I like this picture, no real reason, just do. I don't think it's good enough for a thread of it's own, so I'll just leave it here.
The Stormlight books are a great read. I think they are better than the first three Game of Thrones books. Sanderson's world building at first put me off as a bit "try-hard" but by the middle of the first book I was sold. His "magic" system is different than anything I've seen in decades. The books are hefty; I managed to do 5K pages read in about a week for the first three books. Supposed to be a 10 volume epic, but we will see as he has 3-4 other series going on. I need to stop being a tard and go and read The Wheel of Time. I think I read the first 2-3 books then forgot about them.
sanderson is a great systems writer: things like countries, ethnicities, magic, creatures... real nice the interpersonal stuff is bland but it's never bad, i think he was a great pick to finish the wheel of time because RJ was another great systems writer, except that when RJ wrote people, it was really hit or miss - his characters could be more interesting but could also be annoying/repetitive there's a reddit post out there where somebody counted the number of times a character "tugged her braid," "smoothed her skirts," or "crossed her arms" but i think there's spoilers in it so don't look for it he can lean on catchphrases (catchactions?) he doesn't write women too good, either, but at least he tried
That looks interesting. It might be something that would be up Dala's alley too. As an aside, is it just me, or are micro urls getting crazy ubiquitous these days? I remember when they first started coming around, maybe five or six years ago, maybe longer, and initially there were a lot of warnings to not click micro urls if they were from untrusted sources because you never knew what was at the other end. Now everyone seems to use them from Amazon and Youtube to newspapers to random joe websites.
Blame fucking twitter. URL shorteners have been around almost 20 years now. A quick look at wiki shows a 2000 date. I can recall using shorteners in AIM before 9/11 so that fits. Linking something to a dynamic API URl that is 100-150 characters long is simply too unwieldy. The direct link to that book was 163 characters long (yes I counted); the fucking twitter character limit was such that you could not link that URL without a shortener. If they had not been around since the early 'Aughts, they would have been invented to fix a problem. amazon, Google etc also use them to track what people are sharing and end user engagement. I'd not be shocked at all if there are people tracking where their short URL's are being posted and making marketing and acquisition decisions based on said tracking. In other news, Sanderson's universe has been optioned for a movie, and I dread what they will do with his world. So much of the story won't fit well unless they do a very long series. Book one by itself would be two seasons. Game of Thrones had 100+ characters that had to be condensed to save complexity but the stormlight series does not have that out, there are maybe 20-30 main characters.
Um. Ish? I don't constantly go around looking for fantasy stuff per se, but I enjoy it from time to time. Hard fantasy aside, I'd readily argue if you're absorbing any part of American pop culture, there's a good chance there's gonna be elements of fantasy in it. For instance, I'd readily argue that super hero comics and cartoons like Adventure Time or even Sponge Bob are modern fantasy. They do tick off a lot of boxes. As for this particular image? I'm just really into illustrations and engravings right now, because I'm just awestruck at how well some of these artists convey depth and shadows and such by varying the frequency and strength of the lines they use. Since a lot of these were made by artists for storybooks and such and a lot of those books have classic tales from folk lore to poetry to religion, there are a lot of images with knights, beasts, angels, elves, anthropomorphic animals, etc.
Ah: professional curiosity. The term you want is speculative fiction.because I'm just awestruck at how well some of these artists convey depth and shadows and such by varying the frequency and strength of the lines they use
I'd readily argue that super hero comics and cartoons like Adventure Time or even Sponge Bob are modern fantasy.
Something tells me you'd enjoy these two Wikipedia links. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson_classification_systems