Kate -- forgive you? You made me go hot and cold all over. Not a new sensation, but not a frequent one either.
They say the balrog and the goblin keep
The courts where Durin feasted and drank deep
And Balin son of Fundin? The wild orc
Stumps past his tomb, but he is fast asleep.
I saw the trailer/preview for _I, Robot_. It features armies of killer robots whose eyes turn red when they attack, and many attack sequences, and someone saying how safe the things are, just as one leaps to attack.
There's a story that when the late Isaac Asimov saw the film of _2001_, he said "HAL's breaking First Law!" and his companion said "So smite him, Isaac." The preview made me wish for Isaac to smite them quite comprehensively.
I do not understand the urge to take the name of a classic work and paste it onto a completely different story.
Shooting them wouldn't help and might well make things worse -- they'd have a martyr and an excuse.
A few years ago, I was involved in an online discussion in which the question "Quis custodiet" was answered with "CNN". If you throw the things into Boston Harbour, Jim, make sure you do it with maximum publicity. It would be beautifully symbolic, and you need to do it on a slow TV day.
It's not just a breach of your legal system, it's a breach of the Rule of Law itself.
Or in other words, this isn't just against what was decided at your (1776) revolution but what was decided at our (1688) revolution as well. There shall be divine right of kings. Everyone is subject to the law. Nobody is above it or below it, or we have no law.
I don't revise. At least, I do, I tweak things, but I do it as I'm writing or right after, I don't do discrete drafts. Every time I've been required to produce drafts, I've found it easier to write the thing and fake "earlier" versions than to do what they seem to expect normal people do.
Success as art: what about theatre? By defintion it's only going to work for the people who see it, but it's still art. I suppose it would be possible to argue that if a play is revived and done again it's lasting and reaching more people, that Shakespeare is art and Wilde may be, and it's too early to tell about most plays... but I think it's art even the first time. So is live music.
As for writing a book in a month, I was feeling all superior, having written one in three weeks -- and my hands are almost like hands again, thank you. Then I saw they did it in one hour a day, which I didn't believe was humanly possible until I did the math -- a standard 93000 word novel would be 3100 words a day, which is less than sixty words a minute. I can type that fast. I can't type original fiction that fast, but that, I suppose, is my failing, which would be cured if I were to apply their methods. Run away! Run away! Or, to quote Gorey "How does one become a spy?"
Nobody should be above or below the law. Lay should be tried, yes, and if found guilty he ought to go to prison, where he ought to be treated just like everyone else.
It horrifies me when people treat the abuses of the prison system as if they were part of the punishment. I find that comment above from "Ms Jen" about Abu Ghraib, with the gloating over the details, absolutely chilling.
If you don't give your enemies due process of law, yes, cruel and unusual punishment and Abu Ghraib is what you get. Don't wish for it.
OK, even with my first example shot down so neatly, and I don't suppose V*nn* B*nt* counts either, I still contend that, as with most things, there are women who do it too.
I've met women who do it too. I suppose Teresa was fortunate enough to miss the eruption of "Violet aka Jessica" on rasseff.
Randolph -- sorry not to reply sooner, I was busy. I said on rasseff that the US had stopped reminding me of the Late Republic and started to remind me of the Early Principate.
Good people of the USA, volunteer to scrutinize and count the votes in November. Half a loaf is much better than no bread. Perfection isn't within mortal abilities, imperfection is still much better than outright evil.
Dave -- I'd have suspected that being ignorant of the mechanics of torture was a good and positive thing.
Michelle -- you're right that people don't go around rubbing their hands and cackling "Bwa ha ha, how much evil can I do between lunch and tea today?"
Instead there are quite ordinary people who are worried about their children's marks and their spouses' aches who sit down to earn the wages that keep their home together and who do come back from lunch and sit down to do things that are *objectively* evil, and which they know are evil but which they tell themselves are what everyone does to get along, or that it doesn't matter, or that the people involved are not real people, or any of a million petty and justifying lies.
