The corollary to this: being unsure if the character is bad at lying or if the actor portraying the character is just bad at acting.
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On a TV front, the actor who played the culprit from the first series of Broadchurch lives near us and I regularly see them in the supermarket. I’m sure they’re a perfectly nice person, but I always give them a wide berth, especially if I’m with my kids.
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Interestingly (or I thought it was) the government website has a Scots language option (or it certainly used to).
I flip flop on liking it and thinking it panders to tourists.
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I read Trainspotting aloud to get used to the phonetic text and went around for ages with a dodgy Scottish accent!
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That’s an Edinburgh accent and it’s well dodgy (says the man from Glasgow).
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Ahem. Says the man fae Embra.
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You love it
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Recently finished a few things.
Angel Mage by Garth Nix is a rather fun take on The Three Musketeers with his ever delightful knack for compelling fantasy concepts.
Meandered my way through to the fourth Witcher book, Tower of Swallows. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about these books as a whole, or rather I’m entirely sure I feel a lot of different things about them, but mostly I’ve been enjoying the ride. After bouncing off a fair few darker, bloodier fantasy endeavors it’s nice to have something that clarifies what wasn’t working for me in those–the author feels angrier about the status quo (both that depicted and that alluded to) and there’s more humor, more unpunished compassion and generally more variety underneath the oppressive atmosphere. It feels a bit more in conversation with the horrors it offers up and more willing to let the characters and the reader breathe than some similarly grim fantasies I’ve tried. I also very much appreciate Geralt collecting an adventuring party that views him more or less as a lost puppy with a martyr complex, at once endeared to his brooding compassion and completely done with his self-destructive angst.
Also made it through Kushner’s Swordspoint which was an odd if compelling book. Not unlike Dumas Musketeers books, since they came up, it’s an action story that focuses mostly on personal and political intrigues with only a handful of scuffles. The characters are all kinda awful, but the book was still reasonably compelling so that’s something. 
Started reading Harrow the Ninth, follow up to Giddeon the Ninth, and had to put it down. It’s a very odd read in a way I didn’t find especially pleasant. It’s an intentionally obfuscated read and I find it takes a lot of motivation to stay engaged–it’s not hard to follow, exactly, but the point of view character is heavily dissociated and views things quite abstractly at times while additionally introducing weird sci-fi concepts and unreliably contradicting the events of the previous book. The character is confused, so the book presents their confusion. Not so much complicated, then, as aloof and I can’t quite figure out if I want to keep following it at this distance or not.
And putting that down, I picked up Winter Tides. I’m not much of a Lovecraft fan, but I heard some interesting things about this take on the people of Innsmouth. We’ll see where it goes.
At some point in there I also re-read The Three Musketeers for obvious reasons and most of Crime and Punishment after a weird discussion I had with a family member–I didn’t like either as much as when I first read them, but Dumas is still a funny guy and Crime and Punishment is still a fascinating book.
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Same. Absolutely loved Gideon the Ninth, but the story choices at the start of Harrow mean that the reader doesn’t have much to connect to the first book, and can’t really trust what they’re reading in the second. All the investment is gone. Which can still work if you capture readers’ excitement all over again with the new stuff, but the mystery goes on for way too long. With the added bit that you’ve seen a brief scene from the future, so there’s no tension on whether character X will die. (It gets back to Gideon-levels of awesome by the end, but I’m not surprised if people bounce badly off the beginning).
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Thanks for the encouragement, both of you - I loved Gideon, but clearly I will have to brace myself a bit to start on Harrow.
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Now read Harrow the Ninth. Oh, wow.
I normally don’t get on with books in second-person, books that change person, books that chop the plot out of order. Harrow does all those things but it has reasons for them, not just the author saying “look how stylistically sophisticated I am”.
But I’d hate to have come to this as a reader new to the series. Seriously, don’t do that. Read Gideon first.
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I can’t really think of a second person or chopped perspective book that didn’t have reasons for it.
