All the Literature and Reading Stuff...

[the_dog_days]

 

"New" J.R.R. Tolkien book: https://www.amazon.com/Beren-Lúthien-J-R-R-Tolkien-ebook/dp/B01MG2HOWD/

 

Article on it: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-40109396

Did they just cut the story from the the Silmarillion or is there unreleased material there?

Yes, it was originally from the Silmarillion. Good eye.

[Bartimaeus]

Yes, from my own guess, and based on what I'm reading in the foreword of the book, this is basically a reframing of the story as to separate it from the Simillarion, and to make it easier to follow.

 

On a side-note, I just remembered that I don't like Christopher Tolkien's writing:

 

[Guard Dog]

What is is about sons following up on their fathers work? It never goes well. Brian Herbert took the mess his father made of Dune following God Emperor and made a bigger mess with sequels and prequels. Christopher Tolkien has made a living off his father's pen. Even Jeff Sharra, who isn't a bad writer himself, still isn't a patch on his old man Micheal Sharra as he finished his father's civil war series. 

 

Anyway I'm reading this:

 

One of my favorite novels and movies is True Grit. I actually like the 2012 remake better than John Wayne's 1969 version (sorry Duke) because it is more true to the book. I was reading about the author Charles Portis and I found out the charterer Rooster Cogburn was based on a real man named Franklin Cogburn. Although he wasn't a lawman of any sort he did in fact do some of the things Portis attributed to his character. Not the least of which was the 4 on 1 shootout at climax of the book and both movies.

[Tale]

I just found out Deep Ellum is having a lit hop tomorrow. I assume I'm the only Dallas area Obsidianite?

 

It's a literary bar crawl. I'm struggling to guess at what that means beyond the fact that a bunch of local poets will be attending. But it sounds worth checking out. https://www.facebook.com/events/129649400912879/

[Bartimaeus]

What is is about sons following up on their fathers work? It never goes well. Brian Herbert took the mess his father made of Dune following God Emperor and made a bigger mess with sequels and prequels. Christopher Tolkien has made a living off his father's pen. Even Jeff Sharra, who isn't a bad writer himself, still isn't a patch on his old man Micheal Sharra as he finished his father's civil war series.

 

Will anyone take over after Christopher, I wonder? The bloke is in his 90s now, after all...

Edited June 2, 2017 by Bartimaeus

[Tale]

Is it wrong to hope not? 

[Bartimaeus]

Not at all. Someone will retain the rights, however, and no doubt someone will want to bring it back somewhere down the line, whether in writing or in film.

[the_dog_days]

@Guard Dog: I understand perfectly why the estate would want to add to the original creator's IP. It's only been in the last few decades that hitting the creative jackpot and can make a fortune in a single lifetime has become possible. Traditionally, an IP was a super long term investment so adding new titles after the author dies in like feeding the trust fund. This sounds derogatory but it makes perfect sense if you look at it from the perspective of a family who inherited little more from the author than the IP.

[Guard Dog]

@Guard Dog: I understand perfectly why the estate would want to add to the original creator's IP. It's only been in the last few decades that hitting the creative jackpot and can make a fortune in a single lifetime has become possible. Traditionally, an IP was a super long term investment so adding new titles after the author dies in like feeding the trust fund. This sounds derogatory but it makes perfect sense if you look at it from the perspective of a family who inherited little more from the author than the IP.

Oh I know why it was done. my complaint is it wasn't done well. In the three examples I mentioned the sons are far below the ability of their fathers.

 

Edit: OK, that's not really fair. Jeff Shaara is a pretty good writer in his own right. Brian Hebert though? No. Not even

Edited June 2, 2017 by Guard Dog

[the_dog_days]

I don't believe either Brian Herbert or Christopher Tolkien have ever written a book on their own. Both act as 'creative leads', to borrow a gaming development phrase, rather than writers. I imagine it's hard to find a decent author who won't try to take over the project and make it their own.

[Guard Dog]

I don't believe either Brian Herbert or Christopher Tolkien have ever written a book on their own. Both act as 'creative leads', to borrow a gaming development phrase, rather than writers. I imagine it's hard to find a decent author who won't try to take over the project and make it their own.

I didn't know that. Well, I knew Tolkien's son has really been editing and cleaning up things his JRR was tinkering with but had never finished. He may have filled in some gaps but 90% of the work was JRR Tolkien's I believe. I didn't know Brian Hebert wasn't the sole writer of all the Dune prequels and expanded backstory stuff.

[Malcador]

Brian finally got his revenge on his dad for liking the books more than him.

