The stupid debate that ABF made even stupider thread

[OB1]

If that is so then why do you come off sounding like you prefer the visual medium? And not just here, everywhere else as well. You say that, but your writings suggest differently, I'd say...

No, it's just that you like to lump things into certain bizarro-ABF categories in that twisted mind of yours to make arguments easier for you to create.

But that argument makes no sense... things are described to you so it requires less imagination? Huh? That completely defies logic... no matter how well something is described in words it is never like a picture. And in words it's not just carefully constructed things (like visual metaphors) that require an imagination, it's pretty much everything... it does not require as much artistic attention and the result is at least as good and often greater. Anyway, the point is that I think that that potential argument of yours has no merit.

It has as much merit as Ryan and yours. Like both of you were doing, I was removing some very important aspects of the the topic at hand in order to give my (hypothetical) argument more merit. Ryan's point was that books inherently require more imagination than movies do because in a movie when you see a car that's what everyone else sees, while in a book a car is going to be described in detail for you to imagine in your head. What I was doing was taking this very simple example that is isolated from the entire point of my argument and doing the same thing that Ryan did. The point is not what the car looks like--the point is what exists beyond the car and what the car represents and what purpose it serves in the story. So the imagining comes not from picturing the car that has just been described to you, but seeing beyond that to the purpose of the car's existence. So basically the only thing books inherently require more imagination than movies do is in forcing the reader to use a little bit of imagination (if the books is descriptive enough) to picture that car, something that is so insiginificant compared to actually understanding what the car means. Compared to how much thought and imagination goes into understand what the car means... simply picturing is a non-existent point. And since that true imagining is unquantifiable, there is no inherent advantage one way or the other. If you really struggle to use that "artistic attention" span of yours to picture that car then you're missing the entire point.

You haven't said much good about written works on this subject and haven't said much bad about visual so could anyone be blamed for thinking that?

Not only does that sentence have nothing to do with what Ryan and I were talking about, but you just had to say something so incredible ignorant that no words can accurarely describe what I'm thinking in reply to that sentence right now. Do you think of everything in the most juvenile of terms, ignoring obvious meaning and trying to somehow balance what you think is some sort of black and white contest? I don't even know how to begin to reply to something so weird that has zero bearing on what we were discussing. It's like two people talking about the qualities of celluloid versus digital and then some weirdo coming in and saying "oh so you think that celluloid is easier to use for brushing your teeth???!!".

Anyway, the greater point here isn't about arguing whether books or more intelligent movies are better but to state that most people don't want to bother with either one and would rather indulge in less intelligent forms of entertainment like most movies and television shows... even if movies can come close to or perhaps equal the height books can reach on requiring imagination and being intelligent, most of the time they don't, and it's a whole lot easier to do that in film than in books and it's a whole lot easier to consume the result as well. Even the simplest book requires some amount of concentration and thought, while I don't think I would say the same about TV shows.

You know, it's bad enough that this entire "debate" so laughably wrong and stupid that debating over whether a saxophone is better than a paintbrush would seem like a more reasonable thing to argue about, but your (ABF's) points are so devoid of any actual insight or thought that I'm thinking that it would be utterly pointless to continue any further with this. If there's one thing I've learned from you, my dear Brian, it is that trying to educate you about anything is the most fruitless endeavor any man could ever pursue.