Sir, while you are locked up and have nothing to do, is there a possibility, even the remotest, the tiniest, the most hypothetical one, that you may dedicate a small fraction of your newly-found free time to stringing some words into sentences? https://t.co/zq0DCM58BV
— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) March 18, 2020
(Preferably, not resulting in a novelization of Season 8)
— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) March 18, 2020
it's a testament to how quickly the cultural relevance of game of thrones fell off a cliff that absolutely no one's gone viral for telling GRRM to stay inside and finish the damn books
— local jack please ban the nazis person (@pleizar) March 15, 2020
The 8th season was so insultingly bad that people about to be locked in their houses for weeks on end and NO ONE is going to re watch Game Of Thrones
— Hank Lockwood (@hen_ease) March 15, 2020
The Dangerman
I went on a snark hunt once.
Hold on. That was snipe. My bad.
Carry on.
NotMax
@The Dangerman
They always hide behind the left-handed smoke shifter.
;)
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Does your mom have someone who can bring her what she needs during the coronacrisis?
The Thin Black Duke
Bullshit.
NotMax
Musical interlude:
There’s always room for Zero.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
Since this is an OT post, I’d like to ask for some advice.
I ordered a cheap “factory refurbished” HP Chromebook from Woot, and they stated it came with a HP 90 day warranty.
One of the USB ports (the left 3.1 USB C) doesn’t work so I set out to return it to HP for repair, but the HP Support page said my unit was sold without a factory warranty.?
I’m dithering over whether or not to return it to Woot because shipping is about what it’d cost to buy a replacement USB daughterboard and fix it myself.
Also, the dead USB port in itself isn’t a deal-breaker.
If I returned it, I’d get a refund instead of a replacement unit because they’re out of that model.
Return, fix, or do nothing?
Talk about having a First World problem. ?
Mnemosyne
I still suspect that GRRM let them make “Game of Thrones” because he couldn’t figure out how to make Daenerys do that 180 that he wanted her to do and was hoping that another writer would figure it out for him. Turns out, it’s just not a plausible change for that character no matter who tries to write it. ?♀️
The Dangerman
This made me LOL for maybe the first time today:
Egg Salad, Tomato, and Sprouts
ETA: Oops, boned the link. Hope it’s correct now
ETA: Fuck it, going to bed. It’s the second one at that link.
Mnemosyne
@The Thin Black Duke:
They’ll re-watch it, but they’ll stop at season 7. ?
I saw a YA novel by a writer who wrote it to try and fix all of the problems she saw with “The Phantom Menace,” and came up with her own sci-fi world based on Moroccan culture, to boot (her parents immigrated here from Morocco). I think it’s called “Mirage.”
NotMax
@Steeplejack
If it comes to that, yes. As it stands now she’s well stocked. Only urgency on the horizon of which I’m aware is she has an appointment to have stitches in one eye removed, however that is not until sometime late April.
Note to self: remind her of the shelf stable milk I had her put into the back of a cabinet when I was there last.
NotMax
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
Return it.
The Thin Black Duke
@Mnemosyne: I respectfully disagree. Re-watching the earlier episodes, the subtle foreshadowing of Daenerys descent into madness was always there. I think some viewers missed the clues because back then she slaughtered the people who ‘deserved’ it. But Daenerys was always a sociopath.
The Thin Black Duke
@Mnemosyne: I’ll plead “Guilty” to enjoying season 8 of GOT. However, I will also admit that the truncated season didn’t help, unfortunately. Even two additional episodes would have helped enormously.
Curtis
@The Thin Black Duke: Agreed, that turn by Daenerys was kinda obvious.
Steeplejack
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman):
If you like the Chromebook otherwise, and you’re confident that you can fix it yourself at some convenient point in the future, keep it.
The spec sheet says that Chromebook has two USB-C ports. So you still have a working one?
I have to say I’m a little surprised, because I have had very good experience with Woot “refurbished” stuff. I will note that I prefer to see “factory refurbished.”
