domain:academic.oup.com
JTarrou
1hr ago
could
could be
could drive
When reading a news article, let the word "could" serve as a little bell. In journo-speak, it means "isn't technically impossible". When someone knows they'll be sued and they'll lose if they say something "will" happen, they say it "could" instead. Any time you see the word "could", it negates everything that follows.
The most important motivation for caring about civilization is igniting an individual will to overcome obstacles and shape the world. It's an innate desire, a personality trait that not everybody possesses.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1hr ago
It's not quite A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court but along those lines.
What was wrong with this book? In this context
I read it as an early teen (now far too long ago) and I remember loving the concept (also a massive Twain fan) but then finding the ending so bad it retroactively ruined the book for me.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Awfully bold of you to assume the Dinosaurs didn't build a civilization.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Paging Alfred the great... a fine king, the best! He had some great people in Wessex, it was a very dangerous situation. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
I admit to having enjoyed coming up with this.
Maybe 'oddball future history' will be a feature I start on in the friday fun thread.
It's an appositive a participial phrase and isn't wrong in any way. I suspect OP could have chosen a better example.
Edit: The issue is with the hefting I suppose. Probably wielding would be better.
"No don't bow to me or call me 'sir'; I don't go in for things like that." This one is everywhere and I find it especially puerile.
Well, to contrast #3 with #4, you and I both believe in a religion in which the creator of the universe called humanity his bretheren and his friends, and humiliated himself because he loved them.
It's true that hierarchy is functional, and serves an important purpose in human social organization, but even in a traditional mindset there have long been strong disputes over the relative importance of hierarchy and egalitarianism. We both live in the societies that we do because our ancestors rebelled against strict hierarchicalism. "We developed the systems we did for a reason" is very true, and a huge part of the system we've developed includes the egalitarian handshake instead of the deferring bow.
I presume the point of the "don't bow to me or call me sir" elements you're quoting is that the character is some kind of a prince, or aristocrat -- someone who inherited noble dignity, instead of attaining practical power as a result of earned leadership. The "don't bow to me or call me sir" is an easy statement of opposition to that kind of hierarchy, which makes the authors of such texts completely in tune with the views of average Americans (who are likely a majority of LitRPG authors), and was very nearly added to the American constitution in an amendment I would support passing even today.
I happen to think one of the strengths that drove the West to the levels of power and wealth that it has attained simply is that it adopted values, including the Christian religion, that militated against the worst excesses of hierarchical thinking. A common feature of airplane crashes that involve non-Western pilots is that a captain will make a critical error, the first officer will mentally understand that something has gone wrong, but strict norms of hierarchy will make him nervous to challenge the captain in command, and then hundreds of people die.
Additionally, setting aside the need to be referred to in formulaic ways of deference is actually a status signal: "My status is so firm that I do not need you to make displays of public worship."
GBRK
3hr ago
anti-dan already attacked your source.
No, he didn't. He attacked the people responsible for the source, and acted like that was sufficient to dismiss the source itself. That's a textbook ad hominem.
Buddy, I am really not asking for much. I'm not asking you to make an hour-long takedown of the study's contents, I'm just asking you to find a concrete problem with it or find a contradictory source. Take my response to the CATO article as an example: I didn't go in and question every single stat, I just raised a single, salient problem.
You don't have to find the perfect source or argument, you just need to do a little bit better than I did. I probably won't be convinced on the spot-- but it'll force me to either give up on convincing you or do even better. In the latter case, even if neither of us ultimately manage to convince the other, at least we'll both have better knowledge of the subject that's tested against oppositional analysis. Which is still a pretty great outcome, for anyone who believes in the value of reasoned, good-faith debate. And if you don't believe in that value, why are you on the motte? If you just want people to agree with you without regard for truth value there are other, better platforms.
(also I just realized that you and anti-dan aren't the same person. Which is honestly kind of sad. You have the energy to dogpile me, but not the energy to find a single source to the anti-school-lunch position?)
srf0638
3hr ago
running through Wilson's Ramble with her male boss to get ready.
Woof.
I think I could manage faster than 40 days, but yeah, that's the rub. I've enjoyed interacting with fellow travelers on previous tours, so timing things to line up with the Grand Depart has a certain appeal.
srf0638
3hr ago
TitaniumButterfly
3hr ago
I like the Mist Crown series by Sarah Maas, but its so annoying to read a medieval peasant acting like a modern, feminist, atheistic modern American as though the author literally couldn’t conceive of a premodern woman in a premodern world.
She can't!
TitaniumButterfly
3hr ago
See I found that good. Actually I'm not sure why it would be upsetting to you. Oh no! Too many cool ideas!
Yeah I'm open to that and also didn't expend any real effort here. You know what I mean. The point is made. Yes I could be happier with it. It's difficult for me to be ugly, even on purpose. Take no joy in the awful stuff and would sooner screen it out than collect and revel in it. Else I'd be on /r/drama.
Corvos
4hr ago
My biggest personal grip with litrpg is when the story reads like a D&D campaign converted into a novel. The fights feel like a string of meaningless encounters.
This was the big problem with Worth the Candle for me. It felt like the author had a list of a hundred 'super cool D&D adventures' that he wanted to fit in, and just slotted them one after another, with only the barest excuse for why they were happening. I grant that this is somewhat justified by the setting, but it doesn't make it good writing.
