Recent Posts

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General Discussion / Re: The King's Paws (with one holding a bottle of Peri Peri sauce.)

« Last post by The Gem Cutter on Today at 02:07:09 PM »

Buying real estate seems to be a lot easier these days than it was some years ago. Didn't help that last time I tried getting a loan was in the middle of the financial crisis.

Oh yer, I'm buying a house. Finally no relying on parents/rent/roommates but actually owning my own place.

Congratulations - just don't believe financial institutions that tell you that you can afford $X. It used to be you could use their limits reliably, but they figured out if you default, they get all the money you paid and the house to sell all over again. Rounding down kept my family from disaster on my two previous homes.

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Fantasy Book & Author Discussion / Re: What are you currently reading?

« Last post by Saraband on Today at 01:39:31 PM »

Finished Red Sister. Really loved it. No idea what bothered so many of you with that book...

Oh, it's not 'bothered' per se, it is a very good story and of course, very well written - it just feels, how can I put it, more normal? Themes we've read about multiple times?
It's a good book, just not great, on the expectations I had based on his previous books. I guess the problem was the expectation, hehe

Entirely what @ScarletBea said. The book is perfectly good, nothing bothered me about it, but because it was written by Mark Lawrence and I absolutely loved the two previous trilogies, Red Sister felt a bit less mind-blowing. My partner ended up loving it and so we got Grey Sister after all, and he loved that as well. I'll probably reread the first one and the following two when the entire trilogy is finally out.

I finished Terry Pratchett's Maskerade (one of the average Discworld books), and will now finally get started with Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which I am very excited about.

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General Discussion / Re: The King's Paws (with one holding a bottle of Peri Peri sauce.)

« Last post by ScarletBea on Today at 01:32:42 PM »

Yay Henry!

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General Discussion / Re: Fantasy Memes and silly stuff (about books) from the internet

« Last post by Eli_Freysson on Today at 12:50:22 PM »

Aw. Poor guy.

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General Discussion / Re: The King's Paws (with one holding a bottle of Peri Peri sauce.)

« Last post by Henry Dale on Today at 11:20:09 AM »

Buying real estate seems to be a lot easier these days than it was some years ago. Didn't help that last time I tried getting a loan was in the middle of the financial crisis.

Oh yer, I'm buying a house. Finally no relying on parents/rent/roommates but actually owning my own place.

6

General Discussion / Re: Member birthday calendar

« Last post by Bradley Darewood on Today at 11:06:15 AM »

http://databikes.com/infophoto/yamaha/xj600s-1998.html

One of those.

Old and rattly like its owner. It decided to destroy a chain a sprockets over the last week the cause was the nut holding the front sprocket has stripped its thread and was allowing more movement than it should. Part arrived a few minutes ago so I should have it sorted today.

Nice!!! My best buddy in school had a Yamaha-- his was a shiny red R1 tho and he had a whole matching red outfit topped with a sparkly red helmet. Until this girl called him a power ranger then he got a black jacket.

I started on a 1983 Honda then moved up to a new SV-650 back in 06.

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General Discussion / Re: Member birthday calendar

« Last post by Rostum on Today at 10:37:10 AM »

http://databikes.com/infophoto/yamaha/xj600s-1998.html

One of those.

Old and rattly like its owner. It decided to destroy a chain a sprockets over the last week the cause was the nut holding the front sprocket has stripped its thread and was allowing more movement than it should. Part arrived a few minutes ago so I should have it sorted today.

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General Discussion / Re: Depression, Struggles and Light at the End of Every Tunnel

« Last post by ScarletBea on Today at 10:30:34 AM »

 
So I can't get that, and you can't get mine, which is due to oestrogen elimination in my body

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Writers' Corner / Re: Archetypes - a more well-rounded discussion

« Last post by Bradley Darewood on Today at 10:30:27 AM »

Here's an excerpt from Tolkien that I'm reading right now that applies equally to writers obsession with emulating the Hero's Journey as it does to anxieties about the need to be "original"

Such studies are, however, scientific (at least in intent); they are the pursuit of folklorists or anthropologists: that is of people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested. A perfectly legitimate procedure in itself—but ignorance or forgetfulness of the nature of a story (as a thing told in its entirety) has often led such inquirers into strange judgments. To investigators of this sort recurring similarities (such as this matter of the heart) seem specially important. So much so that students of folk-lore are apt to get off their own proper track, or to express themselves in a misleading “shorthand”: misleading in particular, if it gets out of their monographs into books about literature.

...

We read that Beowulf “is only a version of Dat Erdmänneken”; that “The Black Bull of Norroway is Beauty and the Beast,” or “is the same story as Eros and Psyche”; that the Norse Mastermaid (or the Gaelic Battle of the Birds and its many congeners and variants) is “the same story as the Greek tale of Jason and Medea.”
Statements of that kind may express (in undue abbreviation) some element of truth; but they are not true in a fairy-story sense, they are not true in art or literature. It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count

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General Discussion / Re: Member birthday calendar

« Last post by Bradley Darewood on Today at 09:50:45 AM »

Thanks all spent the day looking at broken bike working out how its going to get me round Holland in a couple of days time    Apart from that a good day will be celebrating in a couple of weeks time too much going on at the moment.

What kind of bike is it?