If you’re looking for substance, keep on walking, this is just a premature curmudgeon ranting.
I first read The Hobbit in middle school. All I really remember was not understanding why the adults raved about it. I read Lord of the Rings in High School. I do recall skipping the songs, but otherwise not having any real issues with it at the time.
Fast forward to 2017 and I’ve developed the habit of listening to audiobooks on my commute. Having found a Lord of the Rings audiobook from the nineties, I decided “might as well”. It was awful, though not for lack of trying on the part of the performer. I rarely end up rage quitting an audiobook because I’m too busy driving at the time. In this case, however, the ponderous plodding pacing provoked perturbations in my personality and I ended up ejecting it shortly after the fourth or fifth pointless rhyme/melody shortly after the close encounter with the black rider on the way from Bag End to Brandywine. The constant, pointless repetition of Hobbit surnames irrelevant to the narrative and dithering about convincing me that the Shire was deeply inbred and pig ignorant made me wonder why this rendition was so different from my memory.
It was simple – when I read it the first time, it was easy to skim ahead to something relevant to the story. So with a reflexive mental editing, I was able to get a more streamlined story than what was actually on the page. The poor performer on the audiobook could not abridge the yarn and had to keep trudging through the text as written. Thus my memory of the work was more forgiving than what a more stringent examination of the work would produce. While someone with unlimited free time might get lost in the meandering examination of tangents, I only had the slices of time where I was commuting, and I’m rarely in the most lenient of moods then.
The whole incident did lead me to think – what else produces unwarranted fond memories? Was the news always so biased? Were people always so unhinged? Did the future always seem so foreboding and bleak?
In the end, my conclusion was that of a songwriter “The good old days weren’t always so good and tomorrow isn’t as bad as it seems.”
Guest Contributer? I can’t even get my avatar on the artcle? D:
SP can do it if the right denomination note is clipped to the back of the article.
Though, I should say think you for the article image and the markup.
You could say that.
what else produces unwarranted fond memories?
Teenage hormones
That is no shit.
Harkening back to my wild, exhilarating, adventurous teenage years they just look like a colossal waste of time.
(skips ahead to see if there’s any thicc booty)
*thunderous ovation*
I look forward to the article where you complain about Games Workshop changing the names of their paints.
I hate that company so much, but I can’t…stop…buying…Warhammer stuff…
It’s called Plastic Crack for a reason.
I still have a demicompany to assemble and paint…
I’ll quit after I buy one more drop pod, I swear…
I know what you mean about audiobooks v reading. With audio, you take in every single frikkin’ word, but I tend to skim when I read. I think audiobooks either work if you are going to be listening to a relatively dense book for short periods, or the book has a lot of dialogue.
Elmore Leonard books make great audiobooks for longer listening stints. I also have a pirated copy of the compleat Flashman novels, which may be the best audiobooks I’ve ever listened to for pure entertainment value. As far as I know without checking, the Flashman audiobooks aren’t available any more on the open market, which is a terrible shame. Great books, and great readers both.
*Makes mental note to pull the Flashman audiobook files off of ancient, dying Mac.*
Another really good author for audiobooks (with generally good readers): Terry Pratchett. Between Elmore and Pratchett, you have hundreds of hours of top-notch listening.
My library had just about every Richard Marcinko book on cassettes. They were hilarious because Marcinko read them himself and tried to bring his cussing to new levels every time. The man is a true artist with profanity.
“He worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay”
+1 Snoddafinga.
I listened to one Flashman book on audio and had a hell of a time following the accents. Doesn’t help that my hearing sucks after too many rock concerts and machine guns.
Well, waddaya know. The audio Flashmans are back on Audible/Amazon. They have samples if you want to test your tolerance for the accents.
https://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=flashman+audio&tag=mh0b-20&index=stripbooks&hvadid=1695991200&hvqmt=p&hvbmt=bp&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_9h7s8n4dsy_p
Noticed I had a stack of Audible credits; burned several on Audible Flashmans.
That’s where mine are going. Thanks!
I listened to Atlas Shrugged as an unabridged audiobook. One advantage of audiobooks is that you keep “reading”. Right before Atlas Shrugged I finished Moby Dick. I often found that I was still looking at the same paragraph for 15 minutes — that was so boring.
