Finished reading:
Angels of Darkness - enjoyed dialogues and stuff a lot, including using various Wh40k sayings. Messed up, especially the conversations of Boreas with his underlings XD . And of course the Tale of Astelan. "Great Crusade isn't an event but a state of mind", joins the list of my favourite sayings.
Oh and portrayal of naval warfare was surprisingly decent. Like for example distances and times clearly being huge and attack by assault boat taking 30 minutes to arrive to enemy ship.
Gav Thorpe quickly became one of my favourite if not my favourite of BL writers because he combines ability to write characters and their psychology with ability to write combat on many levels. He clearly knows his fluff and has interest in military history.
Reading:
The Flowers Of Evil - Complete 1 - Shuzo Oshimi - awesome manga. Very messed up.
Thinking about re-reading
Know No Fear.
Started re-reading
Shadows of Heresy. Realised I haven't read most of the stories - only
Crimson Fist and
Prince of Crows and that there's a story by Gav Thorpe, which I started reading.
Reading as a part of my internship:
HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites - really good textbook. Full colour. Helps me a lot. I'm about 3/4 in into it. Sadly a bit outdated as it was written when HTML5 specification was still developed and has some stuff that wasn't implemented after all, for example hgroup tag. Lacks info on CSS animations too, I think.
The Artist’s Guide to GIMP, 2nd Edition: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers - Meh. Most of projects in it look horribly cheap and tacky. Look at the crushing shittiness of the gallery on the book's archived site and despair! Teaches how tools work, though, so maybe I'll improve my understanding of the program significantly, though.
The first edition was in 1998, which means the author was making these horrible graphics for at least 14 years D: .
Oh, it turns out that he's an
embedded systems developer so it's a persistent case of programmer art XD .
Why is it called
The Artist's Guide to GIMP, then XD ?
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design: Designing Great Web Sites is Not Rocket Science! - I'm halfway through. Finished the Colour chapter mid-June. Will continue it once I get to the part of
The Artist's Guide to GIMP that covers textures because the next chapter is about textures in web design.
Major Rawne wrote:Therion wrote:What kind of marines is it about, when it comes to abilities, casualties, etc? Is it another supermarine book like Siege of Castellax or whatever or is it something more realistic like Purging of Kadillus?
I always find the question of realism in 40k an odd one as i'd strongly argue that it's all a load of made up nonsense set forty thousand years in the future for the express purpose to entertain the reader.
I strongly disagree here. You have stuff ranging from mechanics of various games (which is where made up nonsense applies the most - though for example in BFG it's the opposite - rules are much more setting-realistic than novels - if relation between rules and novels would be like with Wh40k, we'd get at least Newtonian movement in naval scenes and 3rd dimension which would bog the game down/make it very difficult to play instead of the whole close range ship fights thing), through stuff that pretends to be realistic like Imperial Armour, then authors who write Wh40k as if it really existed, then authors who take strong liberties for sake of teh cool (like Aaron Dembski-Boweden), then authors who are completely out there (which again do made up nonsense things).
Also, usually, you have varying degrees of realism - like in Soul Hunter you have Marines ranging from reasonable Marines (usually on boarding scenes) to ridiculous super marines (in larger battle) and then you have ship combat which is absolute made up nonsense.
Like, ship combat in novels and on illustrations is almost always made-up nonsense. Like you have illustrations and descriptions where ships are fighting on space of size of a stem of a cruiser base (which is one of the rare cases where game makes more sense than writing and illustrations.) because authors ignored that, like, 15000km is point-blank range in Wh40k starship combat and you do short range boarding actions from few 1000s kilometres, not from few kilometres or even hundreds of meters, etc.
Then you have various stuff in setting-design that can be measured and compared like armour thicknesses with stronger and weaker areas, armour penetration, ammo capacity, ammo load-outs, etc.
Just because setting is made up, it doesn't mean these don't count.
Knowledge like this can be used to determine risk levels, casualties, descriptions, how many shots units can fire, how long they can stay in combat, what amount of forces is necessary to achieve a goal, what logistics are used, etc.
Major Rawne wrote:Anyway the first question is easy enough, it's about the mysterious silent type who are comparative to the Night Lords in their predatory nature, some of whom die. The book doesn't hugely go into statistical detail on numbers if memory serves.
Well, I ordered it because after all I wanted it since I heard about it. I hope I'll not regret it when it will finally arrive.
"There can be no bystanders in the battle for survival. Anyone who will not fight by your side is an enemy you must crush" -Scriptorus Munificantus