Huh? Sorry, but after the third exquisite description of a cloud, his beautiful imagery made me learn how to scan paragraphs to skip to extraneous bits. Kind of like porn in a way. The first thrust is arousing to watch. The second through tenth are titillating. The eleventh through ninetieth are increasingly routine. Eventually you may find yourself desperately bored, hoping the actors change position or fall in a vat of boiling lead, or something interesting.
I call BS, there are no descriptions of clouds, exquisite or otherwise, anywhere in the TLOTR, except near the end when the black clouds come out of Mordor, a phenomenon that needs describing as it is a major thematic element. You sound like you haven't really attempted to read the book. To give you credit, you clearly know your porn, though.
The reality is that crime hasn't really skyrocketed and by all accounts might actually be rising at a much lower rate when compared with the population. We just have a distorted perception of rampant crime and danger as a result of what the media reports.
Crime isn't even rising, it's actually been going down for many years, but you'd never know that from today's media. It all about fear, make the people afraid enough and you can get away with almost anything. The America I grew up with, that I knew was the greatest country on earth, is fast becoming a memory. Parent should be modded up.
Hang on, how is a crack-head's addiction a consequence of the war on drugs?
It's a direct consequence of the war on drugs, because crack itself exists only as a result of the drug war, read up on the history of the drug if you don't believe me. Under prohibition drugs of all kinds have gotten more potent and/or been reformulated into newer and more potent forms - this is driven entirely by prohibition, no cokehead would have ever thought to take his drug of choice and mess with it chemically to make the freebase form and then smoke it, not if he was already happily getting grams of pure cocaine HCL at the local pharmacy whenever he wanted. Crack was a result of the naked greed of some very clever drug dealers - dealers, not users - who created it specifically as a means of getting more people hooked on more cocaine faster than ever, and guess what, it worked like a charm. This is what happens when you make things illegal, you lose all control of the problem. Of course, with some drugs, heroin being the best example, there simply WAS no problem before the drug was made illegal. Before prohibition the main users of heroin were bored housewives, who consumed it in the form of a variety of patent medicine "tonics", and because these tonics were very cheap and easily available there was no crime involved, and virtually no health problems. These things only became associated with the drug after it was made illegal.
you can't do 'just a little' meth or be an occasional user. You get hooked, hardcore
Fact: There is very little in the way of withdrawal symptoms from meth, mostly you just sleep for days. Many people use amphetamines casually without getting addicted, in fact our armed services gives it to the troops in certain situations to promote wakefulness, they're called 'go pills'.
some like heroin can have fatal withdrawal symptoms
Fact: Nobody ever dies directly from heroin withdrawal. The perfectly legal drug alcohol, on the other hand, can indeed cause death upon withdrawal. Actually, using just about any measure of "harmfulness" you want, alcohol is far and away THE most dangerous drug, whether you look at addiction potential, severity of withdrawal, harm to the body, cost and/or danger to society, whatever you look at... Good old booze is number one. This inconvenient fact is a big reason why our current drugs laws are so pathetically hypocritical. If there were any rhyme or reason to the law alcohol would be illegal and heroin would be easily available at the local drugstore. The reality is that the laws are completely arbitrary in their approach as to what's dangerous and what isn't.
No Lovecraft, Dunsany or Olaf Stapleton?
Also, no Ellison? No Delany? No Fredric Brown? Not to mention del Rey, Simak, Sprague de Camp , any of which should have been there instead of Brooks or Eddings. Also 4 Gaimans, but only 2 Pratchetts? Come on, I like Gaiman, but he can't hold a candle to Pratchett, especially if you consider the whole oeuvre.
If your talking about "older" authors the biggest omission by far, IMHO, has to be Alfred Bester. The Stars My Destination was written in the '50s but reads like something just published. No list of the supposedly all time greatest SF is complete without it. Also, no Jack Vance?? Granted, Vance is not to everyone's taste, but he's indisputably one of the genre's most influential writers and for god sakes, he at least outranks Goodkind!
Pandemic studios never made anything worth having
I beg to differ. Battlezone 2 was and still is one of the best games ever made, easily one of the most immersive games around, one that never gets stale, which is maybe why it still has a loyal following. What other game from 10 years ago still has new mods coming out, to say nothing of substantial revisions to the original game done by some of the original programmers working on their own time?
First they came for the porn stars, but I did nothing because I was not a porn star. Then they came for the dirty magazine publishers, but I did nothing because I am not a dirty magazine publisher. Then they came for the pin-up girls, but I did nothing because I am not a pin-up girl...
...and then we had no porn, and no one came.
There, fixed that for ya.
People even say a computer is junk without a bluray, and as a toy it probably is.
I bought into this argument and bought a Sony VAIO with a Bluray player recently when I needed a new laptop. The Sony's a great machine, it has everything I was looking for in a computer including a superb display. The bluray player was really just icing on the cake, not something I really cared a lot about, but I won't deny I thought it was a pretty nice piece of icing. Well, that was 6 months ago and I have used the damn thing exactly once to watch a bluray movie. The HD is nice and crisp on still shots, but movement is handled so badly, with noticeably jerky playback, that I have absolutely no desire to ever use the player again at the resolution it was built for. Regular DVDs play just fine. But hey, at least I can point to the bluray player and say, "See, my computer isn't junk, it's got bluray!" Moral of the story: not all bluray players implement the standard well. If you really care about having a bluray player, watch it personally before you buy it, don't order online like I did and assume hey, it's bluray, it's got to be good.
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'Informatique. -- Bosquet [on seeing the IBM 4341]