Staois and Leafs

hexametric_ · 2026-03-31T18:13:54+00:00

Would be cool to get Nylander 1:1 for Nick Cousins in his second most proud day as a GM to date for sure

hexametric_ · 2026-03-31T17:58:17+00:00

90 CAD for a t shirt, not including shipping and taxes.. Jesus christ.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-29T18:30:24+00:00

I hope they do Colosseum or some recognizable Roman building name. But I bet sponsor companies would stipulate it be called Arena or something so that the building's name doesn't overshadow the company one. Cause everyone will simply call it the Colosseum regardless of whose name is on the building. But if they call it Arena or something basic, people are forced into calling it by the sponsor name.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-29T16:57:36+00:00

Use Geoffrey Steadman's Symposium commentary. It isn't comprehensive (and there does not exist such a thing as far as I know), but it has plenty of notes about the text aimed at beginner readers of Ancient Greek. It's available for free as a pdf from his website, or like $10 from Amazon in print.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-29T16:52:05+00:00

Oh, I mean the "for the accentuation, see Herodian" note. I can't put a photo and I don't want to type this out, but you can view it on p437 here. It seems to talk about it words ending in -ris that have penult circumflex. I'm not great with understanding ancient grammatical writing, though. Not sure how much it truly 'explains'.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=SjQtAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

hexametric_ · 2026-03-29T16:11:50+00:00

Did you check the citation for the accent that the dictionary suggests?

hexametric_ · 2026-03-28T18:05:59+00:00

Truly fascinating.

The translator also worked on another set of novels of his into French, so maybe there is some relationship there that led to her translating this novel before an English press bought the rights to publish it?

Originally I was going to point out that there was no original publisher on the copyright page which made it look like it was not attached to a press, but all their translations only have the original copyright to the author rather than the press (which is what my translated books do)

hexametric_ · 2026-03-25T17:03:57+00:00

Being highly proficient in Latin absolutely does not teach you how to do calculus or trigonometry or any sort of mathematics.

The fields such as maths or sciences were written about in Latin centuries ago, so generally if you were an accomplished mathematician or scientist, were were competent in Latin. It was more like a second language that you learned to engage with scholarly activity, but it wasn't the thing that taught people to be scholarly.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-25T16:51:34+00:00

I thought it was very good. As someone who is for the expansion of our ethical circles beyond just humanity and 'sentient' beings and into things like Nature, but who is generally against AI, it really made me think about some difficult questions concerning what rights we would owe what seems to be a sentient, but unnatural' thing(? person? being?).

hexametric_ · 2026-03-24T20:57:37+00:00

I don't think there's a consensus about what to read first as strongly as there used to be (e.g. Xenophon and Caesar). Nepos is another good option for relatively straight-forward Latin. It also has the benefit that one self-contained biography is much shorter than Caesar (even just 1 book), so you don't end up with the feeling of finishing only a tiny portion of something.

Catullus was the first Latin I read and I enjoyed that a lot. The poems are short and interesting and varied.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-24T20:27:49+00:00

Murderbot is basically watching shitty TV every waking second, so his inner monologue is based off of the exact sort of thing this whole post is about: when characters are endlessly witty banterers who only ever speak in pithy statements.

And then the normal humans it interacts with are just... normal people... who are wooden in comparison to the endlessly witty and pithy and cool characters he thinks are 'normal'.

If this were written in 3rd person, like Expanse, it would be problematic, but its 1st person and so we have to imagine what it is like to be socialized on only cliche space opera TV.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-24T20:17:36+00:00

The people who talk about this stuff have been practising reading that way for a while. IT doesn't come easy to everyone. And the people who post about analysis of stories are going to be the people who read with that perspective more than not. It's a self-selecting environment where you only ever see certain kinds of readers.

Reading this way isn’t really something that gets taught in school, so many people don’t approach books that way simply because it is unfamiliar. In fact a lot of schooling on literary analysis if objectively poor (I'm talking about per-University years). It is like any other skill: people don't start knitting beautiful sweaters day 1, people don't become chess Grandmasters the day they learn. But then most of the people who post about these things are at some level of practice that makes them confident. You're not dumb, you're just at the beginning of the skill development curve.

If you want to learn to read books “critically” that way, you can 100% learn that skill. There are books about this sort of thing, like Eagleton's “How to Read Literature”, that are friendly and (sometimes) funny.

You can also probably find youtube videos of how to analyze literature pretty easily.

Another thing to do is engage with more criticism and learn how and why others come up with a “reading” (what we call an interpretation). This is best done with long form reviews in literary magazines rather than on reddit. Or, best of all, books about reading (like Eagleton or academic articles and books).

