Posts matching tags 'clichés'
2004/6/16
A list of things announced by journalists to be "the new rock'n'roll". Given that most of these are fairly staid things (suburbia, chicken-keeping, normality, cooking), I get the feeling that a lot of aging journalists with mid-life crises have been attempting to hand-wave their conservative, settled-down lifestyles into extensions of their long-gone youthful iconoclasm. Which, I suppose it is, though it's like saying that middle age is the new youth. (via Rocknerd)
And here's a Google search for "is the new rock'n'roll"; knitting, gambling, e-commerce, architecture and collective weblogging all come up.
2004/5/9
Strange Horizons Magazine has published a list of scifi plot submissions it sees too many of; these range from generic poor writing (boringly linear plots, deus ex machina plot twists and vaguely Mary Sue-ish pieces about writer's-blocked creatives) to clichés (AIs loose on the net, dystopian futures, cultural misunderstandings with aliens leading to interplanetary incidents) and terribly clever things which everybody else has thought of, like tech support calls for magical items or humans described from alien perspectives as vermin or monsters. (via bOING bOING)
And here's the one for horror stories. Not surprisingly, serial killers feature several times in the list.
2004/4/18
Flyer seen in an inner Melbourne café:
Colour me cynical, but I have some doubts about just how deeply the "Melbourne Ukelele Kollective" is informed by Marxist-Leninist ideology, as the name suggests. Granted, they could, by coincidence, be all committed socialists who gather to play the Internationale and other ideologically sound anthems of the radical proletariat on their ukeleles in North Korean-like unison, from each according to his playing ability; though, somehow, I doubt that. What's more likely is that they're just another group who decided to call themselves a "collective" because it's fashionable, in that apolitically consumeristic, Che-Guevara-T-shirt way.
This trend of calling everything collectives has been happening on university campuses for the past decade, as students eke out ways to be revolutionaries and radicals until getting that job at the accountancy firm; now, it seems to have spread to the mainstream, and appears to be losing most of its Red trappings, with "collective" becoming just the trendy replacement for daggy old words like "club" or "society".
What's next: The Chess Collective? The Red Rebel Motorcycle Collective? Celebrity fan collectives?
2004/3/2
What would a car designed by women for women be like? Possibly something like a new Volvo concept car, with ponytail ports in the headrests, easily removable non-shrink seat covers and no bonnet:
The project team thought women would never want to look at the engine, so the front end is designed to come off in one piece at the workshop.
Suggestions that did not make the cut included an on-board cappuccino maker and foot supports for high-heeled shoes.
2002/10/1
The Turkey City Lexicon, a catalogue of conditions afflicting science-fiction (and other genre) stories:
- "Call a Rabbit a Smeerp"
A cheap technique for false exoticism, in which common elements of the real world are re-named for a fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior. "Smeerps" are especially common in fantasy worlds, where people often ride exotic steeds that look and act just like horses. (Attributed to James Blish.)
- The Motherhood Statement
SF story which posits some profoundly unsettling threat to the human condition, explores the implications briefly, then hastily retreats to affirm the conventional social and humanistic pieties, ie apple pie and motherhood. Greg Egan once stated that the secret of truly effective SF was to deliberately "burn the motherhood statement." (Attr. Greg Egan)
- The "Poor Me" Story
Autobiographical piece in which the male viewpoint character complains that he is ugly and can't get laid. (Attr. Kate Wilhelm)
- Used Furniture
Use of a background out of Central Casting. Rather than invent a background and have to explain it, or risk re-inventing the wheel, let's just steal one. We'll set it in the Star Trek Universe, only we'll call it the Empire instead of the Federation.
(via bOING bOING)
2002/3/12
Read: The curse of coffee-table cinema, or how thanks to Disney's Miramax unit, much of "art-house" cinema is now formulaic, content-free soft-focus schmaltz designed to flatter viewers' sense of culture in a mindless sort of way.
Miramax has given the world a host of cliches about European culture - naughty French priests, macho Greeks, hoity-toity Englishmen, zany Italians - and has reduced human complexity to a bunch of hopeless stereotypes bursting with sentiment.
(See also: Working Title, Merchant Ivory) (via FmH)
2000/8/10
Some clichés never die: Wouldn't you know it; the first place winner of the QuakeCon "coolest case" contest involves a glowing skull. (via Slashdot)