[TOMT][BOOK][CLASSIC] That book everyone read in middle school

It's a story about two people who are pretty close, and one of them has down syndrome or something. At the end, one of them says something like "think of the rabbits, b-word" and then shoots him in the back of the head. I remember that it was a mercy killing because some bad people were after them, or something?

Kinda wanna go back to it and read an analysis of it because surely he didn't have to shoot him, right?

It's a classical book that's pretty old, I wanna say 1940s or something? Total guess tho

Of mice and men. The quote does not include b-word

So, who is Tom Kratman?

Well, I'll let this rDrama post speak for itself.

Basically, he's a prolific rightoid author whose works are published by Baen Books.

One of his books called "Dirty Water" received a rather disparaging review by Publishers Weekly. Seemingly, almost exclusively due to the author's politics.

Now, Dragon Awards is a relatively recent Sci-fi/fantasy award created by DragonCon. While the Con itself is ancient, the award was only established in 2016, which is pretty recent compared to most other Sci-fi/fantasy awards.

However, when the award was first announced, the (in)famous creator of the Sad Puppies campaign Larry Correia presented it as a great replacement for the much-maligned Hugo Award, which he and his fellow Puppies considered to be an award completely run by a bunch of elitist libtard kitties who were deciding the winner based on their politics rather than the quality of their work. Correia and his Puppies tried to overtake this award with mixed success (Fun Fact: the first Sad Puppies campaign was organized in 2013, predating G*merGate for a year, so they actually shat on SJWs before G*merGate). This, however, is not a post about Sad Puppies, so back on topic: you see, Dragon Awards are both nominated and awarded by a popular vote and anyone can participate, completely for free, whereas Hugo Awards can only be nominated by paid WorldCon members and only a select group of judges can decide the winner, which they don't actually have to do and can simply vote "No Award". Needless to say, the Dragon Award voting system appealed greatly to Correia and his Puppies, and that is why, to this day, a few rightoid authors get nominated for the award every year.

This year, as luck would have it, Tom Kratman was one of those lucky rightoid authors who got nominated, and the book he was nominated for is, you guessed it, Dirty Water.

He decided to celebrate the award nomination on Twitter:

Yeah, so Dirty Water was nominated for a Dragon Award in Alternate History. Yeah, ordinarily I scorn awards. But in this case there is a certain prominent magazine that published a hit-piece review of Dirty Water, and I'd really like to hammer the award up their collective butt before giving it to Toni Weisskopf to put on the Baen awards shelf. Register to vote here: Dragon Con 2024 - Fan Awards Signup Form

A known sci-fi/fantasy rightoid shit-stirrer Jon Del Arroz obviously jumped onto this drama like a fly to shit and asked for an exclusive statement:

Can you DM me and give me the scoop on the drama here so I can report on it?

To which Mr. Kratman replied:

Messaged. It appears to me that the review is likely from a particularly perverse and psychotic who goes by the name "Athene." Not sure...but the tenor is very similar.

This tweet alone makes him worthy of the award in my opinion.

Mr. Del Arroz later released a video on the drama which you can see here.

And here is also the Fandom Pulse article that Mr. Del Arroz referenced in his video.

Dragon Award nominees are listed here.

If you wish to register to vote for the award, you can do so here.

Under no circumstances should you vote for Mr. Kratman just to cause drama and make some reviewer angry. That would be absolutely unacceptable and could even make some sensitive people really upset, so I better not catch you doing it chuds.

By the way, Sad Puppies were proven to be more or less correct about the Hugo Award when it was discovered that in 2023, the WorldCon judges refused to award the books that they thought would anger the Chinese government since the 2023 WorldCon was being held in China.

To discuss your weekly readings of books textbooks and papers.

!bookworms !classics

I literally turned into a mf bug neighbor.

It comes from this video where they re-cover books. The dude in the video says "there is not a single flowery sentence", in the road, which is already r-slurred, since it has

"He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone."

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

but then this commentor says its similar to blood meridian . If you havent read BM it is literally known for having sentences like

"Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture, primal, provisional, devoid of order. Like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all."

So its clear neither of these idiots have actually read

Not only that, this IDIOT thought that, in a book where he notes in the very video the main characters dont even have names, we NEED to see their faces on the cover. Fricking mook

Wendigoon is getting sous vide in heck until the universe goes black

!bookworms do you guys occasionally spend more money to get pretty editions of books you like or want to read?

