It was actually amazing.

Striking words from an unpublished author to an author who has published novels. Not very respectful.

I'll have to read this Mieville sometime. According to wikipedia, he was influenced by HP Lovecraft, and it said he had written steampunk. Very interesting to see those two combined.

One is allowed to dislike authors regardless of whether one is published or not. You don't need to be a professional to have the right to an opinion.

Striking words from someone with your litany of accomplishments about (not to) an author whose published works you actually own.

Thanks! I love that you guys are so helpful with the gathering and distribution of lore. A lot of sites like this tend to be overly elitist, to the point of discouraging me from further research and interest.
Thanks Crow, this is sweet.

Thanks to that comic, that's how I look at most adventure stories, these days. Did the tale start off with a letter, an insult, or blood?

d'aww, you guys make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Insect Dreaming, that post you referred to was fascinating. The whole thread was interesting, but when I got to that post it became a hundred times more so. That look into MK's head and life, and the creative process at Bethesda, was both illuminating and somehow intimate. Then again, that's true of most things he writes. I'm absolutely gushing with f@nboyish (that word really should not be censored. Silly overly-sensitive iron-handed overlords, the rules of this forum are) enthusiasm, but it's justly inspired.
And oh my gosh did I ever suffer from some nostalgia when Dark Sun and Glorantha were mentioned. So it turns out I wasn't the only person to play King of Dragon Pass?
The only thing about reading that post that wasn't wholly amazing was this paragraph:
Kurt and I were all, "It's set on a gas planet named like UR for Jupiter but it's way in the future so everyone's forgotten that name plus we both love ancient cultures so we can play with the Etruscans and the Medes and BABYLONIAN BULL-PEOPLE, and TOTALLY with air-whales for ships, right, and metal is so scarce that each cannonball has its own name and people eat bone-meal, right, because meat is totally, totally scarce and therefore cannibalism is totally normal and--" and he's all, "Wait, back up the train. That sounds weird. What if we set it in Tamriel?"
because it made Redguard, one of my favorite games, seem pale in comparison to what could have been (cursed cliches, my cognition seems condemned to your clutches!).
But even the wistful longing it leaves me with is colored over by a tinge of "wow I love this so much" and excitement at seeing such exuberant genius.

XxChaplainxX, in context that off-handed jibe at Mieville is much more good-natured. Well, it's still insulting, but it doesn't come off as being petty or bitter or anything like that.
And in reply to your thread, if I had MK Tied to a Chair With a Gun to His Head I would immediately unloose the ropes, throw the firearm away faster than if it were last week's lunch and apologize profusely for whatever asshattery possessed me to get in that situation in the first place.

Then I would probably blush and stutter and profess my admiration and offer to buy him lunch, dinner, post-prandial drinks, breakfast, and a wedding ring in order to have time to satiate my blasarious desire to spend forever in dialogue with this brilliant man.

For being so awed by it, you've a good amount of that intimate and exuberant word-mastery yourself.

In any case I'm sure MK would be (is?) touched to read your post. Share the warm and fuzzies!

Oh, I told him on the forums exactly what I thought of some of his stuff once, and he flamed me in response. On the Lore Forums, independent thought is verboten.

*edit* Yes, I realize now that that particular post was a cheap shot. I apologize to MK for that one, but I don't see why everyone would get so upset over it. Save that fervor for when I invariably insult you.

Yes. That was the joke. ;P

I wasn't upset by it, just saying that in context I didn't think it was as bad as you make it seem. My fervor wasn't directed towards deriding you, honestly. You'll invariably insult me?

Now this, I've said enough that I'm starting to feel like a nag, but jeesh man, you're so negative! There's like this constant inimical undercurrent to your posts. I was just reading through a bunch of threads from way back, like ~2007, and you were around even then with much the same attitude.
Would it be way too forward and rude of me to ask directly what your problem with MK/the forum/the people that like MK is?
I'm sorry if this is inappropriate, really, and if it is I'd invoke "drunkenness" and "situationally-induced emotional openness" as excuses but they aren't, but it seems like you're really unhappy with this place and the general culture of it, and it makes me feel bad that something that's supposed to be fun and enjoyable seems to irritate you so much so regularly.

Given enough time, I'll invariably insult everyone. It's just a scientific fact.

But yes, I'm a bit of a negative-nancy.

I don't really have a problem with MK. I just think his stuff is taken too literally as fiction, when it seems more like poetry. Sheesh, 36 Lessons of Vivec is written by a friggin warrior poet, yet people always take the stuff so literally! If we were to take that stuff 100% at its word, than the graphic glitches in Redguard would be real, Nerevar would've been Vehk's lackey, and Vehk would be wearing grafted-on Daedra blood-filled flesh galoshes. The fun of poetry, especially this kind is that it's real life at its core but drawn out all crazy and surreal-like. Yet people on here throw the surreality to the wind.

Also I wish every discussion of MK didn't turn into one big collective prostration. Shouldn't we wait until he's dead to worship him? Or at least until he loses all his money, takes up the drink, and starts playing bad country music in dive bars? Then we'll know for a fact that he's a good writer.

There isn't one artist alive who doesn't deserve a bit of ball busting. I'll make fun of my favorite artists all the time. I think Bob Dylan is one of the greatest lyricists ever, yet I always say every song of his can be broken down into two categories: Babblers and Ramblers.

I can do the same with MK. He has two styles: Telling it like it is. Telling it every way except what it is.

