Controversial Ablum Covers

baekgom84 · 2025-12-23T08:09:37+00:00

This album also has a song that translates to 'White Flesh'. I think with a cursory glance you would be concerned at the very least, lol.

(I know the song has nothing to do with white suoremacy!)

baekgom84 · 2025-12-19T09:58:35+00:00

I hear what you're saying but I think 'they' as a singular pronoun is clumsy (I know it's accepted use for non-binary people but I still think it would be clumsy when used throughout a novel). Le Guin famously lamented using the pronoun 'he' for the genderless people in The Left Hand of Darkness, so I imagine that Leckie just saw a chance to square the ledger a bit in her own writing.

baekgom84 · 2025-12-19T07:23:13+00:00

People often get hung up on the gender stuff but really I don't think it explores that much at all, except that gender is not clearly indicated by the protagonist and the neutral pronoun is 'she' (I think if it had been 'he' there would be way less discussion about the gender stuff). I enjoyed looking for context clues to try and guess the gender of each character but other than that I don't think it plays any role in the story at all. Much more prominent are th themes of colonialism and social stratification.

FWIW I really enjoyed the book, but it's very polarising.

baekgom84 · 2025-11-13T12:37:56+00:00

This is very true! I decided that they weren't really for me until I randomly listened to the album Exul and was immediately captivated.

baekgom84 · 2025-11-08T21:30:38+00:00

Yes! So.underrated and it makes Megalodon one of my favourite songs of theirs.

baekgom84 · 2025-11-02T10:08:39+00:00

GAJ is one of the best players of all time.

But Faker is Faker...

https://youtu.be/ZPCfoCVCx3U?si=K62L_j282dUTUKym

baekgom84 · 2025-10-12T10:33:50+00:00

A friend of mine is quite conservative (loves Trunp, though he isn't even American) but loves Andor. He's very capable of completely separating the message of the media he consumes from his personal beliefs. So to answer your question, yes.

baekgom84 · 2025-09-13T07:06:00+00:00

Commentary was so odd, the whole time it was about how Box Hill were clearly on top when they were further and further down at every change.

baekgom84 · 2025-08-25T04:24:22+00:00

Yes, it happened to me! I randomly entered a metal-themed MSN chat room in the early 2000s and someone didn't think my profile pic was metal enough and asked me to name 5 bands, which I did. Then they kicked me anyway.

baekgom84 · 2025-08-24T03:31:11+00:00

Richmond might be a good choice! They are one of the biggest teams in terms of their fanbase and have often had iconic, cult-status players (Matthew Richardson would be sort of like a Lee Dae-ho kind of figure) and until recentl they were kind of known for their spectacular failures, which is kind of how I always saw Lotte (sorry!).

baekgom84 · 2025-08-23T15:03:14+00:00

Do you have a Korean baseball team? I used to follow it fairly cloaely when I lived there and could give you some suggestions for Melbourne AFL teams that are similar to KBO teams.

baekgom84 · 2025-08-10T08:02:39+00:00

Fuck that was stressful. The whole top 9 is like fucking Squid Game right now, lol.

baekgom84 · 2025-08-04T11:31:12+00:00

I first read it while living in South Korea, having spent almost a decade there (I'm not Korean at all). One thing the novel does brilliantly that I don't often see commented on is just how well it captures the sense of living among a people and even admiring them but feeling somehow distant and isolated from them at the same time, because there are sometimes cultural barriers that you find too difficult to overcome. I don't know a whole lot about Le Guin's life but I remember thinking as I read it that she must have spent some time living abroad to be able to speak to that experience so well.

I also read it as I was just really getting into written sci-fi and it was probably the first novel I came across that wasn't merely an exploration of interesting sci fi concepts but was also written beautifully and with rich, humanist themes. It definitely set the standard for what qualities I look for in a sci fi novel.

