Go to Making Light's front page.
Forward to next post: Open thread 33
Subscribe (via RSS) to this post's comment thread. (What does this mean? Here's a quick introduction.)
A kamikaze sea urchin sails over his head, squeaking.
Y'know, I read WHAT WOULD BUFFY DO? a few months ago, 'cause I couldn't resist the title. I wasn't looking for spiritual guidance, but I've got to say, somebody who was could do a whole lot worse than Buffy as a moral guide.
They could do a lot better, too. The character of Buffy makes a lot of mistakes and does non-trivial damage to the people around her--not that this is a shock, given that she's (1) a teenager (2) with superpowers.
If you want a real "moral guide" from among that ensemble of characters, I'd say your better bet is Xander.
Catie, I've recommended it to several people. Sometimes as a deliberate subversion, because they're big Buffy fans who *I* think need spiritual guidance...
And people always think I'm making it up when I talk about the Great Vowel Shift. Thanks for linking to something that PROVES I'M NOT LYING.
Whoops, I misread. I think the BOOK is a pretty good source for spiritual guidance. I thought Catie meant the series, not the character, even so.
One of the great things about Buffy (the series as opposed to Buffy, the person) is that all their actions have consequences. Do something bad, it comes and bites you, episodes and episodes later. And people don't just forget everything by the next episode like they do in lesser series.
Patrick: A freind of mine believes almost the opposite about Xander. She points out that Xander tends to duck the final responsibility for a problem and let Buffy handle the actual troublesome parts. I don't know if I buy it, especially since the "troublesome parts" tend to require superpowers, but there it is.
Grist for the mill?
http://www.storysouth.com/fall2004/shortshorts.html
The thing I like best about the Buffy-verse is the way it often takes the whole community to save the world. Including book geeks and donut runners. I see this in Firefly too.
Two questions that I'm sure the commenters on this weblog will be able to answer:
Is the halo as an artistic signifier of divinity of Christian origin? I was in the Louvre a while back, and saw a 3rd-4th century AD mosaic of what I thought was two saints with haloes. It turned out they were in fact Neptune and Venus. As Christian art was already producing be-haloed icons and the like at the time, were they influenced by an older Roman tradition, or vice versa?
And the question the second:
I managed to get a copy of our beloved hostess's Making Book at the (wonderful) Fantasy Bookcentre here in London. I was interested to see that in the essay 'on copyediting', Teresa made the point that proofreader's and copyeditor's marks were distinct. What is the difference? Here in the UK, the British Standard (BS 5261-2) would suggest that proofreader's marks are simply a subset of copyeditor's marks. Is this simply British perversity, or can someone enlighten me?
Ta,
-Jakob
I will be taking the role of Buffy in a Rocky-style cast version of the musical episode of Buffy at Penguicon this year. I doubt my shoulder, which I injured in February, will be in good enough shape to do the flips, but we'll do much of the choreography. I do find myself wondering if the person playing Giles will actually end up throwing anything at me onstage.
Hopefully not sea urchins...
Music of the sort that might appeal to those reading this:
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/
Sample lyrics:
(From "Skullcrusher Mountain")
I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don't like it
What's with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don't like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?
(From "Mandelbrot Set")
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry
(Apologies to those who have seen me promoting this on my livejournal. It's just that I like it, not that I have any connection to the site, the musician, or anything of that sort.)
Two quick comments, one disguised as question:
Any chance of ever getting a full RSS feed instead of/in addition to the "just the first line" version? I miss so many posts because I'm not always online when I'm reading my aggregator.
Also, at least one of my comments here or on Electrolight recently dissapeared/failed to post. I don't know if it was caused by a) my error, b) a technical issue, c) me inadvertently breaking some rule of etiquette, or d) an unholy combination of all three.
If it was a, go ahead and laught at me. It it was b, please be advised. If it was c, I apologize. If it was d, feel free to kick me while I'm down.
My wife rewarded my dedication this quarter in spite of multiple family emergencies and a Major Medical Crisis by purchasing Half Life 2 for me after my last final exam was completed.......
It's been a while since a video game just left me in awe.... the game is drop dead GORGEOUS. The story's a bit sparse in parts, but the physics in the gameplay make up for it....
I actually would have to agree Xander's a good example, if any single character is.
But ultimately, I would have to say it's the group as a whole that should be considered the good example. Everyone's got their part, and their own way of dealing with screwing up (or their friends' screwups), and the cohesive unit (when it is) is a marvelous example of what can happen when you really have friends you can trust.
Which I am thankful to say I do.
Spines held in trembling anticipation
as it hurtles towards the unprotected neck
of the sushi-ko.
For the record: I haven't seen a complete episode of Buffy. My wife started following Angel in the 3rd season, and we acquired the DVD sets for completeness purposes.
The Buffy series officially lost me when they had the musical episode. My wife teased me unmercifully for enduring the entire thing. She insists that it is one thing to watch Buffy and quite another to enjoy musicals, but never the two should mix.
Alter S. Reiss:
Or, to make the hotlinked version, for the sake of the pretty pictures:
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry...
Seriously, a genuine Journalist emailed me needing the answer ASAP, so I posted it on Open Thread 31, and the thread was replaced by this new one:
"I'm trying to locate a story about football players who seize control of a stadium and machine-gun the fans for vengeful fun. Probably 1950s in Galaxy. Do you happen to remember it?"
I swear that I've read this in an anthology, too. But where? *sound of brains being racked*
Otaku Barbie is so wrong in so many different ways. I want one! No Cosplay Ken, though.
Jonathan's pal writes:
"I'm trying to locate a story about football players who seize control of a stadium and machine-gun the fans for vengeful fun. Probably 1950s in Galaxy. Do you happen to remember it?"
This is probably not Norman Spinrad's "The National Pastime," a Seventies story concerning the invention of a "combat football" league to feed the fans' appetite for violence. (No, not those fans.) But I mention it, just in case.
Jakob, as the guy who's Buffyed out, I'm glad to answer your question: Halos, like much Greek, Jewish, and Christian iconography, were borrowed from the Persians, the world power before Alexander and no slouches through their Parthian incarnation. Ahura Mazda was identified with light, so the halo could've come from the monotheistic phase of the religion, or, more likely, it's a sign of being blessed by Mithra, the sun god who became Ahura Mazda's son and helper in the later polytheistic phase. (Don't get me going on Mithra's virgin birth and his rising from the dead, or the existence of Spenta Mainyu, the holy spirit who completed the later Zoroastrian trinity, or the presence in Rome of a male Mithraic cult in Rome that was led by a "Father," or Pope, or Constantine's interesting merger of the worship of Mithra as Sol Invictus and Jesus.
Remember, God works in mysterious ways.
A kamikaze sea urchin sails over his head, squeaking.