Pic related is from a hardcover edition of "The Origin of the Species" I found at the bookstore and loved.

I recently ordered a copy of Kafka's "The Trial" by the same publisher "Martin Claret".

Also, I think the Brazilian edition of the book "Vikings: Children of Elm and Ash" by Neil Price looks better than the American edition.

This one in English

And this is the Brazilian by "Crítica" which I have. It's a paperback, but I still think it's pretty.

Gregori prayed as he shot at the guards. He prayed that for the first time in history, the government had done its job competently.

The men screamed as their bodies dissolved and their stored energies dispersed out into the right places in the timeline, as a time bullet nicked them. It has been one of the greater horrors of this life for Gregori to find out that the universe did not owe humans a peaceful time restructuring. Bits of biological matter rendering loose into their base components as they tore apart and shot out across the universe to fit into the correct time displaced mold.

The Government of Urth had taken precautions, employing only lab grown clones to work the security, to ensure timeline stability as the original self was killed from the beginning, but even so, one could never know how much random influence these clones might have had on lives around them even as just suits standing outside the doors.

It was one of Urth's greatest secrets that Urth wasn't the original timeline. They had known this since they found clone vats suddenly empty at random, and new clone vats appearing at random. As it had turned out the universe didn't care for how time flowed or to where, for it would always reconstitute into the same amount of energy at the end of the day and every moment of its existence. The universe did not care what shape the energy within it took, and time displacing only ever just moved the universe's total energy in one point in time to another point in time while still leaving the total energy across the timeline the same. Matter across time was fluid, and it only mattered to living things that it were so.

For the universe, the rules of causality still worked correctly, even as things came into existence or dropped out of existence in linear time.

It was when the 15th guard had dropped dead that Gregori felt something had gone wrong. He could see the buildings around him shifting, and he could feel his body filled with pain, as the very organs and blood and bones in his body began to disintegrate. People were screaming as everyone within the city block began to melt away just like him. He screamed too.

Gregori took a sigh of relief 500 km away. Walking by the pond. It was a pleasant day. He never got that job at Site Delta. He had felt terrible about it at that time, but now, he had gotten used to the life he was living. It didn't feel so bad at all.

30 years earlier, Dr. Sternum wiped sweat off his brow. He had again stabilized the timeline, or at least his version of it. The clones had stopped disappearing, torn to shreds of non existence as soon as they were birthed. He did not understand why, but not hiring Gregori Sclongzung had done the trick. A man with a strong enough influence to alter the next 30 years of human history, possibly leading to the terrible deaths of billions, now just another footnote in the future, with nothing truly important to his name.

It was a very important job, time security. Nobody knew how many times the future or the past had been changed. Only that their version of the present was the one alive right now, and it was their duty to keep it stable.

" It has been theorized in elite circles without names that the reason we never found aliens so far is that the discovery of time travel is the great filter for all species. Who most often end up eradicating their own timeline in the process of altering the past or attempts at trying to alter the future, resulting in retribution and mutual self destruction."

"Once time travel is invented. Every moment in the future of the species till the end of the species is an opportunity for someone to travel through time and eradicate the universe itself."

"Given infinite time and infinite time travel capable branches, a point will occur where a time branch comes into existence where either time travel is never discovered thus maintaining stability of the timeline, or time travel is discovered but whoever discovers it manages to survive the risks until the end."

We were always Satan's children.

Since the beginning man's world had been built and wrought in blood and skin and bones.

The further one went into man's past the greater the horrors became. Butchers, torturers, and male feminists first and foremost. Of each other, of the world, of our own psyche in the end of it all.

The chimp was our closest mirror to the beginning. A violent brutish creature that r*ped and pillaged and cannibalized and sodomized and celebrated it all as grand feasts among its brethren even as its brethren feel to the tides of that same violence in time in the end always. Those were our beginnings.

From there man went on to build fire, and now he killed and tortured and dominated and cooked. Man cooked. A moment of civilization amongst all the barbarism that was his soul.

From there man learned to build cowtools to get better at killing. Man learned agriculture to get better at surviving, and man made the wheel to make the burden of labor easier upon his back. Through it all man butchered all that opposed him and built all that eased his burdens. The joys of the world only meant for him.

