Hello. I'm not sure if you noticed me, or if you've seen me around. I know I have seen you before, and while I don't know your names, I have come to know you as "They Who Lack Volume Control". I had hoped that was your only vice.
Last night I encountered you at the BYU-H swimming pool, where three of you had decided to inhabit one of the swimming lanes. As a person who swims laps, I and my ken are rather dependent on the existence of available lanes. You, meanwhile, seem to have chosen to not only take up this lane, but to remain at the shallow end, wrapped cozily in floatation devices, talking to one another in the piercing voices that have become your trademark.
I could have excused this if there were an abundance of open lanes; if there were no area where you could sit besides the lanes; or if you were even occasionally swimming what could be called a "lap", but alas you fulfilled none of these exonerating criteria. While there are many health advantages to swimming, there are relatively fewer to standing around shouting jovially at one another while partially submerged in water. Your inactivity rather defeats the purpose of whatever you hoped to accomplish--as a matter of fact, I do not even have a clue what you were trying to do, but I do know you failed, so useless was whatever it is you were--and I use this word loosely--"doing".
I could see quite clearly that all three other lanes were doubled up for nearly the entire time I was there. I noticed this while swimming back and forth, so you have no excuse for not noticing it while you were doing little but existing in a particular space, unless for you the mere act of existing takes up so much of your energy and focus you are unable to consider that others exist. I have considered this possibility, as your existing moniker suggests. Some people, myself included, even attempted to use the rest of the lane to work around you, functionally making you inanimate obstacles. However, an inanimate object does not occasionally shift and shout and sway and cast dirty looks in just such a way to make working around it more difficult. From this I can extrapolate that you are more useless than literally useless things.
I think you fail to understand that you could have stood just about anywhere in the pool. Frankly, the pool was extraneous for what you were doing. I'd wonder if you know how chairs work.
If you haven't gotten the gist, I hate you, mesdames. You might not the worst people in the world, but your faults--that is, being so self-involved and stupid and stubborn that you are unable to recognize that you are not only being inconsiderate to others but gaining utterly no benefit from it--are the kinds of thing that I consider the worst traits a person could have. You're the same kind of people who speed in residential zones and join pyramid schemes and I hate you.
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
An Open Letter to Roger Ebert Regarding Video Games
Roger Ebert famously declared “Video games can never be art” in his article of the same name. Since then, he has redacted this to restate “video games will not be art during any of our lifetimes.” While this was enough to at least reduce the amount of flack he received from the gaming community, it was not enough to satiate me. As an avid gamer, a dedicated critic of all things creative, and a lover of nitpicking, I take issue with this. In the revised article, Mr. Ebert said that many of the rebuttals included specific recommendations of “play this game” or “play that game” which, obviously, are poorly suited to the argument. Mr. Ebert is a film critic, and a good one at that, and he has proven his mettle as a film critic any time it has been questioned. The man is an expert. However, I can say bluntly that he does not know video games. His established expertise is part of the reason this so badly perturbs me; Mr. Ebert is not the typical internet ignoramus nor a senile old man scared of change and pining for the bygone days that never existed, he is a genius of his craft whom I respect and admire and, as an amateur but devoted critic myself, someone to whom I often turn for research purposes. I care what he thinks, and it is therefore annoying, to say the least, when he says something so drastically wrong. Video games are already art; they have been for some time, and while the definition of art is quite subjective, it is hard to create a fair system of evaluation in which it does not qualify.
I have a great concern that Mr. Ebert is allowing himself to be controlled by a confirmation bias. While he admitted he observed a compelling argument from video game designer Kellee Santiago, who cited several examples of artistically-inspired video games including Flower, the entire premise of which is built around the concept of nature versus industry, Ebert still claims “These three are just a small selection of games, she says, ‘that crossed that boundary into artistic expression.’ IMHO, that boundary remains resolutely uncrossed.” However, he then cited Georges Melies’s A Voyage to the Moon as being more artistic than any of the games provided as examples. A Voyage to the Moon was not made with artistic vision; Georges Melies was a magician, who was more interested in the effects of editing as a means of tricking the audience than in using film as a means of art, and he never pretended otherwise. While A Voyage to the Moon was important in terms of future films, it is not, in and of itself, art, by most definitions. He even goes so far to acknowledge he believes chess to be an art form, though doing so would almost certainly validate Tetris or the Professor Layton series the same way.
Firstly, we must address the issue of “what is art”. The term is so subjective that it is difficult to say it has any true meaning, and my personal definition (a work within a medium which exemplifies its ideals) is a particularly loose one. Internet-based comedian and art film critic Kyle Kallgren, specifically addressing the question “Are video games art?” in response to the opening of the Chicago Museum of Art’s new video games exhibit, says “Of course they are. That’s not even a question. They’re made by artists with a creative vision of an artificial world shaped by the author’s creativity and vision. The medium has given us countless memorable characters, shaped our view of history, added to the cultural lexicon, and, like it or not, video games have touched every part of modern life.” However, if I am to make a fair argument, I need to evaluate video games on Roger Ebert’s criteria. Further, as I said, Mr. Ebert is not a gamer, he is a film critic. If I’m to refute his argument, I’m going to need to level the playing field, so to speak, and approach everything in terms of film. I present my argument in the terms of film, as far as I have learned them: of mise-en-scène, of cinematography and editing, of narrative, and of sound.
However, I would first like to point out that Mr. Ebert’s claim would be far stronger if he were not a critic of film. Film is itself a very new medium, and one that is undoubtedly an art form, at least to the aforementioned Mr. Ebert. The reason he eventually acknowledged he could not say video games will never be art was because “Perhaps it is foolish of me to say ‘never,’ because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time,” elaborating to state, “Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.” Rounding for ease of use, film has been around for roughly 112 years; video games have been around for forty. Forty years, may I remind you, is also a long time. A hypothetical critic of paintings or sculpture or theater could say that film would never be an art; however, were he to say this in 1940, it would mean ignoring the dozens of noteworthy films that had already come out and have since been vindicated by history, as well as proving said critic was only tangentially familiar with the medium. Giving myself a life expectancy of 76 years, that would mean that video games will not develop into an art in ninety-eight years. If this same criterion were applied to film, then Citizen Kane would be considered part of the “dark ages” of film creation, before it became art. Video games, too, have been art for years, evident to those familiar with them.
The interesting thing about that hypothetical critic is that he’s unnecessary. That hypothetical is extraneous, because this has already happened. The exact same thing happened with the introduction of diegetic sound into film in the late twenties. Critics of silent film stated that it was a fad, a gimmick; real artists filmed things silently. Charlie Chaplin outright refused to use sound film for most of his career, only caving decades after the change had become nearly omnipresent in the industry.
In terms of mise-en-scène, video games represent a great amount of creativity and effort. Video games are the only medium where science fiction and high fantasy are alive and well; as a result, many video games rely on intricately-designed and extremely creative settings, props, and characters of diversity rarely seen outside German Expressionism and its derivatives. In games more founded in reality, such as L.A. Noir, mise-en-scene is still extremely important and even minute details are critical. With the advent of cutscenes and improved graphical and mechanical engines, this has only become more pronounced in recent years. I learned about composition not from watching movies, but from a particular animation in Final Fantasy IX. One example of truly brilliant mise-en-scene comes from Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles; the game utilizes a “chalice” which must be carried by one of the players. Though generally detested by the players of the game, it in fact served a very simple way of ensuring the four players could stay on the screen at the same time without crowding nor stretching. Indeed, there are professional artists whose sole outlet of expression is in designing characters, settings, weaponry, and other elements of composition for video games and who indeed innovate and express artistic vision in their efforts of doing so.
While it is more difficult to point to use of cinematography or editing, as video games are of course made without cameras, there is no more of a difference in this respect than there is in an average animated film; to deny them on this standard would be to deny Spirited Away and Beauty and the Beast from being art in the same sentence. However, many games such as Pokemon Black and White still play with the hypothetical camera angles, as seen in scenes such as in and near Castelia City. In addition, codes of cinematic conduct such as the Rule of Thirds and the Axis of Action are both enforced and toyed with freely, the same as in a film, even with the added challenge of accounting for a dynamic environment.
Video games’ stories have developed greatly from the basic linear plots from the early games. Starting around the time of the first Final Fantasy, video games have taken on increasingly complex stories, characters, themes, and motifs. In fact, not being bound by the three-act structure common to most films, they are free to explore far larger stories. A movie is considered “too long” if it takes more than a few hours; a game is considered “too short” if it takes less than a few dozen. While action is enough to keep players playing, in order to keep them interested and invested in the characters an intricate storyline is necessary for most games with artistic vision. Often it is not that a professional video game story writer was told, “Here’s a video game, give it a story” and more that someone created a story from passion and felt that a video game would be the best medium for expressing it. Characters in good video games are no less potent and interesting than characters in good movies. Their lives can be interesting, their deaths can be tragic. Their dialogue and actions give them just as much depth as a Hollywood film. Roger Ebert noted of Santiago, “She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.” This is depending on the incorrect belief that video games cannot have clever or important dialogue, disproven many times over. It is here that my concerns of a notable confirmation bias become more pronounced. Like any form of art, video games are even open to experimentation and deviation from formula. Very few works outside the medium offer such options as branched endings, which are quite common in video games. Others, like the aforementioned Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, use methods such as gradually hinting at the backstory and relying on the protagonists to proactively seek it at their own pace. There is no argument one could make against the story elements of video games that would not quash the idea that film can be an art as well.
Sound and the manipulation thereof is a major part of what sets video games apart. While few non-musical movies have a truly spectacular soundtrack, this is a very common feature in video games. ZUN, the one-man creative team behind the Touhou Project series of video games, has composed literally dozens of sonatas to act as character and level themes in his games. The soundtrack for the video game Tempest 2000 was so well-composed it ended up outselling the game’s console port. The mastery is not limited to non-diegetic sound, either. Particularly in action-heavy games, a massive amount of sound engineering goes into ensuring that sounds seem to be coming from the right place, that they are realistic and not distracting yet distinct, etc. To say this much hard work and creativity does not constitute “art” seems like an insult to these engineers, let alone the rest of the finished product.
While I said I would stick exclusively to the terms of art that apply to film, I do feel I should at least acknowledge that video games do have a dimension that film does not, the aspect normally referred to as gameplay. This is what defines games such as Tetris as art, in their beautiful simplicity; like with any gauge of art, it can then range from the immaculately minimalist to the mesmerizingly complex. Much how a book can not be judged for its art or a painting for its soundtrack, the gameplay aspect of video games is unique to the medium. The creative effort that goes into ensuring games are diverse and enjoyable is what defines them and could be evaluated on its own multi-part scale.
I believe it is clear from the evidence that video games not only are art, but that they have been for some time. Evaluation as you have posited it is not only unfair in its criteria but also demonstrably wrong by way of lack of research of the subject in question and its contents. Roger Ebert claims several times that "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." The only reason this is so is because of the negative stigma associated with video games, and an impartial analysis, as I believe and hope I have given, will clearly reveal them as such. I’ve cited Tetris several times; I would also like to present games like Super Mario World, Final Fantasy VII, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, and Doom, just to lay the groundwork. They have established new boundaries of culture, they have become ingrained in the collective unconscious, and they have impacted other media as well. Video games are art.
I have a great concern that Mr. Ebert is allowing himself to be controlled by a confirmation bias. While he admitted he observed a compelling argument from video game designer Kellee Santiago, who cited several examples of artistically-inspired video games including Flower, the entire premise of which is built around the concept of nature versus industry, Ebert still claims “These three are just a small selection of games, she says, ‘that crossed that boundary into artistic expression.’ IMHO, that boundary remains resolutely uncrossed.” However, he then cited Georges Melies’s A Voyage to the Moon as being more artistic than any of the games provided as examples. A Voyage to the Moon was not made with artistic vision; Georges Melies was a magician, who was more interested in the effects of editing as a means of tricking the audience than in using film as a means of art, and he never pretended otherwise. While A Voyage to the Moon was important in terms of future films, it is not, in and of itself, art, by most definitions. He even goes so far to acknowledge he believes chess to be an art form, though doing so would almost certainly validate Tetris or the Professor Layton series the same way.
