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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
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Complex Numbers A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number. The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi. Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary. Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty. ![Merit Badge in Quill Award
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Not much to say today, but I did want to share this link (sent to me by Elisa: Middle Aged Stik  , who loves brutalist architecture) because, being trained in civil engineering, I do occasionally have Opinions about architecture.Save Our Brutalism  Five decades since the craze for Brutalism, most of the discussion about these buildings is about tearing them down. But the radical social vision that drove their rise has largely been forgotten. In 1966 Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, a pioneer of postwar avant-garde architecture, built a figurative middle finger in Sao Paulo’s villa district. His creation: two identical geometric houses made of exposed concrete, showing complete disregard for the stylistic norms of his more establishment neighbors. 1) You gotta love architectural terms, even if you don't like the result. "Postwar avant-garde." 2) Some people don't like bare concrete. Me, I'm all about concrete. (It's not "cement." Quit calling it that. It's quite possibly the worst example of synecdoche in existence.) Today, alas, there is more talk about tearing down buildings in this style than building new ones. But this also reflects a change in the idea of what architecture is for. Far from today’s neoliberal orthodoxy, many Brutalist buildings expressed a progressive or even utopian vision of communal living and public ownership. Aesthetics aside, I'd think the people into "communal living" are all named Safflower or Prunejuice, and they live in a place without concrete and eat exclusively vegan food that they grow themselves. So they wouldn't be into the whole "box of rock" look. Today, the battle to protect them is also a fight to defend this social inheritance. Thing is, architecture, like any art, shouldn't need too much explanation. I'd never have guessed that it was all about "communal living and public ownership" if this article right here hadn't told me. I thought it was pretty much the opposite: a way to dominate the landscape and to spite NIMBYs who insist on having a say in what their neighbors look like. The name refers not to the adjective brutal, but the French brut, meaning raw. I'm just including this bit here in case you can't be arsed to read the article (which is fine, but I think it's important to know where words come from). The root of the term was borrowed from art (Art brut) and from Le Corbusier’s term béton brut (bare concrete). The origin story tells us that during the construction of his Unité d’Habitation social housing complex in Marseilles (1947–52), Le Corbusier was faced with so many overburdened construction companies that out of necessity he decided to leave the huge concrete pillars roughly exposed in bare concrete. He called this method béton brut, and it would be a decisive breakthrough for the formal language of architecture into the 1960s and 1970s. From Corbusier, Banham, and the Smithsons, there thus emerged the building blocks of a Brutalist theory and aesthetics. One generally associates the French with elegance and subtlety in all types of art, including architecture. Picture la tour Eiffel or Notre-Dame de Paris. Again, I'd never have guessed this polar opposite of elegance and subtlety was a French thing unless it was shoved in my face. For instance, the telecommunications center in Skopje, Macedonia, looks like an archaic vision of a space station; it openly puts on display its service core, staircases, and concrete support structures. The building’s materials and inner workings were not only exposed, but exaggerated and celebrated. As an engineer, I tend to value function above form. Not that I don't appreciate a nice form, mind you, but I want to know what something actually is. This, therefore, appeals to me. The article continues with more history of Brutalism; as I noted above, I don't have much else to say about it, but it's a fascinating read if you're into this sort of thing. There were also failures that were rightly criticized: overly sophisticated floor plans that tested one’s sense of direction; absurdly segmented flat roof systems susceptible to leakage; inadequate steel reinforcement that caused difficult-to-repair damage to the concrete... There's an old joke. Well, not really a joke, but a one-liner: Architecture students have to give up many things that other college students take for granted, like weekends, parties, and structural engineering. The architecture of our parents’ age is slowly becoming the architecture of a generation of grandparents. But with distance comes the possibility of a new, less biased view. In many places, historical preservation has also begun to concern buildings dating to the 1970s. This work is being encouraged and supported by an ever-increasing number of initiatives. It's been a while, but I've mentioned the life cycle of things in here before. 1) It's new and people ooh and ahh over it; 2) It becomes ordinary; 3) People start to hate it because they want something new, so a lot of it gets discarded; 4) Someone starts liking it again, it's rare now, and there's a mad scramble to preserve whatever's left. This applies not just to buildings, but to pretty much anything. Apparently, Brutalism followed that life cycle. In the heyday of Brutalism, the architecture of previous generations was widely demolished without much thought. In many German cities, the turn of the century architecture was stripped of its decor or outright demolished at a shocking rate. This inevitably raises the question of whether in fifty years’ time our children and grandchildren will shake their heads and wonder how we could possibly have made the decisions being made right now. I've mentioned something like this before too. Laugh all you want at the fashion choices of the 1970s; just know that in the 2070s they'll be laughing at our fashion choices just as heartily. That is, if anyone's still around to laugh. As I've already said more than I intended, I'll leave it at that. The article's there if you're interested. |
| In another case of random number generator coincidence, this Summer Solstice article is about climate change. Yeah, I'm going there. 1) Because we're doomed. 2) Not me. I'm done. Naturally, I'll be expanding on these points herein. Climate "doomers" believe the world has already lost the battle against global warming. That's wrong - and while that view is spreading online, there are others who are fighting the viral tide. Count me among the former number. The time to do something about it was 40 years ago, kind of like if you're going to deflect an asteroid that's heading for Earth, you gotta catch it early on because it then takes less energy to alter its orbit to miss. As for the fighters, good luck. Truly. I wish you the best. Charles is 27 and lives in California. His quirky TikTok videos about news, history, and politics have earned him more than 150,000 followers. You know what's almost as bad as climate change? DikDok. Neither shows any sign of going away anytime soon, however. In the video in question, recorded in October 2021, he decided it was time for a confession. "I am a climate doomer," he said. "Since about 2019, I have believed that there's little to nothing that we can do to actually reverse climate change on a global scale." Well, at least someone on DikDok has some sense. Or "had," given the way the linked article ends. Climate doomism is the idea that we are past the point of being able to do anything at all about global warming - and that mankind is highly likely to become extinct. Oh, we should be so lucky as to become extinct. No, that's not going to happen. What's going to happen is that War, Pestilence, Famine, Death, and Inconvenience (the fifth horseman that the others don't talk about) will reduce the human population of earth drastically. And then maybe the Earth will begin to recover. The survivors won't have it easy, either. It's pretty easy to glibly say "back to the Stone Age," but the Stone Age was dependent upon readily available resources such as flint, which is no longer readily available because we used all the easy-to-find stuff. Sure, there will be remnants of metals and whatnot from our lost civilization, but how are you going to use them with pre-Stone Age technology? That's wrong, scientists say, but the argument is picking up steam online. It's one thing to say "scientists say." Perhaps they're even right. I'm inclined to believe they're right if there's anything approaching a consensus on the subject. But I take this to mean that there are things we can do to stop and maybe even reverse climate change. Sure. We could. We won't. Because it's not a science issue. If it were a science issue, shit would have been done 40 years ago, like I said. No, it's a political issue, and that's not in science's wheelhouse. Alaina makes a habit of challenging climate doomism - a mission she has embraced with a sense of urgency. "People are giving up on activism because they're like, 'I can't handle it any more... This is too much...' and 'If it really is too late, why am I even trying?'" she says. "Doomism ultimately leads to climate inaction, which is the opposite of what we want." Okay, let me make an analogy here: You're looking for a job. You want a job. You need a job. You have to get a job or you're out on the street. So you go to interview after interview, and never hear back from any of them. There is absolutely no guarantee that someone will hire you. That's the opposite of what you want, but it's reality. So what this woman is proposing is unwarranted optimism: If you keep trying, you might eventually find a job. Or you might die starving on the street. If you give up, you'll die starving on the street. People have been trained to be cluelessly optimistic, and I'll admit that sometimes it even works out. But it's not realistic. Climate scientist Dr Friederike Otto, who has been working with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says: "I don't think it's helpful to pretend that climate change will lead to humanity's extinction." Again, I don't think it'll lead to humanity's extinction. There's an awful lot of us, all over the globe, and some of us are quite clever and good at surviving (not me, though -- civilization collapses and I'm dead within a week). In its most recent report, the IPCC laid out a detailed plan that it believes could help the world avoid the worst impacts of rising temperatures. It involves "rapid, deep and immediate" cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases - which trap the sun's heat and make the planet hotter. And that's why it ain't gonna happen. If the last two and a half years of global pandemic didn't teach you that, no matter what, some people will never do the right thing, then nothing will. Here's the deal: Country A proposes "'rapid, deep and immediate' cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases." Somehow, against all odds, they manage to push it through. Perhaps it's an enlightened dictatorship; I don't know, whatever. Country B, on the other hand, keeps going the way they've been. As a slowdown in production reduces Country A's GDP, Country B gains the upper hand and, eventually, invades Country A and starts doing things their way, the financially efficient way, the old way. After watching what's been happening since late February, don't tell me that's not going to happen. But even that's not realistic, because here in reality, Country A won't do squattly-dick. Oh, maybe they'll ban plastic straws or promote direct solar power (all of our power right now, except maybe nuclear, is solar power, directly or indirectly, and I'd