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gradenko_2000 posted:This was me, except with the Star Wars EU. Then they stole the last one and used it in Episode VII. Also, there was Xizor's date-rape pheromones, the entire character of Thrawn's pretentious rear end and everything about the Dark Nest Trilogy. Disney killing the EU and all it's trash novels was a godsend.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 11:32 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 01:13 |
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Let's look at the comments for the story, shall we? I like how they are saying "gin-soaked" is racist. Since when does the stereotypical blue-collar white dude drink gin?
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 14:32 |
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Max posted:You should all be aware that Chuck Tingle is now an official Hugo Award Finalist for Best Short Story, "Space Raptor Butt Invasion." Antivehicular posted:I just read this story, and oh my God, how are people this angry about this? It's just tribalism, right? Nobody is legitimately arguing in good faith that this story is bad enough to destroy fantasy fiction, right?
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 14:37 |
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Antivehicular posted:I just read this story, and oh my God, how are people this angry about this? It's just tribalism, right? Nobody is legitimately arguing in good faith that this story is bad enough to destroy fantasy fiction, right? People think that Star Wars Vii is a secret plot by JJ to destroy the white male and make him useless. It's how we got the term little white cu'ck ball after all. Nerds are also mad about Fury Road because it focuses on a one armed woman, sex slaves and badass battle grannies with the help of just two kinda useful men literally destroying the patriarchy. Nerds get mad about everything. Tracula has a new favorite as of 15:55 on Apr 27, 2016 |
# ? Apr 27, 2016 14:46 |
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I thought the Hugo nomination process was supposed to have been fixed so this couldn't happen again?
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 15:00 |
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DStecks posted:I thought the Hugo nomination process was supposed to have been fixed so this couldn't happen again? It hasn't gone through yet so we have to suffer through this until next year, when it's properly fixed. James Garfield posted:I like how they are saying "gin-soaked" is racist. They are reacting in a way that they think the strawman sjw who likes this will respond to by feigning exaggerated anger at supposed classism.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 15:39 |
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Tracula posted:Nerds get mad about everything. True, but they get especially mad about icky girls in their clubhouse.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 15:48 |
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James Garfield posted:I like how they are saying "gin-soaked" is racist. Yeah it really is more old school classist. But like, 18th century classist.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 16:03 |
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Tracula posted:Nerds are also mad about Fury Road because it focuses on a one armed woman, sex slaves and badass battle grannies with the help of just two kinda useful men literally destroying the patriarchy.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 16:17 |
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Kulkasha posted:I'd argue that they were more than "kinda" useful, and that everyone who isn't Immortan Joe is getting shat on; the movie is more about how power structures utilize a patriarchic image to co-opt lower class males into suppressing themselves and women against their own obvious interests, which makes the nerd-rage over femnazis that much more hilarious, because they are implicitly falling for Immortan Joe's lies. This seems to be endemic of MRAs - they would rather chew off their own feet than admit that it is, in fact, the old rich men who are loving them and not the opposite sex. Well, I mean, they never carried a printer clear across town for a rich white guy...
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 16:25 |
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Kulkasha posted:I'd argue that they were more than "kinda" useful, and that everyone who isn't Immortan Joe is getting shat on; the movie is more about how power structures utilize a patriarchic image to co-opt lower class males into suppressing themselves and women against their own obvious interests, which makes the nerd-rage over femnazis that much more hilarious, because they are implicitly falling for Immortan Joe's lies. This seems to be endemic of MRAs - they would rather chew off their own feet than admit that it is, in fact, the old rich men who are loving them and not the opposite sex. Yeah, I was being slightly reductive and exaggerating when calling them only kinda useful. I never thought about the point with Joe though and how MRA's really are, to use the movies line, an old mans fool. That makes their reactions all the funnier.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 16:37 |
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Lamprey Cannon posted:Oh god yes. To quote the OP (and myself): I mean, they're up there with the Star Wars prequels and the Brian Herbert/Keven Anderson Dune novels in terms of "Doesn't understand the source material in the least", plus they've got all of Gentry Lee's weird sex stuff. [/quote] Ahh Rama, I grinded through the Gentry ones to get payoff, then lost the final book running for a bus connection when I was about 50 pages shy of finishing it. Probably for the best I did. For the previous mentions of James Rollins, Grendel is ace, in that same pulp way the Meg books rule. You know there's no intrinsic literary value in them but they're fun to read on a long arse journey, and certainly better than Dan Brown's dogshit. I threw Da Vinci code away about 30 pages in, back when all the idiots at work were raving about it and nonstop telling me it was all based on true facts.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 22:34 |
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I finished Ready Player One about a week ago. Read most of it in two big sit downs. The whole thing reads like a YA novel with f-bombs thrown in to make it seem more adult. What I don't think anyone else touched on is that the stated moral of the story is that you shouldn't rely on escapist fantasies. This is thrown in at the very end after the main character wins billions of dollars based on his encyclopedic knowledge of escapist fantasy. The darker implications of everyone in the world relying on a virtual world to live their life is so lightly grazed upon that I feel it was a publisher note that Cline begrudgingly added in as an afterthought. Really, Ernest Cline wrote a Tumblr-esque treatise on why fandom is the most important aspect of any person's life. No one is rewarded for having an original thought. No one in the book ever makes anything of their own, they just steal from the people that had the imagination and drive to create something unique. I once laughed out loud because the main character ironically criticized the bad guys as having no imagination. Pot, meet kettle.
