Because it’s one fucking topic out of many many many more. Just a few weeks ago, there were 4 or 5 other “book-specific” GoT topics. So 20% of GoT topics had that rule.
But there’s two obvious reason for the rule.
A) You’re not only spoiling the show, you’re spoiling the books. You may think “I’m just talking about things that have already happened” but for those of us who read the book after watching the show, we LIKE finding out about the differences. When a storyline has changed from the book, that means it’s a new experience reading it.
B) It’s a slippery slope from “I just mentioned the book” to “So and so is gonna die at the end of the season.” The same thing happened in the Walking Dead threads where people started out making minor comparisons until it grew to big things being spoiled. And we’d get plenty of “Oh, just wait til they get to this place, wink wink nudge nudge” talk. Zero tolerance makes sense, so we don’t have to make judgment calls on “that’s a spoiler.”
Drunky Smurf, you are a gentleman and a scholar. We need to start a support group for victims of trashy popular fantasy — who can say how many IQ points have been lost forever, washed away by floods of turgid but banal prose? Seduced while too young to know better by the Weises and Hickmans, the Martins, the Goodkinds, many individuals never recover. In fact, they may not even realize how deeply their predilections have corrupted them! (Thus this thread.)
If anyone is interested in helping by donation, we will likely need the following items: razors for cutting neck-beards; antiperspirant sticks; classics of English-language literature (have an old Norton anthology from college? Why not put it to use: some of these poor souls have no books without dragons or buxom warrior ladies on the cover). I’d also appreciate it if someone with contacts at a methadone clinic could get with me. The Cheeto addiction can be brutal.
Good modern fantasy is welcome, of course; one can never have enough Gene Wolfe. But be aware that support group members will have to be eased back gently into the consumption of fantasy, lest they risk relapse.
Well, my ONLY mention of the book was “But really, this show is going WAY to much into the torture. The books simply implied, never actually detailed it while it was occurring.” My point was that HBO was showing too much excessive & gratuitous torture, a point made by several others. Now the defense for HBO would be “Well, they are just doing what’s in the books’ but you see, that’s NOT in the books. So, I wasn’t discussing what’s IN the books so much as what was NOT in the books. And, dozens of posters have mentioned in those threads that HBO has added a lot of nudity, etc.
And here is the well reasoned response from Senor Beef “For fucks sake, no one mention the word “book” in these threads ever again. You add nothing to the discussion and you just fucking open it up to stupid squabbling again. THE BOOKS DO NOT EXIST IN THESE THREADS, stop talking about them in any context, and stop trying to argue the policy. “ So if anything, rather than me “* over-exaggerated his stance”* as you claimed- I toned down his actual anti-book stance. I had to. No one would beleive me if I posted his actual stance and beliefs.
Oddly other have said things like mentioning certain characters etc are original with HBO for the TV show- which means they are thus saying they are not in the books. But since they didn’t actually *say *the “b-word’ and since Senor Beef isn’t smart enough to figure that out, he lets those slide.
Sez who? Since a significant amount of the posts in the thread are Senor beef and his sycophants yelling at people for mentioning the “b-word” it seems that there’s not a lot of support for this. Was there a poll? Did we take a vote?
Even if the ratio of book-readers to non-book readers really is 80/20 (and note that that only means that people may have read the very first book, not the entire series), so what? What’s wrong w/ allowing the 20% to remain unsullied (see what I did there?), except just to be an asshole?
Can anyone count how many times I have said "I am Ok with a “no spoilers’ rule”. "
Who is the asshole: *“But really, this show is going WAY to much into the torture. The books simply implied, never actually detailed it while it was occurring.” *
or
*“For fucks sake, no one mention the word “book” in these threads ever again. You add nothing to the discussion and you just fucking open it up to stupid squabbling again. THE BOOKS DO NOT EXIST IN THESE THREADS, stop talking about them in any context, and stop trying to argue the policy. *
I don’t have too much of a dog in this fight because I don’t care for George “Railroad” Martin’s writing and haven’t been watching the TV show either.
