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For some reason I've been thinking about D'Anna again (partially I'm sure due to the recent release of The Golden Compass, the source material of which features an explicit parallel to Eve). And I think I'm able to better detail just what the difference between the three (original Eve, Battlestar's D'Anna, and His Dark Materials' Lyra) is, and why I prefer D'Anna's story. I'm not going to make a lot of sense here but I'll give it a shot.
Who does this guy Rawls think he is, Karl Marx?
An equal society can't work because an equal society would be based on cooperation rather than competition. That's what the economists tells us and they are our prophets (the prophets of profit, hoho), capitalism (or consumerism, really), our religion.
More, that's what the paradigm tells us. The narrative that drives our culture. Our entire societal being is based on the idea that cooperation and equality leads to stagnation, that progress and advancement only results from competition--more than that, only from competition for monetary and/or material reward. This is the essence of "Family": beneath all the rhetoric, what is most sacred is property.
In the beginning there was the Word.
Our world begins as language, thoughts, symbols, scraps of meaning communicated between the scattered identities that make up each individual. To live we organize them into coherent structures, forms, sequences, patterns. We call these structures stories or narratives, and from them we construct the meanings of our lives.
Everything is a story, a narrative arc from beginning to middle to end, inciting incident to rising action to climax to falling action to resolution. Everything, from the new blockbuster movie to the report on the evening news to our daily routines, is a story. That is to say, it is not reality that is made up of stories, but our interpretations of it. Our world is language, which become stories.
I can't just write like I used to.
In the beginning there was the Word.
Not the program, that bloated Microsoft contraption (bloated like all Microsoft contraptions and forced upon a marketplace begging for more, grown fat and complacent on the bloat, completely ignorant of any alternatives--the fast food of software, if you will), but Logos, symbols, language, communication, syntax.
Some people are obsessed with physical pain: fight fans, some sports fans in general, some video game players, and so on. The people who seek out the visceral thrill of seeing blood and bruises and another person's body go limp. Maybe it's about power, maybe it's about stress, maybe it's just about a fondness for red. Whatever it is, we condemn them, or at least tolerate them, but never encourage them. It's wrong to enjoy another person's pain.
But in the same stroke as we dismiss such inclinations as sadistic we embrace their mental counterpart as high art. What is the catharsis of tragedy but obsessing over and, to a greater or lesser extent, enjoying emotional pain? It's not enjoyment, we may say; but it satisfies some craving, does it not? It makes us feel something that we want to feel. How is that different from the "sadists"?
Over lunch today I had an odd thought. I was considering what kind of people play D&D, and this is the list I came up with: the people who are interested in the math and statistics (call them the mathematicians), are the people who are interested in the social aspect (socializers), the people who enjoy the experience of the world and narrative (narrativists), and the people who can only think well of themselves when they're pretending to be a Level 50 Badass Motherfucker of Doom (the creepy fucks who get off on hitting on female NPCs and fucking with other PCs).
And then I realized that these on-the-spot categories map rather well to the four MMO player type model of Achievers (the mathematicians, who want to maximize their stats), Socializers (duh), Explorers (the narrativists, who want to experience the world), and Griefers (who want to dominate other players). Maybe I was just unconsciously influenced by my knowledge of the model, and the model itself is not particularly concrete, and my own player type list certainly holds little weight, but it's interesting nonetheless. I sort of wonder if these four player types rather correspond to generic types of people in general? Achievers are the businessmen interested in accomplishment for itself, Socializers are people people, Explorers are individualists, artists, creators, and Griefers are the jerks. Hmm.
Okay, so I think I figured out why Heroes appears to oscillate between strong women and traditional sexist tropes... and it's a simple reason that people have already figured out long before me and even coined an aphorism for: "always assume incompetence before malevolence" (with variations, of course). In a nutshell, sexism such as in Heroes isn't the result of deliberate intent; it's just stupidity and laziness.
Mad Men's first season ended tonight. The confirmation of a second made me grin with giddy enthusiasm; the date of summer 2008 barely dented that smile, since I knew that would the likely date anyway (and I'm used to long waits from Battlestar).
