Stephen

I think that when all is said and done, this is the man we need to remember. Look at those eyes. Those lips. Those cheeks, brazen with whiskers that sigh, "We blow now, never in need of halcyon days."

I think that, regardless of similarity between games, a score denotes how well a review believes a game accomplishes its goals. How close its grasp is able to settle towards its reach. At least, I believe that's the case for these two zombie games.

I would have to recommend KC Green's comic website Gunshow. Gunshow It is possibly the funniest webcomic on the internet right now. Possibly. There's also the incredibly Not Safe For Work webcomic Oglaf, which only does a new strip every Sunday, and you should never visit if you prefer violence to sex. Sex is Oglaf's stock in trade as jokes go. Oglaf Also, if nobody has posted about the largely defunct Achewood or A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible, then I recommend them highly to boarders. Possibly two of the most well-written webcomics to ever grace our Interzone. A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible Achewood I also apologize for the links looking like links, rather than hiding in pretty sentences. I have not forumed long enough. EDIT: I think I figured it out? You just have to rewrite the link you're given as long as it's still attached to the link address. Also, since nobody has mentioned the graphic novelist Jason, consider him highly recommended. He makes the most beautifully understated and well plotted comics I've ever read. In The Last Musketeer he manages to tell a story that combines Dumas with Ed Wood and in The Left Bank Gang he turns the famous Paris writers of the 1920's into cartoonists and has them rob a bank together.

The next generation of Xbox is all about mocapping as many animals as they can. Did you see the fish?

For comparison, https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+stock+price&sugexp=chrome,mod=7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Also, I think I want to just play games on PC forever now. I'm just not interested in good looking dogs in fatigues.

This is kind've a stupid post for being a little bit around the actual topic itself, but my girlfriend and I like to pick a short story collection off the shelf and read aloud to each other before bed some nights. You should definitely read short stories out loud from time to time. If a writer is good enough there is such a specific sound to the way they write that it can be almost shocking how much you can dig up in an old story when you're reading it again with your voice rather than your thoughts exclusively. It's actually a revelation almost similar to rewriting the story verbatim by hand. You learn a little bit more about how it was constructed.

I couldn't be terribly arsed to read through much more than the last few pages of this thread, but am still quite sure that I'm beating all of the dead animals and broken records with clods of silt packed around hard mud. So tell me. Is this game kind've mired in shit? Because I feel a bit crazy about all of this and I hope this doesn't start some kind of terrible feud. I'm not sure about the tenor of conversation on the quality of the game, but I hoped that the Thumbs forums would have some reasonable responses in mind. Is it just me or does this game have some good ideas for how to improve upon Far Cry 2, but serves to undermine itself at every turn with its bullshit gratification system loops, its spoiled dedication to the first person perspective's immersive qualities through every damn flashing corpse and objective beacon, and its runaway Yale writer who thinks good storytelling starts and ends with creating meta-commentary by flying naked above his Pacific Island funhouse sprinkling writing devices like so much confetti? But man, I had to stop when I started torching a pot farm. I stopped and decided to go read Wolf Hall. Because when I'm not enjoying the repetitive nature of the game itself, I'm tossed headfirst into this storm of bad writing and worse dialogue that has been trying to wink with increasing density at me all game. So, should I push forward to the end of this frustrating experience, or just be happy in the knowledge that Hocking's ideas went somewhere, and maybe they'll get it right next time? And let me make it clear that there is a lot that the Far Cry series does that I'm a fan of, but maybe that makes for a more disappointing experience.

I just finished playing through Lollipop Chainsaw and it's telling how little I enjoyed that game by how quickly I pushed through it, like I wanted to get through all of the gameplay to experience the game's flavor as quickly as my fingers would allow. At a certain point I found the end of the game and wondered how that had happened. The combat is impractically constructed to hide its combos in a shop system and I didn't begin to even derive a mild pleasure from it until the last third of the game. There was maybe a five minute chunk of time where I might have muttered to someone next to me, almost obsequiously, "Hey. Hey, this is alright. I kind've had fun there in that mime-in-a-box, Serious Sam AI, animation-priority indulgent arena." It's a shame that I have an affection for SUDA's games. They're largely boring to play, and Lollipop Chainsaw was almost frustrating as well as bland. But yeah, I guess that's a game I just finished. I don't recommend the experience.

Guys. You all need to decide what these Realms are doing to this Haunting.

Even moreso, the World English Dictionary cites tight as meaning drunk when used informally, although it is the thirteenth definition of the word.

I expect to be berated for this comment. Mildly. Also, while this is probably his best novel, I might prefer Islands in the Stream like a crazy person, or maybe even A Moveable Feast. Nah, who am I kidding. The Sun Also Rises has one of the most perfect final lines in a book ever. It's so absolutely effortless that you don't really think about it like Hemingway sat there for some time thinking 'Oh gawd what is going to be the final line in the novel? How do I perfectly and poetically wrap up my genius?' whereas most other authors allow you to feel their breath prickling your neck hairs as they read over your shoulder going 'Aren't I good? Yes. This is good. So good. What a profoundly rapturous line of prose I have here. Wonders.' Although, interestingly enough, rumor has it that Hemingway was such a perfectionist that he spent entire day's composing a perfect sentence. Nil and nix.

