Steven Adamson

The difference between crude and polite is choice of words.

Yet another book on my to read list...

Creole in Louisiana is. The Caribbean, Brazil, West Africa and various pacific island areas developed their own based mostly off the colonial vocabulary of the day. Creoles were primarily developed on agricultural estates with slave populations where a few colonial overseers had to communicate with a large non-english speaking workforce. To complicate matters, slaves were often from different language groups and had to communicate with each other using the vocabulary of the colonists, hence colonists weren't that involved in creating the langauge once they handed over the vocabulary. However, the exact nature of the process was never observed and thus any statements on the origins is deduction and conjecture.

Scalia isn't so bad. Sure, he went against his stated principles to back marijuana prohibition in the raich case, but he upheld flag burning as speech, which isn't a very republican thing to do. I think the racist/slave comments are unfair to him.

That's the thing though... The origins of creole are shrouded in the fog of history and even the people who study it for a living can't come up with a single explanation for what it is, much less how the various types formed. One thing that a majority postulate, though, is that Creoles aren't a dialect of English. They use English vocabulary in a structure that is either created spontaneously to simplify communication (e.g. dropping past tense and plural endings) or the creators mapped the English words onto the language spoken by the adapters, e.g. English words with Hawiian or West African structures. Either way, most 'creole-ologists' aren't buying the dialect idea. Of course, that's probably because linguists have a much more stringent definition of dialect than ordinary usage.

Ah, my apologies then. I'm a little tightly wound on the issue since I'm a Caribbean creole speaker and my kind gets a lot of flak for speaking 'bad' english even from other people who grew up speaking creole.

You must be a real demon for them jumbo hot dogs...

Slang is slang, not degeneracy. Every generation has its own. I already mentioned 'groovy'. In the 80's, it was 'radical' or 'rad'. in the 60's, 'right on' and in the 50's 'keen'. Shakespeare was throwing about 'zounds'...etc I can't see how the more accepted similar slang usages like 'cool', 'hot', 'keen', 'swell', 'strewth; etc are intrinsically more degenerate than 'word' as slang which seems to have some solid grounding in the ages-long use of 'word' to mean truth or honesty. In other words, let the kids speak as they will. If it seems degenerate to you that's a sign of old age. :-)

Urban Dictionary has it pretty well nailed, though I'm not sure about the origin explanation offered. (shortened form of 'my word is my bond') It's much older than the millennials. Late 80s at least, though it's heyday was the late 90s. Nowadays it's often used as a parody, the same way we might parody the seventies by saying 'groovy' at inappropriate times.

Message me with your e-mail, please?

The female hormones in chicken will turn you gay thing is not original to her. It's a widespread urban legend in third world countries that import US chicken. the 'buy local' groups push the smear to sink sales of less expensive US chicken. I note that the lady in question is Colombian, so that means, she's probably been exposed tot he idea at home.

Still looking for someone to proofread and/or edit.

The thing in the necks might be the monitors used to select candidates for the Battle School. Ender has his removed at the beginning of the book and I don't think it's put back. I never read Ender's Shadow, but the sneaking around in vents was probably Bean in that book. Sneaking fits Bean's personality and size better. Ender in Ender's Game never did that kind of thing. My understanding is that the movie will combine the two books, so there's likely will be vent sneaking involved.

I think he only killed one kid on the ship and the other was before he got there in a regular school setting. The fact that Ender took a regular schoolyard fight to the death is supposed to show his knack for finishing off an enemy. Which is an example of why I feel this story would be hard to film. In the book, we see Ender's process as he's kicking the bully repeatedly. He's focused on making sure that the bully AND ALL WITNESSES know not to mess with him in future. He's not trying to kill, just trying to be complete in victory and indeed, never finds out he killed the kid until years later. I suppose they could have a lame talking to the counsellor type scene where he explains all this, but then it loses immediacy. On the other hand, I hadn't realized Harrison Ford was in this. I'll see him in anything.

What is this 'spring' that you speak of?