Firstly, we must address the issue of “what is art”. The term is so subjective that it is difficult to say it has any true meaning, and my personal definition (a work within a medium which exemplifies its ideals) is a particularly loose one. Internet-based comedian and art film critic Kyle Kallgren, specifically addressing the question “Are video games art?” in response to the opening of the Chicago Museum of Art’s new video games exhibit, says “Of course they are. That’s not even a question. They’re made by artists with a creative vision of an artificial world shaped by the author’s creativity and vision. The medium has given us countless memorable characters, shaped our view of history, added to the cultural lexicon, and, like it or not, video games have touched every part of modern life.” However, if I am to make a fair argument, I need to evaluate video games on Roger Ebert’s criteria. Further, as I said, Mr. Ebert is not a gamer, he is a film critic. If I’m to refute his argument, I’m going to need to level the playing field, so to speak, and approach everything in terms of film. I present my argument in the terms of film, as far as I have learned them: of mise-en-scène, of cinematography and editing, of narrative, and of sound.
However, I would first like to point out that Mr. Ebert’s claim would be far stronger if he were not a critic of film. Film is itself a very new medium, and one that is undoubtedly an art form, at least to the aforementioned Mr. Ebert. The reason he eventually acknowledged he could not say video games will never be art was because “Perhaps it is foolish of me to say ‘never,’ because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time,” elaborating to state, “Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.” Rounding for ease of use, film has been around for roughly 112 years; video games have been around for forty. Forty years, may I remind you, is also a long time. A hypothetical critic of paintings or sculpture or theater could say that film would never be an art; however, were he to say this in 1940, it would mean ignoring the dozens of noteworthy films that had already come out and have since been vindicated by history, as well as proving said critic was only tangentially familiar with the medium. Giving myself a life expectancy of 76 years, that would mean that video games will not develop into an art in ninety-eight years. If this same criterion were applied to film, then Citizen Kane would be considered part of the “dark ages” of film creation, before it became art. Video games, too, have been art for years, evident to those familiar with them.
The interesting thing about that hypothetical critic is that he’s unnecessary. That hypothetical is extraneous, because this has already happened. The exact same thing happened with the introduction of diegetic sound into film in the late twenties. Critics of silent film stated that it was a fad, a gimmick; real artists filmed things silently. Charlie Chaplin outright refused to use sound film for most of his career, only caving decades after the change had become nearly omnipresent in the industry.
In terms of mise-en-scène, video games represent a great amount of creativity and effort. Video games are the only medium where science fiction and high fantasy are alive and well; as a result, many video games rely on intricately-designed and extremely creative settings, props, and characters of diversity rarely seen outside German Expressionism and its derivatives. In games more founded in reality, such as L.A. Noir, mise-en-scene is still extremely important and even minute details are critical. With the advent of cutscenes and improved graphical and mechanical engines, this has only become more pronounced in recent years. I learned about composition not from watching movies, but from a particular animation in Final Fantasy IX. One example of truly brilliant mise-en-scene comes from Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles; the game utilizes a “chalice” which must be carried by one of the players. Though generally detested by the players of the game, it in fact served a very simple way of ensuring the four players could stay on the screen at the same time without crowding nor stretching. Indeed, there are professional artists whose sole outlet of expression is in designing characters, settings, weaponry, and other elements of composition for video games and who indeed innovate and express artistic vision in their efforts of doing so.
While it is more difficult to point to use of cinematography or editing, as video games are of course made without cameras, there is no more of a difference in this respect than there is in an average animated film; to deny them on this standard would be to deny Spirited Away and Beauty and the Beast from being art in the same sentence. However, many games such as Pokemon Black and White still play with the hypothetical camera angles, as seen in scenes such as in and near Castelia City. In addition, codes of cinematic conduct such as the Rule of Thirds and the Axis of Action are both enforced and toyed with freely, the same as in a film, even with the added challenge of accounting for a dynamic environment.
Video games’ stories have developed greatly from the basic linear plots from the early games. Starting around the time of the first Final Fantasy, video games have taken on increasingly complex stories, characters, themes, and motifs. In fact, not being bound by the three-act structure common to most films, they are free to explore far larger stories. A movie is considered “too long” if it takes more than a few hours; a game is considered “too short” if it takes less than a few dozen. While action is enough to keep players playing, in order to keep them interested and invested in the characters an intricate storyline is necessary for most games with artistic vision. Often it is not that a professional video game story writer was told, “Here’s a video game, give it a story” and more that someone created a story from passion and felt that a video game would be the best medium for expressing it. Characters in good video games are no less potent and interesting than characters in good movies. Their lives can be interesting, their deaths can be tragic. Their dialogue and actions give them just as much depth as a Hollywood film. Roger Ebert noted of Santiago, “She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.” This is depending on the incorrect belief that video games cannot have clever or important dialogue, disproven many times over. It is here that my concerns of a notable confirmation bias become more pronounced. Like any form of art, video games are even open to experimentation and deviation from formula. Very few works outside the medium offer such options as branched endings, which are quite common in video games. Others, like the aforementioned Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, use methods such as gradually hinting at the backstory and relying on the protagonists to proactively seek it at their own pace. There is no argument one could make against the story elements of video games that would not quash the idea that film can be an art as well.
Sound and the manipulation thereof is a major part of what sets video games apart. While few non-musical movies have a truly spectacular soundtrack, this is a very common feature in video games. ZUN, the one-man creative team behind the Touhou Project series of video games, has composed literally dozens of sonatas to act as character and level themes in his games. The soundtrack for the video game Tempest 2000 was so well-composed it ended up outselling the game’s console port. The mastery is not limited to non-diegetic sound, either. Particularly in action-heavy games, a massive amount of sound engineering goes into ensuring that sounds seem to be coming from the right place, that they are realistic and not distracting yet distinct, etc. To say this much hard work and creativity does not constitute “art” seems like an insult to these engineers, let alone the rest of the finished product.
While I said I would stick exclusively to the terms of art that apply to film, I do feel I should at least acknowledge that video games do have a dimension that film does not, the aspect normally referred to as gameplay. This is what defines games such as Tetris as art, in their beautiful simplicity; like with any gauge of art, it can then range from the immaculately minimalist to the mesmerizingly complex. Much how a book can not be judged for its art or a painting for its soundtrack, the gameplay aspect of video games is unique to the medium. The creative effort that goes into ensuring games are diverse and enjoyable is what defines them and could be evaluated on its own multi-part scale.
I believe it is clear from the evidence that video games not only are art, but that they have been for some time. Evaluation as you have posited it is not only unfair in its criteria but also demonstrably wrong by way of lack of research of the subject in question and its contents. Roger Ebert claims several times that "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." The only reason this is so is because of the negative stigma associated with video games, and an impartial analysis, as I believe and hope I have given, will clearly reveal them as such. I’ve cited Tetris several times; I would also like to present games like Super Mario World, Final Fantasy VII, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, and Doom, just to lay the groundwork. They have established new boundaries of culture, they have become ingrained in the collective unconscious, and they have impacted other media as well. Video games are art.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Trends, Music, and the New Decade
I'm sure anyone with a decent memory or an old yearbook could tell you that trends change. That jacket you thought was so cool in the 80s now looks ridiculous. Personally I like to divide eras up into decades, since they have a tendency to approximately punctuate American (and in many cases, international) culture.
For example, we can look at trends in music. I like to define each decade by who was, in retrospect, the most popular, lasting, and/or influential example of the biggest genre or style in music for the time. Counting up from the 40s:
1940s: Sinatra
1950s: Elvis
1960s: The Beatles
1970s: I'm not really sure. I'm not particularly familiar with disco. The Bee Gees? In terms of the also-prevalent rock and roll of the time, Queen definitely deserves a mention.
1980s: Michael Jackson
1990s: Nirvana
Naturally, a lot of this is subjective, and of course the decades are only a rough cut. The 80s were not all explosive, high-energy pop; 1987 saw Kenny G's "Songbird" reach #3 on the pop charts.
If we go off of this, we can see some of the other trends of the period. In most of culture, the 90s were a period when things became grimmer, darker, more serious. This was the Dark Age of Comic Books, when basically every name that could be derived from "death" or "blood" was in use as the trends started years earlier by Watchmen started sinking in, but with none of the intelligence or relevance that justified the darker tropes. This was the decade of Batman: The Animated Series and Gargoyles; of gangster rap and dark, quarter-hungry arcades.
The reason I bring this up is because it is now 2012, and we're starting to get some clarity on the trends of the last decade.
What are some of the things on which we can now look back and laugh? The most pervasive trend in music for the last ten-twelve years or so has undoubtedly been, in the words of Todd in the Shadows, "club dance music about dancing in clubs to club dance music". The decade started off with the boy bands and pop idols and quickly turned sluttier. While it is still too early to decide accurately who will be venerated by history as the most significant contributor, I believe we can declare the Black Eyed Peas as the frontrunners of the genre, as many other artists take their influence, knowingly or otherwise, from them.
Not to mention, The Black Eyed Peas also represented perfectly the inevitable collapse of the same genre, when their latest album "The Beginning" bombed. I don't think it was just the music; I think people are finally getting sick of club music. Though to be fair, the album did suck.
Remember the Atkin's diet?
Looking at the pop charts this week, not one of the top five songs could really be called a dance track, and that suits me just fine. As I said, decades are not definite markers, but two years into the 2010s it's finally being shaken off and cast into the fires of Mt. Doom.
So, I want you to look at the period from about 2000-2010. What seems silly now?
I figure this is as good a time as any to talk about nostalgia goggles, since I've seen this image (and dozens like it) circulating:
Music now is exactly as good as it ever was. You just either don't remember the stuff that sucked or your actively filter it out. 1976, often hailed as one of the best years in music (and it did give us some pretty amazing songs; I'm not saying it isn't), still had crappy music.
Both of these charted. "Afternoon Delight" was the year's number 12 hit song, while "Baby" hit only number 44 in 2010. This also means looking at only the very worst modern examples and ignoring all the well-made popular songs made around the exact same time. Your adolescent memories are not an appropriately objective gauge by which to make cultural judgements.
My Public Enemies List
Where I "honor" the "contributions" of those who have made the world that much worse by their continued existence or lingering presence.
- "The Best of Pauly Shore" is an oxymoron.
- Advice to writers: read Twilight. Do the opposite.
- To music producer Mr. Bangladesh:
Beethoven and Mozart, yes, could famously compose entire pieces in their heads. This is not what you are doing. It is called "schizophrenia".
- From what I can tell, Beyonce has gone through what can only be described as an unending cavalcade of bad break-ups where the man was entirely at fault, each and every time inspiring her to write and perform a song on the topic. Perhaps she has some sort of sac or auxiliary organ in which she stores bile and hatred for future use.
- Chris Brown thanks his fans for his success. Makes sense, since we know it wasn't his musical ability or personality or that he deserved it.
His greatest hits album is coming out, by the way. Most of them are to the face.
- I don't think I can properly make fun of Jack Chick. Anything I say would just make him seem less ridiculous than he already is.
- Whenever I get frustrated while trying to draw something, I like to think, "Well, worst case scenario, it's still better than Rob Liefeld."
- Ronald Reagan raised taxes and increased the deficit while somehow convincing modern political actives that we can and should decrease taxes and spending like Ronald Reagan did.
- Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church disliked a verdict held in Sweden that incarcerated a preacher for using hate speech to decry homosexuality. So they did what they did... well, not "best", but "most often". They picketed. They did not picket the Swedish government, or a Swedish embassy, or an area of the United States with a lot of people of Swedish descent. They picketed a local vacuum store, one of whose brands was originally from Sweden. I wish I were making this up. Oh, by the way, as American citizens, their votes count exactly as much as yours does; more, actually, if you live in a populous state. Ponder that one for a minute.
