Hypothetically speaking

30 July 2025 04:00 pm
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
If someone asked for a list of issues with the Reactor site, what would be your top five? Not counting search. Assume search will be mentioned.
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11 digital issues of The Official BattleTech Magazine from Catalyst Game Labs, Shrapnel.

Bundle of Holding: BattleTech Shrapnel 2
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[personal profile] spiralsheep
Checking in to reassure y'all because of the current news.
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One day the General will be victorious. Earth will be his! Humanity will be exterminated!

However, today is the General’s day off.

Mr. Villain’s Day Off, volume 1 by Yuu Morikawa

Heads up for the Pacific

29 July 2025 09:28 pm
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8.7 quake in Siberia, tsunami warning across the Pacific.
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Two orphans try to make a living in an unforgiving universe.

Angel Station by Walter Jon Williams
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English-language ebooks of Apocalisse and Inferno, the Acheron Games campaign settings based on the Book of Revelation and the Divine Comedy for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition and compatible systems.

Bundle of Holding: Apocalisse & Inferno

Clarke Award Finalists 2007

28 July 2025 09:36 am
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
2007: The Blair government is rocked by rumours of Tory-style corruption, Matty Hull’s killers escape justice and are free to kill again, while the global financial markets to which the UK belongs are absolutely secure and in no way headed for a shocking correction.


Poll #33435 Clarke Award Finalists 2007
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 14


Which 2007 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Nova Swing by M. John Harrison
9 (64.3%)

End of the World Blues by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
3 (21.4%)

Gradisil by Adam Roberts
3 (21.4%)

Hav by Jan Morris
7 (50.0%)

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet
0 (0.0%)

Streaking by Brian Stableford
0 (0.0%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2007 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Nova Swing by M. John Harrison
End of the World Blues by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Gradisil by Adam Roberts

Hav by Jan Morris
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet
Streaking by Brian Stableford
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
The quoted material below is quoted material.

I wrote in 2022 that the election system used by WSFS should be changed. At present, the rules for electing the Mark Protection Committee, the body charged with ensuring that the intellectual property of WSFS is protected, are set out in Standing Rule 6.2:

Voting shall be by written preferential ballot with write-in votes allowed. Votes for write-in candidates who do not submit written consent to nomination to the Presiding Officer before the close of balloting shall be ignored. The ballot shall list each nominee’s name. The first seat filled shall be by normal preferential ballot procedures as defined in Section 6.4 of the WSFS Constitution. There shall be no run-off candidate. After a seat is filled, votes for the elected member shall be eliminated before conducting the next ballot. This procedure shall continue until all seats are filled. In the event of a first-place tie for any seat, the tie shall be broken unless all tied candidates can be elected simultaneously. Should there be any partial-term vacancies on the committee, the partial-term seat(s) shall be filled after the full-term seats have been filled.

I warned that this carries the risk that a single faction with roughly half of the total votes could win every single seat and squeeze out other viewpoints.

My warning has come dramatically true.

A birthday, and: Caligula

26 July 2025 06:48 pm
selenak: (Livia by Pixelbee)
[personal profile] selenak
The awesome Helen Mirren turns 80 today. Long may she continue to rule and remain with us! I think the first thing I remember watching with her that made me sit up and pay attention was her as D.I. Jane Tennison, but since then she's never disappointed in any role I've seen her in, both before and after Tennison. I have a particular soft spot for her Elizabeth II and Alma Reville, I must confess. Most recently I took up someone's dare and watched "Caligula - The Ultimate Cut". Caligula, if you don't know: Became (in)famous as basically a late 1970s porn movie with famous actors (among others Peter O'Toole as Tiberius, John Guilgud as Nerva, Malcolm McDowell in the title role, Helen Mirren as Caesonia, Caligula's last wife) due to the fact that even for a 1970s movie, it had a crazy production history: first the scriptwriter - none other than Gore Vidal - and the director, Tito Brassi, fell out and Vidal withdrew his name from the script, then the director and the producer fell out, and since the producer was the then owner of Penthouse, he went back to the set with some Penthouse girls, shot some hardcore porn and inserted into the already shot footage. The example most quoted for how this worked was that where the scene had a non-explicit threesome between Caligula, his sister Drusilla and Caesonia, the released version added two other women spying on them and having very explicit hardcore f/f sex while doing so. This caused the director to withdraw his name as well and the actors making somewhat embarrassed quips for the next few decades (other than MacDowell, who was seriously pissed off about the then result, and Mirren, who was debonair about it and called it "an irresistable mixture of art and genitals"). Then in 2024, a dedicated film fan named Thomas Negovan released the result of some serious work - he'd gotten access to all the shot footage, and recut the entire movie, going back to Vidal's script and using exclusively takes not used for the late 1970s release (and none at all from the porn additions, not that the actual movie is without sex scenes, au contraire), with the result that a pleased McDowell praised him for rescueing "one of my best performances" from cinematic oblivion. Reviews I had read did concede that now there is an actual storyline and (some) character development. (A scene in question singled out and compared/contrasted: apparantly, the original cinematic release version had Caligula simply shouting crazily "crawl, crawl!" at the senators, who did it. The Ultimate Cut version, by contrast, has this scene near the end, with some overtones of Camus as Caligula has long gone from delight to disgust at how no matter what he does, people will obey and abase themselves, and the longer version of this scene has him asking for increasingly outrageous things, cultimating in the "crawl, crawl" and the declaration he hates them for being like that. (Mind you, earlier in the movie when one brave young man did stand up for himself, this resulted in Caligula interrupting the guy's wedding night to rape him and his bride both.)

