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A book about Dracula fighting aliens might be fun, but no. The book is all normal Alien vs Human resistance for the first 95%. Then Dracula reveals himself and says, "Yeah we did a bunch of awesome vampire stuff offscreen and won lol".
7c Nickel has a new favorite as of 18:58 on Mar 3, 2016 |
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Mar 3, 2016 18:45
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Carnival of Shrews posted:Ah, Lisbeth Salander and her Deeply Alternative bisexual hackerpunk autistic-loner lifestyle. Here's Salander, as we first meet her in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; it's hardly the worst book ever, but it certainly has its moments. No-one I've discussed this with -- including some serious Larsson enthusiasts -- has believed that the description can be as dire as this, until they read it again: And there was so much praise for her character, too! After hearing for months about how it was this really great feminist book, I was surprised that just meant "It had this autistic savant he wrote with one hand down his pants" and "The moral of the story is that nazi rapists are bad".
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Mar 3, 2016 19:20
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Carnival of Shrews posted:Ah, Lisbeth Salander and her Deeply Alternative bisexual hackerpunk autistic-loner lifestyle. Here's Salander, as we first meet her in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; it's hardly the worst book ever, but it certainly has its moments. No-one I've discussed this with -- including some serious Larsson enthusiasts -- has believed that the description can be as dire as this, until they read it again: Wow, they really managed to get rid of a lot of bullshit when they made the movies, I sure as hell won't bother reading the books now. I'm referring to the Swedish films when I say this, I haven't watched the American film yet.
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Mar 3, 2016 19:29
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Speaking of bad bestsellers, [b]The Da Vinci Code[/b ] is an utter trainwreck of amateurish bad writing built on a foundation of a D- understanding of history at best.
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Mar 3, 2016 20:09
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Speaking of bad bestsellers, The Da Vinci Code is an utter trainwreck of amateurish bad writing built on a foundation of a D- understanding of history at best. Every Dan Brown book has the same plot with the locations changed, and it's always BASED ON TRUE HISTORY!!! that never actually seems to be true.
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Mar 3, 2016 20:28
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Gotcha, i already covered Da Vinci Code  Seriously, Brown includes two actual lectures as flashbacks in a thriller. They're both on the level of clickbait. e: and a bit of crossposting for Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana. It's about a fantasy version of Italy divided between two foreign conquerors, and the rebels that try to overthrow them. Here is an excerpt: Guy Gavriel Kay posted:Nothing had come to pass as he’d expected. There was only one single element left of his original design for the evening. One thing that might yet offer a kind of pleasure, that might redeem a little of what had gone so desperately awry. "Imma torture some homosexuals" the ugly villain said. BravestOfTheLamps has a new favorite as of 20:48 on Mar 3, 2016 |
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Mar 3, 2016 20:39
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Gabriel Pope posted:I think you accidentally posted this before you got to the part of the book that's terrible, because everything you've said makes it sound awesome. If you don't mind swapping spaceships for biplanes, have I got the book for you.
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Mar 3, 2016 20:52
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Gabriel Pope posted:I think you accidentally posted this before you got to the part of the book that's terrible, because everything you've said makes it sound awesome. I thought it was a fun, mindless book. My complaint is the buildup took too long before the vamps-kicking-rear end started. I wish he'd write a sequel where they have adventures on a ship named the SS Nosferatu.
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Mar 3, 2016 21:01
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Speaking of bad bestsellers, [b]The Da Vinci Code[/b ] is an utter trainwreck of amateurish bad writing built on a foundation of a D- understanding of history at best.
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Mar 3, 2016 21:02
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:The best takedown of Dan Brown remains this gem. This is loving fantastic
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Mar 3, 2016 21:10
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:The best takedown of Dan Brown remains this gem. This is still my favorite paragraph ever written: quote:The 190lb adult male human being nodded his head to indicate satisfaction and returned to his bedroom by walking there. Still asleep in the luxurious four-poster bed of the expensive $10 million house was beautiful wife Mrs Brown. Renowned author Dan Brown gazed admiringly at the pulchritudinous brunette’s blonde tresses, flowing from her head like a stream but made from hair instead of water and without any fish in. She was as majestic as the finest sculpture by Caravaggio or the most coveted portrait by Rodin. I like the attractive woman, thought the successful man.
