Incline Non-linear JRPGs

[OSK]

And uhhhh yeah, it IS grindy. The grinding is not to outlevel your foes, since enemies scale to your highest level character (I hear this isn't popular 'round here, c/d?), it's about keeping your team at the same level. If you have a 2+ level difference, the AI will kill your healer (typically the character with the lowest level - you don't need to heal much if you're doing things right) in 3 hits. To this end, you either need to fight lots of mind-numbing training sessions, or seek out random encounters on purpose and have your weakest characters throw rocks at the stronger characters' backs until they catch up. If that's "tactics", I'll stick to XCOM and JA2, thanks. ;p

You're doing it wrong.

You use a large party so you can swap out characters if they're starting to out-level the rest of your team. If your healer is slow to level, leave him in every battle. If your berzerker is too fast to level, put him in every other battle or so.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Except the enemies gain a level pretty much every battle. If your troops gain an average of half a level per battle (And your healer probably gets that at best without cheesing) after 10 battles your hit rate will be ~10% vs their 90%.

The enemies don't scale to your level, and the difference made by having a level advantage is immense. Your options are grinding or cheese (One man army claiming MVP every battle to maintain his 5+ level advantage over the enemies.)

Which is a pity, because when the fights are decently balanced level wise, they're quite tactically oriented and interesting, with lots of modifiers for terrain and some cool enemy traps using neat spell or ability combinations.

 

[PorkaMorka]

There is no need for grinding in tactics ogre.

Just do this:

(and have the discipline to not raise your levels above the enemy's)

Tested it, works perfectly.

Around the end of Chapter 1 you'll be able to make Clerics out of L- or
N-aligned Amazons. This opens the door to much less tedious training
sessions. DO THIS. Thanks to Seigfried's FAQ for the basic idea.

1)Recruit 2 new L- or N-aligned Amazons. Don't equip them at all.

2)Train them, having them throw stones at your Lv6+ folks until
they're at Lv6 themselves.

3)Make them into a pair of Clerics. Give them each a Heal spell.

4)Train them against each other, one-on-one. No equipment. Set both
to computer control, and turn off all messages in the option menu.
All you have to do is clear the spell quote, which will only show up
once. Every 7-8 minutes your Clerics punch and heal is another
level for each of them. Keep them 14 or 15 levels ahead of your
real army (so you'll initially want them at Lv20-21). Once you get
there (about 110 mins), end the training. For heaven's sake, don't
sit there and watch the fight. Read if you must, or watch a
ballgame- just check the screen every 30 minutes or so to check
levels and make sure nobody's died (press Circle to interrupt the
computer and check levels).

5)Change your Clerics back into Amazons so they can go into water.

6)Now the fun. Go into training again, putting one powered-up Amazon
in the Denim spot on each team (front/center). Fill the other spots
with your army. Do this for both teams and you'll be training up to
eighteen characters quickly. Try to move your Amazons into water or
marshland to increase your army's chance of hitting them, then go to
town. Having your Amazons at too high a level will make the hit
rate around zero, while having the level too low will require more
than one hit to gain a level. Train your uber-Amazons (one-on-one)
accordingly. It should take two rounds or so to get your whole army
up one level, as one hit (rock/Heal/Incubus/etc.) will gain a level.

7)When you go into real battle, leave your SuperAmazons out. They'll
put the enemy forces at a higher level than you want. Usually,
train your army to be even with or a level under a map's leader. Go
ahead and make a Lv45 army in Chapter 1 if you want, but that would
be cheating and you don't wanna cheat. Not the first time through,
at least.

 

[Murk]

erm, I always thought half the fun of Tactics Ogre was to pit your units against one another with AI controls and watch them go at each other while you play another game?

 

[OSK]

Except the enemies gain a level pretty much every battle. If your troops gain an average of half a level per battle (And your healer probably gets that at best without cheesing) after 10 battles your hit rate will be ~10% vs their 90%.

If you're under-leveled, you gain more experience than usual.

