What is this thread all about?
Just a place for general discussion. A place to unload whats on your mind and talk about anything - personal, health, help needed, achievements, daily highs and daily lows, theories, predictions and what have you.
Does not need to be Q related.
:D
discussion:
I thought it an interesting challenge. What sort of criteria would one use when evaluating the worst possible (NORMIE/NPC/SOY) novels"?
The assumption I made is that we are looking at truly terrible story writing. What makes a piece of story crap? Is it primarily contorted grammatical structures? Hackneyed use of pet expressions? Overly self-absorbed construction? Or is it lame content? Dumb plots, insipid characters, immature conceptualization?
For decades, my personal signature line for non-business, non-activist emails has been "form, content, message".
From the viewpoint of linguistics, one can see three broad elemental areas formulating language: you have the form in which the ideas are expressed(e.g. phonology, phonetics, morphology, etc), you have the content - the ideas and information itself (e.g. semantics) - and you have that which combines and fuses the two together (e.g. grammar).
The fusion of the form and the content, the external visible (audible) expression plus the internal, invisible (inaudible) information = the message, the meaning.
True crapolistic excellence would naturally require a necessary devolution (!) of quality in each of these areas, brought together in an uninspired concoction of moronic pathos and intellectually lame ideas.
Ah, one can only dream..... Some day!
:D
Long story. The short version: It's no coincidence that the Gospel of John starts: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Language is a funny and mysterious thing, a human thing, a heavenly thing and a divine thing.
Now, to other matters.
Yesterday, as the daytime temperature hit 23 degrees (fahr 73) for the first time this spring (first time in about 8 months, since April), and the iceberg lettuces are flowing again (we had a shortage a while back, where they cost 3x normal), I whipped up a packet mince taco meat dish, and we ate tacos (australian style?), with hard shells (corn based) and soft wraps (tortillas, flour based). Meat, tasty cheese, small diced tomato and shredded iceberg lettuce. Salsa sauce for sauce.
A perennial favorite here that requires summery warm weather.
Gonna be 25 today, then thunder storms probably in the evening with a drop in temperature to follow.
Melbourne is famous (for melbournites and other Aussies who know) for having unpredictable and erratic weather. "Four seasons in one day" is not an uncommon turn of phrase around here.
But sometimes the summer is really nutso. We might have a hot wave for 3 or 4 days where it is 95 (fahr) then a thunderstorm where the next day the daytime high is 62 fahr for a bunch of days.
A few summers back, it was rinse and repeat every two weeks about 5 times over the summer. Really hot to rather chilly in 24 hours.
In case you were wondering....
keks
It's a big country. The Snowy Mountains are part of a mountain range (the Great Dividing Range) that stretches for thousands of miles. When the GDR reaches the more temperate areas, the mountains get lots of snow in winter months. Lots of skiing and snowboarding, etc.
Up north, we stretch into the tropics. We have massive deserts, which make anything in the US look peewee by comparison. Fertile South Western regions. We got it all, really. But mostly a lot of dry, arid desert.