I don't know if this advice is universally helpful or just for people who think like me, but honestly, never ever work based on a word count. I'm not convinced showing me statistics on how many words I wrote today, having a word count goal rather than something more vague ("get past X scene today"), or comparing one…

Agreed. The #1 priority for an aspiring to be a writer is to shut the hell up and write. Everything else is secondary to this. I wrote three novels in Microsoft Word with my only tools allowed on-screen being a browser window (strictly for Googling facts) and a notepad++ window for my notes text file. Yes, just one…

Agreed with you re: notebook. I use my phone for this purpose as I'm sure most people do, but I'm never shy about and I never put off whipping my phone out and jotting down an idea really quick.

Don't tell yourself you have to write out anything in order. Some people think you should start at the beginning, and that is as far from the truth as you can get.

I feel so vindicated by rules like this. My workspace - both at work and at home - are disaster areas and every horizontal surface is covered with things. But I know exactly where every item around me is, so suck it. I generally find that when I "clean up" it becomes so much harder to find things.

English is literally a living language, and the use and literal definitions of words literally change over time. You could literally complain that evolving word use has literally "diluted" the language so you can't literally come home and exclaim, "I feel very gay today!" without literally having a very long…

That's one of those things that makes sense to lawyers. There's a lot of regulation on how they can use words like "free" in advertisement; that's why most big companies all sound exactly the same - because using other wordings can open the door for lawsuits. I agree it's dumb, but "free gift with purchase" is the…

Synergy

Never heard of a gift exchange? Or a conditional gift?

Never heard of a gift exchange? Or a conditional gift?

That's not necessarily a universal style. There are perfectly common times when you may want to distance your personal opinion from statements of fact, and "My feeling is..." or "I think..." is a good way to distinguish the two.

It goes without saying that...

That's not necessarily true. Anyone who might be seen as speaking from a position of power, or anyone who might be seen as speaking for a group of people, has perfectly good cause to be clear that they are speaking as a person and not as a position.

"Literally" is just the hyperbole du jour. Complaining about its "incorrect" use is just loudly advertising that you are thrown by anyone making a statement that is not absolute truth.

The first five games I played after buying a new PC were, in rough order:

In the show's defense, the sword explicitly has magical powers over wind. Being able to deflect arrows with a sword makes sense if you can magically deflect the arrows into the blade.

Please tell me this is just alpha footage with placeholder textures and with effects not yet programmed in...

It's this product at ThinkGeek.

It's this product at ThinkGeek.

Nope. Corn is heavily subsidized in the US, thus making corn products absurdly cheap. On the plus side, food is way more expensive in Europe than it is in the states in my personal experience. On the down side, HFCS is way cheaper than sugar.

I'm pretty sure they don't use the exact same flavoring, since they're using a sweetener that is less sweet.