Friday's Open Thread

[korinna]

You're free to comment about anything, whether it relates to the interests of the community or not.

Rules

-No nudity, please.
-If you post pictures, please don't make them so big that people have to side scroll. (If you're unsure about a picture, just link us to it instead.)
-No personal attacks.

Comments

[etoilepb]

My take on it is mixed.

On the one hand, yeah, there's an awful lot of rape in ASOIF. On the other hand, the world it represents really would have an awful lot of rape in it and I appreciate that GRRM doesn't just elide that these things happen, as so many fantasy writers do.

I've also found on my most recent re-read (and I'm now at the 48% mark of ADWD, according to my Kindle) that there's a lot going on around explicitly addressing the sexism in this world. A huge number of our POV characters are girls or women who are fighting the system and seeking power wherever they can find it: through marriages, through sex, through straight-up dressing and behaving like men, whatever. The challenges that everyone who isn't a man in power faces are made explicit repeatedly through the text, and I appreciate that.

Right now, most of what I don't appreciate is that about 70% of books 4 and 5 are roadtrip stories that I expect to see mainly happen offscreen when HBO gets to them. Little dribbles of plot on very long rides...

[noabsolutes]

I am onboard with you, only I feel like he sort of turned up the rape dial on ADWD? I'm not too much farther along than you are on ADWD but I feel like in earlier books, a lot of the narrative surrounding female characters - particularly Cersei and Sansa, but not limited to them by any means - felt like meta commentary on their situations and their relative powerlessness because of their place in Westernos society, but then I feel like in ADWD it's just like, a flood of gratuitous violence and the narrative that felt sympathetic in the earlier books feels less sympathetic and more gratuitous now.

But maybe that's just me?

Re: Guild Wars? TL;DR srry

[salacious_pop]

It took me a while to figure this out - Only cities and towns are shared areas. When you leave one, you're getting your own private phased version of the world, and as such all the quests you get out in the great wide open are yours to do alone, without competition. That doesn't necessarily mean you can solo everything - some stuff you have to come back to later or skip depending on your class. If you want help with quests, you need to party up inside a town and then leave together

Re: Guild Wars?

[salacious_pop]

found this: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guide_to_character_creation

The main landing page of the GW Wiki has a ton of other good guides too

Happy gaming!

[noabsolutes]

our mail server at the office just fucked itself and now i have an unread duplicate of every email i have received in the last year

why

[noabsolutes]

down to 821 unread

today is not going well :(

[yeloson]

Pushed through to the Ark section of FF13. Pretty meh about the game overall at this point, and really twitching with the portrayal of Sazh and Vanielle as individuals as well as their interactions together.

Also should be starting an Apocalypse World tabletop campaign soon, and maybe some 4E D&D! Very excited.

[dirty_soap]

 I started rereading Multiplex  from the beginning. So much love for that comic.