Thursday, December 29, 2016

End of 2016 yeilds more outrage, and other updates

It's not looking like I'm going to get another book review in this year. The book I'm reading is really good, but it's dense non-fiction, so it's taking me more time. Keep watch for my review of Ivan Throne's The Nine Laws.

In other book news, Simon and Schuster announced a book by Milo Yiannopolous today, with Milo obtaining a 250k advance for his work.  I personally wouldn't have recommended an advance that large, but whatever. The SJW crowd is going BONKERS over this, including Chicago Book Review. Yes, a major "book review" has announced it's boycotting ALL of S&S books for 2017 if they keep Milo in the mix. Like the Twitter ban, this will make him more popular. As Daddy Warpig stated, "STOP TRYING TO TRICK ME INTO SUPPORTING A BIG 5 PUBLISHER‬."

Personally I don't think they're that smart. I think they're earnest in the hate they have for Milo, and any words that disagree with their mental illness worldview. I also have to wonder, as a media establishment, as to the integrity of their book reviews. Do they actually read the books they review? Do they just read the blurbs? Do they chat with their buddy SJW author about his book, and then write up his thoughts as a book review? I'm calling fake book reviews.

And I should have had that thought back when Publisher's Weekly "reviewed"  Ben Zwycky's Beyond the Mist so badly I had to fisk it. Which leads to the question, how prevalent are fake book reviews? I know they happen on GoodReads(who doesn't care) and Amazon(who does, but owns GoodReads), but what about at the professional level? Have they also descended to the level of making things up, of lying, and going along with the narrative? I can't answer that at this time, and I may never take the initiative to research it.  On the other hand, I'm fairly sure my author friends might have better informed opinions of their professional reviews.

In gaming, I got a four player game of Scythe from Stegmaier Games in on Monday, and was just as great fun as the first game, if not more. We played with the new expansion, drew factions randomly, and ended up with 3 new parts in the game. This was a kind of farewell play with one friend, who is leaving for at least 18 months for trade school.

I've seen some posts praising the game for gender diversity, but that's BS. As Bradford Walker would point out, they're just a unique pawn. There's great flavor art and text, but they aren't real, and thus have no sex.  I would applaud the diversity of play experience the game affords, though. No two games have played the same, and the final numbers are all that count.

When you play Social Justice, the world loses.




1 comment:

  1. Yes, professional book reviews are largely fake, and always have been. You are simply not going to find a major newspaper giving a bad review to a book published by a major publisher, because the print industry is so incestious that even when they aren't owned by the same media conglomerate they rely so heavily on advertising deals that they might as well be. That's one of the reasons that the pros hate Amazon reviews so much--they are written by people that they can't buy. Sure, many of the reviews on Amazon are from people will some kind of personal interest--positive or negative--in the author or publisher, but virtually all "professional" reviews do as well.

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