The Thin Black Duke
And because it’s stupid o’clock in the a.m., I’m off to bed. G’night, all.
Steeplejack
@The Thin Black Duke:
Nighty-night. ??
No One of Consequence
For what it is worth, if I may suggest for your consideration.
The Malazan Book of the Fallen
by Steven Erickson
*IFF* (extra F meaning if and only iff), one is keen for epic fantasy, and wants to cut straight to weapons-grade. If you find Robert Jordan too interested in the fashion choices of the characters in the current scene, if you like the story of Terry Goodkind but could do without the douhebro heavy-handed wrong politics, if you like Tolkien but find it a bit thin, if you like Stephen R. Donaldson but want something with more heft, if you’re looking to cut with the bullshit and go straight to roughly 3.5 million words of complex, pretzel-plot, cast-of-thousands-not-including-infantry, most-advanced-*AND*-ambitious-world-building ever attempted in *ANY* fiction I have yet read…
Then you may be ready for this series. I cannot recommend highly enough, but it will take effort. The struggle is rewarding multiple times within each book, and even more upon successive re-readings. This stuff is dense, and uncompromising. I try to peruse them annually, but it can be a big lift.
So rewarding, I am mentioning it here.
Bonus points: His co-creator of the world, derived from table-top gaming sessions, is too an author, writing stories in the same world, with some of the same plots. Ian Esslemont, I believe is his name. And his books are great too.
Such an enjoyable way to spend dozens and dozens of hours.
Peace,
– NOoC
James E Powell
The experience of @Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman): discussed above is relevant to my current situation and I wonder if anyone can provide guidance.
I want to buy a laptop for a friend who is pretty much housebound in the current crisis. I need to order it and have it shipped. I’m leery of anything that I can’t touch before buying and, in this case, I will be shipping it to another state.
So, what is the best place to order from. I’m thinking not just quality & price, but customer service, ease of returns, etc.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@Steeplejack:
Yes, the right side one (which is the one the charger plugs into) works fine.
HP’s support page said it was sold without a warranty, so it’s a genuine factory refurb, but my guess is that Woot bought a ton of them for resale and meant to give it their own 30 day warranty, but someone screwed up and listed it with a factory one.
I think what I’ll do is contact Woot and see if they’ll send me a prepaid shipping return label.
If they will, I’ll return it for a refund.
If not, I’ll spend the $20 or so for a replacement daughterboard.
joel hanes
@The Dangerman:
I went on a snark hunt once.
joel hanes
@Mnemosyne:
he couldn’t figure out how to make Daenerys do that 180 that he wanted her to do and was hoping that another writer would figure it out for him
Henry V parts 1 and 2 by William Shakespeare
joel hanes
@No One of Consequence:
If you like dense, challenging writing I can unreservedly recommend Dorothy Dunnett’s masterworks, her Lymond and Nicolo series. For my money, some of the best historical fiction ever written.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@James E Powell:
Amazon is easy for returns, as you can just drop it off at the nearest Kohl’s for free shipping & packing.
Just be sure that Amazon is the actual seller and not a 3rd party reseller using their marketplace.
Personally, I’d feel safe using Amazon, Best Buy, Staples, or Office Depot/OfficeMax.
The same caveat about 3rd party resellers apply for those online retailers as well.
Or Dell/Dell Outlet if you want direct from the manufacturer.
JoyceH
I’m in a lot of writing groups on Facebook and people keep posting memes about how it was while he was isolated due to plague that Shakespeare wrote King Lear and under similar circumstances Newton grokked to gravity and invented calculus. So I guess if I just write one of my regular books, that’s not good enough? Sometimes “inspiring” memes are just demotivating.
Cleardale
Here’s my problem with GOT Season 8, and 7 to an extent. We had good ideas what was coming, they weren’t really a surprise. The problem was the show didn’t earn them. It didn’t explain them, show them, and it was completely obvious where they took shortcuts just to get to the end. They had no real interest in telling the story, they were just hitting the points required by the plot.
They were given an outline of the end of the story, and that is all they showed.
Just my two cents.