I bought this yesterday, and read half of it waiting for the Giants game to come on. What an extremely odd book. Fun, though.
"The obvious place to look is a center of personal and social decay."
"What, Los Angeles?"
Seth, if you or anyone else had a comment fail to post, chalk it up to predictable glitches as we shake down our MT3 installation. If all else fails, send it to pnh@panix.com and I'll personally wedge the comment in with a crowbar.
Jonathan Coulton, yes, yes! I can confirm for Alter that the stuff that isn't free is also fabulous. Some of my favorites are the off-kilter love songs, like "First of May" and "Millionaire Girlfriend". The first of those rhymes "in flagrante delicto" in a lovely ode to outdoor sex; the second is about a married man's search for a millionaire girlfriend who will make his life complete -- "when I finally find her, I'll get permission from the wife".
That line about ruining a pony has become part of my household's idiolect.
BUFFY may not be a great spiritual font, but it's a great show to watch with a pre-adolescent or early adolescent daughter. The conversations which have arisen therefrom have been fascinating.
(And I'm still trying to wrap my head around Eliza Dushku (Faith) as a nice Mormon girl. Hmm.)
[tangent] I definitely remember posting at least one entry on a knitting topic somewhere about the group called "Wrap With Love" that asked, about 2-3 years ago, on a local ABC radio breakfast programme if any of the listeners could help them by either donating knitting yarn or knitting some squares or help them sew the squares into wraps, which are sent to different places as charity. This evolved into a whole community effort, culminating in an annual early-morning "knit-in" at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation HQ in Ultimo (Sydney). In the second year they had a webcam, and a "knit-in" was held in several towns around the State (New South Wales) and in both they posted photos of the event and of wraps (or rugs or afghans) on the ABC website, as linked above.
Except I can't find that post - hence the links & summary above. This post was a follow-up, with something of a variation on the theme. You may have noted the Made with Love by a Liberal group(s) in the USA, with a sort-of similar idea.
Tie Quilt for the NSW Cancer Council.
Angela Catterns, Monday, 22 November 2004: Back in May we had a email from a listener, Julia, asking for help ...
"I am a quilter and have a group of six fellow quilters that meet at my house every week. We offered to make a Queensize Bed Quilt using Mens Ties as the main fabric ... If ... your listeners could mail any Ties (clean) we would be most grateful...
Any ties we have left will go into making quilts for kids at Westmead Hospital in their Quilts For Keeps Program. They are always wanting quilts for older kids especially boys."
I have been reading a book called "In Search of the World's Worst Writers" by Nick Page. I was skipping around in it and doing pretty well until I hit the entry for Amanda McKittrick Ross (who is rated as worse than MacGonagall!) Her prose is amazing and horrifying, but it's her poetry that's messed up my head: she wrote a typical-of-the-period WWI poem called "A Little Belgian Orphan," and as I read it I realized it can be sung to "Bell Bottomed Trousers."
Ugh.
I'd rather be stuck singing "Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me" to "The Yellow Rose of Texas" for the rest of the year than be stuck with this piece of slop for the rest of the week...
I have a question here that's a bit odd, but perhaps someone can steer me in the right direction: if it were a general firearms question I'd ask our hostess--unless it involved black powder shooting, which my sister is an expert at.
Anyway, the pocket knife I was given for my 21st birthday was stolen awhile ago and it's turned out to have been in production for only a couple of years and they *NEVER* end up on eBay. (It was the model known as Kershaw Pocket Jewelry--it had a beautiful fake tortoiseshell handle, which is probably why it's gone away.) I need advice on a good pocketknife for the times I don't need all the stuff on my Gerber Multi-Tool, since my current temp job has me opening the Gerber up twelve times a day. I was considering a pocketknife kit, but thought I'd ask here first: there are some pretty *creepy* knife fans out there, and this is one of the least creepy places on the WWW that I know of...
Incidentally, since the upgrade to MT 3 I notice that posting goes much faster.
Your best folding knives are your Buck Ranger or your Buck Folding Hunter. IMHO.
Chad - which book is this? Sounds like it might be worth a read.
Madeleine - are you saying that the actress is Mormon, or another character she's now playing?
Wow, the Death by Overwork link -- which is pictures of well-dressed Japanese businessmen =deeply= asleep on public transportation or on the sidewalk (or worse, at the base of a stairway or in one case on an actual street) is the most disturbing set of photographs I've seen since running across Weegee's photographs taken with an 'invisible' infrared flash. There's something so different about photographs taken without the person's knowledge -- not just that it's intrusive, but that it captures a person as they actually are, instead of how they present themselves to others.
Chad - which book is this? Sounds like it might be worth a read.
It's Bad Magic by Stephan Zielinski. It's got one of the best taglines ever: "There are some things people weren't meant to know. Some people know those things anyway. Sucks to be them."
I finished it last night. Definitely worth a read.
Jakob, copyediting and proofreading marks are like two dialects of the same language. Copyediting marks are used to mark up double-spaced typescript; i.e., the manuscript. Proofreading marks are queer and crabbed, and are used to make corrections in tightly set lines of type.
Say you need to insert hyphens at four places in a single line. If you're copyediting, you write in what looks like an equals sign at each spot. (We use an equals sign to mark hyphens.) Just above the line to either side of your marked hyphen you put little marks like parentheses turned sideways (curve up, ends down), indicating that the hyhphen shall lig up -- that is, that there shall be no space between the hyphen and the adjacent words. However, if you're doing the same thing in a typeset line, each inserted hyphen is marked with little caret, ^, just below but infracting the baseline of the type. If there are no other corrections on that line, what you'd mark in the margin would be the equals sign with the caret under it and the ligs above and to either side of it. Outward from this would be four slants, ////, meaning "do it four times," and beyond that would be a circled PE, EA, or AA, to show who gets charged for that correction.
It only seems complicated when you have to write it all out.
Paul, Eliza Dushku (who played Faith) was raised Mormon in Massachussets.
David, I gather that Movable Type 3 does a better job of running various housekeeping processes in the background while returning control to the user more quickly. Certainly from the administrators' viewpoint that appears to be true.
Paula, just wait until I get up the courage to post the third link I got from Isaac. As he said, it makes you want to wash your eyes out.
Will, I don't think you want to plant a flag on that particular piece of terrain. All I'll say is that it doesn't come as news to me, and I'm not worried about it.
Mad, it makes perfect sense to me. I may be imposing my own reading here, but it seems to me that she has a real appreciation of the joys of Being Bad.
Whoops, time to run, one-on-ones today.
If you want a real "moral guide" from among that ensemble of characters, I'd say your better bet is Xander.
ick. Maybe season 1 Xander, but it's all downhill after that. I'm probably biased because I'm a Spike redemptionist. Although I thought Angel got to say the best "moral value" line, something like: "If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do."
