Rob’s Comments (group member since Jul 06, 2012)

Rob’s comments from the The Sword and Laser group.

Holy Crap! After four years of my whining and cajoling you guys finally caved and voted Theft of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan the March Madness 2019 winner!

For anyone who does audio, I HIGHLY recommend that. Tim Gerard Reynolds is fantastic and has since become one of my favorite narrators.

Theft of Swords is actually an omnibus of 2 different novels The Crown Conspiracy and Avempartha

The first 4 stories (2 omnibuses) can be read pretty stand alone. They kind of follow the TV syndication concept where you can drop into any book and not be too lost, but does build up a larger story over the series.

The final 2 however I found myself needing to read together, and it's that 3rd omnibus Heir of Novron that led to me nominating this book every year.

After the first 6 (3 omnibuses) he's published four more stand alone prequels, and is currently in the middle of another series set in the far past of the series.

So if like me you fall in love with Royce and Hadrian there is a lot more to consume, but if you don't you can just read 1 or 2 of the stories in this book and be done.

Thank you, and I hope enough of you enjoy it/don't hate me after!

Tassie Dave wrote: "Interesting stat. Even though we get dozens of books nominated each year, the last 3 winning (March Madness) books have been among the first 4 books nominated that year.

2017: Invisible Library th..."

So what you're saying is, get your nominations in early? I have no idea now what I'll nominate next year. Thankfully I have nearly a year to think about it..

I just hope the four year of build up for this book isn't too much. I partially nominated Theft of Swords because of home much I loved the later books.

I think it's a lot of fun, so hopefully most of the club enjoys it. Or doesn't hate me for it at least. >.<

Thanks everyone! Despite Dave thinking it innevitable, I had resigned myself to it losing again this year. Fifteen Lives had been winning pretty handily in the last few rounds.

As to why I wasn't in here celebrating sooner, I get up at 4am EST for work, so the polls always finish well after I get to bed, and I had to get ready this morning before all the upkeep stuff now when I should probably be working..

And Thanks Dave/Tom for letting me add the book the shelf/create the announcement thread!

I'll have stats etc in a bit. Much to do, even with the stuff I prepped ahead of time..

I probably won't hit 28% until tomorrow, so I'll have to wait to read your comment.

Silvana wrote: "Ahsoka is 0.99 USD https://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Ahso..."

You can add on the audio for another $9. Not cheap, but it's read by the voice actor from the show!

Robert wrote: "So...Dewey wins?"

Maybe I'll just have to go rogue and announceTheft of Swords as the winner no matter what..

Yet another step in my mad grab for power..

Do you guys have a meeting for early April? I plan to send the blast out tomorrow morning and I'd like to include it if there is one setup.

Thanks.

I've prepared the monthly email blast to be sent out in the morning with both books so I can just remove whichever one loses.

I liked Persepolis Rising but not nearly as much as Nemesis Games and Babylon's Ashes

It's 19 hours in audio, and I average about 2/day so I won't finish until sometime next week >.<

Anyone else reading this? I woke up and started downloading the audiobook right away, so I'm maybe an hour into it?


Spoiler for the opening few paragraphs only (and the previous books):
(view spoiler)[Killing Avasarala in the first line of the book, you bastards!

I guess after skipping so much time in the last book we're lucky she wasn't dead in the last book, but 2 books without my favorite character is the suck! Even if she apparently just dies of old age..
(hide spoiler)]

I don't remember hardly anything from Persepolis Rising. I need to go read a wiki or something.

Right before the final book I plan to finally redo books 1-8, but now I'm going off about an 18 month layoff since the last book and who knows how many other books in between, 150 or something?

Cool. Yeah I love his stuff, and I'm a huge fan of having a history that sprawls such a long period of time.

I think once he finishes releasing the First Empire books he's going to write another series that falls between that series and The Crown Tower, which is the first of several Riyria prequels he's written about the main characters of the Riyria books that start with Theft of Swords.

First Empire is supposed to be 6 books, all of which he's already written, but he always spends time polishing each book before they get released, so I'm not sure if he's started writing anything else yet.

In 2017 he took a break to kickstart, write and release the 4th Riyria prequel: The Disappearance of Winter's Daughter.

