Nom

I've rigged a VCR up to an HD antenna and an amp on my room TV. I'll tape it, and when I get home at around 10:30ish, I'll wait until 11 when it's over, pop headphones in the amp, and watch the whole thing no matter that it's a school night and I'll be up until almost 1 in the morning. THAT is hardcore. And completely worth it.

Hey! Hey, guys! Over here! *waves* This the corner for all the people who know that it doesn't matter one lonely piece of gerbil [cabbage] that Obama is black, whether he is in fact black, or why people voted for him, because he's already been elected. Oh, and in case you didn't know, he was sworn in today! He made this really awesome inaugural address and is now officially the President of the United States of America! So have a good day and remember, the 44th President is Barack Obama!

Allow me to point out the fact that this thread would be long dead by now if not for the continued bickering over whether it should exist in the first place. The dissenters are, in my opinion, correct in saying that there is little discussion value. If you look back over the last few pages, it seems like everyone else realized that as well, and the thread should have died peacefully after everyone had their share of "LOL" posts. At this point you're just beating a dead horse.

No kidding, me and Diesel played in a guitar/bass team last night and took 1st in about half the songs we played. None of the songs had more than three or four scores submitted. Of course that was on Wii, which hasn't been out as long, but still.

The reason Macbeth is my favorite of his plays is because it is more simplistic than his others. Not even the most overzealous English teacher can shove your nose into analyzing something that just isn't there. Looking at the development for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, which is excellent, is pretty much the only relevant thing you can do with it. Beyond that, it's a cool story of intrigue and war revolving around Macbeth's actions and ambitions. I've also seen a live performance of Macbeth and Julius Caesar and filmed performances of Macbeth (Ian McKellan plays Macbeth and the dude that plays Emperor Palpatine is in it too) and The Merchant of Venice. I enjoy seeing them performed but for me it's always so much harder to follow what they're saying, especially since I have a hearing problem. So I like reading them slightly better, it gives me all the time I need to take it in. The realist in me cringes a bit whenever I read him, though. I don't know what world Mr. Shakespeare lived in, but as far as I'm aware very few if any people can pull off the spontaneous eloquence that every single one of his characters does.

in what rankings? a score of 218k exactly would place you 8624th on scorehero. Yeah I was gonna say, nowhere near anything of significance. My score of around 258k would put me somewhere in the 4-5 thousandth range. SH is ridiculous sometimes. Speaking of SH, I shall be uploading my scores to it tomorrow. Three games' worth. Fun. In the final stages of editing for two custom songs and have a 20-second Intro song finished. Once I've come up with a third full-length song I'll be uploading them in the first official release from my virtual band! Yeah it's cheesy but it should be fun. I think the songs are pretty good too, for what you can get out of the music studio.

I object to the fundamental existence of Twilight and pretty much every single thing about that existence. This is the Twilight thread in MM&T. Since I don't want to start up a whole separate argument that essentially repeats what I've said there, you can just skim over it, especially pages 5 and onward. If you object to anything please do say so, but I don't want to repeat myself by laying everything out again. The basic premise, though, is that the prose is badly purple, Bella and Edward are uber-sues of the first degree, the story holds no value except for wish fulfillment on the part of Stephenie Meyer, and the books send a disturbing message of sexism and a distorted view of relationships. For details, see the thread. I'm currently about halfway through Brisingr, having just now been able to get it from a library. So far it looks like he actually tried to listen to his critics, since the prose in the very beginning was God-awful--even worse than Eldest, if that is at all possible--but gradually cleaned itself up a bit. The story seems structured like a checklist, with Paolini addressing each of the points he's been criticized on for a few pages and then moving on. At least he's attempting to clean it up, and it's a sight better than Eldest. Still riddled with problems though, but I don't feel like going into detail since you asked about Twilight not Inheritance.

Reviewers are subject to fallacies just like everyone else, and sometimes it cannot simply be written off a a difference of opinion. I cannot enjoy a book that has glaring flaws like the aforementioned Inheritance and Twilight, and people raving about them trying to tell me they are the best things to happen in the publishing world in the last ten years are quite simply wrong. They may enjoy them in an entirely different manner than I do, but that does not give the book in question any more actual merit. As a writer myself I want to read a book that is well-written in a host of areas, not one that is, as Zonorhc said on the Twilight thread, "a beneficiary of a viciously effective marketing strategy." That being said I suppose you are somewhat correct in saying that it depends on my own personal opinion, but only because I look for different things in a book than the average consumer. I hold them to an actual literary standard and couldn't care less how popular they are. In that way, I do in fact need to know which reviewers to listen to--the ones that are concerned with the same things as I am. Not the ones who harp on about the brilliance of the author or how the work will appeal to every teenager on the planet. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I am not every teenager on the planet, and I will not be duped into buying the book that easily. I read far, far more than the average person and don't need a publicity reviewer telling me to "READ THIS BECAUSE IT'S AWESOME." Some people are bandwagon readers and nothing else and will read the book because it's the hot thing. Some reviewers will give the book good reviews for the same reason. Quite simply put some reviewers are just not qualified to be giving me an accurate view of how good a book is. It is these reviewers that I do not listen to.

