ilx posts with striking imagery

that were good

their footwork for a comparatively large avian is extraorindary

Veered into parody almost with this tho

From I Love Hoops (very slightly edited):

i just saw a gif of #hardendefense from the 2014 playoffs, someone passes a ball right past him and he sort of turns and paws gently at it like he's sitting on a couch, trying to pet a dog running past, but he doesn't really want to lean too far forward because it's so comfortable where he's at. then it leads to a basket and he just literally scratches his head like, "huh weird."

― nomar, Tuesday, April 19, 2016

To quote myself on this subject:

How To Write A Really Really Good Posting

No one likes to be called "uninteresting", whether or not they know what that means. That's why so many people who might post here don't. If you think about how many people there are, and then you think of how many people post here, I think you'll see what I mean. Fear of being "uninteresting" keeps a lot of people from letting their light shine and that's a shame.

That's why I want to help all of you write things you can be proud of, things you want to show off to the whole wide world wide web. So, let's get started, ok?

First, use small words. No one likes big words, so use lots and lots of small words. Don't use any words that most folks can't figure out right off. With big words they have to read what you wrote more than once to see what you meant. If you put a lot of big words in there, there is a good chance they'll just get all balled up any way, even if they read it over and over. Then they'll just get mad at you or give up. Short words are easy. Every one likes them. They are good friends. Use them.

Make your sentences short, too. Lots of people run out of breath when a sentence is too long. Then they have to stop right in the middle for a while and that's not a good place to stop. They can lose their place or forget what came before. Using lots of short sentences lets their minds rest a tiny bit while they pause in between. This helps. I don't know about you, but my mind gets tired real quick and maybe yours does, too!

Don't be clever. Most folks like new ideas to be simple, the kind they can get a good grip on right off the bat. But what people really like is to read ideas they have already thought before. That makes it super easy to think them again. Thinking a thought for the first time is always the hardest. So keep those new ideas out of your posting if you can help it. This works out great for Reader's Digest and it will work for you, too.

By now you might be thinking, "Hey! This is easy!" And you'd be right! But if you want to write the best you can, keep reading because there's even more to come!

I bet you never stopped to think how much more exciting it is to read a posting where the writer is real excited about what they're writing. But it's true! Excited writers write exciting stuff. And the best way to let the reader know how excited you are is to use lots of exclamation points! They're cheap, so don't worry!

Here's another smart tip from the writing pros. Write about what you know best. That way you don't get all tangled up with looking for new facts about things you don't already know. That's just hard work and you might even get mixed up and write it all wrong and not even know it! Why should you risk looking stupid, when you can write about something where you know all there is to know about it? That way you don't even have to think twice about what to say. You can just say it, and that's that.

Write like you talk. Good talkers just grab you by the ears and don't let go. The same goes for good writers, except they grab your eyeballs. If you write like you talk, you'll find the words will just come squirting out of you and onto the page. And right up into your reader's eye, too! That's what you want.

Use colorful words. It's hard to say what words are colorful, but I think you'll know them when you see them. They're the words that zap you and make your teeth hurt, that float as pretty as butterflies, that make your mouth water and your gums tingle. Think of as many colorful words as you can and fling and hurl them all over what you write. Your readers will be hypnotized.

The last thing I have to say is - have fun! Writing doesn't have to be so hard it makes you sweat like a pig. It can be a breeze! So, what are you waiting for? Let your juices flow and you'll write the kind of real good postings that won't be pushed off into the Dunce Corner. So, lick that pencil and get started today! I can guarantee, you won't be sorry.**

**The author of this piece does not actually guarantee that you won't be sorry.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Thursday, June 2, 2016 1:39 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

jfc end ilx

interesting choice of thread to post that in

not sure what the context was but that seems very unlike advice on How To Write Posts Like Aimless. guy writes every post like he's fn John Stuart Mill or some shit

Possibly I was confused when I wrote that.

i got some in my eye and now my gums are all atingle

cmon flopson

it actually didn't clusterfuck me the way other posts do on ilx

Willingness to attack aimless is a dece inverse test of ilxor moral fibre ime

nb he will not take undue offence were i not to endorse his posting style viewed through a recommendation prism of brevity

there's about as much attacking in this revive as there is striking imagery

still boggling at anyone reading that "advice" as given in earnest tho

also I thought this bump would have been for schlump's post in olive thread

we all know the real trick to capable posting is to sum up conventional wisdom in paternal but patronizing bite-sized chunks

ya was wondering where's the imagery

thought it was meta lit crit

龜, it rly sucks to have to break this to you, but when you become Truly Adult, you discover the deliciousness of olives, in this moment simultaneously discovering the error of yr ways, but also, tragically, once you have reached this enlightened stage of True Adulthood, it is only olives that are enjoyable, the rest of your life as sour & chewy as you once found olives. you shd either try to appreciate olives, now, in advance of them being yr only membrane to feeling, or else try to die young, blessedly ignorant, unbaptized.

― schlump, Thursday, June 2, 2016 12:56 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fine we'll post this too

hey, i'm a big Aimless fan

i just found it funny that his writing tips are 'keep it brief and conversational' when his posts read like they're dusted off and read from atop a cliff. but i love reading that shit. one of my favourite ILB posters

paternal but patronizing

lol c'mon mordy

fatherly, but also fatherly

different roots i thought - pater + patron

i lost my aimless alergy some time last year *shrug*

classical Latin patrōnus protector and defender … < patr- , pater father (see pater n.2) + -ōnus , suffix forming nouns

anyway basically I'm just etymologically clowning, what is this thread about

the whole i love books sci fi 'recommendation' thread he did was a classic troll

Psst. I believe his posting recommendation was satirical, recommending the kind of simplistic posting he looks down about and would never stoop so low as to write, not even in order to conquer.

In general I like his posts a lot, but every once in a while he gets into that bag of one pot on the spectrum calling the other kettles on the spectrum black, and that SF thread troll was a classic example of this.

About = upon

guess he trolled me good then cuz that thread really pissed me off

he sure did!

Well what do you expect when you like to read such a poorly written genre with no sense of joie de vivre?

lol

i didn't care cuz i will talk about sci-fi anywhere. and i got to blab about van vogt on there.

lol

xp

To be honest, I think his initial impulse was to reach out and not to troll, but he quickly felt uneasy and had to get back into his comfort zone as a defender of the faith of civilization against the barbarians at the gateway.

it was a good thread tbf, i got to read good writers on stuff i'll never actually seek out, one of the primary joys of ilx 4 me

what happened to chris p.? wasn't he aimless before aimless on ilb? i even made him a moderator.

chris p left a long time ago i think, someone once told me he thought of ilx as a 'hive of assholes' and that phrase has been stuck in my head ever since. thanks chris p.!

Chris P. went to grad school in Canada, became a medievalist if not a full-blown academic and runs a groovy imprint that puts out lots of interesting books. You can find him on FB if you want.

He's FB friends with plenty of past and present ILX0rs, so he couldn't have been down on everybody. Plenty of these are also your FB friends, skot. I saw him last Halloween, well the night before Halloween, when he was home to give out candy at his mother's house.

yeah, found him on FB. i was never exactly sure how he felt about me though...maybe i was one of the asshole hive...

this place woud be an apiary

In fact when I saw Chris I even discussed that SF thread with him. He told me that he had only recently finished John's Scalzi's Old Man's War and that he didn't read it for the prose style but for the weird ideas. Sorry but your name did not come up, Skot.

this place woud be an apiary

Actually I remember one more thing. Chris recommended Aimless read Delany, which recommendation I passed along on that thread, so he read his way into a little bit of Dhalgren.

Chris P. went to grad school in Canada, became a medievalist if not a full-blown academic and runs a groovy imprint that puts out lots of interesting books

what imprint? have no idea who chris p is, so can't google it...

Punctum

its woozy small hours music, too much coke, walled into yourself. i want you to love me, you send me a coffin of roses. i guess avalon is a fair reference, but it misses something. its music influenced by avalon in the same way that life sometimes feel like its being refracted through movies. it feels cinematic inasmuch as sometimes it feels like you get lost in being somebody else in the dark. bringing a cigarette to your lips, watching the smoke billow up through the lights in the club. this is it though, the glassy surfaces. everything is an image. how hard it is to feel things sometimes. its not empty though, its just half numb, playing itself playing at someone else.

i think this is a pretty strange album though. it doesn't help to just tell people that it sounds like steely dan, or late pet shop boys or al stewart whatever. you think we're idiots? we've heard year of the cat. the album works differently, yeah its heavily influenced by those artists, but it seems really obvious that it wants to use them in a different way than to try and emulate them, or make an album in that tradition. there's a sense in which some music is "about" loving other music, or maybe not even loving other music but about the experience of other music. and so the way the appropriation of that language is functioning seems entirely different to how people want to characterise it here. that is, the comparative criticisms sort of miss the point entirely. yeah things are off, the guy has this wobbly croak of a voice, everything sounds glassily self contained, obsessively neat but weirdly off. a strange lens, the perspective doesn't work. something. but its not a failure at emulating Hats or Gaucho. it directly recalls those records, as records. as sound worlds that can be only re-accessed in this artificial way. a set of surfaces, images, movie scenes.

― judith, Wednesday, February 8, 2012 12:25 AM