However, there was a similar situation with the Sookie Stackhouse books/True Blood TV series. On another message board, where the moderation is a shitload more draconian than it is here (the MB in question rhymes with “Smellevision without Shitty”) the admin finally made a similar decision to ban all discussion of the books from the TV threads. The reason being, people who had read the books were extremely bad at determining what information was spoilery and what wasn’t, and also there were several divergences between the books and the TV shows, so all of the threads were turning into “That was a spoiler” “No it wasn’t” and/or “Let’s hijack the thread with a 4-page discussion of how the books are different from the TV show,” which was pretty much off-topic for a thread about the TV show.
The TV show and the books are separate entities. It is entirely reasonable and appropriate to request that one thread be left book-free so that the entire fucking thread doesn’t keep devolving into nothing but discussions of the books and whether information in the book is a spoiler and how the book is different from the TV show, blah blah blah.
You keep saying this but it seems obvious to me that by the standards of the dope your comment was spoilery (and opens the door into arguments about whether they are more torture-y, how much torture is too much, and so on, to boot). Your comment was the dickish one in intent, and it appears the dickish tone of SB’s comment derives strictly from the fact that you can’t seem to keep these dickish comments to yourself.
Well, had the latter been a first blush, point blank response absent any other context, I might have agreed with you.
However, considering you and your endless bickering were a large part of why the arbitrary rule was drafted in the first place during the first season of the show, and you’ve made your specialty of skirting the rule as hard as you could during second season (not to mention, made pit thread upon pit thread about it, and no-spoiler policies in general) AND you’ve started doing it again as evidenced by this thread, well, I’ll hand it to you, it’s quite obvious to everyone who the asshole is. To everyone involved.
I do wonder, do you have some particularly hardcore strand of Asperger’s, that you can’t even pick up social cues when they’re written down for you ?
Know what, asshole? Just because today I have a light workload and you are being a pathetic little twerp, I’m going to force myself to do some math today.
As of right now, we’re looking at a 246 post thread. Here’s a quick break down:
So that’s 26 posts out of 246, or 11%. Both AK84 and magnusblitz’s hijacks were full spoiler hijacks, rather than book discussion, and took up 10 posts total. So the book-only discussion hijack that you mainly participated in accounted for 6% of the thread. But wait, there’s more! You said it was SenorBeef and His Sycophants (clearly, a lute and lyre cover band) taking up most of the oxygen in the room, but forgot to account for the fact that of the 16 hijack posts, you yourself accounted for 6 of them - so Senor and his merry men took up a mere 4% of the thread, trying to get you to stop spewing bowelfuls of crap all over the thread.
Further spoilers: there will be a number of scenes of people plotting treachery and skulduggery while naked. Because that’s what people do when they get nekkid, they plot treason. The blondie dragon chiquita will be named Empress of Everything on the basis of having the most perfect ass ever. “Shorty” Lannister will not have any nude scenes. If you would like that to be different on the basis of equality and acceptance, you are a good person. For any other reason, you are a perv.
It was news to me as well. But it’s becoming clear that he is a raging asshole, frothing at the mouth with impotent rage as he digs his own whole deeper and deeper, wallowing at the nadir of the Pit of Stupidity.
Sad, in a way. “I fear to watch, yet I cannot turn away.”
Excellent use of fact and statistics to make an argument. I don’t really give a crap about the subject of the thread, or the minutae of how to talk about a TV show, but as a scientist, I’m obligated to give kudos.
Someone was just recently banned from participating in ANY thread about The Office because he would pop in every week just to post about how AWFUL it’s gotten and how he can’t believe ANYONE is still watching it, even though he had clearly just done so himself. The mods finally got fed up and told him to leave the threads and not come back. Sounds like something similar may need to be put into place here.
Everything they type in this thread makes me embarrassed for them. They’re like a 4 year old trying to argue physics. It’s beyond their ken and it would be hilarious if it wasn’t so damned pathetic.
Easy peasy. You. Next question?
Undoubtedly. Or else they just don’t care. Because it’s infinitely better for one pedantic wanker to have their way and stomp their feet, than everyone else (except those equally opposed *silent * complainers!) who has agreed to the consensus (of just one person though!).