- Rush Limbaugh clearly speaks for the common man, as does everyone who makes $55 million per year working three hours per day. From what I can tell, his opinion counts for about 3,250 times the common man's.
- Congratulations, Hot Chelle Rae. I award you the title of "Musical Unflavored Oatmeal".
- Here's my hypothesis on Jane Eyre: it was published as a series of literary articles in England during a key period, when scientists were first learning about the causes of disease, specifically cholera, in this case. Also during this time period, paper was considered a commodity, thus people were unlikely to dispose of it. Jane Eyre was published to encourage the use of bathroom hygiene by making paper that was certifiably useless and which no one would want to keep. No one had the heart to tell Charlotte.
- "The Best of Pauly Shore" is an oxymoron.
- Advice to writers: read Twilight. Do the opposite.
- To music producer Mr. Bangladesh:
Beethoven and Mozart, yes, could famously compose entire pieces in their heads. This is not what you are doing. It is called "schizophrenia".
- From what I can tell, Beyonce has gone through what can only be described as an unending cavalcade of bad break-ups where the man was entirely at fault, each and every time inspiring her to write and perform a song on the topic. Perhaps she has some sort of sac or auxiliary organ in which she stores bile and hatred for future use.
- Chris Brown thanks his fans for his success. Makes sense, since we know it wasn't his musical ability or personality or that he deserved it.
His greatest hits album is coming out, by the way. Most of them are to the face.
- I don't think I can properly make fun of Jack Chick. Anything I say would just make him seem less ridiculous than he already is.
- Whenever I get frustrated while trying to draw something, I like to think, "Well, worst case scenario, it's still better than Rob Liefeld."
- Ronald Reagan raised taxes and increased the deficit while somehow convincing modern political actives that we can and should decrease taxes and spending like Ronald Reagan did.
- Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church disliked a verdict held in Sweden that incarcerated a preacher for using hate speech to decry homosexuality. So they did what they did... well, not "best", but "most often". They picketed. They did not picket the Swedish government, or a Swedish embassy, or an area of the United States with a lot of people of Swedish descent. They picketed a local vacuum store, one of whose brands was originally from Sweden. I wish I were making this up. Oh, by the way, as American citizens, their votes count exactly as much as yours does; more, actually, if you live in a populous state. Ponder that one for a minute.
- Rush Limbaugh clearly speaks for the common man, as does everyone who makes $55 million per year working three hours per day. From what I can tell, his opinion counts for about 3,250 times the common man's.
- Congratulations, Hot Chelle Rae. I award you the title of "Musical Unflavored Oatmeal".
- Here's my hypothesis on Jane Eyre: it was published as a series of literary articles in England during a key period, when scientists were first learning about the causes of disease, specifically cholera, in this case. Also during this time period, paper was considered a commodity, thus people were unlikely to dispose of it. Jane Eyre was published to encourage the use of bathroom hygiene by making paper that was certifiably useless and which no one would want to keep. No one had the heart to tell Charlotte.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Sex and Profanity in Comedy
I don't have a problem with it, strictly speaking. Jokes on the subject have the possibility to be hilarious. There are comedians who use it very cleverly and effectively.
I do, however, had a problem with the fact that comedians have for some reason taken this fact and drawn the conclusion that "sex/profanity = funny, no exceptions". Now, technically I have this problem with just about everything, as anyone in the voting section of Memebase can tell you that just because a joke contains some potentially funny element it is automatically funny. Sex and profanity just happen to be the most prevalent.
Presented for your consideration, Pauly Shore:
I do, however, had a problem with the fact that comedians have for some reason taken this fact and drawn the conclusion that "sex/profanity = funny, no exceptions". Now, technically I have this problem with just about everything, as anyone in the voting section of Memebase can tell you that just because a joke contains some potentially funny element it is automatically funny. Sex and profanity just happen to be the most prevalent.
Presented for your consideration, Pauly Shore:
The man is not funny. Just simply... not funny. There is no funny there. If funny were to be measured by scientific instruments a recording of his shows would be a flat line at zero. However, because he throws in a brigade F-bombs he gets a few laughs. Hollow, soul-crushing pity laughs. This is cheap, lazy comedy at its worst. Comedy is defined by cleverness and lateral thinking, and this man has neither. If someone wrote a computer algorithm to make jokes in the 1980s, using a computer of the era, it would come up with precisely this kind of recycled, flat-soda commentary unfounded in reality, but perhaps with an "insert name here" where he says "Hillary Clinton" where you could instead say, oh, Geraldine Ferraro. He does not deserve to have a career as a comedian; if I ran a comedy I would not allow him to perform if he paid me. Profanity is his crutch, and the fact that it can be used as such is why I am speaking out against it now.
On the other hand, George Carlin:
He doesn't use dirty language or strong ideas because he can't get laughs otherwise, he does it because it's the right thing to do for his set. Because of the way he uses it, with obvious practice and forethought, he maximizes the effect of what would already be an poignant and hilarious piece of rhetoric.
The same problem has to do with sex, which again can be an delightful fountain of amazing jokes but can just as easily become a millstone around the neck of a viewer or listener. Remember, about 60% of any William Shakespeare play is two male protagonists talking about each other's penes (which is the correct plural of "penis", by the way). Think I'm kidding? Go re-read Romeo and Juliet. Still, he's hailed as a master of the craft of writing because they were subtle, thought-out, and creative.
Another problem: oftentimes a movie will insert some cussing or a boob shot in order to avoid getting a G or PG movie and being labelled by the public as "for kids". I would like to remind you that just because something is not good for kids does not make it good for adults. Comedy does not work by the process of elimination.
So I realize my point hasn't exactly been clear. What it comes down to is this: I am neither explicitly for nor against dirty jokes. However, make sure that they are good jokes and not just dirty. Here's an exercise: if you can prove to me you can be consistently funny without foul subject material, I will be okay with you being as filthy as you want to be.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Selective Service
I'm overdue registering for the draft, and I've started receiving letters. Well that's fantastic. The draft is by far the stupidest, most outdated, least logical, most unethical government program currently active. How can I say that? Well, examine it, shall we?
THEN WHY DO YOU HAVE THE OPTION, YOU IDIOTS?
Problem number one: it's sexist. This is part of to what I'm referring when I say it's outdated. It is not something made with a modern mentality, it is something written decades ago and never revised. Women are perfectly capable of serving in the military. In fact, recently they were permitted to serve on the front lines, and I think it's pretty ridiculous that it took them until 2012 to do that. Moving on, the problem persists in that only men are required to register for the selective service.
In fact, it's not made with a mentality fitting of a few decades ago, either. It's made with ethics more fitting to the Roman Empire or an ancient Greek city-state. It's acting as if there is no greater contribution one can make than to serve your country in combat. While I do respect our soldiers, I politely disagree on the grounds that war is not good. I might hazard to say it's a little bad. Programs that encourage war would, by association, be less than optimal.
Frankly, it doesn't matter whether or not you agree, because I have my opinion. If my opinion is that war is rarely if ever justified, and I am being forced to serve in the military, then my right to my opinion has been violated.
The military is an enticing package. Scholarships, legs up in employment searches, decent pay (I said decent, not great, they're still underpaid for what they do). Believe me, if there was anyone who would be "just okay" with joining the armed forces, if there was anyone with little enough reason to resist that they wouldn't mind a sudden mandate for them to do so, they would have already enlisted. Just about everyone else would be doing so against their will. Not everyone, of course, but I'm going to say at least a good-sized chunk of the people who are registered for the draft would have a problem with being drafted.
Then they have the gall to say "current law does not permit females to register". Permit? PERMIT? Let us get one thing straight, this is not a privilege, this is a demand. This is reducing our liberties. That is just nauseating, that they would say "permit", as if this is some grand glorious right that we males are lucky enough to receive from our benevolent leaders. I have received letters ordering me to register. Golly gee, I hope they let me.
Let me make another thing abundantly clear: I don't love this country. Why should I? Yes, it's better than a lot of places; I could have been born into far worse circumstances. However, the United States is not the pinnacle of all that is good and right with the world, and it hasn't been for a very long time. "The Land of Opportunity" and "The Home of the Free" are borne from a time when the US was the only developed country not run by a monarchy. Nowadays, our monopoly on democracy is a bit less absolute. Further, America is one of the worse democracies available. What do we have that's so great? A system of election that's broken almost beyond repair from political parties, the spoils system, and rigidness? Citizens too stupid, stubborn, and/or apathetic to work towards fixing it? Public school systems so bad they're an active detriment to their students half the time? Corrupt businesses satisfied with making the American Dream a fairy tale? You're lucky I'm not actively fighting against you!
I'm not trying to blame Obama or Bush or Clinton. I do blame Bush Sr. and Reagan a little bit, but not really. Nor am I trying to blame any of the presidents before them. This was a gradual problem centuries in the making. While "The Founding Fathers Wanted" is an idiotic argument, I do feel the need to point out that the Constitution was mutable for the very purpose that they recognized they weren't perfect, and they wanted the government to be able to change to fit the needs of the people or to be able to incorporate new ideas that would improve it. We have not acted on that.
I'm actually a little more lenient with countries that have obligatory military service, like Israel. In that case, you know it's coming, you're signed up for it. I still think the government is spitting in the face of its citizens, but it's a little better than being given a packet of spittle and being told to hold onto it and apply to the eye when instructed.
June 25, 1993. I'm eighteen, like everyone required to register. This of course means I am seven years too young to be elected to the House of Representatives and twelve years too young to be elected to the Senate. Wonderful. This also means that everyone who might be able to argue on the topic will be entirely unaffected by it. That will work, we've seen how quickly they passed women's suffrage. At least it's better than the first several decades of the draft, when the average soldier in Vietnam was two years short of being able to vote. But of course, that's a matter of maturity. How can we count on someone so young to make important decisions, or be intelligent enough to study the important issues that rule political discussion? Not to mention they're young, we don't want to put too much pressure on them. Much better to give them a gun, ship them off somewhere they've never been, and order them to kill people they don't know. Much better indeed.
See, the government actually bankrolled an argument against their own policies.
Yes, eighteen is quite young. As I pointed out, they are twelve years too young to run for the Senate. They are 60% of the age needed to run for the Senate. They will not be able to drink for three more years, or rent a car for seven. Many of them are still in high school. Does no one else see anything wrong with this being our drawing pool? "But it's still the best age available!" some may say, but if the "best age available" is still an absolutely horrible age at which to be drafting people, then it seems pretty obvious there is no age when drafting is appropriate.
Here's the complete form. As you can see, there is no "conscientious objector" checkmark, no "opt out". You're eighteen, you're a guy, sign the form.
Really, we could pay for a lot of our underfunded programs by cutting money from the military. We have no real reason to be involved in so many international affairs, much less militarily so. As we've seen over and over again, getting involved with other countries ends badly for us, and we go bankrupt in the process. That's why the other countries are beating us. That's why they have things like universal wi-fi, high-speed rail, and decent education systems. They aren't wasting trillions of dollars screwing themselves over.
Honestly, I'm not even concerned about myself. I'm not a healthy person; I'm sure I've got something or other that disqualifies me from serving. I'm concerned about all those other men who are trapped in an unfair, outdated system.
I'm not registering. Not only do my plans see me living outside the United States anyway, but I would rather serve five years in jail than support this program.
Problem number one: it's sexist. This is part of to what I'm referring when I say it's outdated. It is not something made with a modern mentality, it is something written decades ago and never revised. Women are perfectly capable of serving in the military. In fact, recently they were permitted to serve on the front lines, and I think it's pretty ridiculous that it took them until 2012 to do that. Moving on, the problem persists in that only men are required to register for the selective service.
In fact, it's not made with a mentality fitting of a few decades ago, either. It's made with ethics more fitting to the Roman Empire or an ancient Greek city-state. It's acting as if there is no greater contribution one can make than to serve your country in combat. While I do respect our soldiers, I politely disagree on the grounds that war is not good. I might hazard to say it's a little bad. Programs that encourage war would, by association, be less than optimal.