For non-lethal attacks, healing, buffs, de-buffs, etc.: ((Target's level - Attacker's level) * 15) + (random number between 1 and 10)

For lethal attacks: ((Target's level - Attacker's Level) * 65) + (rand. num. from 10-20)

Killing an enemy 2 levels above you is an automatic level. Simply attacking an enemy 2 levels above you is 31-40 experience points. 100 experience points is a new level.

The enemies don't scale to your level, and the difference made by having a level advantage is immense. Your options are grinding or cheese (One man army claiming MVP every battle to maintain his 5+ level advantage over the enemies.)

Enemies scale to your level, but they have min/max levels. The difference of a single level is enormous in the beginning, but it's not as noticeable later on. That, along with your limited options, makes the first chapter pretty brutal.

 

[Damned Registrations]

There is no need for grinding in tactics ogre.

Just do this:

*Cheesy leveling technique*

This is good, but add one additional point: Change them into witches and have them petrify (or sleep, but then they'll keep weaking up) eachother or themselves. Attacks vs petrified enemies have 100% hitrate iirc. It's what I used to get the rest of my units back up to par after soloing most of the game with Denim.

 

[Murk]

^ also do less damage to petrified units so if you have one that's 2 or more levels higher you can have a mob pelt one petrified person with weak indirect attacks and level up quickly.

 

[Zomg]

I remember playing the PSX version of TO a couple of years ago and I never used the training thing. The main autisitc thing I can remember doing was using the semi-unique characters that had big stat bonuses for everything rather than real generics. Beyond that you just think during the fights; I remember getting archers to high elevation was really important.

 

[WanderingThrough2]

Compare Japans cartoons to amerikwas and you come up quite short. Beyond superficial things like art styling.

Nonsense.

Did you ever think to realize I do read good literature?

Nonsense on stilts. Your list (which could rather benefit from paragraph breaks, punctuation, etc.) reads like an awkward effort at middlebrow credibility.

The notion that you are reading through "Shakespeare's library" (by this do you mean, e.g., Petrarch, Holinshed, and the Bible, or do you mean, as I assume you do, his oeuvre?) "every two years" is particularly depressing/revealing, since it means either (a) you are frantically skimming at a rate of a play every 19 days and a sonnet every 4 days -- while juggling your semi-annual Dickens and your smattering of Austen, Milton, et al., -- in which case you are utterly failing to engaging with the text or absorb it and are reducing Shakespearana into a mush of mass consumption or (b) you are unaware of the scope of Shakespeare's works or (c) you are lying about what you read, which is only slightly less pathetic than lying about your IQ, penis size, or fondness for Arcanum.

But equally hilarious is your effort to appeal to all comers, or how you imagine all comers -- the Asian pretensionista who is convinced that nothing, nothing, in Western poetry can match the elegant simplicity of the haiku, the scifi/comic nerd who gushes for Silver Age comics (does anyone, honestly, like them?), and the Serious Reader, for whom the most important thing is that you take AP English Literature seriously.

Three pieces of unsolicited advice, which is intended (as it usually is) to demean more than to help:

(1) If you brag about what you read, you are probably reading for the wrong reason.

(2) It is inconsistent to spit on Harry Potter and Twilight out of one side of your mouth and give a hummer to NGE* out the other side of your mouth (as sexy as the move may be). They're all mass-market, lowbrow products, with occasional pretension to milddlebrowdom. If you want to look scornfully on what the masses love, you can't fetishize anime. Sorry. (You might be able to get away with fetishizing Gaiman -- and I do mean that homophonically -- and hating on the rest, but only among Goth nerds, the proudest but hardly finest of men.) (* Likewise, complaining about things being "Emo'd" while flaunting NGE and Gaiman is a little bit like saying you don't like processed foods while giving yourself a Slurpy enema -- it might feel cool, but it's really a bad idea.)

(3) Assuming you've actually read and enjoyed the books you claim to devotedly read, you should probably try some Borges, R.L. Stevenson, Dumas, and Stendhal. For various reasons, their works hit the vibe you're looking for (fantasies dressed up as serious literature), and I think you'd probably like them. They're also pretty easy reading.