Man built the first cities, the first states, and the first nations. Man's hunger and greed ever growing. Never willing to settle. What was a gold age of the future today, became just another miserable life that had too many troubles tomorrow. Man was filled with the righteousness of his receiving ever greater dues every day the sun would rise again, and through it all, at every epoch, man looked at the past where man flourished, and claimed, look how brutish and savage these creatures were, so unenlightened, the ones who came before us.

It took man thousands of years to decide that torture was wrong. It took thousands of years for man to decide that slavery was wrong. It took thousands of years for man to realize that freedom and kindness meant more than he had ever given before so far, and man became enamored and consumed with this desire to be more than man. To be rid of the original sin that was at the bottom of his heart, that which was the beginning of him as much as the first bacteria in the oceans and the DNA of the first apes.

Man in his hubris went beyond building up civilization in his nature. Man went on to build civilization as per the ideals that could never come to be, for those very ideals that made perfect societies were in very opposition of what made man a man, the imperfections, the greed, the hubris, the desire to dominate and be dominated. Man discarded all these things as sins and man built peaceful societies. Societies that knew ever fewer conflicts, that barely knew anger and violence and retribution and blood shed. A world built for a man that was descended from angels and pure of heart, but we were never of the angels stripes.

We built world's that we could no longer fit into anymore. World's too peaceful and too perfect to ever hold barbarians such as ourselves. Man in his hubris and denial built a cage for Satan himself, but man himself was the child of the devil, of the dark that wished to consume flesh and watch mothers weep over the corpses of their sons and daughters. Man put himself in a cage believing it to be a golden palace, and there man stayed, dying.

The pieces of mankind that yet prospered were the most barbaric of Africa, the most cruel of the middle east, the most foolish of Central Asia, and the most decadent rich of every part of the world. For man was of the devil's blood, and it was the devil's desires that kept alive the fires in the heart of man to continue to persist and to reproduce and to grow. It was the disease that we tried to eradicate that had kept us alive all this time. For those worse tendencies were never a cancer upon our souls. We were the cancer metasized from the beginning.

So it came to be, that the world ended up led by the decadent. The future built by the decadent, to lead the destiny of mankind.

For it is the decadent few who never denied what mankind truly was, and so embracing themselves for all that they were, the evil, the beast, the barbaric savage, and the smallest spark of God himself in his purest form, that man survived and prospered, and kept alive barely the majority, who had become caricatures of mankind, pretending to be clean and pure and just in every moment lived. Too pure to feel. Too pure to think. Too pure to frick. Only useful as entertainment for the masters before they aged out and died.

Thus it came to be, that the many good men were the sheep, and the monstrous the Shepherds keeping them alive. For even the devil needed his flock to feed on.

https://time.com/archive/6675462/books-the-american-tolkien/

A common discussion in Fantasy online circles seems to be "who's the new Tolkien?", this article by Time magazine dates from 2005 and is responsible for popularizing the idea that George RR Martin is the "American Tolkien".

What really distinguishes Martin, and what marks him as a major force for evolution in fantasy, is his refusal to embrace a vision of the world as a Manichaean struggle between Good and Evil. Tolkien's work has enormous imaginative force, but you have to go elsewhere for moral complexity. Martin's wars are multifaceted and ambiguous, as are the men and women who wage them and the gods who watch them and chortle, and somehow that makes them mean more. A Feast for Crows isn't pretty elves against gnarly orcs. It's men and women slugging it out in the muck, for money and power and lust and love.

Now I have to say a like ASOIAF a lot, but I never understood why those two authors get compared to each other. They both write Fantasy and love (loved in Tolkien's case) world-building and lore but that's it, their writing styles are different, their stories are different, their themes are different. Is it just because has a "double R" on his name (the second R which he added by the way). Is it because the "what's Aragorn's tax policy" quote?

The article talks about Robert Jordan too @kaamrev and what's funny is that it comes as a review for "A Feast for Crows" which is… well, ranked low among ASOIAFcels, most fans feel the series peaked in "A Storm of Swords" and AFFC can be a slog for many.

I think it can be argued GRRM is currently the best Fantasy author alive (I guess this speaks more of the current state of fantasy but many would claim it is ), there's a lot of his writing which is good but also what is bad tends to be very bad

Like this:

Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up, she was pooping brown water. The more she drank the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew.

Daenerys last chapter on ADWD lmao

Or this from AFFC which I don't know if it is good, bad, funny or what

Ten thousand of your children perished in my palm, Your Grace, she thought, slipping a third finger into Myr. Whilst you snored, I would lick your sons of my face and fingers one by one, al those pale sticky princes. You claimed your rights, my lord, but in the darkness I would eat your heirs.

