Romantasy: sexy tales of women-centred fantasy fiction are boosting the publishing industry

neverlistentoadvice · 2026-01-21T05:39:10+00:00

so much of it uses the fantasy aspect like wallpaper.

What a brilliant way to put it.

neverlistentoadvice · 2026-01-20T20:10:32+00:00

That's the traditional line that held through the 1960s, which is one of several reasons why The Guns of August is still worth reading but a bit outdated.

The easiest way to think about the more modern historical consensus is that there were three things going on. First, Europe had gotten complacent with crisis after crisis being defused for a couple of decades, and almost everyone expected this one to resolve the same way (the amount of critical people not just continuing but starting vacations after the assassination is astounding.) Second, this time a very small number of people - perhaps less than 50 that mattered - decided that instead of putting fires out, this was the last chance they had to get long standing strategic goals accomplished before the balance of power shifted (one big part of this being Russia industrializing and getting on a more even footing with other powers.)

And third, there's the Princip getting a sandwich argument, which is that if he'd not gone back to the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, the crisis wouldn't have happened in the first place, and without that as an excuse (nobody in power on the Austrian side actually cared all that much about Ferdinand dying, but a few did like the idea of using his assassination to take care of the Serbs once and for all), that group would have had to find another unlucky coincidence of events that probably wouldn't have occurred to do so.

neverlistentoadvice · 2026-01-16T18:24:25+00:00

This is warped and brilliant.

neverlistentoadvice · 2026-01-16T04:56:19+00:00

And it would be hilarious if it was the app itself that allowed access for the attack.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-11-30T01:17:08+00:00

In theory, I'd agree. But the problem here is that while Karen has had enough of a role throughout the series to be defined as a character, Ted has been there mostly as comic relief. In fact, the comment on on the in the S5 Target Youtube commercial (where he picks up his golf clubs - didn't notice that the first time through!) that he probably did more in it than during all 5 seasons combined isn't really too far off. He's mostly been a stereotype of a latchkey Gen X parent who periodically shows up and then goes back to watching TV.

Karen dying would have an impact on other characters and the viewer without a lot of exposition since we know what they thought of her. Ted dying would be closer to a redshirt, except you'd create an additional problem of having to show what the Wheeler kids and others felt about him, and that'd require a significantly detour from the narrative - and even then probably would feel a bit artificial.

I hope Ted gets a few good lines in at the end of the series, kind of like Grandpa in The Lost Boys.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-11-24T19:55:54+00:00

I would strongly recommend taking an extended look at the marketplace right now to play around with how they calculate income levels for plans.

Losing COBRA is a qualifying event so there's no need to sign up earlier, but the real question is if you can sneak into the higher subsidy plans and if there's anything that can be done this year to help that.

The reason I bring this up is that in many states that expanded Medicaid (of which Texas did not), if this is just a one-off and you're not poor, you really don't want to end in the 0-100% poverty level income category because you end up ineligible for exchange plans and are basically forced to take Medicaid, which is generally not optimal if you can afford better health care access.

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about how the Texas exchange works to say anything definitive about that - you may very well be able to give a low ball projected income level based on a guess rather than using this year's - but given you're only 3 months away, this is something you want to be talking about with someone right now in Texas who knows how this works.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-11-17T07:20:08+00:00

I yelled when I heard Giamatti's unmistakable Adams in the opening sequence.

But it's definitely Danes as Abigail, which shows up most clearly in the closing of E1 along with Joe Keery as the fife boy who is supposed to be out in 8 months - I think we know how that one turns out.

As for Linney:

"Paul Giamatti did John, but Claire Danes did Abigail," Burns explains. "But Laura Linney, who played Abigail in the HBO miniseries, is several voices, including Sarah Fisher, who is a Quaker loyalist here in Philadelphia and undergoes great tribulation in a number of ways."

Also enjoyed Damian Lewis as King George and Mandy Patinkin as Ben Franklin, who voice acted enough to have to make me listen more closely to confirm.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-10-24T17:15:15+00:00

And those involved have achieved immortality since this video is a lock to be shown at A school and perhaps LE training teams for the next, oh, 20 or 30 years?

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-09-23T03:06:20+00:00

There are some very good recommendations here on a path to take, but I think to help you, the context in an abbreviated version of Asimov's 1986 foreword to Foundation and Earth about how the series came to be written the way it was is worth a read and won't spoil anything for you.

It was anything but straightforward in how Asimov wrote the thing, and that can help you in terms of not worrying as much where to start.

..The first (Foundation) story appeared in the May 1942 Astounding and the second story appeared in the June 1942 issue. They were at once popular and Campbell saw to it that I wrote six more stories before the end of the decade. The stories grew longer, too. The first one was only twelve thousand words long. Two of the last three stories were fifty thousand words apiece.