I first read Grendel when a crush told me about it. I had just started exploring philosophy too. It was a maddening experience.

I believe that out of everything of Calvino's I've read Cosmicomics plays the heaviest into dealing with woman as objects. I'm wary of saying that this was done on purpose, and also that it might make things worse for Calvino, but I do believe that it was done out of a desire to get as close to the colloquial attitude of old folk tales as he could. Although Calvino was decidedly irreligious throughout his life, he had a dense obsession with the way stories are told. He even released a book intended to follow the Brothers Grimm, but for Italian folk tales. The times when I remember him letting loose are incredibly interesting then because of this. There are quite a few tales where woman are legitimate characters in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which is a collection of stories told by Calvino playing tarot with himself. And in Difficult Loves there is specifically a short story in which a little girl completely shatters for a moment the gang warfare of two groups of swimming boys who are so enthralled with their nonsense they don't even realize she isn't playing. On the other hand, Calvino is good at fitting into a lot of stereotypes of the time for how men saw woman. He definitely never fully gets away from that. It's a shame. Although it's also a good thing that we don't read Calvino because he's a bit predisposed to terribly draconian gender ideas. Calvino is special because, more than any other writer I can think of, he explored what it means to tell stories and take away from them within the context of his own beautiful prose.

I also need to point out the truth of this statement. I first picked up If on a winter's night a traveler... in limbo between middle school and my freshman year of high school due to a recommendation from a crush. I think in some ways it helped me to get over all of that. I ended up with a more enduring love in what the book had to say than in what the crush could ever give me. I realized a few years later how easily I had fallen into Calvino's trap when I read his book on what makes classic literature just that. He says that "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."

I'm just going to leave here a recommendation to anyone that has enjoyed this collection so far. Don't stop there. Read If on a winter's night a traveler... or Invisible Cities or The Baron in the Trees or The Castle of Crossed Destinies. If anything read If on a winter's night a traveler... and maybe go, "That inspired these? What would Cloud Atlas have been if Calvino had not explored those ideas before him?" And on and on. Calvino is a wonder truly.

Limbo is an excellent example of directly subverting the damsel in distress trope. You spend the whole game looking for your lost sister after waking up in the middle of the woods, and when you finally get to her at the end she disappears and you wake up again in the forest. The way that game plays with the trope, forcing you to realize that she isn't the one that needs saving after all is so subtle and brilliant that I'm going to sit down tomorrow and play through that game all over again.

And that's the whole damn problem, you know? People call Italo Calvino and Luigi Pirandello postmodernists sometimes, but when I read them they were post-war italian fabulists. Ugh, hahahah. Cloud Atlas shares a lot of ideas with Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler in that they're both incredibly interested in celebrating and exploring the idea of storytelling as an art form. Cloud Atlas ties together disparate genres to show how they're all a smaller part of this larger history (And he throws confetti in the air and his brain explodes like a champagne bottle with his sheer enthusiasm for celebrating the art of the tradition.) while If on a winter's night a traveler wants to rip off your ear and have you scrambling into the book to find it just so it can tell you how important beginnings are to stories, letting you in on its celebration by talking to you more directly than you ever have been before in literature. But is Cloud Atlas postmodern? I would like to say it is, if we're referring to how it plays with its story. Some might say that it can't be because it doesn't dive deep enough down any wormholes to be postmodern. It isn't difficult enough. It does not play within the time period. It's really just several books of differing genres. The only way to appease some of these people might be to call it Pop-Postmodern, and that makes me shiver. I have problems with the idea of genre. Although it's necessary, it should never be absolute. I don't know if I've answered your question at all. Terribly sorry!