argue that even nuclear is a kind of solar power because fissionable elements can only be formed in stars -- but I digress). None of that will make a dent. "There is no denying that there are large changes across the globe, and that some of them are irreversible," says Dr Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. "It doesn't mean the world is going to end - but we have to adapt, and we have to stop emitting." The world will go on. Minus several species. Last year, the Pew Research Center in the US ran a poll covering 17 countries, focusing on attitudes towards climate change. An overwhelming majority of the respondents said they were willing to change the way they lived to tackle the problem. Which, again, won't do squat, and will pay dividends to anyone unwilling to change the way they live. Because that country scenario I mentioned above? It scales down to the individual level. If I'm living like a hippie, I'll be overrun by mobs of gas-guzzling tank drivers. "The most apocalyptic language that I would find was actually coming from former climate scientists," Charles says. Just guessing here, but I'd say they know what they're talking about, but no longer have a vested interest in seeing any proposed solutions come to fruition. You spend your life chasing a rainbow, and instead of a pot of gold you get a bucket of coal. Which you can't even use because it'll release more carbon into the atmosphere. That's gotta wear a person down. TikTok's rules forbid misinformation that causes harm. We sent the company some videos that Alaina has debunked in the past. None was found to have violated the rules. TikTok says it works with accredited fact-checkers to "limit the spread of false or misleading climate information". As defined by the CCP, and we all know that "misinformation" to them is "something other than the official Party line." Although it can take many forms (and is thus difficult to accurately measure), Alaina says doomism is particularly popular among young people. Good to know I'm young at heart. Now, don't get me wrong -- as with the job hunt analogy above, the only way to have any chance of winning is to keep trying. One day, maybe, low probability but maybe, Sisyphus will be able to roll that boulder all the way up the hill. That, I think, is why people push the "yes, there is something we can do" line. And I'm not disputing that there's something we can do. Just that there's anything meaningful that we will do. Not when there's still a significant number of people who aren't willing to make any sort of sacrifice for the common good. Don't believe me? Look around. Also -- and this is the important point -- it's not on us. It's on large corporations who are the ones spewing out the greenhouse gases. The same corporations who have been publicly denying climate change for over 40 years. I've said this before, I know, and now I'm saying it again. Even if you do something on an individual level -- and I'm not saying that you shouldn't -- it's taking a cup of water out of the ocean while other people are standing around pissing into the same ocean. Sure, it makes a difference. Marginally. But not enough of us can be arsed to do it, and the pissers outnumber the rest of us. Fortunately, there is one thing that's almost guaranteed to happen, and that will certainly drop global temperatures to something approaching pre-industrial levels: large-scale war leading to nuclear winter. Sleep tight. |
| Another entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] You know, the whole thing about tropes is that while they can be clichés, they aren't usually; they're just storytelling elements. What makes a cliché is something that's overused to the point of losing its impact, which is a very subjective thing. So the whole "person comes home and discovers their antagonist sitting in an armchair brandishing a pistol" thing can still work, even though it gets used a lot, especially if you do something new with it. The Blacklist, for example, does this to great effect -- with the twist that it's almost always the antihero protagonist of the series doing the lurking. What doesn't work, what has never worked (in my not-so-humble opinion), one version of this trope that doesn't get mentioned on the page, is the jump scare when someone gets in their car and the bad guy suddenly appears from the back seat. While I don't currently own a car (long story, and I've already covered it here), I guarantee you that if I did and if someone were lurking in the back seat, I'd notice them before I even got into the car. Even assuming I've decluttered it recently (not a safe assumption, by the way), it's literally impossible for me to miss the bulky shape of a human as I'm walking up to the thing, keys in hand. It doesn't matter how dark it is; it's never so dark that you can't at least see the silhouette of a fellow homo sapiens in the back seat. If it ever is that dark, you wouldn't be able to see the goddamned car to open the door. And even if they're lying in the floor well, you'd still see something's off, especially as once you open the door, the frickin light comes on. If you can't see your enemy sitting in the goddamned back seat, you shouldn't be driving anyway, because your vision sucks. I can excuse this version of the trope if the vehicle involved is a van or RV, or something else large and with lots of room to hide. Or if the person lurking has some sort of invisibility or shapechanging superpower, in which case, come on, there are other ways for them to jump out at you. Otherwise, you just can't hide a human in the back seat of a car, Border Patrol insistence notwithstanding. Maybe I've just been conditioned from years of watching movies and shows with the back-seat-hiding jump scare person, so it's become second nature to me to glance into the back seat to ensure no one's lurking there. But every time I see it on a show, whether it's set at night or in the brightest sunshine, it breaks any suspension of disbelief I might have had. So if you're going to do that, make me believe it. Maybe it's a little person. Maybe they were hiding in the trunk and came in through the rear seats while your attention was on the road. Maybe they do have one of those superpowers. And if you're doing the standard version where someone comes home to find the bad guy sitting in their favorite armchair in the dark, at least don't telegraph it with scary music. |
| Lasers: not just fun cat toys. Who knew? Choo Choo, Pew Pew: How a New York Railroad Uses Scorching Lasers to Stay on Schedule Laser trains may sound like an invention of the 2030s, but they’re already a real tool for the Long Island Rail Road. First of all, whoever wrote that headline needs to be sent to Gitmo. What are you, six years old? Second, Long Island Rail Road? On schedule??!  Okay, with that out of the way, the fun sciency civil engineeringy part. New York's Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) has struggled for years with decaying leaves on the line during what its president Phillip Eng calls "low-adhesion season." Which I gather is what normal people call "winter." Trains can struggle to accelerate or stop on the rails' slick surfaces, sometimes locking their brakes and squaring off their wheels, which forces them to be removed from service for repairs. You'd think that wheels made of hardened steel would be pretty resistant to wear. You'd be wrong. As the busiest commuter railway in the United States, the LIRR can't afford delays or service interruptions... Again: ...and has adopted a novel solution to its traction problems: Burn the rails clean with powerful lasers. SCIENCE! LIRR president Phillip Eng reported that train cancellations through November have fallen 48 percent year-over-year versus 2018, and that frequency of lighter, but less capacious, ridership-reducing "short trains" is down 32 percent. Delays are down too: 90.7 percent of trains were on time in November, an improvement of 3.8 percent over last year, and delays of 15 minutes or more are down 30 percent. Well, okay. Maybe because of LASERS their schedule isn't as crappy as it used to be. After all, the whole point is to improve. And to burn shit with lasers. Still, saying something is "down 30 percent" is kind of weaselly. If all your trains were delayed 15+ minutes, being down 30% means "only" 70% of your trains are delayed. Towards the other extreme, if only 10 percent were delayed, now 7 percent are -- not an amount any individual rider would ever notice. "No railroad wanted to try it because... It's not service-proven. Somebody's got to be the first to do it," remarked Eng, who is so pleased with the laser train's effectiveness that the LIRR is reportedly working on leasing the technology for future use, as well as outfitting a second train with the same system. That's always been kind of a problem in civil engineering (of which transportation is a subset): there's a lot of resistance to change, so innovation is a slow process, unlike in, say, mechanical or nuclear engineering. Not just from the engineers (not to be confused with railroad engineers), but from regulatory entities and the general public. Take, for example, roundabouts -- which are kind of the polar opposite of laser-shootin' trains because they're actually lower-tech than what they replace. Roundabouts are objectively better than stoplights in almost every way, and they're even an improvement over stop signs. When I was actively designing intersections and shit, a minimal traffic light installation cost about 100 grand, on top of the actual road construction if applicable. Likely it's double that now, and even more if at least one of the roads is more than 2 lanes. Traffic lights can be designed for efficiency, and the switch to LED lamps certainly made a big difference in maintenance costs, but there are still maintenance costs as well as energy required to run the things. Then you have the road sensors in most cases, also requiring maintenance. On top of that, at a stoplight, at least one direction (usually two) is always stopped, creating fuel-wasting idle time and driver frustration. And don't get me started on what happens when there's two lanes of traffic backed up for a quarter mile at a stoplight and suddenly a wild firetruck appears behind them, sirens blaring. People try to get out of the way, but it's chaos. Compare that to a well-designed roundabout, where traffic rarely stops, and when it does, it's not for some arbitrary length of time. The installation cost is lower than that of a stoplight (depending on how big a statue of some dead white guy on a horse you want to put in the roundabout -- I had to design one in engineering school and I actually labeled it as such). It takes basically no energy to keep running, and as for maintenance, well, you have to maintain the intersection anyway, occasionally repaving it and whatnot. There's more signage, sure, and they tend to take up more real estate, but in general I think they have a cheaper lifetime cost. But there's serious resistance to roundabouts (also known as traffic circles) in the US, partly because some of the older existing ones, like in DC, suck; and partly because people are just not used to it so they freak the fuck out. So, anyway. The points are: 1) don't be afraid to innovate and 2) lasers are cool. Just don't tell me about the swarms of cats chasing the train. I don't want to know. |