DiscourseMagnus
4hr ago
While there's often an unfortunate association there, I don't think that the problem is so much inherent to the grammatical qualities of the perspective as it is the thoughtlessness the author employs in selecting any perspective at all. This is closely related to the oft-commented-upon "books as wannabe movies" problem.
erwgv3g34
4hr ago
From "The Next Ten Billion Years" by John Michael Greer (The Archdruid Report):
One hundred million years from now:
Retro-rockets fire and fall silent as the ungainly craft settles down on the surface of the Moon. After feverish final checks, the hatch is opened, and two figures descend onto the lunar surface. They are bipeds, but not even remotely human; instead, they belong to Earth’s third intelligent species. They are distantly descended from the crows of our time, though they look no more like crows than you look like the tree shrews of the middle Cretaceous. Since you have a larynx rather than a syrinx, you can’t even begin to pronounce what they call themselves, so we’ll call them corvins.
Earth’s second intelligent species, whom we’ll call cyons after their raccoon ancestors, are long gone. They lasted a little more than eight million years before the changes of an unstable planet sent them down the long road to extinction; they never got that deeply into technology, though their political institutions made the most sophisticated human equivalents look embarrassingly crude. The corvins are another matter. Some twist of inherited psychology left them with a passion for heights and upward movement; they worked out the basic principles of the hot air balloon before they got around to inventing the wheel, and balloons, gliders, and corvin-carrying kites play much the same roles in their earliest epic literature that horses and chariots play in ours.
As corvin societies evolved more complex technologies, eyes gazed upwards from soaring tower-cities at the moon, the perch of perches set high above the world. All that was needed to make those dreams a reality was petroleum, and a hundred million years is more than enough time for the Earth to restock her petroleum reserves—especially if that period starts off with an oceanic anoxic event that stashes gigatons of carbon in marine sediments. Thus it was inevitable that, sooner or later, the strongest of the great corvin kith-assemblies would devote its talents and wealth to the task of reaching the moon.
The universe has a surprise in store for the corvins, though. Their first moon landing included among its goals the investigation of some odd surface features, too small to be seen clearly by Earth-based equipment. That first lander thus set down on a flat lunar plain that, a very long time ago, was called the Sea of Tranquillity, and so it was that the stunned corvin astronauts found themselves facing the unmistakable remains of a spacecraft that arrived on the moon in the unimaginably distant past.
A few equivocal traces buried in terrestrial sediments had suggested already to corvin loremasters that another intelligent species might have lived on the Earth before them, though the theory was dismissed by most as wild speculation. The scattered remnants on the Moon confirmed them, and made it hard for even the most optimistic corvins to embrace the notion that some providence guaranteed the survival of intelligent species. The curious markings on some of the remains, which some loremasters suggested might be a mode of visual communication, resisted all attempts at decipherment, and very little was ever learnt for certain about the enigmatic ancient species that left its mark on the Moon.
Even so, it will be suggested long afterwards that the stark warning embodied in those long-abandoned spacecraft played an important role in convincing corvin societies to rein in the extravagant use of petroleum and other nonrenewable resources, though it also inspired hugely expensive and ultimately futile attempts to achieve interstellar migration—for some reason the corbins never got into the quest for fusion power or artificial intelligence. One way or another, though, the corvins turned out to be the most enduring of Earth’s intelligent species, and more than 28 million years passed before their day finally ended.
roystgnr
4hr ago
Semantically incorrect; as in your example, the grammar (including syntax) are fine.
But I'd say that it's semantically fine too so long as the swinging motion is also a hefting motion. Uppercut? The sentence is correct. Horizontal? Defensible, since the attacker was exerting vertical force to keep the mace moving horizontally, but the intended implication should be "wow this mace was heavy" or at least "the attacker had to transition from raising the mace to attacking with it in a single motion" rather than "the mace had to be lifted before the swing began". Overhead bash? Incorrect, since the lifting motion for that ends before the aimed ("at her") part of the swing begins.
But regardless, if this is the worst prose that @TitaniumButterfly sees in his web fiction, I want to know what he's reading! I've enjoyed several web serials, but it's usually been much clearer that any editorial feedback did not come from professionals with English degrees, and you either make peace with that or you don't.
cjet79
4hr ago
On mobile so I can't pull up a long list of recommendations. But the politics issue doesn't happen in all parts of the genre. Or at least not all web fiction.
My biggest personal grip with litrpg is when the story reads like a D&D campaign converted into a novel. The fights feel like a string of meaningless encounters. The MC bumbles their way into saving the world. The setting is nothing but a contrived excuse to bully the MC when he is young.
DiscourseMagnus
5hr ago
I see plenty of merit in points 2 through 5, but as has already been noted I think you at least chose a weak example on point 1.
FtttG
5hr ago
You ever tried to pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time?
I'm doing it right now, and I am killing it. Skill issue. /s
FtttG
5hr ago
Yes, that's why the OP was right to say that it's grammatically (or syntactically, or whatever) incorrect.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
You linked a far left wing think tank as your source somehow thinking it would be persuasive, despite the many cues one gets when you land at the website that this isn't an academic study, its propaganda (and leftist at that, just aesthetically) trying to mimic research, poorly.
anti-dan already attacked your source. I'm defending the idea of dismissing such sources. I know it's really annoying to have someone go through all this effort to put up the form of something that should be really persuasive, then have people see through it and realize it is only the form and the thing is not persuasive at all, but it's absolutely the right thing.
Thank you. I agree, but .... gah
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