Episode 116: Does An Ellipsis Count As Three Words?

[Lemon]

with Isfahan, Bunnybread, Acierocolotl, Boots Raingear, and Lemon.

Edited by Lemon

Content for this episode was provided by Erminea Heart.

Every year when November rolls around, conversation frequently drifts into one of two subjects: The moustache I totally would be growing if circumstances were different, and the novel I totally would be writing if circumstances were different. In this episode, we're concerned with the latter: Persons participating in National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo), mainly by hanging out on a forum and spitballing crappy ideas around. This week, The F Plus buys a hundred head of Satan's cattle.

[Boots Raingear]

I apparently do not know which province contains my nation's capital.

[Acierocolotl]

Even though I live in Ontario, I am the token Quebecois.

[count_actuala]

I'm really glad this episode highlighted a major problem with pop culture-soaked internet writing, that being the tendency to overcomplicate an already flawed narrative premise by including god damned everything nerdy you can think of.

[Bobalay]

Lemon really hit the nail on the head in the TVTropes (I think?) episode when he said that the new generation being more 'savvy' when it comes to entertainment is really just them spewing out whatever they saw in a comic once.

[Cleft Uppercut]

I'm not sure that's necessarily true.  I think the real problem is that NaNoRefuckit primarily draws in kids and young adults to write.  And the fact of the matter is that good writing comes from having lived and experienced a great deal.  But these kids haven't experienced anything, so the only other thing they can think to write is the pop-bullshit the culture industry tells them is artistic.

Woah, got a little dialectic of enlightenment-y there at the end.

[KingKalamari]

I'm really glad this episode highlighted a major problem with pop culture-soaked internet writing, that being the tendency to overcomplicate an already flawed narrative premise by including god damned everything nerdy you can think of.

I think another thing that goes along with that is that too many nerd writers absolutely obsess over the minutia of their work to the detriment of the actual story: Trying to come up with pages and pages and pages of technobabble to explain how their fictional starships' hyperdrives work without ever thinking about the characters who actually pilot these starships.

I think it comes from the fact that the people who write crap like that tend to be the kind of pedantic nerds who look for inconsistencies in Star Trek technobabble and are trying to sort of preemptively prevent other pedantic neckbeards like themselves from poking the same holes in their ""masterpieces" while completely missing the point of what makes for engaging and entertaining fiction.

[count_actuala]

ETA: ^^Also that.^^

Lemon really hit the nail on the head in the TVTropes (I think?) episode when he said that the new generation being more 'savvy' when it comes to entertainment is really just them spewing out whatever they saw in a comic once.

It's not so much a generational problem as a subcultural one. It's nerds in general, not newer nerds. Like it or not, there's a certain cluster of bad personality traits that keep a lot of people in the Marvel-Inuyasha-Squaresoft sphere as a means of defining their existence past the age of 14. If playing video games is all you do as opposed to something you do, you're probably suffering some serious arrested development. It doesn't exactly imbue you with enriching life experience or a varied body of work consumed to funnel into your own endeavors. Incubate that in the echo chamber of the internet and you've got a recipe for terrible creative output.

[Acierocolotl]

No, SERIOUSLY, it's nerds in general, it's been as uniform as we've had science.  Listen:

A novel I read for my radio show, "Edison's Conquest of Mars," involved pages and pages of description of how Edison mastered electrostatic forces to propel his ships through space.  It involved the creation of a superweapon that used resonant frequencies to destroy matter at an atomic level.  Not a single character had a single goddamn iota of personality about them, beyond the casually racist depictions of the Chinese and the pretty female captive being kind of helpless and in need of rescue.  It's no different than what you describe now, save that it was written in 1880 or thereabouts.

Flimsy grasp of science?  CHECK.
Fanfiction?  THOMAS EDISON CHECK AND UNAUTHORIZED 'SEQUEL' TO WAR OF THE WORLDS CHECK.
Amazing self-insert?  All-around-most-competent himself CHECKITYCHECKCHECK.

[Runic]

Also completely missing the point of War of the Worlds, which was a pretty clever critique of British Imperialism.

[chai tea latte]

No, SERIOUSLY, it's nerds in general, it's been as uniform as we've had science.  Listen:

A novel I read for my radio show, "Edison's Conquest of Mars," involved pages and pages of description of how Edison mastered electrostatic forces to propel his ships through space.

IN A WORLD WHERE OUR HOUSES, STORES AND EVEN OUR CARS ARE POWERED BY, YES, ELECTRICITY: ELECTROPUNK

[cyclopeantrash]

These people are going to regret not just keeping their stupid ideas on paper, where it is more easily disposed of in the event they gain any sort of self-awareness. They are going to remember this one day, and think "Why did I do this thing? Why did I think this was a good idea?" while grasping their head tightly and cringing.

[count_actuala]

These people are going to regret not just keeping their stupid ideas on paper, where it is more easily disposed of in the event they gain any sort of self-awareness. They are going to remember this one day, and think "Why did I do this thing? Why did I think this was a good idea?" while grasping their head tightly and cringing.

This could be said of most internet output created before one reaches emotional maturity.

[🍆]

The ASOIAF segment was a nice reminder to self that no matter how big a shitnerd these guys might be, I can be just as bad. Although how the hell can you fit a Billy Goats Gruff story into 50k words? Pull a classic GRRM and fill half of those with descriptions of food and women's nipples?

Boots saying "and then they did it" at the end of that terrible excerpt of the... what the hell would you even call it, fighting guy LARP story I guess?, was hilarious to me because I had just been thinking the story was so poorly written and confusing it was like bad slash fanfiction of its own self.

[Navigator]

Somewhere around the second or third bit, I was reminded of what Isfahan said during the J. Jenny Jay whatever thing (I think): "I just realized something. I'm not that bad of a writer."

Of course, this episode prompted me to go hard drive-spelunking and find the "book" I started writing my senior year of high school, and I immediately took back the sentiment. It really was a situation where I had virtually no life experience to draw from, so I wrote a bunch of confusing, directionless crap, instead. I'm sure I could write something better than that, but that doesn't make re-reading it any less cringe-inducing.