| Today's article, from Cracked, may seem at first to be a niche gamer thing, but there's more nuance there than we usually get from the internet's foremost dick joke site. So it might be of interest to even non-gamers (are there any of those anymore?) Before I get into the article, a bit of history about Baldur's Gate. If you're not familiar with D&D, the eponymous Baldur isn't the Norse god (whose name is more properly spelled Baldr) but a character in a particular D&D setting. Baldur's Gate, in-game, is the name of a large city, named for said character, where surprisingly little of the actual story takes place. The original BG came out in, I think, 1999? I can't be arsed to look all this shit up. Over 20 years ago. It was based on the mechanics of D&D's 2nd Edition, which had its faults, but with which I was intimately familiar, having DMed in that ruleset for a decade. The interface is a top-down map view (actually isometric, but whatever), not the modern first-person perspective, and even back then it was starting to look a bit dated. Didn't matter. Because the game was awesome. As usual for single-player role-playing games (there were options for playing in a group, as appropriate for a D&D game), you'd create a character and set them loose in the created world. There, you fight battles and meet NPCs to help you fight the battles. Pretty early on, you meet the greatest game companion character of all time: Minsc the Ranger (and his miniature giant space hamster, Boo). Yes, even better than the girl from Bioshock Infinite. Or Atreius from God of War. Better by far than the famous Lydia from Skyrim (though there's another possible companion in that game that comes pretty close). And the plot was, apart from some weirdness toward the end, a masterpiece of adventure storytelling. Look, as a writer, that's what I care about, more than game mechanics or graphics. Couple years later, BG2 came out (there were also some expansions for both), and in terms of gameplay it was better, though the storyline was somewhat less strong. In BG2, you had the option of importing your character from BG1, or creating a new one. There's a bunch I'm skipping over here, but it's a game series I kept going back to between bouts of more modern style games like Skyrim or Fallout. Many, many years later, after the original game publisher had long since gone the way of D&D 2nd Edition itself, an independent studio combined the two games and their expansions, and added a bridging storyline that... well, I felt it just didn't work as well; a lot of the charm of the originals was discarded in favor of punishing game mechanics. So this BG3 game -- which I've been avoiding too many spoilers about, but I had to read the Cracked article -- is from yet another publisher entirely, and I will certainly play it when it comes out. Fortunately, according to my sources, they're including Minsc and Boo. Otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, it's not Baldur's Gate. Now, on to the article itself. Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the most important games of all time. And it’s not even out yet. While other games scamper to push out a product to meet the demands of their uncaring, non-gamer corporate overlords, Larian Studios remains boldly free and independent of any of the two or three companies which are buying up all the world’s media. Remember I mentioned Skyrim and Fallout up there? Well, those were made by Bethesda. And Microsoft freaking bought Bethesda. I'm still holding out hope that the creative team stays mostly the same for future games (there's a space adventure from them that was supposed to come out this coming November but got pushed back), but I fear the gigantic corporate influence of Microsuck might defang the more interesting aspects of those games. Microsuck has produced one and only one decent product in all the years of its existence, and that's Excel (and they stole the code for that). And yet I keep using them; the alternatives don't support gaming as well, and I despise consoles. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a high fantasy RPG set in the world of the official Dungeons and Dragons IP owned by Wizards of the Coast, who publishes both D&D and (my favorite game) Magic: The Gathering. Just to explain this a bit, again since not everyone reading this is as big a game nerd as I am, M:TG, like D&D itself, isn't a video game, but (unlike D&D) a tabletop card game. I'm sure there are online versions of it -- hell, I play D&D with friends online -- but I don't give enough of a shit to find out. The fact that Larian Studios, a Belgian gaming publisher, remains free from a massive corporation is a good sign. The studio has stated they’re not looking to sell out and they can still work independently with Wizards of the Coast (who is owned by Hasbro). Hey, maybe some of the pubs in the game will sell Belgian beer. Incidentally, Hasbro also owns My Little Pony. So, technically, MLP could be used in D&D products without copyright infringement. Just saying. In Belgium, the work week is legally 38 hours with workers being compensated for any overages. The article doesn't go into this too deeply, but I think the reason it's mentioned is that it's pretty well known that here in the US, game developers and coders work insanely long hours for... well, usually pretty decent pay, but not great pay. But there’s a larger cultural reason why this game matters so much. It’s the future we’ve always dreamed of, and nerds are king. We’re the mainstream now. We’ve come a long way from the Satanic Panic surrounding the early days of Dungeons and Dragons. If you're following Stranger Things on Netflix, which I'm convinced WotC paid lots of money for product placement in, that whole unfortunate and misguided episode gets a nod there. The show is set in the 80s, before WotC bought the D&D intellectual property from TSR, who never gets mentioned, and in the latest season the Satanic Panic is part of the plot (I won't spoil it further). The irony there is that the greatest danger to kids then was not D&D, but the people screeching about Satan. This sort of thing continues to this day. As a parallel, you know how certain people started bloviating a bunch of lies about how a cabal powerful Democrats ran a child sex ring from the basement of a pizza place in DC? Well, it turns out that a lot of those liars were themselves diddling children (google Southern Baptist pedophilia scandal if you have to). Every accusation from them is a confession. To be clear, I'm not saying everyone on the other side was innocent. People are going to be good or bad, regardless of politics. Just that it wasn't a grand, overarching conspiracy. Point is, when you look at real outcomes, the real moral hazard in the 70s and 80s was sports, not fantasy role-playing games. The most anticipated media is all IP which has traditionally been considered “nerd stuff”. Whether it’s the newest Marvel release or the upcoming Lord of the Rings series from Amazon, its nerds all the way down baby. I knew we'd win eventually. Who knows, when Grampy Biden leaves the oval, maybe we’ll even have a gamer president. Trump's not a gamer; he's a player. There's a huge difference. Yes, I think he's going to run again, and win (by cheating; remember, every accusation is a confession). I'm not here to start arguments on that; just making an observation. Still waiting on that D&D movie though… They made one, what, decades ago, now? I remember watching it. Probably before this writer's time. It also sucked Mordenkainen's Tiny Balls (that's a D&D in-joke). Why are we so attracted to these kinds of stories? And in a high fantasy setting particularly? Well, because dragons are cool as hell obviously. And less obviously, because the game allows us to walk a clear moral path. Baldur’s Gate 3 lays out that path even more neatly. We get to be righteous. That's... one interpretation. One of the best things about the original Baldur's Gate and its sequel was that you could certainly choose to be a force for good in the fantasy world, and most of the story choices rewarded such behavior -- but you could also be evil, and that path works with the story, too. I enjoy playing both kinds in games. Like, sometimes I'll create an absolutely immoral character in Skyrim, like an assassin, just to explore that side of things. To me, this makes for a good game; knowing that you do have the choice, even if you don't take one of the paths. What's the point of being righteous, even in fantasy, if you don't have an alternative? But yes, I find that in the existing BG games, the best storyline happens when you choose to do good. Well, I've rambled on long enough when I could have been playing a game. I hope I made some sense. And I look forward to BG3. Minsc and Boo stand ready! |
| Today, we have something about actual storytelling. I vaguely remember some of these from my childhood, as my parents were old-school and didn't hesitate to try to get me to behave by scaring the living shit out of me through old fairy tales. Didn't work, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have tried. Generations of parents have told their children fairy tales—stories imparting moral lessons that are easier to remember when a princess or evil ogre is involved. I think these days the push is to not scare the hell out of kids with fantasies to prepare them for a harsh and uncaring world, but I'm not sure that's any better. "Stranger danger" just doesn't have the same effect as "behave or an ogre will eat you." But there are many weird, quirky, and sometimes incredibly dark stories you may not know. Here are 11 of the lesser-known ones. Since this isn't Cracked, the list proceeds in ascending numbered order. 1. The Three Spinning Women This Brothers Grimm tale stars a lazy girl who doesn’t want to work on her spinning wheel. Her mother punishes her. I'm not sure I remember this one in particular, but I do recall that there was an awful huge number of "spinning" tales. I'm still not sure why. Even when I was a kid, no one spun thread or wove fabric; you bought that shit at K-Mart and later Wal-Mart. This lighthearted tale shows that, sometimes, laziness does pay off. On second thought, I must have read it as a kid, because I learned that lesson very well. 2. Hans-My-Hedgehog A couple wants a child so badly they'd settle for a hedgehog in this Grimm tale. Yeah, pretty sure my adoptive parents kept this one secret lest I start to identify as a hedgehog. 3. The Ungrateful Son This short Grimm story teaches the dangers of selfishness when a man decides to hide a giant roasted chicken from view when his elderly father visits his house. After his father departs, the man attempts to resume eating the chicken, but it turns into a giant toad and latches onto his head. We all have a vested interest in teaching people not to be selfish. Unfortunately, that shit became a virtue in the 80s and stayed that way. 4. Cat and Mouse in Partnership An extremely dark Grimm tale in which a cat and a mouse decide to live together for the winter. Yeah, I think we all know how this one's gonna turn out. See also: The Scorpion and the Frog. 5. The Girl Without Hands This truly Grimm story is, um, a handful, so stay with us. Unfortunately, there are no fairy tales warning of the hazards of punning. As for the actual content of the story, what the fuck, Grimm? 6. Hans, Who Made the Princess Laugh In this Norwegian tale recorded by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, a beautiful princess never laughs and is uninterested in every man who asks for her hand. The king declares that anyone who can make his daughter laugh will get her hand in marriage and half of the kingdom. This one reminds me of an old joke. Skipping a few here... 10. The Red Shoes In this Hans Christian Andersen story, a little girl named Karen is so poor she walks around barefoot. Well, she should demand to see the manager about that. Incidentally, in case you haven't figured it out by now, Hans Christian Anderson was one sick pup. While I'm not sure about Andersen, it's fairly well-known that the Grimm brothers didn't invent most (if not all) of their stories, but rather adapted them from an older oral tradition -- and cleaned them up a bit in the process. Disney further sanitized a lot of the stories, which is why the seven dwarves didn't take turns with Snow White in the animated movie (Okay, the dwarf sex part was probably left out of the older versions, too, but come on.) Fairy tales aren't, in my view, meant to be static and unchanging, but rather reflective of the evolving values and trends of society. There's probably no known "original" version of a lot of them, but once they were written down, well, that's why we get all the stories about spinning thread and whatnot. A modern fairy tale should have warnings about too much screen time, the hazards of accepting candy from dubious uncles, or the dangers of putting your personal information on the internet. I'll get right on that one of these days. (I have a couple of articles about procrastination in my queue; I'll get to them eventually.) |
