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Sham bam bamina! posted:"becoming" *Relative to it's earlier days. That is saying something. The level of insipid poo poo the EU fell to in its final days would make the Jedi Academy trilogy look like masterful literature.
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Sep 25, 2016 04:17
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Arcsquad12 posted:*Relative to it's earlier days. That is saying something. The level of insipid poo poo the EU fell to in its final days would make the Jedi Academy trilogy look like masterful literature. The issue is that it was less "idiotic children's stories written while the author was drunk/high" bad and more "gross edgy garbage by authors who huff their own farts" bad.
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Sep 25, 2016 04:28
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Many books are unjustly forgotten, none are unjustly remembered - but it's still interesting to see those that were justly forgotten. I lost it at the idea of a toddler spouting off this: quote:“‘Oh, I am so happy, dear grand mamma;—I have seen—I have seen such a delightful person; he is like everything beautiful—like the smell of sweet flowers, and the view from Ben Lemond;—or no, better than that—he is like what I think of and see when I am very, very happy; and he is really like mamma, too, when she sings; and his forehead is like that distant sea,’ she continued, pointing to the blue Mediterranean; ‘there seems no end—no end; or like the clusters of stars I like best to look at on a warm fine night. . . . Don’t look so . . . your forehead is like Loch Lomond, when the wind is blowing and the sun is gone in; I like the sunshine best when the lake is smooth. . . . So now—I like it better than ever . . . It is more beautiful still from the dark cloud that has gone over it, when the sun suddenly lights up all the colors of the forests and shining purple rocks, and it is all reflected in the waters below.’”
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Sep 26, 2016 07:54
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Electric Lady posted:Reminds me of: When your purple prose metastasizes.
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Sep 26, 2016 22:48
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I just read Vn: the First Machine Dynasty. The protagonist has a nightmare that's literally just the opening to the original Silent Hill. Waking up from a car crash to find your little daughter missing, chasing her through the fog in an abandoned town, a wheelchair on its side with one wheel spinning, a body mounted on a chain link fence. Me reading this, becoming increasingly  .The book has some interesting ideas but the execution just kind of runs around in circles and falls on its face at the end. It feels like fanfiction of a franchise that doesn't exist and contains a lot of weird nerd references that had me going ??? until I got to the author bio at the end. quote:Madeline [...] has two masters degrees: one in anime, cyborg theory, and fan culture, and the other in strategic foresight and innovation. All becomes clear 
Brass Key has a new favorite as of 16:42 on Sep 28, 2016 |
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Sep 28, 2016 16:36
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Proud graduate of Otak U.
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Sep 28, 2016 16:50
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I like how the second seems like a desperate correction to the complete unemployability of the first.
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Sep 28, 2016 16:59
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I like how the second seems like a desperate correction to the complete unemployability of the first. Then perhaps doing the master's in strategic foresight and innovation first would have been the better move.
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Sep 28, 2016 17:48
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"Strategic foresight and innovation"? What the gently caress kind of degree is that? is it from a real, accredited institution?
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Sep 28, 2016 18:43
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pookel posted:"Strategic foresight and innovation"? What the gently caress kind of degree is that? is it from a real, accredited institution?
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Sep 28, 2016 19:03
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http://www.ocadu.ca/academics/graduate-studies/strategic-foresight-and-innovation.htmquote:Objectives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccoj5lhLmSQ
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Sep 28, 2016 20:29
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future-enhancing solutions
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Sep 29, 2016 06:32
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I hate it when people mock the Humanities because not everything has to be STEM goddamn it but that sounds bullshit even to me.
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Sep 29, 2016 08:42
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Are we sure it's humanities, because that sounds like some prime marketing/business school jargon.
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Sep 29, 2016 20:52
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Yeah to me that's buzzword nonsense, whatever field you're in. Some chinese whisper chain of deans, copywriters, faculty, execs, lawyers, students, their parents, etc, all managed to turn some completely benign draft of a course description into an impenetrable barrier of word salad. Trying to please everyone & so pleasing none as the guy said.
