Happy Birthday to O6

[Dominic]

I remember when he was just a lil' kid here. Widdle 'Slaught is growing up!

Dom
-feels old.

[Onslaught Six]

Ha! Wasn't expecting a topic, but alright, I'll take it. I've turned twenty. It's a big milestone. I am no longer a teenager. Wow.

Hell, 'I' remember when I was just a kid here. Or at BWTF, rather, but still. People used to balk once they found out my age, claiming I was rather articulate and intelligent for my age. And then that went away, possibly because I got less intellectual, or possibly because I just got older and the expectations went down.

Also, incidentally, Dom, I'm reading Transmetropolitan volume 2 right now, which I got for the birthday, and if you honestly haven't read this book then you 'need to.' They're reprinting the entire series in a series of new TPBs, so now's as good a time as any to jump in. It's funny and thought-provoking and moving and it looks pretty.

[Dominic]

You, Max and Crossrook (who may not want his actual name used) were definitely ahead of the curve in terms of writing when you were kids. Trust me. I met the 3 of you in late '01, maybe early '02. About a year later, when I started working as a tutor, I started noticing how badly some adults write. Expectations likely played a role in how people reacted to your ages.

I still see it now as well. (I have met people with Doctorates who cannot write a worth-while sentence, and are often intimidated by articulate language.)

I will keep "Transmetropolitan" in mind. Right now, I am trying to catch up on my reading in general. (I sitll have to finish the "GI Joe" prequel novel, the TF philosophy book, "Branded Conservatives" by Ken Cosgrove, The Art of War (Strategies for the War on Terror), and a goodly sized pile of comics.

I could stop buying reading material right now, and be set for the year, likely through to summer of 2010.


Dom
-owes you a cookie.

[Onslaught Six]

You, Max and Crossrook (who may not want his actual name used) were definitely ahead of the curve in terms of writing when you were kids. Trust me. I met the 3 of you in late '01, maybe early '02. About a year later, when I started working as a tutor, I started noticing how badly some adults write. Expectations likely played a role in how people reacted to your ages.

Man, Crossrook! I forgot all about him! What's he doing these days?

It was definitely '02, because I joined briefly before Armada started up. Maaan, six years, it's been a while. I would've been thirteen or fourteen, I think. Or something.

I still see it now as well. (I have met people with Doctorates who cannot write a worth-while sentence, and are often intimidated by articulate language.)

For a long while there I was wondering if me interjecting enormous words into my sentences was pretentious, but it always just came naturally. See? I used the word "interjecting." That's a smart person's word. Some people might think I'm a douchenugget for that.

I will keep "Transmetropolitan" in mind. Right now, I am trying to catch up on my reading in general. (I sitll have to finish the "GI Joe" prequel novel, the TF philosophy book, "Branded Conservatives" by Ken Cosgrove, The Art of War (Strategies for the War on Terror), and a goodly sized pile of comics.

I could stop buying reading material right now, and be set for the year, likely through to summer of 2010.

Yeah, there's a fair stack of stuff I'm set up to get soon. Birthday money, yay.

-owes you a cookie.

Awesome. Cookie. <.<

[onslaught86]

Wow, I just realised I didn't even make you do anything fun on the night beforehand. My 20th birthday is most fondly remembered for the last night of being 19. I decided then and there that I'd get all that pent-up angst out of my systems, and did so by going down to the nearby corner store at 11:00pm, loitering, spitting, and cursing, and listening to angry music. It was great.

[Onslaught Six]

I remember that! And you're right, I didn't do any of that. Huh. I suppose because I've gotten it all out of my system.

[Dominic]

Ain't seen Crossrook around much at all.

As far as language goes, there is a movement, (sadly in schools), to dumb down language so that anybody can understand it. Never mind that writing below the literacy level is arguably a worse sin than deliberatly writing above it.


Dom
-notes the awkward use of "interject" in the above post.

[Onslaught Six]

...Really? I had constant encouragement in high school to use vocabulary words. (Although, sadly, these were nearly always words that I already had at least basic familiarity with.)

This reminds me of an incident at work the other day. Before you can actually start here, you need to take a hugeass test that both determines if you're even semi-qualified (and, I'm sure, if you're at least a semi-intelligent human being) and to help familiarize yourself with what we do here. The new secretary was taking the test, had a question, and asked over one of the other secretaries. They stood around for about ten minutes before I walked by on my way to make some copies.

"Hey, what's a euphemism?"
".....[A euphemism] for what?"
"A euphemism. What's that mean?"

I literally facepalmed and sighed as I explained. Here were two grown women--one in her early 20s, one in her 'late forties,' who did not know what the word euphemism meant. It was a sad day.

And I didn't think my use of interject was awkward at all. <.<

[Dominic]

Ignorance of vocabulary is one thing. It happens. (I only recently discovered the word "carbuncle", and a delightful word it is.) Ignorance is not a synonym, nor euphemism, for stupidity or laziness.

I am talking about concerted attempts by people who should know better to simplify language, and make it as anemic as possible. The justification for this is that "reading is hard", and should be made easier, even it actually discourages reading.

Dom

[Onslaught Six]

As a child, I hated any campaign that tried to get me to Reed Moor Buuks. Mostly because I rarely, if ever, found anything I was actually interested in reading. I liked the Animorphs books because they had aliens and occasional death and stuff. If they'd made BW novelizations, I'd have read those, too. This attitude actually continued for a good lot of my highschool career--why bother reading stuff? Most of it was crappy and uninteresting. There was the occasional bright spot (I read 1984 in the seventh grade, and found it to be vastly boring, but the concept grabbed me) but for the most part, I just hung in the back. The stuff we had to read for English was often boring or just plain annoying. (I hated To Kill A Mockingbird, it was one of the most annoying books I've ever read. And I had to read it twice because I failed 11th grade English.)

Then my friend Sam started basically handing me books and saying "You there, read this," and I did, mostly because I wanted to get into her pants. (I never succeeded.) Of course, she actually made me read 'good' stuff like Hitchhiker's Guide and Ender's Game and the like. She helped show me, "Hey, regular books don't have to suck," and that's one of the things I'm always gonna keep with me.

Of course, I'm still lazy and all I ever buy is comics and manga, but that's because I didn't get any of this stuff in the 90s when it was being first published, so most people are all "DUDE SANDMAN IS AWESOME" and I honestly dunno my opinion or not. (Mind, having read the first trade, yes, yes it is awesome.)