| A fifth entry for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] There's usually a reason, in writing, to have the authority figure be unreasonable. It creates conflict. You get one that actually listens, and the conflict has to come from somewhere else, perhaps the other main characters or, as the trope page suggests, an advisor. But, while reading the description of this trope, my mind went to Star Trek. This is not surprising; as you all know, I've been a Trek fan all my life. It's not precisely the definition of the trope -- for that, your main characters would have to be non-authority figures so the authority figures (bridge crew or whatever) would be shown as reasonable or not. This is, in fact, what actually happens in the Lower Decks comedy-focused animated Trek series, but that's only been going on for two years, while the franchise in general has been around for well over 50, and apart from that one series, it always focuses on the leaders themselves. The link to live-action TV from the trope page kind of acknowledges this, presenting examples of reasonable admirals that fit the trope. And yet, in their section on Doctor Who (another long-running franchise that I've seen every episode of), they mention that The Doctor is a RAF. On a starship, there can be no greater authority figure than the Captain. Even when there's an admiral on board, usually to provide a foil for said captain, the captain is absolutely in charge of his or her ship. So to be complete, any discussion of a RAF. must consider whether the main character is, in fact, a RAF. There is, and probably always will be, a long-running argument in Trek fandom about who's the better captain: Kirk, or Picard. (Trick question; it's obviously Sisko.) But I submit that a new contender has arisen in the arena: Captain Christopher Pike. And that's precisely because he is the most R of all RAFs. And that's without being a Gary Stu. Gary Stu is one of the names for a male Mary Sue, which is a trope that itself arose from Star Trek fandom. For those who don't know, early on in the history of Star Trek, a lot of fanfiction got written. This is no different from today, but back then, things were maybe a little more unfocused, what with lack of internet and only one show to pull from. It describes, roughly, a character with no flaws, perhaps even someone nothing bad ever happens to in the story; it's usually a writer inserting themselves into the narrative for wish-fulfillment purposes. The term "Mary Sue" itself is, like many neologisms, often abused and sometimes has misogynistic overtones, implying that the qualities we look for in a male protagonist are unwelcome in a female one ("What do you call a male Mary Sue? A protagonist.") All of which is to say that Pike isn't a Mary Sue, or a Gary Stu, or whatever. He has flaws and personality traits other than "always being right" (and the best tagline in all of Trek). But he's definitely a RAF As an aside, for anyone not up to date on all the recent Star Trek shows, Strange New Worlds chronicles the Enterprise's journeys before Kirk took over. It's based on the original pilot, unaired on its own and only shown in a two-part episode of the original series as flashbacks. Pike also figures prominently in the Abrams revised-timeline movies, but in this series, we're back in something resembling the original timeline (which, I will argue endlessly to anyone bored or captive enough to listen, has been irrevocably altered by repeated time-travel fuckery in various Trek series, so shut the hell up about continuity errors already). Eh, but I've rambled on long enough, and I don't want to point to too many examples lest I spoil the series for someone. The point is that I think it's absolutely a legitimate version of the RAF trope to make the main character one. It can be more fun if their subordinates are incompetent, but of course that rarely happens in Star Trek, because it's basically competence porn. |
| After yesterday's entry, I'm sure we could all use a little less depressing fare. I have eggsactly the thing. As the site is called Art of Manliness, one might eggspect that the whole page would be "make your wife do it." You sexist pig. You need to know how to do it yourself because she will divorce you with that attitude. No yolk. There are a bunch of different ways to cook eggs: hard-boiled, poached, scrambled... I did a thing on hard-boiled just a couple of weeks ago: "Egg Zactly" ...heck, you can even make them in the microwave. Oh yes, please. Make sure you get it on video. (Seriously, though, it can be done, just not whole eggs.) When it comes to making an egg sandwich or putting an egg on a burger (and a burger should seldom be without one)... Lies. ...there’s no question as to which method is best: fried. All the way. You know, one thing that struck me while comparing this article with the one on hard-boiled eggs: this one makes pronouncements; that hard-boiled egg one did science. You can fry an egg over-easy, over-medium, or over-hard, depending on how runny you like the yolks. Folks who don’t like any runniness like their eggs cooked in the latter style. That would be me. There's a lot of things I don't understand when it comes to peoples' tastes, and near the top of that list is the runny-egg thing. Fortunately, I don't have to understand it; I just have to accept it, like I have to accept that some people like anchovies on their pizza or bacon that droops after it's cooked. Just as long as they understand they're wrong. The full deliciousness of an over-hard fried egg lies in the maintenance of its original architectural composition: a wholly intact yolk, sitting in a wholly intact white. Eggineering. Not architecture. (You pronounce that "egg-gin-ear-ing.") Yet getting both parts of the egg to cook evenly, without breaking the yolk, can prove challenging. The rest of the article goes into the actual method, which, to be clear, is very similar to what I do anyway. But yes, sometimes when I flip the egg I end up with a suboptimal result. I attribute that to not doing it very often, so I'm out of practice. And it hardly matters, since I'm just cooking for myself anyway; still, I have a perfectionist streak when it comes to cooking. And writing. And, okay, pretty much everything. But that's not the only challenge I face in the kitchen. I have yet to find solutions to these issues:  Cling wrap. I've pretty much mastered the art of not letting the end fall back onto the roll, thus making it utterly impossible to restart it. But two things elude me. First, being able to get a clean cut after I roll some out; inevitably, it'll tear someplace other than the tear strip thing on the box. Or, usually, start at the right place and then go off on a diagonal somewhere. Second -- and most frustrating -- is that I have yet to be able to pull out any length of cling wrap without the stupid stuff sticking to itself; and then, of course, it never actually clings to itself, or to the container, when I use it for its intended purpose. This is incredibly frustrating and has led me to invent creative curses. And one of these days I'm going to use this in a story: "Her name was Sarah, but we called her Saran, because she was clingy as hell except when you wanted her to be." Along those same lines, aluminum foil. How the hell does anyone get it to stay smooth? Or even fold nicely? I go to wrap leftover pizza slices in it and it looks like a damn moonscape; that is, if I don't tear it during the attempt. I'm lazy, so I keep a stash of frozen egg-meat-cheese sandwiches to nuke for breakfast. The instructions are usually something like: Wrap sandwich loosely in paper towel. Microwave on low for 90 seconds to thaw. Flip, nuke on high for one minute to cook. So I do exactly what it says, and half the putain fromage has melted onto the goddamn paper towel. Now, for a while there, I was also having trouble with the wrapping part. If I just folded the paper towel over the sandwich, it would flower open in the microwave and ruin the taste. I finally started to do an envelope-style folding thing (an envelope was what we used to send handwritten letters through the mail when there were handwritten letters and mail). By locking one corner under the other three, I managed to keep the package together -- but this didn't solve the waste-of-lousy-cheese thing. Ever buy one of those nonstick cookie sheet pan things? Were you able to use that expensive piece of crap more than once? I can't. First thing I bake on it stains it permanently. I'm not talking about a small discoloration here, but a complete ruination of the supposedly nonstick surface. Maybe I'm just buying the wrong kind of cookie sheet, but I have yet to find one that is more than single-use. Because of sunk costs, I usually end up lining the damn thing with crinkly-ass aluminum foil, and then spraying the fuck out of said foil with Pam.Compared to those frustrations, getting a fried egg wrong is bush-league stuff. It's enough to make me want to overuse Uber Eats. |
| I last linked an article from The Atlantic just a couple of days ago. This one, from the same source, is its polar opposite. I can't snark on it. The Holocaust Started With My Great-Uncle’s Murder Arthur Kahn is believed to be the first Jewish person killed by the Nazis. I’ve known the story of his death as long as I can remember, but I wanted to learn the story of his life. Perhaps you feel you've been hearing too much about this lately. Personally, I recently saw a bunch of articles about Anne Frank because the anniversary of her birth was on June 12, the same day I ragged on the happiness article. She'd be 93 now. Not an impossible age. Millions of deaths are a statistic; one is a tragedy. But, considering that there are still people around who want to exterminate other people for being "other," I for one am not going to let it slide. "Hey Waltz, what about all the other genocides in history? Why don't we talk about them in the same way?" Good question. They all suck. The reasons we keep going back to 1930s Germany when we talk about genocides are 1) They were, arguably, the most advanced civilization on the planet at the time, and yet they still committed barbaric atrocities, and 2) there are still people around who want to exterminate other people for being "other," so we have to remember this shit so that history doesn't repeat itself. Which it looks like it's about to. As for the article I just linked, well, I don't have anything I want to quote from it. You can read it. You might encounter a paywall, especially if you also read the one I linked on Sunday, but there's a way around that (I'll email it to you if you don't know). It's another story of an individual, not a statistic -- someone who, as the title suggests, might have been the first victim of Nazi genocide. I've heard there were about 10,999,999 more after him. Oh, sure, you've heard the "six million" number quoted. Those were known Jews. The other five million shouldn't be forgotten, either: people of African origin, Romani, homosexuals, political prisoners, those who opposed the Third Reich, etc. When I was in high school, I was the only Jewish kid in the class when we read the Frank diary, so most people walked on eggshells around me (those that didn't were going to bully me anyway, and took this opportunity to unleash their bigotry). No need for that, though. One time I pointed out the 11 million statistic, and I remember someone being amazed that I would care about the non-Jewish victims. As if I should only care when I or someone in my subgroup is affected. Caring only about your own community is the problem. That said, there's a big difference between hating someone for things they have no control over, such as race, and hating them for things they do, like being assholes (fascists, e.g.). There aren't "two sides" here; there's people who just want to live their lives; and then there's people who want to exterminate them for being "other." I don't care whether that "other" is Black, Jewish, Mexican, Muslim, Asian, Christian, atheist, gay, trans, or whatever. Of course, I could make the argument that you can't help being an asshole, because we don't really have free will. But assholes have been known to become non-assholes, whereas you don't stop being your race. Anyway. Enough depressing shit. I'll write more comedy later. I just felt this was too important to not put in the blog rotation. |