Moby Dick was a nice reference on whaling interrupted by some yarn about a boat.
Maybe, but lines like this will never be topped, from the part where the ship-boy, Pip, has fallen overboard in the middle of a whale hunt and goes mad during his hours-long sojourn alone on the sea, before the ship comes by to pick him up:
“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.”
The Harry Potter Unabridged were actually very good.
Any Tom Wopat audiobook is good too. And I found most of them abridged. Tom Wopat is awesome, fyi.
I’ve tried Tolkien several times in book and audio and never enjoyed it. Brandon Sanderson’s “Way of Kings” series is everything “The Hobbit” wasn’t for me.
I tried Stephen King’s Tower series and thought it was meh.
I’ve also tried reading the Lord of the Rings novels several times. It’s like walking across a desert by going from one distantly-spaced oasis to the next. Eventually you stop at an oasis and go “meh, fuck the desert. I’ll just stay here.’
no, that was the wheel of time.
I finished 12, can’t pick it back up without starting all over either
Brandon Sanderson’s “Way of Kings” series is everything “The Hobbit” wasn’t for me.
YES. THANK YOU. Fucking love that series. Love his Mistborn series as well.
Side note: I have a friend who teaches English at BYU whom I have prodded a couple of times to introduce me to Brandon. No luck yet…
Yes
You answered too quickly.
If anything, people have mellowed out a bit.
Unciv, Here’s what I’m listening to now. Posted it elsewhere, but it’s excellent.
I listened to A Game of Thrones while driving as we moved from NJ to Vegas. Two things about that – first, the guy who narrates (Roy Dotrice) does a different voice for every character (and if you haven’t been in a coma for the last few years, you know that this is an unusual feat). Second, the book is longer than the drive.
Roy is excellent. He makes GRRM’s food meanderings palatable…
Yep – he’s a fantastic narrator. If the next book is ever published, I may wait for the audio version.
You know what the lowest form of life is? It isn’t a child rapist, or an ISIS head-chopper.
It’s people who drive 10 mph under the fucking speed limit on the highway in moderate traffic so it isn’t easy to just plow around them. FUCK YOU!!! I hope your children die screaming in front of you! I hope you drown in your own blood you sick worthless piece of FUCKING SHIT!!!
Come on, tell us how you really feel.
Man, I had that experience this morning. An old man driving a circa 1990 Cutlass Ciera in the left lane going about 45-50.
Please tell me you wrote that while weaving in and out of traffic. ?
He wrote it from the ambulance after having rear-ended someone driving ten mph under the limit.
“The good old days weren’t always so good and tomorrow isn’t as bad as it seems.”
The future ain’t what it used to be.
What is this I can’t even. I read a lot of Amazon reviews where they say “it was so boring I just skipped around and went to the end”. WTF – either read the words on the page or don’t read it at all. No half measures.
Skimming down a page because the author suffers from pacing issues is not the same as jumping around and then skipping to the end.
I had a friend back in high school who showed me all of Akira in about five minutes. He skipped everything except the explosions and tentacle monsters. I think there were tentacle monsters, I don’t remember much of it. Obviously.
Nope, no traditional Anime Tentacle Monsters. They came close with the Tetsuo Transformation Mutation scene, but that was more an organic mutation, and no Naughty Tentacles.
“no Naughty Tentacles”
*crosses off list*
This. I used to read voraciously, but didn’t read well. I’ve slowed my reading down, I absorb more and most importantly enjoy it more. I would never pay attention to descriptions of geographical features, pr plants and stuff, and now I do.
Yet the sixth or seventh time the surnames of half of Hibbiton get repeated in the same sequence ending with ‘and Proudfoots’, I’m going “get on with it”.
I just don’t see the point of skimming. If you’re not enjoying it the way the author intended, put it down and read something else. I enjoy “immersing” myself in a book, so I want to take in every detail.
This is why I never made it more than 30 or 40 pages into The Hobbit, BTW.
If I held that philosophy, I would read nothing.
I would rather scavenge what entertainment I can from the story they were trying to tell.
Besides, the Author is not the boss of me.
If you’re not enjoying it the way the author intended
I read books to enjoy them the way I intend. So, I skim overly involved digressions, etc.
