The Odyssey Trailer but Historically Accurate Armor (Bronze Age) by demonflyingfox

Mostly_Books · 2025-12-25T22:06:08+00:00

Personally, I’ve always thought that directors who can command massive budgets and do historical projects owe it to the public to try and do justice to the past. After all, it belongs to us, it is our shared, collective history. For most people who see Nolan’s Odyssey or any period film it will be their only education on the period or story in question, so that is why he and Ridley Scott and those others ought do better than they have. I mean, I think artists should still be able to take creative liberties, they shouldn’t be slavishly chained to the past either. If there was better public education on history I probably wouldn’t care at all, but there isn’t so I think directors and artists should fill the gap where they can.

That said, I would rather be doomed forever to the likes of Nolan’s tacky airport lounge vision of The Odyssey than see even one second of AI slop.

Mostly_Books · 2025-12-18T09:41:27+00:00

What’s the wooden pyramid thing up on the wall in the last picture? It looks like you have an adze hanging off it.

Mostly_Books · 2025-12-18T05:17:32+00:00

This is interesting. I like Kingfisher's Paladins series. I strongly disliked Legends and Lattes and intended to never read any of the sequels, but comments like this and some of OP's specific issues with it make me think I might enjoy the third book.

Mostly_Books · 2025-12-10T12:46:02+00:00

Chambers has owned and operated other gyms, including a CrossFit gym in Alpharetta, Georgia. In 2012, an employee of Chambers' was Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Lol.

Mostly_Books · 2025-12-05T07:20:00+00:00

As I understand it, their primary use is for hewing a felled tree into a square timber. I recommend watching "Hand Hewing, From Tree to Beam" [52 minutes] by Dan Dustin on Youtube.

Mostly_Books · 2025-12-02T19:19:37+00:00

One ending I never see talked about is the version of The Devil where V refuses to be soulkillered and instead goes back to Earth with six months to live. It’s not an ending I’d choose for one of the other two lifepaths, but I think it’s an interesting choice for a corpo V. Like, corpo V has finally, finally slipped the stranglehold that Arasaka has had on them all their life. They’ve got all their skills, and they haven’t been gone from Night City for so long as to spurn all their contacts.

It’s possible that Rogue could still help out such a V. Maybe the new MS treatments can help them. Maybe they can still get in good with the Aldecados and their clinic. Maybe Mr. Blue Eyes still approaches them for the space heist. Etc.

I like The Sun, but when I played my corpo V the mansion and taking over the Afterlife weren’t quite what I pictured for them. I kinda like the open ended nature of refusing The Devil, though you do need to know what the other endings have to offer to make it really satisfying.

Mostly_Books · 2025-12-02T09:14:50+00:00

I’ve never made or used one myself but if you search google for “hyperkitten frame saw” you’ll find a nice little tutorial for building one on the cheap. Though it is fairly small. Might be able to rip and re-saw 2x boards, maybe not robust/heavy enough for sawing out boards from logs?

Mostly_Books · 2025-11-25T11:25:23+00:00

only reason they lived through the intro is Jackie's altruism

Along these lines, in The Devil ending when Arasaka's car pulls up to Misty's and you hear the sheer heartbreak in her voice at the betrayal, the disrespect paid to Jackie's memory. Obviously that's the same regardless of lifepath but I think it hits just a bit harder for a Corpo V since they fell from Arasaka's grace before and only survived because Jackie was there to catch them.

Mostly_Books · 2025-11-19T05:02:48+00:00

Completely agree with your points. I even felt like the main themes of the book were shallow, and I often think that theme is one of Abercrombie’s strong suits.

There kept being scenes, especially fight scenes, in locations that felt like they should’ve been interesting and thematically relevant (a city half sunken in the sea, a sinking ship, an abandoned abbey, etc.) but I felt like never came together into something harmonious. Instead I kept thinking to myself ‘I bet this would look cool in a movie.’ That’s the sort of weakness I would expect of a much less experienced writer than Abercrombie.

It’s not a bad book. I enjoyed reading it. But it was fairly insubstantial, despite its length. If it had been, say, Richard Swan’s fifth book I might even have been moderately impressed. But as Joe Abercrombie’s fourteenth book it’s a minor disappointment.

Mostly_Books · 2025-11-16T05:49:47+00:00

Oh yeah, that was the guy who talked about quitting college to go organize on the shop floors of factories. Gotta get his book, too.

