These are the posts I wrote at the Puppy of the Month Book Club about Catherine L. Moore’s Shambleau and her other stories:
–Gender Bending with the Dark Gods
–A comment concerning Shambleau and drunken Indians [sanity check required]
Month: January 2017
On the problematic nature of orc-slaughtering.
I stumbled upon this post at DYVERS about that modernist and recurrent issue of “complex morality” in games. I had actually written a huge blog post about the issue, dealing with its relation to original 0&1 D&D edition and how people don’t know how to play anymore, the lack of imagination and sadistic superego of today’s players, the pernicious effect of video game simplifications and post third-edition obsession with numbers in RPGs, how many people don’t seem to know what roleplay actually means or how you play morality (or immorality,) and how all of that ties to contemporary popular culture controversies and their guilt-inducing shenanigans. But then I reread the whole thing and… not even I understood what I had written. Therefore, here you have the tl.dr. version which is even better:
Guardado para la posteridad
… viniendo de todos aquellos que no le vieron venir, se negaon a creer que pudiera ser posible, y luego se pusieron a explicar por qué debíamos creernos sus explicacions de por qué habían fallado sus predicciones. Los Expertos.
Desde que Donald Trump ganó las elecciones, comentaristas políticos de Washington y politólogos de prestigiosas universidades estadounidenses han puesta en duda que el 45.º presidente de Estados Unidos, que accede al cargo sin experiencia política alguna, sea capaz de mantenerse en el cargo durante los cuatro años que dura el mandato.
La Vanguardia, 21-01-2017, ¿Cuánto durará Donald Trump? de Jordi Barbeta, corresponsal en Washington (donde el 90% votó a Hillary)
Post-apoc settings as a prerequisite of Sword & Sorcery.
What the title says.
There is no great sword & sorcery adventure without exploration and discovery. Exploration requires wilderness, and wilderness implies a negation of the World-Building (“everything needs to be mapped and known”) ethos in sff. Adventures require tension, and tension is impossible if everything is mapped, if civilization is dominant, or if the protagonist can go back to their HQ to resupply and rest. Hence, a vast blank space on the map and danger from wich you cannot escape are required: dungeons, caves, ruins, or being trapped inside a magician’s tower. The hero, if he wants to survive, has no other option but to keep going down.
Continue reading “Post-apoc settings as a prerequisite of Sword & Sorcery.”
JUST RELEASED: Appendix N by Jeffro Johnson
APPENDIX N: A LITERARY HISTORY OF DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is a detailed and comprehensive investigation of the various works of science fiction and fantasy that game designer Gary Gygax declared to be the primary influences on his seminal role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. It is a deep intellectual dive into the literature of science fiction’s past that will fascinate any serious role-playing gamer.
Author Jeffro Johnson, an expert role-playing gamer, accomplished Dungeon Master and three-time Hugo Award Finalist, critically reviews every single work listed by Gygax in the famous appendix, and in doing so, draws a series of intelligent conclusions about the literary gap between past and present that are surprisingly relevant to current events, not only in the fantastic world of role-playing, but the real world in which the players live.
“But you ‘get’ a pulp story,” an interview with Hugh B. Cave.
Because the word “pulp” references the material on which those stories were published (compared to the “slicks,” for example) and not any specific genre or style (beyond the fact that all the stories attempted to be exciting -not a minor trait-) it is sometimes difficult to write about them without misrepresenting the whole phenomenon of the pulps, which was huge and encompassed at least three generations of authors. There is also the problem that most of the writers died many decades before our current literary and cultural controversies (or died too young,) or left the field once they could start writing in more prestigious circles.
Continue reading ““But you ‘get’ a pulp story,” an interview with Hugh B. Cave.”
Chutzpah a la catalana, con patatas y dos huevos.
-¿Ve ese acantilado de allí? No se preocupe, está a un kilómetro y no tenemos que acercarnos a él por ninguna razón. Sencillamente lo remarco para tener un tema de conversación.
-Sí, eso está muy bien. *empieza a conducir directo hacia el precipicio*
-¿Pero qué está haciendo? Si no tenemos que ir hacia allí. ¡Podemos ir por otro lado!
-Ya, bueno, pero igualmente…
*coche cae por el acantilado*
Continue reading “Chutzpah a la catalana, con patatas y dos huevos.”
Entre Destrucción y Utopía, señale dónde se encuentra su país.
http://www.vilaweb.cat/noticies/termometre-a-quina-distancia-som-de-la-independencia-gener-2017/
A qué distancia estamos de la independencia, se preguntan en Vilaweb.
90% “Todas las energías de las personas que me envuelven y que se expresan en los medios de comunicación me hacen pensar que estamos en este punto.”
Jejeje. Yo pondría esta frase como epitafio del Procés.
A year, by the numbers.
Feliz año nuevo, chumachos! Happy New Year, random miscreants!
My blog.
2015 (starting in September):
814 views
179 visitors
29 posts published
2016:
13 225 views
5 774 visitors
95 posts published (that much garbage?)
Writing, how does that even work?
According to my Grammarly thingy, I have checked 4,209,978 words, which I’m sure is not possible, with a rate of 0.12% mistakes per word written. Oh, well, I’m not going to argue with a machine. That never ends well anyway.
I can’t into books.
According to Goodreads, I read 82 books in 2016, although a few were short stories so I guess the real number would be around 70, being generous.
Social media
lol who cares, social media is cancer.
Emperor's Notepad 