An important piece is where the author is in his/her career. Early on, they have to listen to their editors and the books are tight and readable. A few best sellers later, they are 1,000 pages and require solid skimming skills to tease out the salient bits.
I’ll throw Pratchett out there as a counterpoint. The Discworld series is the epitome of long running and best selling series.
Yes, for sure Pratchett shouldn’t be lumped in with the Clancys and Kings. He had a real gift.
I would be interested to know how Pratchett worked. I always envisioned hime chuckling to himself as he wrote. Almost as if her were entertaining himself, first.
Slammer, if you like in-depth detail of various professions i recommend the Magic Of Reculse series.
I tend to read books in stages. First time through, I skim quite a bit and get a feel for it. Then I re-read in smaller bits, trying to absorb the things I passed by the first time.
I finally looked at why work blocks glibs: it’s newly registered. Which makes me wonder when and whether the designation will fall off so I can post from work.
It’s allowed from my day job. Probably whenever the next policy update cycle is on your proxy.
You’re being very uncharitable. Each to their own, but those books are wonderful. I would encourage anyone who doubts it to do a deep reading alongside some Tolkien Professor podcasts or perhaps a Shippey book.
As far as your larger point is concerned, It sure seems as though the news is more biased. I think when they started losing eyeballs to the internet and cable networks, the Big 3 finally decided to give up on the appearance of being neutral and try to be more controversial to grab more eyeballs. Social media makes it much easier for people to vent about politics in public – before you had to get a pen and write a letter to the newspaper, then win the editorial lottery. That process weeded out a lot of the insane ranting. The ranting, hashtagging, and likes plus the distance of social media allows people to say things they would never normally say in public. Finally, the future didn’t always look so bleak. After the fall of the USSR, I think there was a decade of optimism that made the country feel as though Western small-l liberal democracy and free markets had won a 70 year argument. The political science was settled, as they say. I think things were pretty optimistic until 9/11 happened and the country lost its shit.
^ It is this.
And it is tied, as you say, to “losing eyeballs to the internet and cable networks” in that they no longer have the luxury of polishing their turds to make them look like gold nuggets. It’s been a slow slide into “just publish the turd, yell and scream at anyone who questions you, and move on.”
This is also very true – there was great feeling after the Berlin Wall came down of “oh – things don’t always have to move in the shittiest possible direction!” I do actually think the long term trend is for governments to lose their power and tyranny to simply become less and less possible, but only fools expect that governments will go gently into that Good Night.
tag fail bigly
Consolation of media moight have played a part in media bias as well.
In the day, the Spanish American war was referred to as Hearst’s war because he drummed up popular support for warring with Spain which put pressure on the politicians to not look weak.
The whole incident did lead me to think – what else produces unwarranted fond memories?
80’s reboots directed by Michael Bay?
I used to have a ridiculous commute (2-2.5 hours round trip per day), so i listened to a lot audio books. I really enjoyed LoTR, but I seem to have a special gift for mental skimming (Tom, Tom Bombadil something something).
I also enjoyed Harry Potter series and The Cat Who… series, which tended to be entertaining and short.
I eventually ended up selecting books based on the narrator. My favorites included George Guidall and Scott Brick.
Try The Cat Who… series, UC. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
I know you mean the series of mystery books, but I keep thinking of “The Cat Who Walked Through Walls” by Heinlein, which holds the distinction of being the only book I ever forcably chucked against a wall.
I set “Love Is a Dog From Hell” by Bukowski on fire in my living room and flung it into the fireplace. Great read, would recommend.
That avatar of yours is the most interesting gestalt yet; it looks like Warty tried to use the Gymnast Rings and slipped and fell on his head. *chuckles*
Reading books in school was always annoying.
Oh, that is good.
High School English convinced me that the main goal of High School English was to make people never want to touch a book again, even avid readers like myself.
I simply wandered away from the assigned list to stuff that wasn’t pretentious shit.
Art was the same way. I had a teacher who hated my work, even though it was arguably decent. I even switched a project with her favorite student as a test and got a c- while my work received and A. The teacher was not happy. But she fucked with me for that year to the point I vowed not to draw again. I didn’t for a while.
