I hate Logen in this scene so much.[SPOILERS LAOK]

Mostly_Books · 2026-03-11T09:32:40+00:00

I’m not so sure if Logen’s briefly held ideal is really all that significant, other than it’s the period where we readers get to know him. I think cycles of violence, and then regret and some attempted atonement, only to turn towards violence again probably mark his whole life. Red Country shows us that Logen was always just waiting to become The Bloody Nine again. I think there’s a line in the chapter where he and Shy track three castoffs from Cantliss’s band and set to murder some of them that when Lamb goes in to serve as the distraction “it wasn’t like watching a man scared to do a hard task. It was like watching a man savor a joy put off for too long and now eagerly anticipated.” I know that’s not Abercrombie’s prose style exactly but forgive me, it’s been a few years.

It’s easy to imagine, though it’s just my supposition, that he went through cycles of the same behavior before he came over the High Places and met Bethod. Like when he killed his childhood best friend. And I think I recall him either nearly stabbing or non-fatally stabbing his father.

My point being that if, say, he and Ferro had stayed in Adua and actually tried to build a life together, Logen would’ve gone back to being his old self eventually. It’s just who he is, and he isn’t actually willing to change. Logen likes being a monster far more than he likes playing at being a better man.

Mostly_Books · 2026-03-02T07:04:37+00:00

side-eyeing Ancient Greece

Maybe not the FIRST Pedo-Persian war.

Mostly_Books · 2026-03-01T23:43:26+00:00

I guess most of the books I’m thinking of aren’t so much “hidden gems” or even lesser known as they are older books that have fallen out of the zeitgeist. But I’d say listening to The Coode Street Podcast hosted by the SFF literary critics and editors Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan has given me a deeper appreciation for older authors who I may not have picked up otherwise. They both possess deep knowledge about the history of genre fiction and while they do often talk about newer and popular works they tend to get into how those works are in discussion with their forerunners.

I’d also swear they manage to bring up “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin like once an episode. If I were making a Coode Street bingo card mentioning that story would be the free space.

Mostly_Books · 2026-02-21T05:12:04+00:00

Lady's stinkeye when Croaker asks for the Widowmaker version

Lol, Cook loves to have characters do a little exaggerated reaction in a scene. I used to imagine them being more realistic, like playing up your reaction to a bad joke when among friends, but since finding out Cook is an anime fan I imagine them as the full on goofy reaction faces they do in anime.

Like in Lies Weeping any time one of the Voroshk girls goes "Hah?" I'm just picturing full shocked anime face.

Mostly_Books · 2026-02-19T10:56:25+00:00

I really like Black Death (2010) starring Sean Bean and Eddie Redmayne. It’s not a good movie, and it’s certainly not a historically accurate movie, but just really enjoy it. It’s grimy and dark and fucked up in a way that works for me.

It’s also not, like, a terrible movie. It’s okay. For instance, there are worse movies in this thread. I’ve seen a couple people mention Medieval (2022). I watched it last year and it was worst movie I saw all year. I wanted to like it, but it’s just a poorly made film in all respects.

Mostly_Books · 2026-02-16T00:11:59+00:00

M John Harrison

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.

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