Commentary: Not super impressed with this one. Kipling's writing is awkward (ye is well out of date compared to the rest of his vocabulary), the story's not particularly exciting (Mowgli never really seems to be much threatened by Shere Khan), and he's probably the least developed character in his own story. 1/5 not worth its pages in the collection.
I'm grateful for all the people who have had the courage to stand up for the rights we (mostly) enjoy today.
Commentary: Apparently I need to read another one of these. Or I'm just a masochist. I think that's 3 "How to read..." articles and a whole book, plus the intros from the Gateway (which, btw, I recommend over pushing through all of How to Read a Book unless you have a good reason).
Woolf is more flexible than Adler. While he offers some options in the exact technique you go about reading and marking a book, he's fairly specific on what the questions you should ask, what you should mark, etc. Woolf opens as follows:
Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
"Squirting half the house to water a single rosebush," is a great metaphor for doing things carelessly. All of you should use it in your blogs this month, let's get it into the lexicon.
Both Adler and Woolf emphasize working with the author to understand their writing, and waiting to criticize until you've read and understand, though both agree criticism is an important part of reading (Woolf is more forceful here). We often talk about how good writers need to read a lot, but I think Woolf is the first person I've read recommending that a reader try writing to get an idea of the process.
I don't know how I feel about her contention that most non-fiction isn't art. Is a portrait or a landscape of a real thing not art, but fantasy art is?
I think I'm getting close to the part of my classics journey where she talks about starting to find books that relate to our tastes in other books. I was thinking about doing either the full Gateway or maybe a Norton Anthology, but I think my to read list seems long enough to just dive in.
This accidentally paired nicely with last night: the art of writing and that of reading. Another 3/5 on the Classics scale (the Classics scale is very judgey. "Good" starts at a 2.)
I'm grateful for all the Beautiful books I get to read.
Real fast version if this is your first time here. This blog is, mostly, me reading and commenting on various pieces of classic literature. Last year, year I did The Harvard Classics; this year, I'm doing The Gateway to the Great Books. Every day I take a word from the editor (Mortimer Adler)'s list of "Great Ideas" that goes with the day's letter. I'll grab one or two readings from it that add up to ~15 pages and tell you about them. Just for fun, I'll also list the other possible words. The numbers in parenthesis above indicate the volume and page number. I'm working from the pdf here.
A: Angels (not included in The Gateway), Animal, Aristocracy, and Astronomy.
Summary: Write honestly, and make sure you have something to say.
Commentary: One of the things I appreciate about The Gateway compared to last year is that I mostly get to read, if not complete pieces, at least complete sections.
"Style is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face. To imitate another man’s style is like wearing a mask."
I've written before about the tenuous relationship between writers and "artists." I think this is less true now than it was a decade or two ago, but there was a time where it seemed pretty common to not consider writers artists, or to consider them a sort of "fringe", as opposed to painters, musicians, etc. I think Schopenhauer's piece is a great rebuttal of this. He explains how writers have styles, just as other artists do, and how they develop and present that style is how they make their art. But this isn't just a puff piece for writers. It also has some good advice, and plenty of take downs of writers who try to disguise their lack of knowledge or otherwise puff themselves up. Great piece, should be mandatory reading in writing classes. 3/5 on the Classics scale (most people should read it, but not earth shaking.)
I'm grateful to be able to, in my own small way, help the next generation of artists. I got a creative writing elective approved at my school for next year, and I'm very excited for it.
Started this the other week, and figured I'd throw up some quick thoughts before I start with A to Z tomorrow.
I've always enjoyed these kinds of in universe guidebooks. I don't know how many times I read over the Essential Guide series as a kid, looking forward to covering those when I get to them in Star Wars Classics.
The "fantasy tour" pastiche works well here, giving just enough distance to mock, without just coming across annoyingly snarky. Sometimes, I think books like this lean too far in the "making fun of" direction. There's plenty of teasing here, but it's clear the author (who also wrote the original Howl's Moving Castle) is enjoying it.
