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Dienes posted:Did your class need to read it out loud, in class, in its entirety? Nothing fosters a love of literature like the stumbling, monotone, bored recitations of teenagers. I had an English teacher who wouldn't correct anyone's pronunciation or explain when people obviously didn't understand something unless they specifically asked, so almost the entire class read "thou" as "though" and clearly had no idea what the words they were saying meant. That on top of the stumbling monotone of the semi-literate.
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Sep 10, 2016 05:13
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Tunicate posted:when he was 'spontaneous' he just didn't plan things through ahead of time Isn't that basically the definition of spontaneous?
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Sep 15, 2016 08:21
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Syd Midnight posted:Wait, what? If you say you don't like the last few Discworld books apparently that makes you an arsehole or something. 
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Oct 29, 2016 04:39
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Suleman posted:I guess creepy sex fantasies were just considered a normal part of sci-fi at the time. "At the time". 
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Nov 11, 2016 03:16
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I was surprised just now to see it rated 3.7 on Goodreads, but it turned out that there's a lot of people who fit those two types.
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Dec 4, 2016 02:27
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mania posted:It's the rating system, it's weighed towards 3-5 stars. I guess I'm weird then, because I give most things 1-3 stars under that system.
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Dec 4, 2016 05:07
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Alaois posted:CSI co-creator Anthony Zuiker's Level 26: Dark Origins is amazingly awful, but don't take my word for it, watch the trailer to see for yourself! And that's not the only video, cause this is a diginovel. I Don't Even Own a Television did an episode on it.
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Dec 8, 2016 03:20
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:I could, if you think it would be interesting, but I'd be very cagey about details because there were only, like, fifty people in our entire high school and I would be easy to identify. Do you have to pay for an account? It's just the Facebook group.
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Dec 19, 2016 08:36
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:Oh, it must be. I haven't listened yet. Yikes! Well, we had a weekly public access show about issues affecting teens and we did plays about domestic violence and stuff. It was pretty cool. I just want to know if it was your real name they censored or if they censored it because they thought "Fleta" was such a unique name that it would instantly identify you.
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Jan 11, 2017 02:58
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I write a lot of reviews on Goodreads and because of that (I assume) I occasionally get terrible authors sending me their books to review. The latest was A Minger's Tale: Beginnings, and it's especially bad. Supposedly a memoir, but full of obvious lies, and at least one section blatantly plagiarised from Wikipedia. You know that guy who thinks he's raconteur, but his stories go nowhere, aren't funny, and have no connection to anything? The author is that guy. Here are some typical excerpts:RBN Bookmark posted:To make things even worse, we had some problems with youth on the estate, and one in particular—I’ll call him Shirley for reasons that will become apparent as I explain. Shirley’s brother was quite a good footballer, and we often played in matches together against other youths from various parts of the estate. In case you're wondering, no, there's no additional context. That's the first and last we hear of Shirley and their brother, and it's never explained what sort of trouble Shirley was supposedly causing for the author and his family. And the same applies to every story in the book. They go nowhere, don't include enough information, and just stop suddenly so he can talk about something completely unrelated. Here's another: RBN Bookmark posted:Gordon was a big chap, bigger than John even. He was white, in his early thirties, lanky but as strong as an ox—nobody could throw the sort of weights he could. He was a foreman, as was John, but Gordon carried more clout. His reputation as a hard man preceded him. It's also full of weird malapropisms and incredibly poorly constructed sentences like "Roy was in his midthirties, with dark slicked-back hair, and a devout Elvis fan." or "Then he smiled, shaking his head, not quite knowing whether to make neither head nor tail of what I’d just said." That might sound funny, and it kind of is, but it's not nearly enough to make up for everything else.
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Jan 28, 2017 05:27
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EmmyOk posted:Here minger is slang for an incredibly ugly person That is the intended meaning in the book and the foreword gives the definition (quoted without attribution from Urban Dictionary). The author seems to really love the word and refers to himself as such almost constantly.
