The Everlasting Gobstopper* is Your Obedient Serpent's own rhyming slang for a "Neverending Doorstopper", the most egregious metastasis of Trilogy Creep.

To qualify as an Everlasting Gobstopper, a work must have most or all of the following traits:

• Each volume in the series will run around a thousand pages, putting each individual installment ( Read more... )

It's called "Friday" because, by the time it gets here, you're fried.

It's called the "Weekend" because, by the time it gets here, you're weakened.

This one should be easy to parse: it's a portmanteau of "dot your I's and cross your T's" with "mind your P's and Q's".

It describes over-attention to detail, to the point where you're "correcting" things that aren't really mistakes.

A more subtle variation is "cross your eyes and dot your T's".

It should come to no one's surprise that a great deal of what I read on the Internet, particularly on the Friends list of this very site, concerns dragons.

It should come as no further surprise that I greatly appreciate someone taking the time to present the following:


( Read more... )

When Your Obedient Serpent says "hoopy", he's not making a Douglas Adams reference.

A hoopy task or process is one that requires jumping through hoops: before you can perform the task, you have to perform another task, which in turn requires another task, and another. It's a highly gradable adjective: a process can be "a little hoopy, but worth ( Read more... )

Wikipedia has a surprisingly good, succinct and precise explanation of a concept that is supposed to be deliberately inconcise and obfuscating. It begins:

Fnord is the typographic representation of disinformation or irrelevant information intending to misdirect, with the implication of a worldwide conspiracy.
And it goes on from there ( Read more... )

Your Obedient Serpent has traveled a lot in his life. Throughout his high school years, his family lived in a motor home, and would take any excuse to pull up stakes and hit the road for a weekend or a week or a month, however long we could get away from work and school ( Read more... )

I'm such a slacker, I only manage to be an amateur crastinator.

Charles Stross explains why he's burned out on "Steampunk".

It boils down to "90% of Steampunk is crud", of course, and over at Futurismic, Paul Raven's commentary applies the inevitable and immortal coda to that clauseI enjoyed both articles, and my superficial summary should not be construed as a dismissal; both Stross and Raven do provide some ( Read more... )

A Bad Case of the Sparkles describes those classic Hollywood vampires who ignite when exposed to sunlight.

This can range from a slow, Joss-Whedon-style smolder to an instantaneous Hammer-style Roman Candle.