In case you're wondering whether the result is worth watching: depends. Certainly as opposed to, say, I, Claudius' Caligula (and his avatar in Babylon 5, Cartagia), who are evil from the get go - in the case of Graves' Caligula literally from birth, he's already a creepy kid when his parents are stil alive - the Ultimate Cut's Caligula has some humanity in him and the introduction sequence makes a point of providing the audience with the backstory of his father Germanicus dying (in this version definitely courtesy of Tiberius), then Agrippina the Elder and Caligula's older brothers all at Tiberius' orders (unlike the death of Germanicus, this is not disputed), with Caligula and his sister Drusilla as the sole survivors (because in this movie, Caligula's other sisters don't exist, though I'm told the porn version actually identifies one of the women having the hardcore f/f as Agrippina, but as the on screen dialogue makes much of Drusilla and Caligula being the sole survivors, I assume in the porn version's Agrippina the Younger would not have been Caligula's and Drusilla's sister), and their incestuous relationship actually one of the very few human, non-abusive and tender relationships happening in the entire movie, with Caligula having the not unreasonable under the circumstances belief that he needs to be Emperor or he's toast as well, only for absolute power to bring out increasingly the absolute worst in him. Buuuuuuuut this existing personal development does not correspond with a general development, by which I mean that since the movie after the introduction with its tragic backstory for young Caligula and the introduction in which he and Drusilla are in a "we two against the world" mode as each other's sole sources of human affection goes on to present Tiberius' life in Capri as a non-stop orgy already, there's no sense that Rome itself pre Caligula is much different than Rome ruled by Caligula. (Incidentally, about the orgy there and the later orgies, which I assume were shot by the original director, since they're certainly rating M or 18, so to speak, but don't have the actors with dialogue do something more explicit than touch someone's nipples, they're the opposite of tiltillating in that no one gives the impression of actually enjoying themselves as opposed to acting on first Tiberius' and later Caligula's orders. The sole exceptions being the scenes involving Caligula, Drusilla and Caesonia.) The Capri sequence does have a moment that gets across human emotion, which is the Nerva scene they hired Guilgud for: this Nerva isn't the later Emperor; he's an old friend of Tiberius who tells his former pal he can't bear the degredation his once friend has sunk to anymore and commits suicide, and Tiberius' reaction to this is when O'Toole actually gets to do some non-hamming-it-up acting. But mostly it numbs you down in its viciousness and it pretty much sets the tone for the film.

