Mr. Darcy
About
- Banned
- Username
- Mr. Darcy
- Joined
- 2012-02-15 03:13:24
- Visits
- 1,197
- Last Active
- 2014-06-03 20:58:48
- Roles
- Banned
Comments
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Things that are too overpowered for D&D: Roko's BasiliskThe HecatoncheiresAutomatic firearms (a note in the Hesiod translation I have compares the Hecatoncheires throwing rocks to "a primitive man's conception of a machine gun".)
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it would be nice if the thread didn't become more trouble than it's worth. That's definitely not something I want to contribute to. I want it to continue long enough for Tachyon to get to the part where it's only rational to send Yudkowsky money so …
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A literal troll.
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If you think I'm calling most of the board morons for pointing out contradictions in their ideology, that's definitely not my intent. I'm sorry if that's how you hear it, and I'd like to drop the issue because it's quite tangential to Tachyon's thre…
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I'd be out of my depth with the evolution of the novel in Japan and China, for sure. The Tale of Genji from the 1010s is obviously a novel, but the only Chinese fiction I'm familiar with are the classic Ming romances. I have no idea if realistic pro…
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Anyway, you should move on to why you need to buy your children cryogenic tubes to be a rational parent, or such.
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Setting that aside, I don't see the sense in positing a never-ending list of groups-which-are-not-to-be-discriminated-against. The progressive stance is quite simply that everyone should be respected for who they are, and nobody should be considere…
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Anyway, I think you're assuming 'liberals' (a term which is very often applied by conservatives and is not always a term of identification for the people you're talking about) are trying to claim association with a tradition in which they are largel…
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And all rationally self-interested homosexuals would be Islamophobes while all pious Muslims would call for them to be punished according to sharia... One can imagine a leftist version of the Singularity, where the list of thoughts considered bigote…
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It's funny how people assume that liberal, freethinking communities implicitly means silencing conservatives, and are confused and distressed by exceptions. Not that LW is particularly open-minded, when it takes fringe and intellectually controversi…
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It's funny how people assume that liberal, freethinking communities implicitly means silencing conservatives, and are confused and distressed by exceptions. Not that LW is particularly open-minded, when it takes fringe and intellectually controversi…
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I don't see how Women in Refrigerators is a mark against this. That term comes from serial fiction like comics and TV, when a writer tries to fix a perceived narrative lull by having a male protagonist's love interest killed in order to create a rev…
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Now let's read "Queen of the Black Coast". We're back to Weird Tales with the May 1934 issue, and Conan gets the cover: Conan looks like a silent movie star here. Says something about changing male standards of beauty. Each chapter starts with a st…
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Well, he was going for something deeper than a ghost story. Atali isn't a ghost or a generic Fair Folk, she's Ymir's daughter. He's trying to add to Norse mythology here, and it's not clear to what end. I don't see why Atali would intentionally keep…
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This next one is a bit different. "The Frost Giant's Daughter" got a rejection letter from Weird Tales, so it was published in 1934 in a magazine called Fantasy Fan, with Conan's name changed to "Amra" (which fans might have recognized as his pirate…
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I also liked this one better than "Pool of the Black One." Olivia is more interesting than... whoever from that story, because we get novelistic insight into her thought process as she tries to be proactive while having been reared without any relev…
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I see Koko has something on her mind.
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dope tune, Are you Hunter S. Thompson?
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Like what kind of a question is this? Is Farrah Fawcett a feminist role model? Is Hunter S. Thompson a druggy role model? Am I Farrah Fawcett, and therefore a feminist role model? I don't know, but Lee Majors is a cyborg role model. Am I Lee Maj…
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All right, next story is "Iron Shadows in the Moonlight". It was published in the April 1934 issue of Weird Tales: We start with a damsel named Olivia being distressed by Shah Amurath. He boasts of having slain the troublesome Kozaks, when suddenly…
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Weed culture = hippies. Drugged out MARXISTS who DON'T BATHE! I'm still ok with it being legal if tobacco is.
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I wonder how many ill people actually get a bigger benefit from marijuana than the lung damage from smoking. Pot clinics seem to have become the more numerous than urgent care clinics around Portland.
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Planning for it, but sympathetic to those discouraged from it by divorce law.