[Bartimaeus]

The worst example of a child "taking over" for one of their parents, though, I'd think would have to be Todd McCaffrey and the Pern series. His mother, Anne McCaffrey, wrote this fun little coming-of-age sci-fi book series, and he writes this weird...like metrosexual fan-fiction-esque subseries about a young teenage girl, taking place somewhere else in the timeline. It was really strange and, I have to say, kind of gross. I've read some of Christopher Tolkien's work, and I've read some of Brian Herbert's work, and I don't think either can be said to be as bad as Todd McCaffrey's.

Edited June 2, 2017 by Bartimaeus

[Raithe]

Hilary Mantel - Women writers must stop falsely empowering female characters in history

[Gromnir]

can't find our copy of as i lay dying. is a handful o' books we read 'bout once per year, and such works is typical annotated by Gromnir to a significant degree.  once we wear out a volume, it is relegated to a box where we may retrieve if needs be.  for instance, in the attic we got eight volumes of dubliners which form an unbroken line going back to our university days.  got similar for shakespeare's richard iii, hemingway's complete short stories and the aforementioned, as i lay dying.  

 

have now spent many hours over the last few days attempting to find our current iteration o' faulkner's novel. might be reaching the terminus o' hope.  

 

other folks got works they reread frequent?  

 

HA! Good Fun!

[Guard Dog]

My copy of The Complete Jack London never spends more than a few months without me picking it up. Even though I've read every story and novel in it multiple times. Walden is also one I come back to. Probably my favorite book is one I read as a kid, Beautiful Joe by Marshall Saunders. It was out of print for a long time but I found a sixty year old copy at a used book store a long time ago. I've re-read that one several times. It's available in e-book platforms now. I guess the day will come soon that nothing will ever be out of print again. That's not a bad thing.

[the_dog_days]

Reading the Other Lands second book in the Acacia trilogy. Starting to feel reading them back to back wasn't a great idea because some of the author's writing quirks are beginning to irk me. Think I'll take a break and come back to it when I'm in a better mindset for it.

[Guard Dog]

I started reading this last night:

 

 

It's all about Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson and the team that created D&D back in the '70s and the cultural phenom it became. Both good and bad. 

[Gromnir]

I started reading this last night:

 

image

 

It's all about Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson and the team that created D&D back in the '70s and the cultural phenom it became. Both good and bad. 

many o' the original d&d icons fell on hard times in the 90s and beyond. david trampier being a widely publicized case. feels wrong to shrug of as the human condition. c'est la vie? no. just no.

[Guard Dog]

 

I started reading this last night:

 

image

 

It's all about Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson and the team that created D&D back in the '70s and the cultural phenom it became. Both good and bad. 

many o' the original d&d icons fell on hard times in the 90s and beyond. david trampier being a widely publicized case. feels wrong to shrug of as the human condition. c'est la vie? no. just no.

 

I didn't know that. I did know they lost control over their creation.

[Azdeus]

Granted, it isn't literature, but since you're on the subject, I really liked the interview Matt Chat had with David Wesely on D&D

[Guard Dog]

Now reading this:

 

 

So far it's ok. It's got a little Planescape thing going. I'm not a fan of fantasy writing because it's usually so awful. This one isn't making me a bigger fan but it's far from the worst I've ever read. The setting is holding my interest. We'll see how it goes from here.

 

Also reading this:

 

 

I just started it during my lunch break today.

[Raithe]

Life in Shadows. A set of short stories by Elliot Kay.

 

It comes with the label:

 

Warning: Life in Shadows contains explicit violence, extended explicit sex scenes, explicit karaoke, profanity, rampant nudity, assault, murder, breaking and entering, belligerent urban wildlife, premeditated sexual promiscuity, vehicular assault, reckless endangerment, attempted kidnapping, attempted robbery, attempted ritual demonic possession, blatant violation of state regulations of adult entertainment, punching, kicking, cutting, stabbing, shooting, hair-pulling, name-calling, ****-shaming, cheap Halloween costumes, strippers, hipsters, poseurs, police, personal calls while on duty, arson, destruction of private property, lingerie, war criminals, break-up text messaging, lesbian demon seduction, accusations of Mary Suedom, poor workplace morale, premarital sex, nude calisthenics, immolation, false identification, ruthless exploitation of personal beauty, unsafe crowd control standards, vertigo, destruction of evidence, elitism, racism (don’t worry, he dies), open relationships, workplace scapegoating, adult use of plumbing implements, fantasy depictions of witchcraft and paganism, at least one reincarnated ancient European warlord, and a girl-on-girl grenade fight.

All characters are over the age of 18, except the aforementioned reincarnation of an ancient European warlord. That gets sketchy.

