English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

1:50 AM

Hah, he erases the entire face he has drawn, must have taken quite a while to do.

@tchrist Ah, I remember now.

An appropriate epithet. Or was it even an epithet?

I cannot tell you how many years it has been since I read Languages of Pao.

Perhaps longer than you have been alive.

> This novel centers on a fictional experiment in modeling a civilization by tweaking its language. As the masterbrain behind this experiment, Lord Palafox, says in chapter 9: "We must alter the mental framework of the Paonese people, which is most easily achieved by altering the language." His son, Finisterle, says in chapter 11 to a class of linguists in training: "every language impresses a certain world-view upon the mind."

Would that it were so easy.

Hah.

It was one of his first novels I ever read, after a few tales from the Dying Earth.

@tchrist Vance was apparently playing with strong Whorfianism.

Still, I doubt whether he would have really believed it.

He died recently, didn't he?

Ah, yes, last year.

Is it silly if my favourite writer from the New World is a science-fiction writer?

& Fantasie.

I remember not enjoying it as much as I had hoped I would.

The language part is not very well done.

I have to admit that what I remember most vividly are the corporeal augments.

The assassination was also very well done.

What was the other language book I read in the last couple years?

Embassytown.

2:01 AM

Ah, the Chinese libellum.

I have heard of it; was it good?

Good enough, yes.

Hmm.

It won the 2012 Locus in SF.

But Miéville is Miéville.

I think Locus is a magazine?

For good or for ill.

Locus is the critics’ awards.

2:02 AM

You won it in Science Fiction?

Ohh "it".

I get it now, didn't see the t.

Locus=Critics, Nebula=Writers, Hugo=Readers

@tchrist You know what? I think I like Miéville the least when he thinks he is at his best.

Ah, I see.

@Cerberus Yes, I do too. But he can also annoy me.

Yeah.

But, like when?

Turgid prose. Not enough payout.

2:04 AM

Ah, yes, absolutely.

He shows off his vocabulary very effectively and believably, but it's no fun.

He comes off as more erudite than Vance, and yet Vance's language is a joy, while his is...a mixed bag.

Funny, that.

It seems today I only typo by two letters at once, mangling the intended word beyond recognition.

What I like about China:

1. No orcs.

2. No cheapness.

3. Very decent plot evolution.

What I don't like:

1. Insect women.

2. Disappointing endings.

I don’t know whom I would call erudite in genre writing today.

"Genre writing", as in...?

Speculative fiction.

2:09 AM

You call that "genre"?

It’s one word for it.

Or does that mean "of the genre that we are talking about"?

It sounds like..."period drama".

I think there is a tacit “our” there.

Of flexible reference?

Perhaps. It gets used in the F&SF world.

Ursula K. LeGuin famously declared that “Gene Wolfe is our Melville.”

But I am not sure that she was referring to his erudition.

2:13 AM

Hmm.

> As you see, I bear some resentment and some scars from the years of anti-genre bigotry. My own fiction, which moves freely around among realism, magical realism, science fiction, fantasy of various kinds, historical fiction, young adult fiction, parable, and other subgenres, to the point where much of it is ungenrifiable, all got shoved into the Sci Fi wastebasket or labeled as kiddilit—subliterature. And the labels stick. As you say, a lot of people still maintain genre prejudice.

LeGuin, there.

> Fantasy is at least as immense as realism and much older—essentially coeval with literature itself. Yet fantasy was relegated for fifty years or sixty years to the nursery.

electricliterature.com/…

> Could you talk about that? About the breaking-down of the barriers between “genre” books and the books that are generally piled on the front tables at Barnes & Noble? This is especially important to me, in that I’m always trying to talk readers into venturing into genre fiction, and still encounter a surprising degree of resistance. The line, “I don’t read science fiction” emanates from a surprising number of well-educated, erudite mouths.

@Cerberus I hate that about China too

@Mitch Good.

My first hit though was this one, which I found depressing as shit.

@tchrist Understandable, in a way.

2:27 AM

> books risk becoming a cultural irrelevance

bah

humbug

It’s The Guardian.

My sons play video games that are spectacular and they are avid readers.

The only issue is pretending that they are the same kind of thing. They aren't.

@tchrist people are reading more. They may not be reading longer sequences.

s/qu/nt/

2:32 AM

@tchrist tl;dr

@tchrist Fantasy does have that aura about it, on the juvenile or low brow

@KitFox This is the problem: not all thoughts worth relating can be compressed into 140 characters.

I don't see lengthy thinking as a problem.

@tchrist The point he makes at the end is, and has always been, true; but the bit about books being threatened by video games is I think nonsense.

I would read writers who can bring me to tears, and not just of sorrow.

2:34 AM

books are threatened by the flexibility of electronic media

chose your own adventure on steroids

The point being that SF and Fantasy writers shouldn't try to get away with simply describing a few exotic-but-not-original baubles and a cheap action plot. They are what has earned SF its bad reputation. But there have always been better authors who had literature to offer.

