The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
There is no such thing as a moral or immoral [book] thread
Posts
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
Boo this man!
Boo!
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
What good is a patrician without an extensive network of spies?
Also his general omniscience makes the moments where he is surprised all the sweeter.
Like in Men at Arms.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I've read Colour of Magic, Guards Guards, Mort and maybe 1 or 2 others I can't remember. Keep saying I will read them all one day but man that's a lot of books
So if you liked Guards! Guards! and want to read more about the Watch, you know the next one is Men at Arms. And so on.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
The connections are minimal. You can generally read a whole plot thread with minimal issues if you haven't read the others - at most you might be surprised by the technological advances that happened in the meantime.
So, yeah, you can read an entire row as a stand alone and the only thing that'll really happen is that, for instance, you might be introduced to a journalist before you've read the book where the whole concept of journalism on the Disc is established.
This only goes up to Thud! in the Watch series, but it's a different chart that shows more of the timeline difference between books. Half of the Watch books take place between Moving Pictures and The Truth, for instance.
The Discworld books have a few general main characters, and for those characters certain books have a certain order to them Chronologically. Like, Carrot and Vimes are introduced in Guards! Guards! But Detritus and Angua don’t appear until Men at Arms and they don’t become sergeants until Feet of Clay.
There are some little connections between the books. Death appears in every book, for example, but he has a whole few books that specifically deal with Death and his domain. Small gods introduces the monks of history, thief of time specifically stars them, and then they reappear in Night Watch (the watch book that has time travel).
The general rule is that you only need to know about the previous books of a particular Discworld series to follow the plot of that series, but there are Easter eggs for people who read them all.
And the book ‘series’ each can have wildly different tones. I am no fan of the Rincewind books, but I love the Watch books and the Death books. The Death books also tend to be more philosophical than others.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown
House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday
The American Indian Ready to Wear Catalog 2018, by Joey Clift
And as a protest against my parents, I bought A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn
I really need to get home soon, I cannot see the polite veneer over these arguments with my parents lasting much longer
Moving Pictures has kinda bogged me down. I dunno.
It's one of the weakest ones, though I like Windle Poons and Reg Shoe
Reaper Man, the next in line, is the one that introduces Windle Poons and Reg Shoe. It's also the one that I forever thought had one of my favorite quotes in it (“"My motives, as ever, are entirely transparent."
Hughnon reflected that 'entirely transparent' meant either that you could see right through them or that you couldn't see them at all.”), but that's actually a much later quote I'm now realizing.
Moving Pictures gave us Gaspode, so it can't be all bad, but it's otherwise forgettable. It feels kinda like a thematic first draft of Soul Music.
oh you're right, I totally spaced on which plot happened in which.
Yeah Moving Pictures isn't great.
Speculation ho!
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
I did like how Valentine was revealed to be a fairly contemptible and pathetic figure, but the other villains, like Crome and Dr. Twix, didn't get basically any characterization, which made their downfall feel kind of weightless. I am curious where the following books go.
Seriously, so much crying. On the subway, for me.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
You are in for a trip.
It starts off as a Calvin and Hobbes-esque story about a multiracial child growing up, and then drops an anvil on your face. A beautiful, heartfelt anvil, but still. It was an incredible story.
It's going have been almost 100 years now in a year or two, and I'd like to read up on the subject because the topic of protest and such is forever going to be topical...
So ya'll have recommendations for some basic entry level, easy to read (in like... structure, I know the content can get... rough.) books on the history of women's suffrage in the USA? Particularly Susan B Anthony's trial and the Silent Sentinels.
I’m also glad I chose to hold off on it until I’d read the other Watch books. It’s actually the one I bought first, silly me thinking by the name that it would be the first one. But reading the others first gave me a much better understanding of the various players and the city itself, as it were.
Next up is probably The Library at Mount Char or Provenance.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
What the hell was any of that? It turns out that everything sucks, in hell, forever?
Screw that entire series. I don't think I have time for any of that in this place and in this time.
Where everyone’s an asshole, everything sucks and nothing matters
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Ship It is about a 16 year old girl named Claire, a superfan of Demon Heart, a shitty CW style budget genre show which is most definitely supposed to remind you of Supernatural. Claire loves the show because it is super queer-baity, and she fills her days writing slash fics of the two male leads, which she's sure will be canon any day now. Not that she's gay, she definitely wants you to know she's not gay, she just like, cares a lot about queer representation, or whatever. Some wacky hijinks go down at a signing and she ends up winning a chance to go on tour with the crew of the show to a couple of other comic conventions in the northwest. Claire resolves that it's obviously her duty to the fandom to talk the showrunner, or the star, or at least one of the marketing interns into admitting how fucking gay their show is while they're stuck with her around.
This would probably be an obnoxious book coming from a lot of authors, but Lundin is pretty obviously writing from a place of a lot of familiarity - growing up as a tumblr-dwelling queer fan herself, and then also someone who's actually involved in real TV production from the other side, there's a fun collision between the fan belief that everything in a show exists for a reason, and the TV-people who exist in a world of just trying to get the dailies finished on time and on budget and the fans are obsessed with what now?? And it has some interesting conversations about representation, and who canon belongs to and wtf that means anyway, and it's also just kind of interesting to get a first-person perspective from a queer female fan who's obsessed with male/male romances, which is something that comes up a lot in like yaoi and those kinds of fan spaces as well.
So yeah, was very surprised how much I enjoyed it. Pretty much only complaint was that the passages of fanfic totally lasted too long, even if it does have some excellently hilarious interludes like Claire trying to google up "gay porn reacharound" at her school library so she can figure out how to write her sex scene.
I finished this today
The best way I could describe it is, what if Inception was about dream detectives instead of dream heists?
It's a little more whimsical than that, and does a better job of conjuring up what most dreams actually feel like, but the methods described for using dreams to lure people into revealing sensitive information are almost an exact match. And this book actually came out a year BEFORE Inception did
It also becomes pretty clear that it's making some allegories about government surveillance overreach, and depending on how subtle you think it is, you may or may not dig it
I liked it a lot!
I’m friends with Britta! I can tell you with certainty that she was the most qualified person in the world to write Ship It, and your take on her familiarity with both worlds is spot on