Frankly, it doesn't matter whether or not you agree, because I have my opinion. If my opinion is that war is rarely if ever justified, and I am being forced to serve in the military, then my right to my opinion has been violated.
The military is an enticing package. Scholarships, legs up in employment searches, decent pay (I said decent, not great, they're still underpaid for what they do). Believe me, if there was anyone who would be "just okay" with joining the armed forces, if there was anyone with little enough reason to resist that they wouldn't mind a sudden mandate for them to do so, they would have already enlisted. Just about everyone else would be doing so against their will. Not everyone, of course, but I'm going to say at least a good-sized chunk of the people who are registered for the draft would have a problem with being drafted.
Then they have the gall to say "current law does not permit females to register". Permit? PERMIT? Let us get one thing straight, this is not a privilege, this is a demand. This is reducing our liberties. That is just nauseating, that they would say "permit", as if this is some grand glorious right that we males are lucky enough to receive from our benevolent leaders. I have received letters ordering me to register. Golly gee, I hope they let me.
Oh yes, I'd hate for anyone not legitimately in America to take away my hard-earned right to unwillingly serve an entity I oppose.
I'm not trying to blame Obama or Bush or Clinton. I do blame Bush Sr. and Reagan a little bit, but not really. Nor am I trying to blame any of the presidents before them. This was a gradual problem centuries in the making. While "The Founding Fathers Wanted" is an idiotic argument, I do feel the need to point out that the Constitution was mutable for the very purpose that they recognized they weren't perfect, and they wanted the government to be able to change to fit the needs of the people or to be able to incorporate new ideas that would improve it. We have not acted on that.
I'm actually a little more lenient with countries that have obligatory military service, like Israel. In that case, you know it's coming, you're signed up for it. I still think the government is spitting in the face of its citizens, but it's a little better than being given a packet of spittle and being told to hold onto it and apply to the eye when instructed.
Yes, eighteen is quite young. As I pointed out, they are twelve years too young to run for the Senate. They are 60% of the age needed to run for the Senate. They will not be able to drink for three more years, or rent a car for seven. Many of them are still in high school. Does no one else see anything wrong with this being our drawing pool? "But it's still the best age available!" some may say, but if the "best age available" is still an absolutely horrible age at which to be drafting people, then it seems pretty obvious there is no age when drafting is appropriate.
Really, we could pay for a lot of our underfunded programs by cutting money from the military. We have no real reason to be involved in so many international affairs, much less militarily so. As we've seen over and over again, getting involved with other countries ends badly for us, and we go bankrupt in the process. That's why the other countries are beating us. That's why they have things like universal wi-fi, high-speed rail, and decent education systems. They aren't wasting trillions of dollars screwing themselves over.
Honestly, I'm not even concerned about myself. I'm not a healthy person; I'm sure I've got something or other that disqualifies me from serving. I'm concerned about all those other men who are trapped in an unfair, outdated system.
I'm not registering. Not only do my plans see me living outside the United States anyway, but I would rather serve five years in jail than support this program.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Valentine's Day
"Pshaw! Valentine's Day. Nothing but a false tradition invented by greeting card companies to sell useless crap! I don't need some corporation insulting me. I'm single and I like it! I'm not going to put any significance into this day, because there's no significance to be had!"
...well, yeah. That's how a holiday works.
With a couple exceptions (Veterans', Memorial, Presidents', and MLK Jr. Days come to mind), there are no major holidays with any actual meaning. Let's run down the list, shall we?
-New Year's Eve/New Year's Day: Really not something worth celebrating, and more importantly, an arbitrarily chosen date. Literally any day could be called New Year's Day. Also, considering a year is not 365 days long but closer to 365.3, we should really be celebrating each subsequent New Year's six hours later than the previous until Leap Year sets it back. It used to be April 1, to celebrate the coming of spring. I'm not sure why we've decided the coldest month of the year deserves fireworks and unnecessary noise. There's a product literally called a "noisemaker", and New Year's Eve is keeping it from burning in merchandise hell where it belongs.
-Oh good, Ireland is Catholic. Let's consume alcohol and wear a certain color on that basis here in a country that isn't Ireland with our friends who aren't Catholic.
-April Fool's Day probably started to make fun of the people who were still celebrating New Year's. It's been four hundred years. We can let it go.
-Arbor Day makes sense, and of course no one celebrates it. Let's move on.
-Easter is set on the first full moon after the vernal equinox. It involves painting eggs and a giant rabbit who hides them along with candy, though in some countries (such as France) it's a chicken. You know, just like the crucifixion.
-I'll give Mother's Day and Father's Day a pass, since I don't think I can describe why I dislike them without angering some people.
-Independence Day celebrates the day the United States became a sovereign country. Actually, no it doesn't, since America went unrecognized by any other countries until years after the Revolutionary War, which itself ended years after 1776, and while the Declaration of Independence was finished on July 2 (not July 4) it wasn't published until later. I'm not sure where July 4 came from, and I especially don't understand why we celebrate it with German food and Chinese explosives.
-Halloween is when we ensure our autumn harvest will not be assaulted by demons. I think it's working.
-Yes, the pilgrims would occasionally break bread with the Native Americans when they weren't killing them or taking their land and then killing them. But there wasn't any set time of the year for it, there was rarely an appointed purpose, let alone giving thanks (not that giving thanks wasn't the goal, it's just that the pilgrims were a mote religious and everything they said or did was giving thanks somehow), and of course they didn't have turkeys, nor did anyone at Thanksgiving until World War II. They had bread, some vegetables, and eels. I don't see many eels at Thanksgiving nowadays.
-Every December 25th, millions gather in the spirit the winter solstice when polygamist Celts born 2500+ years ago bring trees into their homes to appease the spirits, sang songs to appease the spirits, and dance around a fire, before a Scandinavian folk hero and his demonic assistant Krampus bring sweets to good children and beat the naughty ones with birch branches and then drag them to hell in rusty chains. I mean, Christmas. On an unrelated note, Jesus of Nazareth was born sometime in early April.
P.S. Hey, overpanicked moms concerned about your kids turning to Satanism because of rock'n'roll and Judy Blume? You're the ones who taught them those Pagan traditions every year.
P.P.S. Oh yeah, Christmas is under attack? Christmas dates to about 400 CE at the earliest, making Chanukkah between 500 and 900 years older than it. Just sayin'.
P.P.P.S. Yeah, I just said CE. Deal with it.
The point is, every holiday is meaningless, except for the fact that people have decided, "Hey, I should buy my significant other some dopamine-promoting foodstuffs, red paper in the shape of a female's buttocks, and some plant genitals, and go to an overpriced restaurant" or something else equally meaningless in the long run. So if you want to knock Valentine's Day, be prepared for a very dull rest of the year, since there's nothing you can say about it you can't say about any other holiday. I'm not going to force you to celebrate it, but I am going to request that you, in the words of B.B. Rodriguez, "kindly shut your noise-hole".
I realized at some point last year that the people protesting Valentine's day were collectively far more annoying than those who were celebrating or advertising it. Yes, we know it's meaningless. We just don't care.
Culture is what makes people do stupid stuff, but "stupid" doesn't necessarily mean "bad". And if you don't believe me, let me ask you, what color do you associate with boys, and which with girls? And let me ask you the follow-up question, why?
Yes, I realize there is absolutely no connection to the historical St. Valentine. Yes, there is no actual reason to do any of the crap people do. Those two clauses are true about absolutely any day of the year. So just let them have their day.
...well, yeah. That's how a holiday works.
With a couple exceptions (Veterans', Memorial, Presidents', and MLK Jr. Days come to mind), there are no major holidays with any actual meaning. Let's run down the list, shall we?
-New Year's Eve/New Year's Day: Really not something worth celebrating, and more importantly, an arbitrarily chosen date. Literally any day could be called New Year's Day. Also, considering a year is not 365 days long but closer to 365.3, we should really be celebrating each subsequent New Year's six hours later than the previous until Leap Year sets it back. It used to be April 1, to celebrate the coming of spring. I'm not sure why we've decided the coldest month of the year deserves fireworks and unnecessary noise. There's a product literally called a "noisemaker", and New Year's Eve is keeping it from burning in merchandise hell where it belongs.
-Oh good, Ireland is Catholic. Let's consume alcohol and wear a certain color on that basis here in a country that isn't Ireland with our friends who aren't Catholic.
-April Fool's Day probably started to make fun of the people who were still celebrating New Year's. It's been four hundred years. We can let it go.
-Arbor Day makes sense, and of course no one celebrates it. Let's move on.
-Easter is set on the first full moon after the vernal equinox. It involves painting eggs and a giant rabbit who hides them along with candy, though in some countries (such as France) it's a chicken. You know, just like the crucifixion.
-I'll give Mother's Day and Father's Day a pass, since I don't think I can describe why I dislike them without angering some people.
-Independence Day celebrates the day the United States became a sovereign country. Actually, no it doesn't, since America went unrecognized by any other countries until years after the Revolutionary War, which itself ended years after 1776, and while the Declaration of Independence was finished on July 2 (not July 4) it wasn't published until later. I'm not sure where July 4 came from, and I especially don't understand why we celebrate it with German food and Chinese explosives.
-Halloween is when we ensure our autumn harvest will not be assaulted by demons. I think it's working.
-Yes, the pilgrims would occasionally break bread with the Native Americans when they weren't killing them or taking their land and then killing them. But there wasn't any set time of the year for it, there was rarely an appointed purpose, let alone giving thanks (not that giving thanks wasn't the goal, it's just that the pilgrims were a mote religious and everything they said or did was giving thanks somehow), and of course they didn't have turkeys, nor did anyone at Thanksgiving until World War II. They had bread, some vegetables, and eels. I don't see many eels at Thanksgiving nowadays.
-Every December 25th, millions gather in the spirit the winter solstice when polygamist Celts born 2500+ years ago bring trees into their homes to appease the spirits, sang songs to appease the spirits, and dance around a fire, before a Scandinavian folk hero and his demonic assistant Krampus bring sweets to good children and beat the naughty ones with birch branches and then drag them to hell in rusty chains. I mean, Christmas. On an unrelated note, Jesus of Nazareth was born sometime in early April.
P.S. Hey, overpanicked moms concerned about your kids turning to Satanism because of rock'n'roll and Judy Blume? You're the ones who taught them those Pagan traditions every year.
P.P.S. Oh yeah, Christmas is under attack? Christmas dates to about 400 CE at the earliest, making Chanukkah between 500 and 900 years older than it. Just sayin'.
P.P.P.S. Yeah, I just said CE. Deal with it.
The point is, every holiday is meaningless, except for the fact that people have decided, "Hey, I should buy my significant other some dopamine-promoting foodstuffs, red paper in the shape of a female's buttocks, and some plant genitals, and go to an overpriced restaurant" or something else equally meaningless in the long run. So if you want to knock Valentine's Day, be prepared for a very dull rest of the year, since there's nothing you can say about it you can't say about any other holiday. I'm not going to force you to celebrate it, but I am going to request that you, in the words of B.B. Rodriguez, "kindly shut your noise-hole".
I realized at some point last year that the people protesting Valentine's day were collectively far more annoying than those who were celebrating or advertising it. Yes, we know it's meaningless. We just don't care.
Culture is what makes people do stupid stuff, but "stupid" doesn't necessarily mean "bad". And if you don't believe me, let me ask you, what color do you associate with boys, and which with girls? And let me ask you the follow-up question, why?
Yes, I realize there is absolutely no connection to the historical St. Valentine. Yes, there is no actual reason to do any of the crap people do. Those two clauses are true about absolutely any day of the year. So just let them have their day.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Signs and rules
I'm a moral relativist. Ethically, I'm a utilitarian, and to that end I have a very strong tendency to go for the flexible, spirit-of-the-law, ox-in-the-mire, exception-to-every-rule, highest-respect-for-the-law policy of enforcement.
