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Fight Club and Children of Men are two books that I truly enjoyed.

Fight Club is a little more "interesting" though, split personalties, plot twists and of course fighting is always more adaptable to screen than a man rolling a dice.

I think if they did it it may be pretty different from the book.

... and chew valerian root :) Fight Club is full of useful information, by the way (the book, too).

... and chew valerian root :) Fight Club is full of useful information, by the way (the book, too).

Atlas Shrugged is one of those books that is often life-changing. Whether that is positive or not depends wildly upon the reader and their situation.

Other books I'd put in that category are Fight Club and Walden

When Gnutella file sharing first became popular, I noticed that if I searched for .txt files I could find popular books of the day. Sometimes I would download them and do a find and replace operation to change the names of characters, sometimes to my own name or of other people, just to be silly. I think I did this with all the Harry Potter books. I also recall creating a heavily modified version of Fight Club which had a happy ending.
This isn't really what the article is about, but it does show that some edits may well be intentional. None of the works I modified, as far as I recall were in the public domain at the time.

Fight Club was a 90 page book

Predestination was a 5 or 6 page short story

This was posted yesterday on Reddit in writing tips. It's advice from Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) to never use 'thinking' verbs wrt your characters. It's for fiction, but I think it is every better applied for non-fiction. Mr. Stone should have a look at it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1pwh3z/what_small...

Chuck Palahniuk's sole foray into travel literature is called "Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon". This is the author of Fight Club and Choke.

http://www.amazon.com/Fugitives-Refugees-Portland-Oregon-Jou...

Are you aware Fight Club was first and foremost a book? If you've had the opporto read the author's other books you'd likely distinguish a vein of an original artistic contribution that run through his material, straight through to Mr Robot. I'm speaking specifically of the philosophy here. So to also adopt the plot and style so heavily, I just can't.

So for someone to dismiss out of hand with so little consideration, as you did, the artistic licence which was taken with the material in this instance, and then to follow-up without considering my follow-up comment, that is condescending in its own right. To right off the other's thoughts so glibly.

And sorry, but working in the gaming industry does not give someone authoritative rights on being able to call out a rip-off. It's possible you missed something here. In which case it might not be the worst thing in the world to fully consider the other person's arguments prior to responding to the comment by simply stating you hadn't changed your position. A very dismissive response.

"Read books. A lot of books." An invaluable piece of advice from a distinguished philosophy professor of mine.

As a freshmen I'd somehow found my way into his ancient philosophy course–a junior/senior elective typically reserved for PHL majors. While I was able to pass the course, I was always embarrassed by my paper submissions because they'd be returned to me dripping in red ink from his observations. This was a man that had his own translations of Plato's works published in textbooks, and he cared enough to take the time to point out my juvenile grammatical errors on 20 page papers! At the close of the course I wanted to "make amends" for my shortcomings by asking him how I could improve my writing ability. I anticipated he'd recommend some tome on grammar [that I'd never end up reading] but instead he simply said "Read books. A lot of books" and he left it at that.

I've no idea of the count of books I've read since taking his advice to heart, but it's made an enormous difference in the way I structure prose, the vocabulary I use, the tone & voice of my writing, and I could go on... I feel that if you read the works of authors you like on topics that you enjoy, you'll absorb much of what makes their works great. You'll find yourself improving without consciously trying to improve your mechanics–but you need to enjoy what you read for it to work!

And as a check on your own development? Throw in works like "A Clockwork Orange" or "Fight Club" from time to time. These works have intentional errors and nonsense thrown in by their authors to mess with their readers. If your head begins to hurt while reading them then, in terms of your own development of skills, you've done something right!

>Chuck Palahniuk

I've been reading his books since I found out who wrote Fight Club in 1999. My brain does NOT want to remember how to spell his name. It makes me feel like I have a learning disability.

I was about to say that adding water would be bad in the case of lye, but after some research it seems I was wrong. Probably watched/read "Fight Club" too often. Apparently using an acid like vinegar to neutralize lye is more painful than flushing with water and creates a lot of heat because of the strong reaction.[1,2] So the recommendation actually is to just flush with water for 15 minutes.[3]

[1]http://itonlyadds.blogspot.co.at/2012/08/on-chemical-burns-v...

[2]https://www.soapqueen.com/bath-and-body-tutorials/tips-and-t...

[3]http://www.certified-lye.com/MSDS-Lye.pdf

This kind of stuff in Fight Club is probably done very much on purpose. One big point of the book is that people (and perhaps men in particular) tend to be wired for struggle and a search for (a) meaning and (b) a reinforced identity in a social context. There's a number of ways that can be found, but the training of a monastery, the grind of boot camp, the initiation into a fraternity... that's part of what they do.

As an exercise, the astute reader may wish to translate the paragraph beginning with "Apprentice monks" above into corresponding aspects of Valley/Startup culture.

Yeah, I read Fight Club too, dude.

We could have a much deeper discussion on the evolution of society and how the gradual reduction of physical survival difficulty has eroded a lot of the male bonding development that used to exist. But a lot the OP was about difficulty making friends even when people had a lot of things in common, so I was sharing an anecdote on how a shared activity and commitment, even for a mostly trivial hobby, still led to what I considered good friendships.

You may consider bonding through my softball team "play time." I posit that it's better than not bonding at all, but if you really want to dismiss my friendships and suggest the only way to forge lifetime male bonding is to form an underground anarchist militia and make bombs out of soap, I'll take that under consideration.