I cried at the end of Babe

@Mitch Whose names are writ not in tablets of clay or gold, nor even in water, but in the ether, which does not even exist.

I think it's the explosion of the vanity press that's the root of the problem.

Really?

2:36 AM

@Cerberus poor writing is what earn SF its bad reputation. Asimov, great ideas, clunky writing.

Literally anybody can publish whatever crap they want provided they have the resources to do so.

So chapbooks of teen angst are published in record numbers.

Books with typos.

Gah. Don't get me started.

@KitFox not enough editing? That's my biggest complaint about Harry Potter. 100's of pages of teenage whining that could have been clean cut out.

Well, yes. I cannot abide any of that, and frankly, I don’t see those works up for Locus Awards, either.

Maybe Hugos. :(

@Mitch Not any editing.

@KitFox that's not a terrible thing. it's a trouble for readers collecting the good stuff out of the crap.

2:38 AM

“Editors” don’t edit anymore, almost ever.

I believe Steven Brust does actually go through that process, which amazes me.

@tchrist good point. MSWord is doing the editing.

I could, right now, if I wanted, publish 50K random words from my head in no particular order and promote it on Amazon. I could pay people to review it, and let my first draft vomit litter the recent lists.

@KitFox Wait...how random?

@Mitch Wrong. Brust uses emacs.

@Mitch Completely random.

2:43 AM

I don’t think draft is a word in contemporary use.

@Mitch A combination. Look at Jack Vance: his writing is always superb, his plots always deficient.

There are exceptions.

@KitFox Taken literally, no that wouldn't happen. But there are well publicized examples of intentionally made-up text, either computer generated or 'fashionable nonsense'

@Mitch What do you mean it wouldn't happen? All I need is the money to do it.

Self-pub on Amazon and then get my friends to bump it up on the lists.

@Cerberus LeGuin is great... science fiction. One of the best writers.. in science fiction. Her literary abilities aren't ... um Jane Austen... or more relevantly Margaret Atwood

@Cerberus I don't know Jack Vance. Westerns?

Sci fi

2:47 AM

@KitFox Oh. I get it.

I mean, Friday is the equivalent YouTube example.

But realistically it would only happen with your friends once as a lark, and then they'd all get bored.

And you'd still be famous forever, like Rebecca Black.

Or Kim Kardashian.

Who are they?

@KitFox But that was 'produced' (and not random or terrible)

2:50 AM

Please don’t make me use the g-thing.

People who are famous for nothing at all.

You are a g-dropper?

Or maybe for being rich.

~~Not Cardassian~~ I don't get why you posted that picture.

2:52 AM

They are armenian?

Because it’s the only Cardassian I care to know. :)

They always seemed like jerks.

If only you knew my proper name, I could take offense to that.

Cardassians: Putting an ass between the card and ian since 2417.

By jerk, I mean that in the best possible way.

Back to literature, how is having your friends upvote and exclamatory reviews of some random generated stuff much different from Finnegan's Wake?

2:58 AM

Or Naked Lunch?

William Burroughs experimented with the technique of .. what exactly did he do?

A lot of drugs.

Of taking cuts of news articles from the news paper and...

and placing them in sequence

making them into straws to snort coke.

ha ha...stop it.

3:00 AM

Then taking a dose of laudanum to calm his nerves.

Yeah, I don't really know what he did for literary technique.

giving the same feeling as when reading a book of accidentally, when getting to the end of a page, going two leaves in advance instead of one.

Yes.

Also that reading the book was an accident.

It usually takes me a paragraph before I notice.

computers will fix that problem.

for us.

until we're replaced.

by levitating meat sacks.

Sounds delicious.

so hungry.

It shouldn't be too hard to create Stonehenge.

with one person.

3:03 AM

cheese

and no machinery

I was thinking that I'd like to build a personal henge on my property here.

Probably out of stone. We've got lots of granite.

I tried to convince my boys we should make one out of snow, like a first draft.

They thought the snow would melt before the solstice, so we'd not be able to take an accurate measurement.

Also, they preferred to sled.

@KitFox That's totally doable. but making the parts that go horizontal will be tough (to make sure they hold up)

@KitFox no discipline

Yeah, I was thinking we could reinforce the crosspieces with branches.

@KitFox I think they're right.

3:06 AM

We have a bunch of downed trees and limbs from the various ice storms we've had this year already, thank you all for climate change you bastards.

@KitFox even making large snow bricks is hard even with icing then with water overnight.

Well, that was as far as I got before building the largest possible mogul with a modicum of snow became the priority.

Climate change? I have a heat wave. It was 60 today, will be warmer throughout the week, and was 70 on Thanksgiving.

Is that normal?

@KitFox no snow caves?

3:09 AM

Not enough snow. It's all ice crystals anyway, not proper snow.

We did find some pumpkins though, so they want to make snow golems to protect the house.

wait for wetter snow

How come I can’t think of any cromlechs outside the British Isles?

dunno

@KitFox that's weird

because everyone knows that golems don't like snow.

There must be other great megalithic structures.