 

[Zetor]

And uhhhh yeah, it IS grindy. The grinding is not to outlevel your foes, since enemies scale to your highest level character (I hear this isn't popular 'round here, c/d?), it's about keeping your team at the same level. If you have a 2+ level difference, the AI will kill your healer (typically the character with the lowest level - you don't need to heal much if you're doing things right) in 3 hits. To this end, you either need to fight lots of mind-numbing training sessions, or seek out random encounters on purpose and have your weakest characters throw rocks at the stronger characters' backs until they catch up. If that's "tactics", I'll stick to XCOM and JA2, thanks. ;p

You're doing it wrong.

You use a large party so you can swap out characters if they're starting to out-level the rest of your team. If your healer is slow to level, leave him in every battle. If your berzerker is too fast to level, put him in every other battle or so.

Eh, I admit I haven't really thought about doing it that way, but when I played through TO [around 5-6 yrs ago] I tried to have an optimized 10-man team. IIRC you had to use Denim for storyline fights, and since he was a terror knight, he was almost always outleveling everyone else even when I tried to keep his damage to a minimum. I also made it a point to not use training at all (to avoid cheese) and only did random encounters if I was completely overwhelmed in a storyline battle... I think I remember some ambush that started with the enemy focus firing my low level priest and dropping her in the first round.

Anyway, my point was that level disparities between soldiers in TO promotes abnormal behavior... instead of every soldier doing what they should be doing and all of them leveling up at the same pace. Disgaea can also be similarly grindy, though that's fully avoidable if you don't want the over-9000 attacks on your dudes.

Case in point: my priests spent most of the time in those battles throwing stones at the backs of my own characters, it was the only way thy could gain xp (stealing killing blows was very much a no-no when they were still clerics, and friendly spells got seriously gimped xp). You only get lightbow fairly late into the game, which didn't help.

(as a side note: getting an angel knight was very much 'non-trivial', so I wanted mine to be in every fight, dammit!! :p)

 

[roll-a-die]

Compare Japans cartoons to amerikwas and you come up quite short. Beyond superficial things like art styling.

Nonsense.

Name a cartoon from a current age that takes deconstructing a genre to the level of Evangelion? I'll watch it then we can debate pros and cons.
I don't even like Evangelion and I'll still admit it's a decent cartoon. More mature than most of the shit USA puts out these days. Also for more props name one that also takes a romance and makes it take centre stage while the actiony stuff takes a back seat like Eureka. Hell one of Kwas better cartoons that they put out recently(as in the only one I could stand) was made to emulate anime. I still didn't like most of it.

Did you ever think to realize I do read good literature?

Nonsense on stilts. Your list (which could rather benefit from paragraph breaks, punctuation, etc.) reads like an awkward effort at middlebrow credibility.

I never claim to be anything more than middle of the line average.

The notion that you are reading through "Shakespeare's library" (by this do you mean, e.g., Petrarch, Holinshed, and the Bible, or do you mean, as I assume you do, his oeuvre?) "every two years" is particularly depressing/revealing, since it means either (a) you are frantically skimming at a rate of a play every 19 days and a sonnet every 4 days -- while juggling your semi-annual Dickens and your smattering of Austen, Milton, et al., -- in which case you are utterly failing to engaging with the text or absorb it and are reducing Shakespearana into a mush of mass consumption or (b) you are unaware of the scope of Shakespeare's works or (c) you are lying about what you read, which is only slightly less pathetic than lying about your IQ, penis size, or fondness for Arcanum.

As a speed reader I can read things and comprehend them very, VERY, fast. I learned speed reading, typing and writing, out of necessity in grad school. Also yes I mean, his oeuvre, which I have in the form or books from the Folger Shakespeare Library. I do have a book of his sonnets around my house somewhere, amidst the books, computers/spare electronics and mail. My penis is 5in 3cn the rote average for a male in the USA, Arcanum was REALLY good only when compared to most modern RPG's , it's major failing was that it forwent game balance and testing, it's major successes were a decent storyline and setting. My IQ sits somewhere around 90-120 depending on when I'm taking the test.

