Timewaster's Guide Archive

I'm not finished with writing yet, but once I am, I'll probably have a very loose finger on the delete button. That's all I can say

Oh, and I'll leave it untouched for a month because Stephen King said you should. Killing your babies gets easier. (Will give me the strength to cut out my "funny" Lord of the Rings references.)

We don't have thanksgiving in Switzerland, but happy days to all of you anyway!

I would actually say that there's some content that you could easily flag as "inappropriate" in Pullman's novels. There's philosophy and things in there that are pretty complicated and the fights can get quite cruel. Then there's the thing with the knife and the bleeding fingers... I mean...  even I was pretty grossed out when I read that stuff.

But I would at the same time say that we shouldn't underestimate children. They understand a lot more than most of us adults would give them credit for and they're quite able to deal with the harsh reality that so many parents try to "protect" them from.

As a ten year old, I loved playing Duke Nukem. It was a lot of fun, but rated R. I knew that what I saw in the game wasn't real and that it was just like the movies on TV, which also weren't real. There wasn't ever any actual problem with me not understanding the boundaries between fiction and reality. When there are children who get influenced by fiction in such a strong way, I don't think the movies should be to blame, it's something their parents need to teach them.

It's pretty simple: No more computer games or social life. Now if I could get rid of the internet and school, I'd be at 80k already

I've got to say, that's a very interesting article. I myself come from a background that's actually pretty similar to Pullman's from what I read there. (and in the other articles linked) And I wouldn't have thought that such ideas could still offend people in such a huge way. I mean, I knew that there were puritans and some singular voices, but I thought those kept themselves to their farming cities where there aren't any cinemas to begin with. More and more I'm getting to realize that there's still whole countries reacting in such a strong way, and that scares me a little.

I'd like to thank EUOL for proving that there are reasonable voices on the other side of the fence as well. Most I've seen up to now was just rabble-rousing, and after a while that makes it pretty easy to feel contempt for some people that might not deserve it. It's easy to feel superior if your opponent proves himself to be stupid again and again, and the whole discussion becomes a meaningless conflict of egos, nothing more besides that.

Making informed decisions will always be important. I can live with other people who decide to believe in something different than I do, but if they just shut themselves off and don't listen to anything that might be in conflict with their believes, I really have a hard time taking them seriously.

I myself am very happy that the Pullman books are making the jump to the big screen and I really didn't see all that much religiously controversial material inside them to begin with. The Lucifer comics recently vilified god a lot more than anything else I've ever seen, and I haven't much controversy coming from those. His Dark Materials is tame in comparison to that. Anyway, I can't wait for some armoured bear action!

Hehe, I actually got here from the NaNo site. (Brandon has/had a big "Ask a Pro" thread on the Fantasy forums and it's been the most useful thing I found there so far. Kudos! I can't find it anymore right now, though... the mods must've moved it... again...) Basically, NaNo is my first contact with the author world and it's been an eye-opener, let me tell you

It took me from my "it'll be fine, you'll get published some day" attitude to changing my word goal for this month to 90k. 50k for every following month. And I'm planning to edit those too. Right now I'm some thousand words behind the 90k goal. Well, at least there's no doubt I'll be making the NaNo goal

You guys seem like a nice lot, so I hope you won't mind if I "hang out" here a bit from now on. I'll try and keep myself from posting solely on his board and sucking up to Brandon to get writing tips, but I make no promises. 

Nooo! No -ly's! No adverbs!

Hee, but yes, pretty much. Though the translation wouldn't work as directly as that. "Einen Knoten straff ziehen/anziehen/machen" would be "To make a knot tighter" or "To tighten a knot." I don't think you can "Tighten a knot tightly" in German. "Eine Knoten binden", would work, but "Einen Knoten straff binden" sounds weird.

You can  have "Straffe Lederhosen." Maybe that makes more sense 

Edit: Noticed I posted a lot of garbage. Hope it's fixed now.  My fault for not learning English by translating from German, but by doing. It's more of a native language to me than one I learnt at school, so that makes it harder to translate stuff somehow. I seriously couldn't think of the German word for "tying." My brain just didn't make the connection. This is so embarrassing...