Spinoff - Dinner Guests any five writers any time period

[Admin Pete]

My second list would be

Lucian
Ibn al-Nafis
Simon Tyssot de Patot
Jonathan Swift
C.I. Defontenay

[Admin Pete]

My third list

Emily Brontë
Branwell Brontë
Anne Brontë
Charlotte Brontë
Dave Arneson

from Wikipedia

Their reading fed their imaginations, and their creativity soared after their father gave Branwell a set of toy soldiers in June 1826. They gave names to the soldiers, or the "Twelves",[27] and developed their characters. This led to the creation of an imaginary world: the African kingdom of "Angria", which was illustrated with maps and watercolour renderings. The children devised plots about the inhabitants of Angria and its capital city, "Glass Town", later called Verreopolis or Verdopolis.

Their fantastical worlds and kingdoms gradually acquired characteristics from their historical world, drawing from its sovereigns, armies, heroes, outlaws, fugitives, inns, schools, and publishers. The characters and lands created by the children were given newspapers and magazines and chronicles written in tiny books with writing so small that it was difficult to read without a magnifying glass. These creations and writings were an apprenticeship for their later literary talents.

Around 1831, when Anne was eleven, she and Emily broke away from Charlotte and Branwell to create and develop their own fantasy world, "Gondal".

Also from Wikipedia

He took leadership role with Charlotte in a series of fantasy role-playing games which the siblings wrote and performed about the "Young Men", characters based on a set of wooden soldiers. The plays evolved into an intricate saga based in West Africa about the fictitious Glasstown confederacy. From 1834, he both collaborated and competed with his sister Charlotte to describe another imaginary world, Angria. Branwell's particular interest in these paracosms were their politics and wars, including the destructive rivalry between their heroes, Charlotte's Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Zamorna, and his Alexander Percy, Earl of Northangerland. These writings impress by their virtuosity and scope, but are also repetitive when compared to Charlotte's contributions.

Also from Wikipedia

Inspired by a box of toy soldiers Branwell had received as a gift, the children began to write stories which they set in a number of invented imaginary worlds peopled by their soldiers as well as their heroes the Duke of Wellington and his sons, Charles and Arthur Wellesley. Little of Emily's work from this period survives, except for poems spoken by characters. Initially, all four children shared in creating stories about a world called Angria.

However, when Emily was 13, she and Anne withdrew from participation in the Angria story and began a new one about Gondal, a fictional island whose myths and legends were to preoccupy the two sisters throughout their lives. With the exception of their Gondal poems and Anne's lists of Gondal's characters and place-names, Emily and Anne's Gondal writings were largely not preserved. Among those that did survive are some "diary papers," written by Emily in her twenties, which describe current events in Gondal. The heroes of Gondal tended to resemble the popular image of the Scottish Highlander, a sort of British version of the "noble savage": romantic outlaws capable of more nobility, passion, and bravery than the denizens of "civilization".

Also from Wikipedia

She and her surviving siblings – Branwell, Emily and Anne – created their own fictional worlds, and began chronicling the lives and struggles of the inhabitants of their imaginary kingdoms. Charlotte and Branwell wrote Byronic stories about their jointly imagined country, Angria, and Emily and Anne wrote articles and poems about Gondal. The sagas they created were episodic and elaborate, and they exist in incomplete manuscripts, some of which have been published as juvenilia. They provided them with an obsessive interest during childhood and early adolescence, which prepared them for literary vocations in adulthood.

Gondal

[Admin Pete]

My fourth list

Samuel Butler
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Edgar Allan Poe
Edward Everett Hale
Edward Bellamy

[Admin Pete]

My fifth list (why stop at one, you can have a series of dinners after all)

Mark Twain
Jack London
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Robert E Howard
L. Frank Baum

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Feb 27, 2021 0:09:19 GMT -5 Admin Pete said:

My third list

Emily Brontë
Branwell Brontë
Anne Brontë
Charlotte Brontë
Dave Arneson

I want an invite to this dinner, that rocks.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Feb 27, 2021 0:16:55 GMT -5 Admin Pete said:

My fifth list (why stop at one, you can have a series of dinners after all)

Mark Twain
Jack London
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Robert E Howard
L. Frank Baum

And this one, definitely want an invite to this one too!

