Corelli

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Posts posted by Corelli

  4. Posted

    I don't know that one. I thought

    Mance's spearwives were the ones killing. Are you talking about Little Walder's death?

    Not little Walder. It's pretty clear Big Walder killed little Walder. Rather, when Theon talks to one of the spearwives, she says that they did not kill all the men who had been killed. If you go back and read Theon's chapters carefully, you will see big jumps in time. He is experiencing missing time, going crazy, and killing people. Roose talks to Theon and says he can not physically accomplish the killings, but there are other spots where you see that he has some strength remaining. In addition, he meets a mysterious hooded man, who knows all about Theon and his deeds, and who he has killed and hasn't. The theory is that Theon is talking to himself in this section.

    As a crazy aside: When Theon pretends to kill Bran and Rickon in Winterfell, we learn very quickly that he did not kill them. But who were those boys? They were the sons of the miller's wife, who we know Theon was having a relationship with while at Winterfell. Did Theon unknowingly kill his own sons? All that stuff is really dense.

    Edit: And now I sound like the crazy people I was mocking last page.

  5. Posted

    Aurane Waters is a pirate now, too.

    Spoilers for everything:

    Oh hey did you mention the Theon is the ghost of winterfell theory yet? That is one of my favorites as I totally missed it on my first read of Dance, but in retrospect it's pretty textually implicit.

  7. Posted

    She's not a Sand Snake. Sorry, that's my mistake. She's the mother of one of them, a former lover of Oberyn Martell.

    Yeah, I'm sorry, that's what I meant too. That's what I doubt. But who knows, I don't think there's really enough evidence to know either way at this point.

    Also, the new Arianne chapter has some really interesting things going on, stuff about krakens, magic vs. maesters, etc.

  9. Posted

    I really, really hope Syrio is dead

    Also, spoilers for everything:

    I don't buy Septa Lemore as a sand snake at all. If she were, it would seem much more likely that the Martells are aware of Griff's parentage, and they aren't (based on the new Arianne Martell chapter from winds of winter

  11. Posted

    The sisyphean nature of the thing really hit me in the gut as I stared into the possibility of spending hours capturing bases that will just be recaptured later, and so on.

    That turns me off on Planetside 2 as well, although I do have to admit that the first few hours I played of it were really, really impressive. I'll probably still play off and on, but it didn't grip me the way Lords Management games seem to.

  12. Posted

    There are some pretty crackpot theories, but the level of detail the books go into can be astonishing. For example, from A Feast for Crows:

    Oh absolutely. The density and complexity of the plotting is arguably the best part about it.

    But there are also theories like this:

    The Boltons are actually Others. Darkstar is the real Aegon Taergaryen. Varys is an immortal faceless man. It goes on and on and only gets crazier.

  16. Posted

    For most games I tend to agree regarding narrative spoilers. I'm also the kind of person who reads plot synopses of T.V. shows so I can find out who dies beforehand and decide whether or not to keep watching the show accordingly. =P But how do you feel about "mechanical" spoilers and/or puzzle spoilers? (Mechanical spoilers meaning things like, "the A.I. seems really good but if you use this one particular obscure tactic they fall for it every time!"...and now when you play, you've got that tactic in your mind and didn't even have the fun of figuring out for yourself how to break the game...or as another example, all that Ant-Lion stuff discussed on the cast)

    That's a really good point!

    Most games are not mechanically dense enough for this to happen. You have to understand the majority of the mechanics or you can't progress through the game. But to answer your questions, learning about a mechanic in a game second hand doesn't hurt my enjoyment of it at all; in fact, many times I wouldn't know about interesting mechanics without reading about them somewhere else because I didn't figure them out on my own (first thing that comes to mind is killing elites in Halo before the grunts to make the grunts run away, something I had to be told about to figure out. I'm sure there are better examples than that. I mean almost everything in Dwarf Fortress counts, so there you go).

  18. Posted

    Thanks for reading my reader mail on the podcast, guys. In retrospect, I probably should have reproduced more of Bissell's argument, but you all reconstructed the lion's share of it on your own. Basically, Bissell's beef is that this cultural aversion to spoilers prevents good gaming criticism from happening, at least without copious hand-wringing and fan outcry. He would rather gamers police their own content pending sometime in the future when it becomes recognized that plot twists are only the smallest part of a game's appeal.

    Myself, I avoid spoilers for media I plan to consume, but always keeping in mind that, if knowing the plot ruins a game or movie to the point where I won't bother watching it, I'm probably better off knowing and not bothering.

    I think this is a really interesting argument, mostly because I literally could not care at all about spoilers. They mean almost nothing to me, so I'm pretty constantly surprised by the amount of carping that goes on around them. I can think of probably 3 cases where knowing a spoiler would have hurt my enjoyment of something, which is probably an indictment of those things.

  21. Posted

    The best crackpot theory is that Varys is a merling.

    Real spoilers on crazy theories here (don't read if you haven't read all the books):

    As for the Jojen in the paste thing, I really don't see it. Why wouldn't it just be the red stuff already mentioned in the weirwoods? And would Meera really let her brother be turned into paste so Bran can get magic powers? I kind of doubt it.

  23. Posted

    Could you explain how to derive entertainment from Gravity's Rainbow? It's very irritating having that thing on my shelves mocking me for hating it.

    I had to try a couple times. Then after reading it all the way through once, I went online and read a bunch of stuff about it. I'm not ashamed to say that I missed/didn't understand a solid quarter of the novel. Comparing what you figured out with what is actually going on is a big part of the fun. I don't love everything about GR, in fact there's some parts I'm not a huge fan of, but as a whole it's well worth the read, I think.

    But this is sort of the post-modern conundrum, right? Is it worth spending all the time to understand these puzzle tomes? Is it even fun or worthwhile to do so? (Has anyone actually read Infinite Jest?)

    For whatever it's worth, I think it is.

  24. Posted

    Too late

    Have you read some of his other stuff? There really is a stark difference, I think, between Crying and something like Gravity's Rainbow or Mason and Dixon (both of which are supremely entertaining, in my opinion).

    Also, I should state that I love Crying of Lot 49 and I think Pynchon is kind of off his rocker to call it bad in any way. It inspired my XBox Live handle! I think if Pynchon knew that he would immediately self-immolate from despair.