It's interesting that while I've fallen in love with Mad Men over the past thirteen episodes, it wasn't until tonight, after it had ended, that I began to realize how truly transcendent it is as a television show. I submit that it is not just the best new show of the year, which I think is without question, but I think that it may be the best television show I have ever seen, better even than my golden babies of Firefly and (gasp) Battlestar. Both those -- and other brilliant first seasons I might name, like Veronica Mars' -- had their ups and downs, with the downs simply being greater than nearly everything else on television and the ups being some of the best productions ever put to film. But with Mad Men -- and perhaps this is just the rose-colored glasses of post-finale bliss -- has never hit a wrong mark.
Minerva is a Half-Life 2 single-player mod, which immediately makes it notable simply because there aren't many of those. And its being good as well puts it practically in a category unto itself.
After at least a year (I don't remember when the last chapter was released exactly) the final two chapters (for a total of four) were released about a week ago. Having loved the first two -- I thought they were in many ways an experience superior to that of the actual Half-Life 2 -- I eagerly anticipated more great level design, pretentiously enigmatic Marathon-esque narration, haunting music, and so on.
I was disappointed. (Spoilers in this review . . . as always.)
Interesting comment from a friend:
A woman shouldn't be president because women are fucked, and we don't want our country to be fucked. Our country should be doing the fucking.
I don't want to seem alarmist so early on, but what started as a few sour notes in the premier seems to be continuing without abate in the second episode:
- First, most obviously, is our new characters, the Wonder Twins Maya and Alejandro. Not even touching on how this plays into the diseased immigrant stereotype, Maya has an uncontrollable power that kills people by making them bleed out of their eyes (which is not as creepy as I think it's supposed to be due to both Firefly and The 4400 having already done it, and from more than just the eyes), and the only way to stop her is for her brother to be around. So her brother follows her everywhere, insists that he always be with her, constantly tells her that he's going to make everything okay . . . which would be perfectly acceptable, even interesting, since that is almost certainly what the dynamic between a pair of South American siblings would be, except that for the show this is apparently all true. Again, it's early in the season, but we've no indications that Maya will learn to control her power without her brother's help, which is . . . disturbing.
Life is change; static is death. I've stated this before, and it remains true. But I failed to fully explore the implications of that statement. I knew how it applied to my error -- trying to preserve a static identity, through the insulation of myself from any influence of others, not realizing that to do so was nothing better than the meticulous preservation of a corpse, an artifact useful for others but pernicious to the individual in question -- but I missed the key part, what I thought was a minor method of my greater madness that was in fact the most important part of the mistake: the insulation of myself from the influence of others.
Over the past three days, I have, along with a group of between ten and fifteen other people, rewatched the entire first season of Heroes. A good show, especially for network television. One of the things I was struck by while rewatching is its thematic coherence, something I'm fairly certain is quite rare for television in general: from the beginning, the message of love through togetherness and the need to unite to overcome is clearly emphasized without hitting you over the head with it, dealt with in a number of different ways without it getting monotonous. The themes themselves are not particularly original (indeed, are glaringly unoriginal), but my point is that they're presented well.
Replaying Deus Ex (in shoot-'em-up form rather than my traditional pacifistic inclinations) and reminded of its brilliance in not just the big things but little things as well:
- A bum in Battery Park, New York City singing "My Country Tis of Thee". The "sweet land of liberty" line is of course particularly poignant given the circumstances of the game. His off-tune voice and genuine enthusiasm (he seems to really believe what he is singing, not just reciting it) lend it an earnestness that make it all the more sad when considering how his faith in his country has been abused (both in the game and in reality).
- A boy in the Mole People's tunnels who proudly proclaims that when he grows up, he will "know everything". The boy seems to see this as the ultimate accomplishment, suggesting that when he does so he will be above or on top of everyone else. A subtle reference (you don't have to talk to him, and he's easy to miss) on the "Knowledge is power" motif that dominates the game (it is, after all, MJ12's motto, in the Latin I used in the title of this post).
- Another boy int he Mole People's tunnels terrified of some secret demon he describes as "the man with red eyes". At first glance nothing more than an amusing inclusion referencing the devil -- except that (presumably due to his augmentation) Bob Page's (the ultimate villain of the game) eyes are red. You can actually see this early in the game, too, in the magazine in the UNATCO lounge.