[Admin Pete]

Feb 27, 2021 10:13:35 GMT -5 The Perilous Dreamer said:

Feb 27, 2021 0:09:19 GMT -5 Admin Pete said:

My third list

Emily Brontë
Branwell Brontë
Anne Brontë
Charlotte Brontë
Dave Arneson

I want an invite to this dinner, that rocks.

You have it!

[Admin Pete]

Feb 27, 2021 10:14:32 GMT -5 The Perilous Dreamer said:

Feb 27, 2021 0:16:55 GMT -5 Admin Pete said:

My fifth list (why stop at one, you can have a series of dinners after all)

Mark Twain
Jack London
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Robert E Howard
L. Frank Baum

And this one, definitely want an invite to this one too!

You are always welcome PD!

[hengest]

Dante
Jack London
Mary Shelley
Coleridge
Edward Packard

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Mar 2, 2021 20:11:22 GMT -5 hengest said:

Dante
Jack London
Mary Shelley
Coleridge
Edward Packard

I did not know about Edward Packard.

Isn't this fun to do, make lists of folks you wish you can chat with over a meal.

[hengest]

Rob Kuntz (robkuntz )

Let us once again consider children. During their daily activities of imaginative expression kids rarely fail to exceed what we today consider adventuresome Fantasy: While they are about building spaceships for journeying into the unknown of the universe, we are pacing through dungeons; while they are exploring the caves, mountains and wildernesses of uncharted lands, we are groping through dungeons; while they imitate and investigate hundreds of personas and situations far and wide and even alien, we are for the most part, still trudging through dungeons. And to make the comparison more poignant, as a group they are running across a field and in mid-stride changing from frontiersmen to pirates, while we are scouring books of rules, inquiring of our fellows, and writing dissertation length blog-posts in order to ascertain if this very thing is indeed possible.


From A New Ethos in Game Design, Copyright 2014-2018, Robert J. Kuntz. All Rights and Permissions Reserved.

Ogden Nash

Don't Cry Darling, It's Blood All Right


Whenever poets want to give you the idea that something is particularly meek and mild,
They compare it to a child,
Thereby proving that though poets with poetry may be rife
They don’t know the facts of life.
If of compassion you desire either a tittle or a jot,
Don’t try to get it from a tot.
Hard-boiled, sophisticated adults like me and you
May enjoy ourselves thoroughly with Little Women and Winnie-the-Pooh,
But innocent infants these titles from their reading course eliminate
As soon as they discover that it was honey and nuts and mashed potatoes instead of human flesh that Winnie-the-Pooh and Little Women ate.
Innocent infants have no use for fables about rabbits or donkeys or tortoises or porpoises,
What they want is something with plenty of well-mutilated corpoises.
Not on legends of how the rose came to be a rose instead of a petunia is their fancy fed,
But on the inside story of how somebody’s bones got ground up to make somebody else’s bread.
They’ll go to sleep listening to the story of the little beggarmaid who got to be queen by being kind to the bees and the birds,
But they’re all eyes and ears the minute they suspect a wolf or a giant is going to tear some poor woodcutter into quarters or thirds.
It really doesn’t take much to fill their cup;
All they want is for somebody to be eaten up.
Therefore I say unto you, all you poets who are so crazy about meek and mild little children and their angelic air,
If you are sincere and really want to please them, why just go out and get yourselves devoured by a bear.

Philip Dick

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups — and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it’s all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality?

A. A. Milne

But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

Hengest (hengest )

Feb 22, 2021 20:56:50 GMT -5 hengest said:

A dry knothole with two corked vials inside, small, barely enough to hold a swallow of liquid each. They are crudely labelled "WANT FRIENDS" and "NO FRIENDS."

[The Perilous Dreamer]

hengest, you are a deep thinker!