| Entry #4 for June's "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]... Bars are so obvious that using them in storytelling borders on cheating. They're usually a semi-public place (hence the name of the British version), so you get all kinds there, and the opportunity for both planned and chance meetings. This is, perhaps, no better illustrated than by the famous cantina scene (a cantina is, from what I've gathered, a bar in a desert) in Mos Eisley in the original Star Wars. Han shot first, by the way. I have spoken. Setting your scene in a bar, especially early on, is a kind of Chekov's Phaser for me: If the rest of the story progresses without a bar brawl breaking out, I'm usually sorely disappointed.I can only imagine the level of fight choreography that goes into filming a bar brawl. To make them look realistic enough, everyone has to know exactly what they're doing, while making it seem like everything is unplanned. I guess that's why they get paid the big bucks, though. You'd have to time everything just right, and be sure you know the difference between a real bottle and the fake ones used for bopping people upside the head, or the difference between the real chairs and the breakaway ones used for bopping people in the kidneys. Gotta say, I love a good bar brawl scene, whether it's in a Bad Guy Bar or wherever. I mean, you don't usually get those kinds of fights in a library, or at Wal-Mart, though I suppose someone's probably done it in a movie just for variety's sake. But sometimes, those scenes just don't work. An actual melee fight is, by nature, chaotic. If you're in one, you can't keep track of what's going on; you just have to try to avoid getting hit while trying to make sure the other guys don't. Never ask me how I know this. Filming an actual bar fight, for instance from the perspective of a hypothetical security camera, you'd see a lot of flailing around, but there's no focus, and you only get one angle. This doesn't work in a movie, so there needs to be attention paid to the important parts at just the right time, as otherwise you lose the audience. I've seen bar fight scenes where they don't do that very well, perhaps in a bid to capture the feel of an actual bar fight. Lots of quick cuts, and sometimes you can tell by where things are or what the characters are wearing that it took about seventeen takes and the result is a mashed-up edit of different parts of the footage. And, other times, I've seen ones where someone, say, throws a punch, but the angle's all wrong, so you can tell it's a stage punch. You know, missing by a mile while the "punchee" twists their neck like they've been socked. How that gets past the editors and director, I have no idea, unless they were spending the entire scene finding the bottles of real liquor and drinking them. Unfortunately, though, bar brawl scenes give bars a bad name. Of all the purveyors of fine distilled and fermented beverages that I've been to in my life, from sawdust biker dives in Montana up to the Ritz and every level in between, I've never once witnessed an actual fight break out in one. I'm not saying it never happens, but I've been to a lot of bars and I've never seen one. Watch movies and shows, though, and one might get the idea that walking into a bar is like you might as well be carrying a lit match near kegs of gunpowder. But one shouldn't expect realism from movies. I can't count the number of times I've seen a scene filmed at a rave or concert, and the main characters are just standing there talking without saying "WHAT?" after every sentence the other one speaks. Loud bars are loud. I can't hear myself in them, let alone anyone else. You want to talk to me in a noisy bar? Try using a pen and paper, because my knowledge of sign language is limited to "hello," "thank you," and "up yours." Better yet, just let me enjoy my beverage in peace. I'm not there to socialize or get into fights; I'm there to drink. And don't get me started on when a character makes a phone call in the middle of a DJ's set. That shit just doesn't work. Texting might, though. But none of that gives bars a bad name the way fight scenes do. And yet, like I said, I love a good one. |
| Here we go again with "happiness." It's enough to make me grumpy. How about "Eat a Danish?" Here’s some very bad happiness advice based on very solid happiness research: Feel important. Be happily married. Be Danish. Lots of people feel important and yet are angry as hell. Just walk into a store or restaurant and you'll see what I mean. Maybe become a Great Dane, instead? Dogs seem happy. Too happy, if you ask me. Based on what they see in the data from experiments and surveys, what should we do that is both effective and feasible for increasing our happiness, starting today? I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I don't believe happiness is, or should be, a goal. It's a byproduct of doing other stuff. Like, I don't drink to be happy, but when I drink, I become happy. Here are the top 10, in order, with my own assessments as a happiness researcher added in for good measure. Oh boy oh boy this is gonna be fun! 1. Invest in family and friends. The research is clear that though our natural impulse may be to buy stuff, we should invest instead in improving our closest relationships by sharing experiences and freeing up time to spend together. Okay, but "stuff" won't let you down. Oh, sure, it eventually wears out or breaks, but it doesn't deliberately ghost you like friends and family do. And then it's easier to replace. 2. Join a club. The “social capital” you get from voluntarily and regularly associating with other people, whether or not you do so through a formal club, has long been known to foster a sense of belonging and protect against loneliness and isolation. "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member." -Groucho 3. Be active both mentally and physically. You can make this advice as complicated and expensive as you want. But if you like to keep things simple, just try to walk for an hour and read for an hour (not for work!) each day. Yeah, right, because... no, actually, I can't snark on this one. 4. Practice your religion. And this is where I'd stop reading if I weren't dedicated to making fun of shit. 5. Get physical exercise. This is a slightly souped-up version of No. 3 above: Your daily walk should be supplemented with a purposive exercise plan. Now you're just talking crazy talk. And making up words. (To be fair, I make up words too.) 6. Act nicely. Agreeableness is consistently found to be highly and positively correlated with happiness, and it can be increased relatively easily. Oh, sure. Yep. Act nice. Be agreeable. Don't stand up for yourself. Don't argue. Plaster a fake smile on your face, and fake it til you make it. Except bullshit. While I don't think we should go out of our way to be mean or nasty to people, there are certainly times when "be nice" would increase your anger level and decrease your happiness. 7. Be generous. Behaving altruistically toward others rewards the brain with happiness-enhancing boosts of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. Until they start expecting it, when they become mooches. 8. Check your health. Of all health issues, those that create the greatest unhappiness are typically chronic pain and anxiety. Oh, wow, I'd never have guessed that pain and anxiety might be barriers to happiness. Incredible. I guess it takes a degree in happiness science to figure that one out. 9. Experience nature. Studies have shown that, compared with urban walking, walking in a woodland setting more dramatically lowers stress, increases positive mood, and enhances working memory. "That's the problem with nature. Something's always stinging you or oozing mucus on you." -Calvin To be clear, I do love nature, and I very much enjoy watching it from a temperature-controlled, sealed environment. Although I still maintain that the distinction between "nature" and "artifice" is entirely... well... artificial. 10. Socialize with colleagues outside of work. Data have shown that work friendships increase employee engagement, which is associated with both happiness and productivity for workers. What the... NO. Leaving aside for a moment that prayer to Holy Productivity, who wrote this, a corporate executive? So here's my version. You knew this was coming, didn't you? 1. Don't have goals. You will only fail them and that will make you unhappy. 2. Waste time at work. 3. Drink. 4. Expect the worst so you can only be pleasantly surprised. 5. Cats. 6. Read (or watch or listen to) comedy. 7. Music. 8. Minimize the amount to which you are dependent upon other people. 9. Stand up for yourself (i.e. don't always be nice, accommodating, or agreeable). 10. Snark on vapid internet articles about happiness. 11. (Bonus!) Drink some more. |
| I pick these semi-randomly, and today I get to be controversial. I don't do that often, so fair warning. Won't hurt me if you skip this one. Let's leave aside for a moment how we probably ought not to be memorializing those who commit heinous crimes by plastering their name all over the place and thus giving them oxygen. Everyone knows this guy's name, though I'm not going to repeat it here (you can go to that link; it's from Wikipedia). How many of his victims' names do you know? Or their surviving family members or friends? Me? None. Not a single one. What struck me when reading that page was how every damn thing there presaged a lot of the bullshit we have going on right now in the US. Not inflation, an impossible housing market, or higher gas prices; but the conflicts about legitimate government, guns, mass killings, the media's role in all this, etc. Nothing ever got resolved, even though another terrorist attack just 3 months later (to the day) put most of us on the same page for about 90 milliseconds before everything devolved once again into civil war. We'll always have disagreements. We're not supposed to resolve them by shooting, blowing shit up, destroying skyscrapers, or attempting to overthrow a legitimately elected government. But whatever. No, the truly controversial thing this led me to really think about was the death penalty. I haven't discussed that in here recently. Long ago, once, and my opinions tend to shift. Yeah, I'm inconsistent and sometimes I contradict myself. "I am large; I contain multitudes." But I did find this bit from a very long time ago: 5. Do you believe in the death penalty? In theory? Yes. There are some people we Just Don't Need. But that assumes a perfect world wherein we knew beyond the shadow of a doubt (not just "beyond a reasonable doubt") that person A committed a capital crime. But - here's the rub - in a perfect world, no one would commit murder. So in practice? No, I don't think the death penalty is a good idea. Every person's death diminishes the rest of us, whether someone believes it's deserved or not. I still kinda believe that. But since then, I guess my view has evolved. Not that it matters worth a damn, just like all the rest of my opinions. Considering the number of people executed by some government or other for crimes it turns out they didn't commit, or even jailed for a long time while innocent, I still don't generally like it in practice. Hell, on second thought, don't consider the numbers. I'm not even going to bother looking up