Goodkind XXXVI. Moral pie with celery sauce

[The Wolf Maid]

My eyes burned.

Seriously, I'm so very curious who'll the actors that would play the main characters for SoT TV. I'm still rooting fro Britney to have a spot there.

[Moosicus]

The end of the video confused me. Was that really Tairy? How do we know? He was wearing shades to hide his raptor-like gaze. Not to mention he was smiling. Never seen that before. At least it gives the .netters something to masturbate to.

[The Real Will]

[quote name='Myshkin' post='1346386' date='May 8 2008, 09.23'][url="http://www.terrygoodkind.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3467"]Here's the latest[/url] from .net on the casting situation.

And just for fun, [url="http://www.terrygoodkind.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3473"]here's Tairy driving a race car.[/url][/quote]

The world-builder in me wants to point out that there is a shot of Terry putting on his Yeardly gloves and yet, when he drives away, the gloves are nowhere to be seen, but the connoisseur of irony in me loves that fact that Goodkind lacks continuity, even in real life.

Also, the entire video contains only eight words, but he still manges to have a typo and an incomplete sentence. You can't help but admire his dedication, this a man who lives as he writes: in poorly constructed prose, where the present doesn't necessarily have any connection to the past or future.

[Foreverlad]

I hope MyAsterisk gets sued for illegal use of copyrighted music.

Ayn Rand would never use someone else's creations without permission.

[The Wolf Maid]

Oh, come now, like anyone would sue over--

If I were a decent songwriter, I'd sue too if my works was used without permission with anything associated with Goodkind, unless it was to mock him.

[Atreides]

One part confused me: during the middle of the video it kept showing one car speeding alone around the track. I take it that was Goodkind's. Was there no one else on the course (there had been a minute earlier, unless this is multiple days in one video); was Goodkind in last; was he in first, or the video trying to make it seem that way? I yearn for the truth of this matter.

[The Pita]

My god, people, you're trying to so the impossible, and impossible things don't exist because everything's possible and otherwise it would be a contradiction!
If you see the gloves on and then off, it's because the Yeard took them off! With his raptor gaze!
Anything that seems like a contradiction is only you being stupid.
Unless You is Myshkin.

[The Real Will]

[quote name='Un-Yearded Pita' post='1348479' date='May 9 2008, 21.33']My god, people, you're trying to so the impossible, and impossible things don't exist because everything's possible and otherwise it would be a contradiction!
If you see the gloves on and then off, it's because the Yeard took them off! With his raptor gaze!
Anything that seems like a contradiction is only you being stupid.
Unless You is Myshkin.[/quote]

Well, yes, you may be right. But I prefer to believe that Goodkind lives, rather, in a permanent and natural state of non-continuity. He dwells somewhere outside the space/time continuum and the standard laws of causality do not apply to him. If he writes books in which distances, personalities, natural laws, magical laws, moral laws, and the price of eggs are in a constant state of flux, it is not because these are continuity errors. No, rather it is because that is the truth of the world he lives in. If he can be wearing a pair of gloves at one minute and have them disappear the next, if he can be driving among a group of cars and suddenly find himself all alone on the track and perceive this as natural, then it is quite easy to understand why the mutability of space in the midlands is of no concern to him whatsoever.

I say, well done that man. More power to him.

[Jaxom 1974]

[quote name='Myshkin' post='1346386' date='May 7 2008, 18.23'][url="http://www.terrygoodkind.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3467"]Here's the latest[/url] from .net on the casting situation.

And just for fun, [url="http://www.terrygoodkind.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3473"]here's Tairy driving a race car.[/url][/quote]

*WAUGH!*

Apparently you have to have a log in to see the video!

:lol:

[Larry.]

Well, if you really want to see it, just [url="http://www.terrygoodkind.com/RacingMED.mov"]click here[/url], as I bypassed the log-in requirement.

[Shevchyk]

[quote name='Myshkin' post='1346386' date='May 7 2008, 18.23'][url="http://www.terrygoodkind.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3467"]Here's the latest[/url] from .net on the casting situation.

