Messages

The Dark Tower starts well and descends into self-indulgent pap. Any book where the author is a character should be ignored.

I'm reading Stephen King's The Stand for the first time.  I've really lost my reading habit and tried to get back into it

When it comes to getting back into reading, early King is always a good route, and The Stand (at least before he dicked around with it) is a grand satisfying wodge of a read.
There's a lot about the man's style I don't have much time for these days, but that's offset by the sheer amount of content he delivers. My habit now is to read one of his books until things start drifting towards absurdity and then I chuck it. As soon as he introduces stuff like space turtles I know I probably won't like how the story ends. But that doesn't matter because the book has already served up several hundred pages of human interest with spooky stuff added.

PS I agree that his more recent stuff drifts into absurdity and falls apart. The exception that proves the rule being Revival. Brrrr. Absurd and chilling. And very Phantasm

King dicked around with The Stand, then?  Hopefully not in a George Lucas way.

He released a sort of author's cut which included all the bits that the original editor wisely deleted. I only read the start of it, but it was bloated even by Stephen King standards.
(In the proper edition, for instance, the action begins with a bunch of good ol' boys watching a car steering towards some petrol pumps. In the self-indulgent text, it starts with the driver bundling his wife and kids into the car a few days before, thus removing the tense 'Who? How? What the fuck?' of the proper opening.)

Then I gather he produced a version updated from the seventies to the nineties or two-thousands for no good reason at all. I for one like my Stephen Kings to be rooted in a minutely observed 1970s America. Indeed, I often think that most of what I know about the US comes from Sesame Street and early Stephen King.
Anyway, I hear this revision was unnecessarily awful.

Always listen to your editor, children, and just say no to drugs.

Totally disagree. My view is that The Stand (and as an aside, also Raymond E Feist's Magician) really benefitted from having excised text added. The edits were due to uncertainty that the public would buy a book of such size from an unknown author, as opposed to edits for the flow of the text.

Your mileage may vary. You say tomato, I say tomato. Etc. But I like the extras. I like directors' cuts.

That's amazing. I'm quite jealous of the time and detail.

And I liked the Bhein - Paxton rumble puns!

Not the best of covers to entice new readers, is it?

The announcement of a complete story on the cover seems unnecessary. What is so great about this that it had to be on the cover?

Maybe as its for new readers, perhaps put the story name under the character circle pics?

I like the cover. I suspect Rogue is highlighted because of noise about the upcoming film

Just finished Bioshock: Infinite.

It was okay. It dabbled with racism which was interesting, but ultimately said nothing about it.

It also seemed to fizzle out as a sequel. I can almost see the pitch: "Right, the first two were set in a city under the sea. So this one... in the sky?" And then they thought, we've come up with the location let's all go to the pub.

The "twist", which was a bit sci-fi 101, appeared out the blue in the epilogue and seemed to be meeting the burden of the first game's astonishing "Would you kindly..." reveal.

Maybe I am just getting old, but I have no idea what's going on in any of the strips other than Dredd.

I have never, ever, been able to follow Indigo Prime.

Full Tilt Boogie feels like it has 10 years of back story that I've missed.

Deadworld seems to be going in circles.

Thistlebone... nothing has happened in it, other than some folks have made a film and go pissed. There has been no horror (other than 70s fashion). Am I right in thinking it's a flashback?

The annual meat bingo went smoothly enough, but we haven't chosen whose blood will anoint the crops yet.

Nothing out the ordinary, then. Phew. For a moment I thought there might have been something important happened.

Due to technical issues*, by which I mean my old computer dying and me having three teenage boys who hog the replacement, I have been off the board for a couple of months.

What have I missed?



^{*I know, I know, I should have tried cheese.}

EDIT: Three months away, and I am still at 0.8 posts a day. Wow. That says more about me than I like.

Baldurs Gate 3 was amazing and well worth all the hype its had - so good, in fact, that I'm tempted to play it through again.

I played 1 and 2, so have been sorely tempted by this. My daydream is a new gaming PC, a copy of BG3 and then ... immersion! (Getting in the way of that - family, career etc.)

Kinda me. I bought a new PC in December that would run this. But I have since been working through my Steam(ing) pile of shame. Most recently finished Bioshock Infinite. I was shocked that I installed it and was offered the chance to start my last autosave which was in the cloud...

...not a joke there, but a shock that the save was August 2016.

I am confused by this thread. Stumped. What are you talking about?

Tharg is, was, and shall always be the editor. Anyone who says otherwise is about to feel the wrath of a Rigellian Hotshot.

This is just out today, or maybe released tomorrow. I pre-ordered via CDKeys. I have the code. It's for the GOG platform. The code has not been redeemed.

I would rather it was on Steam and made a mistake ordering.

Anyone fancy buying it from me? £35?

If so, DM me please.

Also, Congrats!

Jimbo, did you ever finish Sorcery 4?

No, I never did!

Sadly, around the same time I fell off the gamebook wagon I went and bought a Nintendo Switch, sealing my own doom. My unfinished quest for the Crown of Kings nags away at me, though. Must make some time to complete it before the year is out...

Sorcery, you say?

Switch, you say?

Why choose when you can have both, I say.

Sorcery - the Switch version

Really didn't enjoy this prog.

Not at all impressed with the art on Dredd. The colouring seems off, the art too blocky, and neither lifts the other. The mechanismo on the second last page is a good example. It feels, I dunno, rushed.

Devil's Railroad is an idea waiting on a story.

And Enemy Earth is too childish for me. I get why it's in the prog and it does what it needs to...

The challenge the prog has is keeping long term reader 48 year olds like me happy while winning an audience.

Maybe the childish stuff should be like the recent Battle cross over and less following the crowd?