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BarnerCobblewood
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Hi, I had to find my password to log in. Here are my votes: 7- (E) The Magnificent Showboats of the Lower Vissel River, Lune XXIII South Big Planet AKA Showboat World by Jack Vance, 1975. Enter the cut-throat world of competing showboats as they pl…
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Ready whenever you are.
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Tl;dr: What do people think about how they think about ttrpgs? What I meant to post here was another question about how we think about rpgs. My educational background is in music and language teaching, both of which have several theories, all of wh…
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Sorry about the brief absence - I had a failing hard drive, and it has taken me a few days to get my machine back in order. I also wanted to ask about the drug use (mnetics - what were they called?) in the text. In terms of rpgs thought of it as a …
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Edit - moved to practice heading. Sorry about that.
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@kcaryths sounds good. BTW have had to deal with a failing hard drive over the last couple of days, but it's fixed so I will follow up with the discussion tomorrow morning. BC
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I was thinking about what you said @Apocryphal and it strikes me that it really presents a challenge to the idea that games and entertainment are simply items to be consumed. There's a skill in using them that isn't quite the same as what happens wh…
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@Apocryphal About the Gospodinov book: Yes I vaguely remember it, and based on my memory there's no comparison. That was good, healthy food, this is junk food - not even dessert. It's like comparing my grandmother's apple pie with a pop tart. Sure t…
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Yeah it's funny. I did my undergraduate degree in music, and that has shaped me I guess. I expect I will need to practice everything, but I noticed in my slight foray into gaming with people I don't know, public gaming, that the people in that publi…
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@RichardAbbott That makes me think of the first MiB movie. Actually this book is one of the most movie-like books I've read. It's just absurd, the way that so many movies are now. I had the same feeling reading that Crouch book - Recursion.
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@Everybody I guess when I read this it became apparent to me that I wasn't getting how the large scale structure was supposed to be working. I could read the words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, but the connections among chapters started to elude…
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@NeilNjae That's pretty interesting about the anime ttrpgs. I'm not into anime, so I don't really know much about it. What's been the historical relation among TV and comic books in that genre? Likewise I've not tried any of the FitD games. There's…
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@RichardAbbott I'm talking about books, print on paper, not fiction. We're reading this because it is a book, but how many of us read the book? Some of us seem to do most things on audiobook, I use an eBook for well over 80% of my reading, we all co…
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Yeah, by end the worldbuilding was odd. I did like the really big dinosaurs at the end though. If the text had been more childlike I think it would have worked better, but innocent and edgy? A bridge too far. I got the feeling that this world was n…
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@RichardAbbott Yeah, it's a starnge publication. It felt like it should have been short stories, which were ruined by going for a longer form. I would really like to know what motivated the "publication" of a "book." I see it as …
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No I'm not worried about it. The marketing / hype is pretty aggressive. Hope it will live up to it.
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Looks good to me. I assume you've read it - any concerns about the length?
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Again, I have lots of thoughts. I'll start with the first couple I had: 1) Can we roleplay forgetting while "immersed / entranced" by our PC, or does requiring players to run PCs who do and then forget interfere with immersion and enchant…
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So I have quite a few ideas here, but I'll start with the most pressing thing that occurred to me: The relation between what happens when we play ttrpgs, and what happens when we remember / forecast what playing them is like. At one level the GM pr…
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I enjoyed the book. I read it first on the web-pages, and then later read the book, so I'm not sure that it is a book, but of not, what is it? The writing kept me interested in the story-line, and the characters were developed just enough to make t…
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The process of worldbuilding is what led me to suggest this book. As I think you all know the world is a co-operative project that seems to be now centred at the website https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/ Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCP_Fou…
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Hi everyone. I've posted 4 discussion points for the Antimimetics, and will be posting my initial thoughts on each one over the course of the afternoon. I wanted to have fewer topics because I wanted to try having "looser" topics so that …
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Sorry to hear that @clash_bowley - I had some thoughts I would have liked to hear your reaction to. Drop in on the discussion anyway if you like. @NeilNjae how's it coming? @Apocryphal when do you think you'll have wrapped up?
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@Apocryphal actually you've read it twice already.
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How is everyone doing with the Antimimetics? I was thinking that I might just post 2 questions to begin, hoping that we can have freer discussion that connects elements together. But if people are more comfortable with the other format, I can do tha…
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(Quote) Exactly. For me the book didn't seem to have considered this at all.
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(Quote) I'm not distinguishing magic from science, but from tech. Tech is premised on the user not requiring to care for the self - it works, no matter who operates it. See Mickey in Disney's Sorcerer's apprentice for an example. Magic is grounded o…
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@RichardAbbott I agree that the characters and individual relations were well drawn. And the biofeedback thing had possibilities, but I concluded that it was magic, not SF. One way I spot magic vs technology is that magic is personal, tech is social…
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Of course it could, but for me the world- and society-building meant that I wouldn't really be interested. Perhaps someone can tell me what the focus of the story is.
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I think this is why I became more irritated with the story as it progressed. I found myself incapable of believing that the characters in the story had no idea what inter-stellar travel and technology means e.g. the communications issues, computers.…