But equally hilarious is your effort to appeal to all comers, or how you imagine all comers -- the Asian pretensionista who is convinced that nothing, nothing, in Western poetry can match the elegant simplicity of the haiku, the scifi/comic nerd who gushes for Silver Age comics (does anyone, honestly, like them?), and the Serious Reader, for whom the most important thing is that you take AP English Literature seriously.

I don't like haiku
I think it is for the axis
Haiku can blow me

Though it is a legitimate method of poetry that lends itself well to creativity and to some degree vague philosophy. I've previously explained that I read gold and silver age comics to learn mistakes from the past. I'm not a very serious reader I don't really claim to be. I just don't have as bad of taste as they claim I do.

Three pieces of unsolicited advice, which is intended (as it usually is) to demean more than to help:

(1) If you brag about what you read, you are probably reading for the wrong reason.

I don't really brag about what I read. That was rebuttal to what had been said previously after they had assumed from one recommendation that I had really bad taste.

(2) It is inconsistent to spit on Harry Potter and Twilight out of one side of your mouth and give a hummer to NGE* out the other side of your mouth (as sexy as the move may be). They're all mass-market, lowbrow products, with occasional pretension to milddlebrowdom. If you want to look scornfully on what the masses love, you can't fetishize anime. Sorry. (You might be able to get away with fetishizing Gaiman -- and I do mean that homophonically -- and hating on the rest, but only among Goth nerds, the proudest but hardly finest of men.) (* Likewise, complaining about things being "Emo'd" while flaunting NGE and Gaiman is a little bit like saying you don't like processed foods while giving yourself a Slurpy enema -- it might feel cool, but it's really a bad idea.)

But slurpies are wonderful... Anyway I guess you could say I dislike Harry Potter and Twilight for the culture they've built up around them. Gaiman and NGE have some of that culture but not to the extent that HP and Twilight do.

(3) Assuming you've actually read and enjoyed the books you claim to devotedly read, you should probably try some Borges, R.L. Stevenson, Dumas, and Stendhal. For various reasons, their works hit the vibe you're looking for (fantasies dressed up as serious literature), and I think you'd probably like them. They're also pretty easy reading.

Thank you and I think I may have a read an R.L. Stevenson at one time he wrote Treasure Island right? A quick wiki on Borges looks very much like what I like.

Now I'm currently staring at a soldier of fortune(1) disk trying to decide whether I should attempt to install it, whether it would even run, and whether I would enjoy replaying it.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

As a speed reader I can read things and comprehend them very, VERY, fast.

LOL.

My IQ sits somewhere around 90-120 depending on when I'm taking the test.

You don't say.

 

[WanderingThrough2]

Name a cartoon from a current age that takes deconstructing a genre to the level of Evangelion? I'll watch it then we can debate pros and cons.

I'm not sure what you mean by "deconstruct." I've seen Evangelion, but aside from watching GunBuster when I was a kid (by the same team as NGE), haven't seen other works in the "giant robots piloted by kids killing giant aliens with Judeo-Christianity iconography" genre. (I understand it's a pretty large one in Japan.) So I can't see how the show "deconstructed" anything -- it struck me as okay, as far as it went, but fairly generic anime, with an extremely affectless main character and an extremely ridiculous American sidekick girl, included primarily, it seemed, to assuage insecurities about losing WWII. Is converting the Lance of Longinus into a surface-to-air missile that creates a giant cross-shaped explosion really a sign of cultural development?!

In any case, guessing at what you mean by "deconstruct," here's a list off the top of my head: the Tick, the Head, and Darkwing Duck, all of which were spoofs/deconstructions of the superhero genre; Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law, and Sealab 2020, all of which were deconstructions of the mid-80s Hannah Barbera cartoons; Scooby Doo, which deconstructed not a cartoon genre but the detective genre; and Archer, which targets the spy-thriller. Also, in the decidely post-modern vein (which is what deconstruction is all about, no?) would be Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and (from what I gather) Spongebob Squarepants and Power Puff Girls.