3:11 AM

@Mitch Snow golems do.

@tchrist Wikipedia gives a bunch

Megalith makes me think of Easter Island though.

ok

I feel like Africa should be full of them.

Do pyramids count?

No.

Pyramids are not prehistoric.

It looks like there are a couple of sites, but they are ancient.

so prehistory depends on where you are? doesn't seem fair.

3:16 AM

Before there was writing.

Yes, that’s correct.

So prehistory for the American indians was before 1830 when Sequoyah invented writing for them?

New England seems to have some hard-to-explain stone structures.

@Mitch No, prehistory is before their stories were written down.

Most of the ones in New England are probably historical.

But we don’t know.

Oh.

Yeah.

I got blistered one night and made a bunch of crazy stone sculptures.

> If I’ve learned anything from researching these chambers, it’s how quickly we forget our own history.

northernwoodlands.org/articles/article/stone-chambers

I really, really, really hate charlatans.

I've got sleeping to do. Good night, my friends.

3:31 AM

Night.

@tchrist What about the stories the dinosaurs wrote down before they flooded their libraries in the Pacific?

Will Hunting

8:55 AM

Guys, I will be deleting my account soon. For those of you who know my email address, we will keep in touch via email. If I change my email, I will let you know via email again. I wish all of you happiness in this life and all future lives, until the end of this cycle of universe expansion and contraction.

@WillHunting and yet you think coming off your meds and stopping therapy has had no effect.

2

Mr_Green

11:58 AM

Hi

We are thinking to name our team as "Chronos" (something related to watches)

let me know if you have any decent suggestions or the current is fine :)

Mr_Green

12:14 PM

only related to watches

1:22 PM

> 60% OFF scorponok cas hoarily ride service suspenders long-sleeve set cycling clothing bicycle long-sleeve ride

Thank you, AliBaba. I wonder what the Chinese is that this is translated from.

lol. grey gets translated as hoarily. the rest is funny, but you'd think they'd pick the adjective over the adverb

Wait, you got to hoarily? I am still stuck at scorponok.

60% off this?

scorponok cas... is a cycling jersey

In 1980, that might have been a good offer.

castelli

scorponok castelli

1:32 PM

What is this grammar?

don't know why they called it after a transformer

@MattЭллен You now make even less sense than AliBaba. Achievement unlocked.

scorpion -> scorponok for some reason

Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words, but the thousand words are still nonsense, so what does that get you.

that jersey isn't the only place that hoarily appears. it's on loads of pages on aliexpress

1:35 PM

Anyway. Why is @Rob buying his S&M accessories in China?

Skipping on the hard-working US middlemen?

Haha, there's actually a company called S&M Bikes.

that slash looks like a pen

They are divided on whether they are sado or maso.

important to know.

@MattЭллен yes, if you're a medieval scribe in China writing with a sliver.

@RegDwigнt damn! now you know where I live and how old I am

1:47 PM

I just wonder what "cas hoarily ride service suspenders" means.

practically identical

@MattЭллен That is torture of a sort.

:D

That's the latest beat-em-up from Nintendo, Super Slash Mario.

Or perhaps their lame attempt at copying guitar hero.

I'm imagining streets of rage meets mario-luigi slashfic

1:48 PM

Most likely, it's both because they couldn't make their mind up.

Only one thing's for sure: it's not in HD.

One user says "Рекомендую"

I recommend.

I could figure that much out.

But I guess you guessed that.

And now I know you guessed that.

That is how good I am.

But there are only two reviews, one from a man and the Russian one from "Olga" . . .

1:50 PM

Your duty smells. — Mitch 20 secs ago

@Robusto Oh yeah, that river that always reviews things and then misspells its own name. I wouldn't trust it.

Now I'm wondering if I should dig further to find out if these are men's or women's. Nothing stated about that.

@Mitch do you have the duty-doody merger?

@RegDwigнt V is for Vendetta, not Volga.

@Robusto V is for Vulgo.

1:51 PM

@MattЭллен Ooh, you nasty.

@RegDwigнt C is for Cookie, that's good enough for me.

Sans aucun duty.

@Mitch I try

@Mitch L is for Lulz.

I thought Lulz was a Russian automobile.

Sans aucun doute

Sans aucun doute ("Without a Doubt") is a French television show, launched on 7 September 1994 and presented by Julien Courbet until 30 May 2008 then by Christophe Moulin since 12 September 2008. Produced by Quai Sud Télévisions, since September 2013 is shown daily by TMC in the early evening. The presenter's mission is to help out viewers confronted with major consumer problems or with neighbours, with the help of a team of mediators, lawyers and on the spot journalists. == Format == The show is made up of two main parts for each problem that is treated: a reportage outlining the problem with...

1:53 PM

L is for La Bamba!

@Robusto Lulz is Dutch for dicks. In other words, yes.

@RegDwigнt Quelle fromage!

@MattЭллен Thanks for reminding me about "The Day the Music Died", Captain Buzzkill.

@RegDwigнt All Dutch words mean "dicks" though . . .