(Don't get me going on Mithra's virgin birth and his rising from the dead, or the existence of Spenta Mainyu, the holy spirit who completed the later Zoroastrian trinity, or the presence in Rome of a male Mithraic cult in Rome that was led by a "Father," or Pope, or Constantine's interesting merger of the worship of Mithra as Sol Invictus and Jesus.
But that sounds fascinating -- please do go on.
And what do you think of the assertion that Constantine's conversion to Christianity was politically motivated -- under One True God it made sense to have One Emperor.
Catie Murphy writes :"Y'know, I read WHAT WOULD BUFFY DO? a few months ago, 'cause I couldn't resist the title. I wasn't looking for spiritual guidance, but I've got to say, somebody who was could do a whole lot worse than Buffy as a moral guide."
Back in late 2001, a serious paper was released which used Buffy as a guide to how the US should respond to the threat of chem/bio weapons.
http://www.csis.org/burke/hd/reports/Buffy012902.pdf
Biological Warfare and the "Buffy Paradigm", Anthony H. Cordesman, Arlegh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, Center for Strategic and International Studies. September 29, 2001
It is incredibly tormenting to have to skim comments in fear of finding something spoilery. (Started watching Buffy this year--midway through S4, midway through Angel S1).
I may be perverse, but so far Faith is my favourite character. (Note: I've seen "This Year's Girl," but none of the ones after it.) Maybe because the ways in which she's messed-up remind me of myself at a younger and stupider age, if I'd been rather more reckless. (Or braver, take your pick.)
I think the deeply asleep Japanese businessmen should get together and confer with the deeply asleep Korean businessmen on the Seoul subway...
And Chad-person, is _Bad Magic_ really truly out, or do you have your hands on an ARC? *hops up and down impatiently* I wonder if I can coerce my in-laws/husband into letting me borrow a car and ransacking searching the local bookstores for it! Want to read! Want to read!
*ignoring the fact that she has something like 50 books to ship home from this in-law sojourn alone*
Will: I think C.S. Lewis had the perfect answer to that one: "So much the better for the pagans." Or the Zoroastrians in this case.
But where would a sea urchin get a Mitsubishi Zero, is what I want to know.
There's an interesting article today in the Wash. Post (may need bugmenot.com) regarding two guys who are trying to put together tours of Va. Civil War sites that tell the stories of the black soldier who fought in the war.
Yoon, it's possible that Chad got the last _Bad Magic_ at Borders, as their online inventory shows it as "order" at both Clifton Park & Albany. Don't know about B&N, though.
"Maybe season 1 Xander, but it's all downhill after that. I'm probably biased because I'm a Spike redemptionist."
I'm not following this; I don't see where the contradiction is.
For folding knives I strongly suggest looking at A.G. Russell - he's seldom the cheapest place to buy but he does have a good guarantee. I'd say the Buck 110 is belt knife rather than a pocket knife.
My carry is Russell's original one hand knife which perhaps sacrifices a little in the blade steel (AUS-8 rather than a super steel) but is both handy and a conversation piece. For pocket jewelry of course the William Henry line or for costume jewelry one of Lone Wolf's reborn Paul Knives with an exotic onlay.
A Buck 110 Folding Hunter is what I carry in my right hip pocket.
For a nice all-purpose pocket knife, you can't go wrong with the Spyderco Delica. Good ergonomics, good price, wonderful blade geometry, and lightweight as well.
Also good choices in that range: the Benchmade mini-AFCK; the Benchmade Griptilian; the Spyderco Calypso Jr. Lightweight; the Kershaw Ken Onion Leek.
And a good place to buy them -- www.knifecenter.com.
I've always thought Xander was the secret point of view character of the series: he's the Everyman who never quite gets used to the weirdness, and who has the moral center. He doesn't shirk responsibility -- he rises to the occasion, except for that marriage thing (which I thought was non-canonical, and I stopped watching about then anyway, feeling that the series had lived beyond its lifespan). He expresses the trepidation that his comrades don't always have the wit to recognize, but that's not failing to live up to responsibility: that's setting the stage for true bravery.
Spike's redemption, and Angel's, are both very interesting, but in both cases, the fact that the series went on obviously longer than originally planned eventually dulled those stories.
The success of a series is not a good reason to prolong it indefinitely. I really think a series should be thought out for a defined period, and shoujld be ended when it was originally meant to end, no matter what happens. If you want to go on, you should design a new series, also with its ending defined and planned for.
I'm not following this; I don't see where the contradiction is.
Short answer: Because Xander was always mean to Spike.
Longer answer: Spike redemptionists rooted for Spike becoming good through his own actions and choices (which he did, thanks be to Joss). Xander always seemed to go with the (cough*Watcher-propaganda*cough) view that soulless means unreedemable. The way he conducted himself with Anya also icky. For a lot of Spike fans, it had sort of racist (demonist? humanist?) undertones.
Going back to the question -- is "good" something you are or something you do?
(Although I admit I loved the slashy goodness of Spike and Xander sharing a basement in season 4. :) )
Oh, I get it. Well, yes. I wasn't saying that the character of Xander is perfect. But he is notably unselfish at some very costly moments.
I certainly agree that one of the appealing things about BtVS is the Spike arc, and the way it avoided all kinds of easy moral pitfalls.
Teresa and Jo, no flags here. Just passing along what I've read. My concept of God is big enough to include the possibility that the Catholics have it right, and part of getting it right was using the best bits from other sources.
Mayakda, to be precise, Constantine didn't convert until he was on his death bed. Whether that meant he saw the light then or he just wanted the priests to quit bugging him, who knows? Before then, he essentially said, "Look, Mithra and Jesus are names for the one god, so you Christians go worship on the Invincible Sun's day and quit disturbing my empire."
The "many names for the one god" approach also goes back to the Persians. Cyrus, a Zoroastrian that the Bible calls a Messiah, could tell the Jews to build (or rebuild, depending on your take) a temple to the one true god under the name of Yahweh, and he could tell the Babylonians that he conquered them to restore the rule of Marduk, another name of the one god-- It's definitely smart politics. And good religion, if you ignore the element of force.
I don't even have a copy of Bad Magic. This is what comes of having a book's pubdate fall right in the middle of moving office. The author got his boxful before I ever saw one, and the one I did see was earmarked for someone else. I have faith that there's a carton of them around here somewhere.
Bruce, the world's worst writers don't get published, and few of them are as amusingly bad as Amanda McKittrick Ross or William McGonagall. In the meantime, if you can't get Ms. Ross's poetry out of your head, Longfellow's Excelsior goes very nicely to the Underdog theme song.
If you asked me a question about firearms, I'd refer it to the same person who answered your question about knives. But Jim, for all his many virtues, is not as big a knife junkie as I am. So: what are you looking for in a knife? How big, how durable, how pretty, what are you going to do with it, and what's your budget?