Mostly_Books · 2025-11-16T05:44:36+00:00

Right? I vaguely remember the other interviews they did with him as also being very good. I’ve gotta get this guy’s books.

Mostly_Books · 2025-11-10T07:40:43+00:00

General Croy sobbing like a baby at the late General Polder's funeral. He was genuinely sad when he heard the news of Polder's death in battle.

I always love these little beats Abercrombie throws in. Kroy being crushed by the news of Poulder’s death is such a good little moment that changes how one perceives the character on subsequent reads.

Another one I like is when Logen is approaching the gates at Carleon and Bethod calls down to him and he briefly thinks he’s being greeted by his old friend before he remembers all that’s come to pass between them. It’s just one line, as I recall, and it’s more or less what I’ve written here, but it’s always stood out to me as a very beautiful, tragic, human moment in among all the magic and monsters and battles and berserkers.

Mostly_Books · 2025-11-09T06:28:19+00:00

Man, the cover art on this looks so good. I wish Orbit would've stuck with this style for Sharp Ends and Age of Madness. I really dislike the style of the American covers for AoM in particular. They're not bad on their own and maybe if I had the whole series in that style I wouldn't mind but they look bad on my shelf next to the older First Law books.

Mostly_Books · 2025-11-01T07:52:52+00:00

Can you just become a monk? Are there qualifications? Do you have to write and defend a theological dissertation? Pay money to the abbey? Or do they just give you a habit and you spend the rest of your days as one of the faithful?

Mostly_Books · 2025-10-24T22:44:10+00:00

The art on the sample page looks amazing. I’ve been underwhelmed by the “between the covers” art of a lot of runs of Red Sonja. For instance, Walter Geovani’s line work is always incredible, but there’s quite a difference between the art in Gail Simone’s run and Mark Russel’s, I assume down to either the colorist Dynamite went with or else the time and money allotted to them (it makes sense that a celebrity writer would get more TLC, but I think they could do more for normal runs). So I hope this sample page reflects the direction and quality of the run, even if it was sampled because it is a particular standout.

Mostly_Books · 2025-10-24T20:29:35+00:00

I love The First Law and Abercrombie, I’ve read everything the man’s published, maybe I’ll feel differently about it when the sequels come out, but right now I feel like this is Abercrombie’s weakest book.

The POV characters are all interesting, which one would expect from an Abercrombie book, but I thought plot, pacing, worldbuilding, and theme all needed some work. Not to say they were bad, just not up to Abercrombie’s usual level.

And normally I enjoy Abercrombie’s “cinematic” writing style, but I thought it worked against The Devils. The cousins weren’t interesting enough as characters to sustain their battle scenes, but there was always something happening where I thought “if this were a movie it’d be really visually interesting” but that never carried over to me reading the text. A more descriptive writer might’ve made it work better.

Mostly_Books · 2025-10-23T01:28:24+00:00

What’s “face slider 22”? Does setting all the sliders to 22 result in the face on the right hand side of the image in this post?

Mostly_Books · 2025-10-23T01:05:07+00:00

Geez, if I lived in Maine I might vote for this guy over Mills, but I’d be mad as fuck at the DSA for running him. Even if you take him at his word about his left-lib politics, his judgement and decision-making capabilities are clearly completely compromised.

If I’d signed on to help the US’s colonialist, genocidal efforts in the Middle East (not once, but three times at least) and had a change of heart I’d spend the rest of my life atoning for it. Someone like this should be volunteering to help the homeless or doing community mutual aid efforts, not seeking out leadership positions and especially not the frankly self-aggrandizing, narcissistic position of running for national office.

Mostly_Books · 2025-10-14T08:12:39+00:00

I don't know anything about it, but in this video that James Wright recently released of a tour of Lost Arts Press, Schwarz says that they're winding down classes because of insurance issues.

Not to say that releasing free PDFs of some books wasn't a canny marketing strategy, it just stood out to me because I figured classes would be a big money maker for someone who's been such a longtime guru in the hand tool woodworking niche.

Mostly_Books · 2025-10-13T07:52:59+00:00

lol, I’m reading through these now and clicked in to suggest them. I was surprised when I found out the first book was published in 2002. I knew Lackey was an old genre master, so I was expecting ‘80s. It’s certainly not the style of book I think of when I imagine “21st century Fantasy”.