The exception, and it's a huge exception, is the laws of transit, to which I am a stickling moral absolutist. This is because, as far as I can tell, the laws in place are set up almost perfectly to ensure that transportation is safe and fair.
"But what if I'm running late?" Then you should have left sooner. That extra fifteen kilometers per hour is not going to make a difference, and you'll just be stopped at the same red light as the people going the speed limit anyway. If not, you've just saved about thirty seconds. Thirty seconds and about fifteen meters of stopping space. Most of the time, I'm a cyclist, and I can tell you, you're a dick. I'm basing this on the "mean to the waiter" theory of human behavior--if a person is nice to his or her date but mean to the waiter, he or she is not a nice person. You may be a loving mother of three who donates to charity, but if you drive like a dick, I have very strong evidence you're a dick.
That's not even the stupidest thing drivers do. Now, I'm prone to exaggeration, but when I say that since 2008 I have seen a grand total of twenty-four people make a complete stop behind the limit line before turning onto the main street, know that I am dead serious. I don't believe there's any way they could simply not notice the limit line, because it's a huge white line, made with paint that includes flecks of metal to make it stand out under light, which is preceded by a two-meter long "STOP" also made of highly visible white paint on a black or dark gray background, accompanied by a STOP sign (which by the way is the only red sign and the only octagonal sign used in most of the world, meaning that an illiterate person could still recognize its meaning even if their vision was so bad they couldn't recognize either the color or the shape) and considering that under scientific study white on red draws attention more than most any other combination of colors, I can only assume they see the sign, the writing on the ground, and the line and decide, "Yes, I see these, and I know what they mean, but I'm going to ignore them, plus the fact that this is a T-intersection in most cases as well as ignoring the laws which enforce these signs and laws because..." and I'm sorry but I can't think of any way to finish that sentence, unless every driver I've ever seen is actively malicious. I'd believe it.
And while it's not the subject of this rant, drivers seem to have a disturbing tendency to believe it's okay to specifically target cyclists for harassment. So far I have seen people pull into the bike lane and start driving in it towards me for no discernible reason; I have been hit by four water balloons, a half-full soda, a chicken sandwich, and something round and hard wrapped in paper which I didn't bother to identify, all thrown from moving vehicles. An almost weekly occurrence would be for someone to honk at me at full volume or perhaps roll down the window and scream as they passed me. Why, I wonder? I have not yet received an answer.
This problem, this blatant disregard of law and order, has only worsened here at BYU-H. Again, I point out I'm not exaggerating; I have seen each and every posted rule violated within range of the sign. On my way to the dining hall, I passed three "No Skateboarding on the Sidewalk" signs and six people skateboarding on the sidewalk. I passed no people skateboarding in the street, where it is permitted. In fact, it's become a rarity to see people riding their bikes, skateboarding, rollerblading, or what have you anywhere but the sidewalks. I know they must be seeing the signs, and again ignoring them for no reason.
As I said, I'm a relativist, and I'd be willing to ignore this as long as these skateboarders (hundreds upon hundreds of them) were decent people about it. They are not. They seem unwilling to move even slightly when they are in people's way or when they are about to crash into them; worse, they get angry at the pedestrians. I recall that only one of use is violating the rules.
I would, however, like to give props to the guy who figured out the loophole that unicycles are never prohibited on the sidewalk. Well done, sir.
Moving on, every single posted sign has been violated at least once, usually more.
-"Please do not stack your cups!" on the dishes repository has been interpreted as "Come on, man, you can make it to twelve!"
-One young woman decided to overfill the waffle iron, add something other than waffle batter in the iron, and then remove her waffles with a metal instrument, thus breaking every rule of the waffle irons in the sequential order those rules were listed. On a huge sign, dangling over the exact waffle iron she was using. Well done.
-"Quiet hours are from 10:00 PM-7:00AM!" Aaahahahahahaha.
-"Women are not permitted past this point." To be fair, I'm not sure what I was expecting. Maybe something like the vampires in Buffy.
-Not even the "Caution: Slippery when wet" sign is right.
It has gotten to the point where I oppose posting the Ten Commandments. It's a religious school, I oppose it out of concern for my personal safety.
While there are exceptions to rules, of course, they're in place for a reason, and likewise exceptions have to be made for a reason. Martin Luther King said that to break an unjust law represented the highest respect for the law, but somehow I doubt that crosswalk is infringing on your rights.
The exception, and it's a huge exception, is the laws of transit, to which I am a stickling moral absolutist. This is because, as far as I can tell, the laws in place are set up almost perfectly to ensure that transportation is safe and fair.
"But what if I'm running late?" Then you should have left sooner. That extra fifteen kilometers per hour is not going to make a difference, and you'll just be stopped at the same red light as the people going the speed limit anyway. If not, you've just saved about thirty seconds. Thirty seconds and about fifteen meters of stopping space. Most of the time, I'm a cyclist, and I can tell you, you're a dick. I'm basing this on the "mean to the waiter" theory of human behavior--if a person is nice to his or her date but mean to the waiter, he or she is not a nice person. You may be a loving mother of three who donates to charity, but if you drive like a dick, I have very strong evidence you're a dick.
That's not even the stupidest thing drivers do. Now, I'm prone to exaggeration, but when I say that since 2008 I have seen a grand total of twenty-four people make a complete stop behind the limit line before turning onto the main street, know that I am dead serious. I don't believe there's any way they could simply not notice the limit line, because it's a huge white line, made with paint that includes flecks of metal to make it stand out under light, which is preceded by a two-meter long "STOP" also made of highly visible white paint on a black or dark gray background, accompanied by a STOP sign (which by the way is the only red sign and the only octagonal sign used in most of the world, meaning that an illiterate person could still recognize its meaning even if their vision was so bad they couldn't recognize either the color or the shape) and considering that under scientific study white on red draws attention more than most any other combination of colors, I can only assume they see the sign, the writing on the ground, and the line and decide, "Yes, I see these, and I know what they mean, but I'm going to ignore them, plus the fact that this is a T-intersection in most cases as well as ignoring the laws which enforce these signs and laws because..." and I'm sorry but I can't think of any way to finish that sentence, unless every driver I've ever seen is actively malicious. I'd believe it.
And while it's not the subject of this rant, drivers seem to have a disturbing tendency to believe it's okay to specifically target cyclists for harassment. So far I have seen people pull into the bike lane and start driving in it towards me for no discernible reason; I have been hit by four water balloons, a half-full soda, a chicken sandwich, and something round and hard wrapped in paper which I didn't bother to identify, all thrown from moving vehicles. An almost weekly occurrence would be for someone to honk at me at full volume or perhaps roll down the window and scream as they passed me. Why, I wonder? I have not yet received an answer.
This problem, this blatant disregard of law and order, has only worsened here at BYU-H. Again, I point out I'm not exaggerating; I have seen each and every posted rule violated within range of the sign. On my way to the dining hall, I passed three "No Skateboarding on the Sidewalk" signs and six people skateboarding on the sidewalk. I passed no people skateboarding in the street, where it is permitted. In fact, it's become a rarity to see people riding their bikes, skateboarding, rollerblading, or what have you anywhere but the sidewalks. I know they must be seeing the signs, and again ignoring them for no reason.
As I said, I'm a relativist, and I'd be willing to ignore this as long as these skateboarders (hundreds upon hundreds of them) were decent people about it. They are not. They seem unwilling to move even slightly when they are in people's way or when they are about to crash into them; worse, they get angry at the pedestrians. I recall that only one of use is violating the rules.
I would, however, like to give props to the guy who figured out the loophole that unicycles are never prohibited on the sidewalk. Well done, sir.
Moving on, every single posted sign has been violated at least once, usually more.
-"Please do not stack your cups!" on the dishes repository has been interpreted as "Come on, man, you can make it to twelve!"
-One young woman decided to overfill the waffle iron, add something other than waffle batter in the iron, and then remove her waffles with a metal instrument, thus breaking every rule of the waffle irons in the sequential order those rules were listed. On a huge sign, dangling over the exact waffle iron she was using. Well done.
-"Quiet hours are from 10:00 PM-7:00AM!" Aaahahahahahaha.
-"Women are not permitted past this point." To be fair, I'm not sure what I was expecting. Maybe something like the vampires in Buffy.
-Not even the "Caution: Slippery when wet" sign is right.
It has gotten to the point where I oppose posting the Ten Commandments. It's a religious school, I oppose it out of concern for my personal safety.
While there are exceptions to rules, of course, they're in place for a reason, and likewise exceptions have to be made for a reason. Martin Luther King said that to break an unjust law represented the highest respect for the law, but somehow I doubt that crosswalk is infringing on your rights.
Last Words
On Sunday, February 12, 2012, the writer of this blog was found dead in his dorm. Next to him were found several notes recounting the events of the previous night, most of them apparently written in his own blood.
Saturday, 11.02.12 8:56 PM
So, I went to brush my teeth, but there were two people using the sinks to get water for ramen. College!
Saturday, 11.02.12 9:14 PM
I guess it's not just ramen. They're having a full-on food party out there in the hall. Some of the stuff smells pretty strong.
Saturday, 11.02.12 9:31 PM
I'm having trouble breathing and my eyes are burning. I think I'm allergic to something they're using, plus it smells just... awful. It's like the olfactory equivalent of sandpaper. I'm going for a walk.
Saturday 11.02.12 9:49 PM
Okay, seriously? I've walked all over the place and I can still smell it clearly as ever. I have no idea why someone would need that much spice. What is that, wasabi? Can you even eat that much and survive?
Saturday 11.02.12 10:10 PM
There is no use. The smell has permeated the entire campus.
Saturday 11.02.12 10:23 PM
The smell has permeated the entire town. I cannot escape.
Saturday 11.02.12 10:31 PM
I am upwind of the source. I can smell it. I can smell it against the tropical breezes. What does this mean?
Stardate 11.02.12 10:34 PM
Clearly the entire world has been contaminated and it has looped back around to here. We must burn it down, burn it all down, and start anew. Fire is the cleanser.
Saturday 11.02.12 10:40 PM
They fight my vision. They know not the evil they support. Pure, cleansing flames.
Saturday 11.02.12 11:16 PM
On February 11th, 2012, a date which shall live in infamy, American college students stationed in Hawaii were suddenly and deliberately attacked by Japanese spices.
Saturday 11.02.12 11:26 PM
Have I perhaps wronged them in some way? Please, if there's something I can do to make you stop, I'll do it!
Day in Glory of Saturn 11.02.12 11:34 PM
To the manufacturers of the Bug Bomb,
Have I got an exciting business proposal for you! If you consider joining your wonderful and iconic Bug Bomb with the cleaning power of air purifiers and cleansing bleach, I'm certain it would sell wonders. I believe you could make a working prototype and send it to the provided address within the next thirty minutes, and I will gladly let you keep the profits venture.
Day in Glory of Saturn 11.02.12 11:34 PM (scrawled on top of the previous note)
To the manufacturers of 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene,
Have I got an exciting business proposal for you! If you consider joining your wonderful and iconic trinitrotoluene with the cleaning power of air purifiers and cleansing bleach, I'm certain it would sell wonders. I believe you could make a working prototype and send it to the provided address within the next thirty minutes, and I will gladly let you keep the profits from this venture.
Saturday 11.02.12 11:55 PM
I promise to be a better Christian if I make it through this. Please just make the spices go away.
Sunday 11.03.12 12:00 AM
Better Muslim?
Sunday 11.03.12 12:03 AM
Was it Jamestown? Did I miss my chance already?
Sunday 11.03.12 12:12 AM
Oh, I get it. It's Shinto, right? Pretty tricky!
Tsundere 11.03.12 12:18 AM
If I don't make it through this, call every girl on my contacts list and tell her I love her.
Sunday 11.03.12 12:19 AM
Unless there's an asterisk by her name, in which case tell her I hate her.