Connie, what I found most disturbing about the photos was the sheer helpless exhaustion. It's the kind of thing you read about soldiers doing in the vicinity of battle, falling asleep in their tracks the moment they stop moving. That shouldn't be happening to prosperous white-collar employees when there isn't a major emergency in progress. It speaks volumes about social pressure to demonstrate one's devotion to one's job.
Mayakda, Whedon has an obvious urge to redeem all his characters, and he's very solid on the long-term interconnection of action, habit, and personal character. In the Buffy universe, doing good takes a lot of work, and redemption is a long slow process, but the deck is stacked (slightly) in your favor, because creation is inherently good. Being seriously evil takes commitment. An evil character who interacts with creation (usually in the form of his or her fellow creatures) can be seduced, backsliding into good. Thus Spike, clear back in the second season:
"We like to talk big. Vampires do. 'I'm going to destroy the world.' That's just tough guy talk. Strutting around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I like this world. You've got... dog racing, Manchester United. And you've got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It's all right here."I think my favorite theme of his is that no matter how grim the circumstances in which you find yourself, or how little you're at fault for being in them, if you respond by becoming a monster, you're still a monster.
Teresa:
The world's worst writers can still be wonderful people. To my family, familar with his work and backstory, William McGonagall was a "great soul."
It goes beyond his lack of awareness that his work lacked literary merit, though it sometimes had the advantage of being timely (in a blog-versal way).
He was convinced that he was a Great Writer, and was immune to others who suggested a lack of agreement with his Unique Artistic Vision.
People played cruel jokes on him. For instance, he was told that the Queen desired a Command Performance from him. Impovershed as he was, he walked from Scotland to England, only to find that he'd been duped.
But these did not dampen his cheerful spirit, let alone slow his writing. To me, this is a sign of a very healthy Self Image, which I would not consider pathological.
There is also a chapter about The World's Worst Actor in that book about people who were once famous, but about whom almost nobody today has a clue. Dang, what's that book's name? It's wonderful. The most famous painter in the world, bankrupted by P.T. Barnum...
Longer answer: Spike redemptionists rooted for Spike becoming good through his own actions and choices (which he did, thanks be to Joss). Xander always seemed to go with the (cough*Watcher-propaganda*cough) view that soulless means unreedemable.
Spike ultimately came to the same conclusion. And he could NOT, ultimately, be redeemed without one; remember his attempted rape of Buffy? That's why he went off to get his soul back. Once he had it, he could at least try to be a decent person; all his efforts -- and they were mighty -- failed before that.
Only trouble was, he didn't realize how much having a soul hurts.
On haloes.
Living persons get square halos. Dead persons get round ones. God the Father gets a triangular one. Haloes are usually gold. The only time I've ever seen a black one represented was on Judas Iscariot.
And Chad-person, is _Bad Magic_ really truly out, or do you have your hands on an ARC? *hops up and down impatiently*
It's a real, finished book (complete with strange academic appendix), but it was the only copy they had on hand at the Wolf Road Borders. I was actually pulled partway out from the shelf, as if someone had left it that way to remind them to pick it up, but nobody hollered when I took it, so it's mine now.
If you decide to go looking, I'd recommend trying Flights of Fantasy in Latham (http://www.fof.net/), which is probably the local place most likely to have it. The Wolf Road B&N is another possibility, but the Niskayuna B&N and the Clifton Park Borders are both terrible.
Re: Spike and Xander
Of course, let's not forget that Xander has also tried to rape Buffy--back in the episode where he was possessed by the spirit of a Hyena.
He has also lied to her--most direly when he fails to tell her that Willow is going to try to put Angel's soul back--an action that contributes to Buffy's having to kill Angel and send him to hell.
I think that some of the anti-Xander backlash (with which, I confess, I sympathize) is because some fans feel that what Teresa has aptly characterized as Whedon's being "very solid on the long-term interconnection of action, habit, and personal character" tends to fall apart when we get to Xander.
completely non sequitor, and perhaps someone has posted it already, but this is an interesting red/blue map.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/
non sequitor 2: I thought halos originated from keeping birds from roosting on statues.
non sequitor c: what's this red button do?
I wasn't saying that the character of Xander is perfect. But he is notably unselfish at some very costly moments.
I'll agree with that. He had some knee-jerk issues, but he was, for the most part, the heart of the group.
I think my favorite theme of his is that no matter how grim the circumstances in which you find yourself, or how little you're at fault for being in them, if you respond by becoming a monster, you're still a monster.
I quoted that just because loved reading that. Exactly right.
to be precise, Constantine didn't convert until he was on his death bed
Will, wasn't it common (then) for converts to delay baptism until the deathbed so as to enter heaven washed clean of all sin?
But granting he didn't actually convert until his deathbed, while he lived Christian bishops became powerful political figures due to his sponsorship. I guess here's the question -- how come he didn't pick Mithraism to be the state religion then? Why bother syncretizing with Christianity? I guess that's one of those "we'll never know" things.
Can one speak of his soul back in which case is it the soul of William the Poet xor Spike the Vampire, non-exclusive or or both simultaneously in one soul?
Some say Spike went off not necessarily to get his soul back; sounds a lot like Robert Graves there - is the Jossverse as much a mixture as Grave's tales?
Is the Vamp an invader or is it Jekyll and Hyde duality (doppelgangers seem to have a duality too?)?
Is the Vamp more like being slug ridden (similar amusements in the uncut version too) in Puppet Masters? See e.g. where Mary/Aluquere while hag ridden apparently resists while fighting Sam/Elihu - does one have a moral obligation not to kill the slug ridden or is it euthanasia or self defense?
This question comes up particularly with respect to Spike. Spike had a long time quest to make his people/toys destroy the bodies of their loved ones (more explicitly in the comic books).
For myself I can't think of the series as a series that jumped the shark at any particular point.
Although a given arc could be quite entertaining the "she turned on her left side" kind of world building continuity puzzles seemed to me to have contradictory incluing and annoying retconning
(granting the good foreshadowing but I suspect that was accomplished with hindsight not foresight)
so I mostly take the stories as rep company or shared universe or quantum cat variations on a theme.
Be quite interested to hear more from folks who are happy with the cannon/mythology to the end or up to a point or between 2 points.
Barbara Goss just asked me:
"[I'm] trying to locate a title published in the 70s i believe ... "last breath" maybe? the world is about to end, literally ... something happens at the last minute and the "clock" is reset ... i think the book ends with a tire being burned on a beach ... good grief, that's not much to go on, is it? i work with teenagers ... my brain is dead!"
=================================================
Where one begins by burning books
One will end up burning people.
--Heinrich Heine
=================================================
Souls are tricky things to pin down in the Buffyverse. By folklore, vampires should be soul-less, yet Buffyverse vampires aren't the automatons we might expect. Quite the contrary, even newly risen vampires can have distinct personalities.