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Sep 30, 2016 00:40
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I had never heard of A Little Life before this thread and god drat it looks atrocious. Wow this book is about gay people and how tortured and suicidal they are, this is the gay novel of the century!!! Puke Anyway, one of the absolute worst things I've ever read was Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan. It's a re-imagining of the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red (the one about beautiful twin girls that live in a secluded cabin and talk to bears who are actually people.) Except in THIS version, the twins' mother is a repeatedly-brutalized rape victim. Her father molests her, possibly for years, and then she's gangraped by a group of village boys. The last assault is so bad that she's magically whisked away to safety in the woods where she can live alone and have her twins. But the lovingly described sexual violence doesn't end there! Men get transformed into bears and rhapsodize about how good sex with regular old bears is. Man-bears show their boners to the underaged twins. Magical dwarves make lewd and threatening comments to the underaged twins. Men who perpetrated rape are in turn raped by magical effigies with red-hot pokers for dicks. It's a nightmare, and the fact that I can't remember how it ends hopefully means that I threw it in the trash.This book full of rape and bear-on-human sex won YA awards. A little while after reading this book, I came across another Margo Lanagan story in an anthology. It was about a princess who fucks a unicorn and dies giving birth to their horrible hybrid baby. Apparently she's a pretty well-regarded author but two stores about beastiality were more than enough for me thanks
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Oct 17, 2016 03:22
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Captain Candyblood posted:I had never heard of A Little Life before this thread and god drat it looks atrocious. Wow this book is about gay people and how tortured and suicidal they are, this is the gay novel of the century!!! Puke VINDICATION! This book is the worst kind of pretentious YA claptrap. There is so much in it, so much story, so many themes, so much symbolism and not a single bit of it pays off or even gets resolved in any way by the end. Also that anthology was Zombies vs. Unicorns which is full of good stories worth reading, just not Lanagan's contribution of yet another inscrutable fantasy tale trying to say something about female sexuality that amounts to little more than a wet fart.
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Oct 17, 2016 04:27
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Seriously, what is it with fantasy authors and surprise bestiality? The same thing happened in Lev Grossman's The Magicians. It starts out as basically Harry Potter aimed at an older audience, with magic being kind of a highly complex applied science and there being a college/academy where it's being taught and studied. Then out of nowhere there's a scene where they're practicing transformation magic, the whole class is transformed into foxes (I think). Of course the whole thing immediately turns into a fox-orgy because base animalistic instincts or whatever, and the characters later comment on how cool and liberating that was. Okay, so far, so weird, but you might think that's just one isolated incident. But then later on there's a scene where one of the characters is involved the summoning of some demon/spirit thing. Which is an anthromorphic human/fox hybrid because of course it is. The ritual goes wrong, the demon starts killing everyone, and the character offers to sell him her soul to save her friends. And, how else could it be, the process of taking her soul involves a drawn-out, detailed rape by the foxman.
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Oct 17, 2016 10:47
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there wolf posted:VINDICATION! This book is the worst kind of pretentious YA claptrap. There is so much in it, so much story, so many themes, so much symbolism and not a single bit of it pays off or even gets resolved in any way by the end. Yeah! Tbf, I feel that it IS possible to write a meaningful story about overcoming/confronting abuse, but that is NOT what Tender Morsels is. Nothing is handled with tact or sensitivity, it's just page after page of disturbing poo poo written in flowery ~fantastical~ prose. Jesus. There are ways to make your female characters deep and sympathetic that don't involve graphic rape. I just read through the whole thread and it seems like that's a pretty common problem in good and bad books alike. Haha yeah, that's the one  Teenage me loved that book. Anthologies are a lot of fun but also scary because you never know when you'll suddenly be reading about unicorn sex, or guys loving chunks of disembodied flesh, or teenage nerds getting "revenge" on popular girls by spreading fake nude pictures of them to the entire school....gee now that I think of it I've read a lot of awful stuff lol
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Oct 17, 2016 23:34
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At this point I think we should just ban all fantasy authors from including sex scenes in their books.
