Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Sacha,
clowns are evil
Why else would McDonalds choose one for their mascot?
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Rob Stowell,
I'm just not as hungry to be immersed. Hmm. Sobering realisation (and I haven't been drinking.)
I am, but I have learned to fear and control that hunger. If I had dick-all to do in a day, I'd be into all kinds of immersion, although I suspect long-form novels would lose out to the most addictive kinds of computer gaming.
Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.
Nice. Yup, rings too true with a lot of moralizing that has been going on since time immemorial. Me, I think kids are smarter than ever before. Not in ways we grew up with, but suited to the times.
My folks used to have a quote from Plato on the wall for years in which Socrates carries on about how the youth of today loves luxury and indolence, don't swot enough, and are disrespectful to their elders. Quite amazing that a man so brilliant, and whose entire company of friends was accused of exactly the same thing as they hung on Socrates words and laughed as he dissected the local equivalents of Garth George, could fail to see the irony. Socrates apparently thought writing itself was dangerously weakening to the mind. Thank Goodness Plato ignored that.
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“you can’t wear your thongs there” advised the concierge
Times have changed. I stopped referring to them as thongs in Oz, because people thought you were talking about underwear.
One thing that’s obvious when you head to Australia – they’re doing very well.
Yes, it was a bit of a shock to me just how well. Even my brother-in-law, the sole breadwinner and a nurse, has stopped crying poor to us, it's just untenable after you get yourself 50 inches of TV and build a huge extension to your property.
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Hard News: Time to get a grip, in reply to Russell Brown,
To be fair, viral hepatitis is a pretty good excuse for low energy, as excuses go.
To be fair to herself, Auckland Central, and Labour, it would have been the perfect excuse to put someone else in there.
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I was given to understand that nobody reads blogs anymore?
Yeah, Twitter is the new hip hop to me. I'll drift backwards in time, chewing over the precious conversations of yesteryear, whilst the next generation finds nothing to recommend in my total inability to find anything worth saying in under a few hundred characters.
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Jolisa,
In that, what you listen to at a certain point (or during certain events) burrows into your soul, but after that, the rest is noise?
I'm all but certain of it. Some people work very hard to keep their tastes contemporary, but it's hard work the first time you hit a popular genre you just really don't like. My interest in popular music massively declined as hip-hop rose. Intellectually, I doubt it's of any greater or lesser value artistically than previous movements, but I just can't stand the stuff.
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I also blame the blogosphere for stealing my reading time. A dialectic is 100 times more engaging to me than passive absorption of data, either in book or televized form.
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Jolisa,
I suspect the people who are reading and enjoying local literature are far too busy doing so to even bother glancing at this thread. Aren't they?
Yes, we're under-represented in the YA field. I try to keep this constantly in mind in all discussions, because YA are (in my case) the next generation, not at all far from being the movers and shakers in NZ, so I'd like to know what to expect.
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Hard News: Time to get a grip, in reply to Bart Janssen,
She'll have to learn to cover her contempt better.
Surely there's a buff for that?
Sadly she isn't much above babbling party line either.
It's kind of expected. She's not really invested with authority to make up her own party line. You have to get to party leader before you're allowed to do that in real time on prime time TV.
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Busytown: A new (old) sensation, in reply to Fergus Barrowman,
Are we just getting old, and have read too much? I admire even hack writers who crank out dross, frankly. It's a very difficult job, you have to practice heaps and get constructive feedback, putting up with stuff-all pay for something so insanely demanding.
That said, I don't read much fiction. My main reason, however, is because it takes major time. I'm a fan of speculative stuff, and when I get an author I like, I won't put them down until it's done. The behavior is much the same as when I've developed an addiction to computer games, something I'm as wary around as a reformed drunk is around booze. I've deliberately not kept up with Robin Hobb because I lost a week's productivity on her first trilogy.
Practically the only fiction I'm reading is e-books on Gutenberg before sleep, something that comes extremely fast when I do this (and is part of the reason I do it). But admittedly the same has been happening with cinematic fiction recently too - I'm dozing off during films now, even good ones. Got too much to do, need the sleep.
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