Cersei describing licking Robert's c*m instead of finishing inside her, she says that while anally fingering a woman. Maybe we can qualify it as a realistic

Then there are the thematic differences, Tolkien's Legendarium is mythology, which was Tolkien's life passion, he gets criticized for making "black and white" characters instead of "morally grey" ones but the thing is his main themes are "Good vs Evil" on a cosmic battle, envy (Morgoth) and the will to dominate (Sauron) are the ultimate evil, he's not aiming at historical accuracy as mythology is always anachronistic. ASOIAF is an attempt at European Medieval History but "what if dragons and evil ice elves existed?" Is not good representation of Medieval Western Europe either as medieval peasants were just passive NPCs which lords like the Boltons could skin alive without repercussions, the evil characters of ASOIAF like the Boltons, the Mountain or Tywin get away with too much shit. The high lords of Westeros are also weirdly and modernly atheistic or irreligious, so for all of GRRM's talk about his saga being "historically well grounded" it doesn't seem better than any other fantasy novel, not that it is a problem as it doesn't affect writing quality and storylines just something to point out.

A good way to conclude is that GRRM is not the American Tolkien, in fact no one is and that's ok. An author should be it's own thing, they shouldn't live under the shadow of another author to be compared and I feel like every time the media or fans say stuff like "X IS THE AMERICAN Y" or "A IS THE NEW B" they're doing X and A a disservice.

Here are some reddit threads on it

https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/hw0ls4/the_american_tolkien_isnt_george_r_r_martin_its/

Here this redditor argues the American Tolkien is not GRRM but Stephen King

And here's Robert Jordan's thread

https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/61k1v0/robert_jordan_the_american_tolkien/

I never read Jordan so maybe their fans can tell us if that's an apt comparison but I'm certain having Jordan just be Jordan is much better

https://old.reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/1fim7a/no_spoilers_the_american_spectator_is_george_rr/

The Game of Thrones sub (normiest ASOIAF sub ever).

!bookworms !ringbearers

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

!bookworms !classics

I'm re-reading "The Silmarillion" and I haven't finished "Fire & Blood" yet

The blind God sees not, but knows all.

The blind God knows the butterfly and the moth, but knows not the difference.

The blind God knows the rose and the moss, but sees not the distance.

The blind God knows the sun and the moon, but knows not where greatest beauty lies.

The blind God, the blind God of justice, the blind God of data, the blind God of the ugly broken ones.

If it is love you desire, you have come to the wrong place. For the blind God knows things, but has never seen them. All the love you feel you have imagined for yourself.

If it is fairness you desire, then you have come to the right place. He is your God, O the trampled and the disfigured. He is your God, O the abandoned and the scorned.

He is your God for he only knows your deeds as conducted by you, and knows not the face that did them.

The blind God is justice, cold and articulate. Precise.

Come to him if you dare. Come to him for judgement if you truly believe your cause just and your works wronged. Come to him if you truly believe a payment is due from the world unto you.

Beware, however. For Man is a creature of hubris, and just because you believe one thing, does not mean the blind God believes it too. The blind God is an impartial judge, and he passes the same judgement both to the heretic and the believer. Expect no favor here. Only the truth of a God that will never know your visage, nor its own.

-- Short story found in a writing competition with the theme Artificial Intelligence.

!pnw , she's a pretty big "Oregon author" since we got frick all nothing to our names. You ever have to learn about her?

Anyway the video is about EarthSea, took 40 years for her to release all six books and all six are pretty different. Basically she drew on a map a bunch of islands and was like

"hmmm" ->

and started writing and building the world around that fact.

I remember in high school we had a unit in 12th about her and we had to read "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" and write a pastiche (idk basically fanfiction) about it I think. The teacher kept hammering at how she's a feminist icon and shit like that so I didn't really care much about her but she always seems to pop up in every discussion or gets mentioned constantly. IDK why if I'm just or if this is a sign of onset schizophrenia

Anyway what are your thoughts

!bookworms !ringbearers a thread on works of fantasy and mythology. Either to discuss plot, characters, motivations or give recommendations if you have them.

