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Post by paperchema on Aug 11, 2017 7:35:47 GMT -5
EDIT: Double post.
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Post by eatersthemanfool on Aug 11, 2017 21:50:27 GMT -5
Oh yea, so right now I'm reading The Ultimate History of Video Games. It's... I don't know how I feel about it. Like, the point I"m at right now, he's just finished talking about the Nemo, and while he mentioned that it was originally going to be a cable service, and then they decided to use VHS tape, he said nothing about the 4 track tapes that were developed for it or how the video signal switching worked.
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Post by Maliki on Aug 26, 2017 20:21:30 GMT -5
Reading The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, the first one. Bought 1 and 2. About a quarter of the way through the first one, it's reaaally good ^_^
The Ultimate History of Video Games looks really cool. Sucks to hear some stuff got missed. It looks really big too (pages wise). I'll have to check it out after I read these two.
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Post by eatersthemanfool on Aug 26, 2017 22:39:55 GMT -5
I'm still working on Ultimate History. It's not *bad* really, but it's not that good either. The best part about it are the direct quotes, which it is *full* of. But when the author speaks in his own voice it feels like he doesn't have a great grasp of what he's talking about.
I've started the audiobook for Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits by David Wong. The book itself is pretty good. Some of the humor seems a little forced but the story is interesting enough. It's near-future scifi comedy, about a girl from a trailer park who finds out she's got a bounty on her head because her estranged father was involved with some shady group of rich people.
The audiobook version is crap though. I get the distinct feeling the reader didn't actually read the book before she started recording. Or maybe she's an alien who had english downloaded directly into her brain without ever actually speaking it. She has terrible comedic timing and tends to emphasize the wrong words in sentences. For example, she would say "someone TURNED on the TV", as if someone had betrayed their television, instead of "something turned ON the tv."
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Post by Maliki on Aug 27, 2017 6:56:38 GMT -5
Huh, I gotcha. That would really throw me off a bit. Not enough to dislike it but stuff like that is hard to go unnoticed for me. That's the opposite of the one I'm reading. Man this guy is good (well all of them!). It's all interviews and it's great when the person being interviewed mentions something, he can elaborate or add something in and it sparks even more good discussion. So good. That novel sounds neat too! I just told my friend about it, she likes books like that I never got into reading novels myself. I'm really into books but hobby/subject books. Love sci-fi tho. And that story does sound really cool. That's hailarous about the audio book one with the incorrect emphisis! I feel like I need to try and talk like that at work tomarrow xD
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Post by surnshurn on Aug 29, 2017 10:50:39 GMT -5
does playing text-heavy games (think planescape:torment) count as reading a book? what's the difference?
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Post by The Great Klaid on Aug 29, 2017 11:12:36 GMT -5
There's something about having anything sort of shown out to you that changes the experience. You know a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, there's a skill in choosing those thousand words over just showing the picture. Or rather, using far fewer. And still being able to grasp the picture from those words.
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Post by Maliki on Aug 29, 2017 12:13:55 GMT -5
Playing MUDs made me a speed reader for sure..
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Post by eatersthemanfool on Aug 29, 2017 16:40:47 GMT -5
MUDs and playing D&D over IRC made me a pretty damned good typist.
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Post by Purple Moss on Sept 1, 2017 17:02:11 GMT -5
I finished reading that Goethe book a long while back, and then I read Dragon's Egg. Unlike kaoru I didn't find The Sorrows of Young Werther boring, EXCEPT for that whole Ossian section. Basically, Goethe included his translation of part of an epic poem popular at the time (and which apparently was half made up, hehe). It's a good story, but he made the main character recite it pretty much just before the climax, and it dragged on forever. It could have been replaced with a simple "he read." That reminds me of this story: Dragon's Egg is hard sci fi about an alien species living on a neutron star that develops on a timescale many times faster than humans'. I enjoyed reading the cheela's hardships, but in retrospective it takes too long to get going. The ending is pretty cool. I really liked this one part (spoilers): [The cheela, now far beyond human technology, left us a lot of info. One section said the following:]
"FASTER-THAN-LIGHT PROPULSION -- THE CRYPTO-KEY TO THIS SECTION IS ENGRAVED ON A PYRAMID ON THE THIRD MOON OF THE SECOND PLANET OF EPSILON ERIDANI."