In college, I was stupid enough to take a writing class.
Now, I don’t do rough drafts. Ever. In high school, this never was an issue – my english teachers seemed to understand and gave me the As that I so richly deserved.
This silly twit, however, was so hung up on it, that I ended up getting a C in that class. I asked her what was wrong with my writing – she said nothing, but that I ignored ‘an important part of the process’. So, while the end product was stellar, how I got there made it average. Fair enough – it’s her class.
Thank god my employers didn’t give a fuck how I wrote. They just gave me money for doing it.
“Rough Draft” was that the boneheaded process where you’d write it once, then start from scratch and write it all over again instead of just editing the completed version?
I think so. Preceded by the equally stupid ‘Outline’.
I hated that. I did the same in my math classes, which I’ve always been pretty good at. I’d skip 3-4 steps, doing them all at once. They accuse me of cheating. I do it for them on the board. I say, putting all those steps down slows me down and makes it harder. they don’t care and I start getting half credit for correct answers.
I have found that if I write an outline for a book, I never write the book.
So much this. By far my least favorite subject at least until I learned how to game it later on in HS.
I remember finally having this argument in senior year. I had been thinking it for a while, but finally got fed up and asked for the interview the author gave when he revealed the secret symbolism. Not saying we can’t take some things out of a book, my argument was that it’s quite subjective, and the teacher’s version can’t be the only one that could be right.
English Teachers are English Teachers because they think literature is full of symbolism.
Authors are Authors because they think Literature is full of compelling stories.
“So you just want me to memorize what you think this book is about, is that what I’m hearing?”
“yes, Doom, I guess that’s right.”
I have a burning hatred for assigning symbolism to every fscking action and item that takes place through the book. Water means rebirth, White means purity, Black means corruption, Pickles means penis, Donuts means vagina, etc…
For your point about asking the for the author’s definition, that’s already countered by the Literary Critics. Which has led to critics (I originally had people here) saying that the author didn’t even understand their own work.
I’m sorry, but anyone who says says something to un-self-aware, patently false and up their own rectum as that should be laughed out of the room and ignored for perpetuity.
Relevant.
I once read a critique of Lord of the Rings n which a feminist tried to demonstrate that Tolkien was misogynist because the circle of the ring represented a vagina and thus femininity, and the whole purpose of the story was a group of men going to destroy it. Suspecting that this was insane, I researched and found that Tolkien himself said it represented the Catholic concept that evil is simply the total absence of God’s presence, thus emptiness. I’m sure the feminist was right though.
Huh. Usually the accusations of misogyny simply point to the near total lack of female characters and Tolkien’s correspondingly obvious near total lack of interest in heterosexual relationships.
What?? The Aragorn/Arwen romance was TOTALLY nuanced, plausible, and empowering to females!!!
I agree Tolkien undoubtedly had a classic upper crust British chauvinism about him, but there’s a lot of space between passively leaving female characters out of a story and actively creating a story in which literally the entire point is the destruction of females and femininity.
I had a prog friend who was an English major and was always hyper-analyzing text. A few years back, he asked me to introduce him to some good hip hop so he could expand his cultural horizons or something. Having grown up in a “ghetto” type neighborhood, and having listened to hip hop for most of my life, I take a lot of references and slang for granted. But man this guy would come back after listening to some song, eyes wild like he had just deduced that E does in fact equal MC2, ranting and raving about how some song had solved the mysteries of the human psyche and society and the universe and everything and yadda yadda…and he’d tell me the crucial lyric that tied it all together. I’d just laugh and say “No, dude, he’s just talking about smoking weed.”
Then again, I am the son of a man who, back in the 60s, flunked a college literature elective course required for his micro bio degree because when asked why the eponymous badge in The Red Badge of Courage was indeed red, he said “because the author wanted it to be red.” So, maybe I’m the asshole here.
I never got far enough into that book to find out if it refered to an actual object.
I never finished most of the books assigned during the American lit year – that one, Moby Dick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and a few others stand out as particularly impossible for me to get through.
Then we had a year of British lit and I liked all of it.
I actually read and loved most of the books assigned to me in English class.