I'm not sure if he's planning to do that with a 5th prequel this year, especially now that he's back to self publishing the text. He is still limited to how quickly they can turn out the audio books though.

Age of Myth is a prequel of sorts to Theft of Swords. But it's more like ancient history such that by the time of theft of Swords all the details are wrong.

It's pretty cool, because it doesn't feel like retconning anything. The fourth book of that series just recently got Kickstarted and will be out for nonbackers later this year.

I will warn Age of Myth is much better written, especially when it comes to his female characters. They get better as Riyria goes on, but they are far better in his First Empire books.

When I tell people I read one book and listen to another "at the same time" I mean on the same day.

I know some people use that whipsersync with voice to swap between audio and text of the same book, but I always keep mine separate.

Really though, I just enjoyed the joke..

I remember that promo for TOR. I guess I never realized who did it.

I really enjoyed TOR, until I hit max level then I got bored. The leveling up stuff was pretty great. At least the first time. On a second character it mostly boring beyond the class specific questlines and cutscenes.

I'll have to remember to check out those other videos you linked later.

Revelation Space really turned me off of his writing. Everyone saw how much I liked Hamilton's Commonwealth stuff and told me I'd love Revelation Space..and I didn't..

I don't generally enjoy hard sci-fi. I prefer either space fantasy, space opera, or cyberpunk (or it's many derivations) to books that get into the mechanics of space flight and whatnot.

Also, I'm not a fan of short fiction in general, so I'll probably take a pass on that too. There are just too many other books/authors out there I want to read already.

Maybe I'll give him another shot eventually, but these episodes weren't enough for me to bump him up the list just yet.

So I finally got around to this last week, and I enjoyed it for the most part. I agree with the criticism of the Male gaze. Looking at the authors of the stories it was adapted, it's no wonder.

If they do another they really need to option some female/minority/lgbt authors instead of almost all white men. Even if they picked a bunch of my favorite authors (Scalzi, Hamilton, Kloos).

Some of the sex and nudity felt excessive/unnecessary to the plot. But then you could probably say that for some of the violence too, which as a lifelong anime fan I still really enjoy.

Personally I thought most of the animation was excellent. I loved the variation in styles. It reminded me a bit of the Animatrix.

I generally don't enjoy short fiction, so I was surprised I enjoyed so many of these. I gave all of the a 6/10 on imdb or better, because even the bad ones had me liking some aspect (often time the animation more than the story). I'd probably rate the first season as 7/10 overall, with a few of the episodes getting 9/10 but none a perfect 10.

I thought 3 Robots was the best of the Scalzi ones, but overall I felt like his were some of the weaker stories in the series. He's one of my favorite authors, but I guess I'm no a huge fan of his short fiction.

I was particularly surprised by how much I enjoyed both of the Alastair Reynolds stories, given how bored/frustrated reading Revelation Space. So maybe he's the opposite of Scalzi for me.

Both of the Marko Kloos stories were good, and felt very on brand for his Frontline books.

I really disliked The Witness until the ending. I agree with Trike about it trying to be "too clever" but I still thought it saved it from an otherwise uninteresting plot. Had it ended differently I probably would have given

My top 3 in terms of story were probably:

Beyond the Aquila Rift
Good Hunting
Lucky 13


Looking at the wiki, the animation I enjoyed the most seemed to be made by Blur Studios, although I probably liked the animation of Good Hunting the best, which was done by Red Dog Culture House, and part of why I rated that episode so high. Although as I mentioned I have a life-long love of anime so I tend to prefer that style to a more 3d/computer generated look and feel.

I've been reading Scott R. Kurtz comics for nearly 20 years now. I particularly like his newer Table Titans, but PvP is what first introduced me to him back in college.

Anyways, one of his characters is named "Book Cat". He never talks, he just always reading books around another character of his "Scratch Fury" much to Scratch's annoyance.

I thought today's comic would especially appeal to this group. I put it in spoiler tags just to minimize the load, etc.

(view spoiler)[ (hide spoiler)]

And if you're interested, this is the 3rd comic of this "arc": http://pvponline.com/comic/2019-03-21

Have you guys settled on a day/time/place? If so I'd like to include it in the Monthly message I plan to send Wednesday morning.

Thanks.

Kings of the Wyld is $2.99

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01KT7YTXW/