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Topics - MisterGuyMan

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Author Q&A / Midlist Authors & Online Piracy
« on: July 31, 2017, 11:37:59 pm »
The more time people spend consuming free media, the less time they spend consuming purchased media, the less money they spend. You can spike your samples any which way (the way IP foes do), cherry-pick countless happy scenarios, but it all comes down to this: people spending less, and content producers struggling more.

Being a Yar is bad enough. Being one who thinks they're actually doing good, on the other hand...
This isn't actually how the market has evolved though.  Consumers are spending just as much money as they ever have on legitimate media and the media industry isn't struggling.  The only difference is how that money is being allocated.  In the music industry, for example, people are buying less albums and singles.  That's the big bullet point record companies cite.  What they don't point out is that consumers make upo that difference and more with concert sales.  This results in individual artists making more per capita today and the big losers are the record labels which historically have played the role of middle men.  As I stated before the primary limiting factor of media spending isn't determined by anything media suppliers can manipulate.  Consumers simply have a finite amount of disposable income and they spend a certain amount of that income on media.

I was always interested in how you specifically would view this considering the major themes of TSA.  Copyright and IP isn't actually universal and has only been around for a few hundred years.  It's original intention was a form of censorship.  Creative arts have flourished before copyright and it flourishes today in markets with lax copyright laws.  In the West we've been conditioned to view copyright as an intrinsic right when the historically it's actually the anomoly.

I hesitate to even continue this debate since you are my favorite author and it would be easy for you to conclude that I'm advocating  "theft" of your work.  I'm not.  I'm just pointing out that the marketplace is ever evolving and we can't put the genie back in the box.  Good to artists have always found ways to profit from their work before and after the Internet. 

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Quote from: The Warrior Prophet, Battle of Mengedda
By the God, his fury felt so empty, so frail against the eart!  He reached out with his bare left hand and grabbed another hand-cold, heavily callused, leathery fingers and glass nails.  A dead hand.  He looked up across the matted grasses and stared at the dead man's face.  An Inrithi.  The features were flattened against the ground and partly sheathed in blood.  The man had lost his helm, and sandy-blond hair jutted from his mail hood.  The coid had fallen aside, pressed against his bottom lip.  He seemed so heavy, so stationary-like more ground.

A nightmarish moment of recognition, too surreal to be terrifying.

It was his face!  His own hand he held!

He tried to scream.

Nothing.

Quote from: The Great Ordeal, Battle of Dagliash
And he knew the way all the Dead knew, with the certainty of timeless recollection.

Hell... rising on a bubbling rush.  Agony and wickedness chattering with famished glee...

Demons, come to pull his outside through his inside, to invert, to invert and expose, to bare his every tenderness to fire and gnashing teeth...

Damnation... in spite of everything.

There was no describing the horror.

He tried to clutch with dead fingers... to hold on...

Don't!  he tried to call across the space of a dead man's reach.  But his ribs were a breathless cage, his lips cold and soil.  Don't let go...

Please!  he screaned at his younger self, trying to communicate the whole of his life with sightless eyes... Fool!  Ingrate!

Don't trust Hi--

First of all let me say that I totally missed this on my first read.  I only caught it when I went back rereading the first trilogy.  Second, it's pretty much one of the best moments in the novel for me now.  We already suspect this happens ever since Kellhus states that Serwe is burning in hell but that POV of actually seeing Saubon transition into hell after his death was just a great moment.  I really love how I always thought that excerpt of Saubon seeing himself in the second book was just a way to add creepiness into the battle in a very general way but Bakker had it all planned out to bring it full circle three books later.

I have no idea what to think of this so far.  From the top of my head it's weird because it always seemed like only the gods could affect the past but here a random soul is literally reaching out to his past self.  I know Mengedda is a special place as a Topos but it still seems odd that random souls have that power.  I also like how the very highwater moment that Saubon's faith in Kellhus is cemented is looped inextricably linked to the moment when he loses his faith completely.

As a Zauduyani myself I don't think this shakes my belief in Kellhus at all.  He's still the messiah figure of the story.  He uses people as tools and doesn't care if they end up in hell.  He'll still save humanity IMO.

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The Great Ordeal / [TGO Spoilers] Moënghus' capture by Sranc
« on: July 27, 2016, 04:24:40 pm »
Quote
"He'd counted only sixteen summers the year his cousin Okyati had ridden into camp with Anasûrimbor Moënghus.  Okyati and his war party had taken the man from a band of Srance travelling across Suskara.  This in itself was enough to make the outlander an item of interest: few men survived such captivity. "

The first few times I read the book I never really gave it much thought.  But as we are exposed more and more to the Sranc the weirder it seems that Moënghus, Dunyain or not, would be walking around as a prisoner of the Sranc.  The impulses of the Sranc, as portrayed in 'The Judging Eye' and 'The Great Ordeal,' seem beyond merely unreasonable but almost elemental.  In the Great Ordeal one very smart individual stated that where the Dunyain reach for infinity the Sranc embrace zero.  They ARE their impulses.  How a Dunyain would be able to manipulate the darkness that comes before for a creature like the Srance, who simply were the darkness completely makes no sense to me.  Even if he could do so, the shortest path would seem to be to just kill them and be done with it entirely.  I'm starting to think that this was an early mistake of Bakker before he fully fleshed out how obscene the Sranc were.


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