In my Junior Year in High School Massachusetts instituted a new Summer Reading program. Kids had a list of books to choose from based on grade and class level (Standard, College, Honors, etc.) and had to read and take standardized tests on the books. The idea was that you actually had to go into the School over the Summer and take tests on the books but that was optional and if you didn’t take the test in the Summer you could make it up in the first few weeks of school.
I was literally the ONLY person in my entire High School who tested on all 5 books in the Summer.
So I am not one who finds “literature” unreadable but The Red Badge of Courage and Moby Dick are right up there with Old Man and the Sea and the Thomas Covenant series for the worst books I have ever read. Red Badge of Courage was one of the few so bad I couldn’t even finish it.
For me the award of “Worst Book I Have Ever Read” is uncontested: Johnathan Livingston Seagull
I would go with Surfacing by Margaret Atwood. I was forced to read it in a Contemporary Lit class in the early ’90s and holy shit is it bad.
+1 Just use the fucking ring!
Never even started it myself. I’m an avid reader, but even as a teenager it was my strict policy to never read anything that a government employee was trying to force me to read. I made straight A’s in AP English for 4 years without ever having read an assigned book.
And I can assure you, that says much, much more about the state of “AP English” in this country than it does about my intelligence level.
There are some rappers or rap songs that are very deep. Getting lines to rhyme, especially internally, means some words will shift meaning. I think there are some songs that do really reveal a thought or opinion on life while still sounding like it’s just drugs or guns. these are rare though.
I whole-heartedly agree, and when it does happen, especially when it is embedded into a rhythmically complex delivery and clever phrasing, it can be extremely powerful. But the songs this guy was raving about were not those songs.
I figured as much.
50, unh
Bentley, unh
Em came ‘n gotta nigga fresh out the, slum
Automatic, gun
Fuck ’em one-on-one
We wrap up ya punk ass, stunt ‘n ya done
so deep.
I genuinely think you could a record contract with that kind of wordplay.
But yea I think this guy’s main problem was that he didn’t “get” all the slang, and since he was a proggie who was utterly convinced that all hip hop was the poetry of the streets and voice of the disenfranchised, to his mind anything he didn’t understand MUST be profound. Add that to 4 years of being trained to over analyze every written word you encounter, and suddenly “light it up” is talking about illuminating the mind or some such nonsense, not a straightforward call to smoke a blunt. It was actually pretty entertaining to watch how his brain worked.
There’s a huge-ass thread on the commentariat exodus (several now refer to us as the diaspora) that makes up like 1/3 of the comments in the AM links on the other site. A lot of gross distortion, calling us names, inferences that we’re just a bunch of conservetard Trumpists who couldn’t stand to see Daddy maligned, etc., and some countering those arguments.
Just thought it was an interesting read.
BTW, I want us to be referred to as the exodites, not the diaspora. But that’s just me.
I’m not an Eldar.
*looks for bolt pistol to deal with Xenos*
I’d always thought “diaspora” implies an eventual return to the Homeland. Checking definitions, I see that’s just me. Regardless, not really my intention at this point.
Hey, it’s better than the ‘Secession of the Yokels’ name they’re going with.
I thought we left the yokels behind?
It’s hilarious to me that when we were there, I was a cosmo white-knighting all the staffers, but now that I’m here, I’m a yokel.
Meh.
I always thought you were a cheap puppet produced by Toho Studios, replete with the most thin and meager of budgets. If could be any more maudlin…. In spite of that, Jim, you occupy a slot on the Top Ten Groovy List of Commentariat Excellence. You’re currently at #9, and no, that’s not because of the Beatles.
Yokel-y Dokel-y, I are. Never denied it. *shrugs* I like you folks, overall.
While I appreciate the compliment, I’m still not going down on you.
Yet.
You’ll have to get through Dr. ZG first and you *know* much about the fair creatures known as Ru-Krainian Wimminz, and their….peculiar tendencies.
I am a teensy bit disappointed you didn’t comment on my column though, Jim. You were probably busy doing something productive, like coughing or taking a shit. *grins*
Exactly. Anyone that thinks I’m a yokel is on crack.
I’ve taken to calling that sub-thread you are talking about The Remnant War.
The Remnant War
Needs to be turned into a series of YA novels.
You left, that means yokel, SF. Every reality-based person knows this.
