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Hey, neat! Please tell us some about the PCs and how their adventures are going.

I’m curious about it, and will read it when it gets the library. I’m 59 and have read and enjoyed many gothics, fantasy and otherwise. I’ll see if the unusual characters, who look appealing to me, go with changes of other sorts. If I like it, then I’ll be up one fun read. If not, eh, I’ll not...

I don’t associate purple prose with an innate lack of quality. It’s prose that is usually bad, yes, but really intensely passionate expression and description can be wielded with careful control to good effect. There are Nobel Prize winners I’d put in the category, along with some genre fiction...

I read a lot of dark fantasy and sf, and I’d say that there’s a strong theme of the vulnerability of every society to corruption and decay. But where Howard championed the renewing power of barbarism, modern authors champion the need to build better societies. Renewal is doing this thing again...

I figured it’d be more fun to assume not.

Establish a pristine wilderness area across several biomes, where a stable population of monsters can live fence it with regions for regular species to live in, blessed for as long as they leave the wild zone alone. Transgressing communities get exiled and replacements moved. A thousand years...

That’s true but I was thinking of the bottle dropped somewhere in the Pacific abyss. I haven’t bothered doing any math, but my visualization of the Cosmic All suggests that the flow wouldn’t produce anything especially noticeable at the surface, that any significant halocline or thermocline...

Doing that in a society like ours would fiendish. You wouldn’t need to be a scientist to detect the changing salinity, nor the changing and devastated populations of marine life. But the odds of ever identifying the source are minuscule beyond belief. You could likely pin down which ocean it’s...

It’s even worse…. …well, now I have to up my game…no, what I have to do is concede. You got there fustest with the mostest.

First book finished in March: Memories of Ice by Steven Erickson, Malazan Book of the Fallen #3. Well, wow. Multiple volume’ worth of plotlines converge in an epic, dramatic, tragic climax, and a bunch of people get unexpected conclusions (not all of the “and they blew up” sort, either). On to...

I agree with @Imaro pretty much. There’s some ethnic prejudice among some characters but no sense of authorial endorsement (bigots tend to end up getting hosed for lack of allies at needed moments), an unsurprising level of sexism for work begun in the 1970s but better than a bunch of other...

I’ll be curious to see what sort of setting they use and how they approach the setting. Both Wrath & Glory and Imperium Maledictum (and Age of Sigmar) take cool, useful, and thoroughly different approaches, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

THIS is the gasoline, THAT is the horse tranquilizer, and over HERE is the combo toothpaste/shaving cream. We’ve over this again and again. More seriously, I hope you’re okay.

On an unrelated note, Ramadan is underway. I hope any of you observing it this year has an easy fast.

Yes. All these things can be done well or badly. I like them all done well.

And there’s often a subtext, sometimes very blatant, that because this dish or cuisine didn’t originate in the way a common misconception says, it’s bad and you shouldn’t like it. Whereas if it turned out that my favorite Mexican foods were all invented in the early 1970s by abusive interactions...

In science fiction and fantasy, look at themed collections by Ellen Datlow and John Joseph Adams. They are both reliably excellent; like the theme and you’re gonna like the collection. For best of the year volumes, look at the ones by Rich Horton, Jonathan Strachan. In horror, Datlow is again...

Depending on your genre, there’s a lot available online and digitally, but you’re unlikely to just stumble across it. (I can make suggestions for some genres.) Last reading of the month, Gladius by Guy de la Bedoyere. Like his book Populus, enthused about above, this is about Roman daily life...