Most of the jokes are fairly well trod (possibly not when the original was published in 1996) but they're very well honed here. Not too long, not to short. The most creative is probably a running gag about the ecology of Fantasyland. Basically, there's not enough of anything to maintain a reasonable food chain, ecosystem, etc. so people speculate things like "horses reproduce by pollination." I'm not sure it entirely makes sense (if Fantasyland is a curated tour, why couldn't they just reproduce behind the scenes?) but it's good to have something that hasn't been circulated since the Usenet days to keep the book interesting.
It's interesting to see some of the insistences that feel pretty dated now, but presumably weren't 30 years ago. The book is adamant that STEW is the only (or at least dramatically most common) form of meat, in Fantasyland. I think (thanks GRRM?) food-porn-fantasy has taken off enough now that that's pretty well debunked.
Besides being a reasonably entertaining book itself, this is a great example of how books can tie to particular memories for us. I've probably had this book for almost 15 years. I ordered it from the indie bookshop I worked at in college, after Nethack cribbed some quotes for flavor text. The woman who owned the store, who is probably the only reason I stayed sane in undergrad, mailed it on from the store to my parents' house over winter break as a gift. Even if it sucked, I'd still value it for that, but it helps that it's pretty funny too.
A couple choice bits:
"This is indeed a likely claim in the case of threesomes or pantheons: Fantasyland does have the air of having been made by a committee."
"JOKES are against the Rules, except for very bad cumbersome jokes cracked by [...] (It is believed that the management in fact thinks that these are very good jokes, and treasures them.)
Can you believe I've been blogging for over a year and never posted a cat pic? That's internet heresy! (It was a busy day, and I didn't have time to get all the blog stuff I wanted done. I fixed a door though.)
It closes now!
Pumpkin!
It's surprisingly hard to get her to sit still long enough for a pic.
There's a lot of bad writing out there across movies, video games, books, etc. That's no surprise, there's a lot of writing out there, some of it has to be bad.
But sometimes, writing is bad in an especially frustrating way. A sequel you've been waiting for forever not only doesn't live up to the original, but actively seems to set out to invalidate all the good things the first one did. Or a movie that's really great, until the last 10 minutes complete ruin it. When I read/watch/etc. one of these, I like to do an activity I call, "The Minimum Acceptable Fix". Basically, what's the smallest change(s) you can make to take something bad, and make it good?
Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery (that's a long title) is an easy and popular example of this. After spending most of the movie with KISS as space wizards:
Not just Sailor-Moon-Esque, some of these are flat out swipes.
Before switching to being a hallucination by Shaggy and Scooby in the last 5 minutes. (Or maybe not?)
It's a much better movie if you cut most of that last 5 minutes, and put it in the "this time, the monsters are real!" part of the Scooby continuity.
My wife is a big fan of the Glass Cannon Podcast/Network. Short version, they do a podcast playing TTRPGs, mostly Pathfinder. Their current main campaign is Gatewalkers which is infamously terrible. I decided to take a look at the actual books today to see how much of it is bad module writing vs bad podcasting.
I blame it like 90% on the modules. So, after sending my wife a Discord post that's longer than this blogpost (and thus wasting time I should've spent doing an actual post...) I decided to talk about MAF today, using Gatewalkers as an example. LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD!
GW is made up of 3 books. The initial adventure hook is that, a few months ago, your characters lost time ("The Missing Moment"), went through not-a-stargate and woke up with mild superpowers without knowing what they did. They meet other people who had the same thing happen, including a professor who is trying to research things. The primary issues are everything lack of player agency, a disconnected plot, and inconsistent theme/tone. The campaign is billed as horror/mystery themed. The horror is inconsistent, and there's very little mystery (The Missing Moment is the only real mystery, is largely resolved by the midway point, and requires zero real mystery solving by the players.)
Book 1 deals with the players investigating the legally-distinct-Stargates, an ancient curse, and traveling first to a shadow-fey realm and then to an elf planet. The first 2/3 of the book lean into horror, primarily slasher/body style. The final third has minimal horror, and doesn't really fit the rest of the book, while attempting to establish a tenuous link between the previous events and the rest of the campaign. The characters eventually return to their home planet.
