If you're going to write, best to do everything on purpose. But you should really do these things on purpose. As a writer who is currently attempting three of four (humor, ambiguity, offense, conspicuous alliteration, internal rhyme, or recognizable meter). Well, okay, on the last one I try not to make it conspicuous, but one of the most recurring positive comments about my fiction writing is how lyric and bery close to prose it is. You know, obviously, not something I do for blog posts. And because Dr. Doyle points to it, John Scalzi's line about "The failure mode of clever is 'asshole.'"
"So, your thought for the week is this: published writers are not necessarily better writers than unpublished ones; they just managed to do what they set out to do. And some targets are harder than others." Yea, that. Get all upset that Dan Brown will sell a metric butt-load of Inferno and it doesn't matter because he got published and you didn't. Sure, you know your nouns from your predicates, but he knows what sells and how to sell it, and man does he sell. Same thing about Stephen King, Stephanie Meyers, JK Rowling (who, IMHO, is much better than the critics know and more than she leads on), and any other of the very commercially successful authors that everyone loves to hate. (Grokked from Morgan J. Locke)
"Health insurance companies in Oregon are trying to lower their premiums, in order to compete with each other, ever since the state started publishing a policy-by-policy comparison online, per the requirements of Obamacare." Obamacare fueling actual free market forces? Why, that's unpossible. (Grokked from Jay Lake)
In case you thought grave robbing was a thing of the past, think again.
Where were you when you heard the ice crawling through your house. Wow. I've heard about ice "going out of the lake", but I don't think they meant an ice flow actually going out of a lake and swallowing houses. (Grokked from Warren Ellis)
That email on the Benghazi attack that you wanted released because it showed the "coverup" for "terrorists"? Yea, doesn't show what Boehner thought it showed. Look, I appreciate the right's batshit craziness over this. And, if all the things they say "if this happened" were true, it would be a big scandal. However, even if all those ifs turned out to be true, it still doesn't match up to the President subverting democracy (Watergate) or violating the laws they themselves signed by trading arms to Iran and then using the profits to fund death squads (Iran/Contra). But the thing is, all those "ifs" haven't panned out. (Pointed to by Dan)
Using live, radioactive Listeria to hunt down and kill metastatic colon cancers. Huhn. That's an interesting nuclear medicine technique. As a side, there was a recent report from the ASRT about how school enrollments were starting to sag (well, the wait times are going down) for rad techs. Also buried in that report was the over abundance of nuclear medicine techs and the dearth of jobs. Strange synchronicities. (Grokked from Jay Lake)
“We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux (on the ISS) because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable.” :: points, jumps up and down, shouts "ooo, ooo, ooo!" :: (Grokked from Dan)
If when all you have is hammer, everything begins to look like a nail, when all you have is a polemic of good and evil, everything begins to look like Satan.
"(M)any basic research projects in every field supported by the NSF would likely not qualify for certification under this bill." They're talking about the bill that would require the NSF to certify every grant they gave would be "of national interest or groundbreaking." And as a final irony, to prove that statement, the grant application would be denied under the new rules. (Grokked from Jay Lake)
Jim Wright's latest installment in his Bang, Bang Crazy posts. The short version? Can't fix stupid. But Jim is more loquacious and eloquent about it.
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