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# ? Apr 29, 2016 02:42 |
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grittyreboot posted:I finished Ready Player One about a week ago. Read most of it in two big sit downs. The whole thing reads like a YA novel with f-bombs thrown in to make it seem more adult. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71VFzClEoG0
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# ? Apr 29, 2016 03:56 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:This was me, except with the Star Wars EU. The Vosgian Beast posted:Named Luuke. These are from what are considered to be the "best" EU novels, which included an admiral who could determined his opponent's battle strategies by studying their art. Most of the EU read like rejected SF novels that simply used search and replace to turn characters and things into SW characters and object.
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# ? Apr 29, 2016 15:20 |
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I treasure those moments when nerds remind even the other nerds why nobody likes nerds.
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# ? Apr 29, 2016 20:34 |
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Davros1 posted:These are from what are considered to be the "best" EU novels, which included an admiral who could determined his opponent's battle strategies by studying their art. The book which was basically a British SAS operation turned to star wars was pretty good. Then of course the author went crazy and started writing the jedi as nazis and calling her detractors "talifans". Shame too, because hard contact and triple zero are pretty enjoyable pulp novels before the series went downhill
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# ? May 2, 2016 00:45 |
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I had thought that this had been posted already, but I guess not. Well, better late than never. My all-time favorite terrible book: Dragons: Lexicon Triumvirate must be understood in the context of its batshit crazy, Asian supremacist author, Kenneth Eng. Like a lot of people, I was introduced to this thing through Eng's campaign of spamming it all over the comment sections of countless websites (I wouldn't be surprised if the actual number turned out to be in the hundreds) back in 2007. Around this time, the magazine AsianWeek got in a lot of hot water for publishing an article of his called "Why I Hate Blacks" - he tried to parlay those 15 seconds of infamy into promoting the book as well. Here's a pretty good writeup of the guy from around that time, including a few beautiful anecdotes at the end from one of his college classmates. Eventually, people got curious enough to check out the book for themselves, and when I saw what people were saying about it (and quoting from it), I knew that I had to have a copy of my own. Until I joined Something Awful, that was the best ten bucks I ever spent. I can't think of any more densely bad writing short of The Eye of Argon, which is only about 25 pages long and has nothing approaching Lexicon Triumvirate's balls-out insanity. Every page, every paragraph, drat near every sentence is marked by some beautiful piece of awfulness. Here, let me flip to three completely random pages: Page 76 posted:The moronic sentries began to brawl their way to their concealed spot. Luckily, they tackled each other away before coming too close. Alas, Thargon walloped his opponent away into a cluster of waiting sentries, knocking him unconscious against a wall of scales. When it was clear that the amphiptere was not going to rise, the spectators rallied and stomped on the defeated unit, shattering the little glory it once had. All the while, their animalistic grunts drew forth yet another visitor. Page 131 posted:"You're not taking damage," said Dennagon perplexed. Page 252 posted:A plasma shot was fired, busting straight through Gorgash's robo-head and detonating it in a computerized explosion. The behemoth skull erupted into cyborg parts that integrated both brains and CPUs, flinging cerebellum fragments everywhere. Decapitated, the colossal carcass of sinew and hulky steel fell onto the floor, crushing all the corpses beneath it in an immense quake. All fifty tons of the cadaver became cold and still, twitching only with the remnants of cybernetic code that tried to find a purpose for existing. But even if it had been written competently, the actual content of this story is goddamn bonkers. I'd describe it, but Eng's own blurb on the back cover (thanks, vanity publishing!) does a better job of that than I would: Great blurb or greatest blurb? posted:During the eon that most classify as the Middle Ages, rifts in time allowed the vile humans to tap into temporal flow and summon future technologies and prehistoric beasts. Desiring control over the World, evil dragon king Drekkenoth operated under the hominids to corrupt the minds of all dragons with the venom of knowledge. The only thing that stood in his way was the one true source of omniscience - the tome called the Lexicon. posted:Dennagon nonchalantly dropped down from his perched position to the ground. Without even taking his eyes off his book, he casually thrust his fist out, punching a hole straight through the head of one of his enemies as it charged. The decapitated body still hanging off his forearm, he merely shifted his fist to the side so that the others could run into it. Expectedly, they did, blasting apart their own skulls against his scaly