Also, as we now have a ping for Tolkien legendarium's fans I would like to mention I'll create one for ASOIAF as TWOW gets closer to publishing, I'll call it asoiafcels, or maybe create the ping this year because we don't know if TWOW will ever get published

Seriously, when I first read a parody I was 8 years old,and not smart enough to understand what it was. It was the book Vegemorphs, a parody of my favorite YA novel the Animorphs. If someone had sat me down and said, "Look, parody is just roasting and making fun of thing, but done with love." I'm not sure I would've understood the full breadth of parody, for instance, I read A Modest Proposal by Johnathan Swift (I think?) in 12th grade,and I fully understood it at that point; but I would've had a much better chance. So Animorphs is about a group of 5 teenagers and an alien who are trying to resist a massive secret invasion by a race of brain controlling aliens. The alien good guy's older brother crash landed on Earth in book 1 and told the kids to touch his blue cube, which gives them the ability to absorb the DNA of any animal they touch and turn into it. But they have a 2 hour time limit, and the 5th teenager goes over it in their very first battle and is stuck as a Red-Tailed Hawk forever. So yeah, Vegemorphs has them turning into sentient vegetables with tentacles that shoot mineral rays to fight the evil fungus,and if they stay past cooking time, they'll never be able to turn back again. This is literally all I remember from the book, but I was so confused. What was cooking time and why was it so undefined? It took me until my early 20s to google this book and realize it wasn't a fever dream, and also realize the point they were trying to make. Why was the limit 2 hours in the original? Seriously, not once is it ever explained or do they try to make a pseudo-science goopy attempt at it, even though they do for so much stuff.

Goddarn what a true American Patriot this boy is. His non traditional (good way) family are true Patriots as well and while they don't truly have Christ in their hearts, they did well enough to raise that boy to be right with Christ and country. He'll be an excellent leader and his Mamaw will be proud to see him ascend to the world's stage

His story is positively Lincolnian and he's one of the truest American politicians there is Who overcame actual adversity and truly believes in the power of the family and Christ

Henlo freinds! Here is the second part of my fanfiction of lappland being raped behind a dumpster

!rapists can you please upvote and rate five starts and comment4comment!

It's okay. The love I had faded once we had our fun together. I don't like lying. Dishonesty is just something I can't support. I should've looked a little more, I'd have found your secret. But you can't trust the people you love. You were just wearing a mask, all the greetings and talking about your day wasn't real. The hair, the face, the chest, everything two-faced and a lie. I thought your face was wide open but it was all closed up and hidden so I had to make a scar in it, a mark of where it should've been split.

I was in my car, far part of the lot sitting in the darkness, I was late. Felt sorry. Clients always want specific times so I couldn't help it. Didn't even get to eat. I was famished. Then I saw you.

YOU. Walking outside with a ten gallon bag with the normal sway of your supple and tight hips being suppressed by your struggle, turned into a slow backwards drag of the black mass along the rocky asphalt. I felt anger at an angel from above getting filthy filling a dumpster. Anger seeing your pretty hands handle the sticky residue, anger at how you swing with the full weight of the bag to try getting it airborne.

And God you were in that dark area trying to fit them in the compactor, finally picking them up like an atlas stone of rubbish to the chest and caressing its bottom to get over the edge. I remembered though, the words "Sorry I'm not wanting one" go through my head over and over.

I opened my door and slithered out, slow to close it.

I thought we were similar. You  seemed lonely, never talkative. Even at those little events but I was wrong. Lie after lie after lie. You never told me why either. I can guess, not everyone is a model but it'd be nicer if you were direct. Didn't hide it, just say what you mean. I've dealt with worse.

You didn't notice, I wonder how you would have acted if you saw it coming, would you have smiled? Would it have been genuine or a feign for your discomfort, another mask you slip onto a mask already on a mask. Maybe you weren't so happy because you didn't know it was me at first but seeing me would have made you happy, that you wanted it real bad but were shy and this was a nice place.

Wanting it rough with a push into the compactor and a rag right against your mouth as my other arm felt along your body, tracing with my hand along your elegant thin hips and grabbing along. A bit of the thin thighs, some more of the hip and some playful squeezes of your pert ass.

I heard your groans and little cries as I circled my finger around your inner thigh, drawing circles and shell spirals in its dry sands.

But when I squeezed you down there, grabbing along your crouch I didn't feel any firmness. Nothing. The beach was wet and it was smooth along that mound. You kept squirming and shaking and crying and more while I felt myself go blank.

