jamesbondsmith

Random question, but is anyone else kind of turned on when someone is better than you at something? It's not something that will make feelings miraculously appear, but if I'm already attracted to someone then finding out a talent seems to make it stronger. I could have proposed right then when someone played this in front of me years ago: Andy McKee - Drifting (youtube.com). It could be insane maths skill, being physically tough at martial arts or just having the guts to kick out dirtbags at a customer service job.

Currently going through The Rook by Daniel O'Malley. It's OK so far and appeals to my interest in mixing mundane and fantastic, but it's also glaringly obvious a hundred or so pages in who the villain is (or at least one of them). Which makes me think it's not them (or it will be a twist that the way too simple and obvious traitor is in fact the traitor).

After that, probably will go onto Will of the Many by James Islington. I really liked the Licanius trilogy and I've heard good things about this new book.

On 3/3/2024 at 6:56 AM, Through The Living Glass said:

Relationship advice thread? Nice!

...

Any advice for helping your best friend to know how much she's loved and valued after she's broken up with a toxic guy? A couple of other friends and I have been trying to help, but her sense of self-worth seems... not so great right now.

As the one who's been on the receiving end of advice, I would kind of nod and smile at people giving me the usual 'you'll find someone else, plenty of fish in the sea yada yada yada' stuff. If you're feeling low enough you can slide into the 'they don't really mean it' trap. Just try to make it not sound like the kind of thing you googled and spouted word for word. 

I personally avoid the 'plenty of fish' thing, and if I have to give advice (sometimes to myself) I phrase it as 'did you ever think you'd feel this way when you met them? Then what's to stop you from feeling this way about someone else if you let them go?'. 

Is she willing to hear about how toxic this guy was? As the old Bojack Horseman quote goes, when you look at the world through rose tinted glasses all the red flags just look like flags. 

21 hours ago, Just-A-Stick said:

*sigh*

Guys, I'm trying to talk to this guy, and I think he just doesn't care that much...

He kinda just ghosts a lot and I feel like I have to carry the convo by myself, and everything feels tight and awkward...  

It's almost stressful, cause I don't know how to act anymore...?

Help me plz o-O

I'd like to give advice going both directions, if you don't mind.

Firstly, I've been in the position of being somewhat cold towards someone I was into. It could be due to nerves, not feeling like you're worthy of them, or having baggage to deal with before you're ready to pursue them. Whether you want to pursue something with them under those circumstances is up to you. 

Alternatively, as I put in an above post, you'll have a rough time if you expect rules not to apply to you. If someone is cold, it could be because they're actually into you but they aren't sure how to go about it, or it could be because they aren't interested.

I know it probably gets repeated, but the best course of action is to be brave and ask bluntly. Guys especially aren't good at picking up hints (I'm pretty sure I've talked myself out of things that could have been hints because of previous experiences). Besides, a good relationship requires honesty.

Also, here's a meme:

2 minutes ago, AonEne said:

I don't think you're blowing it out of proportion, it's not cool to out people without their knowledge/if they're not okay with it. Even if A is queer themself, they should not have done that (and why are they going down a list telling you what everyone is anyway? what even is the point of that??). 

I can't recall exactly how that came up, I think it may have been a comment on hiring practices? The previous boss of that team had hired many people of similar ethnicity to them (including me), and A seemed to have hired a lot of queer people?

58 minutes ago, shortcake said:

okay, i think that this boss person (A) didn't have the right to go around and talk about who is queer and who is not, especially without asking for consent from the person, which is what i presume what had happened here. i'm not sure if this is the advice you were necessarily looking for, but i don't think this person had the right to go and out all of those people, including you

(let me know if this doesn't make sense, i may have read this wrong)

Thanks, I was worried that as a 'potential queer newbie' for lack of a better term I was taking it too far.

As for consent, I don't know if there was or wasn't for the others (I can't exactly ask 'hey, did you tell A if it's ok to tell me that you're queer' if they've never said so to me in the first place, and some of them still haven't months after that conversation. Not certain they even know I know). In my case I didn't explicitly say 'don't tell anyone', but I would have thought that 'I've never actually said that out loud' (which I believe were my exact words) would have implied it.