statistics, because even one is too many. And capital punishment is pretty damn final. And yet, in the case above, of which today is the anniversary, I can't say I disapprove. We know the guy wasn't innocent. We know, insofar as we can really "know" anything, that he killed a bunch of people. Better if he'd been stopped first, but then we wouldn't have entire Wiki pages devoted to a non-attack, would we? Problem is, we're pretty sure that the death penalty doesn't serve as a deterrent. Murderers gonna murder. Some of them do it in a bid to take as many people as possible with them when they suicide. So what purpose does capital punishment serve? Don't say justice; that's some Hammurabi shit right there. Vengeance is more like it. And keeping them off the street so they can't do more murder, but that can be arranged with a life sentence too. There's also the argument that a state-sponsored execution costs society more than a life prison sentence, but that argument always struck me as incomplete. We could choose to make it cost less if we really wanted, and if, as I argue, such a sentence should be reserved for cases where we know beyond any doubt, there's no reason for endless appeals. Arguing on the basis of the cost is a little bit like arguing that you shouldn't smoke weed because it has bad effects. What are those bad effects? Potential loss of civil rights. Make it legal nationally and that argument goes right out the window. Not a great analogy; I know. But the point is, don't conflate physical laws with government laws. By far the worst consequence, though, of this penchant we have for railroading certain innocent people into confessing to murder or whatever is not only that an innocent person gets locked up and/or executed, but the fucknut who actually did it is still out there wandering around. But like I said, that's not the case here. What we do have, though, is a martyr for his cause. Something for other racist bastards to rally around. Like I said, a lot of the bullshit he spouted is still being spouted to this day, and will continue to be spouted. Would this be the case if he'd received a life sentence instead? Well, that's above my pay grade. Maybe. I don't know. We'll probably never know for sure. But that's why I'm avoiding the name. No more oxygen to these assholes. |
| We have another Cracked link today, and it's about beer. Of course I had to share it. It is, however, from way, way back in March. Many cultures have their own drunken festivals. Just last week, for example, we celebrated St. Patrick's Day. I told you it was from March. Other alcohol festivals include Marathon Monday, Mardi Gras, New Year's Eve, and of course payday. And Cinco de Mayo. For some reason we imported most of our drunken festivals here in the US - SPD from Ireland, Mardi Gras from France, and that one from Mexico. It's not actually Mexican Independence Day, if you didn't know; it's way more complicated than that, but that's a story for another time. "For some reason" means "because this country is infested with prohibitionists and Puritans." You know what else usually happens in March (besides the equinox)? Purim. Purim is a Jewish festival based on the Book of Esther from the OT. When I was a kid, a rabbi told us that while kids celebrate Purim with noisemakers, adults are supposed to get so drunk that they can't tell the good guys from the bad guys. As Purim is based on the Hebrew lunar calendar, it moves around year to year like Hanukkah. This year it was, coincidentally, on St. Patrick's Day. This is probably why you almost never hear about Irish Jews. I mention the bit about Purim mostly because... well, I'll get to it later. [Egyptians'] annual Festival of Drunkenness, less commonly known as the Tekh Festival, was devoted to the "lady of drunkenness," the goddess Hathor. Everyone got very drunk, collapsed in a stupor, then awoke to drums (the drummers didn't pass out, as drummers all have a high tolerance for alcohol). Vouch. They celebrated alcohol for all the expected reasons (alcohol means joy and life and wealth), but also because in their mythology, beer had once saved them all. Beer. Is there anything it can't do? The article goes on to describe exactly how, according to the Egyptians, beer saved everyone. It's short, so I won't quote more from it here. You can go read it if you're interested. Instead, I'm going to go back to Esther. In a kind of roundabout way. Bear with me here. One of the earliest surviving odes to the wonder beverage is the story of the goddess Inanna and the god Enki. As it's translated from ancient Sumerian tablets, you might find different translations. Here are two of them: This one appears to be the most literal.And this one probably has more accessible language, but leaves out the most prurient parts.I first saw it in a different form, but I think the gist of it stays the same in all translations: Inanna and Enki get into a drinking contest; Inanna wins, and she steals all the keys to civilization from a passed-out Enki. Supposedly it's a myth used to explain why the seat of power in Sumeria changed from Enki's city of Eridu to Inanna's city of Uruk. Both of those cities are now dust, but beer remains (albeit in a more modern formulation), and we're still using it for drinking contests. Some things are literally as old as civilization; I have, in fact, heard compelling arguments that it was beer that caused the beginnings of civilization, because of the logistics involved in growing the grain and making the stuff. In Babylonia, Sumeria's effective successor civilization, Inanna became Ishtar. Later offshoots of Babylonia included the writers of the Old Testament; stories from Babylon (including the bit about the flood) were pretty obviously copied there. The Semitic goddess cognate with Inanna and Ishtar was Astarte or Astaroth, an obvious linguistic link. It was only later in life that I realized that Esther is another linguistic mutation of Ishtar. Further, the "good guy" in the Book of Esther is Mordecai, and the Babylonians had a god named Marduk. (Admittedly, I never found a link with the "bad guy," Haman, and the story itself takes place in Persia, which was further east and a different civilization entirely. Sumeria and Babylonia were, as we all know, roughly where modern Iraq is, while Persia was located approximately in what would become Iran.) I do not believe for one second that this naming thing is in any way a coincidence: Esther can be traced back to Inanna, the winner of the Drinking Contest of the Gods in ancient Sumeria. Is that why we get drunk on Purim? I don't know. But until I hear a compelling argument against it, that's my working theory |
| Entry #3 for June's "Journalistic Intentions" [18+] This one has a remarkably short description for a TVTropes page, but I can distill it even further: One character has some kind of manner of speech or habit, and another ends up unconsciously copying it. From what I've seen, and glancing at some of the examples, this is usually comedy. It doesn't quite fit the Played For Laughs trope because it's not a parody of a serious plot device. But the point is it's normally intended to elicit at least a smile or a sensible chuckle from the audience. And as we all know, or should know anyway, the wall between comedy and tragedy is paper-thin, and one often hears the other having loud orgasms in the next room.I just came up with that, and I'm quite proud of it. Where was I? Oh, yeah. So I can see it being drama too, is the point, if it's framed right. But there's a third choice. Someone's probably already done it, but I can't be arsed to read all the examples on the linked page, nor can I remember any instances of it. And that third choice is using your weird mannerisms to do good. That page I just linked is also about using one's powers to do evil, but using this one to do evil would still be comedy. As apes, we're very, very good at aping, so if one of us does something creative or slightly "off," others can pick up on that and, under the right circumstances, mimic it. The expression is "monkey see, monkey do," but monkeys aren't apes. We are. This is often called something like "leading by example." Under the right circumstances, your good deed will be contagious. A real-life example of this would be a phenomenon I've heard of but never experienced because I almost never go there and never through the drive-thru: the "pay it forward" (PIF) conga line at a Starsucks. Coincidentally, I'd just heard yesterday of another one of those happening. With all the inflation going on, my comedian mind immediately went to "each order will be more expensive than the last," meaning that every customer would pay an ever-increasing tab. And then, naturally, I thought of how I could use that power for evil. To do so, I'd have to work in an office or have a bunch of friends, but hey, I'm a writer, so I can imagine impossible things. What you do is, if you know there's a PIF line at the Starsucks drive-thru, you get in the line and order like 60 venti espresso soy milk double-shot cocoa mocha lattes (or whatever the goddamn stupid trendy drink is these days) and all of their danishes. Then the person in front of you is morally obligated to pay for your $5800.00 order instead of her $6.50 single short Tazo herbal tea, which the person in front of her had to pay for. And then you only have to pay for the Grande Americano of the idiot behind you. Of course, I would never actually do such a thing, because you might get some goody two-shoes hero working there who warns the lady in front of you that you ordered everything in the store, and then you're on the hook for the $6300 bill (it went up while you were waiting for the order to fill). Because I consider it my hobby to think about everything that can go wrong with a scenario. That's an important skill for a writer to have, you know. Normally, I only use the power for good. Normally. |
| In an ongoing effort to understand people who are not me, I took a look at this article that someone sent me. I don't find endless speculation helpful concerning the root causes of, for example, why some people shoot up a school or other place where it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone has their little pet theories: lack of mental health services; the existence of football (okay, that one is mine); video games (oh come on); religion; lack of religion; guns; not enough guns; drugs; not enough drugs... whatever. None of that helps. I want to see solid science, and I haven't seen a whole lot of it. You might think your pet theory is based on "common sense," but you know how much I hate that concept, and besides, it's obviously not working. But this article got me speculating myself, and since this is my blog, you get to read the speculation. Or you can skip it; to quote the rallying cry of my generation, whatever. When disasters strike, the flood of images on TV and social media can have a powerful psychological impact on children – whether those children are physically in the line of danger or watching from thousands of miles away. This is somewhat interesting to me, because when you hear about trauma, it's usually in the context of adult PTSD or, in the case of children, abuse. This is more like second-hand triggering. Our latest research uses brain scans to show how simply watching news coverage of disasters can raise childen’s anxiety and trigger responses in their brains that put them at risk of post-traumatic stress symptoms. It also explores why some children are more vulnerable to those effects than others. Now, see, this is science. Though I'd take it all with a huge grain of salt until I knew more about things like sample size, and whether getting poked into a brain scan machine itself causes baseline anxiety to rise for some people. With climate change, researchers estimate that today’s children will face three times as many climate-related disasters as their grandparents. And the pervasiveness of social media and 24-hour news make exposure to images of disasters more likely. Which is one reason I never wanted