[hide=These quotes, they are too big] You take food? If your going camping....lol, you need a couple cans o' boyardee. Real men kill bears with their bare hands and eat the meat raw. Naw, REAL men bring a box of poptarts. Which they use to beat the bears to death. Exactly! [/hide] Unfortunately bears stay away from me. They are repelled by my tangible aura of masculinity. Even pop-tarts' effectiveness as a ranged weapon is wasted when enemies flee in terror long before they enter my sights. Therefore, I revert to the Chef Boyardee. And eat it straight from the can. With my hands. It is a poor substitute for bear-slaying, but one must adapt.

I take manly walks. As in ten miles through wilderness with a tent and some food.

Reviews can be good and bad. Basically what it boils down to is knowing what reviewers to listen to. Crap like Twilight and Eragon get good reviews as part of a marketing strategy, not because they have any actual merit. I'm sitting here with a copy of Brisingr from my brother's school library and snorting at the review snippets on the back cover. I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewers are being paid to lie through their teeth. I find that customer reviews are often more helpful than professional ones, if you can get a ton of them from a site like Amazon and see how the good/bad ratio works out. But in the end it's always a risk to buy a new book. If I'm unsure, I head to the library. I could do the author focus thing for next week if you like.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Zephyr Song

Ozzy Osbourne is the only reason that any kind of metal enters my list of favorite bands. He's just that awesome.

Listening through the Death By Sexy album from the Eagles of Death Metal, currently on "I Like to Move in the Night."

^Lol. [Originally intended for Nad, but works just as well now. Seriously dude lay off.] That would be because it is a horrendous book. I guess even die hard twilighters can pick up on it when something is just that bad.

Way to be studying :lol:

Got any sources for that? I've heard information that suggests it's around 17/18 for both genders. In fact, there's some who doubt the validity of the term "sexual prime" altogether. I don't have any immediate sources that are credible to my satisfaction, but a general search brings a consensus of late teens-early twenties for males and 30s and 40s for females. I got the original information from my Morality and Social Justice teacher, who has been teaching that and Bioethics for 30 years.

What he said. Male sexual prime is sixteen. Female is around 35 IIRC. That's only the physical aspect, though. Mentally it's different for everyone, obviously.

Witness this thread. You'll view the story in a different light.

Got myself a haircut. Shortest it's been in about two and half years. Indexing would be great :)

No matter how old Paolini gets, people don't seem to get tired of the age argument. To lay the facts out in the open for anyone else who might try this: Eragon was published in 2003. The "about the author" flap says that he was nineteen. Eldest was published in 2005, making him 21. Brisingr, the third book, was just published in September of 2008. Twenty-four. He has shown no improvement whatsoever, in fact he regressed between Eragon and Eldest. So I suppose he improved over Eldest with Brisingr, but Brisingr doesn't even match Eragon, which wasn't great but not horrendous like the subsequent book.

I have the same beef with Meyer that you and I share with Paolini - they both published pieces of crap. Meyer changed things, yes--but in incompetent hands, change is just as bad as boring cliche and plagiarism. The only reason she changed the vampire myth is because she wanted to add a fantastical element to her love story. It serves no purpose at all other than that. None. Edward being a vampire doesn't get in the way of their relationship; in fact since he's now had every dangerous aspect of vampirism taken away he's nothing more than an immortal pretty boy. Which is what she wanted. She wasn't out to tell a vampire story but a romance. The vampires might as well not be there, but then she wouldn't have an excuse for the immortal pretty boy. That just screams BAD from even a basic level of fiction writing. You don't invent a character for the sole purpose of being a sex object (or, in more widely used terms, the DESIGNATED LOVE INTEREST), much less inject an entire race and with it the fantasy element. Just like you don't throw in a stock race of elves and shake them up with ludicrous tweaks to try and mask their true purpose as philosophical mouthpieces and producing the DESIGNATED LOVE INTEREST. See? The transition from Meyer to Paolini was rather smooth, don't you think? It's the same basic writing crime.

There should be a sticky to archive old issues so there's only 1 issue in the general topics at a time.

Thing is, she's copied too many parts that she liked from folklore, then put it into a damn lovestory. Vampires were always seen as evil omens, they should stay that way. Exactly, glad someone gets it. The point is not that she changed the vampire myth, it's that she changed it to fit her wet dream of a love story. The book has no good points that I can see.

The fact is she's made a complete perversion of the vampire myth and they can hardly be called vampires at all. They don't die in sunlight, therefore they don't have to stick to the night hours. -1 scary point. They don't drink human blood. -1 scary point. They are amazingly beautiful. -1 scary point. The vampires Meyer has created exist for the sole purpose of being immortal sex symbols. Take everything scary about a vampire, everything that makes a vampire away, and you're free of all those possible wrenches in a love story. Oh, but they still have craving for human blood, see! Bella cut herself and vampire boy went crazy! CONFLICT! Uh, no. Her research certainly didn't serve her well when she invented a ludicrous biological explanation for why the vampires sparkle. Or when she termed menstrual blood "dead blood" to explain why Edward goes crazy over a paper cut but not when Bella has her period.