Necroing my thread (Lost Metal Spoilers)

81) Telling people of Wayne's heroic sacrifice in the ettmetal explosion is acceptable. Telling them it was actually because he let out a MASSIVE fart into a candle is not.

82) Even if it's a legacy he would really love.

83) Plans to defeat major foes of the cosmere must involve more than holding Chiri-Chiri up at them and saying 'she'll eat your investiture for breakfast'.

Can I please get some perspective on an issue I'm facing? I'm not sure if I'm blowing it out of proportion as people I talk to IRL don't seem to have much of an issue with it. Sorry if it's a bit hard to keep track of, I'm trying to keep things vague, as I'm aware this is a public forum but I also don't really have anywhere anonymous to talk about it that won't potentially have repercussions. Spoilered largely for length

I identify more with Windrunners and Bondsmiths, but literally every time I do the test I get Truthwatcher. I don't get it.

I want to put this in my group chats but I don't want people to get worried

The Dinosaur Lords series will probably be unfinished, as the author died partway through and I haven't seen anything about anyone taking it over. I've bought the first book but haven't read it yet as my TBR is piling higher and higher.

Possibly best summed up by this quote from this review: Dinosaur Lords has medieval knights riding dinosaurs into battle. Your decision to read the book will inevitably be based not on this or any other review but on precisely how excited you feel by the phrase “medieval knights ride dinosaurs into battle.”

As for research, there's a lot of people (admittedly anecdotal) who claim that ASOIAF or Kingkiller are the reason they don't start an unfinished series, which would obviously affect newer authors trying to get series published. Are you doing qualitative or quantitative research? For the latter I can't help as I have no idea where you'd find stats for this sort of thing outside of interviewing publishers. If you're doing qualitative research could you spin the project as focusing on audience reception? I did my honours thesis on the Hunger Games and I could use memes and news articles about fans recreating elements of the games because that section focused on audience reception and whether the audience paid attention to the messages (spoiler alert: it's really hard to tell when the whole point of media analysis is how to interpret the text).

Edit: this link is obviously pretty biased (but depending on your focus if you acknowledge that fact then it may still be a primary source) but this talks about how the Kingkiller Chronicles issue has affected others 

As one, I concur that guys can be useless at picking up hints (whether intentionally or not) and it's best to be direct. I know that can be terrifying but many of the most worthwhile things in life are.

At the same time, think through your actions and figure out if they might be giving off unintentional hints (positively or negatively). I severely misinterpreted what I thought were hints when I was younger and I'm only at the tail end of working through all that now years later.

So basically, be brave and be smart.

Just found this banger (was already a fan of Little Monster by the same band). 

Any other recommendations for tasty riffs (preferably not the ones everyone knows like ACDC or Led Zep).

Although speaking of ACDC, this is one people don't seem to talk about much and it's one of my favourite tracks by the band 

Been playing Baldurs Gate 3 and I'm hitting the same wall I have with other RPGs in that there's so many options that I'm paralysed with indecision (currently have Skyrim, Witcher 3 and Mass Effect playthroughs stalled for the same reason).

I just finished Deathloop a couple of weeks ago, and while it scratches the itch of 'I don't wanna deal with narrative consequences' above, I was a little disappointed that I completed the Golden Loop in one go once I figured it out (although I did grind to get all weapons/powers and I spent a good deal of time running away from fights screaming on the penultimate level). Biding my time until Judas/System Shock Remake/Bioshock 4 arrive for my immersive sim fix.

Probably going to try to finish off the Valkyries in the first Norse God of War if the RPG paralysis keeps hitting me.

One thing to maybe think of is the fact that Radiants are supposed to automatically become 4th Dahn, but the fact that darkeyed people can become lighteyed hasn't led to a breakdown of the system. They've simply been slotted into the lighteyed group while the rest of the darkeyes are left where they are. Or at least it's something I think is interesting. It's pretty much queue-jumping when it could have been a cultural turning point.

