The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Emmet:

Motivation - Who Needs It ?

Some protagonists set out to have plot. Others achieve plot. And others again have plot thrust upon them. Are the last category unfairly discriminated against ?

Holden Caulfield
Jeff "the Dude" Lebowski (moderator)
Elric of Melnibone
Louis de Pointe du Lac
Hamlet (co-opted from the audience part-way through)

It seems to me that programming should have shown more awareness of the difficulties inherent in the very concept of this panel.

Lebowski opened by asking the panelists to introduce themselves, and it went wrong almost straight away. Caulfield and Elric got into an exercise in competitive whining from the get-go, with Caulfield seeming to scale his own issues with obscene graffiti and Olivier's Hamlet as on a par with Elric's experiences of slaughtering everyone he ever cared about with his demonic sword; this also prompted a furious interjection from Hamlet, in the audience, in support of Olivier.

Louis de Pointe du Lac made a valiant attempt to calm things down by talking about the beauty of the night, and how this served (in an argument I confess to not entirely following) to illustrate the pointlessness of existence as a positive thing. This then led to some debate as to whether being ineffective due to being caught between conflicting motives should be considered equivalent to not being motivated to do anything in the first place, again prompting some interjections from Hamlet (including a very nice snarky sideswipe at Jasper Fforde), after which he was invited to join the panel, and did so.

The panel then moved on to to the question of whether having no motivation only [i]some[/i] of the time counted. Caulfield seemed not to understand the concept; Elric spoke forcefully on the power of a lifelong doomed love to provide some variation in the tone of one's ennui, following which there was a scuffle at the back of the room which I later heard involved Edward Cullen. Elric also spoke about how lack of motivation could come about from being surrounded by beings of lesser races, and having no true peers, which prompted a strong expression of support from Edward Weyland in the audience; Lebowski's somewhat unnerved observation that "there sure are a lot of vampires here" was answered by a cryptic interjection from Jukka Sarasti which appeared to suggest that this had to do with the nature of consciousness itself, but which nobody entirely understood.

Hamlet proceeded to wax rhapsodical, and got into a heated debate with de Pointe du Lac which lasted a good ten minutes before they realised that they were in fact in violent agreement. After that the panel languished ito more of Caulfield's whining, until interrupted by an unexpected prank; the arrival of a glowing grey ring, claiming that the panelists had all shown the capacity for great apathy and had hence been selected as candidates for Grey Lantern for Sector 2814. None of them could be bothered to respond, excelpt Elric, whose attempts to secure the ring, it claimed, disqualified him from further consideration; Elric became somewhat upset at this, and after refusing to heed repeated warnings from Skaffen-Amtiskaw (security staff for this panel) was displaced to the surface of a near-Earth asteroid until such time as his tantrum should subside, and the panel broke up in disarray.

According to the newsletter, the Guardians of the Universe have stated categorically that, despite the recent confusion related to the War of Light, they have no cognisance of a "Grey Lantern Corps" and believe no such thing exists, and are inclined to place the blame on that cabal of Culture Minds that recently discovered 4chan.

I would like to strongly recommend that future panels on this topic be given stronger moderation, Lebowski's attitude being far too laissez-faire for these panelists, and would suggest selecting a moderator from among the ranks of nigh-omnipotent aliens or mythical beings whose familiarity with the topic of the panel derives from having already done everything and being bored now.

You don't need a Queen.

The Republic of Ireland has an elected parliament on something like the Westminster model with an elected President with seven-year terms in lieu of a monarch. In 1982 there was a hung Dail (parliament split exactly such that nobody had a majority) in which the then-President had to choose between calling another election or saying "look, form a government anyway", a situation very similar to the current one in Canada. The then-President chose the latter course, and the subsequent government wooed one Tony Gregory, an independent from a very poor part of Dublin, who wagged the dog for his constituents' benefit thereafter.

(The longer lasting impact of this on Irish politics is that the then-deputy-Prime-Minister, Brian Lenihan Sr., ran for President in 1989, was accused of having tried to influence the President to call another election in 1982 in the hopes of getting an overall majority, and denied this vigorously. And just after the nominations for President closed, a political science grad student produced tapes of interviews with Lenihan from his thesis in which Lenihan admitted making said calls; so he basically got fired as deputy PM and Minister for Justice by a party which had no choice but to try to support him for President anyway. Hence Ireland electing Mary Robinson as President instead, a truly great day for a recovering theocracy.)

OH NOES !! I IS SUDDENLY TRANSFORMD INTO MONSTRUS INSECT !!

[ "Hey, guys, you won't believe the size of the bug I just squished in Gregor's room." ]

OH NOES !! I IS SUDDENLY TRANSFORMD INTO MONSTRUS INSECT !!

[ "Hey, guys, you won't believe the size of the bug I just squished in Gregor's room." ]

Fade@5: I am coming round to the viewpoint that for 2001 to work, the absolute minimum screen size required is "taller than the viewer", and the optimum is around three times that.

I am of the opinion that Eternal Sunshine is science fiction, and one of the best acted pieces of cinematic science fiction ever made; it was quite interesting, watching the making-of conversation with Jim Carrey and the director on the DVD extras a few weeks back, just how much of the effort that went into making that film work from everyone else involved seemed to have been Jim-Carrey-wrangling to get a non-over-the-top performance from him without being too obvious about it.

Xopher@154: I had, IIRC, three different explanations at the end of Matrix Reloaded which would have made more sense than the third film did.

In re The Island: has there ever been a genre work in which people lived in a restricted, futuristic or post-disaster, environment enlivened by the promise that selected individuals would be shipped out to a utopian paradise, in which the twist was that they actually were being shipped out to a utopian paradise ?

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