And then there's the matter of the Slayer soul. Pre-Faith, I understood it to be passed on from slayer to slayer at the moment of death, yet not displacing the new slayer's original soul. But with Buffy's first death the slayer-soul got passed on, and yet remained with Buffy. Truly ineffable.
Thanks to the BBC's eccentric programming of the last series, I never quite caught the explanation for how all potential slayers got awoken, but I guess it had something to do with the post-Faith realisation that souls could be split.
So it seems likely that in the Buffyverse, souls, while immortal and intangible, are not unchangeable. That they may be split, combined, or even stored in jars without losing their efficacy. (Soul preserve, anyone?)
I wonder how well this accords with Christian -- or any other religion's -- stand on soul metaphysics?
conundrum:
I've written a short story about book-burning. One of my lines reads:
"If they're burning books now, they'll be burning people next."
I hadn't heard of Heinrich Heine until this open thread.
What do writers do when they encounter something like this?
My working theory is that all the claims about souls propounded by all the people and factions of the Buffyverse are, in different ways, wrong.
As I said, one of the pleasures of the storyline is the way that what we had previously taken as metaphysical givens so frequently turn out to be somebody or other's self-serving dogma.
Mind you, I'm not trying to make a multi-author collaboratively-written TV show live up to greater claims for metaphysical coherence than such a thing can bear. But I do think Whedon had in mind from early on that a lot of things we're initially told would turn out to be wrong. TV is actually well-suited to this particular flavor of dramatic irony.
Hello,
I have checked many publishers' submission guidelines but haven't seen any reference to British vs. American English.
Would a manuscript written in British English be at a disadvantage when submitted to an American publisher? My guess is that the quality of the manuscript is all that matters, but I'd like to get know for sure.
Speaking as an acquiring editor, I couldn't care less whether a submission is in "American" or "British" English.
The only times it matters are when the idioms of one are put inappropriately into dialogue spoken by the other, with no plausible justification. But that's easily fixed 99.99% of the time.
A reply in under five minutes! Now that's service. :)
Just as I thought. Quality is what counts. (And I should have double checked my previous post for errors. I'm lame.)
Thanks, Patrick!
Tangentially, while looking at Mr. MacDonald's Buck links, I found this:
United Lord Of The Rings Fighting Knives of Legolas Scabbards
But where would a sea urchin get a Mitsubishi Zero, is what I want to know.
There are plenty of them at the bottom of the Pacific. Getting them to fly again is the tricky part, but they don't need to stay up for very long...
*sigh*
Why do all the interesting forums eventually spin off into Buffy threads?
I'm going to back the Buck knife supporters. I've loved the Buck folders I've used, and my BuckTool is still my favorite Multitool (although the new SwissArmy's that integrate USB drives are very drool-worthy). I've also carried a Frost Bulldog mini-folder with a fossilized walrus tusk handle in my wallet/pouch for 12 years, and it's been an awesome little knife. Sadly, the scrimshawed warrior maiden holding a flail on the handle is almost worn to invisibility, and I'm not sure if my abilities are sufficient to resurrect her.
As we've gotten into editing questions, I have one, and would be most grateful for any advice.
I've been working on a non-fiction book (esoteric non-fiction, specifically about research in the general Pagan community and how to do it better.)
[Note: The organization of said book owes something I can't explain to Elise Matthesen having handed me Making Book while I was in the middle of writing it, and telling me firmly to read the last essay. I couldn't for the life of me tell you exactly why it made it a better book. I'm just glad it did.]
I'm in the editing stages now, and have a copy of the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style coming home with me this weekend from work.(I work in a well-stocked private high school library as a paraprofessional.)
How best to use it? Start at page 1 of the book, and look through the MoS for anything I have questions about? Start at page 1 of the MoS (skipping the parts that obviously have no immediate relevance) and work through the book?
I'm particularly trying to sort out consistency with things like referring to other chapters, the whole email/e-mail, web page/site term preferences, and punctuation.
My parents were English and raised in the UK respectively, and while spellcheck programs catch the assorted British spellings I still use, I know I do non-American things with my punctuation at times. I just can't always tell when.
So, wise people with editing experience, how to make best use of my time? (I'll gladly listen to other editing advice too.)
People who want to check the on-shelf availablity of various books at physical Borders bookstores can go here.
Bad Magic is outstanding.
Some of the "variable" constants in Buffy/Angel continuity just throw me out of the story.
Vampires eating ordinary food: a tremendous big deal for Angel in the episode where he becomes human for a day. (Rediscovering the pleasure of eating chocolate is an important signifier of what it means to be "alive" rather than "undead.") Eating is nothing at all for Spike. He drinks beer and scarfs cheeseburgers all the time.
Moral consequences of acts such as murdering a human being are also variable. Oz shrugs his shoulders, gets into his truck and leaves town. Faith (a bad girl) has the full majesty of the law thrown at her and goes to prison. Willow (a good girl in temporary plot difficulties) gets sent off to "magic-addiction recovery school."
As far as I can see, the mystical reason why Spike redeems himself and becomes ensouled is that Sara Michelle Gellar requests Joss Whedon to make him a romantic interest. When James Marsters is signed on to become a regular character, they put the chip in Spike's head, allowing him to be more charming-Brit-bad boy than soulless monster. "William" is developed and retconned, as necessary, from that point, because expanding Spike's humanity proves to be a tremendously popular and successful plot development.
Granted that the writers and actors mostly pull all this off with aplomb. But, for me, there's an overarching feeling of arbitrariness about both the Buffy and Angel series. Individual episodes have powerful emotional overtones, groups of episodes sometimes convey specific existential ambiance.... But if you try to take both series as an integrated continuity, the metaphysics and moral implications are more fragmented over a seven-year run than Batman over a fifty-year run.
(Comparing the mythology and moral structures of Buffy and Batman might make an interesting panel item -- how writers succeed and fail in tinkering with continuity for the sake of individual stories.)
I agree that Xander is probably the most consistently-developed Buffy character. He throws himself at evil, when confronted by it, simply because he believes it's the right thing to do. This gets stronger and stronger over the entire run.
A note on the Borders bookstore availability marker. From various chain location and Borders employees, the availability is not actually tracked in real time, but is supposedly an indication of liklihood that the book would in the course of normal events be stocked.
Perhaps less of a crap shoot that normal, but just something to keep in mind.
A kamikaze sea urchin sails over his head, squeaking
With friends like these, who needs anemones?
However, if you're doing the same thing in a typeset line, each inserted hyphen is marked with little caret, ^, just below but infracting the baseline of the type. If there are no other corrections on that line, what you'd mark in the margin would be the equals sign with the caret under it and the ligs above and to either side of it. Outward from this would be four slants, ////, meaning "do it four times," and beyond that would be a circled PE, EA, or AA, to show who gets charged for that correction.
