Bay 12 Games Forum

"Samus is the man beside you. SAMUS IS YOU."

And now I'm thinking of one of the weirder Super Metroid crossovers I could conceptualize. I guess Samus would be slannesh or tzeentch sworn in that one? To account for the genderswap/mind fuckery or whatever's going on there.

... actually, thinking on it marginally more, the Chozo would fit fairly well into Tzeentch's iconography, wouldn't they? Huh. Samus's colors are more Khorne, but the zero suit is pretty blue...

... and honestly, thinking somewhat more, the Metroid storyline even sorta' plays out like a Tzeentch plot if you squint at it right, doesn't it? Hrm...

... think it's more abhorrence than apologist inclinations, LS. Maybe lack of exposure (or at least lack of recognition of exposure, which amounts to the same thing) to the violent side of racist ideology. Lot of people, especially when viscerally exposed to something like this for the first time, are shocked enough by it they can't really wrap their head around it. Especially if they've been around folks that are... well, you probably know the sort -- best people in the world, so long as you're not <insert race>. It's incredibly goddamn jarring the first time you notice the people around you are actually not far off from being murderous assholes. The mind recoils. Doesn't want to accept it, etc., etc. Makes you want to think that the beliefs the people you otherwise respected couldn't lead to abhorrent acts such as the one in question.

That's... it's not really a bad thing, exactly? Entirely, anyway. People who have that reaction to acts such as these are ones who probably aren't going to perpetrate them, and are fairly likely to spread that kind of reaction to those around them. Naiveté, perhaps, but sorta' a good one, so long as it doesn't blind the person to the existence of what causes acts like these. Which it does have an unfortunate tendency to, as you've kinda' noted, LS, pointing out the similarities to apologist bullshit.

Unfortunately, violence against groups that have been painted as the degenerate Other is entirely too human, too sane, and too normal... there's consequences to professing beliefs

Probably gospel?

E: Specifically, it's being used to denote the difference between, say, John the figure and the text that is the Gospel According to John. The passage is consistent about that use, anyway.

... I think the best part of that mini-rant is that assuming that people doing stupid things are stupid is, itself, quite stupid :V

Differing capability in varying fields, environmental factors that may be temporarily causing poorly thought out actions by an otherwise capable person... the list just kinda' goes on. There's a lot of reasons a person who is not stupid may be acting stupidly. Assuming someone's stupid is a recipe for an unfortunate surprise...

Books totally have smells, especially the older ones. There's a particular scent of must that comes with a collection of books that is indeed both very compelling and quite unique.

In retrospect, I wonder if they have old book smelling candles...

E: They do! Not spending 16 bucks plus shipping for one. But they exist!

I find books easier to read than words on a screen. Could be the whole contrast thing though.

F.lux (or an equivalent) and changing the background/text color helps mitigate that tremendously. After that, it's just a matter of getting used to it.

Personally, I'm long past the point that it's easier for me to read on a computer, due pretty close to entirely to the zoom feature and the mentioned color alterations. Large text at will with a more pleasing color contrast, me hearty. Black text on a white background, even the faded, yellowish white that books end up being with time, is one of the worse color contrasts for reading, imo. Just reversed is much more soothing, and a less strident contrast even more so. I use a grey text on dark blue background, m'self.

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And yeah, Tack, the cost thing is why the genuinely tremendous works are probably going to be limited to commercially unpublished/unpublishable works -- or, at the very least, digital -- because of the lack of fiscal motivation. Without that incentive to break things up or push out shorter works, stuff can get as large as the author wants it to. Alternate publishing methods -- see stuff like Worm, web serials in general-- are another potential bypass to that.

And aye, I'd probably have a library, too, because despite the fact I read almost entirely on the computer these days, I still have and fully intend to maintain a physical collection. I like physical books, they're just considerably less convenient for me at this point, especially since I was gifted an e-book reader. Portability, ease of reading, largely cost (due to the mountains of (legal, even!) free material)... it's all good stuff from here on out, digital wise.

Book, probably not -- simple physics means books over a certain size are incredibly difficult to bind and ridiculously clumsy to use regardless -- but other formats... that's a different thing. I'm pretty sure there's at least one or two fanfics that are listed as over 2 million words for a single work (there's several that's over 1m), and who knows how many original works published online of similar or greater length... a digital format lends itself much better to that sort of endeavor.

Basically, I wouldn't say "Nobody." At best, nobody yet. And I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find a piece that the author considers singular that's over 3-4 million words. If there's not now, give it another decade. Digital publishing still hasn't been around all that long. It'll come.

I raise you Robert Jordan's 'Wheel of Time'.
15 books for a total of ~12,000 pages.

Around 3.3 million words, checking on it. Largest book's less than 400k, though. I'll give this much, I can't recall any singular fanfics that match the entire series on their own, of the top of my head. There's definitely a few series of fanfics that can, but not solo acts. It's very possible there's one matching it I'm not aware of, though. The world of fanfiction can be a terrifying place.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen stuff actually tops WoT by about 20k words, though :V