Steeplejack
@James E Powell:
Pace Darrin, I have had good experience with Woot, if they have a specific model you’re interested in. For general browsing/ordering, I have used CDW.com, TigerDirect.com and Newegg.com extensively and feel comfortable recommending them, in roughly that order of preference.
JoyceH
@joel hanes: I’ve adored the Lymond books since my teenage years (when they were still being written and you had to wait something like four years between books!) Never really got into Nicolo; should I try again?
hervevillechaizelounge
@James E Powell:
I know Amazon has labor issues but I’ve purchased laptops there for years. My GPD pocket had charging issues and they replaced it after three weeks no questions asked.
On an unrelated note, are any political historians still awake? I just watched Where’s my Roy Cohn? and I need clarification re: Joseph McCarthy’s sexuality. The documentary mentions allegations of gayness (gaiety?) but google is failing me.
Was McCarthy closeted? I know he married late and his child was adopted but I don’t find either of those circumstances dispositive.
Steeplejack
@Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman):
That sounds like a good plan. I have seen Woot chats on certain items where someone’s comment says, “Hey, the description says x, but something else says y,” and Woot has had to change the description. Minor (but annoying) snafu.
Joey Maloney
@No One of Consequence:
I always enjoy a little infinite recursion of a morning.
joel hanes
@JoyceH:
I think the Nicolo books are better by a considerable margin, but it takes a while to come to any understanding of the character of Claes/Nicolo.
There’s a place in one of the middle volumes where I was sobbing for a while. Literally.
Kafka “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
And it was.
Joey Maloney
@No One of Consequence: If one wants that level of complexity and intricate worldbuilding but in a more hard-sf kind of setting, check out the Foreigner series by C. J. Cherryh. Now up to, I believe, 20 full-length novels with another one due out. She’s been turning them out not-quite-annually since the 1990s.
Anotherlurker
Day 6 of quarantine: Tonight’s conversation with my houseplants proceeded nicely. Tonight we covered British Archaeology. It was a lively discussion that included a fascinating digression, by a Venus Fly Trap, on the importance of stratigraphy in properly dating a site.
All came crashing down, however, when my Aloe Vera, out of nowhere, flatly stated that “Titus Andronicus” was the template for all 3 Stooges films.
Interesting times.
prostratedragon
@Anotherlurker: You know, just a moment’s reflection, but the Venus flytrap might be right. Have to think about it some more …
Anotherlurker
@prostratedragon: Ponder this deeply, my friend.
Tony Jay
@No One of Consequence:
I discovered the series with ‘Chain of Dogs’ and after that utter delight left me curled up in a corner of my attic staring blankly into the uncaring shadows for three weeks, they became my eagerly awaited Christmas Book for the next decade.
Can not recommend enough. Great choice.
OT – Unrelated piece of good news. Two weeks ago we carried out a very minor repair on our boiler’s hot-water diaphragm (cost £3) but after we’d finished the boiler utterly refused to ignite. Being stubborn and bloody minded, and since we still had the electric shower and boiling pans for washing-up isn’t exactly a back-breaking chore, we put off forking out huge sums to get an engineer to even deign to look at it and kind off fiddled around with the pressure, emptying it, refilling it, sacrificing small woodland creatures to it. Nothing doing, kept on going into fault.
So, of course, I gave in and started filling out the ‘Nature of the Problem’ box on an appointment request for a local boiler engineer, but I wanted to check exactly which fault lights were flashing in what order. Opened up the boiler, turned it on, noted the fault lights, turned it to Reset for the 10, 000th time, watched slack-jawed as the ignition kicked in and the whole boiler kicked into life.
Small things, I know, but combined with the MOT and repairs on our car coming to £81 rather than the “Here’s the bill, the zeroes carry on around the back” figure we were both expecting, well, it’s not all shit all of the time is what I’m saying.
