It's fun pseudo-Gothic trash for a few books. First three, as I recall, before she completely munchkins her main character and it gets really faggoty. Interview With the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and Queen of the Damned, and then stop. If you find yourself with Tale of the Body Thief in your hands, you've gone too far and need to go back.
She's got some porn books under a pseudonym too--"Anne Roquelaire" or something like that, I'm not looking it up. Interestingly, she was the one who kicked off the modern resurgence of the female obsession with BDSM, and she also brought "ponyplay" into the mainstream consciousness.
I read them as a teenager, so it's quite possible these are worse than I remember. At the time, I was reading stuff like Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and Larry Niven...also Raymond Feist for fantasy, and I found Rice to be trashy in comparison, but not prohibitively so. I dunno. I read her because nerdy-but-hot teenage girls were reading her, and I wanted to bang them. Eventually I did, so it all worked out.
You appear confused, or you're replying to the wrong person.
Except that obviously they do have that claim, because look around you. They're claiming it, and what exactly are you going to do about it?
Attempting to build up your (belligerent) alliance up to someone's doorstep, when they have the ability to defend themselves against this, is retard diplomacy.
Along with Tony Timpa, Daniel Shaver is another harrowing example. I can't even watch the video of his slaughter without my pulse rising and my face getting hot.
These things don't matter to the kinds of people you're talking to, however. As Jonathan Swift said: "You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place."
Also, these people have been trained by decades of completely faulty education, to never accept that they've lost a point and use that to modify their own conclusions, or to accept an opponent's proven point and compromise. They've been trained that in the event that they've lost any argument, to run back to a "trusted authority" that agrees with them, and use that to simply dismiss any opposition out of hand. People who consider themselves "the smart ones" have been indoctrinated as severely as any Scientologist, and to lose an argument pertaining to one of their sacred positions is a threat to their entire sense-of-self.
Their self-worth and self-schema of being "smarter" is bundled into their obeisance to the orthodoxy. If the orthodoxy were to lose an argument through them, the entire delusion of intellectual and moral superiority might be shown for the fraud it is. Any given argument might seem like not such a big deal to you, but for them it could provoke a total mental breakdown.
Wanna hear a heresy that's gotten me in trouble more than once?
That's how I feel about Foo Fighters. Toothpaste commercial jingles. Aggressively okay. I have never understood why people go all gaga over them.
It's not that they can be played at the same time without tangling, it's that all the chord changes, key changes, bridges, breakdowns, swells, pauses, are in the same place. If you could draw a topographical map of a song, it'd be the same for both songs. It gave the impression that these were being very cynically and mechanically produced.
In the early-to-mid 2000s, a website popped up that simply played their "Someday" and "How You Remind Me" simultaneously, unaltered, with one song through the left channel and the other song through the right channel. There was a slider bar that would slowly mute one side while elevating the other. The slider bar was there in case you didn't believe what you were hearing and needed proof, because what you were hearing was that these songs could be played right on top of each other and it was nearly seamless.
It's not so much that people "hated" them. They were just very bland, very generic, and inexplicably ubiquitous. You couldn't escape them, especially in a grocery or retail environment. When large numbers of people are basically forced to hear something over and over, especially something almost aggressively bland, and they literally can't get away from it, that's going to leave a lasting negative impression.
Tolkein was interviewed frequently on the subject of, and of his own accord wrote what probably amounts to thousands of pages explaining in detail regarding, exactly what his motivations were, his inspirations were, and his desires were, both from an authorial standpoint and illustrating what he wanted out of his audience.
These are all just stupid kids who are so afraid to and/or lazy to do the homework, that they'd rather just blithely hypothesize that their opinions are all that matters, and no record from the past could possibly disagree with them. Nobody involved in these things cares anymore beyond the money and stardom it brings them now. They're not reading enthusiasts, certainly not appreciators of Tolkein, and have no informed opinions on anything they now serve as the face of. I have severe doubts that literally anyone involved in the product has read the 4 main books that serve as the series.
(various internet noises)
You need to eat fire ants. What I am telling you, is that you are transparent, and it is tiresome. Nobody gives a shit that you have a hate-boner for Donald Trump, and that this is how you want to spend your online life--celebrating what you perceive to be his losses, while pretending to be some sort of master strategist. You're an ignorant turd with his head on backwards, and you are an antagonist to the possibility of getting decent people in the positions they should be in to actually help their constituents.
You are some cringy shit. You have a very obvious monomaniacal goal, and it's tedious as shit. You're completely uninformed, and you pretend to play insider-baseball with the governance of places where you have no knowledge, and no interest.
WEF scumbags destroying the country
Yeah I'm doing this by being a strong parochial citizen, and supporting local good guys, not by power-brokering with far-away places whose political players I do not know.
and not on your fellow citizens on the right.
This from the guy who's been reduced to a one-trick pony, that trick being popping up like a macaw every time the opportunity to fling shit at Donald Trump arises? You are not my "fellow citizen," you are part of the problem. You'd throw your support behind people you haven't vetted, simply because they are capable of giving the appearance of supporting your "team." Then lo and behold, after they get the seat, they stick a knife in you, and you didn't see it coming because you can't be bothered to inform yourself beyond looking at jersey colors.