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Jan 28, 2017 05:48
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My sister picked up Laurell K Hamilton's Kiss the Dead from an op shop recently (since she likes supernatural romance stuff) but even by the standards of that genre it turned out to be especially bad. So after she finished it she gave it to me to read, and she wasn't kidding. Here's the blurb:quote:When a fifteen-year-old girl is abducted by vampires, it’s up to U.S. Marshal Anita Blake to find her. And when she does, she’s faced with something she’s never seen before: a terrifyingly ordinary group of people—kids, grandparents, soccer moms—all recently turned and willing to die to avoid serving a master. And where there’s one martyr, there will be more… That all happens right at the start and then the majority of the book focuses on Anita personal life. She says at one point that she has seven boyfriends, but I'm pretty sure there were more than that. Plus one girlfriend. And all of them are either vampires or lycanthropes, many of them magically enslaved by her. But that's OK because "preternaturals" can't be allowed to be free, and actually they prefer it that way. Which brings me back to the blurb and how these vampires are willing to die rather than serve a maaster. It sounds like it's going to be an analogy for real-world issues of slavery and civil rights, and it kind of is, except that the protagonist is firmly on the pro-slavery side. As well as being a US Marshal she's also a government-sanctioned vampire hunter, which gives her the freedom to just kill vampires and lycanthropes if she suspects that they've killed someone, are going to kill someone, might be thinking about killing someone or even saw another vampire/lycanthrope kill someone. Yes, as a vampire, witnessing a crime is also a crime, and the sentence is death. And the book goes out of its way to tell you, over and over again, that if she invokes her right to kill vampires then she doesn't need any kind of evidence and there will be no investigation. Her word is good enough. She can also grant this same permission to cops she's with. And it also allows them to kill humans who are (or seem to be, or might have been) working with the vampires. The whole message of the book is basically "some people aren't really people and it's OK to kill or enslave them, and in fact it's right to do so." Also there's a lot of really badly written, but very graphic sex, and endless references to the previous 20 (yes, 20) books in the series. Anyway, here are some quotes: quote:I knew without doubt that if any more of the vampires tried to attack us I’d kill them, too, regardless of apparent age, race, sex, or religious affiliations. I was an equal-opportunity executioner; I killed everybody. quote:Yeah, that's the group name for a bunch of vampires: a kiss of vampires. A gobble of ghouls, a shamble of zombies, and a kiss of vampires; most people don't know that, and the rest don't care. quote:Looking at the twenty or so frightened faces staring at me, I felt bad that they were afraid of me, but I knew that if they attacked us, I'd kill them. They should have been afraid—of me. There's so much more, but it's hard to pick out the funny bits from the endless rambling and repetition. I wish I'd read an ebook version because then I could have copied them out as I went, but then I'd have had to actually pay money for it.
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May 4, 2017 10:28
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Jerry Cotton posted:e: They were usually under 200 pages though and I'm guessing this isn't?
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May 4, 2017 10:46
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Antivehicular posted:I've never read the book, but based purely on watching the (RiffTraxed) film version, I kind of feel like the passivity is a big part of the wish-fulfillment -- the concept that you don't have to try to be popular and loved, it just happens, even if you have no actual positive qualities.
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May 11, 2017 09:53
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bean_shadow posted:KFC has released a Col. Sanders romance novel for Mother's Day. It's free on Amazon and is called Tender Wings of Desire.
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May 13, 2017 17:06
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:isn't this essentially the premise for 90% of stuff featuring fantasy races vs humans? 
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May 25, 2017 12:25
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Did you know that the guy who played Quark on Deep Space Nine wrote a book? Did you know it's terrible? The Merchant Prince by Armin Shimerman and Michael Scott tells the story of The plot is really dumb, but it's fairly easy reading and would probably be entirely unremarkable if not for the fact that the protagonist is clearly supposed to be Shimerman - to the extent that the picture of Dee on the cover actually has Shimerman's face. I don't know if it's incredible narcissism or tragic insecurity, but there's got to be something really wrong with someone to write themself into a book like this. 
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May 30, 2017 16:02
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Tunicate posted:A merchant saving the planet from aliens? SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:To be fair my understanding of book covers is authors usually don't get input on them. I wonder if Shimerman was a special case, or if the publisher asked the artist for it thinking it a fun tie-in?
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May 31, 2017 02:37
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Antivehicular posted:"Protuberant, tight young breasts" is a memorably bad phrase. Is there something in the human brain that just loving short-circuits when trying to describe breasts without word salad? I'm still trying to parse "Naked, except for the belt of white he wore around the expanse of skin normally covered by swim trunks". Is he wearing a miniskirt or something?
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Jun 2, 2017 10:11
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God, it just keeps going. Every time you think "this must be the worst thing in this book" it finds some new way to be terrible. 
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Jul 11, 2017 05:37
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there wolf posted:I guess it's well he just needs to stop going back to if he doesn't have any more stories for it. I mean what else is there to write once you've defeated the literal world-destroying evil? If you're a good writer, maybe something about what the heroes do and how the world treats them now that they're no longer needed? If you're a bad writer, another world-destroying evil.
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Jul 31, 2017 06:56
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:I CARE DEEPLY ABOUT EVERYTHING AND I HOPE EVERYONE IS HAVING SUCH A NICE DAY! I'M ACTUALLY NOT FEELING GREAT TODAY BUT I JUST TOOK A SUDAFED SO HOPEFULLY I WILL BE FEELING BETTER LATER ON.
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Aug 3, 2017 06:21
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Fleta Mcgurn posted:SUDAFED IS HIGHLY EFFECTIVE AND I AM HAPPY T HEAR YOU HAVE MEDICATION! FEEL BETTER SOON AND TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF!
