Posts by Keir Leslie
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The only real definition the genre has is "we'll file this where we think it's most likely to sell."
This is Gary Farber's definition, which while I hate to disagree with him is I think wrong; sf & f are in my opinion natural kinds, and sf&f may even be a natural kind.
Atwood's treated as sf these days by most anyone that isn't a clown, and I basically think sf has a depressing persecution complex where `ooh ooh nasty mainstream people' is used as a way of avoiding serious introspection about the fact that the genre's pretty fucking dead in the water at the moment.
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I don't really know why JS&MN is put under fantasy either - sometimes it seems "Fantasy" is just "Other".
Because The Ladies of Grace Adieu (v. good by the way) was included by Patrick Nielsen Hayden (a noted sf&f editor) in a sf&f anthology published by a noted sf&f publisher. And JS&MN is quite clearly fantasy by any definition of the genre.
I wasn't too taken with Militant Modernism -- if you've read the blog you know what's coming. If you haven't, it's too bloggy. Worth buying anyway, but. And the later Earthsea books Don't Exist, OK?
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When you say Victorian, do you include the Continent? Because male nudes were a standard part of the Academy system, both in France and elsewhere. Mondrian painted them in the Calvinist Netherlands and this was a very traditional part of a conservative process. --- of course, there's a difference between the Continent and the Empire*.
Neo-classicism was very big on the male nude (or draped) but of course Romanticism and realism weren't so, so that's something else to consider.
* minor nashie bitch: Scotland, Ireland and Wales had people living there and showing, you know.
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This rule keeps them all acting very responsibly - imagine if all pubs in New Zealand had to operate this way!
Which is an interesting point; why should we expect legal intoxication venues here to be like Dutch legal intoxication venues and not, er, NZ legal intoxication venues?
I am also unsure of the economics of coffee shops; I get the impression they don't need to advertise because, dude, Amsterdam! Everybody interested already knows, including middle-aged non-stoner New Zealanders, who must be getting close to being the antipodes of the target market. That wouldn't be the case so much over here.
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I always thought Shakespeare was a tad overdone; sure, he's good, but 1/5 of the 7th form English curriculum good? Nah.
Generally I ended up with a vague distaste for texts we studied at school. The text was only a means to an end, viz. passing, and that obviously ends up making you dislike them. And generally it's all very
six munths hard labour
doon nthi poetry section
uv yir local library
coontn thi fucking metaphorsas Tom Leonard puts it.
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I/S was talking about the concept of flying a flag which symbolises Maori identity. Anyone who clings to the notion that we only need one flag is at odds with our bi-cultural future.
Yeah, see, that goes down like a cup of cold sick with a lot of people. In particular, what does it mean to have more than one flag? How much right do non-Maori have in determining this other flag? How much right do Maori have to determine the non-Maori flag? etc. etc.
These are things that we should be having proper debate about, not just John Key saying yeah do it.
(Merely flying that flag on Waitangi Day is well, why not? But a lot of the other stuff, eh.)
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I would say, go on, define pathological case.
Seriously, if you can't be arsed spending five seconds with a search engine...
The rest of your complaints really are just that we didn't argue like you wanted us to, which again makes me go eh.
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But I don't think the responses you got were at all out of line; in fact, they were pretty temperate, and as far as people talking on the internet goes, exceedingly polite.
Mainly you seemed to be annoyed that people didn't argue the way you wanted, which, well, tough. There's no obligation on me to adopt a rhetorical stance that pleases you. (And `pathological case' is a perfectly respectable term of the art, so meh, I really couldn't care less if you find it silly. & of course it wasn't you that was naive, it was your ideas, a rather important difference. & again naive is a perfectly sensible word to use.)
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I really don't see the problem with `Hizbollah, the Lebanese organisation'. It's true. And I wouldn't see the problem with the other lines, provided they were in context where it wasn't being asserted that, say, the IRA were the Irish organisation.
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The problem that we are actually facing today is a exponential growth of the population compared to a linear growth of food production, with a big part of the population starving in our present situation.
Malthusianism: getting it wrong for 200 years and counting.
(Hint: the demographic transition means that assuming population growth is exponential is just wrong. And, of course, linear increase in food production is a bit of a suspicious assumption.)
I also think that the Green obsession with zero-growth economics is a tad embarrassing.