Sunday 11.03.12 12:26 AM
I'm not sure why everyone hates Pauly Shore, Biodome was hilarious! He made noise with his mouth a lot.
Sunday 11.03.12 12:31 AM
I fear my mind has begun to failllllllllllme. Let it be known that I am a man who faces death with composure!
Sundae 11.03.12 12:44 AM
I drew a horsey [this note was accompanied by a picture of a horse, also drawn in the author's blood]
Dimanche 11.03.12 12:51 AM
Screenplay idea: a man struggles against the forces of darkness, despite the darkness's horrible smell and Japan spice
[the rest of the screenplay has been omitted from this report for brevity]
In addition, investigators estimate the author used well over the 4 L of blood contained in a single body in writing this screenplay. DNA testing is currently being used to determine from whom he took the rest.
Sunday 11.03.12 12:64 AM
I don't like Google Chrome. I just don't. Too fancy.
Soonday 8.6.75 3:09 AM
They're still out there. Why? Why are they still out there?
Monday Monday Why Would You Leave And Not Take Me April 14 802,701 AD
There is no place for me in this world. Farewell, foul stench.
4 8 15 16 23 42
Oh, wait! Tomorrow they're serving pancakes, aren't they? I'm gonna miss that.
There were no more notes.
Saturday, 11.02.12 8:56 PM
So, I went to brush my teeth, but there were two people using the sinks to get water for ramen. College!
Saturday, 11.02.12 9:14 PM
I guess it's not just ramen. They're having a full-on food party out there in the hall. Some of the stuff smells pretty strong.
Saturday, 11.02.12 9:31 PM
I'm having trouble breathing and my eyes are burning. I think I'm allergic to something they're using, plus it smells just... awful. It's like the olfactory equivalent of sandpaper. I'm going for a walk.
Saturday 11.02.12 9:49 PM
Okay, seriously? I've walked all over the place and I can still smell it clearly as ever. I have no idea why someone would need that much spice. What is that, wasabi? Can you even eat that much and survive?
Saturday 11.02.12 10:10 PM
There is no use. The smell has permeated the entire campus.
Saturday 11.02.12 10:23 PM
The smell has permeated the entire town. I cannot escape.
Saturday 11.02.12 10:31 PM
I am upwind of the source. I can smell it. I can smell it against the tropical breezes. What does this mean?
Stardate 11.02.12 10:34 PM
Clearly the entire world has been contaminated and it has looped back around to here. We must burn it down, burn it all down, and start anew. Fire is the cleanser.
Saturday 11.02.12 10:40 PM
They fight my vision. They know not the evil they support. Pure, cleansing flames.
Saturday 11.02.12 11:16 PM
On February 11th, 2012, a date which shall live in infamy, American college students stationed in Hawaii were suddenly and deliberately attacked by Japanese spices.
Saturday 11.02.12 11:26 PM
Have I perhaps wronged them in some way? Please, if there's something I can do to make you stop, I'll do it!
Day in Glory of Saturn 11.02.12 11:34 PM
To the manufacturers of the Bug Bomb,
Have I got an exciting business proposal for you! If you consider joining your wonderful and iconic Bug Bomb with the cleaning power of air purifiers and cleansing bleach, I'm certain it would sell wonders. I believe you could make a working prototype and send it to the provided address within the next thirty minutes, and I will gladly let you keep the profits venture.
Day in Glory of Saturn 11.02.12 11:34 PM (scrawled on top of the previous note)
To the manufacturers of 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene,
Have I got an exciting business proposal for you! If you consider joining your wonderful and iconic trinitrotoluene with the cleaning power of air purifiers and cleansing bleach, I'm certain it would sell wonders. I believe you could make a working prototype and send it to the provided address within the next thirty minutes, and I will gladly let you keep the profits from this venture.
Saturday 11.02.12 11:55 PM
I promise to be a better Christian if I make it through this. Please just make the spices go away.
Sunday 11.03.12 12:00 AM
Better Muslim?
Sunday 11.03.12 12:03 AM
Was it Jamestown? Did I miss my chance already?
Sunday 11.03.12 12:12 AM
Oh, I get it. It's Shinto, right? Pretty tricky!
Tsundere 11.03.12 12:18 AM
If I don't make it through this, call every girl on my contacts list and tell her I love her.
Sunday 11.03.12 12:19 AM
Unless there's an asterisk by her name, in which case tell her I hate her.
Sunday 11.03.12 12:26 AM
I'm not sure why everyone hates Pauly Shore, Biodome was hilarious! He made noise with his mouth a lot.
Sunday 11.03.12 12:31 AM
I fear my mind has begun to failllllllllllme. Let it be known that I am a man who faces death with composure!
Sundae 11.03.12 12:44 AM
I drew a horsey [this note was accompanied by a picture of a horse, also drawn in the author's blood]
Dimanche 11.03.12 12:51 AM
Screenplay idea: a man struggles against the forces of darkness, despite the darkness's horrible smell and Japan spice
[the rest of the screenplay has been omitted from this report for brevity]
In addition, investigators estimate the author used well over the 4 L of blood contained in a single body in writing this screenplay. DNA testing is currently being used to determine from whom he took the rest.
Sunday 11.03.12 12:64 AM
I don't like Google Chrome. I just don't. Too fancy.
Soonday 8.6.75 3:09 AM
They're still out there. Why? Why are they still out there?
Monday Monday Why Would You Leave And Not Take Me April 14 802,701 AD
There is no place for me in this world. Farewell, foul stench.
4 8 15 16 23 42
Oh, wait! Tomorrow they're serving pancakes, aren't they? I'm gonna miss that.
There were no more notes.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Vegetarianism
I am vegetarian. Usually I try not to make a big deal out of it, but I am just seriously squicked out by the concept of meat. And don't worry, this rant is not going to be some appeal trying to get you to stop sticking cow parts in your mouth.
Well, that's not entirely true. There's one product that just... utterly disgusts me, and that's the hot dog. Basically taking pig organs, grinding them up into paste and sticking them inside one large organ, and then twisting it up a regular intervals so that the paste is under pressure and sort of solidifies. I don't care how it tastes, I just don't get how people could put that in their bodies. I'm not even talking about the health part of it, because I have a pretty crappy diet. Hot dogs just strike me as just about the most disgusting thing an animal could produce (yes, out of anything) and we've chosen to eat it.
I actually might overlook that, except that the sausage has existed for millennia. They may have had them as early as 1000 BC. This means that "ground up organ goo inside one large organ twisted up" predates all of the following:
-radio
-women's suffrage
-the steam engine
-the seed drill
-the violin
-feudalism
-gunpowder
-indoor plumbing
-paved roads
-the longbow, and
-democracy
They say "necessity is the mother of invention". Apparently at some point a pre-Hellene gentleman was looking at a pig and thought, "Hm, I've already stripped it everything edible, but there must be some way to get more of it inside me!" He then set to work, running experiments, creating hypotheses--at least, I imagine something along those lines, since this predates the scientific method.
This rant is concerning vegetarian food. See, I have come across some problems at my school's cafeteria. While there is a medium-sized salad bar, that gets boring quite quickly. The school does not seem to consider that, just maybe, not everyone who wants pasta wants it thickly coated in meat sauce. There is also that possibility that fries can exist without chili. I've watched the process, I've seen the point at which they add meat sauce or chili, but for some reason it is prohibited to interrupt it even once.
I'm not the only vegetarian, of course. However, they seem to fall prey to another annoying fallacy. Their thought process, as far as I can determine, runs along the track, "This dish does not contain meat. We should try to cover it in as many different spices and as much spice as we can possibly manage. Johnson, check the saturation point of oregano for this sauce." No, some people don't like that. I'm not sure if you've realized this, but some people don't like that. They've made a few stews that looked appetizing, but from the smell seemed nothing short of noxious. The cooks seem to believe that just because someone discovered a plant with a particular flavoring, it would be a shame to let it go to waste even for a single meal. Perhaps they accidentally misordered very large quantities earlier in the year, and they feel it would be a shame to let any of it spoil.
I try to expose myself to new things--film, music, nature--but when it comes to food, I have very bland tastes. I don't particularly care for sharp flavorings, odd spices, the sour or spicy. I'd appreciate it if they would at least offer a little more variety in that way. My preferences may be bland, but I will eventually get tired of cereal, salad, and waffles.
Also, their orange juice is perhaps the most disgusting vile thing I have ever tasted. Signing out.
Well, that's not entirely true. There's one product that just... utterly disgusts me, and that's the hot dog. Basically taking pig organs, grinding them up into paste and sticking them inside one large organ, and then twisting it up a regular intervals so that the paste is under pressure and sort of solidifies. I don't care how it tastes, I just don't get how people could put that in their bodies. I'm not even talking about the health part of it, because I have a pretty crappy diet. Hot dogs just strike me as just about the most disgusting thing an animal could produce (yes, out of anything) and we've chosen to eat it.
I actually might overlook that, except that the sausage has existed for millennia. They may have had them as early as 1000 BC. This means that "ground up organ goo inside one large organ twisted up" predates all of the following:
-radio
-women's suffrage
-the steam engine
-the seed drill
-the violin
-feudalism
-gunpowder
-indoor plumbing
-paved roads
-the longbow, and
-democracy
They say "necessity is the mother of invention". Apparently at some point a pre-Hellene gentleman was looking at a pig and thought, "Hm, I've already stripped it everything edible, but there must be some way to get more of it inside me!" He then set to work, running experiments, creating hypotheses--at least, I imagine something along those lines, since this predates the scientific method.
This rant is concerning vegetarian food. See, I have come across some problems at my school's cafeteria. While there is a medium-sized salad bar, that gets boring quite quickly. The school does not seem to consider that, just maybe, not everyone who wants pasta wants it thickly coated in meat sauce. There is also that possibility that fries can exist without chili. I've watched the process, I've seen the point at which they add meat sauce or chili, but for some reason it is prohibited to interrupt it even once.
I'm not the only vegetarian, of course. However, they seem to fall prey to another annoying fallacy. Their thought process, as far as I can determine, runs along the track, "This dish does not contain meat. We should try to cover it in as many different spices and as much spice as we can possibly manage. Johnson, check the saturation point of oregano for this sauce." No, some people don't like that. I'm not sure if you've realized this, but some people don't like that. They've made a few stews that looked appetizing, but from the smell seemed nothing short of noxious. The cooks seem to believe that just because someone discovered a plant with a particular flavoring, it would be a shame to let it go to waste even for a single meal. Perhaps they accidentally misordered very large quantities earlier in the year, and they feel it would be a shame to let any of it spoil.
I try to expose myself to new things--film, music, nature--but when it comes to food, I have very bland tastes. I don't particularly care for sharp flavorings, odd spices, the sour or spicy. I'd appreciate it if they would at least offer a little more variety in that way. My preferences may be bland, but I will eventually get tired of cereal, salad, and waffles.
Also, their orange juice is perhaps the most disgusting vile thing I have ever tasted. Signing out.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
The Romantic Bechdel Test
This story, one of countless "Facebook Love Stories" distributed by hormonal teenagers who apparently "crie evertim" they read the word "love" or "dead" and whose appreciation for the English language is underdeveloped to say the least, represents a fundamental flaw I see in humanity's collective culture. While this is particularly narmy (and without the dramatic reading, almost painful to read), the problem is universal.
The problem is that we, as a species, have no appreciation for subtlety when it comes to love. When we see a couple on screen, if they aren't sucking face they aren't "in love". They're "boring". The best they can hope for is to give the main characters bad advice (old people are exempt from this rule).
They aren't all bad, of course. It's much like the Bechdel Test*, though: it's less a judge of a single movie and more of movies in general. Does the movie intone that one type of love is better than another? That's the problem to which I'm referring.
[[*At least two female characters who have at least one conversation about something other than men or a man. Used as a litmus test of the feminism of movies: do they treat the females as actual characters, or just as accessories to the male lead?]]