kids; I knew that the world I'd leave them would be worse than the world I lived in. But while around 10% of people who are directly exposed to traumatic events develop symptoms that are severe enough to meet diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a majority do not. I felt like this is important to emphasize. It's never as simple as "if x happens, then y will also happen" with psychology. People react differently. It's good to see a number attached to that, though. The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study followed 11,800 children across the United States over a 10-year period using a variety of brain imaging and mental health assessments. Well, that answers my question about sample size. Seems large enough. Though the study they quote about long-range second-hand trauma appears to have used a smaller subset of that sample. We found that greater media exposure was associated with higher reporting of post-trauamtic stress symptoms – and the link was just as strong in San Diego youth as it was in Florida youth. Well. I guess maybe ignorance is bliss, after all. Or was that not the point? So what can parents do? For starters, parents can monitor and limit access to some internet content for young viewers. Gosh. I've never heard that bit of advice before, ever. I don't want to be all "When I was a kid we didn't have the internet and things were better," but when I was a kid we didn't have the internet and things were better. Honestly, though, I'm not convinced there's a direct causal relationship there. Blaming the internet, which after all has managed to connect people from all over the world and broaden everyone's horizons, is just too simple. As with automobiles that kill 40,000 Americans a year, it's still preferable to not having it -- though it's worth exploring ways to make things safer. So here's my worthless speculation: what if the recent mass shootings could be traced to people who had experienced such first- or second-hand trauma while they were younger? It tracks. You get someone obsessed with disaster news; it follows, logically, that such a person might be focused on creating his (it's mostly "his") own disaster. I'm not saying this is right, of course. Just that, as I said, I wanna see the science. |
| Here's a thing that I can only vaguely relate to, but it seemed interesting enough from a philosophical point of view. The purpose of my linking this is not to spark a fruitless discussion about the billionaire. I've largely stayed out of that fray and will continue to do so. No, I wanted to highlight what "free speech" means. The background, for anyone who's been hiding under a rock, is that there's been talk about Musk taking over Twatter; I don't know the current state of that process because I don't follow it that closely. If anyone's interested, my earlier comments on free speech, from way back in January, are here: "Freeze Peach" And something else I found from the truly ancient days of 2010: "On a serious note..." And stretching even further back into the murky past: "Quick civics lesson" So what is Elon Musk’s definition of free speech, exactly, and how does that relate to what you can and can’t say in your tweets? "Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy." -Musk First of all, here's my perspective, for whatever it's worth. Before DikDok, Twatter, Bookface, etc., even before WDC, there was IRC and newsgroups. The internet wasn't as populated back then, and a lot of people accessed it through the filter of AOL. In many ways, this was superior, as in order to connect with people then, everyone had to have some minimum level of understanding of how shit worked. Kind of like how there's a filter here keeping out casuals who can't or won't learn simple formatting tools. Superior, yes, but by no means utopia. Newsgroups were largely unmoderated, and they mostly trusted people to keep discussions on the topics listed (and boy, were there a lot of topics, some of which were definitely in XGC territory). This lack of moderation meant that, over time, most newsgroups got choked by spam ads and porn. I'm not knocking porn, but there were specific newsgroups for the various categories of porn; I mean that adult material got into things like alt.rec.teletubbies or whatever. The result was a low signal to noise ratio, creating a positive feedback loop as ordinary people left newsgroups alone. I think the last time I checked on them, 20 years ago or so, it was nothing but spam. I have no idea of newsgroups are still around in any way, and I'm not going to bother to check. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was also a kind of Wild-West thing. Anyone with moderate knowledge could create a channel. Whether anyone came to the channel or not was another story, but most channels were, as a result, moderated. Channels, incidentally, were prepended with the pound sign #. Yes, that is a pound sign, or perhaps a number sign. It is not, and never will be, a hashtag in my universe. All of which is to say that it's clear to me that absolute, unfettered free speech may sound like a good idea in theory, but in practice, you end up with nothing but spam, porn and porn spam as people seeking meaningful content abandon ship. And yet I believe that if that's what people are looking for, there should be access to it. Just labeled correctly, kind of like genres and Content Ratings here on WDC. Speaking of, one thing that attracted me to this site in the first place is that we do have freedom of speech here. Yes, we require things to be rated appropriately, but as I said, that's a bare minimum so that people have some idea what they're in for. Still, I've seen people write about things I find completely appalling, and that's okay because I can choose whether to read it or not. I've written stuff that other people find completely appalling. And yet, things like advertising are restricted, and images are another subject altogether. Point is, no practical interpretation of freedom of speech guarantees a speaker (or writer) the right to an audience. I chose to abandon Failbook, and I never did get a Twister account. The first I heard of Twutter was a friend of my then-wife told me that some engineer she worked with had rigged his office chair to tweet every time he farted, and I decided right then and there that I wanted nothing to do with the platform. Nothing I've seen since then has convinced me that the level of bumper-sticker discourse on the site has been raised since then, and when I see a transcript of multiple tweets because the story's too long for whatever character limit, I get enraged. Just write a damn blog and link to it already. Discussing shit on Twitter is like arguing with bumper stickers. I am aware of the irony of me distilling my idea to a less-than-140-character bumper sticker slogan, there. I'm not quoting any more from the article, as I wanted this to be more about my own thoughts on the subject matter. Go read it if you care. Don't if you don't. No one's forcing you either way. And isn't that really the point? |
| Entry #2 for "Journalistic Intentions" [18+]... We've been conditioned. Thanks to fairy tales, comics, books, shows, movies, etc., most of us take certain ideas as absolute fact. These include:  If it seems too good to be true, it is. When wishes come true there's always a heavy price. Utopia is impossible.A lot of this is because, were it not so, the story wouldn't be very interesting. "One day, little Angela found an old lamp and rubbed it. A genie came out and granted her a wish. She wished for a pony. She got a pony. They became fast friends and lived happily ever after." That's not a story. That's an anecdote you tell in an actual story, one with conflict and characterization and plot and shit like that. You could say that the biggest part of a fiction writer's job is to think about everything that could go wrong, implement some of it, and have the characters deal with it. Preferably they actually succeed in the end, but that's optional. So, faced with a utopia (a concept that, at its very inception, was meant as satire), we're programmed as writers to search for flaws, any flaws. An early episode of ST:TNG comes to mind. In it, they find a utopian planet where everyone is young, fit, blond, and mostly naked, wearing the bare minimum to get past 80s TV censors (I will just say, as an aside, that William Ware Theiss , the costume designer for TOS and TNG, was a goddamn genius). Everyone on the Enterprise is pumped to be there, especially that absolute dog Riker. And then Wesley (of course) fucks up and discovers its horrible secret first-hand. This leads to Picard bending the Prime Directive to the breaking point, and it's in the running for my award of Worst TNG Episode, despite the preponderance of ultra-hot Nordic babes.Trek itself, from the get-go, was conceived as a utopia of sorts: a post-scarcity technoparadise where everyone (mostly) got along. Later shows subverted this, mostly after Roddenberry died. Else the property wouldn't have lasted as long as it did: 55 years and counting. A real utopia, if it's even possible, would simply be too boring to write about. Which is one reason I've never accepted the idea of Heaven. Leaving aside for the moment the metaphysical issues, the concept of spending eternity in a golden cloud city surrounded by angels playing harps sounds more like Hell to me. I mean, Hell itself doesn't sound too great, but damn , those (and every other) concepts of an afterlife make utter nonexistence seem pleasant by comparison. The only way to make Heaven work is to alter peoples' minds so that they believe it works, at which point, if you can simply make people happy by manipulating emotion and perception, there's no need to actually create a utopia. It'd be like that meme where the dog is sitting there surrounded by fire going: This is fine.  As long as your mind is in thrall and you never wake up to reality, you'll stay in utopia. Yes, yes, I know, The Matrix did something like that. I maintain that the movie, for all its excellent special effects, was entirely derivative. The whole thing reminds me of the famous Milton quote: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." Which I'm still convinced he cribbed from Shakespeare. |
