Oh god, you don't know the first thing about writing.
Thanks
Also Hadas, I realize word limits can generally be a boon to readability and shit, but I have this condition called being a horrible autistic that causes me to have to talk at length about everything or I will literally go insane. Also, I've been told I'm pretty good at it, and I could poop 800 words a week.
And sure, Zhukov, I'll link my shit up if I can get dipshit to post it tomorrow
Writing means nothing unless you're writing for an audience. Writing for yourself is meaningless. Why would you publish something instead of just keeping it in a drawer, then?
my association may also be from your usage of the word "oy" which, like zhukov, I didn't bother to even read before -- but it likely still influenced my thinking and made me biased towards british! interesting truth: even if we don't detect or consciously observe stimuli, our brain still processes it and communicates it across our minds. that process of filtering the stimuli has the ability to corrupt our thinking and has a temporary suggestive power over us.
for example, television producers could subliminally flash any image before us without us even realizing something had happened, if the length of the flash were short enough. the image could be of a glass of water, which we wouldn't see, but we'd probably still develop a sudden interest in thirst. or, they might flash cardboard and make us crave mcdonalds out of nowhere. not saying this is abused, but it has the potential to be! the same goes with sound too, and just about everything else.
it accounts for a lot of daily "coincidences" and spooks too, like when you "feel" that someone is behind you/or following you but you're not sure why. and then you turn around and they're there! it's because your brain was picking up on the sounds or change in temperature, or whatever, that would otherwise be undetectable within the human threshold. it then filtered that stimuli and sends you that thought as a warning, like, "hey dude someones about to stab you in the bum!"
or like whenever those neighbors in interviews are always like "Oh yeah, I always knew that guy was a creeper, I just saw something in him" blahblahblah, they think they all have superpowers but it's a very basic cognitive peculiarity that everyone does daily ;(
so even when you can't perceive, your mind does. and even when it can't tell you what's wrong, it'll still try to tell you that there's something. the lesson here is that you should always follow your instinct, even if it is out of the blue. unless you are watching television, then you should ignore all urges.
the other lesson is that psychophysics is awesome.
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Hey elx, your sig is too big. 400 x 100 pixels is the limit, son
Also Hadas, I realize word limits can generally be a boon to readability and shit, but I have this condition called being a horrible autistic that causes me to have to talk at length about everything or I will literally go insane. Also, I've been told I'm pretty good at it, and I could poop 800 words a week.
Yeah, so talk about everything at length and then cut it down to a thousand words. If your gonna be a journalist then this is something you'll inevitable have to do so you might as well start now. Also, you edited your post, I don't know if it's better like this but it's certainly longer.
Well, I could say it's equal parts for myself and for an audience, but that would be a big fat lie because I do my thing for a website where the sun does not shine and nary a reader is to be found, probably because of our crippling lack of spellchecker or any sort of coherent editing process. I think our guy pretty much clicks on word count and gives a yea or nea depending on how much he thinks it'll stretch the front page.
That's ok, though, because I just like writing so damn much that I will keep churning out essays on a weekly basis and devote all my effort to making them enjoyable and informative reads, even if they consistently remain unpublished and my ambitions are left to decompose under a juniper bush.
Also, yeah, Hadas, I've played that game in a lot of journalism classes. I think I might have a bizarre sexual fetish for the inverted pyramid and murdering inefficient words.
The major difference is that then, I had someone acting as a quality buffer, rather than having to look at everything with my disgusting malformed brain and trying to decide what should stay and what should go. I'm wildly inconsistent about how good I think I am, too, so some days I might just set fire to the entire goddamn thing and curl up in a corner telling myself I'm a hack over and over again.
I'm terrified of becoming George Lucas, basically. I fucking need someone to question me critically or I will inevitably create horrible, childhood-ruining butt shit.
Last edited by Guitar Woman : Apr 7th, 2011 at 12:53 PM.
I think you have unrealistic views on editors GW, in reality they'd probably end up pissing you off. I wrote a review for this site awhile ago that Rog put up nearly unchanged except for a single word, I was surprised at how mad I was. I didn't say anything because it was just a bit of minutia and it would of been embarrassing to throw a fit over but still. I used to imagine I wanted to be a writer too but that shit's far too frustrating. Now I work at Walmart, and I couldn't be happier!
I'm going to guess that whatever you wrote an article about, GW, or what you have written articles about in the past, the topic has always managed to revolve around yourself. Your posts do nothing but talk about numero uno.
Not really, no. It's a video game column, not a fucking blog.
My articles are usually my subjective opinion, of course, so I'll say things like "I particularly liked the part where you had to fast-talk your way into the morgue and get rid of the pathologist so you could cut off and steal body parts at your leisure," but I'll only really talk about myself if it's to make a cheap self-deprecation joke. Which I should probably stop doing anyway, since everyone else has savagely beaten it into the dirt at this point.
I also talk about loads of other stuff all the time, but since you dickheads insist on constantly patornizing me I've got to do a lot of explaining. Well, I don't, actually, but that's lazy.
Either that or you don't even read it; by your admission, you disregard everything I talk about because of tl;dr, so it's more of a case of selective memory. Which isn't to say that I'm not a little whiny from time to time, but I'd rather work out my frustration with words, in a consequence-free internet environment, than by, say, going to town on someone with a sledgehammer.
but I'll only really talk about myself if it's to make a cheap self-deprecation joke. Which I should probably stop doing anyway, since everyone else has savagely beaten it into the dirt at this point.
Self-deprecation is not a cliche, it's a legitimate literary technique that lets the audience know the writer doesn't think himself superior to the reader. I used it in my last post when I said I worked at Walmart (I'm actually unemployed ho ho ho). The technique can be overused though.
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