Posts by Lucy Stewart
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
That's why the kids love these words. They sound great, the mouthfeel....but not being gay I have no idea how much that would fuck a gay person off just hearing that word used negatively in the street.
I really don't think it requires that big a stretch of the imagination. At all.
We told you! Didn't we tell you? When I said 'twat' in passing in that class discussion, lord, the horrified silence...
(My FB status updates often include variants of 'goddammit' just to fuck with my American relatives. I am kind of an evil person.)
I keep having conversations wherein people apologise for swearing because they said "shit" once, which usually runs so beneath my radar I don't even ping it as swearing until they start apologising. One day I'm going to, I don't know, drop a rack of nearly-boiling test tubes on my foot and then they're all going to get a terrible shock.
-
There's one infamous scene where the c-bomb is most definitely dropped on a room full of men. And by a 13 year-old actress playing an eleven year old girl, to boot.
Kick-Ass is *trying* to be shocking, though. I think Ben's right that most Americans would be very hesitant to pull it out at all, and see it as a very gender-specific insult. Which would make it more shocking in Kick-Ass to American audiences.
But then, Americans are just weird about swearing. I am having to practice some fairly hefty self-censorship.
-
Hopefully in 3<x<6 years ..
God and my supervisor willing, of course. (And I know whose approval will make more of a difference there.)
-
Because we apparently like to make our (supposedly) brightest minds look really silly.
It's a Great English Tradition. We've already established we like those.
(I am kind of stoked I will hopefully get to graduate in American robes, which are much more colourful.)
-
I did four years of a PhD before dropping out, and to be honest, at times the only thing that kept me going for that long was the desire to be known as *Dr Moreau*, which is just impossibly awesome. Particularly if you live on an island.
That's not just impossibly awesome, that's impossibly impossibly awesome.
-
(To say nothing of the fact that my doctorate isn't exactly in statistics or any other discipline useful to that particular conversation.)
Eh, what's the point of all that hard work if you can't intimidate the uninformed with it occasionally?
-
Look a white,blue eyed Miss India winner in a beauty pageant is a story anywhere in the world. Celebrating Indian babes usually has a lot to do with their beautiful dark skin tones.
Actually, there's a whole motherload of touchy ethnic issues skimming under the surface there. Ever taken a look at your average lineup of Bollywood actresses? Ever compared their looks to your actual average Indian woman? They are significantly lighter-skinned; it's considered a sign of wealth and good breeding. People will take out marriage ads asking for fair-skinned (for a value of fair, obviously) brides. Darker skin tones are associated with being poor and lower-caste (and then there's the southern vs. northern thing - southern Indians are usually darker.)
Obviously there are an awful lot of people who do not think this way, and who are trying to change it, but the lighter-is-prettier standard of beauty is an ongoing issue in Indian society. It's one that doesn't usually get examined in the Western beauty media because if any attention is paid to South Asian women it's about their Exotic Good Looks, but I think it provides an important amount of context to the whole thing.
-
You never know what might happen.
If you want to discourage this lot, you're going to have to try harder.
This is advice for those of you who'd like to sell more of your own books but "can't" because of that clause in the contract that says you can buy copies of your own book at wholesale for your own use but not for resale.
This was actually the very first question on the thread - whether this sort of thing was a practical problem - so I'm glad to hear it's not.
Funny what sort of things end up in contracts through inertia; when we moved in to our new place, there was a clause saying we could only have overnight guests for two nights a week. When I asked for clarifiation, it emerged it was there to stop undergrads moving their boyfriends/girlfriends in, and that there was no problem with us having people to stay for more than a weekend. Sometimes you just have to ask!
-
I should've explained that better. I've seen these NZ books already listed on Amazon at crazily high prices with huge delivery times -- but, as you point out, perhaps they're just having a punt because the chances of anyone buying it are so low (except for those who specifically want only that book).
Then my guess would be they just don't care - the effort, even to list on Amazon, is not worth what they make. After all, making the widest number of books available to the widest number of people is not their goal.
-
I like you when you're roused, David.
I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
Also, I wonder why NZ publishers don't use Amazon's print-on-demand service to list their novels in the US? That would reduce costs (and increase profits) enormously for those sales.
My guess would be the marketing thing: you can list on Amazon all you like but the stock is so big and the eearch system is so bollocks that unless it's reasonably popular or people are looking for it specifically the chances of anyone finding it are low. And Amazon might ask a pretty hefty cut, c.f. their Kindle book prices, which can be *more* than paperback copies of the same book (including shipping!).