[Raithe]

For those people across the Atlantic, this might be one worth a considered check up..

 

Millions got free amazon credits from an apple lawsuit and it expires this following Saturday

 

 

A year ago, Apple settled a giant class-action lawsuit (details below). The result was that millions of Americans got free credits in their accounts at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or other e-book retailers. If you're an American who is reading this article and you've bought e-books in the past, there's a very good chance that you were included.

The catch? If they haven't been used, all of these credits expire this Saturday at midnight Pacific time. So you'll want to log in now and see if you have money waiting for you that will otherwise disappear in a matter of days.

 

Below you'll find: (a) how to check your balance, (b) background on this whole affair, and © a bit more on an extra tactic I discovered that meant I was able to more than double the credit I had waiting for me. (Although, as you'll see, I almost lost it twice!)

How to check your balance

Maybe you already knew that you had a credit, and you're sure that you've already spent it. If so, fantastic--go read this instead. But if you want to check your account on Amazon to be sure, here's what to do--along with an extra key step that will seem obvious, but only in retrospect.

1. Go to this page on Amazon. You'll find a page entitled "Information for 2016 Apple eBooks Antitrust Settlement."
2. If you're not signed in already, you'll be prompted to do so.
3. Once you're signed in, if you were awarded credits, you'll see a display that provides your "Total Credit," along with "Unused Credit" and "Expiry Date." The Expiry Date should be June 24, 2017, in almost all cases.
4. Very important final step: Most people have multiple email addresses, so it's crucial to log out of your account, and then try to log back in using any other email address you might have been using between 2010 and 2012. Amazon wants you to use these credits--it's a purchase that Apple is paying for, after all--but it can't necessarily tie accounts together, and let you know if there's money waiting for you in an account you don't often use.

Adding that last step more than doubled my credit, solely because I'd forgotten that back in 2010 and 2011, I often used another email address to make purchases at Amazon.

For reasons you'll see in the next section, while Amazon is the most important retailer to check, it's possible you could have a credit with any retailer who sold e-books in the first half of this decade. I couldn't find a similar one-stop page on Barnes & Noble, for example, but this page gives you more information on how it calculated credits, and you should simply be able to log into your account to see if you still have money waiting for you.

Background on the whole case

All of this goes back to 2009. Amazon's Kindle had 90 percent of the e-book market, and Apple was trying to break in. Steve Jobs was still CEO, and he sent executives to try to work out a deal with some of the biggest New York publishers.

Basically, Apple offered to let publishers set their own prices on Apple's platform, and agreed to take only a 30 percent cut. But Apple also required that the publishers agree not to sell to any rival (like say, Amazon or Barnes & Noble) for less. Overnight, some e-books that had been selling for $9.99 on Amazon rose to $12.99 or $14.99.

(As an aside, I paid special attention to this because one of my books, The Intelligent Entrepreneur, which came out in 2010, was affected by it. That experience is part of why I started writing e-books like How to Raise Successful Kids, and giving them away for free.)

Ultimately, the U.S. Department of Justice got involved, and there was a big lawsuit. In the end, Apple agreed to pay $400 million in total to "millions" of people who bought e-books at inflated prices. These were the biggest publishers, and a vast majority of books were sold on Amazon, so the odds are good that if you bought any big, best-selling book between the middle of 2010 and 2012, you were probably part of the lawsuit.

The extra tip

A year ago, I wrote about this settlement when it first came out, and when people started to get their credits. But I also mentioned that I'd realized that I had a second email account with Amazon back at the start of this decade.

 

Hence my zealotry on this idea: My first credit was $17.92; when I logged in under the second (older) email, I had another $21.17 waiting for me.

How's this for irony, though? Despite all that, I actually forgot about the second email address and the second credit until this past weekend, when Amazon helpfully sent me a message reminding me that it was there, and that it was going to expire soon.

 

One more little trick for you: My wife and I had decided we were going to finally break down and get an Amazon Echo, so I thought I'd use the $21.17 toward it. But then I realized that my second account--the one with the unused credit--wasn't signed up with Amazon Prime. Talk about a First World problem, but this meant if I wanted free shipping, my new Echo wouldn't arrive for about five days.

 

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to research how to merge two Amazon accounts, or at least transfer a credit from one account to another. Let me save you the trouble, in case you ever need to do this. There's no way to accomplish this online, but if you call Amazon Customer Service at 1-888-280-4331, they can do it for you.

For security, you'll need to have both email addresses, along with the first names listed on each account, and at least one address associated with it.

[SonicMage117]

My ever growing obsession Jules Verne..

 

Have you guys ever heard of him?