And just for fun, [url="http://www.terrygoodkind.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3473"]here's Tairy driving a race car.[/url][/quote]

Oh Sweet Buttery Jad on a Sigil Spike that was goofy. No one warned me about Goodkind's irritating nasal accent!

[The Real Will]

[quote name='Triskele' post='1349496' date='May 10 2008, 12.00']Question: What does "The God of good people" mean to you Lemmings?[/quote]

It would depend a little on the context. It could refer to a mythical construct designed to enslave the masses and draw their minds away from the Truth; tt could be a title assumed a pseudo-communist overlord in order to awe the mindless throngs with his own magnificence and thus deprive them of their essential human dignity and their desire to stand up and live their own lives; it could be a code word for some form of goat; or it could refer to Richard Rahl or Terry Goodkind--or Richard Rahl and Terry Goodkind as I'm fairly certain that they make up two thirds* of some lesser known holy trinity.

You understand that etymology is difficult when it comes to the Yeardian languages, and questions of mean of value can be hard to pin down.

[quote name='Triskele' post='1349496' date='May 10 2008, 12.00']PS

Am I supposed to capitalize Lemmings?[/quote]

I'm not sure but the answer is either, a) Of course you are, for we are Lemmings and will be given our due, b) Certainly not, the lemming is the natural enemy of all things good and thus must not be encouraged, or c) You are responsible for your own life and none can tell what to do with, your punctuational choices are likewise your own and must reflect your inherent human dignity.

Understand that you must choose one answer and that whichever answer you choose it will almost certainly be the wrong answer at the given time. This is just the way that things are done here.

*Or more probably five sevenths of a holy trinity as I'm almost certain that Richard is worth more than most men, but not more than all men. Although that doesn't sound right now that I think about it.

[Sophelia]

[quote name='Exa Inova' post='1345617' date='May 7 2008, 13.38']I like to show off my new avatar in this thread first.

My daughter loves to watch Nick jr. There is this show which I'm certain is a secret anti Yeardkind show. Its called wonder pets and features a [url="http://www.nickjr.com/shows/wond_parents/index.jhtml"]a lemming, a chicken that is not a chicken and a turtle[/url] that save animals with deeds of altruism.[/quote]

Hmm - there do seem to be a lot of coincidences, including the very moral:

Wonder Pets Celery Treats

Wonder Pets Nutty Celery Stick

:smoking:

[quote name='Myshkin' post='1346386' date='May 8 2008, 00.23'][url="http://www.terrygoodkind.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3467"]Here's the latest[/url] from .net on the casting situation.

And just for fun, [url="http://www.terrygoodkind.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3473"]here's Tairy driving a race car.[/url][/quote]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

:ack: How embarrassing is that? :o

[Viragora]

Wow. Ok, I have read almost every one of these threads, then re-read several parts of the books, and I've come to the conclusion: I am either really dumb; or my English teacher was justified in failing me. I just don't see what is so horrible about the writing. The SoT series are some of my favorite books. Now, before everyone starts flaming, I understand the arguements about Terry, about the ethics of Richard vs Terry and the speeches in the later books, I am talking only about the prose and that some people compared it to a high school sophmore's personal journal.

So, I guess what I'm asking is an English lesson: why is the fire speech so horrible? If this is so bad, does anyone have an excerpt of some good writing?

On another note, I went through some of my collection and made this list:

[b]Liked:[/b]
Farenheit 451-Ray Bradbury
Animal Farm-George Orwell
Robert Jordan
Sword Swinger series-Jennifer Robertson
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
Piers Anthony
Crime and Punishment-Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tanya Huff-The Quarters Novels
A College of Magics-Caroline Stevermer
Melanie Rawn-The Exiles, Dragon Prince series (didnt like Dragon Star)
The Grand Tour-Jody Lynn Nye
Utopia
Mercedes Lackey- Dragon Jousters and The Valdemar collection (with exception of the Gryphon trilogy)
Lord Valentine's Castle- Robert Silverberg

[b]Didn't like:[/b]
Lord of the Flies, Golding
Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Miguel Cervantes- Don Quijote
Steven King
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Adams- add to this most any space-style including Star wars and Star Trek
Interview with the Vampire by Ann Rice- and all sequels
Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer, not sure if there is a book I hated more than this one
add to this most space-style including Star wars and Star Trek

Not sure what this says about me, but I am interested to hear what you think.

