|
VanSandman posted:What if you’re too poor for PMs? Then the only way you can keep up a discussion is by shelling out $$ one way or another.
|
#
?
Oct 13, 2017 23:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 16:27 |
|
|
If you are too poor for them quite luckily you are also too wealthy for them so you're set.
|
|
#
?
Oct 13, 2017 23:55
|
|
|
relevant to this thread
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 18:41
|
|
|
Sagebrush posted:relevant to this thread I can't blame my countrymen in these days for being literally unable to conceive of any service that doesn't nickel-and-dime you to death.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 18:51
|
|
|
Sagebrush posted:relevant to this thread 
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 21:47
|
|
|
That can't be a real comic.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 21:50
|
|
|
PJOmega posted:That can't be a real comic. Hi & Lois is often lame as hell, like Family Circus. Edit: Keep in mind that it's been running since 1954 with the same author.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 21:53
|
|
|
Arivia posted:Honestly as someone with an actual English degree these last few pages have been so bad they’ve bored me out of my loving skull. As a fellow English degree holder it reminds me why I finally went into something STEM-related instead. Powerful Two-Hander posted:Mods please word filter this thread to replace all instances of "class/criticism" with "shartballs" and "bourgeois/Marxists/Marxism" with "shartballers/shartballing". My sharty sensibilities agree. Sagebrush posted:relevant to this thread It’s like the library version of those “can’t use a toilet properly” posts.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 21:54
|
|
|
PJOmega posted:That can't be a real comic. Well, keep in mind it's from seven years ago, back when the concept of selling books hadn't yet been totally eradicated by Big Library lobbyists.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2017 22:22
|
|
|
PJOmega posted:That can't be a real comic. It is.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 06:07
|
|
|
outlier posted:You've reminded me of a Terrible Book from years ago (the mid-80s?): Airscream. For a while, it seemed to be in every used book shop and pile of free books, so as a bookish youth I ended up reading it. Essentially it's the lead to a horrific mid-air collision and the public inquiry afterward. The court material is decently readable, but the crash itself features lots of characters being finely detailed and then suddenly killed. The one that sticks in my mind is a whole chapter about a farmer, the details of his life, his worries about the farm, the conversations with his family, what he does that day, etc. etc. Then in the final paragraph of the chapter, he's eviscerated by red-hot falling debris and never mentioned for the rest of the book. quote:A flaming mid-air collision...and suddenly a woman is a widow, thrust into a fierce battle against the airline, pitted against the establishment to rescue her dead husband's honor. Beyond the sudden carnage and the burning, twisted wreckage of a crash with no survivors lies a horrifying trail of legal and sexual perversion. The shockwaves of disaster are overwhelmed by a wife's stubborn, gritty determination to solve a mystery and absolve a man. The climax is as shattering as the midair disaster itself. quote:You really don't have an air-crash novel without vats of gore and burst bones, the pornography of a massive explosion at 400+ mph, satisfying our horrified curiosity about what it's like to go off in a mist of blood, flaming gasoline, and metal particles. John Bruce's only twist on this genre is to add a homosexual flight captain trembling under blackmail and/or exposure. Over Wellington, New Zealand, a giant, government-owned passenger jet collides with a small private Cessna being flown by an elderly veterinarian. The jet comes in at 4000 feet, the Cessna at 3000--somehow they meet. Is the vet or the disturbed flight captain responsible? The vet's wife indignantly defends his name during the book's long legal inquiry, but the Prime Minister wants to defend the government against mass suits (this is New Zealand's first major air disaster), and big business is bending all arms to protect its interests. The homosexual captain's panic makes for an effective opening, but, while waiting around for the defective equipment to be located, Bruce falls back on mere voyeurism and routine legal puzzlework.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 17:34
|
|
|
And then there's the other airplane disaster novel, Airframe, which is "the Chinese did it".
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 17:40
|
|
|
Apraxin posted:Amazon description: Inspired by the USS Iowa?
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 18:03
|
|
|
Kaiser Mazoku posted:And then there's the other airplane disaster novel, Airframe, which is "the Chinese did it". Wasn’t that based on a real incident in Russia?