If I ever needed a reminder that copyeditors and copy editors are not the same thing, this was it. I used to want to make the transition from newspapers to books someday, but the more I hear about book copyeditors, the less appealing the job sounds.
"If they're burning books now, they'll be burning people next."
Recently ran across that same quote in Inkheart, by Cornelia Funke (highly recommneded YA, btw).
Why do all the interesting forums eventually spin off into Buffy threads?
Because BTVS is such a morality Roscharch test? Plus -- James Marsters and Eliza Dushku ...
A kamikaze sea urchin sails over his head, squeaking.
At first reading, I thought that this was a scene from the new Spongebob Squarepants WWII epic, Tako! Tako! Tako!
Jennett,
First of all, are you editing the book yourself? I mean editing your own book yourself? Wow. Is this the pre-submission editing stage? (Meaning, you don't know who's going to publish the book?) If so, then a lot of this answer is probably moot.
May I strongly recommend that you re-consider this notion, and offer to trade services with an editorially inclined friend? It's really a good idea to have a second, fresh pair of eyes look at the writing.
That said, if you're determined to do it yourself, here's my thinking:
I use Chicago (or New York, which is less comprehensive but friendlier) as a reference, similar to the way I use whatever dictionary I'm using that day. I would not recommend starting at the beginning and continuing until I got to the relevant bits because, well, you probably don't need to know about The Parts of a Journal (Chapter 1, 1.138—1.191).
I might recommend reading most or all of Chapter 2, Manuscript Preparation and Manuscript Editing, which will probably answer a lot of your other questions. Chapter 2 does rather assume an acquired MS., but it's a good overview of the process and of the responsibilities of everyone involved.
Remember, if the MS hasn't been acquired, and you're planning on having it published by a traditional publisher, then it's going to get copy edited professionally. So at this stage you should be polishing up the writing, and doing your best with the spelling and usage, in the knowledge that good writing will speak for itself, and that most publishers don't care if you use their preferred spelling for website. If the book is destined to be self-published, then it's still not a great idea to edit it yourself. It's very, very difficult to see your own typos.
If you're really, really determined, I'd suggest taking a copy editing course—one of the weekend-type ones—which will give you an overview of what to look for in terms of commas (series and otherwise), which vs. that, ellipses, compound adjectives, and other issues of editorial persnickityness. Then when you come to one of these issues in your manuscript, look it up in your style guide of reference (Chicago in this instance), make a note of what it says, and impose that choice consistently.
Use a dictionary for spelling. Choose one dictionary and use it for every word whose spelling is debatable. Once you've made a spelling choice, impose it rigorously on every instance of that word.
The thing about copy editing is that consistency is about as important as correctness. Possibly more so.
The thing about CMOS is that it tries to cover all the bases. Which can prove a bit befuddling.
The thing about CMOS is that it tries to cover all the bases.
Well, yeah...you got your pMOS and your nMOS in there...
Lenny, I would have to submit that the moral consequences of the three murders are variable because so were the circumstances, but I also would argue all three cases involve self-redemption, which is sort of a big theme in the Buffyverse.
Oz killed a fellow werewolf who was trying to kill his girl. He didn't just 'shrug his shoulders and leave'; it caused him to, in great agony, realize he couldn't trust himself around humans because of the wolf inside, and go off -- leaving the one love of his life -- to try to learn how to control it. This may not be legal penance, but it's penance nonetheless. (And how many courts are you going to find who understand werewolves?) He then firms up this desire for self-redemption by voluntarily giving up his girl forever when he realizes that the strong emotions surrounding her are not going to allow him to maintain control.
Faith killed numerous people, not just one, which already makes her different, though I think she's only doing jail time for one (they do leave it sort of up in the air). Excepting that first manslaughter, her murders are mostly pre-meditated, not crimes of passion; she's clearly depicted as enjoying the kill in certain scenes. On the other hand, she chose to turn herself in and go to prison in part so someone else wouldn't get imprisoned for her actions, which brings us back to that self-redemption thing.
Depending on whether or not you want to believe the magic-is-a-drug thing, you could argue that Willow was both not in her right mind due to grief and not in her right mind due to drugs. I'm still not sure how I feel about the 'power makes you do things you might not' theme but I at the least could understand "you killed my one true love, you must die"; it may not be right, but it's understandable. And the person she kills is a multiple-murderer himself who has slowly escalated the level of his crimes, not some random innocent person, which makes it easier for people to understand. So possibly that's why people have an easier time dealing with her after than you'd think. Certainly, if you do buy into the "went completely batshit from power and grief" explanation, then counseling is more apropos than jail time would be, though in her case I think the self-redemption thing falters a bit; I don't care for how they handled her reactions after.
"As far as I can see, the mystical reason why Spike redeems himself and becomes ensouled is that Sara Michelle Gellar requests Joss Whedon to make him a romantic interest."
You have some interesting vision. I see that Spike going off and getting his soul back (which wasn't his intention when he left) was being led up to for 4 seasons. Even discarding everything about love and attraction and the Slayer, there's one important other factor that makes it make sense: Spike's rivalry with Angel.
I'm not going to say there's zero inconsistency in the Buffyverse by any means (250 episodes on two shows with how many writers?) but I think there's more than people like to give it credit for, particularly when it comes to things like this.
But having said all that, it does bug me that Angel can't enjoy food but Spike can.
Mayakda, there's some question about the Roman custom for baptism in the fourth century. What's most interesting to me is that the bishop who baptized Constantine on his deathbed was an Arian.
Also, my apologies for being unclear. Constantine didn't get rid of Mithraism; he helped it merge with Christianity. The Edict of Milan didn't make Christianity the official religion or get rid of paganism; it just made the official day of worship come into line with the Mithraic choice. Constantine's coins still read "Sol Invicto comiti" and he kept the Mithraic title of High Priest. You can find a fair look at Constantine and Christianity in Wikipedia's Constantine article.
The merger of Mithraism and Christianity helped me understand something that had always baffled me about Catholicism. Jesus said, "Call no man Father." Given that, how do you explain the Pope? Once you know that the highest Mithraic rank was Pater, it becomes clear.
That Angel can't enjoy food but Spike can is, however, entirely in character for both of them.
Great post from Tina. I have a pile of respect for Lenny Bailes, and I'm not going to get into a twist over a TV show, but I really have to say that Lenny's descriptions of several critical plot developments are, well, let's just say we watched very different shows.
There are a lot of things to criticize about BtVS, but when you start by characterizing Oz as having "just shrugged his shoulders and left" ... As someone said to me in a different conversation recently, I didn't know my eyebrows could go up that far.