Of course, you have me at something of a disadvantage since I haven't watched "children's" cartoons since the 80s or even "grown-up" cartoons since the early 00s, so I'm going off of memory and a degree of informed speculation.

I don't even like Evangelion and I'll still admit it's a decent cartoon. More mature than most of the shit USA puts out these days

Well, I don't know most of what the US puts out these days (television-wise), except that it seems heavily influenced by anime.

But I think your premise is wrong. American cartoons should be more juvenile, on average, than Japanese ones because American adults watch, e.g., dramas with real actors, rather than ninja cartoons with tentacle porn. It's kind of comparing apples to oranges, and the use of "maturity" as the descriptor is inapt because it carries too much judgmental freight. A children's cartoon that is full of childish delight is not "immature" in some pejorative sense, and it is in a sense a measure of immaturity to view bloody and sexual cartoons as more mature than, say, Wall-E or Up, with their child-like innocence.

I guess it is certainly fair to say that Japanese cartoons are more adolescent than American cartoons. Perhaps that is the best word for it.

That said, I would stack Batman: The Animated Series up against most Japanese TV show.

Also for more props name one that also takes a romance and makes it take centre stage while the actiony stuff takes a back seat like Eureka.

It's not clear to me that the lack of cartoon romances is a sign of immaturity in a culture. I mean, romance strikes me as a genre uniquely focused on the human qualities of the characters, so relying upon drawings rather than actors is a real limitation. I certainly can't think of any American episodic cartoons that are romance-driven, but then there are no American TV shows that are romance-driven. Even those with a heavy romantic component (like, say, Friday Night Lights) rely primarily on other moods. So episodic romance just isn't an American product, whether done with pictures or real people.

Even including films, though, cartoon romances are still pretty rare (perhaps Beauty and the Beast is the foremost example that springs to mind). That said, I would take the first five minutes of Up, the space dance of Wall-E, and Jack and Sally's duet from Nightmare Before Christmas over the overwrought psychodrama of the animes I've seen.

As a speed reader I can read things and comprehend them very, VERY, fast.

That is a terrible way to read works whose form is as important as their content. If you're going to take that approach to literature, you might as well just read the Cliff's Notes.

Thank you and I think I may have a read an R.L. Stevenson at one time he wrote Treasure Island right? A quick wiki on Borges looks very much like what I like.

I would start with Treasure Island by Stevenson and Fictions by Borges.

 

[roll-a-die]

Name a cartoon from a current age that takes deconstructing a genre to the level of Evangelion? I'll watch it then we can debate pros and cons.

I'm not sure what you mean by "deconstruct." I've seen Evangelion, but aside from watching GunBuster when I was a kid (by the same team as NGE), haven't seen other works in the "giant robots piloted by kids killing giant aliens with Judeo-Christianity iconography" genre. (I understand it's a pretty large one in Japan.) So I can't see how the show "deconstructed" anything -- it struck me as okay, as far as it went, but fairly generic anime, with an extremely affectless main character and an extremely ridiculous American sidekick girl, included primarily, it seemed, to assuage insecurities about losing WWII. Is converting the Lance of Longinus into a surface-to-air missile that creates a giant cross-shaped explosion really a sign of cultural development?!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... nstruction
The Dark Knight Returns series by frank miller is by far the example of kwa deconstructing.
I've never read it but kickass seems to be one as well.
In web comic form Erf World deconstructs the japanese tactical turn based strategy genre.