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Mar 3, 2016 21:13
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:The TVTropes threads got really interestingly insane. They ended up fostering their own tiny culture that occasionally broke off into completely incomprehensible derails about how, to give one memorable example, liking turn-based combat in video games makes you racist To be fair that sounds more like the PYF of the time than anything specific to the TVT threads. What was the argument there? I don't remember that one at all.
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Mar 3, 2016 22:32
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Yeah, PYF kinda went insane for a while. A lot of people (myself included) got a bit caught up in it. I can't speak for the others, but I feel like a loving idiot in hindsight. The very first TVT thread was definitely a mock thread though - I was the OP. It was entirely for laughing about Troper Tales, but once the thread ran out of funny ones and started digging into the forums, poo poo went really off the rails. Staring into the abyss etc etc. We really should've just let the threads die after we'd finished with Troper Tales.
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Mar 3, 2016 23:18
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WeaponGradeSadness posted:To be fair that sounds more like the PYF of the time than anything specific to the TVT threads. What was the argument there? I don't remember that one at all.
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Mar 3, 2016 23:37
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I had no idea how lucky I was to be driven away from those threads by their sheer repetition instead of everything that evidently came next.
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Mar 3, 2016 23:58
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bringmyfishback posted:I Don't Even Own a Television just did Scruples by Judith Krantz, which was one of the most simultaneously revolting and enthralling pieces of "literature" I've ever read. Has anyone else here picked up that turdburger?
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Mar 3, 2016 23:59
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Don't worry, TVTropes is still bad, although now that they've banished Troper Tales, Fetish Fuel, and all the pages about individual works of porn and pedoshit, it's merely the normal sort of nerd badness rather than horrifying abyssal badness.
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Mar 4, 2016 00:29
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spite house posted:Scruples is loving incredible and I can't recommend it enough. It is just total garbage and takes itself completely seriously and is full of characters with names like "Harriet Toppingham". It helps to steal it from your mom and read it when you're 15 though. Valley of the Dolls is amazing for the same reason. You can actually feel your brain cells dying as you read it, kind of like sniffing glue or something. Cheap, dirty high included.
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Mar 4, 2016 00:33
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GottaPayDaTrollToll posted:Don't worry, TVTropes is still bad, although now that they've banished Troper Tales, Fetish Fuel, and all the pages about individual works of porn and pedoshit, it's merely the normal sort of nerd badness rather than horrifying abyssal badness. Yeah mostly it's just boring now.
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Mar 4, 2016 01:05
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I use TvTropes to spoil stuff I can't be bothered to watch. It's surprisingly comprehensive.
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Mar 4, 2016 01:22
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I just can't stand their hyperbolic reactions to everything.
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Mar 4, 2016 01:27
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Arcsquad12 posted:I just can't stand their hyperbolic reactions to everything. How can you stand Something Awful then? That is... all we do?
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Mar 4, 2016 01:36
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Crow Jane posted:Valley of the Dolls is amazing for the same reason. You can actually feel your brain cells dying as you read it, kind of like sniffing glue or something. Cheap, dirty high included. I kind of feel like stealing lurid, brain-rotting trash lit from adults as an early adolescent is a rite of passage, kind of like finding woods porn. For me, it was my grandmother's "True Stories" magazines, which I'd end up reading whenever I got bored during a family visit. Those things weren't Valley of the Dolls-caliber, but what they lacked in raw unvarnished sleaze they made up for by being the stupidest thing you could buy at a newsstand. My mother also got me into the J.D. Robb In Death books, which I still refer to as my "trashy books for ladies," but I was a grown-rear end adult at that point, so I really have nobody to blame but myself.