The fact that people can live with themselves and justify what they are doing does not make them less evil in an objective sense, looking at them from outside, from our point of view, even if we can understand them and see all the steps that led them one by one to doing what they are doing.
Toleration is a wonderful thing, but you can't tolerate evil because you can very easily go down that path and become evil too, and also pragmatically because it isn't going to give equal time to tolerate your beliefs.
The worst of it was that she'd quarrelled with them
And now they were dead, all dead, her parents too,
Nobody left but her awful aunt and uncle,
Whose faces collapsed like their future.
Still she stood at the graveside, calm, composed,
Pale-faced, with folded hands, her shoulders back,
She'd been a queen once-in-a-dream,
She was left alone but she knew how to behave.
If only they'd not quarrelled in these last few years..
They'd called her shallow and she'd called them babes,
They had not wanted to grow up, they never would.
She, more than ever, knew she had no choice.
The service droned, but something -- she looked up
Saw cassock, surplice, and a lion's eyes.
Apparently some kid wrote to Lewis suggesting that you could read them in the chronological order, and Lewis replied saying yes, you know, you certainly could. This has been taken as evidence that it is his intention one should.
When I was oh, six, I figured this out myself, read them once that way, shrugged, and went back to reading them in the proper order.
It's one of those things like whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son together, you can argue about it until your city falls down, but it makes more sense to let people think as they like about such things.
As for _Little Women_, it's taken me literally decades but I have come to terms with Jo and Laurie not marrying, though not with Laurie marrying that idiotic simpering spiteful Amy with her frills and furbelows and her totally undeserved trip to Europe.
When I was a child I took not only Alcott but such other books of that period as _Elsie Dinsmore_, _Pollyanna_, _Tom Sawyer_ and _What Katy Did_ to be portraying the life of contemporary, or near contemporary, America, a strange country full of opportunity and freedom and an openness about things. One of my earliest compositions was a letter that began "Dear Jo March, Europe is not as exciting as you may think."
I'd have thought making votes count by getting votes counted was a pretty good plan at this point.
After the 2000 election people were saying things about reforming the methods of vote counting in various states. The only think I've heard about it since is the Diebold fiasco. I wonder if ballot design and vote counting for November is something individual Americans of goodwill could do something to improve at this point.
This is a revelation. I always assumed people writing in coffee shops were doing it because they were caught short. I mean they were out, and they had to write something down, and they saw the welcoming light.
I've written lots of poems and bits of dialogue and cryptic notes like "Dog!!! On boat, later!" in cafes, and on park benches, and sitting on walls, and in children's play areas, and launderettes, and public conveniences and... not usually very much, just enough to keep me going until I got home.
The ones with laptops, I thought were just strong and organized, or maybe electronic nomads like Cory Doctorow and Jonathan Evans.
I had no idea people did that on purpose.
Oh, and if anyone is caught short and writing out somewhere and someone interrupts the way Ayse describes, they almost always ask what one is writing about. I've found that the answer "Cows!" works very well to get them to go away, and it was even true the first time.
I've expanded my thought, above, on my journal:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/papersky/150657.html
Nick Mamatas has a very funny piece about it on livejournal
http://www.livejournal.com/users/nihilistic_kid/405207.html
I'm in awe at that woman. Not just the money -- imagine never having done any job harder than writing.
Credo is a brilliant game, but it helps to play with someone who has played it before, because the rules don't explain how it works very well.
Actually, I can summarize what the rules leave out.
The game proceeds with people picking up cards in turn, and every so often this is punctuated with a church council when everyone goes mad and starts yelling and playing cards at each other and persecuting and making deals. It's a bit like Illuminati. No, strike that, it isn't.
We play it every Christmas, and I could bring it to a con if people wanted to play.
(Only US con currently planned for this year: Minicon.)
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