In any case, guessing at what you mean by "deconstruct," here's a list off the top of my head: the Tick, the Head, and Darkwing Duck, all of which were spoofs/deconstructions of the superhero genre; Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law, and Sealab 2020, all of which were deconstructions of the mid-80s Hannah Barbera cartoons; Scooby Doo, which deconstructed not a cartoon genre but the detective genre; and Archer, which targets the spy-thriller. Also, in the decidely post-modern vein (which is what deconstruction is all about, no?) would be Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and (from what I gather) Spongebob Squarepants and Power Puff Girls.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... nstruction
Deconstructing something fully relies quite allot on a solid throughput series something like Spongebob may deconstruct something for one episode but afterwords everything is hunky dory. There are no real consequences for the actions of a character beyond that episode. To do something to the degree of NGE takes allot of effort. And you likely having not seen much of the mecha or anime genre would realize the subversion's and by-plays going on in the characters.

Of course, you have me at something of a disadvantage since I haven't watched "children's" cartoons since the 80s or even "grown-up" cartoons since the early 00s, so I'm going off of memory and a degree of informed speculation.

I don't even like Evangelion and I'll still admit it's a decent cartoon. More mature than most of the shit USA puts out these days

Well, I don't know most of what the US puts out these days (television-wise), except that it seems heavily influenced by anime.

Being an insomniac and being fed up with most Live Action TV shows certainly helps me. Most of my animu knowledge is from around 10 years ago as well. And by more mature I mean humor that isn't Fart jokes or cursing, or so young that it annoys an older viewer.

But I think your premise is wrong. American cartoons should be more juvenile, on average, than Japanese ones because American adults watch, e.g., dramas with real actors, rather than ninja cartoons with tentacle porn. It's kind of comparing apples to oranges, and the use of "maturity" as the descriptor is inapt because it carries too much judgmental freight. A children's cartoon that is full of childish delight is not "immature" in some pejorative sense, and it is in a sense a measure of immaturity to view bloody and sexual cartoons as more mature than, say, Wall-E or Up, with their child-like innocence.

I guess it is certainly fair to say that Japanese cartoons are more adolescent than American cartoons. Perhaps that is the best word for it.

That said, I would stack Batman: The Animated Series up against most Japanese TV show.

An Excellent choice and is about 1 of 3 Kwa cartoons that does things better than most good anime. The other 2 are venture brothers and The Boondocks and Japan also has dramas, and live action TV shows, in reality, in japan, anime is actually quite looked down upon by the the middle class, just as comics and cartoons are here. The Comic Geeks and Nerds are just far more visible there and get more attention from here. Also you likely haven't seen any seinen or josei manga have you. It's not all dragon ball and mecha or hot vampires and harams.

Also for more props name one that also takes a romance and makes it take centre stage while the actiony stuff takes a back seat like Eureka.

It's not clear to me that the lack of cartoon romances is a sign of immaturity in a culture. I mean, romance strikes me as a genre uniquely focused on the human qualities of the characters, so relying upon drawings rather than actors is a real limitation. I certainly can't think of any American episodic cartoons that are romance-driven, but then there are no American TV shows that are romance-driven. Even those with a heavy romantic component (like, say, Friday Night Lights) rely primarily on other moods. So episodic romance just isn't an American product, whether done with pictures or real people.
SNIP

And that's exactly why it should be in animation, if animation is to be taken seriously as an art on the level with literature, it has to be able to reach all genres not be confined to mere amusement.

As a speed reader I can read things and comprehend them very, VERY, fast.

That is a terrible way to read works whose form is as important as their content. If you're going to take that approach to literature, you might as well just read the Cliff's Notes.

The point of speed reading is that you still absorb the text while reading really fast. When you speed read properly, you don't read the words "the green house on a hill" you see,

Ignore the lower caption it's the only thing I can find without changing the example.

Thank you and I think I may have a read an R.L. Stevenson at one time he wrote Treasure Island right? A quick wiki on Borges looks very much like what I like.

I would start with Treasure Island by Stevenson and Fictions by Borges.

[/quote] Thank you once again.

 

[WanderingThrough2]

The point of speed reading is that you still absorb the text while reading really fast. When you speed read properly, you don't read the words "the green house on a hill"

Exactly. But the art of writing often turns on each word of "the green house on a hill." Merely absorbing the image means losing, among other things, the possibilities of assonance and consonance, alliteration, or mere surprise.

