gregbrown

My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgaard is wonderful, honest, and reflective in the best way. You also can't go wrong with other John Williams (Butcher's Crossing or Augustus), and Warlock by Oakley Hall is an amazing examination of heroes and the American West.

Goatse will always live on as a platonic form, with the specter haunting various unfortunate logos and advertisements.

Funnily enough, the AV Club just posted a look at the series' misogyny: http://www.avclub.com/articles/revisiting-the-sad-misogynistic-fantasy-of-xanth,104382/

99.9% sure RespectfulMom is trolling, lol.

I don't really think that a Star Wars displaced serious sci-fi any more than Flash Gordon did, so I'm not sure how Le Guin makes that argument (unless it's "Star Wars made new readers expect my novels to be like Star Wars") Also, I'm 90% sure you all confused her with Madeline L'Engle, which confused me for years too.

Yeah, the new ones suck, but they had one or two old ones squirreled away at the store I went to. They really are so gorgeous in person, especially seeing them all together on a table. (And yes, the Lovecraft one could be improved by dropping the pasted-on cover art. The other hardcovers are all etched and look better.)

I'm reading through a complete HP Lovecraft collection right now, and I agree—especially when you add in his earlier stuff, and his less-regarded works. It's 1000+ pages and I only started hitting stories I recognized on page 170+, and the preceding stuff is pretty repetitive and one-note for the most part. A lot of his shorter works are just ramping up to a specific, singular, unique image or moment that justifies the whole story. Most of the time it's worth it, but the mechanics he uses to get there are kinda repetitive. Still, though, the imagery in "The Outsider" and "The Music of Erich Zann" is as captivating as I remembered, especially the former, though less for the (obvious) end revelation than for the wonderful spatial twist that happens about halfway through. I'm really excited to get to the later stuff that's more well-regarded, but kinda feel like I need to pace myself. If anyone's interested in picking it up, the complete collection is one of those really nice Barnes & Noble hardcovers that they've produced a few dozen of. They're absolutely gorgeous, and even cover some non-public-domain stuff like Asimov's Foundation books, Dune, some Stephen King, and more. My only caveat is to NOT buy anything in translation, and only go for the English-written stuff.

Broom of the System (if you haven't read it) is essentially DFW-does-Pynchon and might be up your alley too.

I find it funny that the thumbs accidentally reinvented MMORPG world events, without even knowing it. (Except instead of an NPC enemy, a real person would be driving.)

Earlier today, Eurogamer posted video of the torture scene, and while I found the "racial profiling" pretty benign, the torture itself is kinda disturbing: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-09-16-is-the-most-disturbing-scene-in-gta5-justified Honestly, any game that requires the player to torture in order to advance the storyline is really gross—even when it's arguably on par with the wonton killing. Something about deliberate suffering just trips different emotional wires. That said, the framing ever-so-slightly puts the game in a more favorable light, highlighting the limited effectiveness and general dumbassery of the characters involved.

Yeah, Chronicles is best described as "When World-Building Goes Bad".

Kinda frustrated by the reflexive tut-tutting by the indie game community at the positive reviews of GTA V: as if the game couldn't possibly bring anything interesting to the table, or be distinguished in its craftsmanship. In a way, it's even more frustrating than the backlash against not-perfect scores, if only because I expect better out of them. There are some serious issues with the way Rockstar treats women and violence in their games, but that doesn't obviate the positive aspects—or justify ignoring the game when pointing to how AAA games never do anything innovative. I can understand saying that the game isn't for you, since if you don't like previous GTA games you probably won't like this one. But the reactions I've seen go far beyond that, to the point where Leigh Alexander's insipid ~parody~ is championed, when it commits the same "turning it to 11 isn't satire" mistake that many criticize the game itself for! Anyways, between that and the predictable ugly reaction against reviewers who have the gall to criticize misogyny—or even worse, commit the sin of BEING FEMALE—I'm really disgusted today by the whole gaming scene.

Dredd is a really good movie! I'm actually jonesing to watch it again, which is really weird for me. It knows exactly what it wants to be, and does it all in 90 minutes—without franchise bullshit or stupid character arcs or four-quadrant side-characters or anything! So goddamn refreshing, plus it is unexpectedly good at the psychedelia that gives it a strange, morose mood that I didn't think was possible in a really violent action movie? It is weird that it exists yet I kinda love it.

It is so goddamn crazy. Sad that Zemekis abandoned film for zombie CGI for quite a while there.

I'd argue that movies have changed too thanks to shifting economic models—but that it started earlier with Star Wars and the rise of "toyetic" filmmaking. And now, we see everything being ground into franchises because quicker release cycles mean that well-received films don't reap the financial rewards until sequels. (Amongst other things, the reason why The Dark Knight hit it out of the park after an ok showing from the almost-as-good Batman Begins.)

If you revisited it, you'd be surprised how rare the HS episodes are. The second season in particular has a jag of really great body-horror episodes, one of the principal obsessions of the series.

Translocators in Unreal Tournament might be a good example to examine as well. Can't comment on the similarities as the link seems to 404 now.

Where's your evidence that lower willingness to pay isn't the case? Overall store revenue is lower on Google Play too.

Unsurprisingly, the Ouya store is gross as hell. http://www.merseyremakes.co.uk/gibber/2013/08/its-difficult-to-trust-the-ouya-store/

RE: Keith David—He was in The Thing!!! It wasn't quite the deep-voiced Keith David we know from later films like Requiem for a Dream, but still pretty visible.

It ran ok on an Intel HD 4000 for me. (MB Air) Great, great game. Amazing how they got all the details right, even with such a small team.

That's who they all compare him to, but I haven't tackled that giant yet. Wanna pick up the newish Lydia Davis translation of Swann's. :[

That's actually how the review scoring system works: they gradually spell out CITIZEN KANE as you get more points. For example, rymdkapsel gets a mere C I T I Z E, whereas Crusader Kings II is all the way to C I T I Z E N K A N already.

If you're looking for an odd but surprisingly magnetic read, My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard would be a great choice. It's in six volumes with only the first two translated into English so far, and I can attest that the first one works great as a standalone read. Most of all, the book just feels refreshingly honest—Knausgaard directly confronting his childhood, adulthood, and feelings throughout. The first volume has two sections, the first on his childhood and the second on the death of his father. Outwardly the books are an accumulation of details, including the daily motions of life that are so often elided from other fiction. But the magic of the book is how, through those inconsequential details, Knausgaard slowly accumulates a sense of the moment that's stronger than any other book I've read. This is a book that feels like life, which feels like trite and overused praise because people have wasted it on books other than this one. FSG just reprinted the first volume with a garish cover, so it should be more widely-available than it was even a few months ago.

If you're enjoying the first 100 pages, the rest of the book should be a super-easy read. The narrative becomes infinitely more coherent after that first section.And yeah, I found GR to be way harder than IJ. The hardest book I've ever read, in fact, though I haven't read any Joyce, Gaddis, Cormac's Blood Meridian & Suttree, Melville, etc.