I could try. I shudder to think what SugarFree would make of that title.
@Gojira
I’m more imagining it more as one of those pulpy scifi covers.
The two are not mutually exclusive. Do we know an artist who can work in that style?
Apparently, “The Remnant War” is part of the HALO universe.
The Remnant War
Son of a…
I already had ideas.
How bad would it be to continue anyway?
I’d say go for it, it’s not exactly some solid, stand-out title that defines a well-known product, like Star Wars or Special K.
I’m seriously thinking about it.
So far I have some ideas for setting and significant factions (allegorically inspired by the same commentariat exodus, but not sticking to the events or participants, so that the stories can proceed of their own volition)
A feature of the setting will be the absense of ROADZ. We’re looking at some sort of space opera where the exodus set out for a different system after getting fed up with the established order. Leaving behind the titular ‘remnant’ which obviously falls to infighting.
*starts scribbling notes*
But what are your symbols!?!?
Dammit, UCS, I want more Shadow
boydemon 🙁Or junior Redemptioners at least.
No, wait, noir hijinks of Omnirunner.
What I’m saying is, people need to buy your books.
“What I’m saying is, people need to buy your books.”
And be sure to write in a major role for Jennifer Lawrence. She thanks you in advance.
Anyone make any salient points?
Against us? Not really. FS comes closest when he says that his strategy is to flood the comments of the other site with criticism to try and make people take notice.
Everything else against us is laughably inaccurate at best, slander at worst.
Can’t imagine why I’d care what they think about this place. I like it, and I can’t think of anyone else’s opinion that matters. Honestly, between the articles and the glibertariat, this place is easily a match for H & R even before the Descent into Mediocrity.
I confess to a certain amount of smug satisfaction at seeing the remaining commenters tear into each other over us.
I honestly don’t understand why they care. That what stumps me.
Vibe of the site is basically dead now, trolls make up half the comments a lot of the time, and a lot of the longer threads are just John arguing with/screaming at chemjeff, Konima or some one else. The Diaspora just made the comments as unbearable as most of the articles in a lot of ways.
They know they are slipping into being a sub-critical mass. John, Free Society, a couple of sane people who won’t come over here and a bunch of trolls can’t keep that community from dying.
As I said before, they should shut off comments for six months and then reboot with a whole new commenter base.
What Sugarfree said, they’re starting to eat each other. Rats scurrying over each other on a sinking ship.
Thats a really interesting and smart idea.
And probably also why its something they won’t do.
John commented the other day that he was not invited here. I hope no one minds me commenting back(don’t know if he read it) that “Everyone is invited I think, just don’t be a troll.” I’m trying my best not to negatively comment or advertise for here on TSTSNBN. I really do believe the comments is what made interested in that place. I am thoroughly enjoying Glibertarians and the topics that are discussed here.
Bacon, now they’re getting pissy about people welcoming others over to this site. There’s bitching about our ‘clubhouse’ and all that. I’d give them some time to mellow out, most are already aware anyway.
Understood, John Titor. OMWC straightened me out on advertising for this site. But if they ask, I assume it’s ok to tell. I will not fish for recruits again.
I don’t think you really need an invite (although Dr. Groovus gave me the heads-up). Best, IMO, if any refugees keep their H & R nom du comment. Between the cat-butt and the ban-hammer wielded by our doughty sponsors, I don’t worry about troll infestations.
Hey, it juiced their total comments, so win-win for them, right?
One of the staffers tweeted something along the lines of the alt-right is the best thing that has ever happened to libertarianism as it provided a much needed house cleaning.
I’d love to bring that place down.
Yeah, that’s what the libertarian thing needed – a good purge. There were getting to be too many libertarians, dammit! My basic gripe was that Reason had just become too ordinary, just another outlet for the DemOp Media talking points. Looked like they picked up the DemOp Media contempt for their lessers, as well.
huh. I don’t think anyone read anybody’s “I’m leaving” notes.
Goodness, it’s unpleasant over there this morning.
It’s gross.
I haven’t been over there much lately. I will say that the one good thing about the implosion is that I’ve been revisiting a lot of places that I used to go.
It’s a big, wide world out there. Reason will get their shit together and be a worthwhile destination again.