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Mar 4, 2016 01:39
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Antivehicular posted:I kind of feel like stealing lurid, brain-rotting trash lit from adults as an early adolescent is a rite of passage, kind of like finding woods porn. For me, it was my grandmother's "True Stories" magazines, which I'd end up reading whenever I got bored during a family visit. Those things weren't Valley of the Dolls-caliber, but what they lacked in raw unvarnished sleaze they made up for by being the stupidest thing you could buy at a newsstand. My middle school friends and I passed around a copy of Anne Rice's Exit to Eden that someone had stolen from her mom. It's basically about a high society BDSM resort, from what I remember? We thought we were very mature for reading it, and I'm pretty sure it gave all of our hormonal little brains some very odd ideas about things. As a younger kid, I used to beg my mom to buy Weekly World News every time we went to the grocery store. I couldn't understand why a newspaper (which was surely 100% serious and truthful) was announcing that Bigfoot had been found on the moon, of all things, and she didn't seem to care at all. When I finally started earning an allowance, the first thing I bought was Weekly World News. I read that thing cover to cover so many freakin' times. Thankfully I started reading real books eventually, but I do love me some quality trash. Crow Jane has a new favorite as of 02:07 on Mar 4, 2016 |
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Mar 4, 2016 01:57
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Crow Jane posted:My middle school friends and I passed around a copy of Anne Rice's Exit to Eden that someone had stolen from her mom. A bunch of seventh-graders proooobably shouldn't have been reading about 80% of what we were reading. spite house has a new favorite as of 02:32 on Mar 4, 2016 |
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Mar 4, 2016 02:29
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Yeah mostly it's just boring now. Yup, even if the mock threads didn't have a history of turning into dumpster fires, there just isn't a whole lot worth mocking that isn't just regular fandom idiocy (which is a deep and horrible rabbit hole in its own right with more than enough material to support its own thread, but none of it is specific to TVTropes).
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Mar 4, 2016 02:33
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Seriously, Brown includes two actual lectures as flashbacks in a thriller. They're both on the level of clickbait. tbf, it's no worse than the villain in Left Behind giving a rousing speech to the UN by naming a bunch of countries e: 
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Mar 4, 2016 02:48
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Crow Jane posted:My middle school friends and I passed around a copy of Anne Rice's Exit to Eden that someone had stolen from her mom. It's basically about a high society BDSM resort, from what I remember? We thought we were very mature for reading it, and I'm pretty sure it gave all of our hormonal little brains some very odd ideas about things. Back in eighth grade, the kids I hung out with were mostly Xanth readers, so the infamous paperback du jour was Piers Anthony's Firefly -- by the Xanth guy, but with actual sex in it, oh my God!! I think I've ranted about Firefly in this thread before, but to repeat myself, it's completely repulsive. It's ostensibly "erotic horror" about an ooze monster that secretes pheromones to get people all sexy-feeling/maybe screwing the ooze? (it's been a while since I read this) and then drains all their precious bodily fluids, but it involves an extensive subplot about how the heroine was sexually abused as a young child and is traumatized, not by the abuse, but by the fact that her "lover" was arrested and died in prison, and didn't they see that he loved her and they were so happy?! This subplot results in a long, thoroughly unnerving afterword from Piers Anthony about how pedophilia is okay, pretty much. Blessedly, even as an eighth-grader, I was well aware this was creepy bullshit and didn't get any ideas from it besides "you remember those weird vibes you were getting off of Piers Anthony novels? Yeah, they were on the money. Stop reading those loving things." Firefly also has a lengthy, completely superfluous aside about Piers Anthony's theories about the evolution of breasts. I don't remember why, and I'm not rereading the loving thing to remind myself.
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Mar 4, 2016 03:03
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Arcsquad12 posted:I just Can't Stand their Hyperbolic Reactions to everything.
