with the research team like that, which, mood.

This book also hurts because Murderbot's internal narration is very sarcastic and snarky and then it drops shit like how it's so stressed out that it's literally decreasing its system integrity and suddenly you feel a little bad for laughing. But hey, you laugh to keep from crying. Just like Murderbot.

It's a very fun book about Some Guy with a very charming way of talking, except the guy is classified as a weapon instead of a person and it's simply trying to get by without anyone realizing that it IS a person.

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2023. BABEL, OR THE NECESSITY OF VIOLENCE: AN ARCANE HISTORY OF THE OXFORD TRANSLATORS' REVOLUTION by R. F. Kuang.

First off, what a title! Included here in its full glory because I didn't realize it was that long, but I delight in academic titles when played for poking fun especially.

I've been reading about a chapter of this a night, so far, and I'm enjoying it! It's much more approachable than I was afraid it would be, given the comp to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell--this one is a doorstop, but it's a very readable doorstop! I'm excited to see where it goes.

[thesawrfilms]

highlight reel of Angus Sampson as Cisco Wojciechowski in The Lincoln Lawyer S1E1

[abybweisse]

Ch201 (p4), Discovered

The mysterious driver leaves, and the kids with Finny go inside to investigate.

They can't find any hidden doors, etc., so they are puzzled about where the guy placed Ginny (or her body).

They try to keep looking, even though Oliver says they need to leave. Mabel seems particularly determined to keep searching.

Then someone shines a bright light on them and demands to know what they are doing.

I'm hoping that next chapter it'll turn out to be Snake, with him attributing those words to one of his snakes... but idk. Could be a regular staff member making their rounds... or showing up to deal with Ginny.

[ah0yh0y]

Red White and Whole - a initial review

hey Red White and Whole made me cry. perhaps its the fact that Tamil words so familiar to me are sprinkled in or it captures that very nebulous love that South Asian parents give , so hard to put into words. It very much shines bright with this young girls struggle a tale as old as time )or colonialism or immigration(  of being stuck between the land you were born in and the land of your forefathers and your blood. It is very much a love letter to those who came before us and we who live after and it doesn't diminish either side of the argument or struggle . it is very much whole 

[fantasyfantasygames]

Stickshift

Stickshift, Final W Games, 2007

Did you watch Initial D? So did the folks at Final W Games! Did you have no idea whatsoever how to adapt it to an RPG? Same for the folks at Final W Games!

Stickshift is a driving RPG that focuses on a drift-racing team (your PCs) as they try to win illegal street races.

Most of the mechanics for Stickshift are fine. Well-designed, even. Your stats are all either social or tie directly into driving. There's a "risk tolerance" factor that tells you how much your character is willing and able to risk in a given situation, and your risk tolerance goes up when something you care about is at stake. I love that. Dice are a unique d6 rating where you add 4, 5, and 6, and subtract 1, 2, and 3, which gives you a weird bimodal distribution. You're more likely to get higher or lower rolls than mid rolls.

However, I said "most" mechanics. And the one that hurts the most is that the racing mechanics are trash. You can put together the solid base mechanics and the risk/reward tradeoffs and your car's maintenance level and... it's all still just a time/distance meter that you fill up on your own. There's no real sense of competition. Roll dice, add to total, keep rolling, keep adding, whomever gets to 100 first wins. You might as well all be rolling separately, and then comparing afterward. There aren't any real tactics you can take advantage of that aren't blindingly obvious. You could make bad choices, but it's obvious that they're bad, so you don't. How do you make a driving game where the driving is not fun?

Another unfortunate thing in Stickshift is that most people have no idea how to describe driving. We've all seen fights in movies and TV shows. Most people come up with Star Trek technobabble or noble intrigue plots without too much trouble. How do you describe driving fast? "I shift into 3rd and floor it," sure, but how many different varieties of that description do you have? I played in a group where one person had seen Initial D, one had seen Tokyo Drift, and the others hadn't seen either, and boy did it show. Stickshift might have benefited from a big chart of descriptions that people could throw into the game.

The art initially looks like it has three clashing styles, until you get to the two-page spread in the middle of the book, when all three styles are used in the same piece you realize that there are three teams of drivers, each with their own art style. That two-page spread slaps. Anime-style guy high-fiving spraypaint-grunge-style guy while newspaper comic guy looks on with disrespect? Yes. The art direction is on point. I say guys because they're almost all guys. Gals are generally in the three classic "chick" stereotypes - the extra-femme girlfriend, the short hot-tempered driver who has to prove herself, and the mechanic with extra-baggy clothing who is secretly super-hot. There are worse stereotypes, I guess, but there's a much wider range of representation they could have gone for than "the standard 3 chicks".

Grab a copy if you want to scavenge it for parts, but most of it you can leave in the junkyard.

[carrion-carry-on]

Thoughts about TADC

Watched the pilot. Several times over now. I became increasingly worried with each watch.

Is this a SOMA thing? What about "I have no mouth and I must scream"?

I don't trust Caine. Literally the guy who invented murder in Christianity. Guy's shifty.

Jax is worrisome. Why the attitude? Has he simply "given up," in the sense of "I'm never getting out of here so I might as well enjoy it"?

Ragatha is sweet, and optimistic, I can see her using that as a coping function.

All in all, I'm interested to see where this series goes.

[ceo-of-sloppy-men]

My professor, expecting a normal and informative final exam (written)

Me:

Have you heard about our lord and saviour

Roman Concrete?

[parsleysagerosemarytimemachine]

Interesting premise - a young woman ends up interviewing to join a Magical Girl company. That said, I feel like this is sort of aimed just sideways of what I'm actually interested in, so while I'll read the next volume or two I don't know if I'm as excited as I was in my initial imaginations. Specifically, the big theme so far is 'small startup companies will save the world by breaking the rules' in ways that remind me too much of tech-bro finance that wants to 'disrupt markets.' Kana is introduced interviewing for large mega-corps that are too hidebound and checked out to see the worth of her passion and diligence, but she ends up working for a place that gives lip service to training, but also is too understaffed to let her complete it before she has to deploy dangerous magic to compensate for her partner's busted equipment; this is supposed to be a good thing, and not a harbinger of multiple expected safety and labor violations to come. I would love if future volumes talk about how many regulations are written in blood, but since they almost literally say 'move fast and break things' and 'we're like a family here' I don't expect it to come up. Also, some mild transphobia about how weird it is that her boss is a guy wearing a magical girl dress and no one else comments on it. (Also also, disappointing that the other weird employee is 'glasses guy who does all the computer coding' which in this world means 'makes their magic spells' - if this is going to be a show about adult working magical girls, one of the things I want to see is them doing their own programing/spell-work.) Anyway, overall interest but I don't know if I'll stick with it long-term; I'm sure there's a person for whom the valorization of startup culture is the antidote for their office-job ennui, but that's not me.