Some of the violence is outré and camp, such as the machine decapitating people in the arena who are buried up to their necks in sand, and thus hard to take seriously; otoh the whole Caligula first menaces and then rapes the young couple sequence is violence of a very different type, and genuinely frightening. Drusilla and Caesonia are the two outstanding female roles (and the sole women with personalities); it's another interesting contrast to the I, Claudius versions, in that Drusilla there was a none-too-bright but not personally malicious ditz, whereas here she's depicted as not without her own ruthlessness (she talks Caligula into getting rid of Macro, for example), but also smart and (within this movieverse) sensible, and later the sole person with the courage to argue with Caligula; it's her death (by illness) that removes whatever restraint he has left. Caesonia, too, is depicted as a smart woman (described in dialogue as profligate, but we don't see her having sex with anyone other than Caligula, and in the one threesome scene with Drusilla); Mirren gets hardly any lines in the first half of the movie when Drusilla is still alive but conveys a lot with facial acting, and then in the second half (when she is the character he has most dialogues with) basically becomes the sole person a) aware why Caligula is actually doing all of this ("Do you have to show them your contempt so openly?" "I don't know how else to provoke them"), and b) who among the various sycophants around them still has it in them to be dangerous. As opposed to Drusilla, she doesn't argue with Caligula directly, but she is great at keeping the balance between presenting her critique in a playfull manner and challenging him but withdrawing the moment she senses it could go against her and distracting any ire to another target while returning to her subject in a different way. It's a good role for a young Helen Mirren; this Caesonia is neither a good person nor an evil overlady but a cunning survivor (right until she gets murdered directly after Caligula, that is).

Around these interesting character depictions, however, is, as mentioned above, non-stop viciousness (some sexual, some not) to a degree that it just numbs you down emotionally. In a word: Grimdark. I've said elsewhere that the reason why I, Claudius works in a way many of its imitations didn't is that I, Claudius doesn't just consist of its spectacular villains (be they Livia or Caligula, the two main antagonists, or Sejanus), but offers a sympathetic main character and some other non-evil supporting characters you actually care about, so that when bad things happen to them, you feel for them. None of the various victims and/or targets in Caligula gets enough personality to make it to memorable human being, with the arguable exceptions of Nerva (in the Tiberius sequence) and of the young couple whom Caligula rapes for no other reason that the bridegroom pissed him off by standing up for himself. Drusilla and Caesonia, as mentioned, are interesting and Caligula himself certainly is a charismatic performance by McDowell, who manages to get across Caligula's inner scared child who never grew up along with the increasingly destructive and self destructive nihilism as he figures out that "I can do whatever I want" is neither safe nor as satisfying as he'd assumed but essentially empty. It's now discernable why so many good actors actually signed on to this project (beyond the cash they got). But I wouldn't say their (good) performances are enough reason to put yourself through nearly three numbing hours of grimdark. (Sorry, Thomas Negovan.)
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Eight works new to me. Mostly novels but there are two tabletop roleplaying rule books in there. Four are fantasies (including the ttrpgs), one seems to be horror, one non-fiction, and two are SF. Four could be said to be series books and other four appear to be stand-alone.

Books Received, July 19 to July 25


Poll #33429 Books Received, July 19 to July 25
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 57


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Stone and Sky by Ben Aaronovitch (July 2025)
34 (59.6%)

The Adventure of the Demonic Ox by Lois McMaster Bujold (July 2025)
33 (57.9%)

They Call Her Regret by Channelle Desamours (February 2026)
4 (7.0%)

Sky on Fire by E. K. Johnston (July 2025)
15 (26.3%)

The Rainseekers by Matthew Kressel (February 2026)
10 (17.5%)

Warhammer: the Old World Roleplaying Game, Gamemaster’s Guide by Dominic McDowall and Pádraig Murphy et al (Q1 2026)
4 (7.0%)

Warhammer: the Old World Roleplaying Game, Player’s Guideby Dominic McDowall and Pádraig Murphy et al (Q1 2026)
4 (7.0%)

Starlost Unauthorized by D G Valdron (October 2024)
18 (31.6%)

Some other option (see comments)
0 (0.0%)

Cats!
36 (63.2%)

naraht: Moonrise over Earth (Default)
[personal profile] naraht
Picked this up because I kept seeing it being described as literary SF – with that classic complaint, "no plot, hated the protagonist," that often signals a novel that may interest me. It's the tale of a depressed, isolated telepath in New York City in the early 70s who's gradually losing his powers as he enters his forties.

A reviewer on Reddit dismissed the novel as a clumsy metaphor for impotence. Having read it, and read a little about Silverberg's career – he had been churning out multiple novels per year before temporarily deciding to retire from writing in 1975 – I'm now 95% convinced that it's in fact a slightly less clumsy metaphor for the retreat of literary inspiration. Which makes it somewhat more interesting. Isn't fiction really, in some ways, based on the ability to see into other people's minds?

Not a great novel, but it has its moments. Very much of its period and setting, in both the good ways and the bad ways.

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