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Aussie! Welcome back. As promised, you are a mass murdering robot in my book. You run Acme, Inc., a firm founded by the Professor that holds a monopoly on all tech manufacturing, including a coconut powered time machine.

However, for various reasons, I've decided not to publish the book until after I write and publish a totally different story about the rise of the Antichrist within the Catholic Church. The book summary for it is on the last page of my thread.

Some of the fans say that Snoke in The Last Jedi is worse than Jar Jar. Personally, I liked Jar Jar.

The research is going to require many long months, especially since I can't keep anything in my head. I had to buy five books just to find two decent Catholic interpretations of Revelation, and even they don't agree.

Draft Book Summary:

Just finished The Exorcist (40th anniversary edition). Meh. Medically and religiously speaking, it's incredibly well researched, but the Father Karras character (a Jesuit psychiatrist) treats phenomena like mind-reading and telekinesis as facts of modern science, ruling them out as signs of Regan's possession. I'm glad those elements were left out of the movie. The prologue was a mess and the first few chapters didn't draw me in at all. The book was written in omniscient POV, with quite a bit of telling, and overuse of flashbacks. I don't mind omniscient if it's well done (e.g., Dune), but in this book, the author, William Peter Blatty, headhopped like a ping pong ball, including describing things that happen when no one is present to see them. Also, a heavy focus on excrement, vomit, and obscene masturbation involving Regan that took me out of the story. Nevertheless, none of the above got in the way of him selling 13 million copies, so what do I know? I got some useful research out of it, although I prefer the prequel, Exorcist: The Beginning, written by another author.

Now back to researching the Book of Revelation. I now have five books on interpreting Revelation, three of them written by Catholic theologians, and they all disagree wildly about the prophecies. One of the Catholic authors cites quack science about the ability of the U.S. government to use EMF-emitting technology to control our thoughts.

Here's the most difficult example of was/were I came across as I wrote my current book. There are a total of six:

With the help of njc and Janet Reid, we got it down to three:

Chapter 28, King of the Salves, is up. It's a cleaned up version of the same chapter from v2, including suggested edits from reviewers. I also rewrote the opening to make it more from Joseph's POV, rather than that of a neutral narrator. Given that the temperature reaches up to 50 degrees Celsius due to the Warming, I got rid of the convertible taxis. The cabs are fusion-powered, so there's plenty of energy to keep the cabs running and the air conditioners going. Leonardo's cab is specially equipped, since he's the Crazed Cabbie, and can eject its roof. The aero-hunters are open-air vehicles to begin with, since the guards need to be able to stand up in them and shoot at those they're pursuing.

Quick, go read!
Dirk

Welcome. Here is a quote from a post my Marilyn Johnson that you may find useful: The one thing I would suggest is when you post your first chapter or story or poem, make sure to post it in a group that pays points to the reviewer, like the Premium group.  If you're not a member of it yet, may I suggest you join that one before you post.  You will get more reviewers if they get points for their review, which they will use to post their next piece.

I finally continued watching the Exorcist Anthology. The film with the worst rating, Exorcist: The Beginning (11% on rottentomatoes.com), was almost as good as the original film, in my opinion. I actually ended up buying the Kindle book for that movie. It's very well written. That leaves me just one more film in the series, Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, which is an alternate story from that of Exorcist: The Beginning.

The Catholic ritual for exorcisms only uses the line "The power of Christ compels you." one time, whereas the movies repeatedly uses "The power of God commands you. The power of Christ commands you." It's too bad that isn't part of the real ritual, since I was going to use those lines myself.

Thanks for the links, njc. I've only briefly reviewed them, but will do so in detail before I start planning the main story elements. I'm leaning toward keeping climate change out of the book and going with the original, simpler premise of the Antichrist trying to seize control of the Church in the present. It would be far easier to write without having to become well-versed in climate science, not to mention having to project the story world forward 30-40 years. Dan Brown tried to include antimatter physics in his Angels & Demons book and got the fundamentals wrong. Studying Catholicism is hard enough.

My initial impression is that wattsupwiththat.com isn't trying to give a balanced view of climate change, but refute it. Some of the links I followed in your first article showed what appeared to be cherry-picking from the papers. I also saw one reference in passing to Breitbart News, which is not a site I would look to for unbiased opinions. I'll see if I can find it again when I read the articles in depth. I prefer "fair and balanced". :-)

Your last article talks about 413 papers that refute some of the arguments made by climate change supporters, but doesn't say how many papers were published reaffirming the general consensus. It's roughly 13,750 (97%). Below is a link claiming the remaining 3% of papers were flawed.
https://qz.com/1069298/the-3-of-scienti … ll-flawed/