I don’t think they will.
It’s that or double down.
I’ll say. Looking over a lot of the posts over there just tells me that I’m fully done with “that other site.” I planned to make the occasional post over there if I wanted to, but the childish responses by some of the remainers makes me see that there’s no real conversation to be had. Oh well, hope they enjoy the remaining community. #Rexit
I prefer audio books now. I’m always driving so I just want to relax. A good yarn like a Tom Clancy novel is really good for a long drive.
This particular incident makes me wary of putting Clancy on in audio form – I read them in book form when he was alive.
Seriously, G. Elmore Leonard audiobooks FTW. Good stories, and they are just a good size and shape for audio.
I’ll check it out. I just like to have Clancy stories because I love operators operating operationally.
If you haven’t gotten into Pratchett’s Discworld yet, I’d start with the Night Watch sub-series.
I have found several occasions at work to quote Vetinari on democracy (paraphrased, probably): “This is a democracy. We have one man, one vote. I am the Man, and I have the Vote.”
I love Pratchett. He’s great.
RIP.
what else produces unwarranted fond memories
All Saturday morning cartoons ever.
OOOF, yeah holy shit.
Oh yeah. I bet “Hong Kong Phooey” doesn’t hold up at all.
Looney Tunes is the only thing out of all that crap that will be remembered.
And Scooby Doo.
Hm… saw some recently. It’s awful, therefore perfect. You may be right.
I’m talking the earliest ones, with the groovy soundtrack playing during the pointless pursuit scenes.
Smurfs, for Saturday cartoons.
Lots of Afterschool Cartoons, too. Those always bring back memories, epecially since they were….well….after school.
An interesting article on The Demise of Saturday Morning Cartoons.
Road Runner is one of my favorites.
I remember one of my moments of clarity, when I began to notice the changes in the sociopolitical winds, was when I saw a Looney Tunes collection on DVD, and it had a “Mature Rating” sticker on it.
Maybe we are just coming full circle? Original cartoons were made for adults, after all.
I mean, it was hardly for children that Donald Duck learns how to fill simplified income tax form…
For further discussion:
-what the fuck is his marginal tax rate?!
-watch the sequel, Spirit of 1943 to see prototype of Scrooge McDuck and Gladstone Gander make their appareance
-tell me why the fuck can’t you make propaganda like this anymore?
*orders something from Acme to blow up Pomp with*
The hell you say.
Batman’s still pretty good.
I seem to recall that was a weekday afternoon series, as I’d watch it after getting home from school.
Canadian, different airtime.
Bullshit. All you ever watched, Titor, is Body Break. It really explains much, so much.
Well, that and hilariously creepy 90s PSAs.
For me it was the Channel 9 (WOR) or maybe it was 11 (WPIX) Saturday-afternoon “Drive in movie” double-feature which would show Godzilla then Kung-Fu movies back-to-back.
I think a large part of my imagination & sense of humor can be tied to those 2 things.
Yes! And speaking of those types of movies, MST3K’s new season launches on Netflix in April.
Hey!
Ugh.
I’m sure it’ll be on Showbox or Terrarium the same day for android users.
I have mixed feelings about this.
The talent of Joel is unquestionable…
but for me, Mike, Kevin and Trace were the dream team – and Bill jumped in seamlessly, to his immense credit.
imo, Tom Servo simply cannot be replaced.
Overall, I prefer Rifftrax (and The Film Crew) to Cinematic Titanic – though admittedly, Mary Jo adds quite a lot of great stuff to the movies in CT.
I hope they keep the feel of the original. We’ll see. There is a 24/7 mst3k channel on Pluto TV app. Amazon prime just added a ton of Rifftrax as well if anyone is looking to watch the old stuff for free.
Thundarr was a work of art man… a work of art.
Haven’t read all the comments – my experience with audiobooks is the voice thing in my Kindle. I sometimes regret not being able to mark pages while listening (of course, I would only mark pages on my own book), and with something like LOTR I prefer traditional reading because sometimes I have to take time on some passages to get the gist. Going through the whole text at a steady clip can trip you up if you miss something.
So your memories of reading LOTR in the traditional way could be perfectly valid memories. It could just be that audiobooks for works like LOTR are a bad idea.