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Aug 3, 2017 15:43
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Inescapable Duck posted:Is anyone else really sick of 'seemingly standard fantasy setting is actually the FUTURE after nuclear war!' even though it isn't used that much? artsy fartsy posted:But I also wanna say those books had a time-traveling wizard character who would occasionally drop George Lucas' name or something like that. At the time I loved it but I think it would just annoy me now.
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Aug 10, 2017 12:39
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Sandra Hill posted:“As Hilda’s buttermilk bosoms squished up against his granite abs, Torolf almost had a dick aneurysm.” She's written a ton of stuff and I'm tempted to see if it's all this funny, but the prices are just slightly above my limit for something I expect to be bad. Those quotes are brilliant though.
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Sep 12, 2017 09:46
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queserasera posted:A public library should have it. My podunk one does--and in large print no less. The local library here is basically worthless when it comes to fiction. They do have some, but it's a really small selection and I've never found anything I was actually looking for there.
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Sep 13, 2017 08:15
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Djeser posted:I still haven't found the steampunk anthology book in my things, but I did find this excerpt in my imgur account: TheKennedys posted:I've got to second the "for once the TV show is actually way better" opinion re: The Magicians. Trauma Dog 3000 posted:Books can't be pretentious, that's not a real criticism
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Sep 15, 2017 05:19
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TenCentFang posted:Sharknado and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter hosed everything up for all of us by popularising low effort monkey cheese Intentionally-"bad"-but-actually-just-bad entertainment, and now everyone wants to cash in. Wasn't it Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that kicked that trend off?
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Sep 19, 2017 05:33
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hackbunny posted:Presented without context or comment: $4000,000? Who writes numbers that way?
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Sep 23, 2017 03:53
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Pastry of the Year posted:Here's a famously awful passage (that was new to me). It's a photograph of a page in a book, but linked for NSFW text, just in case. http://i.imgur.com/I4ZrJ91.jpg Drunken Baker posted:This is what delights and infuriates me about crap books/films/whatever. You get an idea like RPO and it is done so, so terribly. But it gives you a little spark of insight and inspiration because it COULD be the bedrock for some really fascinating fiction. Strom Cuzewon posted:His ship and robot action is vastly more interesting than his human stuff - the opening of Excession has a drone escaping from a hacked ship, bouncing of pressure waves, rerouting forcefields, jettisoning memory cores, all takes place over a matter of seconds. It's pretty great. Wheat Loaf posted:Is "genre" just science-fiction and fantasy or is stuff like detective novels and thrillers "genre" as well? there wolf posted:Those "write about this specific topic" anthologies have been around for a while; I used to have one that was stories about Zombies against stories about Unicorns.
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Oct 10, 2017 06:58
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outlier posted:Related anecdote: some years ago, I asked a knowledgeable bookseller friend to recommend me some modern crime genre novels, that were acclaimed but not the Big Name, mass-market stuff. Without exception, every book was cliche-ridden bollocks: angsty cops that never slept and lived off coffee and cigarettes (literally not figuratively), genius serial killers with absurdly ornate MOs (e.g. this one poses their victims in the style of Italian paintings of the 14th century), sudden romances with inexplicably beautiful expert lawyer / art professor / DJ who is drawn into the case and who will later get kidnapped by the serial killer.
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Oct 10, 2017 14:15
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That woman looks fairly unconcerned about the situation. The man is freaking out, but she's just sort of calmly dealing with it.
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Oct 11, 2017 10:11
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:All social conditions are economic conditions. That's complete nonsense.
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Oct 12, 2017 08:02
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:What is the difference? BravestOfTheLamps posted:The problem is clear: you haven't ever read literary criticism, and are imagining attacks on the character and integrity of people living in trailer parks.
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Oct 12, 2017 11:18
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PJOmega posted:That can't be a real comic. It is.
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Oct 15, 2017 06:07
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Mr. Sunshine posted:the entire setting is actually in the past and the Culture are actually not humans? Or something?
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Oct 18, 2017 15:57
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Inescapable Duck posted:Never seen trolley problem pictures/parodies before? Hoo boy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHI2QV_-mF0&t=80s
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Oct 28, 2017 15:57
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Midnight Voyager posted:Things learned from english class in school: loving nothing is good when you have everyone alternate reading it out loud. NOTHING.
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Oct 31, 2017 03:25
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Jerry Cotton posted:Doesn't really matter since rather little in Shakespeare was pronounced the way it's pronounced nowadays anyway. Half the rhymes don't work anymore. It's not about the sound of it, it's about the fact that if you think "thou" means "though" then you obviously have no idea what the words you're saying mean.
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Oct 31, 2017 15:25
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Jerry Cotton posted:The reason Shakespeare is so god drat boring is that you've literally heard or seen the material (including jokes) in variations a million times in later works. He's not the only old artist with this problem of course but he's one of the most used.
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Oct 31, 2017 15:44
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