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This is the second time we've seen Conan run into a stone wall for laughs. He has a high Constitution score. I do like how this story consists of one damn thing coincidentally running ahead of another, and how Murilo assumes Nabonidus must be a sorc…
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Let's read "Rogues in the House". This was published January 1934 in Weird Tales, and this cover has nothing to do with it: Well, instead of a girl tied up in a dungeon, we meet Conan chained up in one. The back story here is that Conan was the mos…
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You summarized Conan's social skills better than I did. After being a naive loner in the thief stories, he can now effortlessly win over rogues, if not respectable people.Yeah, Howard has Zaporavo drop that line about the island of guarded crypts fr…
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Let's read "The Pool of the Black One." We're hitting a run of three stories that didn't make the cover. I thought it would be interesting to show you what Weird Tales readers saw in October 1933 instead: ... Batgirl's first costume was weird. Well…
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Speaking of cover, I've read somewhere that Howard himself was not too fond of sex scenes nor of deliberaly distressed damsels, and preferred the stories without any. Too bad for him that the tastes of the resident illustrator were quite specific an…
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Let's read "The Slithering Shadow". Ms. Bondage Brundage, if you please? We open on Conan lost in the desert with a kneeling girl clasping his knee. He's in a loincloth again, so it's quite Frazetta, except for the fact that being lost isn't very m…
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Now, Shevatas is established as a very successful (and thus not poor) thief, yet here he is described as wearing nothing but loincloth (granted, that was a very fashionable loincloth) and a weapon. Which is what makes me wonder if the thieves in the…
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And now, let's read "Black Colossus".This was the fourth Conan story published in Weird Tales (June 1933). From this point on, he was one of the magazine's star writers, with 9 of the next 14 stories making the cover. The name of the artist here is…
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This is one of my favourite stories, mostly because of how it subverts the usual Eldritch Abomination theme - just how often does the hero get to rescue one from the clutches of a mortal doing unspeakaba things to it instead of vice versa? That bein…
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Now for "The Tower of the Elephant". This was the third Conan story published in Weird Tales (March 1933). It's part of a set of "Conan the thief" stories, and I think it's the best of them. We start with some scene-setting prose in the Maul, the la…
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Hey Beholder, I agree with everything you said about "The Scarlet Citadel". Conan leaves chaos in his wake for selfish reasons (that black guy had a point) but he does have a conscience: M. Bison would have enslaved that village himself, while Conan…
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Glad to oblige, Justice. "The Scarlet Citadel" opens with King Conan fighting among the fallen bodies of his armored knights, having ridden in to help Aquilonia's old ally King Amalrus of Ophir, only to find himself double-crossed and fighting six-t…
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... yeah. It is like an exploitation film plot in the form of first-rate iambic pentameter rather than a screenplay.Note though that Elizabethan stereotypes were different. Religion and geography are treated as much bigger deals than race or ethnici…
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Now I'm rereading Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great. Oh my goodness, it's a shame that no publisher hired the late Frank Frazetta to illustrate an edition of this. Tamburlaine's sons assure him that they'd build bridges of carcasses suspen…
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What if I started to feel much more healthy both mentally and physically at the same time I've became less restrictive about eating? No gorging on Big Macs (except once, to prove a point), but eating "healthy" for general meals and having nice thing…
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Then why doesn't Anonus eat beef? Hindu?
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Recently read: All of Plutarch's LivesEdgar Rice Burroughs's first three Mars novels, first two Pellucidar novels, and reread the first two Tarzan novels.Gerhard Weinberg's A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II.Every Euripides tragedy I …
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I'm a Buddhist Wait, really?
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I've been eating spinach salads with beets, avocado, and walnuts for either lunches or dinners, accompanied by beans or low-sodium vegetarian soup. Breakfast is bran cereal, oatmeal, or French toast. Leigh has also been making pasta/Asian noodle rec…
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Happy marriage:
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Grognards are people who drink grogn, right?
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or we could make crimean war comparisons as if this is more like the context of open warfare and the ottoman collapse and religious warfare than the more recent and obviously relevant pattern of russian sponsorship of semi-popular independence movem…
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It seems I haven't posted here in a while. For history, I've read the surviving books of Livy, Appian's Civil Wars, Tacitus, and Gibbon. I'm now reading Plutarch's Lives with Beholderess, having just finished Alcibiades. It's hard to tell if that ma…