Spook Country is William Gibson's (of Neuromancer fame) latest novel, a sequel (at least in the manner of Gibson's sequels) to his last, Pattern Recognition. PR is one of my favorite books; I consider it Gibson's second-best after Neuromancer. SC, while a good read and certainly better than much of today's popular fiction, doesn't quite stand up to its predecessor.
Supposedly the Iowa State Fair is world famous, or at least nationally known. It is a celebration of everything Iowan, and for a week in late August thousands come to swelter in the heat and humidity and eat fried turkey, Twinkies, Oreos, and god knows what else on a stick. Big-name musicians play, there are rides, everyone has fun. It's a family event.
Except that it's all a load of shit.
The above is one of the two most-cited bad/cliche endings in amateur writing (the other being "...but it was all a dream!"). Most comments towards it do note that such an ending can be pulled off effectively in certain cases. (I would imagine one such case being if the story regarded how people respond to an alien, hostile, indifferent universe, or something along those lines... but most would say that's been done enough.)
The fact of the matter, of course, is that such endings happen all the time in real life. People die for random, mundane reasons, all the time. Take the bridge that collapsed in Minnesota a few days ago. Yes, there was a reason -- engineers and politicians and many other people were certainly be investigated and held at fault -- but for the people who died crossing a bridge they crossed every day, it was random, irrelevant to each of their personal stories. It just happened. Now seven people are dead.
Let's try this again.
I'm a religious atheist. What follows is just how I view the world. I'm not trying to present it as fact, but I'm not going to throw in a bunch of IMOs because it'd get tiresome and I think you can figure that out.
Humanity, unique (as far as we know) among life on Earth (and possibly the universe), is sapient. That is, it possesses the ability to think and reason beyond instinctual programming. (Many animals are sentient; many animals can learn. These are not sapience, however.) This causes two problems for us: the problem of absolutes, and the problem of purpose.
(I love critical analysis, and I really enjoy doing little mini-reviews on Facebook. But those are unstructured, stream-of-consciousness pieces done just to get my mind engaged and thinking about whatever I watched/read/played. So here I'm going to try to convert those pieces into full-fledged reviews, as well as discussing some of my thoughts on reviewing, from the stand point of someone who knows very little about the theory of it -- perhaps useful, most likely not, but I'll do it anyway. This first one is from almost a month ago, Facebook told me -- still long after the film itself originally came out.)
Over the years I've spent a lot of time thinking about religion -- some of that has come up here -- but only in the past couple of weeks have I really began to organize my thoughts into a coherent theology that I think I can live with for quite some time. It'll change, of course, as everything does, but nonetheless I want to record it here, organize it and write it down for the first time so that I might not forget where I came from.
The protagonist's titular antisocial act in Crime and Punishment leads to much discussion of his theory regarding "ordinary" and "extraordinary" people, a philosophy that seems an almost perfect restatement of Nietzsche's over-man decades before Nietzsche formulated his own theories. Of course, most of the characters in the novel recognize this theory as absurd and dangerous (upon declaring that he wanted "the right", Sofya Semyonovna says, "The right? The right to kill?", clearly horrified), and I think most people in reality would respond similarly.
The anniversary of D-Day was three days ago.
An associate asked people to remember the Allied soldiers who died for the liberation of Europe.
Another person suggested people remember the German soldiers as well, because they were people to, fighting for their country. (Apparently the Italians the Japanese get no love.) People agreed, for the most part, but someone added, but not Hitler and the rest of the bastards at the top.
And I say, why not? Hitler and his fellows were horrible people, certainly, but they were people. Not monsters or evil demons sent by Satan to spread death and destruction among the naturally good societies of man, but people, shaped by genetics and experiences and their own choices.
This is going to all sound very obvious because, well, it is; but it's not something I've ever realized in quite this form until today (when it hit while reading Marmeladov's opening speech in Crime and Punishment -- great stuff, by the way).
Basically, what I've realized is that there's a fundamental incongruity in Christian doctrine. There's the Old Testament-inspired fire-and-brimstone stuff about hell and damnation and eternal punishment, which, no matter how many times Christians say is overriden by Jesus' words later, is still a major part of the Christian faith; and then there's the New Testament-inspired God-is-love and infinite-forgiveness stuff (the stuff that I like about Christianity).
The problem is that these two things cannot work together. You can't have infinite mercy and still condemn people to eternal damnation. God can't be love and still force people to suffer after death.
From the past week:
* A gleaming black dragonfly, wings about three inches across and body as long, appearing like an obsidian jewel carved by nature and set floating to wherever the wind takes it.
* A tree covered with stumps of severed limbs, like a stout but dim boxer bearing the scars of too many fights. I wondered who could do such a thing, torture another living organism so brutally only for their own aesthetic pleasure. The tree's remaining limbs were twisted around the trunk, appearing almost to strangle the tree as if in some vain attempt to protect itself from its attackers.
* A field by a creek dotted with crinkled white objects that I first took for so many discarded facial tissues but upon closer examination discovered, to my delight, to be fallen flowers from trees overhead. I cradled one and held it up gently, feeling its soft folds against my palm and studying the pattern of tiny brown dots on the interior of the flower. The end was a clean break; they had fallen as intended, to be scattered by the wind and spread the seeds of new trees across the earth, even though most had barely escaped the shadow of their parent. I was reminded of a wedding, or perhaps a funeral; but then I realized that those were merely artificial recreations designed to evoke this very event. They were the simulacra; I was experiencing the reality.
Some of the most interesting things I've written were written when I was tired, exhausted, ready to fall into bed and... well, not sleep instantly, because I can't do that, but as close as I get to that (which is for me something like twenty minutes).
When we're tired, our conscious mind gets slow and lethargic, just like the rest of our body. We start to rely on instinct and gut reactions rather than logic and convention. Our internal censor takes a breather.
Good lying depends on accurately replicating your appearance when speaking the truth. That is, if you want to appear hurt, and you normally get angry when hurt, then looking sad and dejected is not a good idea. This requires you to be a good actor in order to be a good liar, so that you can replicate disturbed emotional states when necessary. This is well-known, I think, even if people don't think about it in such terms -- it's too simple for that.
But the interesting thing to consider is that if your normal response is to appear detached and without emotion, as a robot or myself, then lying/acting simply involves doing the same thing. Thus the only requirement for a robot or me to lie well is to be speak the lie unemotionally -- which is, obviously, significantly easier than replicating a more energetic emotional response.
But while being mechanical in your emotions make you a good liar, as I am, it causes many problems as well. Empathy or sympathy, even when felt, may not be noticed by other people. People see you as aloof, distant, arrogant, isolated. (Often times they're right.) And connecting to people is... difficult, to say the least.
"Stop analyzing!"
This is the refrain of many who spend even a small amount of time in my company.
I answer truthfully: "I can't." But there is another answer, just as truthful, that I don't say: "I won't."
On my long (long, long) walk to Ciara's yesterday, I experienced something I do not see very often: natural beauty.
There's a difference, in my mind, between natural beauty and what I might call "human beauty", which is to say, art and indeed any human creation. The disparity, I think, lies in meaning. Art -- human creations -- inherently possess some meaning; even if we don't know what it is, even if the artist doesn't know what it is, even if it isn't possible to convey in any form of communication we possess, there is a meaning. All human creation is in pursuit of some purpose -- often, we just aren't aware of it.
But the need for meaning is a feature found solely in human beings. The natural world does not desire meaning; it exists simply because it exists. Its form has been decided by evolution and no small degree of random chance; and as such, inherently meaningless, its beauty is, I believe, of an entirely different character from the beauty of art.
At Ben's party tonight we played football. Though I'm not much on offense -- can't catch the ball worth shit -- it was observed that I am somewhat adept at tackling. Not from any skill or experience (I played soccer and basketball when I was younger, but never football), but simply from an almost bloodthirsty tenacity and persistence. Simply put, when I decide to take somebody down, either they go down, or I do. There is no compromising, no meeting-at-half-way, no agree-to-disagree.
When I write (to diverge a bit and reconnect to this point later), my highest concern is always for character. I want to feel what they are feeling and understand why they do what they do -- and if I can't, I won't write (or at "best" I'll end up with hollow shit). So when my characters are compassionate, or sad, I feel it... and when they are angry, or hateful, or raging, I feel it as well.
For future reference, both a fascinating dialogue and proof that video games are more than just entertainment (this is from Deus Ex):
MORPHEUS: JC Denton. 23 years old. No residence. No ancestors. No employer. No --
JC DENTON: How do you know who I am?
MORPHEUS: I must greet each visitor with a complete summary of his file. I am a prototype for a much larger system.
JC DENTON: What else do you know about me?
MORPHEUS: Everything that can be known.
JC DENTON: Go on. Do you have proof about my ancestors?
MORPHEUS: You are a planned organism, the offspring of knowledge and imagination rather than of individuals.
JC DENTON: I'm engineered. So what? My brother and I suspected as much while we were growing up.
MORPHEUS: You are carefully watched by many people. The unplanned organism is a question asked by Nature and answered by death. You are another kind of question with another kind of answer.
JC DENTON: Are you programmed to invent riddles?
MORPHEUS: I am a prototype for a much larger system. The heuristics language developed by Dr. Everett allows me to convey the highest and most succinct tier of any pyramidal construct of knowledge.
JC DENTON: How about a report on yourself?
MORPHEUS: I was a prototype for Echelon IV. My instructions are to amuse visitors with information about themselves.
JC DENTON: I don't see anything amusing about spying on people.
MORPHEUS: Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are.
JC DENTON: Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance.
MORPHEUS: The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.
JC DENTON: Electronic surveillance hardly inspired reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence.
MORPHEUS: God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment, and punishment. Other sentiments toward them were secondary.
JC DENTON: No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera.
MORPHEUS: The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.
JC DENTON: You underestimate humankind's love of freedom.
MORPHEUS: The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization.
MORPHEUS: The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government. You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.
They say that money doesn't buy happiness. That saying is often dismissed as being obviously wrong, and it is, in a way. The intent of the saying, I think, is that money in and of itself is not happiness -- having piles of money does not inherently make you happy. This is true (hopefully obviously). But money can (also obviously) make acquiring life's material necessities (and pleasing unnecessities, if I may make up a word) easier -- which is the intent of those who scoff at the saying.
The point is that money is a means to an end, and not an end itself. This is what many people lose sight of when they waste their lives in pursuit of cash and forget to ever stop and enjoy it.
This, I think, is a well-known situation these days. But this issue also applies to other situations, such as science.
I previously mentioned that D'Anna is my favorite of Battlestar's recurring characters. Hers is to me one of the most simultaneously beautiful, tragic, and inspiring stories I have ever watched on television. D'Anna's story is one we all know -- it is the story of Eve, and all the others who have reached for the forbidden fruit --yet it deviates from the archetype in important ways that make D'Anna's story not one of a fall, but an apotheosis, an elevation to divinity.
For most of the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, the show's supposed "bad guys", the Cylons, remained a mysterious, malevolent force, striking out from the shadows like the bogey man of children's nightmares. The few glimpses we had into their society -- notably "The Farm" -- suggested a foreign culture that enhanced rather than diminished the alienation Battlestar's characters, and its audiences, felt towards the Cylons. Then season two's "Downloaded" offered an open view into life of three Cylons, showing them to be not as different as we had thought, and humanizing them. Season three spent an entire story arc on a Cylon ship, a decision that generated much controversy. Many, including the show's own Jamie Bamber (Lee "Apollo" Adama), thought that the unknown, mechanical nature of the Cylons had been their greatest asset, and that by stripping the mystery away, they had been weakened as enemies. While I understand this point of view, I personally disagree it with it.
Some time ago I revisited a video game entitled Rome: Total War. Rome is, like its predecessors, a hybrid strategy game that combines high-level turn-based strategic planning with low-level real-time tactical battles. In terms of its gameplay, it's one of the most complicated and enjoyable video games ever made; one of the best the strategy genre as ever produced, at least. (In terms of everything else -- well, it really has nothing else. No plot, no interesting artistic direction, etc.)
The tragedy at Virginia Tech has generated a spectrum of responses from a multitude of people; some offering sympathy for those connected to the dead, some using the tragedy to bring gun control issues back to debate (whether in an honest attempt to prevent future tragedies or simply to further their own political agendas), and some expressing understandable outrage at the murderer, and, more disturbingly but still understandably, at the fact that, by killing himself, he prevented people from administering "justice" to him -- their idea of "justice" being something similar to the suggestion in the title, which is an almost direct quote from a fellow student.
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