knuckles. posted:The Technorealm Mainframe was a tremendous cylindrical tower that scraped the limitless heavens of total darkness. An enormous screen wrapped around its radius, founded upon a prodigious control panel that was studded with keypads and buttons. Dennagon had no idea what to make of it, what with all its alien symbols like "Alt", "Ctrl" and "F5", yet he surmised that its familiar icons of the alphabet were used to cast spells. Perhaps finally, those spells would allow him to understand what this mysterious "technology" really meant in the tides of his reality so that he could make sense of everything that was going on. Standing on the edge of the panel, he awaited Shevinoth's speech, still locked in disbelief that the draconic legend was still alive, let alone in his presence at the moment. Maybe if it were a dream, it would be more acceptable to his rationale... posted:Yet, there were explosives everywhere. Dennagon only saw one option. Stolidly thinking, he contemplated the factors of his situation as variables that could be translated into pure mathematics. Judging by the heat, the wavelength of the light was about 5 × 10-7 meters and its frequency was 4 × 1014 Hertz. However, it was moving through the prism at a slower speed, and he estimated by the degree of the heat that the velocity was 2 × 108 meters per second inside the glass. That meant that the index of refraction was about 1.5, and that if he wanted to bring the light together, he would need an index of 1. I could post isolated quotes from this thing forever (or at least until I end up transcribing the entire text), but at this point, I think that an actual scene or two would be more worthwhile. To that end, the end of Chapter Eight and the beginning of Chapter Nine, one of my favorite sections in the whole book. And if that doesn't sell you on this masterpiece... what the hell are you doing in this thread? Edit: How did I manage to forget the glossary? This thing has a goddamn glossary. Here's some stuff from the glossary: quote:Astinor: A gargantuan terrabiological organism that posits itself upon the World's surface. It acts like living terrain, consisting of mountainous fangs, hairy plains, and fleshy forests. Feeding off the World's wisdom, it helps to maintain a balance between the consumption and processing of data, and is usually harmless to smaller organisms like dragons, thunderbirds, krakens, and humans. No one knows why it exists, but some scribes theorize that an extraterrestrial consciousness might have been at hand. quote:Dragon: Dragons are the most superior of all races in the mediaeval realm. As hated as they are mighty, they are often portrayed in myths as mindless beasts meant to be slain by knights, thunderbirds, and such; however, in reality, they have made the most accomplishments in terms of aesthetics, sorcery, warfare and philosophy in the World. No one truly knows of their origins, but many scribes declare that they were forged by the one without a name in a time beyond reckoning. At the "present time" they are primarily amassed in the kingdom Drakemight in a social order known as the collective. The king Drekkenoth is the leader of this collective, although there are still others who dissent from his command. quote:Humans: Sometimes portrayed as mighty, other times depicted as evil, the humans are a species of dual nature. However, their vileness spans much farther than the stereotypical descriptions of many fantasy novels in the mediaeval realm. They are the diadems of avarice, the heralds of doom to all intelligent species. It is they who intend to destroy all knowledge of the World and secure total control over time for the sake of fulfilling all their horrid desires. To help accomplish this task, they have been breeding a new weapon called the sapiens. quote:Mediaeval, Daemonhand: A skeleton warrior whose legend is so timeless that it has no bounds in eon or age. Once a human knight, he fought to keep the Gateway to time shut, but was slain and reborn as an undead 100 billion years into the future. Afterwards, he found the living sword known as Demonsword and battled against the Black Technoknight Uther Penn Sapien to prevent humanity from seizing total control of the World. According to myth, there was no end for him, but rather his journey itself became an everlasting conclusion to his existence. "The purpose of one's life journey is not the end. It is the journey itself." quote:Scribe: A cloaked, faceless scrivener that wanders the World spreading vile poetry and telling morbid tales of a coming apocalypse. He believes that because a multiverse is the only realm that must always exist by decree of logic, the pursuit of perfection must be the meaning of life. Thus does he spend his eons trying to craft stories that are ideal - ones that elicit ultimate bliss for a main character via the strategic placement of events, conflicts, characters and emotions along space and time (spacetime being the fabric of a story, which can be viewed as a worldline). Some say that he can travel through a multiverse and that his myths are actually created from the fragments of different realities, but no one truly knows what this cryptic wordsmith really wants. All they know is that everything he says revolves around one concept: "The attainment of perfection will be the end of all life." Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 06:37 on May 3, 2016 |
# ? May 2, 2016 02:00 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:...the tome called the Lexicon. So... a dictionary?