Even worse, it seems like we're unable to have any movies without romance. Again, sometimes it's okay. Sometimes it's great. But it gets very frustrating when every single movie decides that its lead had to close a scene with a kiss. If there's both a male and a female in the main cast, then it's a forgone conclusion. The last exception, at least the last exception I can currently recall, was Blade. That came out in 1998. It's like, no, I'm trying to get into this story, but you seem to have decided that plot isn't enough.
This also has an annoying tendency to create characters with no purpose other than being romantic partners. This is why chick flicks like When Harry Met Sally do so much better than those like Kate and Leopold: not because of some magical non-chick-flickiness, it's because they're, y'know, good. These characters are absolutely frustrating for me, as a connoisseur of fiction, because they are the epitome of flat characters: they don't even have that one trait that makes a flat character, their only trait is that they exist alongside another character.
Why is this so absolutely awful? Because it means the romance won't work. The characters aren't interesting enough for me to believe that they stand a conversation together, let alone a relationship. Here's my "romantic litmus test", modeled after the Bechdel Test: the characters must have at least one good conversation on a topic other than themselves or each other that would work equally well (A) if they were romantically connected; (B) if they were not romantically connected and had no desire to be; AND (C) if they had already been married for twenty years. That's what I would consider a real conversation.
If you can't fluidly do that, then don't make them romantic leads. It would just be an awkwardly shoehorned subplot. Next time you watch a movie, see if it passes. Again, like the Bechdel test, it does not by itself mean the movie/romance is bad (my favorite movie of all time, Brazil, does not pass). Plenty of wonderful movies failed the Bechdel test, too (Twelve Angry Men, any war movie). The problem arises when you consider how rarely the test works.
It doesn't have to be a romantic movie. The original Bechdel test used Alien as its example, which was hardly a radical feminist statement. It was just a movie which happened to have well-written female characters.
Coming back to the "dramatic romance" part of the rant: that's just simply not how love works. It works because two people can tolerate to be around each other so much that they begin to want to tolerate each other. A date goes smoothly because people have common interests, not because the guy rescued the girl from the enemy ship. I long for a movie that recognizes, yeah, just because we've done something big together doesn't mean we should get married.
Oh yeah, another pet peeve: high school romances end. They end. Maybe 5% of them don't. But if your TV show or movie ends at graduation, then those romantic leads are getting married. That's always bugged me.
Personally, I want a girl who doesn't mind that I'm flipping through Wikipedia while we talk... because she's doing the same thing. Not someone who'd drag me to her friend's birthday party, someone whose friends are interesting enough I'd want to go anyway. "Our Song" would be something with an awesome guitar riff and trippy lyrics, not some sappy pop ballad. In short, the absolute opposite of nearly every rom com I've ever seen.
With the exception that I'd really like her to be hot. Signing out.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Men and Women
You've all seen it. Every two-bit stand-up comedian, every sitcom drained of ideas, every obnoxious adolescent girl on Facebook seems to have some fanciful, exaggerated opinion about the difference between men and women. Well, here's a shocker. It's nonsense. Yes, utter garbage.
While I can't quite say "identical", I think you'll find that outside of cosmetic and biological differences, men and women are astonishingly similar. I have determined this through years of studying social behavior. After spending far too long being surrounded by the intolerably stupid mantra "the girl/wife is always right", I, as a person who loves being right and a man of science, decided to take it upon myself to prove just how asinine this idea is, as well as the Mars-Venus mentality upon which it is based.
"The girl/wife is always right" is in fact so stupid that even hearing it once is to be exposed to it for "too long". Thanks to Mormons and high school girls, I had to hear it more than once. It was dreadful. Before I proceed to the meat of this discussion I shall expound on the unrivaled idiocy of this belief.
The most easily identifiable flaw is that "always" and, for that matter "never" hold absolutely no truth outside of a mathematics textbook. Next, if a woman is assumed to be "right" and the man "wrong", that implies several things initially. Firstly, that all men and all women share the same belief on everything. Thus, every option can be divided into only two options: the "right" option selected by all women and the "wrong" option or options selected by all men. This would mean there would always be only two political parties, one for the men and one for the women; the party run by the women would consistently make correct decisions in policy and campaigning, thus trouncing the men's party. Why men would even allowed to vote, knowing they would only make the wrong decisions, is puzzling on its own.
Taking away the "always" modifier, even though no one who supported it ever did, and substituting the much less brief and less satisfying "a statistically significant number of women are correct more often than men with statistically significant magnitude" still fails to resolve the problem. If you haven't been paying attention to the entirety of history before New Zealand became the first country to give women the vote in 1896, men are, in fact, capable of doing things. In fact, up until about the 1970s it was entirely the opposite: men were the stable, capable ones taking care of their ditzy, hysterical wives. While I'm glad that's over, I can see we've overcorrected.
It also raises philosophical questions: would a particular point of view be right because it is right, or because it is feminine? If a man consigns his opinions to a woman's, on which scale are they judged for weight of possibility of being correct? The point is, never, ever say that phrase ever again or I will scald you.
Moving on to the less-obvious and more-relevant matter, masculinity and femininity represent false dichotomy. Saying a particular action, interest, or trait is "masculine" or "feminine" is as meaningless as saying it is particularly white or blue or green. "You enjoy sports? That's an orange trait, all right!" Mentally, men and women are not so different. That's to what this all boils down.
Housework and cooking are not "feminine", they are "domestic". Playing sports is not "masculine", it is "sporty". Likewise, paying attention to sports is not "masculine", it is "stupid"*. And recalling that 40% of the Super Bowl's viewership is female year after year, it is easy to see that gender really has little impact on this. At least, that's what I would have said back when I was young and optimistic about humanity. In practice, people have yet to pick up on this.
[[*I can put a spheroid through an opening with greater accuracy and/or frequency than the layman. Give me millions of dollars!
Alternatively: You are large and can run towards other large people without being readily knocked down. Congratulations, you have all the qualifications to play football or mate with a female gorilla.]]
So what does cause those schisms that fill the repertoire of bad comedians and page after page after page of Dating Fails? Purely social stigma. This is where those years of study come in to play. As you come closer to the social norm, gender differences become more and more pronounced. The duck-faced pre-teen girls, the frat boy jocks, the long-married Mormons. The further from social norms (that is, the disaffected nerds, hippies, and counterculture) the less gender roles matter. It seems no coincidence that the only gender-integrated teams at my school of which I am aware are those populated by nerds (Quiz Bowl, Science Bowl, mock trial), though mind you, this was NOT the extent of my research. Why? Because the people already separated from the popular influence (and this plays up heavily the "nurture" end of the equation) in elementary, middle, and high school are those who are not, for lack of a better word, contaminated by the dichotomy model of gender theory.
Perhaps most frustrating is the "protector-protectee" dynamic seen far too often, which holds (in addition to "the girl is always right") that the girl is inherently special and deserves the adoring support of the boy. This is a way of simultaneously building up and insulting both genders: the girls think of themselves as the magical chalices of vague virtue and the boys as lowly servants; the boys think of themselves as noble knights protecting a valuable object, but an object nonetheless. Comforting on some level, but ever so stupid.
Boys are encouraged into sports; girls are, by and large, not. However, the worst part about this is that it is self-perpetuating. When a girl plays and enjoys sports, she is called a "tomboy", the implication being that her interest is not in sports but in masculinity, again tying into the false dichotomy.
This leads into the sexual double standard, which fortunately has been growing weaker in recent years. Truthfully I'm a little squicked by the whole topic (I also have trouble touching people, so perhaps I'm not the most reliable source on the topic), but to place one group as the "victors" and the other as the "prize" just represents building up these non-existent differences even more. And while at first glance it seems unfair to women, it also means that men are assumed, by default, to be undesirable and thus forced to rise above their lowly station to score. Yes, it strikes that rarely-seen sweet spot of stupidity where nobody wins even a little.
I am a straight male who enjoys clothes shopping and fashion, video games of most genres, Terry Gilliam and Hayao Miyazaki, alternative rock, writing, comedy (particularly dark comedy), and bashing on stuff. I hate sports, children, rap, Michael Bay, Twilight, and sensitivity. Notice a pattern?
Good, you weren't supposed to. There wasn't one, because a person's interests are, by and large, not directly tied in with one another and particularly not in such broad bundles as "male" and "female". Unless you noticed "nerdy", "tasteful", or "whiny", which are correct. If you deduced that I had just returned from Afghanistan, then I'm afraid I must inform you that Dr. Moriarty's plan has already succeeded. Moving on!
What does this mean for you? Instead of worrying, "How on earth will I talk to this girl/boy?", think instead "How on earth will I talk to this person?", and then the problem seems to diminish. Unless you have a phobia or anxiety disorder which pertains to that situation, but now I'm getting too technical.
Not that gender is meaningless, of course. There's still sex, of course. However, unless you are presently engaged in the active pursuit of someone with whom to hump, it's not much of a concern. Like I said, I can't quite call men and women identical, but society plays a far more enormous role in their differences than any actual differences.
So in short, the key to figuring out women is that they have thoughts comparable to your own. Fancy that
While I can't quite say "identical", I think you'll find that outside of cosmetic and biological differences, men and women are astonishingly similar. I have determined this through years of studying social behavior. After spending far too long being surrounded by the intolerably stupid mantra "the girl/wife is always right", I, as a person who loves being right and a man of science, decided to take it upon myself to prove just how asinine this idea is, as well as the Mars-Venus mentality upon which it is based.
"The girl/wife is always right" is in fact so stupid that even hearing it once is to be exposed to it for "too long". Thanks to Mormons and high school girls, I had to hear it more than once. It was dreadful. Before I proceed to the meat of this discussion I shall expound on the unrivaled idiocy of this belief.
The most easily identifiable flaw is that "always" and, for that matter "never" hold absolutely no truth outside of a mathematics textbook. Next, if a woman is assumed to be "right" and the man "wrong", that implies several things initially. Firstly, that all men and all women share the same belief on everything. Thus, every option can be divided into only two options: the "right" option selected by all women and the "wrong" option or options selected by all men. This would mean there would always be only two political parties, one for the men and one for the women; the party run by the women would consistently make correct decisions in policy and campaigning, thus trouncing the men's party. Why men would even allowed to vote, knowing they would only make the wrong decisions, is puzzling on its own.
Taking away the "always" modifier, even though no one who supported it ever did, and substituting the much less brief and less satisfying "a statistically significant number of women are correct more often than men with statistically significant magnitude" still fails to resolve the problem. If you haven't been paying attention to the entirety of history before New Zealand became the first country to give women the vote in 1896, men are, in fact, capable of doing things. In fact, up until about the 1970s it was entirely the opposite: men were the stable, capable ones taking care of their ditzy, hysterical wives. While I'm glad that's over, I can see we've overcorrected.
It also raises philosophical questions: would a particular point of view be right because it is right, or because it is feminine? If a man consigns his opinions to a woman's, on which scale are they judged for weight of possibility of being correct? The point is, never, ever say that phrase ever again or I will scald you.
Moving on to the less-obvious and more-relevant matter, masculinity and femininity represent false dichotomy. Saying a particular action, interest, or trait is "masculine" or "feminine" is as meaningless as saying it is particularly white or blue or green. "You enjoy sports? That's an orange trait, all right!" Mentally, men and women are not so different. That's to what this all boils down.
Housework and cooking are not "feminine", they are "domestic". Playing sports is not "masculine", it is "sporty". Likewise, paying attention to sports is not "masculine", it is "stupid"*. And recalling that 40% of the Super Bowl's viewership is female year after year, it is easy to see that gender really has little impact on this. At least, that's what I would have said back when I was young and optimistic about humanity. In practice, people have yet to pick up on this.
[[*I can put a spheroid through an opening with greater accuracy and/or frequency than the layman. Give me millions of dollars!
Alternatively: You are large and can run towards other large people without being readily knocked down. Congratulations, you have all the qualifications to play football or mate with a female gorilla.]]
