xzar_monty

Would you say that book 6 is, in general, at the same level with book 1? If not, would you say that there's a specific spot where the quality starts to get worse? I'm curious about this because it seems to me that very few books that eventually turn into series can maintain their quality. For the record, I have only read book 1 and liked it, but not enough to continue with book 2.

Incidentally, this is not a new phenomenon. Medically / psychologically, it is profoundly disturbing. For a historical example, read Don Quixote, the first part of which was published in 1605. It is a brilliant study of a person who is neither stupid nor uneducated but who happens to possess a black spot in his thinking that no amount of fact or logical reasoning can cure. And yes, of course I know Don Quixote is a fictional character -- but the phenomenon is very real, and Cervantes treats it magnificently well.

Lamentable, yes, but I would argue that it was not a sign of the times. The history of the press is not a particularly edifying subject to study. Oh and @BruceVC: I rarely visit the CNN website and never watch it, so I can't comment on that at all. The BBC I am not especially suspicious about, but it does have its share of even fairly recent crises, so it's not as if it's a paragon of journalism. (And I never watch the BBC, either.)

Our equivalent of the BBC is decent enough most of the time, and our biggest newspaper isn't too bad. I have worked in the printed press, starting from the 1980s, and have, in my view, a decent combination of trust in and scepticism of it.

There can be a whole lot of reasons, and you have one good answer to your question right above this post. Your question implies that "one war" and "another war" are comparable, but it isn't necessarily so: there is a potential fault in the comparison you are making. Untrustworthy sources aren't always untrustworthy, either. I would not trust, say, the Daily Mail, but if I happened to walk past a newsstand and Daily Mail was reporting that the Pope is dead, I would believe it. You can't really overstate the importance of context.

Your question is unanswerable because it relies on the premise that "most people will believe what comes from Hamas but question what we hear from Ukraine" which is completely unproven. You will have to demonstrate the veracity of that premise first, until then the question itself makes no sense. What is "most people"? Most people where? In the world? Most, by definition, is over 50%, so do you mean it has been demonstrated that over 4 billion people believe and question things according to what you just typed there? I don't mean to deliberately punch holes in what you're doing, but you really do have to ask better questions.

You're not wrong as such, but I would qualify that last sentence by adding "English-speaking" right before the word "media". Or, possibly, "international" -- although the word international is somewhat nebulous in this context. But anyway, not all media, not in all countries. Israel's atrocities do get plenty of coverage around here, for instance.

Israel really, really, really does not want the world to become any more aware of its horrendous brutality than it already is. I am not all that well aware of the history of Hamas, in terms of its publicity policies, but I would assume that it does not agree with the idea that any publicity is good publicity, quite the contrary.

A tiny bit of pointing out the obvious there, in that the relevant technology has either been non-existent or not in use in nearly all previous conflicts. You can expect there to be even more coverage of that kind in future wars. (This reminds me of how the sculpting of the finish line photo of the 100 meters dash in the 40BC Olympics was only finished in 37BC, so the two fastest guys really had to wait to find out who won.)

Yesterday I made Baingan Bharta (with peas) for the first time, and it turned out much, much better than I'd expected. I highly recommend this to anyone who likes cooking, as it's not all that difficult if you've got at least some experience of cooking in general, and do not get jittery about roasting eggplants.

I've got hardly any DVDs but more than hundreds of CDs, I have to say. And while at work in my office I listen to them practically every day, although it's nothing but classical these days, basically -- so an awful lot of stuff is just lying around, quite literally collecting dust. Speaking of dust: Tori Amos was superb at her best. I remember weeping like crazy upon hearing this for the first time. It was just so beautiful. Her lyrics rarely add up to a coherent whole, but there are some masterful lines -- here she's brilliantly evoking memories and the sense of transient but life-transforming moments, whatever they may be for the listener.

How wonderful that someone really did it! I mean, wonderful in the context of famous metaphors becoming a kind of reality, not in the context of energy politics.

A funny (to me) observation: reading Don Quixote today, it's impossible not to notice the parallel between Don Quixote and modern conspiracy theorists. Don Quixote is neither stupid nor uneducated, it's just that he has a huge flaw in his thinking when it comes to the question of chivalry, and no one can help him see the problem, no matter how they try. That's precisely how it is with conspiracy theorists, it's just that the flaw happens to be in different "places" in their mind.