I feel like I made this point before, but I can't find it in my post history so it might have been in some other forum.

Was anyone else surprised to find out Brandon Sanderson was religious? I got through the entirety of the first Mistborn Trilogy and Reckoners, two books into Stormlight and I think I'd also read both Elantris and Warbreaker before discovering this, and I genuinely thought he disliked religion. So many characters use religion to justify either pointless/petty (e.g. Vorinism defining what you can eat by gender roles and denying women the use of a hand, Mistborn going full Life of Brian with the Church of the Survivor) or outright heinous things (Dilaf's attempted genocide against Elantris, the brutalities of the lighteyes/darkeyes system or the Lord Ruler's society) that I thought he was making a His Dark Materials type point about religion. And let's not forget the ardentia literally making an attempt at world domination in the backstory of the Stormlight Archive and the various examples of religious texts and doctrine being used to mislead people or refuse to believe what is going on.

Perth here.

In other tips, sometimes the hardest thing is taking your own advice

Super random question to resurrect the thread, but what would you think it means if someone described you as Baymax (the robot from Big Hero 6)?

More than one person has directly or indirectly called me that lately, and I'm not sure what to think about it.

If someone else can offer advice, this is something that took me far too long to realise.

Holding onto someone in the hopes their feelings will change isn't fair on anyone involved. They deserve people in their lives without ulterior motives and you deserve the chance to find someone who wants you back.

It sounds romantic to hold on and suffer in silence, but every day it doesn't work is a day your heart gets stomped on. Sometimes there are exceptions but expecting rules of life to not apply to you will lead to a rough time.

Anyone else dealing with the inevitable drifting apart of friends?

Uni friends tapered off after graduation, several of them either moved across the country or lived there to begin with and even a best friend of years is now not replying (although wanting more out of it probably contributed to that).

I have a few friends still, but work, relationships and growing families make trying to catch up with them like herding cats.

3 hours ago, Cruciatus_heart said:

I made Arrabbiata pasta for dinner today

With penne? On a tray?

Suzy Eddie Izzard- Death Star Canteen - YouTube

I spent about 4-5 hours last night making a somewhat inauthentic bolognese sauce (I added garlic! ). 

I've been trying to get alla gricia and cacio e pepe down. I think I can get alla gricia reliably, but my cacio e pepe ends up either too runny or clumpy.

@MandamonThanks for your feedback.

I definitely didn't intend to imply the things you picked up on, but I'm glad that things were a little clearer once the reveal happened. Now I guess I need to straddle the line of foreshadowing/revealing too early. Any tips?

For context,

Edit: I wanted to apologize for anyone I may have upset with the stuff the others had picked up on.

Thanks. I've got about 1500 words and a couple of months to work with, but I should be able to incorporate some of your feedback.

I hadn't considered the disability angle, but I was definitely going for the 'self-imposed isolation' angle.

Also just nitpicking but it's less supernatural/magic and more X-men style superpowers, if that might affect the way it comes across?

Edit: Actually I kind of had meant for the disability angle as a red herring, before it reveals his abilities, but I hadn't fully considered that it might be a touchy subject. I'll have to rejig that part in some way.

Sorry I haven't kept up with the previous installments of this, I can jump in blind if you don't mind. Please ignore or correct if some of these points would have been answered in the rest of the prose.

"Not my most alert" feels a little awkward. Maybe 'I'm not at my most alert' or something similar. Is it an Irish phrase? I'm assuming this is set in Ireland or at very least inspired by Ireland with the character names, or are they more for a 'celtic fae' vibe? The use of 'mom' is confusing the origin a little.

N is talking about texting his mum, but if he's fae and F is having phone troubles why isn't N?

I like how you're keeping the language in the dialogue closer to what might be actually spoken than written, which is a pet peeve of mine. I think you might be able to get a little more descriptive and delve into a little more of an internal monologue in the non-dialogue parts, but the fact you're using first-person narration could potentially limit you to the same issues that believable dialogue has.