A quick example can be found in Heaney's superb translation (well, from an end-user's standpoint; God knows how well he captures the original Anglo-Saxon) of Beowulf:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
as his powers waxed and his worth was proved,
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
beyond the whale-road had to yield to him
and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.

If you merely absorb from this that Shield Sheafson was a good king and a bad ass, you're missing 90% of the work that Heaney (and the original skald/poet) put into the stanzas. If you read it each word at a time, the old English sounds mount one on another, and wrapped up in that symphony of long nouns, you're hit by the delightful surprise that this "terror of the hall-troops" and "wrecker of mead-benches," a rampager and a scourge, is, in fact, "one good king."

Now Beowulf is a poem, but most great literature has its poetry, and you're really losing that if you're just trying to get the sense for what each paragraph (or page) conveys.

Speed reading is a valuable tool, in the way logical analysis is a valuable tool, but like all tools they have their proper uses. You shouldn't eat dinner with a drill or try to digest Shakespeare with speed reading techniques.

 

[laclongquan]

Speed reading mean nothing if you dont have the interest to reread the book.

Speedread/skim through on the first time to see whether it worth paying attetntion or not.Sometime a few tens of pages are enough but most of the time it require a full reading to see whther this worth committing.

Good book is books that make you reread the secondtimes (3rd times if you count the skimming).

Why? Because there're books that quite ambigous. I think book1 of the Wheel of TIme fall into this category. I reread it about 3 times but I am still not sure of the entire content. There's some sequence of chapters that just plain doesnt make sense. Make me think of a closed loop time travel sequence. ( and if you think I just read WoT and the likes you are in for a surprise).

And yes, bragging about books you read is like showing your ass to the wind. An invitation to be buttfucked, hard.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

The point of speed reading is that you still absorb the text while reading really fast. When you speed read properly, you don't read the words "the green house on a hill"

Exactly. But the art of writing often turns on each word of "the green house on a hill." Merely absorbing the image means losing, among other things, the possibilities of assonance and consonance, alliteration, or mere surprise.

It's not only that though. The way perception works, you're going to be bombarded by your memories that are the most easily accessible to you at the moment of reading, which usually means you will think in cliches no matter what you read if you're reading too fast, and will miss all of the non-cliche implications, nuances, allusions, and references. Looking at how roll-a-die read my dialogue piece, you might also lose the images themselves.

At the end of the day, there aren't many books where the rhythm and sounds of the prose matter enough to merit spending ten times as much time reading them as you would otherwise, unless, of course, you can't think of anything better to do. (That said, I usually read even prose narration roughly with the speed of (fast) speech. I started doing it when getting into Dunsany's delightful prose several years ago, and haven't been able to stop since. When I try to read faster, e.g. to avoid boredom, my mind becomes a jumble of sounds. I then realized I could read all of the implications of meaning as well as the meaning while I'm at it, so I don't complain. It forces me to read actively, instead of passively like a child.)

 

[WanderingThrough2]

You said you were speed reading Shakespeare (not just that, but speed rereading Shakespeare!). Either you have terrible judgment by pegging his plays as being outside the set of "books where the rhythm and sounds of the prose matter" or you have a problem with honesty.

Anyway, I've delurked enough. I'll rise from under the mountain when trouble haunts the land once more. . . .

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

You said you were speed reading Shakespeare (not just that, but speed rereading Shakespeare!). Either you have terrible judgment by pegging his plays as being outside the set of "books where the rhythm and sounds of the prose matter" or you have a problem with honesty.

Anyway, I've delurked enough. I'll rise from under the mountain when trouble haunts the land once more. . . .

Excuse me? Who, exactly, are you talking to?

I don't speed read anything, even non-fiction.

I wouldn't read Shakespeare for his timbral allure. I have Bach, and other actual music, for that purpose.

 

[Paula Tormeson IV]

Notice also how this guy, roll-a-die, says he reads "so much" because of his insomnia. Notice his purported all-encompassing love of Shakespeare. He is like the second coming of Harold Bloom. Just another aspect of his many-sided literary personality, I guess. :D