A concept I have heard for this is the Suck Fairy.
The Suck Fairy visits the media you loved as a youth and sprinkles her magic dust on it removing all the illusions of just what that work was so that when you re read it years later you all of a sudden notice glaring flaws you missed back then and discover parts of the work you remember fondly are more fabrications of your immagination that actual scenes from the work,
The biggest case of this happening with me that I can recall was in McCaffrey’s Dragon Riders of Pern. I first read them in High School and read them a couple of more times through about age 20 then didn’t touch them again until a couple of years ago (a gap of more than 20 years) . Re-reading it after all that time I discovered just how weak and disjointed the story really was and how cardboard the characters were, lines of dialog and in a few cases even whole scenes that I strongly remembered were simply absent from the book and what was in their place was a very pale imitation of them. All of the elements of a good story were there in the background but the writing utterly failed to bring them out
I know the Suck Fairy has done a number on my record collection.
Adam and the Ants? Really?
I want those who get to know me to become admirers or my enemy
I recommend listening to Bored of the Rings instead
I had a copy of that as a teenager. Frickin’ loved it.
Tim, Tim, Benzedrine! Hash! Boo! Valvoline!
Clean! Clean! Clean for Gene!
First, second, neutral, park,
Hie thee hence, you leafy narc!
I had a bad reading year a few years ago. Everything I read was shit. I tried different lists and reviews still shit. Room by Emma Donoghue was a standout terrible read.
I think the lessons I learned was to read Amazon’s 3 stars reviews and never read another literature fiction genre book again. By literature fiction I mean the genre that takes place in “our world” but has no fantasy or sci-fi connection.
Never, ever download the monthly free Kindle books.
Haha, I downloaded a couple but never read them.
The reading suggestions from the commentariat have been very helpful. They helped get me out of my shit reads rut.
Skimmed through all of this. Good stuff from what I saw.
*slow clap*
I read LOTR as a young bacon bit. I agree with skimming some of it. In fact most of the books I’ve read were skimmed. I even think I skim through life. *wanders off aimlessly*
So that’s not a glass of whole milk that you and the eggs come with in the morning?
nice.
Fantasy books are boring as boring can get. It’s similar to the Superman problem: invincible guy gets into a fight, and the outcome is so predictable that there’s no tension at all. When the imaginary creature battles the other imaginary creature, there’s precisely nothing at stake.
YAWN.
You could say the same for any work of fiction. They’re not real, so why does it matter?
I can relate to Bruce Willis crawling through an air shaft to foil bad guys. I can’t bring myself to even care about a plot that depends on magic rings and magicians doing magical things with them.
Freakin’ scientists. /magic lover
Ahem, the plot actually centers around magicians *not* using magic rings.
I read science fiction, fantasy and the in-betweens. Interest is in the eye of the beholder.
Willis is just as invincible as any magical wizard nonsense. Do you think the star of an action movie is suddenly going to get capped by a stray bullet?
Hell, action movie stars routinely take beatings, and even catch bullets, that would leave a real person somewhere on the continuum from screaming in agony to stone cold dead.
That’s one of the fun parts of Last Action Hero, that movie about a boy getting trapped in an Arnold movie. Arnie gets out into the real world, gets fatally shot, so they dump him back in the movie so he can just walk it off.
The action-movie version of realism
You do realize that there is virtually no actual magic that occurs in the LOTR movies and even less in the books right?
Not to be pedantic, but guys crawling through ductwork to foil bad guys/escape/whatever is as fantastical as anything in LOTR.
Boring formulaic fantasy is boring and formulaic, true. The trick if your fantasy is going to have magic is to come up with a magic system that is plausible, articulated, with consequences, limitations, and traps to it.
Don’t forget that, while Tolkien didn’t exactly invent his ideas out of thin air, his work can be considered fairly original in comparison to lots of the derivative stuff that came afterwards.
So to the extent the stuff in LOTR seems familiar and boring, it’s like the old joke about Hamlet being full of cliches.
He, UnCivilServant, as long as you’re mocking nerd culture, tell us about how you can never tell the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek!
#DuneMasterRace
+1 I miss Pro’L Dib…
where he go?
I’ll just leave this here:
UCS’ attire