I just got my copy of The Last Emperox by John Scalzi. It is going to be my reward for finishing my novel (today, stamped-it-no-erasies-black-ball-beats-'em-all). Can’t wait! I love Scalzi’s work… he’s my writing patronus.
I also finished reading the graphic novel Infinity: Betrayal, which on a first read-through was okay. Not great, a few tiny errors (Spanish “before-and-after” punctuation, for example), visually beautiful, but I’m going to have to read it again and see if it’s as sloppy as I think it is, or if I read it too quickly and missed some important cues and clues. The original Infinity: Outrage was much stronger writing, and it’s the same author so I’m struggling with what I feel is a much, much weaker and more obvious story. I probably just missed stuff. But the new artist was great.
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Just finished Warren Ellis’ Wildstorm. Really enjoyed it, but it did suffer from the usual problem I have with serialised comics - 99% of the story is build-up, with the big unstoppable threat stopped in a single page. It didn’t so much feel like beginning, middle and end, as beginning more beginning, more beginning, oh it’s over. It was a sketch show displaying the powers of a few superheroes before moving onto the next lot. Still, a few really impressive scenes in there and a decent romp. As far a superheroes go, it was completely different to the usual without being too zany.
I do like his writing style though, so going to give Planetary a shot next. Seems to have a big fan base…
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I’m part of that fan base, even though I find the occasional hints of Ellis’s politics detestable. His love of classic pulp and comics really shows, and I enjoy his ingenuity in transforming them into new stories. In fact I ran a two-year campaign intentionally in the same genre, though taking place around 1920 and with my own different tweaks on classic characters. The entire series is on our graphic novel shelves and is going to stay there.
I’m currently supporting the print edition of Stand Still Stay Silent, which I love for the beautiful art, for the characterization and character interaction, and for its handling of Nordic legends and folklore that are largely unfamiliar to me. The archives are available online if you want a look (I recommend sampling Chapter 1 before going back to the prologue, which is a bit slow). I anticipate that it will reach at least 8x its required funding level before the Kickstarter closes in mid-September.
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I just finished Thomas Hager’s The Alchemy of Air. The central coverage is on the Haber process for nitrogen fixation. There are good top level summaries of the saltpeter and guano situations prior to this and then adequate coverage of the impact of this on WW1, the formation of IG Farben, and then impacts on WW2.
The main items called to my attention for further research which I had very limited knowledge of previously were the Saltpeter War, the guano islands act, and the bombing of the Leuna works.
Not exhaustive but a comfortable popular history read.
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I don’t have any issue with his politics but there are allegedly other things about him that may be detestable:
Or if you want to hear directly from his accusers:
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It looks like his response shows more sense of the need for an actual apology than I’ve seen from other people against whom accusations have been made.
I hadn’t heard any of this, but then I’m not much involved any longer in superhero comics fandom. But there are similar stories, and some worse ones, from science fiction fandom; I can no longer bring myself to read anything by Marion Zimmer Bradley, for example. It’s a complex question where the boundary lies beyond which personal conduct poisons our response to art, but at least for me there is such a boundary.
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I’d still recommend a lot of Ellis’ work. His own characters would be mad at him for what he did, and they’re often written as independent and powerful women. The Authority (Jenny Sparks wouldn’t stand for his nonsense for a second, the Engineer is smarter than everyone else in the room) and Transmetropolitan in particular. I have friends involved with him and the real-life situation, and I’m not excusing any of it, but if a story has a strong positive message then I think it’s often okay to separate it from the artist.
That holds up for Whedon and Buffy too - his personal failings don’t stop it being unquestionably groundbreaking and feminist - but there’s definitely a line, because I also won’t pick up any Marion Zimmer Bradley.
The Ellis situation is so full of contradictions, he’s spent decades promoting women in the industry and on the page, so I totally understand everyone needing to find their own place on it. But if you’re after his best work I’d say the initial Authority run and most of Transmetropolitan are considered so good they were important in comics.
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Yeh, it’s a very weird thing that pretty much all the people I follow who’ve been affected by or spoken about this, I know of because of being introduced to them by Warren, either directly or indirectly.
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