Jake

Idle Thumbs 181: Rumors & Hearsay

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picked up Wolf in White Van.  It's fantastic.  Like a sense of an ending, should probably be read in one, or two, goes as it spirals so much into itself, it allows you to get more out of it.  

 

It's weird that the lit creep in me was fighting the game creep in me.  Trace Italian sounds like something I'd love.  Even when he names it, I know that Christmas Morning sorta feeling you get.  

Also, it made me watch the first hour of Gor on Amazon streaming. Not very good.

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And in The Blues Brothers, Elwood uses "to bullshit" as a term for telling white lies. "I didn't lie, I just... bullshitted you."

This is pretty common parlance in the US. Although, it isn't white lies per se. Bullshitting is a slightly different skill. It involves saying a lot of words without actually saying anything. Making your target believe that you agree with them, or will sign the deal, or whatever else without actually presenting a position or making a commitment. It's telling people what they want to hear without actually saying it.

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This is pretty common parlance in the US. Although, it isn't white lies per se. Bullshitting is a slightly different skill. It involves saying a lot of words without actually saying anything. Making your target believe that you agree with them, or will sign the deal, or whatever else without actually presenting a position or making a commitment. It's telling people what they want to hear without actually saying it.

 

Huh, interesting, thanks. Guess I'd better go watch that movie again now!

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Just to add: I thought of a good illustration of the distinction: if you're a student, you can try to bullshit your way through an essay/test/etc. i.e. you don't really know anything about the topic, but you know things adjacent to the topic, so you just talk in circles around it and hope that nobody notices that you actually have no clue what the economic impact of the Franco-Prussian war was.

 

But you wouldn't say you lied through the exam in that case.

 

Is there a colloquial equivalent in the Queen's English? I didn't realize it was an American-ism.

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I thought bullshit crossed the pond to us, but maybe not all the way to Britain? There is bollocks, it's largely the same as bullshit.

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In that exam example, I would say I blagged my way through it (same with an interview etc), but I couldn't use that for talking to a friend. Perhaps this is just me, but I think over here "bullshit" simply means lies. "Bollocks" can also be used for that, but can also be used to say something is crap.

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I think the key thing is that the phrase denotes something of poor quality, in the context of it being ostensibly of good quality. You can bullshit, horseshit, bollocks, crap, etc your way through anything.

This thread is making me lose my appetite.

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You can bullshit, horseshit, bollocks, crap, etc your way through anything.

 

I propose this be the Idle Thumbs Forums motto!

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As fans of the show Trailer Park Boys know, one person in Canada is actually the undisputed champion of shit derivatives:

 

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As fans of the show Trailer Park Boys know, one person in Canada is actually the undisputed champion of shit derivatives:

 

I love it so much! The best bits are when he gets into Bubbles's head.

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1) I can understand cringing at the use of "xenomorph" and I don't think it's necessary to use in the context of a discussion that's already specifically about the  Alien franchise, in which we've only ever (in the movies,at least) seen two types of alien - the eponymous one, and the Traveller in that dead spaceship. But I do think you need -something- to refer to that specific creature in a more general context, because there are a whole lot of different kinds of alien in media. So, xenomorph is, for now, that term.

 

2) Man, 80 Days is awesome. Getting into fistfights with waiters, committing mutiny, having a romantic evening with Death...and I think that people who dislike steampunk as a general rule should be okay here. It's not nearly as tropey as that label might make it sound, and the worldbuilding on display is solid and original. It's also demonstrably really meaty, because even my (unfortunately failed) run only made it through maybe a sixth of the cities in the game before I made it back to London, and it seems like most of them (and most of the travel methods) have at least one unique bit of narrative attached, probably more than one in many cases. And that was a several hour experience. Well worth it.

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1) I can understand cringing at the use of "xenomorph" and I don't think it's necessary to use in the context of a discussion that's already specifically about the  Alien franchise, in which we've only ever (in the movies,at least) seen two types of alien - the eponymous one, and the Traveller in that dead spaceship. But I do think you need -something- to refer to that specific creature in a more general context, because there are a whole lot of different kinds of alien in media. So, xenomorph is, for now, that term.

I don't think you do. "The creature from Alien." It's hard for me to imagine a situation where it's not clear that you're already talking about Alien/Aliens, or where you are talking about so many different monsters or Aliens that you absolutely don't have the linguistic time to append the very brief "from Alien" for context. Also, "the creature from Alien" or "the monster from Alien" or even "the alien from the Alien movies" is WAY clearer than "xenomorph", which isn't an actual word and can't be assumed to be in most people's vocabulary.

Considering it's not even actually called a "xenomorph" in the fiction of the world, it seems overly affected to me to use it as though it were.

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Nobody gets confused by the Alien vs Predator movies even though both of those monsters are alien predators.

 

Best weird nondescriptive monster naming: people are way more likely to understand what you're talking about if you say "Jason" than "Jason Voorhees."

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I don't understand what's wrong with calling it a xenomorph. You know what it means. The fact that it's not referred to in the source material and isn't a dictionary definition doesn't mean that's not what it, now, is.

 

It's like colloquially calling someone a dude and saying "No, he is a man."

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