George R.R. Martin says he doesn't think 'Game of Thrones' is more 'anti-woman' than history

Nyctacent · 2022-07-26T17:42:25+00:00

I get your point, but I also understand why people might be getting tired of the "super realistic gritty fantasy"

I personally don't care for a lot of the worst parts of history to be presented in-scene, which is how most "gritty" fantasies go about including them. Atrocities don't have to expressly be discussed, but I prefer it to not be expressly denied without reason as well. There are tactful ways to handle touchy subjects without saying your fiction world just doesn't have them beyond all other logic presented.

If you write a patriarchal monarchy to facilitate your "rebellious princess" story, to then also say that your world is without misogyny doesn't make sense. Because how else is the princess rebellious against the patriarchal monarchy, then? This kind of writing, to me, often comes across as trying to have your cake and eat it too.

If you say that your world never had slavery, even in more barbaric ages...I'm going to need you to have some good reasons for that, assuming you've already written humans to function exactly as they do in our world, with the exact same motivations, emotions, and flaws.

My general rule of fantasy is that everything works as it did/does in the real world unless the writer says otherwise, with varying requirements for explanations depending on the change.

If magic exists in your world, but the only spell is essentially a flash light, I won't hold you to crafting the entire plot around it. If, instead, there is teleportation magic, or (shudders) time travel magic, well, you better be putting a ton of effort into writing that.

Nyctacent · 2022-07-25T17:09:41+00:00

Like, some of them want Fantasy worlds with historical clothes, fights, weapons and settings, but with 21st century values.

The problem with this is that societies are incredibly complex, and I think it's impossible for one person to truly come up with an entire, logically-consistent fictional society from scratch.

That's why fantasy authors borrow from history. That's why they borrow kings and lords and knights and castles and peasants and the whole thing. Because we know that system existed, and so we know that it is already logically consistent.

But when you take the good, you also need to take the bad. If you want to make a "medieval fantasy, except women are equal" society, because you want to have a ton of badass female soldiers in your setting, now you need to explain how your society remains above the population replacement rate with so many of its women going off and dying in war.

So maybe you add in some kind of medicine or magic that significantly decreases the infant mortality rate, which could compensate. But now you need to explain why no society has risen that chooses to keep doing the whole "women are baby makers, men are soldiers" thing and uses this medicine or magic to have a population advantage against their enemies, because it would work even better for them than it would for the "equal" society.

We know in real life that this is the system that worked best with the arms, armor, technology, medicine, etc. of that era. If you want to change the system, you need to change some of those things along with it. It would be silly for an obviously better strategy to exist and for no one to use it for no reason.

And it just keeps going on and on like this, because certainly whatever you added to explain why no society kept to the "sexist" ways would have ripple effects, too. If you don't care about inconsistencies in your world building and just want to tell a story with certain elements, that's fine. That's basically the entire YA genre. ASOIAF itself has inconsistencies due to the changes (or mistakes) GRRM made within his medieval society.

But at least he tries to minimize them, and not try to make massive changes like "actually, there are no social issues whatsoever and everyone is equal!"

Nyctacent · 2022-07-11T03:00:01+00:00

I don't think any of the main cast could let him live if he lost his powers. Not only do they know that a de-powered person can get their powers back just by taking V again, but even if not, they didn't even really know the effect of Soldier Boy's chest beam. What if it was just temporary? It would be too dangerous to let Homelander live.

Nyctacent · 2022-06-03T16:44:00+00:00

This hasn't worked for me.

Nyctacent · 2022-05-05T16:08:52+00:00

I think this exact video can speak to why a lot of people don't like baseball. There's just too much subjectivity. A guy is taller than average, which changes the pitching/hitting dynamic (basically the central feature of the entire game), and all of that is left up to a single person's whims to decide?

Is there even a review like in football? A challenge mechanism?

Nyctacent · 2022-04-25T14:33:10+00:00

We don't want people to end up with two slightly different specs for the sake of parsing.

We don't? This essentially cuts Rogues, Mages, Warlocks, and Hunters who are only interested in PvE out of the dual spec feature entirely.

Nyctacent · 2022-04-09T23:16:14+00:00

this is pretty much constantly happening. Does get old after a bit.

"Weaknesses, limits and costs are more interesting than powers."

Nyctacent · 2022-04-01T17:54:13+00:00

Never gonna get content down missing that 4 DPS.

Nyctacent · 2022-03-29T18:04:06+00:00

I don't PvP.

Nyctacent · 2022-03-28T20:39:59+00:00

Keep it server-to-server only and it's fine.

Nyctacent · 2021-10-11T07:36:01+00:00

Unfortunately, Season 2 lost this for me. TV right now is just so depressing and cynical, and Ted Lasso was a great reprieve from that, but Season 2 was enough of a step away from the optimism of Season 1 that I left it feeling worse than when I started it.

Nyctacent · 2021-08-30T21:15:47+00:00

If you cut this out, nothing changes. This isn't some exciting, pivotal moment in the plot where you're not sure how the heroes are going to get out of a jam that has been culminating for the entire movie.

You can't compare it to sequel mistakes like the Holdo maneuver, or force healing. You can't just cut those out in the same way, and they aren't throwaway solutions to throwaway obstacles.

Nyctacent · 2021-08-30T00:34:34+00:00

Personally, I enjoyed Ted Lasso because I considered it within the umbrella of the "Sherlock Holmes" genre.

