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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,074
- Last Active
- Roles
- Member, Administrator, Moderator
- Games I like
- Sundry, mostly board
- Books I like
- Science fiction, fantasy, some historical fiction
Comments
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> @Ray_Otus said: > Yes, I recently saw an article that year old ravens test above dogs in intelligence or some such. Which explains why dogs are great and ravens are a pain in the ass. :) Sufficiently so that the UK relies on ravens to ke…
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(Quote) Your comment made me realise that "impenetrable" may have sounded as though I wasn't enjoying it. In fact I am - I was meaning impenetrable in the sense that a maze or riddle is, and hence invitational rather than off-putting. What…
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So far I have found the book fascinating but (perhaps) slightly impenetrable! (I won't try to make an argument that this is a kind of mimesis for the fascinating but impenetrable Archipelago, but on a better day I am sure that such an argument could…
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For fun, here is the relevant part of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf: (Quote) So he has "gem-studded". Other translators choose "golden", "costly" or similar so I suppose that the original word is suitably ambi…
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Sounds interesting
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I guess they're the equivalent of the half-elven, seeing as how orcs were made in imitation of elves. Maybe Aragorn's press releases for former followers of Saruman never included the tagline "he's just like an Uruk-hai... only better..."?
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I have a feeling that I looked into something similar a while back, maybe even the same one, and it wasn't available in the UK. But maybe times have changed?
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(Quote) No problem :)
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(Quote) According to Wiki, "Greek and Roman accounts exist of smoking hemp seeds, and a Spanish poem c. 1276 mentions the energetic effects of lavender smoke, but tobacco was completely unfamiliar to Europeans before the discovery of the New Wo…
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A strange story with tragic end. Maybe we should aim to include one of his stories in the collection this year?
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First, let me say how much I'm enjoying these notes of yours :) Secondly, about song... (Quote) It's a good point. I'm sure that, from the late perspective of LotR, his goblins would have sung a probably slightly distorted version of the Elvish pa…
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> @Apocryphal said: > David Day’s book Tolkien’s Heroes > covers the inspiration for various > people and races. If I remember, the > Rohirrim in particular are based on > the Anglo saxons. But Arthur was a > Briton, who …
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@NeilNjae this sounds really interesting... I have often meant to read Neuromancer but have never done so. And these latest two sound well worth reading
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> @Apocryphal said: > If you're in, please let me know - and also roll a D20 for initiative! We'll resolve the order from highest to lowest. Ties will be resolved in order of response. Here's a dice roller if you need one: "Alexa, rol…
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I've been meaning to read some Terry Pratchett for ages so I'd be up for this
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(Quote) Carrying on from my thoughts about @Apocryphal 's post, it's an interesting question whether Aragorn or Theoden is more like Arthur! In the early strands of the Arthurian material, Arthur left Britain in order to help the beleaguered Roman E…
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(Quote) I read back through Christopher Tolkien's comments about the textual history of this poem and that (as with so many of his father's projects) it wasn't clear why it was abandoned given that it had had positive feedback from a couple of trust…
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The Islanders bought on kindle... no going back now...
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> @clash_bowley said: > Richard? Where is this 'mild' geekiness you spoke of? ;) To misquote, "we have not yet begun to geek"!
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(Quote) On a small enough scale, almost everything's flat :o B)
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(Quote) You reckless person... you just know that @Apocryphal will change it now...
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(Quote) A few years back when I was heavily involved with ancient Hebrew and Egyptian poetry (like you do) I became quite fascinated by the various choices made in the translation of biblical poetry, especially versions which are aimed at more modes…
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There seems to have been a lot of thought about Fermat's principle over the years, along the lines of "does this mean that light is somehow sentient and aware" though a lot of it comes down to it seeming to be an inevitable consequence of …
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Following on from my post on Tolkien's Treasures here's the bit about the original version of The Hobbit which is relevant: (Quote) (The chapter on The Hobbit includes some splendid illustrations by JRRT for the book, only some of which I had seen …
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(Quote) Some great points, especially for the reminder that the code as written in the source bears little resemblance to the final sequence of instructions processed by the device. Making a (possibly strained) analogy with the film version, one of…
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My reading was more modest than yours this year - according to Goodreads I managed a total of 44 books and very nearly 13k pages (hence just under 300 pages per book). That is staggeringly consistent for me (only in 2016 did I break through 50), and…
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(Quote) That's an interesting analogy though I'm not totally convinced by it, mainly because computer code is what you "say" to the computer (in order to get it to do something), and the computer output (whether spoken or displayed) is wha…
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I just had a quick look on bookfinder.com and while The Islanders and The Dream Archipelago seem quite easy to come by at a sensible price, The Evidence is scarcer and more expensive.
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One of the delights of learning about literary devices is the cool names they all have :)
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(Quote) There's been lots of work studying how writers deploy literary devices, from the ancient world (eg Egyptian and Hebrew) through to more modern writers. Also some contrasting which ones work better in speech than in writing - typically the on…