Which as a tagline for the Malazan Books is kind of unforgivably naive. Rhulad Sengar would probably not agree.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@joel hanes: @No One of Consequence:
Can’t upvote this hard enough. The Lymond Chronicles are the best historical fiction ever created – thrilling, intricate, witty, tragic, romantic, swashbuckling, etc., etc., and amazingly well-researched, with the fiction fitted remarkably, seamlessly into the history. I’ve re-read them several times and still find new pleasures each time.
@JoyceH: I got stuck in the middle of book 3 of Niccolo and can’t get any further. All of the characters, including our hero, are so unappealing I just don’t give a damn what happens to them next. I know other Dunnett fans in the same position – loved Lymond, indifferent to Niccolo.
Mnemosyne
@The Thin Black Duke:
I’m more in line with Cleardale at #26 — that may be where they always meant to take the character, but they took so many shortcuts on the way that it didn’t make any sense unless you accepted the premise that OF COURSE chicks are gonna go mad with power once they get it. They took the lazy route and leaned on stereotypes rather than finding the reasons why that specific character would act that way in that specific situation.
The laziness was what pissed me off.
Tony Jay
@joel hanes:
Again, 100% agree, and yes, give the Niccolo books another try, they really are just as good.
SectionH
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: You’re posting! Well I was worried about you – how are you doing?
So, what’s the first book?
Mary G
I also loved the Dorothy Dunnett novels, Nicolo, Lymond, and the mystery series with Johnson the painter spy. I spent the better part of my twenties hauling them home from the library.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@SectionH: Thanks so much! I was worried about me, too, but I’m feeling much better today and the fever is gone. (My son is another story but let’s leave it that way.)
The first Lymond book is The Game of Kings. (Get it from somewhere other than Amazon, of course.) It’s recently been reprinted and there’s an e-book edition. There is also a newish audiobook, which I haven’t heard, but which has got to be better than the ancient, pretty terrible original.
And per the author, it’s pronounced “LIE-mund.” The old audiobooks even got that wrong.
JoyceH
I read an article some time ago about the Lymond books and the article writer pointed out something that I’d never realized but explains a lot about how the books and the character of Lymond are so intriguing. Dunnett wrote in third person omniscient POV so she could present the current scene from the POV of any of the different characters. This is how Will or Richard or Kate experienced this event. But what she never did (except very briefly several times in the later books) was to give us Lymond’s POV. So we experience Lymond through the observations and feelings of the other characters- and they are BAFFLED!
Robert Sneddon
@Mnemosyne: Danaerys had a problem. She slaughtered everyone in a twenty metre radius, the problem went away.
Danaerys had another problem, she had a couple of dragons and she slaughtered everyone for a hundred metre radius and the problem went away. Later on she acquired an army and a navy and she still had the dragons and more problems came along. It’s a bit late for her to learn diplomacy and compromise and dispute resolution when she’s got a tested working solution to problems at her fingertips. And dragons.
Book recommendations — if you ever wondered what the mob extras behind the stars in stories like Game of Thrones have to go through you might like the Commonweal stories by Graydon Saunders. The March North is the first in the series, available as ebooks from the Usual Suspects.
NotMax
@James E Powell
Based on your parameters,
Amazon
If you’re a member, Costco Online (costco.com)
Newegg (newegg.com)
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
I thought it was more that her entire family was prone to madness and she ultimately was a victim of her family destiny. This was a different kind of laziness, but I don’t think it was about stereotypes of women in power. This view also clearly dismisses other women in the series who wielded power well, and also ignores the men who were venal, cruel and incompetent.
ETA. Also agree with Comment 26 that the plotting in the last episodes was clumsy and the fates of characters was unearned.
Tony Jay
@JoyceH:
One of the joys of the Lymond Chronicles is how deftly Dunnett manages to humanise a character who, quite frankly, spends a lot of his time being an arrogant, dismissive, viciously superior know-it-all and borderline Marty Stu, and she does it through the eyes of the rest of the cast. Even when they’re homicidally angry with Lymond for his latest outrage they simply can’t quit trying to help him, because for every withering put-down or cold rejection of sympathy there’s a moment when the ‘real’ Francis Crawford peeks through the carapace of Lymond and they fall in love with the difficult bastard all over again.