I think the difficulty most people have with postmodernism as a genre is understanding exactly what it is meant to be. Tristram Shandy is not Finnegan's Wake is not The Third Policeman is not Infinite Jest is not Against the Day is not Underworld and so on. But these all fall under the banner of postmodern writing. It is thus easy to see postmodernism as anything purposefully difficult when so much of it coheres to the being that is writing it. This is largely why I love it though. A postmodern novel is always waxing the surface of the Great Conversation in all writing. These books are always directly addressing the larger ongoing dialogue that is Making Shit Up, lending it this honesty and playfulness that can come across to many as showing off. When Sterne's Tristram Shandy decides to leave a page blank in his life, literally, there is this glorious hand-wringing moment for him as a character that has actually been earned because we expect this of Sterne by the time we see it. I do not think Pynchon would have done such a thing though. He was more inspired by Oakley Hall than Tom Swift. I don't know if your opinion would change reading a longer novel. You might have a harder time of it. I'm not ashamed to admit either that reading Gravity's Rainbow was not something I had been ready to do until I had made my way through Ulysses, and that I still spent a good portion of my time looking to outside resources for greater understanding of the text than I had ever before. I've even heard proponents of the book say in conversation, attempting a Wholehearted Recommendation of the thing, that you need to stick with it until page 400, because that is when it gets really good. So I guess it's best to say that GR is a commitment. Nobody has to read it. People shouldn't complain about it unless they're willing to meet the book on its own terms. It isn't that the book isn't for them, but that Pynchon did not write it for every kind of reading. Obviously we all read for different reasons, and some read for many, depending on what they have in front of them. I love postmodernist fiction. A lot of it isn't great. A lot of it does seem gimmicky. A lot of it is gimmicky. But there is an awful lot of it right now, and so much of it is worthwhile if you're looking for writing that is bluntly contributing to that eternal dialogue in writing that takes place across all tenses of time.

In some of his letters Pynchon has suggested that at one point The Crying of Lot 49 was a part of his first novel V. and that he excised and came back to it after V. was published and decided to just get rid of the damn thing so he wouldn't feel overwhelmed since he was working on several other books at the same time. And from what I can remember vaguely, he referred to it as a nice little pulpy piece that he just wanted out of his lap. I guess what I'm saying is, is that I love The Crying of Lot 49, but I have to admit that it is the most accessible of his works because it is one of his least ambitious. And I know that sounds a bit insane, but it is likely because it is so quick and tightly constructed that it is likely to be the only book most people ever finish by him. That or Vineland.

I would have chosen If on a winter's night a traveler as well or even Invisible Cities, but I'm just glad that they're reading Calvino at all. If on a winter's night a traveler was a life changing book when I initially read it. That somebody could have so much damn fun exploring some incredibly complex ideas was fascinating. The book is also largely an older exploration of a lot of the same ideas that Cloud Atlas approaches but does not dig as deeply into. I don't know if that makes the book a better candidate than Cosmicomics for its thematic relationship to Cloud Atlas or a worse candidate for exploring ground they have already tread lightly on previously. Also, it is possible to get The Complete Cosmicomics for cheap now in the US at least.

Oh, sorry. I realized that though and just forgot to clarify in the midst of my post. What I meant to write initially is that I'm disappointed in how the list can at all be about finding the Great American Novelist while excluding the country's foundations, which do not go so far back as to be entirely worth disbarring. America is still so young, you might as well play with the breadth of its history. Although I know it can be argued that making a list at all seriously requires some method of narrowing choices so as to actually complete the damn thing. Anyway, don't mind me! I just love Melville.

Oh man, allow me to throw my pocket change in here and tell you to read David Goodis and James M. Cain, but mostly David Goodis. There's been a Goodis revival in recent years and you can find a great collection of his work through Library of America. I'm tempted to say that Goodis invented noir as we know it while Cain fathered it. It wasn't until a few years after The Postman Always Rings Twice that Goodis would play his hand, really sinking his teeth into the idea that noir is largely about your protagonist circling the drain faster and faster until he just washes away.

I don't know how much I like the idea of such a list to begin with, but if there is to be one at all it most definitely would be remiss to leave out Melville. He was the man that shaped American literature, although I'm not sure if he created it. He did however find it wanting, and renovated the damn building with his own ink-and-tear-stained hands. If his exclusion is associated with his inability to produce four great novels then I incredulously disagree. Typee and Omoo beg to be read together, Moby Dick is the inverse of playwrighting (It is Shakespeare's innards clutched and torn dripping as easy as molting a new exoskeleton.) that tears apart the ship rather than meticulously sealing it board by board, and Billy Budd is a wonderful mess whose importance exceeds the masterpiece of the work itself. (The importance of its story and its incomplete nature is an integral part of its legacy; see Woyzeck) You should all read The Confidence Man, by the way. And make sure to pick up the Dalkey Archive edition. It has an awesome preface written by Daniel Handler and some great annotations. (It's also a placeholder to me for the dawn of American postmodernism. So far.) Hyperbole aside, it kind've sucks that Melville was shunted here. I guess that just leaves him for people like me to have an unhealthy obsession with the man alone in my own tight, wrinkled, stained, and acutely asphyxiating corner of lip-smacking apophenia. My goodness have I got to go to bed.

I would like to third the reading of A Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki. It's such an incredibly delicious epic piece of frame storied fiction. It's one of the books I sell by hand to people at the bookstore I work at. Topper by Thorne Smith would also be an excellent choice to come after both Gatsby and The Crying of Lot 49. Thorne Smith is a forgotten jazz age writer that is attributed with having invented the 'American ghost'. His prose is poetic, but also fun. He is Fitzgerald and Wodehouse and proud, ecstatic alcoholism. You all should give him a try. Seriously.