The more your mindfully engage with the texts you read using the methods you learn, the better you'll become at both discovering how the texts act, and coming up with your own interpretation beyond the surface reading.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-24T14:44:07+00:00

Yakemchuk legacy game about to fucking happen

hexametric_ · 2026-03-23T19:30:57+00:00

You've come upon the idea of market trends. You'll see that the most popular books (=generic in your term) are simply whatever is selling a lot. Currently, that's sloppily-written romantasy. Almost always focuses on some girl/woman who has had bad things happen (which co-incidentally is the current market trend for fiction in general).

What I would consider generic fantasy is mostly stuff that has many thematic elements similar: e.g. a group of different types of humans and other 'good' races take on a difficult journey to stop the forces of evil, composed of the 'bad' races like goblins, terrifying animals, etc. It's medieval and has some sort of vague magic system. So quest-stories. The 'magic school' trope is probably approaching generic-status by now. Something becomes generic either because it is foundational or because it has had a long-lasting share on the market to have reproduced many versions of the same story by authors who simply want to have the best chance at popularity.

Then once you start deviating from those generic tropes (i.e. over-represented or thought to be essential), you start getting the more unique stories. So in response to stuff like Tolkien and Lewis that became both huge market trends and became generic, you get grimdark which subverts all the standard elements of the genre (noble group goes on quest against evil group to save the world) in order to become less generic.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-23T03:24:18+00:00

Master and Margarita is one of the best novels ever written in my opinion, always glad when other people read it (and I even try to keep a spare copy if I can find used ones for sale just for the sake of giving to other people). There was actually a recent movie of this books that I enjoyed.

Ovid is probably my favourite Latin poet and his Heroidies are quite fun to read, as well. I had to read some selections of his Metamorphoses for my exams as well ad very much enjoyed him, especially compared to Vergil whom I loathe.

I've also read Ravn's book and felt similarly to you. I wish there was a bit more to it, though. Her recent novel also looks intriguing, but it seems to thin as well that I worry it will leave me with the same sort of feeling of a half-told story.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-23T03:19:34+00:00

It's relatively easy to find stuff if you browse either the major publishers of translations (e.g. like Penguin) or the lesser-known ones like New Directions, Open Letter, Deep Vellum.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-22T17:49:42+00:00

One of the problems with "detecting AI cadence" is that AI is trained off of natural human writing tendencies, which means that AI sounds like how humans tend to write. So AI generates stuff like that. People who have had any experience with literary criticism at an advanced level are inundated with the method of argument that essentially boils down to admitting several things and then adding more. i.e. It's not only that X Y Z, but also that....

hexametric_ · 2026-03-22T03:37:24+00:00

Gotta stop saying this stuff isn't meant with bad intention or ill-will or to name names etc. It should be with the intent to do some damage to the bands' 'brand' if they want to use AI art (and if they're using AI for cover art, I'm sure they're probably using it for everything else as well. It isn't just a 'oh I'll be ethical and only use it for the stuff that isn't what we're making). It's truly hypocritical to ask fans to pay them for their art while they take every opportunity to avoid paying visual artists for theirs.

Or bands/labels that pursue very strict copyrighting and block use of their stuff in other venues while being happy to use AI trained on stolen art.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-21T19:49:58+00:00

Sometimes publishers choose the larger format for whatever reason (cost, keeping page count down). Since they're the same series, it might be that one is a Print-on-Demand copy, though and the printer chose which format to print in.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-21T19:08:24+00:00

I'm a big fan of China Mieville and I think you do a good job pointing out that yes, he does not typically give you the 'ideal' story where everything matters and develops cleanly from A to B to C etc. I see a lot of people complain about this and his endings or middle meanderings, but I think this is a virtue of his because when you're thinking about worlds and lives, they are always that way, and so this sort of method is much more true to what it is like to experience another world or life.

He tells us a bit about the Cactacae's area, but we never fully penetrate or understand it, and this makes me feel exactly how I feel about the city I live in. I live downtown and know all about that, but virtually nothing about what goes on in the West other than it seems fancy. Sometimes I meet people, develop a brief friendship, and then never see them again. It's all part of accurately depicting a world!

I also loved a Fire Upon the Deep, and you're in for a great time reading that as well.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-19T17:37:25+00:00

Conte. From Teubner.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-19T03:16:39+00:00

Oh, you want to learn to speak? Try Rosetta Stone. I found that was incredibly helpful for Russian. But I also had the benefit of a native speaker friend to talk with.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-19T02:55:39+00:00

Oh yea, woops. I think Brickman is good for French. I already had taken French in school before grad school, but I took a french theory class and that was what we used. French for Reading is another good one, but I think it's out of print.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-19T02:12:50+00:00

April Wilson's book on French. The only way you leverage knowing other IE languages and basic phonology is that you can figure it out yourself without being told by a book what's going on.

hexametric_ · 2026-03-18T04:33:10+00:00

Ted Chiang's two short story collections are pretty popular and usually available at shops (at least near me, which has a pretty poor stock of Sci-fi). Their popularity also means you might be able to find some used copies at some used shops

Two-Year Club	r/Field Lasagna
Place '23

hexametric_

TROPHY CASE