On halos:
These seem to be descended from a common element in religious imagery in the old Middle East: in the Hebrew Bible the term used is 'anan (also used in Ugaritic texts) which is related to words for cloud, mist, and smoke, but is associated with divine authority and refers to the same thing as the melammu of Assyrian and the aegis of classical Greece. (The word is used of the pillar of cloud/fire in the Exodus, for example.) This is frequently depicted in sculpture and bas-reliefs as a winged sun-disk both in Greek and Middle-Eastern traditions. This becomes the halo in later art.
So the halo is derived from pre-Christian roots, but they seem generally spread over the east of the Mediterranean world, not just Rome.
Jennie:
Thank you for the help!
This is pre-submission editing. I've got other people reading it, and commenting, but I know that (because of my background) I've got bunches of minor inconsistencies in spelling (easy to fix) and punctuation (not so easy because I notice it less.)
I want to clean up as much of that as I can. And if I'm going to clean them up, I might as well do it while picking a variant for a specific reason. (Which may include "I like that one better and it's perfectly acceptable.")
There's also the factor that several of the esoteric publishing houses don't have the best track record for editing. I can't tell from my perspective if the well-edited ones started that way from the author, got good editing from the house, or whether the house tried to edit the poor ones and got firmly told "No! Not my precious manuscript." by the author.
[I have guesses, naturally, in some cases. And realistically, it's almost certainly some combination of all three depending on other variables. But getting the manuscript consistent to the best of my ability in advance seems like a good idea.]
The thing about CMOS is that it tries to cover all the bases. Which can prove a bit befuddling.
That part I'd noticed, yep. I've got a good idea which bits are most likely to be relevant. Don't worry, I wasn't planning to read it cover to cover. (Well, not right now. I'm one of those people who reads dictionaries, too.)
The thing about CMOS is that it tries to cover all the bases.
Well, yeah...you got your pMOS and your nMOS in there...
No, no! CMOS doesn't have bases, it has gates, and it exposes lots of them. TTL covers all bases. And don't get me started on ECL....
(The NixonFET: an obsolete three-terminal device with an unimpeachable source, an economic drain, and, of course, a water gate)
Jordin (EE Geek Jokes V/I Us) Kare
Patrick:
You're right that I mischaracterized the response Oz shows in that Buffy episode by saying that he "shrugs his shoulders and leaves." I should have said, simply, that the entire Buffy gang gets a pass as far as further responsibility (or involvement) in the external world after one of them commits murder. The same thing happens with Willow's act of murder. When Faith becomes a murderer, it's a different story: corpses, police departments, and external karma are inescapable. I'm willing to buy the internal destructive burden of karma that Giles assumes after his act of murder, but the aftermath doesn't ring true to me with Oz or Willow.
As far as Giles' murder, I just feel that he made the wrong decision for a hero living in our world (where you need to watch out and guard yourself from the dangerous siamese twin without murdering the innocent half). In the world that Whedon invents, populated by an unstoppable killer god, the moral calculus may be different. But I hate the implication that comes across: "sometimes you have to shoot through an innocent body to protect your family from the killer behind it. It may unnerve you, but you just have to do it."
My regular pocket knife is a wretchedly sturdy job of no certain parentage from a road store in the middle of West Virginia.
Most to the point, it's folding, has a point, and both a serrated and smooth part to the blade. It was also cheap enough that I don't feel badly about some of the things that I do to it - and it isn't kept at the razor sharpness of my multi-tool (really - it's not an advantage to open boxes with something that sharp...).
"sometimes you have to shoot through an innocent body to protect your family from the killer behind it. It may unnerve you, but you just have to do it." I thought Donald Hamilton did that one well: for Matt Helm and for Mac. Granted the innocent moved at the last minute but Mac's last words on the subject were well done.
With friends like these, who needs anemones?
Hurt. Hurt. Hurt.
As far as Giles' murder, I just feel that he made the wrong decision for a hero living in our world (where you need to watch out and guard yourself from the dangerous siamese twin without murdering the innocent half).
I believe Giles' last line before doing it is "Yes, well, they're heroes. You and I are different." Or words to that effect. In other words, he's saying he ISN'T a hero, and that's why he can do what must be done. And it really WAS necessary. There was no other way. And the vic didn't give a flying frell about anyone but himself.
I shed no tears for that.
But then I'm easily manipulated by good television. The other night, watching an episode of Law and Order - SVU, I actually cheered when a man shot a ten-year-old kid through the heart. Granted, the boy had smothered the man's son by shoving gravel down his throat, and done it on purpose for fun, and was very likely to do it again when he got out of juvie in 8 years, but I still found my reaction disturbing.
As far as Giles' murder, I just feel that he made the wrong decision for a hero living in our world (where you need to watch out and guard yourself from the dangerous siamese twin without murdering the innocent half).
Except by that time, Dr. Ben wasn't innocent anymore. He had already sold Dawn to Glory.
One of my favorite lines about microcircuit materials was "Gallium arsnide has been the material of the future for the past 30 years" (said by a senior coworker back in the 1980s).
I thought ECL had mostly gone away years ago, its place taken by advanced silicons structures and silicon-germanium, and other materials... I'm not up on current materials, last time I was following it was when I was doing electronics industry market reseach a decade [eeep...] ago.
Dunkin' Donuts update...
I found one backed up against Mall Road in Burlington a few days ago, on the north side of Mall Road between the Middlesex Turnpike and a street east of Middlesex Turnpike [we're talking eastern Massachusetts here, never depend on there being an accurate street sign--first there has to -be- street sign, before accuracy comes into play! Street signs have a habit of disappearing early and often when put up, if put up] that's west of the building that's a Kohl's that originially was a Bradlees [yes, the building was built to be a Bradlees] before that chain went out of existense. It's the last street heading west on Mall Road, before the Middlesex Turnpike. Between that street and the Middlesex Pike there are stores. There are parking lots with roads in it between the two streets--actually, the parking lot and roadway are bounded by the street I don't know the name of, which runs from Mall Road nortwest up to the Middlesex Turnpike, so the three roads, the Middlesex Pike, Mall Road, and that whatever-the-name-is road, bound a parcel of land full of parking lots stores. One of the drivable paths through the parcel is parallel to Mall Road and north of it, and there is a parking lots and a north-facing stripmall between it and Mall road. The stores include a Newbury Comics, I think a Taco Bell, Other Stores, AND, apparently, a Dunkin' Donuts--which didn't used to be there. I noticed the sign on the back wall of the strip mall last weeek. I don't know when it moved in, two tenants ago Softpro which was a computer and scienc/engineering bookstores, in that space I think. On the west side of the stripmall are more stores, which some of which face easst, and some face south. North of them, across from drivable road, is a Tower Records facing ast and some other stores facing east north of the Tower Records, and east and north of them, facing south, is a Staples, and to its northeast is an entrance on the road I can't recall the name of
The Dunkin' Donuts is about 1.3 miles west of the Readercon Hotel--which is not less than the distance to the Dunkin' Donuts on Cambridge street past Burlington Center.
