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RichardAbbott
About
- Username
- RichardAbbott
- Joined
- Visits
- 6,445
- 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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Sometime I must read American Gods, but I haven't had that pleasure yet. What I thought was done well here was Casiopeia's constant, and IMHO credible, vacillation between two poles: a) the constraints of her upbringing, poised uncomfortably betwee…
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(Quote) I think you're right - Deepmind was built (I suspect) using a set of assumptions that the situation on the playing area (and implicitly the gameplay until "Now") was sufficient to construct a strategy for going on. There was no fac…
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(Quote) I suppose that's to avoid the need to build some kind of parsing engine to infer what somebody else is offering as a deal? But you'd have thought that as a minimum they could have had a selection from a list of options - "make alliance&…
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(Quote) Sounds grim, glad it's behind you now
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I'm about 2/3 through, really enjoying it but juggling with all the tasks needed in the week running up to our first opening after lockdown (yay)
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The Mule would be good, I think, and probably easier to portray now, nearly 70 years after the original writing, with all of the real life and fiction dealing with mutants that has gone on since then. I remember being utterly impressed by the Visi-S…
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> @clash_bowley said: > [I] was looking forward to the end where everyone dies messily, without compassion. Such a heartless book was not good for me, I must confess. Perhaps you could work it out in your next album... The Stone Sky Thrash?
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> @NeilNjae said: > Nothing to be a good sport about: it's not my book, and the discussions were all civil and fruitful. I think one thing is clear: the books work better when read at speed and you're caught up in the excitement of them. N…
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(Quite long, for which apologies) Personally, I'm not bothered about continuing. Like @Apocryphal , if the collective mood is to continue then I'll join out of solidarity. But as an individual read, it doesn't interest or excite me, and I wouldn'…
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> @NeilNjae said: > (Quote) > Are these stories the same, but ending at different places? Higher beings evolve, first to take care of us, then to transcend and move on to higher things. Which was also pretty much the plot line of _Her_…
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> @BarnerCobblewood said: > LeGuin clearly loved individual persons, and her best stories shine a light on them in a way that makes the reader love them too, but she seems quite cranky when presented with peoples, retreating into clichés. …
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Thanks @Apocryphal , there's an interesting compendium of bits and pieces here. I'm just going to pull out a couple of bits that intrigued me... no point others will have different choices. (Quote) This kind of supports my point challenging her &qu…
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@Apocryphal said: > If she’s not an observer, why is she in an observatory 🤨?! > @BarnerCobblewood said: > Janitor perhaps. PC found the observatory empty and decided to explore the contents, finding that they weren't of much immedi…
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I keep going back to the Pandora classic myth - which I am sure we are intended to by virtue of the name alone. It seems an odd allusion to me... an intrusion of a Mediterranean classical reference into a world with no other large-scale Old World my…
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> @NeilNjae said: > (Quote) > Another loose thread is that Alabaster never actually said what he found in the shaft at Corepoint. Something down there scared him, but we don't know what. Interesting points about the Rennanis attack, th…
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(Quote) Hmm yes but that's my point really. Rennanis is a very long way away from Castrima. Such a large army would take a very long time to get there. Are we to believe a) that Rennanis would leave itself so depleted of personnel during a Season? b…
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Yes, I've been meaning to say thanks for the mention, but it's another of those items which hadn't quite got to the top of the stack of things I'd like to do. Hence my reply here in the group. (I shall be mightily relieved when lockdown ends and the…
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Well, this was a flurry of activity. No end of super-powers suddenly emerging, with no apparent precursor other than the immediate need for a solution. Very ex machina, it seemed to me. And coincidentally, Essun and Nassun seem to have reached near-…
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(Quote) This is a theme which ULG loves to explore and does so in numerous ways in both EarthSea and The Dispossessed (and no doubt elsewhere). She always tries to balance the two themes that a) return is crucial but b) return is impossible. So for …
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I don't have anything to contribute here but am loving the debate :)
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(Quote) This is a very simplistic view of the novel. and of literature that extends deep into the past way beyond the development of the novel - I strongly suspect that ULG knew it was simplistic, and was making the statement for rhetorical purposes…
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I'm curious about the various transformations into stone (this may well be something we have not yet had explained, and if so I'm happy to wait and see). We have a number of different events through this book which may or may not be related to each …
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(Quote) That sounds really interesting. Are the changes in description voluntary ("I want to trade strength for charisma" or whatever) or the consequences of action and so not directly willed for (kind of like a character in a Star Wars ga…
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(Quote) Well, it seems to me that this is clearly the focus of the more polemic parts of their description. They segregate men and women, regard women and girl-children as property rather than persons, require women to be veiled when outside their o…
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I thought that "dualistic" typically meant that good and evil were essentially independent and opposed forces, whereas the classical Christian position, and the one adopted by JRRT for his universe (implicitly but not explicitly Christian)…
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(Quote) Most of the individual stories within ACH involve conflict, sometimes cultural (as in StoneTeller) sometimes rooted in personal choice. Even the Pandora episode I have just read (Gently to the Gentle Reader), which is scarcely even of flash …
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(Quote) I persist in thinking that she did a better job of communicating this in The Dispossessed :)
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A mere £4.99 on UK Amazon Kindle :)
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This may not be directly related to your question, but it was spurred on by your words so I'll post it anyway :) On one level the (human) people in ACH ought to have every opportunity to be individuals - they are not just given one name, but severa…
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Aha right got it thanks