21 DEC 2025 by ideonexus
Race in Dungeons and Dragons
The impact of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) and its many transmedia products, while fairly infrequently discussed by historians of fiction in Fantasy, ought not to go unremarked. Even if the trickle-down influence of the game is not considered, its most popular realms were shared worlds in which large numbers of novels, written by multiple authors, were set. Hundreds of novels have been written for each of the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance settings, for example.15 In the early editions of...Folksonomies: fantasy critical theory
Folksonomies: fantasy critical theory
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notes21 DEC 2025 by ideonexus
The influence of philological Anglo-Saxonism on Tolkien
The influence of philological Anglo-Saxonism on Tolkien is clearly visible in his depiction of the Riders of Rohan who “resemble the ancient English down to minute detail.”42 Tolkien had access to the culture of the Anglo-Saxons through his professional work, and drew on their literature extensively. Yet that access was not direct, a jump from the twentieth century to the first millennium, rather, his medievalism was coloured by that of earlier philologists who conceived of them in racial...Folksonomies: fantasy critical theory
Folksonomies: fantasy critical theory
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notes29 NOV 2025 by ideonexus
Socrates' Criticism of the Written Word Echoes Those Agai...
En la época de Sócrates, los textos escritos aún no eran una herramienta habitual y todavía despertaban recelos. Los consideraban un sucedáneo de la palabra oral — liviana, alada, sagrada—. Aunque la Atenas del siglo V a. C. ya contaba con un incipiente comercio de libros, no sería hasta un siglo después, en tiempos de Aristóteles, cuando se llegase a contemplar sin extrañeza el hábito de leer. Para Sócrates, los libros eran ayudas de la memoria y el conocimiento, pero pensaba ... 1 notes
notesIs it better to know things or to know where knowledge is kept and may be retrieved? You can't remember and recall every fact in every book in a library, but you can know what book has the facts you are looking for. Search engines can know where the facts are, so using them makes us twice removed from the fact itself. AI regurgitates facts, potentially removing the source completely… but so does a person telling you the fact.
04 NOV 2025 by ideonexus
Interactive Fiction has "Potential Narrative"
A work of IF is not itself a narrative; it is an interactive computer program. A narrative is “the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence” (Prince 1980, 180); this can result from an interactive session but does not describe any IF work itself. Similarly, interactive fiction is not a story in the sense of the things that happen in a narrative, or more precisely, “the content plane of narrative as opposed to its expression or discourse; the ‘what’ ...Folksonomies: interactive fiction gamebooks
Folksonomies: interactive fiction gamebooks
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notes08 OCT 2025 by ideonexus
Tolkien's World Makes Race Scientific Rather Than Legalistic
The core of the problem is that Tolkien conflates race, culture, and ability. Hobbits, he says, are a race, and based upon a combination their hereditary traits and cultural practices, are better at being stealthy than other races.
Tolkien does this throughout his novels, outlining the “racial” characteristics of men, of dwarves, of elves, of orcs, and those few of mixed ancestry (like Aragorn or the Uruk-Hai). As Helen Young, author of Race and Popular Fantasy Literature put it in a re...
1 Race is a legal concept, but Tolkien's fantasy novels turn it into a scientific fact of his world.
20 SEP 2025 by ideonexus
The Screen Revolution is Breaking the Thread of Literacy
If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.
Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI).
Because ubiquitous m... 1 notes
notes12 SEP 2025 by ideonexus
Medieval Book Curse
Steal not this book my honest friend
For fear the gallows should be your end,
And when you die the Lord will say
And where's the book you stole away? 1 notes
notes28 SEP 2021 by ideonexus
Caching in Public Libraries
...libraries are a natural example of a memory hierarchy when used in concert with our own desk space. In fact, libraries in themselves, with their various sections and storage facilities, are a great example of a memory hierarchy with multiple levels. As a consequence, they face all sorts of caching problems. They have to decide which books to put in the limited display space at the front of the library, which to keep in their stacks, and which to consign to offsite storage. The policy for w...Folksonomies: metaphor computer science
Folksonomies: metaphor computer science
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notes07 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
Popular Books are Quickly Forgotten
Love your beloved classics now—because even now, few people read them, for the most part, and fewer still love them. In a century, they’ll probably be forgotten by all but a few eccentrics.
If it makes you feel any better, all fiction, even the books people love and rush to buy in droves, is subject to entropy. Consider, for example, the bestselling fiction novels of the week I was born, which was not so long ago. I’ve bolded the ones my local library currently has in stock.
Hawaii,...Folksonomies: social norms best sellers
Folksonomies: social norms best sellers
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notes07 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
LOTR Inspires Hikers
The Lord of the Rings fascination reaches far beyond trail names. It seemed like every AT shelter had “Not all who wander are lost” carved into it somewhere; the quote also serves as the most overused thru-hiking Instagram caption. It’s so ubiquitous that most a number of people don’t know it’s from Bilbo’s poem about Aragorn in The Fellowship of the Ring. “Second breakfast” is a beloved part of a hobbit’s diet and an essential part of a thru-hiker’s as well. And one time,... 1 notes
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