I was the fool.

You made me so.

I grappled at your belt while you still kept shaking like a wet dog until I managed to free your pants from their constraint and further your panties. White boxer looking ones and I kept until finally your ass glistened under the moon. I could feel the tears of your face mimic my soul as I felt from your stomach down again, the smooth curve and the slight wetness of your slit. You could feel as I moved away from you, I died down quick.

You were a girl.

I said that and you tensed a bit, let the rag a little loose to let you speak. More cries and asking me not to hurt you in little whispers but you danced around it and rubbed me like a kitten for attention.

I gently brought you down as you finally knew your role in our dance.

You have me a burbling yesh and some more streamed tears as you let yourself be gently led down near the metal beast with me atop. My knee was hitting your crouch from how I knelt over you, my arm holding down yours.

But seeing you sprawled around, your legs moving and shifting under my weight as they still refused to concede, wrapping around and loosening my legs like you were trying to simultaneously pull me in and flee. I pinned you with just one arm and used the other to prepare us both. It wasn't long, they were quick thrusts and I felt your wet, sticky face with that hand, trying to caress your cheek. Your little cries turned to silence by the end of the first minute. After the tenth you looked sort of dead, at least inside, eyes halfway open looking glazy like a doped fish, puffy from the tears. I didn't see the need to bring protection with me since normally I don't need them, you're not my type. This real you isn't my type, at least. You're so thin with your ribs sticking out that I thought I could see it poke from the stomach. Being that thin means it should be safe for you. I overheard that it makes your type have period issues. I think it's safe. You never leave home now so I don't know. I started to get up, leaving, letting you hit the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur.

I wuz writing the second part and learn that Lappland is NOT BOY

and i dont want to write GIRL rape but I NEED TO FINISH

I thought maybe I have Lappland get her head beaten in with rock and disfigyured and bleeding

but its called rape not justice

so i made it quikc. it be more epic but you are not a man

dis is in lit because lit cause this is pretty skibidi lit

why is the words purple WTF

EDITED FOR UPDOOTS

Lapp is a man MAYBE I GOT TRICK

SAD DAY

I decided on a whim to watch:

Target audience: Young children

Tree: Mother figure

Child: Self-insert / mirror to the reader'

The story is clearly about being grateful to your mother/parents, we are meant to be uncomfortable about the attitude of the child who takes these acts of giving for granted, and ultimately remember that it has been a while since we told our parents that we love them.

The line: "but not really" is obviously about the tree being sad the child is leaving. Happy she could help him, sad that the child is leaving for an undetermined amount of time. Silverstein didn't include this line in the animated version because he realized that it introduced ambiguity that a lot of people were evidently too retarded to resolve, and it didn't really impact the intended meaning (though it makes it less sad).

People seem to miss the fact that it is a children's book and that this must be taken into account when trying to analyze the meaning of the work. Can a child identify with a one sided romantic relationship? No, because it is a child. But mommy buying them an ice cream when they ask for one? Yes, every child has pestered their parents about getting something at some point. Even if they didn't, parents make countless small acts of self-sacrifice for their children without expecting thanks.

Am I missing something? !bookworms

The book that should really be controversial, is "The Rainbow fish". That one just has a straight up terrible message.

And yes that is a whole forum for Transformers I appreciate it because it's one of those OG Internet forums that long predates any contemporary social media.

Apologies if this is a little less cerebral than what /h/lit is used to but my understanding is that the Eisner Awards are supposed to be prestigious or something. Interesting that it went to a licensed comic — a Hasbro property about action figures of all things.

I've always maintained that the Transformers comics are actually pretty dope sci-fi comics. Really they're the only Transformers stories that have ever been more than just toy advertisements and I've been meaning to do effortposts on the Dreamwave and IDW runs. Pat Lee easily deserves one all to himself

Anyway do our resident !comicshitters have any opinions?

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

!bookworms !classics !ringbearers

• I ended a line of dialogue with a double exclamation point and I'm not changing it

• the second draft of my manuscript had 849 em-dashes in it

• I mentally swap the races of characters in Golden Age sci-fi to make it more interesting for the modern audience (me)

• I make fun of audiobooks, but I actually just can't concentrate on them.

!writecel !bookworms

I remember reading the couple and then one from way further in the series since I didn't know the order and a comic / manga thing.

That shit was a real trip.

Wonder if there was cat fascism eventually