Just stop, child.
I doubt Alaskans give a shit what you would have done if you had any skin in the game regarding their governance. I have no idea why you feel you have some relevant opinion on the subject either. I do observe that you've been the weird guy popping up in numerous threads for no other reason than to chime in on any political thread tenuously connected to Donald Trump, to throw shit on him and anyone he's ever smiled sideways at. This looks like more of that.
As someone who lives under a DeSantis Governorship, and has been watching you wanting to fuck with that, and now watching your couch-potato General-ass pontificating on the politics of yet another State you don't live in and make grand sweeping pronouncements on their people whom you do not know, how bout you go on ahead and fuck off now. We're doing just fine without your "team-playing."
What bizarre reasoning. You don't support the Republican candidate, lose the seat, and it's her fault?
No broheim. If you don't support the candidate, it's not your seat to have, is how this works. She didn't "lose you a seat," you did. This is a clear, unambiguous example of "You get the representation you deserve."
This picture of what? What am I supposed to see here that is in any way "harrowing?"
I see a floor of I-don't-know-where, covered in pieces of paper that I largely can't see, put there by I-don't-know who. I don't know who took this picture or why, who published it, there's no information in it, I don't know who staged the scene and placed the objects where they are, and the only thing I can recognize is a file-box with some Time magazines in it, which if you're going to try and convince me is harrowing, you better have a good explanation as to why, not just some vaguebook bullshit.
This is a rorshach test for crazy people.
Tolkein's works elevate, celebrate, and romanticize virtues such as dignity, stoicism, humility, loyalty, honor, self-restraint, duty, yearning, and self-sacrifice.
GRRM's only bring these concepts up to have them fail in the face of unrelenting human ugliness. The entirety of the GoT cycle is pigs fucking in the mud.
On a completely unrelated tangent, I wonder if our dear M. Fauci has ever shared a room with M. Rocco Siffredi? If not, this is an oversight. I am sure they would be delighted in each others' company. We could even round out the guest list with the following additions:
M. Gaspar Noé
M. Vincent Gallo
M. Lars von Trier
Such an important man as our dear Anthony "The Science" Fauci would surely delight in an evening in such esteemed company. A meeting of the minds and other assorted organs could and should be arranged, for all humanity's edification. Drinks are on me you sonofabitch.
Apropos of nothing, I've been wondering of late what the effects of--theoretically of course--the institution of public, universally-broadcast, brutal, enthusiastic, unrelenting, balls-to-the wall, crying and screaming, tissue-tearing multi-angle HD face-in-the-dirt rape would be as punishment for the highest of crimes against humanity.
Surely if self-aggrandizement and personal gain is the motivation for a crime like this, humiliation and degradation in equal-but-opposite proportion would be the most suitable outcome and future deterrent, no? For crimes that damage billions of lives, a real butt-fucking of biblical proportions, to be spoken of in hushed tones for a generation?
If mass graves had tombstones, that slogan would be written on an awful lot of tombstones.
"Twoslugbuttquiplus."
I like "slug-butts," for short.
Impossible. Plurality is dead, and institutions are run by winner-takes-all. No legislative process is going to point at schools that are entirely staffed by liberals, leftists, progressives, and Communists, say "tut tut chaps play nice now," and that will magically happen.
These big gray boxes where children are shipped to daily for processing, are simply a bad idea. That gray box system has managed to successfully lobby for fully half or more of all property taxes, and nobody blinks. Of course that's going to be a political chess piece, because that's a dragon's hoard of resources and reach.
This is Hamiltonian government, and it fucking sucks from its foundational assumptions. Starve it, neglect it, dismantle it brick by brick.
Right now, sort of the more important point though. The forum origin question is "What happened to him" which rather implies a concern with what he's going through and where he may eventually land. Nothing about the current work (which is sort of a low-rent George Alexopoulos) indicates that this content has its head on straight, because it's still straight-up reactionary. Okay, it swung from left-wing reactionary to alt-media reactionary, but it's still vacillating wildly.
A cynic would observe that the most likely answer is he licks his finger and sticks it in the wind to see where it blows. The more charitable answer is some sort of come-to-Jesus moment. Both together would agree that the overall personal situation is clearly all over the place.
I don't think he's specifically a feminist. But he is a populist, and unfortunately popular opinion is very feminist. He has only ever billed himself as traditional insofar as the 1980s embody American traditionalism.
Me, I'm willing to accept that as a stepping-stone, because it was a glorious illusion.
I think the point is not so much that he's "a leftist" per se, but that he's a perennial radical looking for something to get all agita about. Yesterday it was blah, today it's anti-blah, and smart money doesn't bet on where he currently is, but that the human ball-in-a-roulette wheel will most likely continue to keep on boffing about.
The ability to vote is not and never should be a reward.
Loosely, you could say The Silmarillion.
Personally, I don't believe that's predominantly J.R.R.'s work. I think his son Christopher, and another writer named Guy Gavriel Kay, wrote most of it (perhaps based on notes left by J.R.R., maybe) and passed it off as official LotR material.