Book 2 is an extended escort quest with a seer, where 90% of the plot of the whole trilogy is handed to the players via narration/dream sequence. Horror content is fairly low, consisting of a ghost ship and some slightly Lovecraftian dream sequences.
Book 3 is Rhyleth Trail, with the players playing an idiotic navigation minigame to stop Whale-Cthulhu from awakening. Also, unsurprising betrayal of the professor from the opening scene who's been largely absent/disguised. Public domain Lovecraft goodies abound, and the writing attempts to pivot to Cosmic Horror with mixed results.
This post fixes mostly on fixing the story elements, but I'll touch on gameplay where it's relevant.
Book 1 is the best of the three, and allows an easy demonstration of one of the basic MAF techniques. Sometimes, a part of a story doesn't fit with the other parts, and can be easily pulled out. Book 1 is all about jumping between planets and dimensions, with a modest amount of squicky horror. That's a great adventure theme! It's also totally dissonant with the rest of the series. The best thing Paizo could do for Book 1 is to yank it from the trilogy entirely, and either make it stand alone (PCs investigate the gates/curse>PCs get transported to horror-fey-land>PCs beat the shadow king> PCs go home [cutting out The Missing Moment and the final third to beef up the other parts, possibly enhancing it with part of Book 3]) or the start of another, more thematically unified campaign. This could either lean into the body-horror, or go for a "horror of the week" theme, using the gates to fling the PCs into different subgenres every session or two. The final section on the elf planet could probably fit here by touching up the horror a bit, but is too out of place if it's standalone.
Book 2 is probably the worst of the bunch. The extended escort quest needs to go, obviously. The Missing Moment is mostly resolved here. During this time, the PCs were capturing a legally-distinct-yeti and dragging it to legally-distinct-Leng (which is public domain anyway) to free Whale-Cthulhu, who is mind controlling them. The full details won't come out until Book 3, but the broad strokes are there. There's an Inception-city that could possibly have been leveraged into a useful dungeon by better writers, and a ghost-ship sidequest with a small dungeon. While you could pull out some parts out, the best plan here is to axe 90% of the book, and keep the yeti-napping as the starting point for a campaign. The mystery isn't "what were we doing?" but "why/how are we here?" The PCs have vague memories of dragging the yeti and something big and scary being near them. They wake up in a blizzard a day's journey from the nearest settlement. They make it back, but no one can tell them why they're there or who they are. Random bands of crazy explorers pass through all the time, so none of the natives think a ton of it. The PCs have to do actual investigating (instead of getting everything handed to them via NPC/dreams) to figure out why they're here, which eventually leads them to the end of book 3, stopping the space-whale-monster they were brainwashed by.
Book 3 starts with a link back to Book 1 (the doctor was evil all along!) It's one of the better sequences in the adventure, even if it's fit awkwardly here between two trips to the North Pole. Again, this could be lifted as the final chunk of Book 1 (with levels adjusted). In the new Book 2-3 campaign, I don't think there's a ton of space for it. Maybe if the location was shifted to being in the Arctic, instead of halfway across the world, you could use it. Section 2 is 200+ skill checks (seriously, who writes this stuff?) as your characters trek to the pole. A much abbreviated version could be used to investigate how you wound up there (there's spots for encountering monsters, ruins, explorers, etc. this could much more satisfyingly be used to find clues instead of random encounters.) Section 3 is stopping whale from escaping from its prison under the Artic city watching the NPC you escorted in Book 2 stop the whale. Again, that's gotta go. Paizo sidesteps having you fistfight Cthulhu by using a corrupted yeti here, which is a decent idea. The professor should be the final boss here, and can be used with minimal modification. He was still part of the earlier expedition, he still tricks the PCs, etc. Beating him gives the PCs a chance to disrupt the ritual (not via skill checking to aid an NPC) and close out the adventure. Alternatively, the elaborate travel sub-game could maybe be used as part of a an Artic West March. It'd need to be redone, but random bullshit on your way to explore the lost city is very OSR.
History is more like fiction than science, because you have to create a world for it. That was the most interesting and controversial thing in this chapter. The rest is pretty rehashy.