Fighting isn't part of the 'game'. The game is played with freeze guns that immobilize the targets. There are two or three fights that take place outside of the game when Ender is being bullied. And there's like one mention of a girl changing her clothes in front of the boys and a fight in a shower and everything else is fully clothed. Plus I think the ages go up to 14 in the book. Ender was 11 or 12 at the end of it. Dude, did you read the book a really long time ago or something? Pecman: Re: artists being blacklisted by owners/producers, I'm fine with it. I'm against govt censoring artists, but if a corporation doesn't want to hire a sculptor to design a piece for their lobby because the sculptor denies the Armenian genocide or if a church decides not to hire a painter to create a mural of Jesus because the painter is gay...I think that's just freedom of association at work. Let it be. I've got no fondness for the idea of an Ender movie, because I think the book is unfilmable. So much of it is cerebral and non visual that I cannot see it working well enough to do the book justice. So protests against the movie don't make me feel bad. Well, except for the actors, grips, sound guys etc who might suffer, but my understanding is that for the most part they get paid fixed fees no matter what the movie makes.

It's basically the very British idea that one should "Keep calm and carry on" when things get rough.

Holy shit, that poor kid. Imagine growing up gay knowing your dad created a law against your kind...

I had trouble understanding that line too, but only because i misread it as 'makes trouble with a trusting grace.'

I grew up here in South America and except for 2 short vacations, didn't experience the US until I was 19. I read American and British novels almost exclusively and the references were not obstacles. Stephen King, Alistair McLean, Robert Ludlum, Mark Twain, Conan Doyle, Stoker, Saroyan...all referenced things I didn't know about first hand, but the context was clear and if I didn't get the reference, the emotion and tone and conflict of the book overall wasn't affected. Even in the case where a character makes a 'clever' reference I didn't get, like 'where's the beef,' I still understand they're being clever from the context or the reaction of the others etc. Heck, I got most of the jokes in MAD magazine though that would seem to demand you understand the context to get the satire. Bottom Line: As long as it's not a significant plot point (e.g. To Serve Man) the decorative references to culture at the time are fine and make the place seem more real. In fact it enhances the experience for us outsiders because we feel like we're outside our own realms and being transported is what fiction is all about.

I think restricted POV solves the Vonnegut dilemma. It allows the story to come alive with conflict and possibilities up front by giving the reader a good dose of information, but the plot gets to develop along surprising lines by having the reader discover new information with the POV character. I suspect the real problem is when the POV character reveals that he saw the ivory mask when he visited Sir Elmont's house and thus the butler did it, but the mask was never mentioned in the actual section narrating the visit to Sir Elmont.

They say the customer is always right, but when different customers say different things, one has to be wrong. Ho-leee shit. That burn was so hot I felt it through my keyboard...

Also, I need regular editors for the story too. It's 3000 words and is a coming of age story with no scifi elements. (In fact it was started for the coming out event we had back in Feb 2012. :-D I got stuck because I didn't like the ending I was working towards and had to let it stew for a while to come up with something else.)

I've heard it said that 90% of art produced in any age is crap, so modern movies lacking in quality is no surprise. I'm not sure that a lot of people writing gay fiction are soap opera fans. I'm not buying that as a source of the disease. Maybe 'How I Met Your Mother'? It might not be an outside influence at all. Just a failure to adhere to the rules about knowing the ending and having everyone want something. That's probably why those stories get into trouble, because the author never defined an end goal for the story OR the characters and thus the story keeps going like some perpetual daydream.

Regarding this, I blame Tarentino. Not that I dislike him, but his imitators miss the mark. Consider his famous Royale with Cheese conversation from Pulp Fiction. It's not just a wandering quirky talk. It sets up the whole movie by explaining the relationships, the history, and personalities involved. When Jules decides at the end of the movie to wander the earth, it's set up in that first conversation when he's enthusiastically asking questions about France. This relates to Pecman's complaints: Lots of dialogue is indeed bad when it doesn't obey Vonnegut's rule about revealing character or moving the plot forward. Once it does that however, long, meandering conversations can be fun. And so can descriptions of eating lembas or tearing up a tree trunk or learning math.