Bay 12 Games Forum

My main thrust was addressed at quality, however

You meant quantity, yeah? And... conceptually, I guess? But the saturation point for any particular published genre is not static -- authors float in and out constantly, just like fanfic authors float in and out of active writing. Especially among the worst authors, heh. It's not a terribly low limit on sheer number of drek, and that's something that's exacerbated by the fact that published stuff tends to be longer per work -- a really terrible fanfic author may never produce a novella's worth of text, but that trashy romance novelist produced at least a good 100k words and change.

Though yeah, there's a quality difference. I'd just argue that the quality that they primarily differ in isn't all too terribly core to overall work quality -- it's most strongly seen in mechanics, not plot/characterization/world building. With the latter, I'd fairly strongly argue the difference between published and unpublished work is not particularly notable.

Though @ Ree, the WH40k stuff varies wildly. Some of it's pretty good, just like a fair amount of the Forgotten Realms stuff is solid. It's just some of it... isn't. Think there's some derivative LNs or manga out there that follow similar patterns, heh.

-2 seconds of googling suggests the U stands for Ultimate.

Beach is also full of jellyfish and, worse, tourists. Though to be fair to the tourists, the only thing worse would probably be the locals. S'how it is 'round here, anyway. Pool is nice even when near beach. Much less likely to be attacked while swimming, either physically, aurally, or photogenically.

Man, Sturgeon's revelation was a product of a time in which a bad writer still at least had to convince the staff of a SF rag to publish their stories. The internet allowed for a tremendous explosion of all the shit that would ordinarily stay in daydreams and teenaged poetry, magnified by greater access to media.

And yet sturgeon's still still pretty much entirely accurate. All that shit was still and is still being published -- the only thing editors and whatnot really control for is mechanics (spelling, sentence structure), when it comes to bottom barrel material. Having read entirely too much drek out of sheer boredom, worked in libraries, and spent many an hour trawling through used/discount/thrift stores for books, I can pretty safely say that fanfiction is little to no worse than published media when it comes to headdeskingly bad writing. It just has more spelling errors and marginally worse grammar.

Looking at SF rag stuff would have gotten you a better than average ratio of junk to readable, honestly -- the really amazing drivel is in romance, westerns, crime/mystery novels, and so forth.

... you're not required to be locked into MS Office unless you're a student or a business (or their employee), anyway, in which case if you don't have full functioning .docx/etc. integration (i.e., you have office, because insofar as I've noticed no-one has managed to entirely crack whatever MS does to kill compatibility these days), you're very likely to be just flat screwed. You, yourself, may be able to get away with not having access to the MS Office suite, but you're going to be working with a lot of people that do use it, and have to be able to make sure there's no compatibility issues, or your grade or (much, much worse) your business tanks. M'by and large a pretty high-functioning computer user, m'self, and getting through this latest round of college education was a goddamn mess without home access to Office -- most of the folks I went through school with were entirely willing to bite the cost of MS instead of dealing with that mess, even with the school providing free library access.

Which is how it works. It doesn't matter how spoiled for choice you are if the vast majority of people are still using a single thing you have to be able to work with. That's pretty much literally how MS is maintaining their hold on things -- businesses and their workers can't stop using MS software because too many other people are still using it, and trying to wean off means they introduce a whole host of compatibility and communication issues to their workflow and interbusiness communication. And in doing so, lose business, potentially to a crippling degree. Integrating people working with different software is a bloody nightmare in the business world.

Maybe (shit, hopefully -- I'd love to actually be able to go into a job involving any degree of digital paperwork and expect to not need easy access to office) the mobile/cloud upswing is going to chip into that to a meaningful degree. M'personally not holding my breath at the moment, and won't until whatever MS's latest format is stops being the default for business (and by dint of that, education and a great deal of casual personal use). Because right now, it is, and it's not really budging, even as mobile use increases and starts to integrate. We've still got a long bloody way to go before that actually makes inroads hard enough to be called substantial.

... wait, gates was held as a villain by the media? I... don't remember that? Microsoft definitely catches flak, but most of the media attention I've seen on gates specifically was fairly positive...

There's probably several, it's just that no one's really listening to them anymore.