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# ? May 2, 2016 02:24 |
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flosofl posted:So... a dictionary? Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 02:47 on May 2, 2016 |
# ? May 2, 2016 02:29 |
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quote:I have already received about 10 racist remarks in the past three months and I have only been out of my home a handful of times. This is the funniest thing I've ever read
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# ? May 2, 2016 03:10 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I had thought that this had been posted already, but I guess not. Well, better late than never. My all-time favorite terrible book: I kind of want to read this, but I'm not sure it would stay as funny for the length of an entire book.
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# ? May 2, 2016 04:25 |
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Tiggum posted:I kind of want to read this, but I'm not sure it would stay as funny for the length of an entire book.
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# ? May 2, 2016 04:27 |
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Does that comma mean what I think it means? Is that skeleton warrior named Daemonhand Mediaeval?
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# ? May 2, 2016 04:49 |
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AlphaKretin posted:Does that comma mean what I think it means? Is that skeleton warrior named Daemonhand Mediaeval? pages 266-7 posted:Drekkenoth clenched his fist again, wrapping his claws smoothly around his palm in a balled set of knuckles. The transient fiery diagram of the World evanesced and in its place, the image of a human skeleton warrior took shape. It was equipped with plates of tattered gold armor, pieces of the uniform that it had seemingly worn through countless ages of battle. A sword dangled in its undead hands that used to be encased in a carbon-based sac of human flesh, resting beside a shield that was locked onto its double-pronged bone forearm. A helm guarded its face, yet it didn't matter, for there was no face on its exposed skull to protect and no identity that could be drawn from its visage to place it in danger. Not even Lyconel, who was a whelp familiar with the countless heroes of the World's myths and histories, could recognize the being. Somehow, though, it did carry an air of importance.
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# ? May 2, 2016 04:56 |
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I'm just... I'm just frowning.
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# ? May 2, 2016 05:34 |
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I'm glad he described what exactly a clenched fist means because that was the thing that lost me.
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# ? May 2, 2016 12:16 |
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PYF Terrible Book: The human that aforesaid his mortality for the sake of omnikind
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# ? May 2, 2016 12:31 |
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Holy poo poo, that's beautiful. The perfect car crash of imagination and incompetence.
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# ? May 2, 2016 12:54 |
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quote:... a carbon-based sac of human flesh As opposed to all those "sacs" of human flesh based on different elements.
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# ? May 2, 2016 14:44 |
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There are some books that make you realize that you will never be a writer, because you cannot compete with them.
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# ? May 2, 2016 15:21 |
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The worst book I've read is Exquisite Corpse. I bought it on a whim after someone I knew said it was their favorite. Not sure what I expected when the premise is "serial killer romance", but I put it down when I realized it wasn't going to be anything beyond fanfiction-tier gay erotica between edgy torture scenes. I thought about donating the book but I don't want to inflict it on anyone else honestly, so its still on my shelf.
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# ? May 3, 2016 02:14 |
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Mr. Chainsaw posted:The worst book I've read is Exquisite Corpse. I bought it on a whim after someone I knew said it was their favorite. Not sure what I expected when the premise is "serial killer romance", but I put it down when I realized it wasn't going to be anything beyond fanfiction-tier gay erotica between edgy torture scenes. I thought about donating the book but I don't want to inflict it on anyone else honestly, so its still on my shelf. Isn't "exquisite corpse" the name of a sort of improv exercise between writers/artists adding onto each other's work? I wonder if that factors into how the book was written.
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# ? May 3, 2016 04:33 |
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From the children's book Slugs.
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# ? May 3, 2016 04:50 |
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# ? May 3, 2016 05:08 |
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In fourth grade or so, I was in a children's theater workshop that focused on an adaptation of Slugs. I don't want to say that's why I'm a hideous goonlord now, but if the shoe fits?
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# ? May 3, 2016 05:28 |
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dirksteadfast posted:Isn't "exquisite corpse" the name of a sort of improv exercise between writers/artists adding onto each other's work? I wonder if that factors into how the book was written. It's not a complete dealbreaker, but if you see Poppy Z. Brite on someone's bookshelf, definitely consider that a factor."
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# ? May 3, 2016 06:31 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:what the hell are you doing in this thread? Blinking a lot. What the gently caress were those things? They looked like sentences but... Ugh. How the hell do you write that and not, y'know, realise that it's unreadable?
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# ? May 3, 2016 06:40 |
John Big Booty posted:Not very likely. What factored most into the writing of the book was "can I write something more homoerotic and grossly goth than Anne Rice?" Poppy z brite is fantastic at creating atmosphere, everything else is just really gross. Her short story collection is pretty good, and I guess she now writes mysteries about a New Orleans chef, so hopefully less gay vampire incest
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# ? May 3, 2016 13:40 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 01:13 |
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I was reading some short story collection years ago and got to a Poppy Z Brite one. One of the earliest lines was about using an oiled human femur for sex and I was like "That's enough of that!" and skipped to the next story.
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# ? May 3, 2016 14:06 |