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Oct 18, 2016 01:45
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Captain Candyblood posted:Yeah! Tbf, I feel that it IS possible to write a meaningful story about overcoming/confronting abuse, but that is NOT what Tender Morsels is. Nothing is handled with tact or sensitivity, it's just page after page of disturbing poo poo written in flowery ~fantastical~ prose. Jesus. There are ways to make your female characters deep and sympathetic that don't involve graphic rape. I just read through the whole thread and it seems like that's a pretty common problem in good and bad books alike. YA novels are dicey genre. I was into it for a long time and read a lot of fun, quality books, but there is a ton of lovely novels made more lovely by trying to impart some great message about whatever issue. Tender Morsels is even worse, because I don't think it actually tries to impart anything; it just fronts like some deep message novel and uses all it's transgressive sexual content to sell the con. If we're shittalking YA though, I'm going to bring up Uglies which was the distopia novel de jour before Hunger Games, and is basically a kids bop version of Brave New World.
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Oct 18, 2016 01:47
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The Lone Badger posted:At this point I think we should just ban all fantasy authors from including sex scenes in their books. Agreed, probably should apply that to Sci-Fi authors also just to be on the safe side.
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Oct 18, 2016 03:19
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I am not sure that is the answer because the bad sex scenes across all genres even the books specifically written for gin addled 1950s wives have far more badly written sex scenes than good ones.
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Oct 18, 2016 03:30
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there wolf posted:If we're shittalking YA though, I'm going to bring up Uglies which was the distopia novel de jour before Hunger Games, and is basically a kids bop version of Brave New World. I kind of liked it because of that. Babby's first cyberpunk. (I also liked, though it does contain some really dumb things, that it's that rare dystopian YA novel where the dystopia didn't happen because the ruling class are frothingly evil dickbags for no reason.)Hunger Games would have been way more interesting to me if the Capitol was ruled by actual humans instead of designated villains who make the stupidest choices at every possible turn. "Oh you won the games? Yeah instead of a reward we're going to prostitute you to the elite. Why would we do that? Idk, because the author is in no way subtle, I guess."
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Oct 18, 2016 14:02
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Brass Key posted:I kind of liked it because of that. Babby's first cyberpunk. Hey, don't pick on baby's first class war for being unsubtle and often nuts. Actual human history is full of cartoon villains doing stupid things because they believe what has always worked to oppress the masses will always work. And really, the winner for bad villains in popular YA is probably Divergent since it seemed to be building to a conclusion that analytical thought and factual evidence are bad things, and the people who favor those things are evil.
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Oct 18, 2016 21:54
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EmmyOk posted:I am not sure that is the answer because the bad sex scenes across all genres even the books specifically written for gin addled 1950s wives have far more badly written sex scenes than good ones. Ban all sex scenes in books for the next 15 years.
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Oct 19, 2016 01:34
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there wolf posted:Hey, don't pick on baby's first class war for being unsubtle and often nuts. Actual human history is full of cartoon villains doing stupid things because they believe what has always worked to oppress the masses will always work. And really, the winner for bad villains in popular YA is probably Divergent since it seemed to be building to a conclusion that analytical thought and factual evidence are bad things, and the people who favor those things are evil. I never read Divergent cause I thought it looked dumb in the boring way, not in the funny way, but somehow I thought the movie WOULD be funny. I love horrible movies so I was expecting a goldmine, but holy poo poo. Probably the worst thing I've ever seen. It managed to make two hours feel like an eternity and yet be utterly forgettable at the same time. I don't remember the character's names or almost any plot points, but I sure do remember how agonizingly painful it was to watch
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Oct 19, 2016 02:44
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Captain Candyblood posted:I never read Divergent cause I thought it looked dumb in the boring way, not in the funny way, but somehow I thought the movie WOULD be funny. I love horrible movies so I was expecting a goldmine, but holy poo poo. Probably the worst thing I've ever seen. It managed to make two hours feel like an eternity and yet be utterly forgettable at the same time. I don't remember the character's names or almost any plot points, but I sure do remember how agonizingly painful it was to watch I went and saw the movie with a friend who was reading the books and I remember it as an adequate teen action flick slowly being crushed to death under the rock-bottom stupidity of it's premise. It's just aggressively dumb, and it's hilarious that the last film is going straight to T.V.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:13
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Was Divergence the YA Sci-Fi dystopia novel that ended up advocating eugenics or was that something else?