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 20:55
|
|
|
Glazier posted:Wasn’t that based on a real incident in Russia? For people that haven't read it, the pilot lets his son take control of the plane and he fucks up and kills a few people. I'm pretty sure I do remember something like that happening in real life too.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 21:13
|
|
|
Tagichatn posted:For people that haven't read it, the pilot lets his son take control of the plane and he fucks up and kills a few people. I'm pretty sure I do remember something like that happening in real life too. Daniel Johnston (of the famous "Hi how are you" frog drawing and weird songs recorded on cassettes) was institutionalized after he had a psychotic break on a flight with his dad, thought he was Casper the Friendly Ghost, and removed the plane's ignition key and threw it out the window, forcing his dad to crash land in a forest. He was still in the mental hospital when Kurt Cobain wearing his shirt suddenly made him famous overnight, and record company executives tried to get him to sign a contract from the hospital. He refused the record company Metallica was signed to because he was convinced they were minions of Satan trying to kill him.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 21:35
|
|
|
Tagichatn posted:For people that haven't read it, the pilot lets his son take control of the plane and he fucks up and kills a few people. I'm pretty sure I do remember something like that happening in real life too. I found it, and holy poo poo he didn’t kill a few people he killed everybody onboard! Wikipedia posted:Cockpit voice and flight data recorders revealed the presence of the pilot's 12-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son on the flight deck. The son had unknowingly disengaged the A310 autopilot's control over the aircraft's ailerons while seated at the controls. The aircraft rolled into a steep bank and near-vertical dive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2017 22:05
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/JayShams/status/919673803579559938
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 16:57
|
|
|
I read all four (as there were then) Dan Brown books just after The Da Vinci Code was published and it was generating all kinds of controversy. However, the one thing I remember after all these years is how the requisite weirdo Bond villain henchman in Digital Fortress was a deaf Spanish assassin - that's his defining characteristic, his deafness, and the book states in no uncertain terms that he has been deaf since he was a child - who meets his demise when he's distracted by a loud noise.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 18:36
|
|
|
PYF Terrible Book: just remember the wise words of Disney's Princess Elsa
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 19:00
|
|
|
Wheat Loaf posted:I read all four (as there were then) Dan Brown books just after The Da Vinci Code was published and it was generating all kinds of controversy. However, the one thing I remember after all these years is how the requisite weirdo Bond villain henchman in Digital Fortress was a deaf Spanish assassin - that's his defining characteristic, his deafness, and the book states in no uncertain terms that he has been deaf since he was a child - who meets his demise when he's distracted by a loud noise. I've heard that before & it sounds hilarious. Pls c/p the relevant part!
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 19:19
|
|
|
Here's a fun snippet from the first chapter of Da Vinci Codequote:A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Do not move." No wait, i'm the silhouette filled with visible detail, like the distinctive irises in my eyes.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 19:35
|
|
|
I also like the 15 chillingly close feet
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 21:11
|
|
|
Wheat Loaf posted:I read all four (as there were then) Dan Brown books just after The Da Vinci Code was published and it was generating all kinds of controversy. However, the one thing I remember after all these years is how the requisite weirdo Bond villain henchman in Digital Fortress was a deaf Spanish assassin - that's his defining characteristic, his deafness, and the book states in no uncertain terms that he has been deaf since he was a child - who meets his demise when he's distracted by a loud noise. Digital Fortress is an amazing concept - someone comes up with an unbreakable code, the government freaks the gently caress out. Everything else about that book, though, is complete and absolute dog poo poo. God drat it sucks. On the other hand, Deception Point had a private military runway, a puzzling fact I somehow still recall ten years after my last reading of the book.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 22:35
|
|
|
can I be the attacker behind a sealed iron gate?
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 22:41
|
|
|
FrozenVent posted:On the other hand, Deception Point had a private military runway, a puzzling fact I somehow still recall ten years after my last reading of the book. The main thing I remember about Deception Point was how the requisite Bond villain henchmen are a team of nameless Delta Force operatives who at one point attack the heroes in Antarctica using guns that can compress snow into ice bullets; Brown dutifully informs us in the end-notes that this is 100% real technology which is regularly used by the US military today. Said Delta Force guys all get eaten by sharks at the end.