Fair enough. I'm certainly guilt of excessive worship, as evinced by this very thread

With that aside, just for the sake of devil's advocacy I'll point out that the graphical glitch you're referring to WAS real in Redguard and the 36 Lessons. It may not have been an intentional part of the game-world or a serious part of the literary narrative, but it existed in those representations of the TES universe all the same.
And at heart, I see TES as very much a "pick and choose your own reality" type thing. It's true for our various heroes and their adventures, it's true for whether or not Telvanni necromantic magisters are http://imgur.com/1jQ6s or http://www.uesp.net/wiki/File:MW-npc-Aryon.jpg, and I also think it's true for whether any given writing is to be taken as a literal description of the Aurbic universe, or as just flowery poetry or mistaken scholasticism. After all, there is no single "true" version of the world of TES. It's fantasy. And what's more, it's a fantasy that we the audience have some individual control over simply by our participation in it. Right? So it's all fair game.

Cheers man, sorry for being a bother. You're a negative-nancy, I'm annoying, we all have our shortcomings. :3

Speak for yourself, sir. Some of us are perfect in every way.

I totally agree with you about TES, though.

Too bad we couldn't have seen those Telvanni wizards ingame. Would've been killer.

As for TES reality, it's a double-edged sword. On one hand we might argue that anything ingame has to be the way things really are obviously because we're looking at it. On the other hand, there's no way the Imperial City is as large as my local Walmart, and the developers with their limited technology can't possibly render the full scope of something. Personally I can't think of any good balance.

I didn't actually know about the graphic glitch until I saw it listed under Morrowind's Easter Eggs. For all I know, the majority of 36 Lessons could just be a bunch of Daggerfall jokes.

That telvanni drawing-- All we got was the cephalopod helm? Whoah.
totally off topic

Not to be a hater, but this thread is rather embarrassing. Lets just let it slip to page 2...

Page three, bro.

No sense of humor?

I'm certainly embarrassed by it. And I haven't even sobered up fully or slept yet. I can't wait to re-read my posts tomorrow and be really embarrassed. Including this one.

I said, above, that I found that comment by MK disappointing. The full post by MK was actually quite interesting, in what it said about his role in the Elder Scrolls series and how the creative process worked, and the way he wrote it was quite lively.

I was disappointed, specifically, in what MK said about Mieville, and more importantly, by what he didn't say. That is:

1. I was disappointed that one writer whose work I enjoy doesn't like another writer whose work I enjoy. As I said above, I kind of had an inkling that one of them would have strong feelings about the other's work, positive or negative, if they knew it at all, so it wasn't really a surprise.

2. I was disappointed in the way MK expressed his dislike for Mieville, mostly because it seemed like a sudden outburst of hostility for no apparent reason. That's complicated, however, by a couple of things: particularly that in rereading MK's post, it seems to me that some of his use of language (particularly the terms that are likely to cause offense and so cannot be directly referenced here) looks like he's playing games with it, to the extent that I'm left wondering if it wasn't some kind of joke and that he doesn't dislike Mieville after all. How often do we see MK's work criticized for being "turgid" and "self-indulgent" around here? Bracketing that, we're left with a criticism of Mieville's book jacket photos. Part of the reason I'm left to wonder if it's a joke, is that a few paragraphs earlier, MK mentions wanting to be an artificially intelligent vacuum cleaner illegally listening to jazz, and there's a minor character in Mieville's Perdido Street Station who is an artificially intelligent vacuum cleaner who is also a spy.

3. Most importantly, and the reason I return to this subject at all, I was disappointed because I've had a sense that the two have dialectically opposed ideas they're trying to express, and yet seem to occupy similar literary spaces, and I thought there would be some valuable insights to be found in the criticisms one might make of the other's work; yet I didn't gain any insights from MK's one comment. I did find a few comments in this thread to be interesting: in particular, that MK is a mythologizer and Mieville a de-mythologizer. That's a good starting point. To some extent, that's a personal thing: I'm curious how it is that two dialectically opposed ideas both interest me, and that's hard to discuss with someone who doesn't perceive the dialectical opposition and find it interesting.

Interesting stuff. After reading the bit about the intelligent spy vacuum, I really need to check Mieville out now. Sounds like some kind of sci-fi satire like Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut.

As for MK insulting him, I don't know why one author would do that. Did Mieville insult MK previously? Had they ever collaborated on anything or met each other before? Also why would you call someone's writing turgid and self-indulgent? I can't even imagine writing that is truly self-indulgent beyond like a pompous speech at a bachelor party or something. Not sure how a writer's entire style could come off as such.

Still if you call a writer's style turgid, you're just calling the writer turgid, so MK probably thinks Mieville is a blow hard or something.

To be honest, I had to look up the word https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/turgid. It just seems odd to me for the guy known for "The 36 Sermons of Vivec" and "The Song of Pelinal" to criticize someone else's writing as turgid. It's like one bull taunting another bull by calling him headstrong.

In context, MK was listing authors of "weird fantasy", and especially when he wrote it, Mieville was rather eclipsing other writers in that sub-genre, so I suppose he might have resented Mieville for overshadowing authors he thought deserved more attention -- although in that case, I'd rather have heard more about why MK liked them.

I think Twilight svcks donkey [censored] and Sword of Truth is a misguided Ayn Rand fanfic-slash-bdsn pormo. People have these things called opinions, you know.

I was being pretty glib when I made the comment about mythologising, though I think there is a grain of truth to it.

Anyway, what's that line? 'Every writer hates every other writer.'

Fixed...

I think this thread strayed off topic??? Anyways I would like to know the whole hero/event mechanizm...