Why no one has adapted those books into a monstrously popular TV series yet I simply can’t fathom. I mean, Lymond aside, which actor wouldn’t jump at the chance to play Phillipa, Sybilla, Jerott, Archie Abernathy or, big gulp, Graham Reid Mallet?
Anne Laurie
Not an expert on the man, but two obvious factors:
He was a serious alcoholic (that’s what killed him), and alcohol abuse leads to sexual disfunction.
Apart from that, a *lot* of Irish-American men of his generation (and earlier, and later) were effectively what are now known as aces (asexuals). Conventional wisdom among anthropologists used to be that raising Irish men, in particular, to be terrified of any sexual/romantic contact was a folk method of birth control. (Or maybe we’ve just selected for aces, notthattheresanythingwrongwiththat.) McCarthy may just not have had a whole lot of interest in using his generative parts, as the priest who taught sex ed in our all-girl’s high school used to call them.
Possibly relevant joke:
What’s the difference between a gay bar and an Irish pub?
Gays go to the bar to get drunk; drunks go to the pub to get gay.
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@Joey Maloney: Hah!
Edmund Dantes
@No One of Consequence: yes. One of my all time favorites.
Erikson can rip your heart out.
One of the overarching theme of the series is also very interesting. Compassion and what that means to have it, and what happens when we lose it.
also, the foreshadowing and setups in the book are so well done. He trained originally as a short story writer so there is rarely a waste of a word.
The toughest part of the books is most of it is “in media res”. You have to be an extremely active reader. These aren’t pick up and read for 30 minutes then come back to it months later books (not to mention in many parts it’ll be hard to put them down). You need to pay attention to character descriptions. You are also often left to come up with your own idea as to what happens.
He also spends a lot of time deconstructing tropes of the fantasy genre.
In general he is a fascinating person. And if you are struggling, the Malazan re-read of the Fallen over at Tor Books website is really helpful. Also Erikson engaged a lot with the readers in the comments sections of those posts and not just the Q&A posts.
Though I don’t always agree with the whole reading the ICE books where they choose to. Sometimes it’s helpful other times it can spoil things even though technically the two authors prefer you read them chronologically.
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@No One of Consequence: Been reading fantasy and sci fi as my primary genres to enjoy since first encountering Tolkien and Asimov, et al, as a young lad back in the 60s. I’m about halfway through Erickson’s first 10 book Malazan series (just started Bonehunters) and I agree with your take so far on all accounts (as does my F & SF fan son, who is one book behind me).
Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time had “greatest ever” potential, but not only did he go off the rails badly after about book 5, then sadly never completed the series (Sanderson’s wrap-up was jarring in its inevitable, I suppose, difference in style) but Jordan’s female characters — though imbued with great power — were just too often badly-written in their relationships with each other (as if they were the cattiest of stereotypical Jr. HS girls).
If — looks like a pretty big “if” — GRRM can actually finish his Ice and Fire series as strongly as he’s written the first five completed books, then for me it will be the “greatest ever”.
HBO’s Game of Thrones final season sucked not just because of Danny’s stupid ending, but much more from the overarching existential threat of the Others (“White Walkers” on the show) to the entire world turning out to be so easily and ridiculously dealt with in one fell swoop. That overarching existential threat (analogous to AGW in the real world) in comparison with the petty political squabbles is the main theme of the book series, and the terrible HBO showrunners Weiss and Benioff turned that on its head because (as I understand they admitted themselves) they had no idea what they were doing.
Edmund Dantes
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot: Song of Ice and Fire was definitely into Jordan territory already.
The first two books are great and amazing. Third starts to show he didn’t know how to end his original trilogy, and the 4th and 5th started to become an exercise in what other POV’s can I go to to avoid dealing with having lost the plot and deciding to skip my originally planned 5 year narrative time skip.
Morzer
@Edmund Dantes: I personally feel that the Dunc and Egg books are much better written and more enjoyable than the rather limited potboilers that shamble along as the Game of Thrones series. It probably helps that there is actually a plot and some credible characterization in there.