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Mar 4, 2016 03:10
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spite house posted:Did we go to the same middle school? My crew put some mileage on that sucker (which actually isn't terrible as these things go, certainly has it over Fifty Shades like a tent. I remember the double-dildo scene with fondness.) The girl who swiped the book from her mom was quite the celebrity for a short while, until I usurped her position with my own mom's Anais Nin who does not belong in this thread. Was one of your crew a girl with a pronounced lisp who couldn't stop talking about "whipth and chainth" for like a month after her turn with the book? If so, I had every class with her that semester, it got really hard not to laugh or accidentally slip and say it the same way. And yeah, we probably shouldn't have been reading that crap. I think my parents just figured that reading was better than my spending all day in a chatroom or getting pregnant, so as long as I had a book in my hands they were happy. I think they were kinda relieved when I started reading books that didn't have gold-embossed titles or heaving breasts on the cover art, though.
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Mar 4, 2016 03:29
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Carnival of Shrews posted:
Carnival of Shrews posted:
 Carnival of Shrews posted:
spite house posted:A bunch of seventh-graders proooobably shouldn't have been reading about 80% of what we were reading.
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Mar 4, 2016 04:18
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Tiggum posted:What does that even mean? See faces of meth and mix that with the chick who went into the club at night and came out in the morning. That should tell you about her general appearance. Disheveled and probably torn up
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Mar 4, 2016 04:52
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I revisited Scruples for the first time since high school, inspired by this thread and the I Don't Even Own A Television podcast. I wondered if it was really as crashingly, awe-inspiringly, psychedelically terrible as I remember it being. Oh no. It's worse. It's so much worse. It is just sublimely bad. It would be high camp if it had even a little self-awareness, but it doesn't. Judith Krantz really, really cares a LOT, and what she cares about is the following: Describing every stick of furniture and scrap of clothing in the characters' immediate vicinity, in flabbergasting detail Raunchy and vaguely queasy-making sex (lots) Occasionally embarking on surprisingly sober and informative digressions about the inner workings of various industries, mostly publishing, fashion and film More sex The trivial existential crises of very, very rich people What she does not care about : Plot Meaningful character development Really anything except clothes, loving and interior decor It's spellbinding. If you enjoy bad books you're shortchanging yourself if you don't find it and read it immediately. (This shouldn't be difficult, the local Goodwill probably has six or seven copies for a quarter apiece.) Sample passage: Scruples posted:The entire world was available to her she observed, as she flipped over the pages of Architectural Digest. For three hundred thousand dollars she could own an air-conditioned pavilion in Bali, built in a coconut grove next to the ocean, with a swimming pool of course. In Eleuthera there was a house for sale that had twelve hundred feet of pink sand beach and a private overseas telephone system—all for less than three million dollars, furnished. (Did the list of private phone numbers come with the furniture?) Or, if she preferred something less tropical, she could live in England at Number 7, Royal Crescent, Bath, for no more than seventyfive thousand pounds, owning a house that had been built in 1770 as part of the most splendid example of Georgian architecture in the world, and which now possessed a sauna and a five-car garage. If she chose, she could adopt the life-style of someone like Bunny Mellon with four fabulous homes, two full-time interior decorators, everything from her tennis hats to her ball gowns to her servants’ uniforms designed especially for her by Givenchy. They said she kept apples boiling at all times on the stoves of her one hundred thousand-acre Virginia estate to perfume the air with an authentic farm aroma. Such precious attention to detail made Billy’s teeth hurt. Too much! YOU DON'T SAY.
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Mar 4, 2016 19:17
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I wish I could find a link to a copy of this book but I can't- when I was about 12 I decided that I would read Moby Dick, and found the only copy in our school's library. Unfortunately it was the severely redacted "safe" version of the book, which omitted every religious reference as well as key quotes such as "Call me Ishmael".
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Mar 4, 2016 22:37
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Robot Lincoln posted:I wish I could find a link to a copy of this book but I can't- when I was about 12 I decided that I would read Moby Dick, and found the only copy in our school's library. Unfortunately it was the severely redacted "safe" version of the book, which omitted every religious reference as well as key quotes such as "Call me Ishmael". did it still have the entire chapter dedicated to whale sperm?
