Timewaster's Guide Archive

From what I've heard, large books are a bit more of a risk for publishers.  There's a barrier to sales because some people are intimidated by excessive book-length and there are significant printing and binding cost increases with books above a certain optimum size.

I think, though, that the risk a publisher sees in a long book is far outweighed by the advantages to starting a series.  Repeat sales possibilities and all that.  Why not make it a duology?

The fact that you referenced a post that had no bearing on the point you were trying to make is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.  You made a dead wrong statement to support your argument, and then, somehow, I'm a jerk for pointing it out.  Your posts are often garbled and unclear, and when people don't take the point you had in mind, they didn't read closely enough, they're slow, or they're jerks.  You're just repeating the same pattern I warned Charity about.

Here's a perfect example.  You did make a post where, I believe, you attempted to show that your argument was not circular. To start:

ah, no.
You've equated my statement that different morals and ethics always involves killing

First, that isn't even actually a sentence.  What was equated with what?  I thought I took your meaning though.  You seemed to be saying that someone had said that actions abhorred by an observer with different morals and ethics than the perpetrator must always involve killing.  Since I had said nothing of the kind, I could only assume that you were talking about something someone else had said.  No bearing.

You then said:

but I have *not* made the argument that no one is crazy, nor do I intend to.

I never said you made the argument, only that it followed from your statements, which I had quoted. Then you said:

Nor does that follow from my arguments. That's *your* input, thank you. Nice straw man though.

Notice the complete lack of a response to the actual reasoning involved.  You simply said I was wrong and accused me of putting up a straw man.  Note that you have since contradicted yourself here and allowed that my reasoning was a reasonable extension, though not the one you intended.

Then you said:

No, a difference in morals and ethics does not mean a person is crazy, but that doesn't mean a crazy person can't have different morals and ethics.

Here you contradicted your earlier statement, where you imply that Kelsier's morals and ethics have direct bearing on whether or not he is considered crazy.  "He holds a different set of morals and ethics than you do. Is everyone with a different set of behavioral standards from you nearly crazy? That doesn't make sense." Which, for all intents and purposes, validated my point. 

But then you immediately said:

No, there's no circular argument there. You simply need to demonstrate to me with more specific arguments.

Again, this didn't make a lot of sense. Demonstrate what to you?  But the rest of the paragraph talked about Kelsier's motivation for killing and what bearing that had on the question of whether he was crazy or not, entirely abandoning the morals and ethics argument you had made in the above post to which I had responded.  Therefore, again, no bearing.

I did read your post. At the time I thought you might have been trying to address the point I had made about the circular reasoning but you never addressed the actual points of my post so it didn't seem appropriate to respond.  You did, in a later post, speak to the circular reasoning I pointed out, to which I responded with the post in question.

Listen to Your Heart, by Roxette. 

Man, High School sucked.

Yes, perhaps the path of reason I see behind a person's statement is occasionally something other than the path they actually followed.  I certainly don't do that on purpose.  But since we're dealing with text representing that reasoning (and only text, since it is not possible to access anything beyond the text) I don't see how making one assumption over another is going to improve understanding.   It might make things nicer, but if I still fail to divine what you really meant, my experience tells me that you're just as likely to start telling me I didn't really read what you wrote, that I need to keep up, or any of a dozen condescending tropes you use over and over. 

Perhaps if you assumed that others are not deliberately interpreting your statements in the worse possible light or that others did understand what you wrote and therefore, perhaps, your text didn't say what you meant it to say, the niceness quotient would also be increased.

So it's not what I'd call abnormal behavior, but it is behavior that is, in my understanding, antithetical to societal stability and growth, which I can accept as a provisional descriptor of some types of "crazy."

hrm. I sound like I'm trying to say I guess I'm wrong without saying that. Maybe I'll leave it as that. Though it's not the sort of crazy that I was thinking of.

So, someone can be considered crazy over behaviors that are perfectly in line with their morals and ethics.  Excellent.  You broke the circle. 

Go up to the VA hospital.  You will find more worthy needs than you could shake a stick at.  Notice there's a satellite location in Orem.

I actually find RatLord's comments to be more amusing than offensive.  It's always funny to watch someone try and impress strangers with their badassery on an internet message board.

*audience squeals "ooh, ooh, I hope I never meet ratlord in a dark alley!  I'd be really afraid!  He must be so tough, look at what he wrote on the internet!" squeal!

LOL