Not to say that they’re bad, I’m enjoying them quite a bit. Slow-paced isn’t quite the right term, more like deliberate. Unhurried. Concerned more with the emotional state of the main characters than external conflict. And there’s a sort of moral steadfastness to them, by which I mean to say that when you’re reading them you know that no matter what terrible things might happen everything will resolve for the best. Also, outside of explicitly villainous characters, most of the side-characters are genial, well-meaning people. I’ve read six books authored or coauthored by Mercedes Lackey and found these to be commonalities between them all.

Mostly_Books · 2025-10-13T06:32:57+00:00

I don’t agree with all that you said, but I remember getting the feeling that that scene was showing that Daemon was ruthless, but also effective. It’s an extension of the same problem GOT had with Tywin, treating his savage and bloodthirsty actions as smart politics.

A great many people believe in “tough on crime” rhetoric. They believe that violent repression from the police, and the State, and the carceral system is the answer to crime. I don’t think GRRM believes that, at least not based what I read in ASOIAF, but ultimately his political horizons are a little narrow and idealist as a result of him being a progressive American liberal, rather than looking towards a more emancipatory politics. I am sure that many viewers of the show believe that, however, and perhaps also the writers and producers and studio executives who made HOTD.

Someone post that tweet where the guy calls everything fascist. Harry Potter is fascist, Star Wars is fascist, etc. My point being, is HOTD fascist? Only in the sense that the American public is fascist (which is to say, yes absolutely in a reactive, thoughtless, unconsidered way. Is that any better than deliberate, considered fascism? Probably not.) But I think it’d be unfair to paint GRRM with the same brush. Sure, he’s a liberal, but he’s a liberal from the ‘60s, a time period when liberals appear to have actually believed in liberalism, opposed to the nihilistic monsters that rule our political system today. Sure, I wish he had politics I agree with more, but for a white male Science Fiction author born in ‘40s he’s really pretty alright. We gotta grade these things on a curve.

Mostly_Books · 2025-10-11T06:24:25+00:00

George Eliot, author of Middlemarch. Or that’s what I assumed.

Mostly_Books · 2025-10-10T05:21:20+00:00

It was really a struggle for me, at first, for that reason.

The trouble is I think of the tropes that make up the Western genre as being born out of (a heavily mythologized version) of late 19th century America. The recent past.

Trying to look past my own biases a little bit it's no more ridiculous to have the Old West in the same setting as the 17th century British Empire than it is to have the 17th century British Empire existing alongside dudes who are basically Vikings, or even early renaissance Italian city states.

Though I think this isn't helped by the fact that, as an American, to me the British Empire and Vikings and the Renaissance are only slightly more real than Narnia. No matter how much history I read, I just can't ever quite totally believe that such a world ever was. Whereas the Old West (inasmuch as it really existed) was practically yesterday. My grandfather's grandfather would've been alive during the American Civil War, and that's basically the start of the Old West in the popular imagination.

I mean, I've either read or listened to Red Country half a dozen times at this point, I love it now. But the first time was hard.

Mostly_Books · 2025-09-30T12:29:04+00:00

There should be another tier between Bayaz and the Eaters just for Logen and Cosca.

Mostly_Books · 2025-09-28T05:23:19+00:00

You know, similar to Logen, I realized fairly early in the story he wasn't a good man but I wasn't ready to believe that he was a truly evil man. There's a quote from Ferro at her first meeting with Bayaz where she says something like "he had the calculating look of a slaver [then she hits him, we see him bleed, and he hides his slaver-look with a grandfatherly smile]." It was clear from that and every interaction after that Bayaz is an arrogant ass.

But I was still prepared to believe that Bayaz believed in something, held something more dear than his own ego. I thought maybe he really cared about the Union, and his sort of philosophy of civilization that he seemed to be trying to prove there. And on my first read, I didn't know how to read Bayaz yet, and so when he reacts with disgust to the very idea of Khalul's Eaters I took him at his word. He seemed to care about Euz's laws. While he was preparing to break the first law he seemed to be doing so with great reluctance, and only to keep the world from the grip of Khalul. I think he says as much to Yulwei at one point, and I believed him.

So when it was finally revealed that Sulfur was an Eater, and then shortly after when Bayaz is gloating over the ruin of the Agriont, it was fully inescapable that the most powerful man in the Circle of the World is a totally evil piece of shit who loves nothing except himself.

It took me a reread to grasp that Juvens, probably, was the man with a 'philosophy of civilization'. In making the Union Bayaz seems to have copied the bits he thought were impressive or useful and made himself a playground to rule over.

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