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Mar 4, 2016 22:43
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It wasn't a terrible book but was Kim Stanley Robinson contracturally required to produce a minimum page count for Blue Mars because loving hell about 50% of it was of no relevance to anything in the wider plot. Did you know that weather is complicated? Well the author did so so here is 3 entire chapters about clouds! Btw people are visiting other stars now but that's not important, have you heard about the hydrological cycle?
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Mar 4, 2016 23:33
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Robot Lincoln posted:I wish I could find a link to a copy of this book but I can't- when I was about 12 I decided that I would read Moby Dick, and found the only copy in our school's library. Unfortunately it was the severely redacted "safe" version of the book, which omitted every religious reference as well as key quotes such as "Call me Ishmael".  Alaois posted:did it still have the entire chapter dedicated to whale sperm? IIRC, although technically about spermaceti rather than actual whale jizz, that chapter is called 'A Squeeze of the Hand'. There is no way that Melville could have done this by accident.
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Mar 6, 2016 12:05
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A while ago, James Frey's A Million Little Pieces came up in this thread and reminded me of another bogus memoir - one with a ridiculous bombastic title - that I'd actually enjoyed because it was so stupid. Googling 'tiger book christian fake' led me to it in moments. It's 'Taming the Tiger: From the Depths of Hell to the Heights of Glory', by Tony Anthony. I read the first few chapters in a youth hostel on the Pennine Way, where it was the only book available, and when I later saw a copy in a charity shop, I bought it so I could finish the incredible tale. As a motivational autobiography about a ruthless hardman's Christian conversion, it lacks a certain something, and that something is any basis in fact. As absurd fiction, I highly recommend it. Every time you think it can't get sillier, the author comes up with an action scene to out-Bourne Bourne himself, or decides to do a bit of scene-setting. We're in the Middle East? Beggars instantly sidle up whining 'Baksheesh, baksheesh'. We're in a bar fight, defending the honour of a pretty blonde? Our hero is speedy as a coiling snake, his opponent a thickly-built brute, over six feet tall. I'll say this for Anthony – his style is very consistent. Here is Anthony, attempting to kill his merciless kung-fu Chinese grandad (aka 'Lowsi') at the age of 6. (Our hero has already been taken to China from the UK as a four-year-old, to be taught the ways of a Shaolin warrior). Crouching Tiger, Obvious Bull posted:
Remarkably, it took a few years for people to start seriously questioning if any of this poo poo could actually have happened, even in China. As the Crosswire link describes, Anthony later turned out to be of mainly English and Cypriot descent, and his grandfather was by all accounts a harmless chap who supported his family with laundry work, and never laid the Secret Shaolin Touch of Death on anybody. The only spoiler of the reader's enjoyment is that, unlike Frey, Anthony actually had been responsible for a fatal car accident, and blended the one undoubted fact -- that he'd run over a cyclist -- into his conversion narrative, whilst also claiming he had no idea he'd actually hit anyone at the time.
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Mar 6, 2016 12:09
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Antivehicular posted:I'd say respectable authors writing their own lovely fanfic is totally acceptable for this thread. Otherwise Hannibal, my favorite literary hatefuck, wouldn't be acceptable, and what fun would that be? Really, Thomas Harris couldn't win there. As I heard it, when Silence won a bunch of Oscars, he was basically told 'Write some sequels/prequels, or we'll get someone else to do it.' If you were in such a situation, what would you do? Also, the main issue of the TV Tropes thread was that it rapidly devolved from laughing at people to a lot of people getting legitimately angered by the site and its members, which just made them come off as stupid in a different fashion.
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Mar 10, 2016 11:45
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Cornwind Evil posted:Really, Thomas Harris couldn't win there. As I heard it, when Silence won a bunch of Oscars, he was basically told 'Write some sequels/prequels, or we'll get someone else to do it.' If you were in such a situation, what would you do? Yeah, I definitely prefer the theory that Harris deliberately pissed down his leg/tried to write something unfilmable for the last two Lecter books and that it just didn't work. It still doesn't mean that Hannibal isn't godawful, though.
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Mar 10, 2016 11:54
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