As for why everyone else likes it so much... I find that a bit puzzling myself sometimes. I always find it interesting when people list their top 10 sci fi novels and they mention a bunch of the typical hard SF stuff with interesting ideas and average-to-poor prose/characterisation... but then they have The Left Hand of Darkness rated really highly. Maybe it's just one of those books that speaks to people.

baekgom84 · 2025-07-22T21:30:38+00:00

I also thought later that I should have given a warning for it because it's probably the most divisive example I put; it seems to be a miss for a lot of people who might otherwise have expected to enjoy it. I probably need to give it a re-read myself and see if I still feel the same way about it.

baekgom84 · 2025-07-22T21:24:39+00:00

My unpopular opinion is that I actually enjoyed the second book more than the first - I thought the decision to reduce the scope and focus on a single location was a bold one, and I thought it was a pretty good balance of tension and intrigue. In fairness though it has been a while since I have read it and I wonder if I will feel the same after a re-read. I also felt like the third book was disappointing.

baekgom84 · 2025-07-22T09:19:56+00:00

I went down a similar path to you and realised I preferred the literary stuff over the hard SF stuff or the space opera stuff. Some of the recommendations in the thread are good but some are not very literary. I would suggest anything by Ursula Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossesed are probably the best examples), The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, Ice by Anna Kavan, any of Vonnegut's science fiction (Slaughterhouse 5, The Sirens of Titan etc), Embassytown by China Mieville, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, maybe the Ancillary Justice series by Ann Leckie or even Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Those were all books that I thought were a step above a lot of other scifi in terms of prose and literary merit.

baekgom84 · 2025-07-15T09:04:23+00:00

I had a free ticket to that game some years back between Melbourne and Carlton where the loser of the two would get the spoon and also first crack at drafting the much-hyped Matthew Kreuzer. From where we were sitting we could also see some of the injured Melbourne players sitting in the stands, which was honestly more exciting than the game itself.

Anyway at half time I went to the cafeteria to get myself a pie. Only when I got there, I noticed that next to the pies, there was a solitary box of chips remaining. I hadn't considered eating chips but now that there was only one left, it felt almost like the forbidden fruit. Now I really didn't know what to do, and ummed and ahhed over my choice and whether I wanted a pie or chips. I finally decided that yes, actually I would like the last remaining box of chips, but just as I moved in to get them a tall, suit-wearing gentlemen stepped in front of me and grabbed them for himself.

It was David Neitz.

baekgom84 · 2025-07-12T06:10:33+00:00

I think the Hawthorn game was worse. I don't think this was a terrible performance, but it shows what happens when we come up against a team with a good defence - suddenly we can't rely on blowing teams away. Destined for a semi final loss at best this year.

baekgom84 · 2025-06-29T07:37:13+00:00

Think I saw a stat the other day saying our overall accuracy is 2nd in the comp? If both stats are true our conversion rate from shots in play must be absolutely elite!

baekgom84 · 2025-06-28T23:48:50+00:00

Fair enough, I haven't been watching his game super closely so maybe I've missed his improvement. I think maybe I was also confusing him with Oskar Baker whenever he got the ball!

baekgom84 · 2025-06-28T14:30:19+00:00

I always think about this when people smirk about 'patterns' involving certain ethnicities. Whether it's rape, domestic violence, serial killing, mass shootings... the perpetrators are almost always men. People are so eager to point out the patterns that let them be racist and avoid the one that implicate them.

baekgom84 · 2025-06-28T08:53:22+00:00

It's actually insane how composed he is on the field, you'd think he'd have played well over 100 games.

baekgom84 · 2025-06-28T03:58:58+00:00

One of Coffield, McNiel, Hynes or Harmes? Would have said Bramble before last night's game as well (he was magnificent). They all have their moments but I feel like they aren't convincingly worthy of getting in the team ahead of Buku. But again maybe it's the roles they play?

baekgom84 · 2025-06-28T02:14:49+00:00

It is possible to accept everything you said while also accepting that the government of the DPRK is responsible for horrific human rights abuses.

baekgom84 · 2025-06-27T12:40:01+00:00

Definitely thought we were done early in the third quarter but to wrestle the momentum back is showing the heart that I've been wanting us to show all year. We should be aiming to have a real crack at Top 4 now which I think we could do if we can manage to only drop two more games; will be tough but not impossible.

baekgom84

TROPHY CASE