[Foreverlad]

Viragora,

No worries about flames. It's an honest question and you've been considerate enough to read through our rants.

On the subject of fire: It's not so much bad 'writing' as it is stupid writing. The most influential man in your town gathers you all together to discuss the evils of fire. People start tearing up and nodding in agreement, completely taken by the orator's message. That's what bugged me about it. After decades (or centuries) of use, the town mayor is deciding we should find ways to stop using fire? It's one thing to propose a town fire fighting unit, but that's not what was happening. Dick's (step) brother is convincing the townfolk that fire is bad. No one questions it, no one doubts the validity of the argument.

It's much like Zedd convincing the angry townsfolk that their genitals suddenly disappeared. Honestly, I can appreciate backwoods stupidity, but isn't that a bit much?

The entire Fire passage is a great example of Tairy and his straw man writing style. Let the bad guys make stupid arguments while the good guys do the questioning and challenging of the ideals. No intelligent person rapes and pillages and kills and justifies it with Socialism/Communism. Tairy lacks the capacity to look beyond moral absolutes and his characters are empty vessels reflecting that.

Aren't the best novels filled with antagonists who can make the protaganist question his position? Moreover, shouldn't the reader be forced to argue with themselves over the validity of an argument?

Tairy's novels are all about living and thinking for yourself, but they don't show you how to do it, they tell you how and through what codes you must follow.

Everyone here will have an opinion and a

[Lemming That Is Not]

I've been "free riding" these threads for a while and I just had to contribute something.

Some time ago I "read" Yeardy KindaGood's Assterpiece Almost-Quad-Trilogy (audiobook) till I literally dropped. I got through the first book and then thought It was rather entertaining (at the time), so I endeavoured to marathon the rest of them. I got till Chainfire where Klit (Khalan's rhyming nick with Rickhard's) is gone and Dickhard leaves O'ldworld. I thought I was going nuts after listening to those self-righteous multi-hour-long rantings and just couldn't go on any more when I found myself skipping whole 20min parts or reading a magazine while the ranting went on.

After realizing my "wrong" ways, I almost felt that there was no reason for living, that I hungered for death, after I so cowardly failed to complete the glorious rite to truthfulness... that I could not finish reading the whole SoT. I thought I must be an evil death-chooser to have these wicked thoughts.

I felt alone, that I was the only one who thought that this "praised" writer didn't keep all his marbless in the same basket until found this/these thread(s) in westeros.
In that instant I felt my commie lemming pilar-of-creation rise in me, over me and finaly covering me in death-slime of immorality.

I gave up my inDICKvidualism and gained freedom from the Sort of Turd :thumbsup:

You gave me back my sanity and peace of mind. You all saved me, Thank you!
I felt being almost-raped the whole time I was with SoT (mainly after book 4).

NOW, I'm ready to embrace lemmingness, abandon Yeardy's "truth" and begin dreaming about thrusting moral celeries into his arse, very, very looong celeries!


BTW you guys are ingeniously hilarious... :drunk:


...so, whats up with the "Chick, that is not a Chick", is TG into Shemales? :sick:
(or is it nothing more that something like this: [url="http://www.philosophersnet.com/images/chicken.gif"]NotChicken[/url])


What do you think, shouldn't we have "officially" stated rules too, like noble Goatkind has?
Or do we and I have missed them from the earlier threads?

something like...

Lemmings First Rule:
#1 Tho Shalt Nut Fed teh Yeard


What happened to that see'er-lady that was prisoned by that RapedQueen Cyrilla. Was it morally right to leave her there to rot and NOT for example exchange her to Klit's brother?


