The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Mr. Chris:

Thanks for the photos. I started to tear up just looking at the monument.

What really struck me, reading about this, was the heroism of the victims, how they all acted to protect the people around them. Whether they acted in the line of duty, like Scott Phillips, Leslie Lord, and the numerous law enforcement and medical personnel who responded to the incident, or whether they were ordinary citizens reacting to the sudden violence around them, like Vickie Bunnell, Dennis Joos, or the unnamed IGA employees trying to protect their customers, it sounds like they all contributed what they could to protect their community from a maniac who was hell-bent on destroying it.

Part of the reason I found the Ballad of Carl Drega to be both infuriating and deeply creepy was its tone-deaf refusal to acknowledge the heroism of the people who were caught up in the incident. Then I remembered how many internet arguments I've seen featuring rugged individualists who refuse to acknowledge the existence of communities, and I felt like I understood where Vin was coming from. If you're the kind of person who's so deeply alienated from the rest of humanity that you can't recognize the reality of human communities (and I get the impression that Vin is one of them), maybe you can't acknowledge the heroism of the victims because you can't even understand why they acted the way they did.

However heroic standing up for your own rights might be (and I hasten to emphasize that there's no evidence Drega was doing any such thing), I can't help but think it pales in comparison to the heroism of putting your own life in jeopardy to help save your friends, neighbors, coworkers, or whoever else happens to be nearby when disaster strikes. I find it sad that there are people who can laud the former sort of heroism while being unable to even recognize the latter; I find it terrifying when, like Vin, they feel the need to ascribe such heroism to someone as monstrous as Drega.

That's terrible. I can't even wrap my head around what it would mean for 90 thousand people to be killed like that, or what the effects would be. I can, however, start to imagine what it would be like if half the police officers in my hometown were killed, along with (for example) one out of ten judges and journalists. Then it's no longer an arbitrary number of people, but real individuals I can recognize and name, and maybe I can start to get an inkling of what's it like for a community to go through that.

Like Nicole, I'm surprised I didn't hear about this at the time. Now, eleven years later, all I can do is give my sympathy to Jim, Debra, and everyone else who was affected by this tragedy.

Inevitable correction:

While Randy Weaver's wife and son were killed at Ruby Ridge, Randy Weaver was not. My apologies for the error.

I had the same results when I Googled for "Carl Drega"; even creepier, there was a link to the Amazon page for Suprynowicz's book (and let me tell you, "jerk" is about the nicest name you can call him) with about 15 reviews, all of them giving it five stars. Horrifying.

Interestingly enough, I find that you can weed out most of laudatory crap from your Google search by using the terms "Carl Drega" and "murder". There's still one pro-Drega site that refers to the "murders" of David Koresh and Randy Weaver, which is something of a trigger for me. I actually went to high school with members of the Michigan Militia in the 90's, and they all talked like the dopes who have the pro-Drega websites. There's something uniquely unpleasant about living in close proximity to people who are just waiting for a reason to take up arms against you, and sometimes I wonder if I've ever really gotten over that.

Then I see people supporting what this psychopath did, and I realize that no, I'm really not over it.

Eleanor @ 766 is correct, of course.

In light of the hints Paul A. dropped at 767, I'm going to take a stab at #755a and say that it's Nezbe, by Wbua Fgrnxyl.

I can't help but notice how many books I've enjoyed sound absoluely awful if you strip every element of theme and characterization (other than descriptions of the mains character's AWESOME POWERS) away from them, and describe them solely based on the plot. It's almost as though this game contains some sort of hidden lesson for novice writers, but I can't imagine what it might be.

My entry at #689 is not based on anything by Michael Moorcock, although in retrospect I can see the resemblence, and it frightens me. Of course, on rereading it, I can see that I got the most vital plot point wrong. I could claim that this was to make it less identifiable, but the sad truth is that I was so entranced by the idea of transforming an SF classic into OMGKEWL fanfic by a slightly disturbed teenager that I just failed to catch my oversight before I posted.

Also, fair warning, I may have gotten some details wrong, since all my books are halfway around the world at the moment. In any case, I shall provide some additional hints, while attempting to maintain the authorial voice:


OK, I've made some revisions to the plot since the last time I posted. First, one of my beta readers told me I needed to have more "cute stuff that makes you go awww" so I added a sequence where the hero sort of adopts a kid. I don't really know where to go with that whole subplot, but I'll figure something out. More importantly, it turns out a lot of my readers said the whole "saving the universe" thing is WAY overdone, so instead of saving the universe, I'm going to have the hero become King of the World at the end, which is a little more believable.

I didn't seem right to just end the story there, though, so I've started working on a epilogue. What's going to happen is the hero is going to save the world (or maybe the whole solar system) by traveling to ANOTHER UNIVERSE! Only all the people in the other universe are, like, angels! ALIEN angels! Man, that'll mess with people's heads! And maybe the hero will have sex with one of the alien angels, because he's just that irresistable. And since the other universe is, like, heaven, that means that I can have a big scene where all the characters from earlier in the story make a cameo appearance! Awesome!