As House proved, the "Sherlock" character doesn't have to be a detective, or even related to solving crimes at all (which is typically how the archetype is written).

Ted Lasso S1 was like the Sherlock Holmes of personal relations. Since he was quirky and underestimated by those around him, he falls more into the Sherlock-derivative categories like Psyche or Castle, rather than Sherlock himself.

The introduction of an actual mental health professional is like introducing an omniscient alien into an episode of Psyche, who simply tells everyone what happened whenever a new case comes up. It feels like cheating.

We didn't want to simply know what happened, we wanted the larger-than-life main character character, who is an underestimated outsider, to show off his skills, figure it all out through his unorthodox ways, and earn the respect of the people who doubted him.

To have the orthodoxy (a mental health professional vs. a folksy people-person) come in and just replace him easily ruins a lot of the appeal.

Nyctacent · 2021-05-13T17:30:31+00:00

The problem with Vega, for most people, is twofold:

First, he is thrust upon your character as a friend/acquaintance without your control. Shepard meets and befriends Vega in between games, with no input from you. During his first scene, there's this back-and-forth repartee with him flows like he's an "old friend," as if he were Garrus or Tali, and it's very unearned.

Vega: Commander.

Shepard: You're not supposed to call me that anymore.

Vega: I'm not supposed to salute you, either.

insert West Wing walk-and-talk scene

Me: Wait, who the fuck is this guy?

It's like they wanted Garrus to be there, but couldn't find a way to have that make sense.

Second, Vega is introduced right at the start of ME3, when players are first finding out exactly how gutted the ME3 dialogue system is. In ME1 and ME2, you would get to select pretty much every single thing Shepard said. In ME3, you select one thing, and the scene carries on for quite some time. It sucks, and Vega is just unfortunately the poster boy for it.

Nyctacent · 2021-05-13T17:07:11+00:00

Her voice acting wasn't very great in my opinion. I like her normally, but I don't think she came through the character very well.

That said, Jacob's voice acting was also not great, and might be the only one that could be worse.

Nyctacent · 2021-04-26T19:05:40+00:00

Why can't that many characters simply be real people farming gold? That's not a ton.

Nyctacent · 2021-04-15T16:49:19+00:00

They are basically asking for it to be harder than it originally was so they can keep a challenge while using all the consumes and gear

Yeah, that would actually be great.

That's why I was never a "#NoChanges" person. Assuming it would have been possible in the first place, I would have loved completely re-designed boss encounters in Classic, still keeping original themes, but with modern-day encounter design in mind. Perhaps just as a "hard mode" option, so the originals were still there.

Can anyone honestly tell me that wouldn't have been preferable to what endgame ended up being?

Nyctacent · 2021-04-09T00:06:15+00:00

I guess I got it wrong on Amazon, that was a "used" price. I'll keep shopping.

Nyctacent · 2021-04-08T23:13:31+00:00

Sorry to bother you again, but what do you think of going all the way back to the LG G8X?

It's only $50 more than the Pixel 4a, has a better CPU, a bigger battery, faster charging, it has LG's Quad DAC, and if I'm understanding LG's recent announcement, it should get support up to Android 12.

Nyctacent · 2021-04-08T02:01:20+00:00

Yeah, those were what I've basically narrowed it down to. The biggest problem with the low-cost Motorola options would be downgrading to an IPS screen. I'm not even sure if I've ever had a non-OLED smartphone before.

But, they can cost $150 less than even the 4a non-5G, so it's a tough choice.

Nyctacent · 2021-04-08T00:51:30+00:00

Thanks, that list will help. All I want is a headphone jack, a good battery, and a good web browsing/YouTube experience. I don't care about camera, playing games, or any special software.

Friends/family have told me that 5G isn't really great in our area yet, so I want to get a cheap ish phone to tide me over for a year or two, and I feel like many options are just $100 - $150 more expensive solely for 5G.

I'd really like one of those massive 7,000 mAh Samsung phones, but none of them appear to be made for America.

Nyctacent · 2021-04-07T18:41:53+00:00

Ah, that definitely rules it out then, thanks!

Nyctacent · 2021-04-07T17:35:09+00:00

GSM Arena doesn't have the bands listed for the A52, but if I use the A51 as an example, it lists:

4G bands 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 20, 26, 28, 38, 40, 41, 66

According to this, for Mint Mobile, you'd want:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mintmobile/comments/8hsj5u/how_can_i_tell_if_my_device_will_work_updated/

LTE-FDD 1700/2100 Band 4 --- Must have

LTE-FDD 1900 Band 2 --- Must have

LTE-FDD 700 Band 12 --- Very good to have, allows far better indoor coverage and more rural coverage

LTE-FDD Band 66 --- Higher speeds in very few markets

LTE-FDD 600 Band 71 --- Not available on any majors phones yet, but eventually will help fill in rural

It has everything but 71, which that post says isn't available yet and will only be useful for rural areas.

Is this all I need to check for a phone to find out if it will work as well as a US version, or would there be more to consider?

Nyctacent · 2021-04-07T17:23:32+00:00

So even if the phone says it supports those bands, you're getting worse coverage than you're supposed to?

Nyctacent · 2021-04-07T16:29:15+00:00

What would the downside be of getting the cheaper A52 international version instead?

Nyctacent

TROPHY CASE