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[ChairmanPoo]

Unpopular opinion: Taking children from candy can be better than taking candy from children.

... You're not Bozo the Clown are you?

[Bumber]

Unpopular opinion: Clowns are people as well as law abiding citizens.
The content of the previous post can be interpreted differently depending upon whom is taking the children and where.
Unpopular opinion: Stephen King's It is a Superhero movie, starring Spiderclown.

[Max™]

Stephen King is not in fact a horror writer (as should be clear to anyone who woke up with one of his books glued to their cheek by drool) but is actually a deep cover agent working for the same people who created what can only loosely be called the first artificially (artificial as in olestra) intelligent author: Stephanie Meyer who was able to establish herself in some sort of weird boundary-straddling niche as a "young adult vampire romance" writer. King was able to assist her there by pumping out story after story and getting them placed on the "horror" shelves somehow, so when those attempting to read something thrilling and scary began having their eyes glaze over at the very sight of sideways letters spelling out "Stephen King" they would start to wander over to nearby shelves and some portion of them wound up looking through the "young adult vampire romance" stuff.

The catch is, all of these books were supposed to be treated as tongue-in-cheek parodies, but somehow got taken seriously, and now I know who Footface Robbinson is.


King himself may have forgotten his original mission, becoming subsumed in his own cover, which I guess is maybe kinda sad but not really?

Though he has cited Lovecraft as a major influence, the trick H.P. pulled off was one of meticulously assaulting the perceptive faculties of inquisitive personages with unnecessarily embellished draughts of fossilized thesaurus extracts, whereupon even the most exceedingly loquacious amongst us would find the authorial perspective proffered somewhat supercilious and seek respite elsewhere as they find it difficult to remain perpendicular in the face of somnolescent beckonings, and then whilst in this pseudodreamlike embrace the gibbering madness lurking in the deepest corners of ones awareness is suddenly able to seize hold of the slightest insinuation of detail and thrust it mightily to the forefront of the imagination and force one to confront that which is both within and without!

Simply throwing more words at a scary idea doesn't quite achieve the same effect.

[wobbly]

Stephen King is about 1% horror,  99% small American town soap opera.

[Loud Whispers]

Can we not make this the "act snide about liberals" thread? I know a couple people have been using it for that occasionally, but it's going to ignite an argument. You can phrase these criticisms without sounding like you just got out of a fight on another site and are trying to bring it here.

I'm not acting snide about liberals. I lean left myself, in many respects. But it's undeniable that some on the far-left defend deplorable practices, as long as it is a practice from a group they identify with (communists, anarchists) or are deemed "oppressed" (Islam).

Personally I blame protestants

[itisnotlogical]

Unpopular opinion: CGI in movies can be totally fine. It's just that nobody knows how to make a visual spectacle anymore because Hollywood can only ever make one of two movies: "iPod aesthetic" where everything is sleek and futuristic, or "gritty and desaturated" where everything is covered in so much greebles and film grain and random crap that it's impossible to tell what anything is.

It doesn't help that shakycam has completely and utterly ruined action films. You can't appreciate anything that might be cool before it's jerked out of frame and motion blurred to oblivion in the editing room.

[NJW2000]

Don't forget bombfetti.

Then again, in Fantastic Beasts, actors seemed to be getting better at acting with CGI, unlike the recent, horrible hobbit films.

[helmacon]

Though he has cited Lovecraft as a major influence, the trick H.P. pulled off was one of meticulously assaulting the perceptive faculties of inquisitive personages with unnecessarily embellished draughts of fossilized thesaurus extracts, whereupon even the most exceedingly loquacious amongst us would find the authorial perspective proffered somewhat supercilious and seek respite elsewhere as they find it difficult to remain perpendicular in the face of somnolescent beckonings, and then whilst in this pseudodreamlike embrace the gibbering madness lurking in the deepest corners of ones awareness is suddenly able to seize hold of the slightest insinuation of detail and thrust it mightily to the forefront of the imagination and force one to confront that which is both within and without!

Translation if you need it: He distracted you with fancy words so that your subconscious can run away with the details.

The counter argument here is that language changes, and his work has just become dated. Not just from a syntactical standpoint either, but the actual fears that his work played to are no longer founded or relevant in society today. A prime example would be "Cool Air" if you've ever read it.
Personally, I've never found the language to be much of a barrier. His work just isn't as relative as it used to be.

[MaximumZero]

Stephen King is about 1% horror,  99% small American town soap opera.

This is controversial? I'm pretty sure he'd agree with you.

[Max™]

Though he has cited Lovecraft as a major influence, the trick H.P. pulled off was one of meticulously assaulting the perceptive faculties of inquisitive personages with unnecessarily embellished draughts of fossilized thesaurus extracts, whereupon even the most exceedingly loquacious amongst us would find the authorial perspective proffered somewhat supercilious and seek respite elsewhere as they find it difficult to remain perpendicular in the face of somnolescent beckonings, and then whilst in this pseudodreamlike embrace the gibbering madness lurking in the deepest corners of ones awareness is suddenly able to seize hold of the slightest insinuation of detail and thrust it mightily to the forefront of the imagination and force one to confront that which is both within and without!

Translation if you need it: He distracted you with fancy words so that your subconscious can run away with the details.

The counter argument here is that language changes, and his work has just become dated. Not just from a syntactical standpoint either, but the actual fears that his work played to are no longer founded or relevant in society today. A prime example would be "Cool Air" if you've ever read it.
Personally, I've never found the language to be much of a barrier. His work just isn't as relative as it used to be.

(Basically, yes, but it seems like King just took the "use more words" part and ran with it.)

[misko27]

Stephen King is about 1% horror,  99% small American town soap opera.

This is controversial? I'm pretty sure he'd agree with you.

There is no greater horror than small-town America.

Can we not make this the "act snide about liberals" thread? I know a couple people have been using it for that occasionally, but it's going to ignite an argument. You can phrase these criticisms without sounding like you just got out of a fight on another site and are trying to bring it here.

I'm not acting snide about liberals. I lean left myself, in many respects. But it's undeniable that some on the far-left defend deplorable practices, as long as it is a practice from a group they identify with (communists, anarchists) or are deemed "oppressed" (Islam).

Personally I blame protestants

Everything went wrong when the papists broke from the true church. Return and all shall be forgiven.

[Enemy post]

Can we not make this the "act snide about liberals" thread? I know a couple people have been using it for that occasionally, but it's going to ignite an argument. You can phrase these criticisms without sounding like you just got out of a fight on another site and are trying to bring it here.

I'm not acting snide about liberals. I lean left myself, in many respects. But it's undeniable that some on the far-left defend deplorable practices, as long as it is a practice from a group they identify with (communists, anarchists) or are deemed "oppressed" (Islam).

Personally I blame protestants

Everything went wrong when the papists broke from the true church. Return and all shall be forgiven.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

[wobbly]

Stephen King is about 1% horror,  99% small American town soap opera.

This is controversial? I'm pretty sure he'd agree with you.

well it's not really, was more following up on what Max was saying above.

[Cthulhu]

Here's a real one:  HP Lovecraft was terrible.

He was important, and he did important things, but most of his contemporaries and later authors in the same vein (Ligotti for example) were much better writers.

[wobbly]

I wouldn't say terribly so much as repetitive. He pretty much wrote 1 story well then repeated the same schtick over & over again. It's why my favourites are always the few stories that break the basic mould.