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 22:58
|
|
|
Wheat Loaf posted:The main thing I remember about Deception Point was how the requisite Bond villain henchmen are a team of nameless Delta Force operatives who at one point attack the heroes in Antarctica using guns that can compress snow into ice bullets; Brown dutifully informs us in the end-notes that this is 100% real technology which is regularly used by the US military today. They're the ones whose hypersonic spy plane land on the private military runway! Also the who point of the book is that someone is faking a meteorite in an ice cap because... funding?
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 23:01
|
|
|
FrozenVent posted:Also the who point of the book is that someone is faking a meteorite in an ice cap because... funding? Yeah, the main character is a CIA analyst whose estranged father is this hard-right senator who's running for president and one of the main planks of his campaign is that the government spends too much money on NASA; he's conspiring with a bunch of J.R. Ewing knock-offs who want to mine asteroids and print Pepsi logos on the sides of space shuttles (which I'm pretty sure already happened anyway); then there's loads of back-and-forth about NASA announcing they've discovered the ice cap meteorite you mentioned and it has microscopic alien life in it, then it's revealed to be a fake, then it's revealed to not be a fake, but then it actually is a fake. At the end of the novel, the bad guy senator (who actually has nothing to do at all with the conspiracy) is defeated when his aide replaces photographs he was going to present to the media (which were going to be bad news with the president or something) with spy photos of her having sex with him. The book ends, as do all Dan Brown novels, with the not-classically-handsome-but-actually-classically-handsome dashing male lead having sex with the main character, except they do it in the White House while he's wearing the president's pyjamas. I'm not sure why I remembered that bit. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 23:09
|
|
|
That's right up there with Dirk whatshisface having sex with the heroine in a stateroom aboard the just-raised titanic. Oh yeah, a mattress that's been underwater for sixty years! It's bone time!
|
|
#
?
Oct 16, 2017 23:17
|
|
|
FMguru posted:No wait, i'm the silhouette filled with visible detail, like the distinctive irises in my eyes.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 01:51
|
|
|
FrozenVent posted:That's right up there with Dirk whatshisface having sex with the heroine in a stateroom aboard the just-raised titanic. I haven't read the one in question but you must mean Dirk Pitt. Hoooo boy those are some unrepentant trash.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 02:00
|
|
|
food court bailiff posted:I haven't read the one in question but you must mean Dirk Pitt. Hoooo boy those are some unrepentant trash. One of the books ends with him celebrating his victory over a Hitler-Clone-Cult-Cruise-Company by flushing Hitler's remaining jizz down a toilet.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 05:40
|
|
|
I think that was Hitler's ashes, and it was a toilet in the White House. Also the Nazis were based in Atlantis.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 05:50
|
|
|
FrozenVent posted:Digital Fortress is an amazing concept - someone comes up with an unbreakable code, the government freaks the gently caress out. One of the key puzzles in Digital Fortress is "The prime difference between Hiroshima and Nagasaki". The answer is three, which is hilarious because it's also wrong.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 06:22
|
|
|
*writes thousands of articles about how Dirk Pitt novels being poo poo means every boat owner is a racist*
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 08:07
|
|
|
Wheat Loaf posted:The main thing I remember about Deception Point was how the requisite Bond villain henchmen are a team of nameless Delta Force operatives who at one point attack the heroes in Antarctica using guns that can compress snow into ice bullets; Brown dutifully informs us in the end-notes that this is 100% real technology which is regularly used by the US military today. This sounds just like a Matthew Reilly novel, a comparison that manages to insult both parties.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 09:17
|
|
|
Reilly's version has a special forces free-for-all in an Antarctic base where the British have freeze grenades, the French have crossbows, and the Americans have grappling hook guns.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 10:39
|
|
|
My dad is a huge Clive Cussler fan and he loves the Dirk Pitt novels, but I don't think I've ever had any inclination to read one even though mainstream adventure fiction is the sort of thing I would ordinarily enjoy.
Wheat Loaf has a new favorite as of 12:38 on Oct 17, 2017 |
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 11:07
|
|
|
Everyone should read Raise the Titanic! at least once, as it's the quintessential illustration of how commercial success does not correlate to quality.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 12:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 16:27 |
|
|
Trauma Dog 3000 posted:*writes thousands of articles about how Dirk Pitt novels being poo poo means every boat owner is a racist*
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2017 12:24
|
|