Kevin's Watch

Stephen Donaldson likes to use obscure words. A lot of them. Reading his books, most everyone needs a big fat dictionary (or several of them) and time to digest the full meaning of his rich language.

But that's not a Law of Nature. When we become Cyborgs, with the mandatory built in Dictionaries, thesauruses and Wikis, reading Stephen Donaldson would be a whole different experience.

How will Cyborg You feel about the books now that their meaning has become instantaneously crystal-clear to you?

My Microsoft Word X grammar check mechanisms take infinite time to process the text because the code was created by people who think compound/complex means EVIL, and "See Spot run" is writing.

The thesauri, wiki, and dictionaries declare genocidal war on each other, while all three sub-routines of my Semiotic database laugh and laugh and laugh.

My Master-personality software dual-processes in parallel streams: the right channel experiments with synthesizing appropriate emotional response to all 10 billion possible meaning combinations.
the left channels refines context-relevant means of expressing psuedo-sadness to the few remaining "humans" for the death of fantasy in the face of realism and technology.

My plastic-clad grey matter screams silently forever.

To me the books would have remained as good as before, perhaps better if there was never any language barrier. The richness of the language and the layers of meaning imbued in it would not have been lost. They would only shine brighter.

But if my dictionary-thesaurus-wiki addons interfered with my sense of enjoyment I could get them them offline for the 13 seconds I'll be reading the book and install the emotion-motion total-immersion addons for the nonce.


Vraith - obviously you need to install a new Googoo-Linux brain. Don't be afraid to explore your penguin side

I've never, ever, not ONCE needed to pick up a thesauraus to find the meaning of a word in any of Donaldson's work..
So yeah it would make no difference to me whatsoever.

Let us all buy the NinjaBoy edition dictionaries

Poppycock, I say!

His work is cobwebbed with improbable METAPHOR; topheavy with the cumbersome burden of a salutary incongruity.

Much of it would still be utterly impenetrable to the shallow illumination of algorithmic regularity; the faint path-light provided by the pulse of electronic synapses clicking away along their digital pathways.

That's all I got to say.

P.S. Kinda missed the Watch. <3

The Watch misses you too!

danlo wrote:The Watch misses you too!

What he said

I would find the dictionary-thesaurus-wiki helpful, but me, human/skurj hybrid me, enjoys the books with only the glossary provided.

*sizzle*

All the dictionaries in the world haven't helped us understand my personal favorite: unambergrised

shadowbinding shoe wrote:Let us all buy the NinjaBoy edition dictionaries

So you'd be buying.. nothing.