[quote name='Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, Full Metal Jacket, probably Dickhards morally best friend']"Who said that? Who the fuck said that? Who's the slimy little communist shit, twinkle-toed cocksucker down here who just signed his own death warrant?"[/quote]

[Myshkin]

As for the fire speech:

Imagine trying to live life without fire. No way to keep warm at night, no way to cook food, no way to work metals, no way to illuminate the darkness. Fire is one of the most basic needs of mankind. Without fire we die. But in Tairy Goodkind's world a moving speech can make everyone forget that. That's why the speech is so stupid. No person, or group of people, anywhere at any point in history would ever consider banning fire. No speech, no matter how moving, would ever convince anybody to consign themselves and their loved ones to a cold and hungry death.

As for the Lemming(capital L) rules:

We only have one: DO NOT FEED THE YEARD!

[The Real Will]

[quote name='Viragora' post='1350215' date='May 11 2008, 04.05']Wow. Ok, I have read almost every one of these threads, then re-read several parts of the books, and I've come to the conclusion: I am either really dumb; or my English teacher was justified in failing me. I just don't see what is so horrible about the writing. The SoT series are some of my favorite books. Now, before everyone starts flaming, I understand the arguements about Terry, about the ethics of Richard vs Terry and the speeches in the later books, I am talking only about the prose and that some people compared it to a high school sophmore's personal journal.

So, I guess what I'm asking is an English lesson: why is the fire speech so horrible? If this is so bad, does anyone have an excerpt of some good writing?

On another note, I went through some of my collection and made this list:[/quote]

A couple of people have mentioned why the fire is stupid, but I think you're asking about the prose alone. It's a difficult question to answer because people tend to make their own judgments about the quality of writing and demonstrating the flaws objectively is not always possible. In Goodkind's case he is not a consistently dreadful writer. He doesn't produce prose to standard of say Newcomb who could make a persons hair curl with his inexplicable inability to turn a phrase, but Goodkind does fail often enough, and significantly enough that he deserves some disdain as a professional writer. Especially as a professional writer who lauds technical ability in ones profession as a great virtue.

How does he fail? On a purely technical level, he is not marvelous at punctuation. I would give some examples but the only Goodkind I can quote are the Mad Moose's quotes of the day and since the Moose typed those in himself there is no assurance that the punctuation is exactly what Goodkind put originally (no offense to you, Moose, but it's a lot of typing to do and typos are bound to creep in somewhere). Still, Mr. Goodkind runs on sentences like there is no tomorrow. That is, he loves to join two sentences together when they are really separate and without providing the necessary words or punctuation to join them.

The second thing, technically, the Goodkind loves to do, is to misplace a modifier. Here I will give you a quote. This one is from Soul of the Fire. "They flowed around the trees and benches in the center, between the two sides of the road, making them look like treed islands." The question is, to what does the last "them" actually refer. Grammatically, it would seem to refer to the first "they" ie. the crowd. However, the crowd looking like treed islands is fairly stupid. Obviously it is actually referring to the trees and benches among the crowd however it's not really grammatically correct. The sentence is very unclear and is generally considered very poor writing. (Also, comparing isolated tree and benches in a big crowd to treed islands isn't the world's most creative metaphor. But maybe that's just me). Goodkind does this one a lot as well. He also tends to write in very short sentences. Mr. Goodkind seems to believe that every clause is important enough that it deserves a sentence of it's own. Now, this can be used to good effect on occasion, but Goodkind fills pages with tidily little sentences. I am being slightly unfair; he does break them up a little, and occasionally he goes for a really long uber-sentence in which he combines all the above grammatical errors into one glorious stew of nonsense.