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Oct 19, 2016 04:15
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Kumaton posted:Was Divergence the YA Sci-Fi dystopia novel that ended up advocating eugenics or was that something else? it's actually the opposite, it's about a dystopian society that sorts people into castes based on personality tests and how that's a bad thing. How people look at that and interpret it as there wolf posted:analytical thought and factual evidence are bad things, and the people who favor those things are evil. is something I don't really understand but then again I've never read the books.
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Oct 19, 2016 04:54
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Guy Mann posted:it's actually the opposite, it's about a dystopian society that sorts people into castes based on personality tests and how that's a bad thing. How people look at that and interpret it as the bad guys are the "intelligent" caste who want to kill the other castes for incredibly vague, infinitely undefined reasons. the primary target being the "selfless" good christian kids.
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Oct 19, 2016 05:53
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Brass Key posted:I kind of liked it because of that. Babby's first cyberpunk. That's sadly not an unrealistic twist.
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Oct 19, 2016 05:56
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Guy Mann posted:it's actually the opposite, it's about a dystopian society that sorts people into castes based on personality tests and how that's a bad thing. How people look at that and interpret it as Really I'm just following the logic of having the people in charge of all the science be the villains up against people who are brave, honest, peace-loving, and compassionate.
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Oct 19, 2016 06:10
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I've never read this book but the wiki article on the five special cliques the sorting hat puts you in says "Because of the Erudite's thirst for knowledge, they are the ones easily susceptible to moral corruption as knowledge leads to lust for power" which, yeah, sounds kinda anti-intellectual when you put it like that, doesn't it
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Oct 19, 2016 06:54
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Also the super special people are the ones with more than one personality trait so that little kids who read it feel super special.
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Oct 19, 2016 10:09
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I Killed GBS posted:That's sadly not an unrealistic twist. Yeah, but I don't mean so much the fact that that one thing happened, but that it's a thing that keeps happening. It's a world without nuance. The villains will break every promise, betray every trust and commit every excess because the world turns on the protagonists exclusively. Though that's kind of a problem across the whole genre. (My name is pro'tagonist superspecial sparkledog. I'm clumsy and plain and I live in a society rigidly stratified according to American high school clique stereotypes. But I'm different. I have... Two stereotypes! But before I can bring the revolution to this ill-defined dystopia I have to decide between TWO BOYS! (It's okay because the bad boy will probably die heroically saving me in the third act so I can go off with the boy next door without having to actually make any kind of decision.)) Speaking of bad YA, have any of you read The Declaration? The premise is that immortality drugs have been invented and you can have them for free on the condition that you keep to your quota of children so the population doesn't explode to insane, unsustainable levels. The entire plot is about how wrong this is and that people should have as many children as they want, and also live forever. 
Brass Key has a new favorite as of 11:57 on Oct 19, 2016 |
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Oct 19, 2016 11:55
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Apparently in the last Divergent book the main character is killed and brooding love interest is the one who saves the day. I've never read the books but I did see the first movie and something that really bugged me was how the smarty group's plan was to kill off all of the current leader caste. Except their whole thing was that they were selfless and nonviolent. So if they had just been deposed they probably would have gone along with it.
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Oct 19, 2016 12:13
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Brass Key posted:Yeah, but I don't mean so much the fact that that one thing happened, but that it's a thing that keeps happening. It's a world without nuance. The villains will break every promise, betray every trust and commit every excess because the world turns on the protagonists exclusively. Though that's kind of a problem across the whole genre. These are kids books, so a little simplicity is to be expected, but I think it's fair to say that distopia has taken over the role of all the after-school-special books that made up most high school fiction sections before Harry Potter came along.
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Oct 19, 2016 22:18
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There is a difference between simplicity and a dumb message or idea. The ideas kids read about when they're young help form their thoughts and ideas later in life.
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Oct 19, 2016 22:26
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