RobertB
@Mnemosyne: Count me in on that too. Game of Thrones seriously got into tell vs. show starting in Season 7.
What I read at the time was that HBO was fully on board with 10×10 episodes of GoT, but Benioff and Weiss were bored with it, and wanted to wrap it up. So much for their reputation.
RobertB
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot: If we’re talking greatest series EVAR, then N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy is going to be a pretty high bar for GRRM to clear. She won back to back to back Hugos, and IMO they were well deserved.
Anya
The entitlement of that tweeter is astounding. Do they think GRRM owes them a living? Get over yourself.
Also, how do they know people are not rewatching? I see people still making Youtube reaction videos about new things they’ve discovered or rearguing a point. Just check how many people watch those videos.
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@Edmund Dantes: “Definitely into Jordan territory already”? Sure, I suppose so, somewhat anyway. I’m just not down on books 4 & 5 as I know many are. I enjoyed them just as much as the first 3, while recognizing that expanding the plotlines in so many directions and POVs was likely a bridge (or two or ten) too far to be able to satisfactorily finish in just two or even three more books.
I appreciate GRRM’s effort in attempting such a grand and sweeping story (or really, set of interrelated stories with the overarching existential threat of the Others looming above it all). I found all of them interesting and well-written (not at all “limited potboilers” lacking “credible characterization” as Morzer found, but that’s just, like my opinion, man) but he’ll need to truncate a lot of that since he can’t possibly get to anything like Malazan-length which would be necessary to do them all justice.
I think that’s what has him stuck — how do you do that without just throwing tons of things overboard nonsensically like HBO’s Game of Thrones did? Maybe he’ll surprise us all, but I’m not betting on it.
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@RobertB: Jemisin’s Broken Earth series is quite good, really one of the best I’ve read of many over the past 50+ years immersed in the fantasy and sci fi genres. I just like A Song of Ice and Fire better, even uncompleted. If GRRM can complete the series it will, to me, set the bar of best ever.
piratedan
@Spinoza Is My Co-pilot:
I has a sad, nary a mention of Glen Cook’s The Black Company series which more or less brought the entire genre into being….
joel hanes
@Morzer:
I personally feel that the Dunc and Egg books are much better written
Seconded.
Jimmm
I delurk in order to amplify your comment… The Black Company is excellent, and would make a worthy addition to any quarantine reading list.
Jacel
One sign of how sharply the value of Game Of Thrones branding has fallen…
A few weeks ago Trader Joe’s was selling bottles of GOT branded Johnny Walker
whisky for less than $10 each.
Feathers
GRRM has said that a big part of his problem now is that he killed off a character he needs to have in order to finish the story. I can certainly see that. While watching the final season, I kept thinking that, I get that they wanted to isolate Danny to increase the pressure and madness, but it also means that they have no one to interact with her, so we don’t know what’s going on with her. They also didn’t have other characters to provide story beats in her story to move her arc forward.
The why is obvious. How are there no Targaryen supporters to appear when Dany returns? It’s only been twenty years. You would have people who lost everything when the Mad King fell and can only gain by declaring loyalty to his daughter. You have the children of people who had titles stripped and want to regain them. What happened to her mother’s ladies maids? The son of the cook? It was weird that Dany had no one from Westeros hanging on in Pentos. Authoritarian follower is a personality type. There should have been a whole set of characters introduced in late season 6 or early 7, but the desire to wrap the show up meant it didn’t happen.
At least now there will be a strong counter case for not keeping the original showrunners on when they get bored of a show.
tam1MI
As I understand it, where Martin left off in the books, Tyrion hasn’t even met Dany yet. I maintain that, if he wants to salvage the series, he should just have her turn down his offer because”my destiny is here in Essos”, loan him a dragon, and devote the space he would have used for his uber-misogynisyic “Bitches be cray, yo” plot to actually developing the character of the dude who actually ends up on the throne of Westeros. You know, um, what’s his name….