Joe Abercrombie

It would perhaps more properly have been called a timber baluster from a traditional victorian staircase. Seems some of my older blog posts have vanished with this most recent web redesign. Our lives are written in sand, indeed...

I agree with some parts and not others.

Like the man says, rhymes with pricker...

For me it's way the best ever performance in the US. Red Country made no. 27 when they still had an extended list, but that was an easier time of year. September's pretty tough.

You can ask me that here. I still won't tell you, though.....

Business owners wouldn't be buying spinning wheels at all, they'd be buying spinning jennies or spinning mules, which were the automated versions that made the spinning wheels redundant... There were all kinds of complex interactions between different kinds of technologies that would cause huge shifts in the labour market. So automated spinning, for example, created a lot of jobs minding the spinning machines but destroyed cottage industry hand-spinning which had been a big earner for rural families. People often went from doing various different kinds of work on small holdings to doing one specific task in an urban setting, at which they were vastly more efficient. Indeed a lot of rural poor became vastly richer overnight, and could afford all kinds of stuff they never dreamed of before, so there was a demand for mass produced fabrics, crockery, cutlery, lamps, books, you name it - stuff that had been luxuries for the nobility became necessaries for the gentry and then available to everyone within a century. But living in cities had downsides, of course. 'Demand' was massively lumpy and unevenly distributed under these circumstances, because processes become automated at different times. You can only increase your profit tenfold from increasing production tenfold if you have the market, and you wouldn't right away, because when for example spinning was first automated, weaving still had to be done by hand. The result was that yarn became incredibly cheap overnight, and hand weavers were suddenly in immense demand, so they were having a great time. Then ten years later the power looms put all of them out of business, the price of cloth plummeted, and sewers, dressmakers and dyers had a purple period. The rapid changes made the markets incredibly wild as well, so there would be huge booms followed by giant slumps in demand that no one really understood because the economic model was so new, accompanied by mass unemployment which would itself cause slumps in demand. But I digress...

September 2020...

Rhymes with Pricker

Just sort of like this.

I never said so...

Who can say...?

Brint, Shivers, and Sulfur, they're all back. In fact all three of them are in all three books of the new trilogy, come to think of it...

This is the problem with grimdark as a genre, quite apart from the silliness of the name. It's not really used neutrally like sword and sorcery or high fantasy to describe stuff with features in common. It tends to either be used positively, in which case it becomes a huge catch-all including all that stuff I like, or it's used negatively, in which case it becomes a trash chute for the stuff I don't like. This leads to loads of straw-man arguments and people talking past each other.

I read em quite recently but I shall happily follow along...

It's not what you do it's the way that you do it. That's what gets results.