And damn, that made me wonder...
I may read at least the first Game of Thrones book next. I don't follow the TV series closely, but it has piqued my interest.
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Post by Serah on Oct 7, 2017 2:37:30 GMT -5
I finished The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson yesterday and, wow, this is absolutely one of my favourite books of all time. Highly recommended to anyone who likes slow-burn psychological horror.
I also read Sour Candy by Kealan Patrick Burke the day before which was okay but a little too direct in its horror. It's obviously Lovecraft inspired but it lacks the sense of mystery that Lovecraft's best stories had. The main threat doesn't feel all that incomprehensible or mysterious at all. It's not a bad little story though. I might check his other work out, I hear a lot of it is much better.
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Post by Ike on Oct 7, 2017 3:14:12 GMT -5
Check out We Have Always Lived in the Castle if you liked Shirley Jackson’s other work. It’s real good
My reading time and willpower have been limited but so far this year I’ve read Moby-Dick by Melville; Swann’s Way by Proust; Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle and Despair by Nabokov (and about half of The Defense); Sun, Wind and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; and a couple others I’m sure I’m forgetting but I’m too lazy to get up and scan my shelf. Right now I’m about halfway through Sartre’s Nausea. I’ve alao been translating The Little Prince from French to English in my spare time, so I guess that counts.
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Post by Serah on Oct 7, 2017 10:33:18 GMT -5
Check out We Have Always Lived in the Castle if you liked Shirley Jackson’s other work. It’s real good My reading time and willpower have been limited but so far this year I’ve read Moby-Dick by Melville; Swann’s Way by Proust; Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle and Despair by Nabokov (and about half of The Defense); Sun, Wind and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; and a couple others I’m sure I’m forgetting but I’m too lazy to get up and scan my shelf. Right now I’m about halfway through Sartre’s Nausea. I’ve alao been translating The Little Prince from French to English in my spare time, so I guess that counts. Yeah, it's on my to-read list now. It sounds really interesting! I've jumped into Blindsight by Peter Watts first though. I'm really enjoying it so far. Translation always seemed like it would be pretty fun to do.
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Post by eatersthemanfool on Oct 7, 2017 22:49:41 GMT -5
Just finished Collapsing Empire, first book of a new series by John Scalzi. Read by Will Wheaton. Quite enjoyed it, looking forward to the next one.
Nothing super original or anything, it's pretty standard Scalzi, but it's a lot of fun. Basic premise is that humanity exists in an empire of interdependent colony planets connected by a web of natural phenomena that allow for FTL travel but only between naturally occuring points. Essentially star lanes like in Master of Orion. Interstellar travel and communication still takes months, but that's preferable to thousands of years.
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Post by GamerL on Oct 25, 2017 7:37:24 GMT -5
I'm reading the new book in the Anno Dracula series One Thousand Monsters that just came out.
I like it but I'm also really confused, this was originally announced as taking place in 1999 with the title "Daikaiju", instead it takes place in 1899, still in Japan though, but I don't know if this is a prologue, (I'm well into the book, which is shorter than the others and there's been no time skip) or if Kim Newman decided to spin the idea into two books or, hopefully not, cancel the 1999 idea.
So I'm liking it but that confusion is also really distracting, on top of that it's kind of a cheat considering every other story in the series takes place sequentially, so to go back in time kind of feels like wheel spinning, you want to know what happens next where the last book left off.
So I don't know, we'll see how it goes, all that aside I am still really enjoying the book, I love Newman as a writer and this world, so I can't complain too much and the Japanese setting is course really cool.
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