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I definitely agree that you should communicate in whatever way will be most easily understood by your audience. However the point I was trying to make is that, without knowing what your audience will understand, it is best to write/speak as clearly as possible. To me this means avoiding...

LOL yes. "done with it" was what I was going for there. I'm certainly not holding *myself* up as a paragon of communication. :p

Really? So I should be writing everything in netspeak then? Or using "ain't" more liberally? Perhaps I should start "axing" people questions... Hmmm I didn't think it was common practice. I've heard of studios editing movies after the director/editor was down with it, but to my understanding...

No objective standard for what? Declaring something "art"? While I can agree that declaring something to be "bad" (in the sense of being absolutely without merit) isn't practical (or maybe even possible), I still feel that there are objective standards for evaluating the quality of a work within...

Not really. There are still objective standards that can differentiate one work from another. You can say one guitarist is better than another by how they play their instrument (one may miss notes/chords that the other consistently hits). One writer may be far more effective at communicating...

Value and merit aren't the same thing. Value is quite subjective, while merit implies excellence (and certainly not all art can be called excellent). I don't think taste and intelligence are necessarily linked. Intelligent people can like things that are bad for them (smoking, for example)...

But what do you base your standards on? Where did you get them from? After reading amateur fiction on the interwebs, I'd say the chances are pretty good that adults can produce that kind of work. Hey I don't like tossing around "crap" or "worthless" either; those terms certainly rankle me...

And yet there are people that will voice their opinion on books they haven't read, movies they haven't seen, and so on. Is their opinion as valid as someone who has? But if it was "good" to begin with, how do you know when and what to improve? If something can be better than it was before, can...

I agree everyone's opinion should be valid. That doesn't mean their opinion is informed, however. And by not making any attempt at determining quality, everything tends to end up rather similar. Its the danger of a monopoly; without competition to drive innovation, the product tends to stagnate.

There's a *problem* in that rant somewhere? Is British culture in danger of disappearing somehow?

I would agree that *enjoyment* is subjective, but that doesn't mean quality can't be judged with a certain degree of objectivity. Certainly one can examine how well a work accomplishes its goal (although what the goal is can be hard to determine) and the merit of the craft that went into...

Definitely don't just start layering on the adjectives -- that is a quick way to get into "purple prose" and just makes your writing hard to read. Twain and Hemingway both followed the theory that you are far better off finding the right verb and noun than using a bunch of adjectives and...

The Terminator - even though T2 was a slicker movie with better effects, I just find the original to be a superior movie; plus the second one introduced all kinds of wacky time paradoxes (I actually wrote a paper on that in university for film class :lol: ) Conan the Barbarian - still one of...

I just finished book six and I've come to the conclusion that he isn't bad at writing one *type* of female character, but he seems to be unable to conceive of one that isn't a short-sighted bully. That and the "everybody loves Rand" bit is tiresome. As far as the series originally being four...

Just as long as you keep your "Dim Mak" to yourself it's all good. :p

Are you basing your judgement of the effectiveness of Kung-fu from watching movies and anime? Isn't that like judging the merits of boxing by watching Rocky? Here's a quote from Bob Wall on a recounting of Bruce Lee fighting an extra on set that was aggressively challenging his martial-arts...

I've seen a few fights by Gung-fu practitioners against more traditional MMA fighters and the results have been mixed: some do well, some don't. There aren't a lot of fighters who use it as a basis so I'd say it is hard to really say how well it applies to MMA. I was under the impression that...

Yup, and from what I recall there are a few examples of this in the Silmarillion.

He is, although he chose to be Elven while his brother chose to be Human; they are, for all intents and purposes, fully of those respective races.

Cheers!