So, that's the technical elements, and if they were his worst failings then people would probably shrug and ignore it. He certainly isn't alone in his grammatical eccentricities. But he tends to break a lot of writing rules as well, and he's not breaking them in order to test them. He's breaking them because he doesn't really understand them. His best and most glorious failing is probably his refusal to show things and not tell them. It is generally accepted that if it is much more powerful to demonstrate a character being evil than to just say "Jagang was an evil evil man". Take any of the generally praised books from your "liked" list and count the number of times that the reader is told by the objective, narrative voice that a character is "evil" or "good". Take Martin as a really good example. Martin never tells you how to judge a character, he just shows the characters and their actions and still everyone manages to make a judgment. Now take almost any page of Goodkind; almost everything described has a value judgment attached to it and those values are to be seen as objective and unquestionable.

But to come back to the fire speech. The real problem with the fire speech (aside from its stupidity) is that it is largely unconvincing. Michael is supposed to be a great orator, capable of easily swaying public opinion, but the demonstration of his skill is fairly unimpressive. In my opinion that crowd would probably have pitied him, seen him as having lost his mind a little over his mother's death, maybe even laughed at him. They wouldn't have been swayed though. There is a term for this, but I can't recall it just now. Now, that's a bit of a subjective judgment, I admit, and partly it does just come back to the stupidity of the argument. Probably the best modern comparison to be made would be a speech against electricity. Imagine if the greatest orator in the world stood up and told us all that electricity was dangerous. We'd probably accept that. It is. It has killed many people in its long history. What if they then went on to say that electricity should be banned? I don't think there would be many takers. One or two for sure, but we depend on electricity too heavily for most people to really accept that it ought to be banned.

Which is probably the other greatest problem with Goodkind's writing. People don't act like people in the Sword of Truth. They act however Mr. Goodkind needs them to act in order to demonstrate whatever the point of the moment might be. He needs the crowd to be stupid and gullible and to be swayed by a moment of passion into banning something that their entire existence depends on because he feels that it is a neat metaphor for gun control.

Goodkind is emotive, biased, unreasonable, unrealistic, and has absolutely no interest in injecting a little consistency into his world. He throws modern terms into his pseudo-medieval world ("chain reaction" and "give peace a chance" anyone? What kind of medieval peasant quotes John Lennon?), and his uneducated back country character talks like a scholar. In fact all of his character speak in exactly the same style. Zed's minor luggage inspired Tourette Syndrome and Jegang penchant for calling everyone darlin (is this supposed to be a truncation of darling or is it a made up word?) are about as much characterisation as you're going to get. The good guys take their language straight out of the Objectivist's handbook and the bad guy crimp theirs together from the mein kampf, the communist manifesto, and a greenpeace flier, but it's all the same style. On top of all of that the man struggles with, and is often over matched by, the English language generally.

I hope that answers your question. I know I'm a little biased, so feel free to take it or leave it as you see fit.

[Norseman]

[quote name='Foreverlad' post='1350341' date='May 10 2008, 23.01']It's much like Zedd convincing the angry townsfolk that their genitals suddenly disappeared. Honestly, I can appreciate backwoods stupidity, but isn't that a bit much?[/quote]

Nope actually that makes perfect 100% sense if you go to google news and write [url="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=steal%20penis&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wn"]steal penis[/url] you'll see tons of examples of this happening in the real world. This mentions mainly witches, but similar panics in the Sudan, Uganda etc were supposedly caused by the Jews. In some parts of the world this is so common they have a word for it [url="http://www.medicineword.com/shook+jong.shtml"]shook jong or koro[/url].

[The Real Will]

[quote name='Norseman' post='1350843' date='May 11 2008, 16.11']Nope actually that makes perfect 100% sense if you go to google news and write [url="http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=steal%20penis&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wn"]steal penis[/url] you'll see tons of examples of this happening in the real world. This mentions mainly witches, but similar panics in the Sudan, Uganda etc were supposedly caused by the Jews. In some parts of the world this is so common they have a word for it [url="http://www.medicineword.com/shook+jong.shtml"]shook jong or koro[/url].[/quote]

I know. It has always been my contention that Goodkind's greatest gift is his near prescient ability anticipate current events. I felt much the same way when the magic began to seep from the world and no one could remember dragons anymore. Also in the midst of the great chicken attack of '03.