Bay 12 Games Forum

I mean... if you're at the point you're deliberately infecting people with a plague, you'll probably take what you can get :V

Here's hoping the surgeon is actually right! Good news if so, surgery sucks.

How does a place that includes Texas only have a few hours of energy reserves? I thought that was their thing.

By it being only Texas, from what I understand. Unlike more or less every other state on the mainland, Tex's power grid is apparently more or less entirely separated from any other state, so when shit went down they were just flat on their own.

Add in a history of notable mismanagement of their power grid (remember: Texas has been largely GOP controlled for forever now, and good governance just isn't their shtick, especially when it comes to infrastructure) and a situation involving significant power demands (heating due to an unusually intense winter storm in a state largely not equipped to deal with it) and, well.

They were not prepared for a significant disruption in the grid, and now the state's population is paying in lives -- half dozen dead last I saw a count, probably more since then

That. Nothing involved there really resembles the movies, anyway? There's not some kind of canon validity thing going on here.

Ruddy thing's probably actually an empire at war mod or somethin'

Eh... the caveat I'd put on going out and reading wuxia/xianxia is that, well. A lot of the major/main characters in those things are just colossally terrible people.

It's not a genre you want to wade into without being aware you're going to run into wildly unethical MCs and secondary characters -- mass murder/genocide and torture, rape and various sorts of mind control or slavery, murderously rampant theft, the list just kinda'... goes. There's a lot of interesting ideas (that, obviously enough, are particularly relevant to ACS), but as a genre there's a lot of literary sewage (even relative to general fiction) to swim through and some commonly repeating themes that are pretty damn nasty.

So, like. Tread careful if you're going to tread, and don't hesitate to just drop something like it's a poisoned cow patty and move on. One unabashedly good thing about punch magic fantasy stuff is there's oodles -- millions upon millions of words -- of the junk out there these days, even if they're not a major print genre outside their home countries. If you run into something unpleasant just go find something else.

Big (for us, anyway) paperback order starting to get processed today. Between romantic suspense and paranormal romance eating into the mystery and sci-fi/fantasy stuff, it's been like 50% romance novels by quantity so far (theoretically, it was supposed to be closer to 1/3rd).

So much smut. So much. Smut for literal days. Literally wall to wall bodice rippers (if we used the smaller wall, anyway).

Like, I knew it (popular romance fiction) was like this, but occasionally it really impacts, y'know? You encounter something that really emphasizes, yes, romance fiction really is just nigh unrelenting smut. This being one of the best selling genres really hammers it in that fanfiction isn't actually out of line with popular tastes when it comes to thirstiness.

...

... in other wtfry, what exactly is it with dukes and regency fiction/smut? Because they seem to be without any doubt the most prolific title dropped nobility for historical romance, seemingly by like a long shot, and I'm just wondering. Why? Is it just because its similarity with a different four letter D word or is there something else going on there?

Dumbo octopi are remarkably adorable, tho'. But yeah, actually going there, naaah.

No clue how I'd handle a sub, though... I'm fairly phobic of boats, specifically, due to childhood trauma, so getting to one at all would be a problem, but I'd probably be pretty okay if I could get past that hurdle? Dunno.

Caves have a similar "the surroundings may collapse and kill you" vibe but I've mostly hella' liked caves. The fairly open ones, anyway.