From mhoye@prince.carleton.ca Mon Apr 30 11:25:19 2001 Date: 16 Mar 2001 19:34:12 GMT From: Michael Hoye Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan Subject: Re: TAN: Buffy. Enh. In article , Mark Loy wrote: >In article <98te4l$iaq$1@bertrand.ccs.carleton.ca>, >mhoye@prince.carleton.ca (Michael Hoye) wrote: > >> In article <01c0adaa$0c1dd0a0$7a5c1c3f@cvnulame>, >> R Sanderson Pratt wrote: >> > >> >On that note (rocking), how bout Neal Stephenson, anyone? >> >> Snow Crash kicked all the ass regionally available at the time. >> >> Cryptonomicon rocked the funky beats, but those beats were not, by and >> large, as mad funky as those rocked by Snow Crash. Still the beat was >> there, and it was funky. > >You know I uh...I don't know if you meant this to be funny or if, >well...you actually consider this to be a validly insightful review of the >books in question. All I do know is that it made me feel not just old and >"out of it" but so ancient as to be centuries past decay and well into the >early stages of fossilization. Well, I speak the language of the youth of today. Really, there's nothing to it. Just take out any adjectives in a paragraph and replace them with a musical or anatomical reference. Entire sentences can be replaced, if you're so inclined. Then, choose a number between zero and two, three if you're feeling particularly exuberant, and preface those adjectives with that number of references to an unstable or inadequate mental condition. Toss in a reference to an assertive or violent action, which is also typically viewed as complimentary, and add to that a description of the scope of that action. And you're done. Don't forget to refer to men as "dude", though, and make sure that "as if", "though" and so on are replaced with the word "Like". This last point is key. Consider the following, from Moby Dick: "His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.... Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, where visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." This can be roughly translated as: "Dude tried to get all hard-core with that crazy, stupid-big whale, and he got fucked up, old-school beat-down style. And it just made him insane in the membrane, man - mad, block-rockin' beats insane. Dude was kicking the mad plans, gettin' all crazy hard like he chewed his own peg-leg and shit. He saw that whale, man, and that was _it_, man, like he forgot about Dre. He was going to put the smackdown on that big-ass whale, man; mad, crazy stupid beatdowns, like." See how easy it is? -- Mike Hoye