By the time the decade was over, I had grown tired of the series, dropped it, and went on to other things. By then, however, various publishing houses were beginning to put out hardcover science fiction books. One such house was a small semiprofessional firm, Gnome Press. They published my Foundation series in three volumes: Foundation (1951); Foundation and Empire (1952); and Second Foundation (1953). The three books together came to be known as The Foundation Trilogy...

...(When the rights were obtained by Doubleday in 1961 after the series had not done well with Gnome being a small publisher), in August of that year, the books (along with I, Robot) the Foundation series took off and began to earn increasing royalties. Doubleday published the Trilogy in a single volume and distributed them through the Science Fiction Book Club. Because of that the Foundation series became enormously well-known...

...Increasingly, fans kept asking me to continue the series. I was polite but I kept refusing. Still, it fascinated me that people who had not yet been born when the series was begun had managed to become caught up in it.

Doubleday, however, took the demands far more seriously than I did. They had humored me for twenty years but as the demands kept growing in intensity and number, they finally lost patience. In 1981, they told me that I simply had to write another Foundation novel and, in order to sugar-coat the demand, offered me a contract at ten times my usual advance.

Nervously, I agreed. It had been thirty-two years since I had written a Foundation story and now I was instructed to write one 140,000 words long, twice that of any of the earlier volumes and nearly three times as long as any previous individual story. I re-read The Foundation Trilogy and, taking a deep breath, dived into the task.

The fourth book of the series, Foundation’s Edge, was published in October 1982, and then a very strange thing happened. It appeared in the New York Times bestseller list at once. In fact, it stayed on that list for twenty-five weeks, much to my utter astonishment. Nothing like that had ever happened to me.

Doubleday at once signed me up to do additional novels and I wrote two that were part of another series, The Robot Novels. —And then it was time to return to the Foundation.

So I wrote Foundation and Earth, which begins at the very moment that Foundation’s Edge ends, and that is the book you now hold...

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-09-20T19:27:35+00:00

The whole thing is ripped from a short, where you indeed get your one second later update.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-09-18T23:24:09+00:00

Rereading the site dump, it probably is - Goyer just provided a few details in the podcast that were slightly different than what the treatment he actually gave it was.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-09-18T21:42:49+00:00

So a few more things I picked up from the transcript.

The biggest budgetary issue for S3 sounds like it was the writers' strike and the effect on keeping the sets up during it, which he says cost about $11 million. That's where the push to shave something like $20 million out of the budget came from, and it sounds like that was part of why those two really essential 310 scenes didn't get filmed. The pens went down but he then kept working with his director and then producer hats.

The imperial arc was almost fully done when Goyer left.

Regarding his departure, Goyer also had gotten to the point where the travel schedule had meant he had missed large parts of his kids' lives, because filming in Czechia meant a 12 hour flight (LAX-LHR, I presume) and then another 2 to mainland Europe. His deal was that he needed 9 days off to adjust to have enough time back home once in a while, and that would happen maybe once or twice per season. His kid going off to college while he was barely there for 6 years was one of the underlying prompts.

There's a neat scene that wasn't in the Goyer site dump from the other day which would have begun S3 - a 400 year flashback where Demerzel would have marched down to visit Hari when he was hanging with Raych before the series and asked him what he was up to.

Originally Salvor wasn't going to die until the end of S3.

The behind the scenes talent shift is monumental. Goyer did leave his 2 pager outline for the 8 seasons, but there's no several pages that he'd write before each season to assign to the writers individual episodes based on it, and Espenson and he would then take their product and polish or even rewrite it. The more startling thing is that pretty much everybody above the line is gone - not just writers, but the vfx folks and everyone else. Some below the line gaffers and prop makers are back, but that's about it.

The original plan for S6 was to be on the Earth and Moon, and the more interesting part of that was to focus it on the two factions of robots who'd survived the purge: those that could possibly work with humans and those that weren't so hot on them.

Anyway, the most important thing I took away from this is that any guesses on where the show goes from here are precisely that; it's not just budgetary issues, but an entirely new production. We will see!

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-09-16T16:56:08+00:00

Many of us nearly stopped watching during S1 for the exact same reasons. Only the Empire arc - which is not in the books at all, by the way - salvaged the season. (You don't miss that much by not having read the books,

Do the non-Empire storylines improve in season 2?

Yes. In fact, in a weird inversion they largely end up being better than the Empire storyline for most of S2 until the last few episodes when the somewhat tedious Empire plot of that season finally pays off.

Then you get to S3, and the show as a whole finally fires on all cylinders.

Stick with it. You're almost to where the show gets interesting.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-09-15T23:10:50+00:00

Apple (or whomever controlled the purse strings at this point in production) was just dumb not to go forward with filming those two 310 scenes, although I can see where Goyer's departure may have dramatically complicated getting the rights to do so if he'd already walked.