So what does cause those schisms that fill the repertoire of bad comedians and page after page after page of Dating Fails? Purely social stigma. This is where those years of study come in to play. As you come closer to the social norm, gender differences become more and more pronounced. The duck-faced pre-teen girls, the frat boy jocks, the long-married Mormons. The further from social norms (that is, the disaffected nerds, hippies, and counterculture) the less gender roles matter. It seems no coincidence that the only gender-integrated teams at my school of which I am aware are those populated by nerds (Quiz Bowl, Science Bowl, mock trial), though mind you, this was NOT the extent of my research. Why? Because the people already separated from the popular influence (and this plays up heavily the "nurture" end of the equation) in elementary, middle, and high school are those who are not, for lack of a better word, contaminated by the dichotomy model of gender theory.
Perhaps most frustrating is the "protector-protectee" dynamic seen far too often, which holds (in addition to "the girl is always right") that the girl is inherently special and deserves the adoring support of the boy. This is a way of simultaneously building up and insulting both genders: the girls think of themselves as the magical chalices of vague virtue and the boys as lowly servants; the boys think of themselves as noble knights protecting a valuable object, but an object nonetheless. Comforting on some level, but ever so stupid.
Boys are encouraged into sports; girls are, by and large, not. However, the worst part about this is that it is self-perpetuating. When a girl plays and enjoys sports, she is called a "tomboy", the implication being that her interest is not in sports but in masculinity, again tying into the false dichotomy.
This leads into the sexual double standard, which fortunately has been growing weaker in recent years. Truthfully I'm a little squicked by the whole topic (I also have trouble touching people, so perhaps I'm not the most reliable source on the topic), but to place one group as the "victors" and the other as the "prize" just represents building up these non-existent differences even more. And while at first glance it seems unfair to women, it also means that men are assumed, by default, to be undesirable and thus forced to rise above their lowly station to score. Yes, it strikes that rarely-seen sweet spot of stupidity where nobody wins even a little.
I am a straight male who enjoys clothes shopping and fashion, video games of most genres, Terry Gilliam and Hayao Miyazaki, alternative rock, writing, comedy (particularly dark comedy), and bashing on stuff. I hate sports, children, rap, Michael Bay, Twilight, and sensitivity. Notice a pattern?
Good, you weren't supposed to. There wasn't one, because a person's interests are, by and large, not directly tied in with one another and particularly not in such broad bundles as "male" and "female". Unless you noticed "nerdy", "tasteful", or "whiny", which are correct. If you deduced that I had just returned from Afghanistan, then I'm afraid I must inform you that Dr. Moriarty's plan has already succeeded. Moving on!
What does this mean for you? Instead of worrying, "How on earth will I talk to this girl/boy?", think instead "How on earth will I talk to this person?", and then the problem seems to diminish. Unless you have a phobia or anxiety disorder which pertains to that situation, but now I'm getting too technical.
Not that gender is meaningless, of course. There's still sex, of course. However, unless you are presently engaged in the active pursuit of someone with whom to hump, it's not much of a concern. Like I said, I can't quite call men and women identical, but society plays a far more enormous role in their differences than any actual differences.
So in short, the key to figuring out women is that they have thoughts comparable to your own. Fancy that
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
The Mary Sue
Aah, the Mary Sue. Bane of fanfiction readers everywhere, this horrible abomination against writing has managed to wriggle its way into every medium, dragging down its quality and ruining forever everything it touches.
Except, no.
The Mary Sue, despite all the hate against it, is a character archetype and, like any character archetype, can be used poorly or used well. Very well, in fact.
First, it seems like we should describe exactly what makes a Mary Sue (which I will be using to refer to both genders; in other contexts you may see male Sues called Marty Stus or Gary Stus or some other variant). This is not easy to do, since everyone has their own definition, and since it's hard to pin down exactly.
The original Mary Sue comes from A Trekkie's Tale and was actually a parody of other ridiculous self-inserts the author had seen in earlier fanfictions. Some of the defining traits is that she is overly perfect, enough that he or she overshadows all the other characters. The character does not grow or develop significantly. The rules of the universe seem to be built or bent just for them. We'll say that these are "the" Mary Sue traits, and the others are peripheral to it.
Her powers and abilities are vaguely defined so she can conjure new ones as the plot demands. These powers and abilities may or may not fit in with the context of the world, may or may not be explained, and will always be more important than anyone else's. If she dies, it's either because she was "too good for this sinful earth" or else she's coming back.
Her physical appearance is always perfect, but she'll rarely know it. She might have some deformity (wings are popular) which she thinks make her ugly until someone tells her otherwise.
Expect them to be able to do whatever they want and no one will ever call them out if (I repeat: if) they make a mistake. She'll probably have had a hard life, but it will never weigh her down. She will have sex precisely as often as she wants to. In most cases it's an insert of the author; the author's views are always exactly right in the universe in which the story takes place, and no good character will ever question them.
Sounds pretty boring, right? No wonder every Mary Sue is a detriment to anything in which she appears, right? Again, no. While this describes many unpleasant characters (Ebony Raven Dark'ness Dementia Tara Way, Bella Swan, Wesley Crusher, Jenna Silverblade, SCI Spy), it also describes a surprising number of beloved pop culture and literature icons. Don't believe me?
-Mary Poppins
-James Bond
-Gandalf (from The Lord of The Rings, The Hobbit)
-Sora (from Kingdom Hearts)
-Vash the Stampede (from Trigun)
-Mary Jensen (from There's Something About Mary)
We already know James Bond will never be defeated, and he'll always pull off some daring feat in the third act that results in perfect victory after sleeping with an attractive female lead. So why do we watch movie after movie while ripping Sonichu to shreds?
Well, to be fair, Sonichu's kind of beyond saving. But let's ignore that for now.
I currently have a multi-part model that explains this. The first is the setting and storyline. If you're going to have a perfect character, then the challenges they must face must be scaled up appropriately. They must be challenged despite their seeming perfection. Vash, the superbly skilled gunman, must win without killing anyone, while coping with the pain he's inflicted in the past. Mary Poppins' perfection is actually the main point of her character, and she's used as a tool to develop the others. If the audience is more concerned about how our hero will win this time, they'll be a lot less concerned about how unrealistic it is that they've made it this far.
In How Not to Write a Novel, the authors tell prospective writers that the more improbably something is, the more important it must be to the story. If the protagonist wins the lottery, they must win it early on and the story must center on it (was there a caper involved? How will they spend the money?) Likewise, the more impossible a character, the more the challenge must be ramped up.
One of the cornerstones of the Mary Sue bashing is saying that it's just wish fulfillment for the author. This overlooks the fact that this can be a good thing--as long as it can be wish fulfillment for the reader as well. Ultimately, James Bond is built on this.
However, the third point is far more important, and it all comes down to that cardinal rule of writing: show, don't tell. SCI Spy isn't all that different from James Bond, to the point where it's fair to call him a straight rip-off. What SCI Spy does wrong, however, is that it focuses far too much on telling us why the titular character is so great, while a James Bond book or movie gives us the pleasure of watching him outsmart the bad guys and charm the ladies. Instead of having someone tell us Sora is cheerful and lovable, then making him act like a sullen jerk the entire game, we see him being cheerful and lovable.
This becomes particularly important when it comes to dialogue. Mary Sues are often built up as witty, charming, and uproariously funny. As Dorothy Parker said, "I have yet to have an author inform me that a character is charming, and then, by that character’s deeds and conversation, convince me of that fact." Again referring to James Bond, we know he's witty because we see him being witty, and we enjoy it. In fact, the problem is not the Mary Sue; no character or story works well when telling overshadows showing.
However, none of this means that your fanfiction is good. Signing out.
Except, no.
The Mary Sue, despite all the hate against it, is a character archetype and, like any character archetype, can be used poorly or used well. Very well, in fact.
First, it seems like we should describe exactly what makes a Mary Sue (which I will be using to refer to both genders; in other contexts you may see male Sues called Marty Stus or Gary Stus or some other variant). This is not easy to do, since everyone has their own definition, and since it's hard to pin down exactly.
The original Mary Sue comes from A Trekkie's Tale and was actually a parody of other ridiculous self-inserts the author had seen in earlier fanfictions. Some of the defining traits is that she is overly perfect, enough that he or she overshadows all the other characters. The character does not grow or develop significantly. The rules of the universe seem to be built or bent just for them. We'll say that these are "the" Mary Sue traits, and the others are peripheral to it.
Her powers and abilities are vaguely defined so she can conjure new ones as the plot demands. These powers and abilities may or may not fit in with the context of the world, may or may not be explained, and will always be more important than anyone else's. If she dies, it's either because she was "too good for this sinful earth" or else she's coming back.
Her physical appearance is always perfect, but she'll rarely know it. She might have some deformity (wings are popular) which she thinks make her ugly until someone tells her otherwise.
Expect them to be able to do whatever they want and no one will ever call them out if (I repeat: if) they make a mistake. She'll probably have had a hard life, but it will never weigh her down. She will have sex precisely as often as she wants to. In most cases it's an insert of the author; the author's views are always exactly right in the universe in which the story takes place, and no good character will ever question them.
Sounds pretty boring, right? No wonder every Mary Sue is a detriment to anything in which she appears, right? Again, no. While this describes many unpleasant characters (Ebony Raven Dark'ness Dementia Tara Way, Bella Swan, Wesley Crusher, Jenna Silverblade, SCI Spy), it also describes a surprising number of beloved pop culture and literature icons. Don't believe me?
-Mary Poppins
-James Bond
-Gandalf (from The Lord of The Rings, The Hobbit)
-Sora (from Kingdom Hearts)
-Vash the Stampede (from Trigun)
-Mary Jensen (from There's Something About Mary)
We already know James Bond will never be defeated, and he'll always pull off some daring feat in the third act that results in perfect victory after sleeping with an attractive female lead. So why do we watch movie after movie while ripping Sonichu to shreds?
Well, to be fair, Sonichu's kind of beyond saving. But let's ignore that for now.
I currently have a multi-part model that explains this. The first is the setting and storyline. If you're going to have a perfect character, then the challenges they must face must be scaled up appropriately. They must be challenged despite their seeming perfection. Vash, the superbly skilled gunman, must win without killing anyone, while coping with the pain he's inflicted in the past. Mary Poppins' perfection is actually the main point of her character, and she's used as a tool to develop the others. If the audience is more concerned about how our hero will win this time, they'll be a lot less concerned about how unrealistic it is that they've made it this far.
In How Not to Write a Novel, the authors tell prospective writers that the more improbably something is, the more important it must be to the story. If the protagonist wins the lottery, they must win it early on and the story must center on it (was there a caper involved? How will they spend the money?) Likewise, the more impossible a character, the more the challenge must be ramped up.
One of the cornerstones of the Mary Sue bashing is saying that it's just wish fulfillment for the author. This overlooks the fact that this can be a good thing--as long as it can be wish fulfillment for the reader as well. Ultimately, James Bond is built on this.
However, the third point is far more important, and it all comes down to that cardinal rule of writing: show, don't tell. SCI Spy isn't all that different from James Bond, to the point where it's fair to call him a straight rip-off. What SCI Spy does wrong, however, is that it focuses far too much on telling us why the titular character is so great, while a James Bond book or movie gives us the pleasure of watching him outsmart the bad guys and charm the ladies. Instead of having someone tell us Sora is cheerful and lovable, then making him act like a sullen jerk the entire game, we see him being cheerful and lovable.
This becomes particularly important when it comes to dialogue. Mary Sues are often built up as witty, charming, and uproariously funny. As Dorothy Parker said, "I have yet to have an author inform me that a character is charming, and then, by that character’s deeds and conversation, convince me of that fact." Again referring to James Bond, we know he's witty because we see him being witty, and we enjoy it. In fact, the problem is not the Mary Sue; no character or story works well when telling overshadows showing.
However, none of this means that your fanfiction is good. Signing out.
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