Progress: 54% completed

I haven't seen this one posted yet, which struck me a curious given the comments upthread, although I may have missed it while skimming past some of the ROT-13. Anyway, I thought this one just cried out for some fanfic-style self-promotion. It's a bit long, for which I apologize. Fair warning; I've tried to make the summary misleadingly dorky, but SPOILERS AHOY:


Okay, I'm posting my NaNoWriMo project to Livejournal, and words alone cannot describe how awesome it is. The hero is an incredible badass with unusual mental abilities who was raised by a secret society which taught him the ways of pain and death from an early age. As if this didn't make him cool enough, he wears black all the time, and wields a totally awesome sword. He's a prodigy who commands the respect of some of his teachers and the jealousy of others, but his life is turned upside down after embarking on a doomed love affair and having some problems with drugs and a really extreme case of the munchies.

Evicted from the shelter of the community where he grew up, he explores a strangely-familiar world where technology and magic intermingle, traveling through time as well as space (it turns out everything happens in OUR WORLD, just in the distant past or the far future)! He meets various beautiful women, some of whom he sleeps with, one of whom may be his mother. I'm not like some sort of pervert or something, though. I only put the bit about his mother in there because we just just read Oedipus in AP English (shoutouts to my peeps in Mrs. Smith's class! Juniors rule, seniors drool!). If you don't know what I'm talking about, you should totally read Oedipus because it's all classic and stuff.

Anyway, enough of those old Greek guys. Back to MY story! As the novel progresses, the hero does all kinds of cool stuff. He explores caves and ruined cities, fighting CHUDs, a Doppelganger, an Ettin King, a Giant (Aquatic), and some other monsters from an unlicensed D20 supplement I found online. He befriends an elderly librarian, engages in a duel, becomes a professional actor (and eventually beats up his jerk of a director!), fights in a war, meets wise aliens who help him discover his destiny, and eventually he SAVES THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE! He also dies a few times, but he's so tough he always comes back, just like Chuck Norris!

I just finished the first draft, and now I'm looking for some Beta readers to give me feedback; I'm especially curious to know what everyone thinks about the brain-eating scenes! If you want to read it, let me know so I can friend you and give you access! Kthxbai!

In response to Bruce Cohen @ 128:

Your objection to the "philosophical zombie" thought experiment reminds me of hearing some of my classmates, many year ago, complain about how terrible it would be to live in the society described by Borges in "The Lottery of Babylon." My classmates were horrified by the idea that the a random lottery conducted by a secretive, unknowable organization could direct the course of the lives; the narrator of the story is horrified by the idea such a lottery doesn't exist.

It occurred to me that the reality described by the narrator was indistinguishable from the one my classmates and I inhabited, the only difference being the existence of undetectable human agents orchestrating those events which we can observe. I expressed the opinion that any comments about how awful it would be to live in the world described in the story were premature until it could be established that we weren't living there ourselves.

This is essentially how I feel about the "zombie" thought experiment. My response to being told "imagine a world just like ours, except that no one has consciousness," is "how do I know the people in our world don't already lack consciousness?" Why imagine how such a world would be different if I can't know it actually is different? For all I know, a world without consciousness could be the same as a world without unicorns: we might already live there.

I also have a problem with the Mary's Room thought experiment, in that it combines the impossible (someone with complete knowledge of the physical facts of people's experience of color) with the mundane (leaving a black and white room and seeing the color red). It's possible that the ease with which most people can imagine the mundane experience of leaving the room makes them more likely to assume that Mary obviously learns something new upon leaving the room.

I think that this represents a critical failure of the imagination, however. Most people do have the experience of the color red, so it's easy to assume that that experience can't be replicated by merely knowing all the physical facts about how people perceive color. What happens, though, if Mary isn't studying how people ordinarily perceive color? What if she's studying the experiences of someone who is completely colorblind but, for whatever reason, experiences a particular taste sensation when observing the wavelength that we perceive as "red?"

If Mary can somehow rewire her own brain to replicate that sensory experience, can we say that upon looking at a red object and "tasting" it for the first time, she has really learned something about how this one other person experiences the color red, something she couldn't have learned from studying how the other person's perceptions of color stimulate the parts of the brain responsible for creating the sensation of taste? How can we even be certain she really is having the same experience? If abnormal perceptions can have purely physical causes, why can't normal perceptions also have purely physical causes?

I'm not quite sure how to express the point I'm trying to get at, but it seems to me that the pro-qualia elements of the thought experiment are based on the fact that most people CAN perceive redness on a visual level, so it's relatively easy for people to come to the (in my opinion probably fallacious) conclusion that sure, there's something about one's perception of the color red that goes beyond mere physical information.

I guess this is just a very long-winded way of saying that I think I agree with Niall McAuley @ 95 that "our mind is a relatively simple summary abstracted from all that activity." Considering the sheer complexity of the human nervous system, I don't really see any reason to assume the existence of perceptual experiences independent of physical information. To say that such experiences must exist (or even are likely to exist) would require a much more intimate knowledge of the human nervous system than we presently have.

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