There are Still More Dunkin' Donuts in the area, there's one on Washington Street in Woburn, the exit east after route 38 where the Stop & Shop had a Dunkin's Donuts in the store. The Washington Street on is south of 128, in a commercial/industrial/stripmall area, on the west side of the road, sort of across the street from a Staples... Uh, yeah, the Staples is maybe four miles from the Staples in Burlington. But the Staples on Washington Street in Woburn is in Woburn, in a commercial-industrial area, whereas Burlington is office buildings and shopping malls and a hospital. "Van de Graff Drive" is on the -other- side of 128 in Burlingon than Mall Road is, named for the person who invencted the accelerators that used to be made there. There long ago was a building that said "High Voltage Engineering" and "Ion Phyiscs. The building was demolished some years back and an high tech office buildings built on the site, which have houses successon of failed dotcom industry businesses or dotcom-related businesses... the sign "Genuity" is still on one of them. "Genuity" was what the Internet Webhosting business the Verizon spun out, that before NYNEX and Bell Atlantic merged and renamed itself Bell Atlantic, before NYNEX or was it Bell Atlantic and GTE merged and renamed itself I think to something else, before GTE bought out BBN [Bolt Beranek & Newman, the company that built the switches and did the R&D for the ARPAnet, that over time/mutated evolved and split int systems than included the Internet, and BBN over time started providing commercial ISP and webhosting servies.... Anyway, Genuity went banktrupt and out of existence quite a number of months ago. There used to be industrial--as in hardware manufacturers--businesses in Burlington, but conversion over into retail and software and bank buildings and Lahey Clinic and empty buildings where the previous owners or tenants of buildings vacated the premises and in various cased evaporated as opposed to relocated. Digital Equipment Corporation and I forget which other minicomputer manufacturer had had facilities in the area--oh, Hewlett-Packard bought out Apollo, which had been in Chelmsford, and moved from there to Burlington. But there was at least one other minicomputer maker which had had a facility in Burlington. EG&G had been in Burlington originally, GCA which had been a big name in semiconductor processing equimpment had been there, RCA had been there with a manufacturing piece of its defense hardware business (before GE bought out RCA and then started getting out of hardware defense contracting other that e.g. jet engines)... Sum bucked the trend, a few years ago it decided to consolidate its east coast US operations and put up a big complex in Burlington, I don't know if there's any hardware done there, I suspect not.
Anyway, the business mixes have definitely changed over the years.
Bruce, regarding clasp knives: when I was a system administrator opening boxes on a nigh daily basis, I picked up a Camillus 886. (It seems the line has since been renamed-- now they're calling the knife that looks like the old 886 a "Large deluxe lockback (#9)." They have a web site at camillusknives.com . For the purposes of this note, I'm going to say 886, since I've never picked up a new #9 with my own hands-- but it should be the exact same thing.)
The 886 has the distinct advantage that unlike a lot of Spyderco's stuff, it doesn't look high tech and evil. Whip out a Centofante III FRN to open a box, and the people around you will snicker and/or blanch-- and may well ask if there are any testosterone-related issues you'd like to discuss with the nice psychologist down in Human Resources. Spyderco makes fine knifes-- they just look like the sort of thing a poseur would carry.
Now admitted, the Camillus 886 does not have a pocket clip or a hole in the blade to assist opening. (I still carry mine in the leather sheath it came with.) On the other hand, let's get real-- it's a BOX. It's not going to run away if you lose a few seconds opening the knife. (Knives for self-protection is a can of worms I don't want to open; in the unlikely event anyone cares what my opinion is, send me email.) Also, if anyone says you can open an 886 or knife of similar design one handed, they're not lying-- I do it myself-- but for the only way I know how to do it, one failure mode is bad and the second potentially catastrophic. (Step one: hold knife by blade, snap wrist to whip hilt out until it locks. Screw this one up, and you throw the knife across the room. [It's probably not open, though-- otherwise, I'd never do this when other people are around.] Step two: flip knife in air and catch by hilt. Screw THAT one up and you can stab yourself in the hand.)
On another note: thanks for the kind words, all. In particular, y'all should note that James Macdonald has been godfathering Bad Magic for years out of nothing but fondness for the text and the kindness of his heart. If ever you want to see her eyes roll, corner TNH and say, "So I hear there's a story about your temporarily misplacing the phone number of this guy who sent you a manuscript you pulled out of the slush pile..." Mr. Macdonald is the hero of the tale. Bring popcorn.
My heart sinks. As Mayakda pointed out above, the line I wrote in my short story comes from the book Inkheart. Which I did read (+ loved). I honestly thought when I wrote the line in my short story that it was original, but Inkheart must have lodged itself in my subconcious.
What do I do? Change the line in my story, except it is one of the main turning/focus points.
Does this happen to writers often? I am writing my first book. Since I started I've been reading as much as possible to get a feel for what works and what doesn't, and what is already out there. (As well as hanging out at places like Making Light to learn how the publishing world works).
My friend Peet, who wrote a lot, rarely ever read books because he wanted his work to be completely original.
I feel quite sick about it. Does this happen to writers often? Or is my poor memory just biting me in the ass?
(Back to Buffy):
I think the difference in police involvement has less to do with the "in gang" than the circumstances of the murder, again. In Veruca's case, I'm not sure how it was handled, but I would guess that 'mauled by animals' was the verdict and therefore no one suspected a murder charge. In Willow's case, a wanted murder suspect disappeared off the face of the earth; no body = no murder.
Faith's manslaughter of the deputy mayor got police involvement because he was the deputy mayor and because the Mayor wanted to get rid of the slayers. The involvement of police down in LA during the later Angel episodes also suffered from intervention, a combination of Wolfram and Hart ratting people out and Kate being a little too perceptive. I don't think it has anything to do with the fact she wasn't in the In group so much as: Faith? A little conspicuous.
My take on opening boxes is that this is what disposable razor knives are for.
This is in part because I have unreason in my heart, concerning the proper treatment of any knife one will be troubled to sharpen; it's in part because getting tape adhesive on a folding blade isn't the best thing to be doing.
My normal pocket knife is the MEC own-branded Swiss Army default consumer widget. The actual knife lockblade knife is some Swedish thing, bought at a little kiosk in a shopping mall in Ottawa, and a bit on the heavy side, but then again I've had it for twenty two years and it isn't showing much in the way of signs of wear, and I've used it to cut down sapling trees. (The lanyard isn't showing signs of wear. I like stuff like that.)
I don't carry it around these days, since I'm being so thoroughly urban in my habitat, but I still know where it is.
Comments on Open thread 32: