"Love is a central theme in humanity across time and cultures" is every sentence friends who teach have ever posted to facebook in despair about teaching.
So what, they never finished it? I'm confused.
1: I have a speech i want to give to students about clichéd, pompous opening sentences. The central theme of it is "Please don't open with a sentence that saps my will to live."
I've never given it because it would make me seem weird and dramatic and not actually change the way students write.
I've never given it because it would make me seem weird and dramatic and not actually change the way students write.
I'm fine with weird and dramatic--part of my first day of class schtick is to tell students I will Lose. My. Shit. if I catch any of them plagiarizing. I also hate on the grandiose opening sentence thing, and it's as successful as anything else I ever say to my students.*
* The ones who are listening usually remember. The ones who aren't, don't.
The conclusion of my "These are the mistakes you should not make in a paper" talks is usually something like, "Your professors will make snarky remarks about this stuff to all of their Facebook friends."
I will probably regret saying that some day.
You could kill several birds with one stone and threaten to plagiarize their worst opening sentences for the Bulwer-Lytton contest. While losing your shit.
5: "Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to expunge the scourge of pompous opening sentences..."
I don't understand this project. They're having a "relationship" but not physically?
The pompous opening sentence was first recorded by the Ancient Egyptians, who wrote them all over their monuments because they could never think of good second sentences.
SRSLY, 40 Days Guy makes me want to spoon out my eyeballs: "I love the thrill and parody of it all." Do you, Timmeh? Do you really. Tell me was a 'parody' is, please.
It's a Gormanesque book project, right?
Webster's dictionary defines "pompous" as "Affectedly and irritatingly grand, solemn, or self-important".
It becomes much closer to delightfully charming if you think of this as an online portfolio for themselves and their graphic/multimedia designer friends. Look at the list of credits along the right-hand side, and look at their own professions.
As for the dates, I am guessing that the 40 days occurred in April-May 2013, but that it took a while for them to clean up and polish the summaries. Hence the "About" page, which says they are posting one article a day, Mon-Fri until Aug. 22, 2013.
The list of questions on the front page is missing the most important one: "Why should anyone not involved with this care?"
I initially thought the OP was about Trapnel and the Iberian Beauty, to be honest.
Ok, reading past the first sentence now. I'm curious about this "everyone always thinks they can do better" line. I heard it a lot about New York. I am skeptical that it's particularly true here or particularly not true elsewhere. Is the idea that, in Philadelphia, people are really eager to settle?
Ok, he just quoted Winnie the Pooh in service of sleeping around. Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
18.2: yeah, I'm pretty sure Owl never actually said that, and I like to think I'm fairly familiar with the oeuvre in question.
Good grief, I want someone to date Tim and laugh at him. New Yorkers? Any takers?
BEST WINNIE THE POOH DERIVED PICKUP LINES:
Hi. Oh, look, it's almost eleven o'clock. Time for a little something?
I'm curious about this "everyone always thinks they can do better" line. I heard it a lot about New York.
In New York it's probably true.
(sorry)
21.1:
The single entendre: "How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."
Comments on the outfit: "When you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen."
The PUA.1: "It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like "What about lunch?"
The PUA.2: "Think it over, think it under."
The PUA.3: "It's not much of a tail, but I'm sort of attached to it."
The furry: "Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That's the problem."
19: Googling tells me the line is from a Disney TV show, not from a Milne book.
Not a pickup line but: For a little while Pooh and The Floating Bear were uncertain as to which of them was meant to be on the top, but after trying one or two different positions, they settled down with The Floating Bear underneath and Pooh triumphantly astride...
If it wrapped up may 22, then at the end of the posting we should get an update about whether or not they kept dating of their own accord, which is the only part I'm curious about.
Also 17 is awesomely insulting.
18: I could see it as a big city v. anyplace else issue -- not so much that you could exactly always do better, but that there's never a moment when you could say "I've exhausted the pool of possible options, and this is the best I can do" because the pool of possible options is so big.
21: "I may be a Very Small Animal, but not where it counts. Laydeez."
"Well, I'm very glad I brought you something to put in your useful pot."
BEST WINNIE THE POOH DERIVED PICKUP LINES:
"End of the road. Nothing to do, and no hope of things getting better."
Well, it worked for me eventually.
27: Oh my, I had no idea. I just thought that Trapnel was a commitmentphobe (otherwise known as polyamorous, though that's not quite right, as polyamory people can commit to numerous people), so I thought he might be finding himself in a commitment trending situation.
That was before I clicked through to the linked piece, which is about something entirely different.
But Eeyore wasn't listening. He was taking the balloon out, and putting it back again, as happy as could be....
29- should be "...but I always seem Bigger because of the Bounces."
29: "Sure to be a pole, because of calling it a pole ... because there'd be nowhere else to stick it."
"I can see mine!" cried Roo. "No, I can't, it's something else. Can you see yours, Piglet? I thought I could see mine, but I couldn't. There it is! No, it isn't. Can you see yours, Pooh?"
"No," said Pooh.
"I expect my stick's stuck," said Roo. "Rabbit, my stick's stuck. Is your stick stuck, Piglet?"
"They always take longer than you think," said Rabbit.
"How long do you think they'll take?" asked Roo.
"I can see yours, Piglet," said Pooh suddenly.
"Mine's a sort of greyish one," said Piglet, not daring to lean too far over in case he fell in.
"Yes, that's what I can see. It's coming over on to my side."
Rabbit leant over further than ever, looking for his, and Roo wriggled up and down, calling out "Come on, stick!
Stick, stick, stick!" and Piglet got very excited because his was the only one which had been seen, and that meant that he was winning. "It's coming!" said Pooh.
I'm confused. Have they posted any of the descriptions of the couples therapy sessions or the answers to the questionnaires? Because I couldn't find them on the site.
His use of the word "parody" *is* lame. On the whole, she sounds more interesting to me than he does. I can't really hate them. I totally want to know how it turned out. I hate myself for that.
Doing couples therapy from the very first week is the most boggling part.
24. - another reason to hate Disney.
So are the posts videos of them talking? I'm not watching that. Or have I missed a link?
You reprobates disgust me. How long should it take you to come up with "That's no honeypot!"
I don't understand this project. They're having a "relationship" but not physically?
Spoiler alert!
They have sex on day 24/25 (depending on who's counting). I hadn't thought 17 was particularly insulting--it wouldn't be entirely out of character for me to ask "How much do we hate these people?" while referring to myself--but 31, on the other hand...
I only got through Day 15 or so before deciding that they just weren't very interesting (and if I want to read about a selfish NYC dude dating, I can reread Waldman's "Love Affairs of Nathaniel P", which has the benefit of a wiser authorial voice behind the shallow protagonist).
I find them equally irritating. Although there are lots of dumb/funny pull quotes.
Love is not a matter of the heart, it's all in our brain. Chemicals like dopamine and norepinephrine are released when in love. The chemicals increases energy, increases focus, and helps make us feel fucking awesome all the time. In fact, research shows brain activity in love is almost identical to our brain activity on cocaine.
(that's from Day 2)
40: but 31, on the other hand
I apologize, then, for misunderstanding a bunch of things. We should talk about this some time, off-blog. I'm off for now, though.
Doing couples therapy from the very first week is the most boggling part.
Before they even so much as kissed, right?
OT: I don't really mind very much, but I wonder whether I am utterly alone in thinking that (i) people with Internet access take television too seriously and (ii) if every typist from Slate to Gawker to ESPN and back assures me that "Breaking Bad" is the Second Coming without the negatives, I'll keep on not caring.
41: Neuroscience is the new fucking veldt, with added punchability.
27: I too thought it was about trapnel and IB all the way to the word, "asks." Then I realized it was a link AND I found five dollars.
The funny thing is that for the few seconds I thought it was about trapnel, I assumed he was the hopeless romantic.
a commitmentphobe (otherwise known as polyamorous, though that's not quite right
That's not even close to right.
God the people in the link are annoying.
I am curious what 45 means. I don't really buy it, but I am curious about it.
That is to say, is quantum physics the original veldt?
he means he thinks it's easier to punch a neuroscientist than a caveman.
They tend to have less upper-body strength.
Calling commitmentphobes polyamorous and vice versa seems like a really rewarding way to needle either one, although in the reverse case you'd certainly get an earful.
53: 45 means the new source of just-so-stories that reify social processes as natural ones. (I think you know that.)
Offered generously, it suggests that the actual science is quite interesting but it gets horribly mangled by popularizers with reactionary agendas, although it need not be offered generously.
Shorter 40 Days: "I'm young and wrapped up in my own drama, which is incredibly ordinary and gender-specific. Of course I'm going to sleep with my good friend with whom, for the reason stated above, I clearly have no business sleeping. But I'll feel it's more special/defensible if I throw it out to the world as a social experiment wrapped in shiny bows of hipstery cascading style sheets."
59.1: sure. The key difference though is that this goofy reifying dualist misunderstanding is not being offered by prominent voices in the field, who instead tend to push back against it reasonably hard. And the field is a lot more rigorous and empirically grounded than even the best ev psych.
Which is to say, it's not the fault of the science that people are stupid. In ev psych... well, harder to say.
What popularizers are doing good work explaining what is breathy pop reductionism and what is the actual state of the science?
Mo Costandi and Neuroskeptic are both good.
I wasn't really talking about popularized, though; one of the somewhat troubling things about ev psych is the degree of overlap between popularizers and actual prominent researchers; successful neuroscientists doing excellent work tend to not really be in the business of telling stories to a lay audience (although of course that's a fairly important part of the enterprise in general).
I had a friend in college who did 40 days of celibacy.
66: Yeah. He was feeling like he had been hooking up with too many people or something. He later wrote an article about it in the alt weekly.
"I'm young and wrapped up in my own drama, which is incredibly ordinary and gender-specific. Of course I'm going to sleep with my good friend with whom, for the reason stated above, I clearly have no business sleeping.
Or you could have just summarized it as 'I'm young'. The only variable being are they going to sleep with the good friend they have no business sleeping with or not sleep with the good friend who they should sleep with.
||
Nothing, but nothing, makes me angrier than the knowledge that there are people who found and continue to find latter-day Achewood funny.
|>
Latter-day? As in, the one strip that's been posted in the pat year?
People pay to attend Penny Arcade-sponsored conventions, neb.
Latter-day? As in, the one strip that's been posted in the pat year?
"Latter-day" means "since the beginning of the Great Outdoor Fight arc".
Huh. That's where I dropped off! So nice to be correct in something.
I'm kind of shocked the 40 Days thing has sustained this many comments. To 65, was that before the crappy movie?
76,77: oh man was that ever a crapt movie
I'm kind of shocked the 40 Days thing has sustained this many comments.
Ouch! Everybody's a critic today.
Don't be so negative, trapnel. It's unpleasant.
Since apparently this thread needs more fuel: one of the woman's recent project was designing this "We Are All Workers" billboard for Levi's.
There exists a book with the title "The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories".
Have they posted any of the descriptions of the couples therapy sessions or the answers to the questionnaires? Because I couldn't find them on the site.
Well they need to save something for the book. I mean, they're clearly angling for a book contract, aren't they?
I don't hate these people. I'm just not that interested. And I wouldn't buy the book.
80: I guess not caring enough to hate is worse than hate?
82: That's not all she's known for. (The guy on the right in the second link is her business partner, previously known for doing things like this.)
83:
The debut pulp-fiction collection from Alisa Surkis and Monica Nolan will not induce wet panties. Not even a little bit. But the book can be loved for what it is--eight vintage stories of ladies, lust and the pretty ponies they love. It's kind of like Black Beauty for big girls.
I wonder if okcupid users in other parts of the country or world also take it for granted that everyone likes Ender's Game.
You could try Plenty of Fish instead.
Just be careful the dating site's code hasn't been compromised so people can steal your information. I heard that there's plenty of phish in the C.
Anyway, I haven't particularly noticed that about OKC users in Anchorage.
86 pretty definitively moves her into reactionary and uncreative territory, as far as I'm concerned. Yuck.
(I guess it's not worth going back and actually reading any of the 40 days entries. I only read the About page before.)
I kind of wonder whether any reputable couples' therapist could even take this on as a project. Aren't there ethics rules?
I'm still at a loss for what, specifically, makes the OP couple contemptible. That they're bohemian hipster types? That they're doing performance-art dating?
I wouldn't say they're contemptible, necessarily. Just kind of boring and overly pleased with their cleverness.
I don't actually hate them as much as I implied in 52.
Everyone is contemptible all the time.
Except for you, my brothers, and you, my sisters, and also all of you, my genderqueer siblings.
98 - What if your siblings like Ender's Game? Or Daniel Quinn's Ishmael?
I don't know anything about the second one, but the first is not possible.
Ishmael's the one about a super-intelligent gorilla or something, right?
A super-intelligent gorilla that delivers the important message that mankind should never have dallied with agriculture.
I don't remember that part from "Report to an Academy".
If it were a novel about Gorilla Grodd or something, I would be down with that. Not if it were Gorilla Grodd delivering third-hand John Zerzan, I guess.
Having just returned from a 20th HS reunion, at which I was (a) probably the best dressed male-identified person, and (b) probably one of the people my classmates least expected to attend, I have to say that we are a huggy motherfucking society nowadays. Also, that the kind of people who show up to reunions of my class seem to be evenly split into three groupings:
1. Comfortable white UMC liberals
2. Fun, but pathetic, lumpenproletarians
3. Slightly past-their-prime bohemians
Groupings 2 and 3 made it to the after-party in force. Grouping 1, not so much, as they had baby-sitters who needed to be in church the following morning.
Given the kind of social groupings I find myself in most of the time these days, the fact that probably 25% of the food provided wound up going uneaten was perhaps the biggest shock of the evening. The most positive surprise was that the person I had been somewhat afraid might be dead is actually doing just fine, is a division head of a Fortune 500 company and just became a 2nd generation international adopter.
Also, beer and wine were free.
Ender's Game is the exact kind of book my brother would love. I must never ask him. (I once read David Eddings and Dragonlance to humor him.)
I don't know how much I hate these people until I know if they were paid for this stunt. If they were handsomely recompensed, then I hate them only slightly; if they did it for free because they wanted to be famous for 15 minutes, then I hate them only slightly less than Robert Mugabe.
You should, it's a good read. I mean, it's no Use of Weapons but for YA stuff it's excellent.
I read it. I thought it wasn't bad, but it appeals to literally the worst aspects of humanity. 15 minutes after discovering Usenet, I found myself reading people who explained how they were a superior type of humanity like Ender and his siblings, and that's why they deserved to be in charge.
Use of Weapons makes you feel bad about yourself and humanity, which is the appropriate purpose of reading.
card is a nutcase and has never written another book that was any good (causing me to wonder why I have read, seriously, like 4 or something), but ender's game is actually a tight little novel in its way and, when read properly, makes you feel bad about yourself and humanity. we shouldn't let its base appeal to proto-libertarian assholes, who think that they would save the world by being good at mariokart, deprive us of amusement. it's a YA novel; it's good viewed along a certain axis. ender himself appropriately recognizes that the adults running the game/war are just as psychopathic as his older brother, especially when he sees their reactions at the end of the last battle. and did his parents consent to have these horrible things done to their children each in turn? ender still adores his sister but now almost pities his brother--he has no interest in any of the adults who brutalized the people he loved and everyone, all, everyone, in a whole world. it's also one of very few books that people 25 have all read in common, if you try to come up with one, at least in narnia.
The imminent Ender's Game film is causing some discussion amongst my kids. The 12 year old is uncomplicatedly pro seeing it, and the 16 year old is explaining to him why Card is a dick and why we shouldn't want him to get any of our money. But she does still want to see it.
proto-libertarian assholes, who think that they would save the world by being good at mariokart
New mouseover everything text.
Years ago someone linked the novella version on here and I read it and it rubbed me wrong in a way I can't find precise words for though probably close enough to mariokart reference above. But I don't have a lot of love for Sci-fi to begin with. My sister and I did like Star Trek books! There was one that seems particularly awful and aimed-at-young-Smearcase in retrospect where Uhura had to save a planet full of singing kittehs. In the ever useful words of Anna Russell: I'm not making this up, you know.
Did I read somewhere that Star Trek books were fanfic?
Count me among those who initially read Ender's Game as a powerful statement on the inherent inhumanity and uselessness of war and the insanity of the adult world. Okay, yes, it turns out it was actually about the total awesomeness of war and the inherent radness of getting to do adult things like massacring intelligent beings, but I contend that the former interpretation is still possible.
successful neuroscientists doing excellent work tend to not really be in the business of telling stories to a lay audience
What about Christof Koch?
115: I have mentioned before how Star Trek books allowed me to realize that there was actually a level of prose shittiness up with which I would not put.
117: true. I was thinking of, like, Deisserof or Friston. But Koch and Sebastian Seung and so on certainly write popular books. I guess Eagleman counts as a neuroscientist, too.
My proposed 40 day experiment: recapitulate your life day for year (adjust # of days for those who don't happen to be 40). So, take good shit on the 1st day, throw a tantrum on the 3rd, masturbate on the 11th, get laid on the 17th, do some courses or go on binge 18th-21st, wallow in self-pity on the 24th. Whatever. Or could do themes--books, movies, food, beverage.
It's a terrible idea.
122: watch out, then Stormcrow will have to start posing naked to catch up.
Actually he didn't say, but presumably day 2 involves running around naked while laughing hysterically, right?
We could play Act As If The Temperature Were Your Age and Decade. So if it's 85° out you have to act like an octogenarian during the Reagan era.
124: That's going to get awfully old in Texas.
124 would certainly make the dead of winter in Boston jazzier.
Living it up like a young retiree avoiding the Vietnam draft.
Although the Albertans currently surrounding you would probably not enjoy soiling themselves and dying of dropsy, come January.
The thread has already made me hate Noah and 80% of E. L. James. I don't have the energy left over to hate Stormcrow.
115: Yes, I think they're the equivalent of regulated-public-utility fanfic, not canon.
135: although some elements from the books have entered canon, such as Kirk's middle na... shut up shut up shut UP. SIFU. GEEZ.
116 was my interpretation too. It's a book about how a climate of endless war and paranoia turns people into monsters. Pretty much every character in the book, in fact.
116 was my interpretation too. It's a book about how a climate of endless war and paranoia turns people into monsters. Pretty much every character in the book, in fact.
The problem with any kind of detailed exegesis of Ender's Game is that you have empathize on some level with Orson Scott Card, and it's very distasteful to interface even slightly with his creepy politics and personality. Perhaps if there was some way to train especially brilliant, but socially alienated youth in techniques of literary and psychological analysis, say in a competitive environment far away from the mainstream of everyday life, and, upon completing an analysis, the children could be sent on a long trip, so that they wouldn't have to pollute ordinary society with their knowledge of Card and his ideas, that would be okay.
I think 116 made perfect sense as an interpretation of the original novella version, and because I'd read the novella first, it's how I read the novel as well. OTOH, in retrospect the novel version leans a lot more toward arguing that being a monster is absolutely necessary and in fact commendable, and anyone objecting to monstrous behavior is weak and unrealistic.
139: I dunno, the fact that his creepiness springs from an excruciatingly painful yet totally unacknowledged (and, right, yes, entirely speculative at this point) history of childhood sexual abuse makes me feel a little bad for the dude.
140: you know, I also bought the idea that Starship Troopers (the book) was about the horrors of a society shaped by war, so maybe I just read things through War Sucks colored glasses.
I thought that was the accepted interpretation? Or perhaps that's only the accepted interpretation of the movie.
141: Well, certainly, all kidding aside, if he was indeed sexually abused then I can feel some empathy for him. And even with the whole deeply-frustratingly-closetedness of his adult life, I'm sure his long, dark nights of the soul must be pretty brutal, and that is sad. At the same time, we're not talking about some idiot man-child in a Southern gothic novel. The guy's had every opportunity to work on his shit, and he's chosen, consciously, to indulge his right-wing power fantasies, both in his fiction and in public policy debates. Hitler had a somewhat shitty childhood too, you know.
143: I fear the latter may be the case, and that Heinlein really thought a society on a permanent war footing where only veterans get to vote would be a solid way to solve some of these problems we've been having with the long hair and the sapping of fluids.
143: I thought the point of the movie (ST) was that government inevitably veers towards fascism, even as it maintains the trappings of bourgeois democracy.
Is there a well-known AH story where Heinlein becomes the cult leader instead of Hubbard? Seems like there should be, it practically writes itself.
Hitler had a somewhat shitty childhood too, you know.
And creative aspirations! If only he'd had some of OSC's stick-to-it-ivness a/f/a making art maybe things would have worked out better.
112: card is a nutcase and has never written another book that was any good (causing me to wonder why I have read, seriously, like 4 or something), but ender's game is actually a tight little novel in its way and, when read properly, makes you feel bad about yourself and humanity.
I do love this as a summary of the book's virtues.
And I dunno, Card did have some other decent moments. The Alvin Maker books penned in the Eighties were all pretty decent. The Folk of the Fringe story collection was unabashedly Mormon but not in any crazy or unpleasant way that was readily-detectable. Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide were both okay, although it seemed like he got closer and closer to fully unzipping and waggling his scabrous politics in our faces with each outing. Which I guess is why I never did read Children of the Mind or any further Ender universe wankery.
One can detect the warning signs all the later unpleasantness reading in retrospect, with fresh eyes. But ut sort of seems like somewhere in the early to mid-Nineties was when he truly started to lose his shit in a way that was obvious in his creative prose.
147: Although, now that I think of it, one where Ursula LeGuin or John Brunner founded a cult might be even more entertaining.
What Castock said. Though Speaker was definitely better than Xenocide.
one where Ursula LeGuin or John Brunner founded a cult might be even more entertaining.
That some bunch of Californian hippies did not, as far as I know, try to reconstruct the world of Always Coming Home and probably perish in the attempt, has always struck me as providential.
I never read the novella version, but I think Ender's Game might have value beyond any political lesson its author might draw from it. Put another way, it is a well-realized dramatization which offers as many questions as answers, but works on its terms. Card might have become a fascist, and may even have been one at the time, but Ender's Game isn't fascist trash, it's about a character who becomes a ruthless general and who happens to be a child. What I found most interesting about it is that Ender's empathy is a necessary condition for his success. His sociopathic brother can never be as successful because he can never understand his enemy.
Walt gets it exactly right in 111.last with this:
Use of Weapons makes you feel bad about yourself and humanity, which is the appropriate purpose of reading.
Before EG was "Mikal's Songbird" and Songmaster. I remember reading it as I read all the award nominees, but don't remember it. Looks very interesting, doesn't it? Course, haven't read any Card written since EG.
Starship Troopers, well, hard for me to wrap my head around a Heinlein that liked any gov't, but it was the height of the fucking Cold War. You cannot imagine. You can't. Great powers opposing each other in terminal battle, we all gonna die.
Wasn't anything much written around 1960 that was *nice* like y'all seem to want. Vidal and Mailer, Planet of the Apes, Fanon, Stalinists, shit was fucking mean why-don't-you-all-just-die from all and any possible subject positions.
Heinlein, in context, was very far from the worst. Fuck, when Curtis Lemay was stroking JFK's hard-on, the Dixie Racists were far from the worse.
re: 155
You cannot imagine. You can't.
Or, maybe we can. What with having been alive during the Cold War, and all that.
You weren't alive the way bob was alive, man! bob, do you have a Cuban Missile Crisis bit that you're just dying to get through?
I really tried to like Vidal*, but he was just too fucking boring to follow. Heinlein is very readable.
* Once, for a half hour.
And as far as EG goes, shit, I am into anime. 14-yr-olds destroying the world are a fucking trope.
I was also remembering C J Cherry the other day. EG was a moral joke compared to The Faded Sun
***spoilers***
Out identifiable characters are a race of mercenaries, with women being the brains, of course. Mercenaries are scary as fuck, but damn, are always betrayed by their employers. Go home for help. These mercenaries, in an attempt to protect themselves, committed serial xenocide. Betray us, we eliminate your species.
Book Two is just fucking glorious, as our bushido queen, having had her family and followers massacred, FTL "jumped" according to the old mapped traditions, from wasted empty planet to empty planet, learning what revenge and honour really means. Weird combination of horror and pride.
Does she really want to do this?
That was 1976. Card's a wuss.
Seth Edenbaum put me in this mood. Not that it was hard.
He also directed me to re-read Hannah Arendt Feb 1959. God knows how many times.
Try just the last page again. Not as Gandhi as you remember.
I think 13-ish-year-old-me liked Speaker for the Dead more than Ender's Game and rapidly lost interesting during the fourth book, but my memories of the books are fuzzy and I don't really want to revisit them to figure out if I had reasonable opinions then. Probably not.
Are we avoiding the math thread just to fuck with neb?
I'm in a Wendy's. There's no math allowed except for the cash register.
162: I was, but it looks like the jig is up.
Okay, now I hate Stormcrow. Noah and 80% of E. L. James can rest easy.
Are we avoiding the math thread just to fuck with neb?
I was avoiding because it didn't amuse me.
The reason is because assholes!
171: I wasn't aware that was an option.
Research needs to check his royal privilege.
There is, however, an isomorphism between what essear did feel and amusement.
Is "hypothesize" acceptable British English, or would it be "hypothesise"?
Or "marginalise"? These just don't look like words to me.
Research in 175 was supposed to be essear.
Research in 1795 was supposed to be Lavoisier. Bad French people. Bad.
I would have a witty retort if I understood what Stormcrow was saying.
I've been debating whether to weigh in, but it happens that I teach a course with EG, Speaker for the Dead, and some Le Guin (among other stuff). As many problems as the Card books have, they're also rich texts for discussing self/other relations and a host of related topics ("Speaker" in particular, of the two). I do worry about whether or not to include a spoken disclaimer about Card's politics, but that pushes right up against the line where I think it's appropriate to share my beliefs with my students.* (Then again, it's not like he's Roman Polanski, whose films I won't show until he's dead.)
As for other Card books, which I read mostly because i could find used, English-language versions when I lived in Poland, Enchantment is the only one I could stand. Ender's Shadow was kind of cool, but Petra and the rest of the series took a huge nose dive.
* For the record, I did tell them last year that Card was a vocal political commentator, and that I personally found his politics offensive, but YMMV.
Why would you debate whether to weigh in?
Why would you debate whether to weigh in?
The slim but very real chance that she will be weighing in on a coded debate that determines whether a deeply foreign yet fundamentally knowable species lives or dies.
I've been mulling over whether to debate whether to weigh in.
183: It was a stupid attempt to reach for a joke based on linking "didn't amuse me" with the (probably apocryphal) Queen Victoria story. It was rendered hopelessly pointless and imbecilic by iPhone auto-correct, and did not warrant my attempt to correct it. This overlong explanation completes this episode of comedic humiliation. So, yes please, do retort wittily.
188: did you know you can turn autocorrect off? it's under settings-->general-->keyboard. recommended!
NASDAQ's what I'm talking about!
Someday we'll even be able to wreck a nice beach.
You better check yourself before you auto-correct yourself.
Also I kinda liked David Eddings ever since I read (in one of the terrifying spin-off merchandising bits) that he literally writes his books by (and I paraphrase his words only slightly) "take one from column A, one from column B, and any TWO of column C, then proceed according to Rules X, Y, and Z. Do not allow quality or dignity head space".
Also he's open about his wife's role as co-author, which, you know, is quite cool I think.
I'm a little sad this thread never really turned into an extended serious discussion about dating, or shamelessly-self-promotional blogs.
But only a little!
Maybe we can discuss that stuff in the math thread.
an extended serious discussion about dating
My girlfriend is about to move a few hundred miles away to start her new job. I has a sad.
Sorry to hear that. Are you guys going to try to do the long-distance thing?
I suppose I should elaborate but I'm too sober.
Luckily that's an eminently solvable problem.
Unlike the relationship one, which is way harder.
Banff mosquitoes: much worse than Texas, possibly worse than Florida. Or at least equal.
Otoh, in Florida they sprayed the streets down once or twice a week, so the mosquitos weren't full force. Still, this weekend was mosquitorially brutal.
I thought summer mosquitoes were notoriously bad in most northern forests.
I think I may have gotten into a quasi-romantic friendship where a long-distance thing is about the only way it could move forward. She was only around for the summer, and it has been a very slowly developing thing which we haven't actually clarified as romantic or not. I think we were overly cautious, knowing she was about to move.
The whole thing seems embarrassingly teenagerish summer given our ages.
And on that bit of helpfulness, I say goodnight internet.
185: I get nervous about pseudonymity and discussing classes I teach is all.
I thought summer mosquitoes were notoriously bad in most northern forests.
Yep.
It's seriously unbelievable if you haven't experienced it before.
teofilo, may I ask you for some quick advice? I'm planning a short (maybe 7-10 days) road trip to New Mexico with a friend. What are your favorite places to see (or to send visitors)? We'll probably be in northern NM, so around Chaco, Santa Fe, Taos, Bandelier, etc.
You may! The places you list all sound like good options. Do you have any particular preferences for things you'd like to see? You can fit quite a bit into that much time.
Other good options that occur to me: Jemez Springs, Acoma, Pecos, El Morro, Aztec, Chimayo, Albuquerque (especially Petroglyph National Monument and the Sandia Peak tram, maybe also some of the museums and stuff).
But I feel like a week is not quite enough time for all of those places, right? We'd like to do a mix of outdoorsy things (hiking in pretty scenery) and looking at historically or archaeologically interesting places. Also, I'm told there's a Benedictine monastery with good beer.
Well, it's not enough to do them all in any depth, no. There's generally going to be a lot of overlap between outdoorsy and historically/archaeologically interesting, in that most of the interesting places will be in rural areas with beautiful scenery.
This is the monastery with the beer. It's in Abiquiu, but the beer is available lots of places.
We're also deeply interested in beer and sopaipillas!
You'll find plenty of beer and sopaipillas wherever you look.
So upon giving it some further thought, I guess my main recommendations would be:
1. If you're going to do Chaco, budget two whole days. It really is quite isolated and hard to get to, but definitely worth the effort. You'll need to either camp at the park or stay in Cuba (unless you want to keep going up to the Four Corners area, in which case you might stay in Bloomfield or Farmington). If you're going to camp, be aware that it might be pretty cold, depending on when you'll be there.
2. The main things you'll want to see in Santa Fe are the plaza area (including the Palace of the Governors and the New Mexico History Museum) and Museum Hill (including the Folk Art Museum, the American Indian Art Museum, and the Wheelwright Museum, which is another museum of American Indian art). I'd suggest probably two days at least.
3. Bandelier and Taos are both easy day trips from Santa Fe, as is Pecos. If you go up to Taos definitely consider taking the High Road and stopping in Chimayo.
4. You'll almost certainly be going through Albuquerque anyway, so you might as well stop and see some stuff there. It's not really a tourist destination like the other places, but there's still some interesting stuff if you know where to look.
1. I don't think we're going to have camping equipment, but I'd definitely like to see Chaco. Is it a pain to drive from Cuba?
3. Chimayo is at the top of my list of places to see.
4. So, what are the interesting things in Alburquerque?
Thanks so much!!!
I don't think we're going to have camping equipment, but I'd definitely like to see Chaco. Is it a pain to drive from Cuba?
Not really. It's about an hour and a half one-way, and the last thirteen miles are dirt. You can certainly see plenty of the park in a day driving in from Cuba. There are three motels in Cuba (or were the last time I worked at Chaco), which from what I've heard are all fine. There are also some good Mexican restaurants; El Bruno's is a particular favorite of Chaco staff. I think Del Prado is just as good, but it has a much less impressive ambience.
Chimayo is at the top of my list of places to see.
And rightly so. It's a fascinating place.
So, what are the interesting things in Alburquerque?
Well, there's Old Town, which is like a less impressive version of Santa Fe but has some good museums. The Natural History Museum is pretty cool if you like that kind of thing (i.e., dinosaurs), and there isn't really anything else like it elsewhere in the state. The Albuquerque Museum is an art and history museum that is pretty small but often has interesting traveling exhibits.
As I mentioned before, there's also the Sandia Peak tram (allegedly the longest in the world) and Petroglyph National Monument, which are on opposite sides of the city and probably further out of your way than you're really going to want to go if you're just passing through. The Maxwell Museum on the UNM campus is pretty cool if you're into archaeology. The campus itself is also interesting architecturally, as it's all in Pueblo Revival style. If you're there in October there's also the Balloon Fiesta.
Also, if you're into Breaking Bad, I guess there's a lot of stuff featured on the show that you can check out. I've never seen the show myself, so I don't have anything more specific to say about that.
227 is exactly the kind of info I wanted. Thanks again.
Wasn't anything much written around 1960 that was *nice* like y'all seem to want. Vidal and Mailer, Planet of the Apes, Fanon, Stalinists, shit was fucking mean why-don't-you-all-just-die from all and any possible subject positions.
I always thought there was something a bit dark and nihilistic about "Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves".
142: I read starship troopers when I was really young, so the message I took away from it was "grenades that are little nukes! fuck yeah!"
Reading 231 in a hurry made me think that alameida had read a rather different edition of "Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves" to the one I had.
sorry about the gf, essear.
The 40 days thing is stupid. They are going to date for 40 days exclusively? That bar seems pretty low.
Also, the Wash Post recently had an article about the wedlease topic that we has discussed.
Oh, can I talk about Orson Scott Card, even though the conversation has moved on a bit? Or perhaps I mean "may I"?
When I was in my early teens, I found Seventh Son, Red Prophet and the short stories in Folk of the Fringe totally revelatory. (In fact, I think I read Card in the first place because I read an anthology - in the waiting room at the dentist! when I was eleven or twelve! - in which a short story from FotF appeared (along with a Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser story which prompted me to start reading Fritz Leiber around the same time).
Red Prophet was the first book I had ever read where one of the main points of the book is "white people ruin everything because they are terrible, and it isn't by mistake, it's on purpose out of cruelty and greed, and just because you the individual white person may be sorry about this it doesn't mean you're off the hook". I strongly suspect that my adult politics would be totally different if I hadn't read that book at that particular moment. Of course, I am given to understand that the series continues with "white people ruin everything until the Mormons arrive and show everyone else, including the indigenous, how to Be White Correctly", which is a bit of a let down.
I dislike Card's fetishistic writing about child suffering - a better example of the feeling described as "squick" is hard to imagine. I started to loathe him when I read the extremely homophobic and generally gross novel Lost Boys - despite the fact that it seems very much a metaphorical treatment of what we all assume to be Card's own abuse. And then I read that one from the late nineties about how the genocide of indigenous people in the Americas was totally justified - though tragic - because otherwise the Mayans would have developed an ocean-crossing fleet, devastated Europe and instigated mass human sacrifice and paganism everywhere and really loathed him even more. At least in the Red Prophet series there is no suggestion that native people deserve their own genocide.
The main theme in Card is that life is incredibly tragic and brutal and unjust but you'll be killed/suffer worse if you try to change the brutality and injustice. Sometimes he's talking about how brutality is genetic (the native creatures in Speaker for the Dead, for instance); sometimes he's talking about how it's religiously ordained; sometimes he's talking about how it's political/historical. But the Card story is always about a basically good person/people trapped in a situation where they must both endure evil and perpetuate it even though the whole process basically wrecks their humanity and/or body. And unlike, say, Lars Von Trier, you don't get the feeling that he has engineered his characters' horrible and pointless suffering because he gets a kick out of it (as one feels when watching Dancer In The Dark).
Now I'm all feeling sorry for him again, despite the fact that he is horrible.
I still like his novel Wyrms, even though it's full of the same fucked up stuff, because the characters seem to have more agency and it seems much clearer that the characters are choosing the Horrible Scenario that benefits them rather than the Horrible Scenario which would benefit the other creatures in the book instead of being forced to accept one awful situation because all the other alternatives are so much worse. And almost uniquely, it's a novel which suggests that while homosexuality may be a little too much on the glitter, spangles and debauchery end of the spectrum, it isn't some kind of uniquely appalling yet enticing perversion but rather is just something that some people engage in.
Oh, I mean I loathed Card even more after reading the one about the genocide of indigenous Americans - not that the Maya would have loathed him even more, although they undoubtedly would have.
And I mean that I am a person who closes their tags. Virtually all the time.
The Mayans seem like a particularly bad group to focus on since they actually weren't victims of genocide and are, in fact, still around.
Lots of groups that were the victims of genocide are in fact still around. But quite a lot of Mayans did get killed.
238: With disclaimer that I'm not at all an expert, my impression was that the Maya fared somewhat differently from the other major South and central American groups.
Because the conquest of the Mayan states occurred later and took longer than that of the Incas and Aztecs, they were never "de-Mayanized" to the same extent. Significant numbers of people still speak Mayan languages today, for instance.
Again this is all from Discovery channel and wikipedia level knowledge.
On the other hand, I study biological molecules, the Mayans are made of biological molecules, therefore I'm an expert on Mayans! (see the math thread for an explanation)
All I'm saying is that you don't need everybody to die or assimilate before you can say it was a genocide.
240: Yea, I didn't express myself well.
I just thought it was odd to single out the Mayans out of all of the indigenous peoples conquered by the Spanish because:
1) Culturally and linguistically they seem to have fared better than most in terms of surviving their contact with the Spanish
and
2) They seem like especially unlikely candidates to build an ocean crossing fleet, invade Europe and institute human sacrifice because by the time the Spanish showed up their classical period was already over
Does anybody have Mel Gibson's number? I'm picturing a small group of Mayan warriors, having first recruited the legendary Jaguar Paw, sneaking into Spain and sacrificing a bunch of humans. He could do a lot worse and I bet somebody wants to pay for a sequel to Apocalypto.
Or maybe it could be filmed from the Spanish point of view and as a comedy. Something like 1941. Maybe 1541?
244: So, the Mayans don't actually invade Spain, there's just a panic in Spain that they are going to? I like it!
241.last: Maybe not the way you play Civilization.
They seem like especially unlikely candidates to build an ocean crossing fleet, invade Europe and institute human sacrifice because by the time the Spanish showed up their classical period was already over
I suspect that Card didn't know what he was talking about. It seemed like an especially ridiculous plot twist (there was time travel involved and alternate timelines and all kinds of goofy stuff) but I assumed that Card associated the Mayans with particularly grisly and repulsive human sacrifice so he felt that they'd make a good unassimilable other. I don't think he even posited that Europe would be decimated by New World diseases, thus making the Mayans' evils schemes easier to carry out. (Although it wouldn't have been anyway, right? Weren't the New World diseases less severe than the Old World ones brought over by the colonists?) No, it was a terrible hack job of a book. I only read it because I was in a situation where I'd read all the other available English-language books, even unto completing Infinite Jest.
246: Civ 5's "Great General" feature really does result in some funny things, like you're trying to conquer the Aztecs and Cortez is fighting for them.
And I felt a little nervous when I had to conquer Mecca in order to get resources, but it worked just fine.
249: The new expansion means that you can have "ancient" or "medieval" works of art produced by, say, Brahms or Manet.
Although your scenario in 249 sounds like the basis for some great-white-hero Civ 5 fanfic. (Which I guess is just alternative history.)
Alternate history. Alternative history started in the 80's.
250: However, unlike Instapundit you didn't conclude from this, that invading Saudi Arabia in 2002 would be a good idea.
I still took their oil, of course. I'm not made of stone.
Almost completely OT, has anyone else read Wen Spencer's _A Brother's Price_?
249: Have you actually been able to play Civ 5 for any length of time? I'm still waiting for Civ 6 in order to determine whether the franchise has been permanently screwed.
Steam reports that I've played Civ 5 for a scarily long time. But I also loved Civ 4. They're very different takes on the same idea, but I don't think the new one is broken.
You might luck out, though: Civ 5's lead designer left Firaxis a year or so ago so it's possible they might take the series in a different direction.
In one of the older Civs, I was once the victim of an unprovoked nuclear attack by Gandhi. From that I learned not to trust world leaders.
257: Yes. I only bought it this summer. Steam annoys me as a concept, because I want to be able to play when the internet is down.
I'm pretty sure you can play offline. Or at least I just tested and it works fine. I thought you needed to check in on occasion (I was assuming a month or so), but this KB item doesn't mention it.
241.last: Maybe not the way you play Civilization.
Crusader Kings 2 actually has DLC in which the Aztecs invade Europe.
Heh, that's awesome. I'm going to stay away from that, though--I've lost too many nights to Europa Universalis 3 and Victoria. Paradox games are too addictive for me.
Back to the OP, I decided to check in on our friends Tim & Jessica, and perhaps this will help out those of you on the fence about drinking the haterade:
Jocelyn challenged us to start thinking about what's going to happen when this project ends in 10 days. Do we want to continue dating or do we want to stop?
Honestly, I have no clue. Jessie said that she is preparing for things to be over between us. She thinks I'm going to call it off after the 40 days are over. I don't necessarily agree with that. I do feel resistant to promising anything too definitive, though. I just want to go with the flow, keep it light, have a Coke and a smile and enjoy what's going on here. Is that so bad? Is that me just being a coward?
You "have no clue" if you want to stop dating this person in 10 days, this person you've known for 4 years and seen every day for the last 30? Yes, that is so bad. Yes, you are a coward.
And if that's not enough, try this on for size: these cutting-edge designers have apparently configured their site so that, if you're viewing it on an iphone (shut up, I was walking by the AT&T store and I just wanted to play with it), it forces you to rotate the phone to landscape mode, so that you can better see both goddamn columns of text at the same time, despite the fact that said columns, thusly formatted, are only about 4 goddamn words long, and why the hell would you want them side by side like that, anyway--what, I'm going to read Jessica's paragraph, then Tim's, then scroll to Jessica's next paragraph, etc.?--fuck no, that would be stupid! The point is: these people are eminently hateable. (It strikes me that the obvious way to handle the blog-concept on a small screen is to allow for swiping left-to-right to switch between Jessica & Tim's "reports", but what do I know, I didn't study design.)
Indulging in hatred is fun. Okay, back to Ruby text-processing.
back to Ruby text-processing
Why on earth would you do that to yourself?
Because I'm indulging in self-hatred.
264: The two-column thing wasn't an effective device when James Dickey used it in Alnilam and those hipsters ain't James Dickey.
Heh, that's awesome. I'm going to stay away from that, though--I've lost too many nights to Europa Universalis 3 and Victoria. Paradox games are too addictive for me.
Europa Universalis 4 is coming out today. Just saying.
I rather liked the "rotate" thing (although it took me a while to figure out what to do, because I am old), but then yes, it was worse than pointless when it came to actually reading the words. (Which I eventually found, I'd got stuck on the About page before, because, as I said, I am old.)
Europa Universalis 4 is coming out today.
You're telling the truth. Oh no.
I think I'm going to have to ignore this fact for a few years, for the sake of my sanity and career.
264/5, OK, I'll play. The most hateable bits to me were that Tim "doesn't carry condoms on him" so they had "had no choice but to use one of her Sagmeister & Walsh company condoms," complete with photo of the wrapper. She says, "I knew having condoms as business cards would come in handy one day. I woke up with an empty package under my pillow."
The eight hours of continuous handholding was icky. I was thinking, surely they'll drop hands to use the bathroom. Nope, she learns that he has a shy bladder. Totally romantic. (Can't find the day, so no link.)
Finally, Tim's end of the project involves Sharpie?
Although it wouldn't have been anyway, right? Weren't the New World diseases less severe than the Old World ones brought over by the colonists?
Yes, basically. The only really severe disease that an invading New World fleet would have brought to the Old World was, IIRC, syphilis. The invading Mayans would have had:
no cavalry
no artillery
no firearms
no steel weapons
no metal armour
no experience of large-scale command and control
no engineers
no local allies
no wheeled transport
And as soon as they landed, their soldiers would have started dying from the diseases that, in our history, were spread to the New World by European explorers.
I really can't see it turning out well for them...
The fact that there are Sagmeister & Walsh company condoms redeems everything.
How could there not be Sagmeister & Walsh company condoms?
275, because it reduces the chance that their employees will reproduce?