Uh-oh. The alleged terrorists have appeared in Russian court in a not very good state at all. A surprise, that. (I'm saying alleged because there is no doubt that Russia will always find someone to convict if it deems the crime serious enough. Whether these people are indeed guilty is another matter. And something like the murder of Politkovskaya obviously isn't serious enough, or serious at all.)

I was going to say essentially the same thing. I can't think of any reason to pay any attention to something like the Codex at all, and even to comment upon is a waste of time (and yes, I do recognize that this comment, by extension, is a similar waste of time).

I suppose the bottom line is that no matter who did it it, Ukraine is going to get the blame and the revenge, as far as Russia is concerned. I can't see how it could be any other way. (And yes, it almost certainly was islamists by whatever name they wish to be called.) As much as what happened was ISIS' modus operandi, blaming Ukraine is Russia's.

Btw, I have no idea whether there was much discussion about this here at the time, and I have no desire to re-ignite it if there was, but it has to be said that some of the writing on this one was just ghastly. I did play it once, though, and it was enjoyable enough despite all the flaws in the writing department.

By the way, here's a concrete example of what "bad translation" can look like, and one I think just about everyone on the forum can relate to: In the Lord of the Rings, the river Anduin is also known as "the Great River". Now, in the Spanish translation of the book, "the Great River" is rendered as "el Rio Grande", which is technically correct but actually problematic, in my view, given that there's a river known by the same name flowing between the US and Mexico (even if it's also known as Rio Bravo). I am firmly of the opinion that the Spanish translator probably should have considered another adjective, which the Spanish language has plenty of. Even if you theoretically don't have to consider any facts outside the book proper when doing your translation, there are cases where you should, and I would argue that this is one of them. I mean, reading LotR in Spanish, your mind may well be taken to the wrong thing every time "el Rio Grande" is mentioned.

Ok, fair enough. I don't have this myself but I see where you're coming from and it's a valid point. (I never set out to memorize stuff, but my memory happens to work in such a way that I can quote more literature by heart that anyone would ever want to listen to -- not all of it correctly, mind you, so it's not as if my memory is eidetic.)

In UK English, it's unequivocally not "Doon" and can be either dju:n or dʒu:n, the latter essentially being a homophone with June. In North American English, it can be either "Doon" or dju:n. Bear in mind that this pertains to the language as it's described in written sources, and as everyone knows, by the time language gets described in written sources, it has already changed.

I always find this argument slightly peculiar, if indeed the only complaint is size. If someone is a reader of books or a player of games, it doesn't seem relevant to me to worry about length / size, if you're going to spend that time reading / playing anyway. If the books or the games are bad then by all means toss them aside, that's what I also do, but if not, where's the problem? Btw, I'm not sure about this but isn't BG2, for instance, bigger than Deadfire? I bring it up because you mention DD, so you're likely to have played that.

The most pertinent part of Ferrante's analysis was that the US government has, without fail, been greedy and inept precisely the way the mafia wants. Not once has it been different.

Thank you for this clarification, and for your post in general. As far as rackets as a whole are concerned, I was delighted by something I read in a new history of the mafia by Louis Ferrante, an ex-mobster. He pointed out that the mafia is not and has never been interested in overthrowing any governments; indeed, the mob relies on a "capitalist system with a democratically elected and stable but greedy and inept government; and in this the US has never been a disappointment to the mafia". Cruel but apt, I would say.

I don't know Serbian so I can't say anything specific, but extremely bad translations do exist, even for famous books. For example, the first Swedish translation of the Lord of the Rings was so poor that the Tolkien estate expressly forbid the same folks from translating The Silmarillion. A translation can be extremely bad (in faithfulness to the original) even if the result reads well as a book, as such.

I read it recently out of curiosity aroused by the movie, and it was interesting to note, yet again, how marvelously a science fiction book often begins and how unsatisfactory the ending is, by comparison. This is very common in both sci-fi and fantasy, in my view. (Neither the Lord of the Rings nor the Earthsea stories suffer from it, but they're so good(*) that they essentially transcend genre anyway.) Sometimes in "horror" as well, like in Stephen King's Under the Dome, which remains a really good story despite the completely ridiculous ending (but to be fair to King, he put himself in an impossible situation to begin with.) (*) Notwithstanding Tolkien's serious problems in various areas, well established and often talked about.