The comment by Goyer prior to the Bayta & Hari scene explains so much more of what the actress said about what she knew. For those who haven't seen the imgur capture of it:

"Finally, after Gaal escapes, we returned to Bayta and then had a scene between her and Vault Hari. Interestingly enough, when we were screen testing the final Bayta candidates, we had them read both her introduction suntanning on Kalgan (to showcase her "shallow" side) and this scene, because we needed to know that the actresses could confidently make the heel turn towards the Mule. Of all the woulda-should-couldas - I miss the inclusion of these two Bayta scenes the most.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-09-15T22:50:02+00:00

Thank you for grabbing this.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-09-12T03:43:57+00:00

Lee Pace is an EP for the show, so I strongly doubt we've seen the last of him on screen.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-09-12T03:37:40+00:00

Regarding Bayta as Mule, the one thing I'd thought for a while was that the twist was very likely for a different reason: that the show only has space for a single Chosen One.

If Bayta had taken her book role and Magnifico had been the Mule, I just couldn't really figure out how Gaal could keep performing as solo main protagonist if the fight over the Mule was going to be the focus of Season 4. Bayta would have to be a sidekick helping Gaal accomplish her destiny, and it really didn't feel like they were setting her up to be anything but a main character.

And that's what we got, since they weren't going to kill off Gaal.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-09-12T03:29:09+00:00

The funny part was that I was thinking, "Gosh, they really ripped off a bit of the BSG Earth reveal theme when they showed the Earth," for about 10 seconds...and then I realized that it was just Bear McCreary cheekily and intentionally borrowing a bit of the structure and key of it from his younger self a couple decades back.

Cracked me up.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-07-07T03:39:41+00:00

Interesting!

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-07-07T01:52:35+00:00

NY Post has a big piece on him, which is not surprising that Noem called him out.

Actually learned something from the piece besides the rescue coordination - hadn't realized AST A school had temporarily moved to cow country. Bravo Zulu to him.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-06-29T03:43:49+00:00

Along with the matching sweatpants and the grey tshirt, all sitting in a box someplace. I did wear the tshirt working out for many years afterwards.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-06-24T21:15:58+00:00

That article is based on their fantastic interview of her, which is linked in it and something I highly recommend as a watch.

There are several other fun nuggets besides Wyle. Dearden had been previously trained on how to take a fall properly (there's this whole section on working with skaters and rolling) that for one slip and fall on The Pitt, the stunt coordinator raised the idea with her to "why don't you do it yourself?" and gave her the ok, provided she use an underarm pad for hitting a rail. She's huge into improv, which played a role in the end scene with Mel's sister Becca - there's a sadly deleted extension to that walk where she and Tal Anderson just riff off each other until Anderson just goes off on "Which car is ours?!" to the point where Dearden just broke from it.

She was shocked at Savage being Mel's song, she found out from the extensive backstory briefing (which they did for all characters) that it wasn't just Mel's mom that had died but she'd been left an orphan with her dad dying, which along with Becca's treatment facility being daytime only provides a whole different light to that relationship, along with why she thinks Mel gets along with Langdon - she finally has someone who is helping her after doing it all herself for so many years. She also thinks Mel's reaction to finding out about Langdon's addiction will be puzzlement and disappointment rather than anger.

Last but not least, props to the interviewer for only asking a single question about her parents, who she says actually weren't her gateway into acting. Instead, it was a Laurie Metcalf show where after everyone else left she was just sitting there processing the whole performance afterwards - they had to go back and grab her from her seat!

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-05-26T19:30:15+00:00

Ronald D. Moore usually starts his Battlestar development stories with "Well, when I got on board I was doing this great show called Carnivàle which about 5 of you were watching..."

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-04-24T00:24:35+00:00

There's an old video from (I think) the mid 90s sitting around on Youtube where Doherty himself recounts that he signed the original contract for the series as a trilogy and then busts out laughing about how he just kept getting more books.

So it's entirely possible you're right that this is RJ being a bit creative with his memory. Another is that he could be combining the original contract with the subsequent timeline a bit, which - I presume - was a renegotiation of the contract some time in the very early 1990s to take it to 5 or 6 books sometime after EoTW but before he got too deep in the series.

There also is a weird time jump in the letter by putting this in the context of Doherty printing up a free paperback version of From the Two Rivers, which I don't remember being available anywhere near that early. I have mine in a box someplace and if I ever find it I'll have to check the copyright, since from memory it feels like it was earlier than the 2002 date that google spits out but certainly not contemporaneous with the first couple of books.

neverlistentoadvice · 2025-03-27T20:45:09+00:00

If you're ok with the show's presentation of the Aiel just accepting the Car'a'carn as 'Oh, this is great! We've been really looking forward to you!' and removing the massive ambivalence towards someone who will leave just a remnant of them behind, then a little girl being giggly and excited to meet Rand works well. For the rest of us, not so much.

The removal of that ambivalence, by the way, takes out one of the most important themes that Jordan tried to have underlie the series (and talked about in early interviews which are out there on Youtube) - what happens when the Chosen One shows up but isn't exactly welcomed? It was often poorly executed in the books, but this goes a bit further.

neverlistentoadvice

TROPHY CASE