| Today's article is about four years old, and has been languishing in my queue for a while (though not four years) until the Random Number Generator deigned to notice it. But despite its advanced age, I don't think the subject matter has an expiration date. Physics Needs Philosophy / Philosophy Needs Physics Philosophy has always played an essential role in the development of science, physics in particular, and is likely to continue to do so I've said it before: science informs philosophy, and philosophy guides science. For example, we know that we can get a lot of good answers doing testing on unsuspecting humans (because some assholes have done so), but it takes philosophy to realize that doing so is usually Bad. Science is great for understanding the universe, but on its own it's ethically and morally neutral. A certain current anti-philosophical ideology has had damaging effects on the fertility of science. The recent momentous steps taken by experimental physics are all rebuttals of today's freely speculative attitude in theoretical physics. Empirical results such as the detection of the Higgs particle and gravitational waves, and the failure to detect super-symmetry where many expected it, question the validity of philosophical assumptions common among theoretical physicists, inviting us to engage in a clearer philosophical reflection on scientific method. I have to admit I've been largely ignorant of any such fray. I'm merely a spectator here. Against Philosophy is the title of a chapter of a book by one of the great physicists of the last generation: Steven Weinberg. Weinberg argues eloquently that philosophy is more damaging than helpful for physics—it is often a straightjacket that physicists have to free themselves from. Anyone else see the irony here? That taking a position against philosophy is itself a philosophical position? It's a bit like the old "This sentence is a lie" false paradox. Here are a few examples of this influence, from astronomy and physics. Ancient astronomy—that is, everything we know about the Earth being round, its size, the size of the moon and the sun, the distances to the moon and the sun, the motion of the planets in the sky and the basis from which modern astronomy and modern physics have emerged—is a direct descendent of philosophy. Physics (and science in general, though the philosophical argument could be made that all science is, at its core, physics) is really quite good at answering "how" questions. "Why" questions have been more elusive, though, and are generally the domain of philosophy, in my view. And religion, perhaps, but I consider religion a subset of philosophy. We're curious, but to get meaningful answers, we have to ask the right questions. "Why are we here?" is vague and contentious, but "How did we get here?" can be answered through science. Why this influence? Because philosophy provides methods leading to novel perspectives and critical thinking. Philosophers have tools and skills that physics needs, but do not belong to the physicists training: conceptual analysis, attention to ambiguity, accuracy of expression, the ability to detect gaps in standard arguments, to devise radically new perspectives, to spot conceptual weak points, and to seek out alternative conceptual explanations. Here, I might have cause to quibble. Science is all about "attention to ambiguity" and "accuracy of expression." Sure, they borrowed those traits from philosophy -- which is much, much older than the modern scientific method -- but from my understanding and experience, they're absolutely taught as part of a science curriculum. Whether that's the case for advanced physics, I have no idea; like I said, I'm mostly just a spectator here. Here is a second argument due to Aristotle: Those who deny the utility of philosophy, are doing philosophy. See? Even dead Greeks agree with me there. The article provides many examples of how, as I put it, philosophy informed science over the centuries. And even how science affected philosophy in turn. Really, I'd call it a symbiotic arrangement. If your philosophy isn't grounded in objective fact, it's mere word games. (They can be fun, too, of course.) And if you don't have a clear methodology for doing science, then all you're doing is groping around in the dark (which, under the right circumstances, can also be fun, or so I've heard). Just the other day, I saw a study that examined -- well, let me show you the blog post discussing it.If you can't be arsed to click on that link, or even if you can, just to be clear, that study was about "do guys living under a neoliberal capitalist realism hellscape like big boobs?" Philosophical question: WHY?? Scientific question: How in the hell did they manage to score a grant for that? Speaking of which, going back to the original article: I think that this methodological philosophy has given rise to much useless theoretical work in physics and many useless experimental investments. Apparently, not just physics. But to be honest, the only branch of science I trust less than evolutionary psychology is nutritional science. Anyway, the article has a lot more information than the little snippets I'm pasting and, fair warning, sometimes goes over my head. But I think I get the gist (though that may be my confirmation bias talking). Here is one last argument from Aristotle: More in need of philosophy are the sciences where perplexities are greater. You can tell when something is truly profound when it twists grammar around. See also: Yoda. (For all I know, that might be a literal translation from Aristotle's language. I know next to nothing about ancient Greek.) That's really all I have to say about it, but if any of this shit interests you even a little bit like it interests me, the article is absolutely worth a look. |
| Back from the beer festival. Instead of my usual, I thought I'd talk about *gasp* my experience. So, a little background that I'm not sure I've shared here before: I got the beer fest tickets months ago, when they first went on sale. The theme of the festival was queer beer; that is, not beer that is weird, but breweries that are run by lgbtqia* (or whatever the latest label is) folks. Now, you may be wondering why I, the most heterosexual man in the universe, would be doing at a queer beer festival. Well, first of all, I've long been an ally, as I'm a proponent of individual freedom. Call it performative virtue if you need to be cynical about it, but I don't think I would be much of an ally if I didn't publicly support these marginalized groups. The second and more important reason, of course, is beer. Beer doesn't have a gender or sexual orientation. It's just beer. I don't care what the brewer identifies as; I just want to try the beer. A beer festival is a great way to sample brews from all over. And this is the first one I've had a chance to attend since the Before Time. It might occur to someone to wonder "where's the straight beer festival," to which I'd respond that probably over 90% of breweries are run by straight bearded white dudes, so sometimes to highlight diversity you need to put it out front. Believe me, there are plenty of other beer festivals where the majority can do their thing, too. Or will be; not so much the past couple of years. Anyway. I was supposed to go with my housemate, but she broke her leg, which of course sucks and tends to keep one from traveling comfortably for a while. As the tickets were nonrefundable, I went with a different friend (after making sure someone else could be here for the housemate). I do have to say, I was moderately disappointed by the festival itself. A couple of rows of tents on a pier poking the Potomac, with the main sponsor's tent (New Belgium out of Colorado) taking up one end like a throne. Most beer festivals, I get overwhelmed by the choices; here, there just weren't that many. Maybe a couple of dozen. But like I said, minorities are minorities, especially in the beer community, so it shouldn't be surprising that there were relatively few vendors. At least that meant I got to try something from pretty much every booth. By "try," for those unfamiliar with beer festivals, I mean "sample." Different jurisdictions have different rules; for example, here in Virginia you get four-ounce samples. Apparently in DC it's only two ounces, which is certainly enough to get a taste of the product. So no, it's not like I went from tent to tent having a pint at each. Not even I could have done that. I'd have ended up floating down the river. With no regrets. After a couple of hours of this, of course we had dinner and went to pass out. Which is how I expected it to go, and why I did warn you today's entry would be delayed. I expect tomorrow I'll go back to the regularly scheduled program. |
| Note: Tomorrow's entry will be delayed. I'm going to a beer festival in DC tomorrow. Assuming no one opens fire into the crowd (this is America, so it's a nonzero chance), I'll return home on Saturday and then blog. Between expecting to be drunk and having a drunk friend to deal with too, I doubt I'll be able to get online at my usual time. So, like, time for an article about language. Link is from the Guardian so the spelling is, like, British. Why do people have such a problem with “like”? Is it because it simply won’t go away? In 1992, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a robust defence of the word and the way it carries “a rich emotional nuance”, responding to what had already been a decade of criticism. This did nothing to settle the debate. Some people get annoyed over the stupidest things. This is one of them. Who cares? You know what other word gets overused and we don't think about it until it's pointed out? "Up." Scores of recruitment specialists and public-speaking coaches have publicly bemoaned the word’s rise and say those who use it prevent themselves from getting opportunities. I don't know what a recruitment specialist actually does, but I think public-speaking coaches are the people that try to get us to stop saying "ummm..." too. Which does nothing to actually promote public speaking; sometimes a speaker has to pause for thought without giving the audience an opportunity to think she's stopped speaking. Sure, if it becomes a vocal tic, perhaps then it's truly annoying, as with any other word or phrase. Until then, to me, using "like" as an intensifier is merely the sign of a casual conversation. Hell, I even use it in my writing in here. Deliberately. In 2010, Emma Thompson complained to the Radio Times that she “went to give a talk at my old school and the girls were all doing their ‘likes’ and ‘innits?’ which drives me insane… I told them ‘Just don’t do it. Because it makes you sound stupid.’” Well... "innit" is unique to England, as far as I know, and it really does make you sound like a chav. There’s certainly an element of sexism here and the detractors of “like” say it makes you sound girlish and stupid, arguing that this is a newish tic said mostly by women and that it’s a meaningless “filler” word that doesn’t add anything to a sentence’s meaning. But they are, in fact, wrong on every count. As the article eventually points out, the liberal sprinkling of "like" was popularized in the US in the early 80s, the whole Valley Girl thing. But who made men the gatekeepers of language? The first of these is the quotative “like”: “He cooked a spag bol for me last night, I was like, that’s delicious.” Maybe this is because I'm American, but "spag bol" would enrage me way more than the use of "like" there. The other hated “likes” are as a discourse marker, “What did I do last night? Like, had dinner, hung out”; an adverb to mean approximately, “It was super quick to cook, like 30 minutes”, and what’s known as a discourse particle, which goes in the middle of a phrase, rather than at the end of it, “This dinner is like the best I’ve eaten.” But there are more uses than that, for example the Geordie tradition of finishing sentences with a like. “He cooked dinner for me, like,” and increasingly “like” is also used as a noun because of Facebook and Instagram, “I gave it a like.” Always good to know what part of speech you're using. As for the social media aspect, hate the media, not the noun. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, written at the start of the 17th century, Valentine says to Cesario, “If the Duke continue these favours towards you, Cesario, you are like to be much advanced.” The linguist Anatoly Liberman says that this version of “like” was being used as a shorthand for likely, and may be the beginnings of our contemporary usage. Here's where they lose me. I'd need a bit more support for that hypothesis. The dialogue isn't "You're, like, gonna get promoted," but as noted, a shorthand for "likely," perhaps to fit better in iambic pentameter. But the biggest lie about “like” is that it’s stupid; that it adds nothing to the meaning of a sentence. “People say language is random. But language is almost never random. You can’t just stick that like in anywhere,” says Fought. “So for example, if I say, ‘Oh look at that boy over there. He’s wearing a top hat. And he’s like, 10.’ That makes perfect sense. But if you say ‘How old is your brother’? And I say ‘He’s like, 10’ that’s a little more unusual. Or if I said, ‘My, like, grandma died.’ That’d be a very strange context to hear it. So there’s patterns. There’s ways to do it more grammatically.” English evolves, but as with any evolution, there are constraints. So if linguists are largely agreed that “like” is, at least in some contexts, no bad thing, why does society still bristle at it? Katherine D Kinzler, the author of How You Say It, a book about linguistic bias – which she argues is one of the most persistent prejudices in our society – says that taking someone to task for the way they speak is one of the last societally accepted ways to exercise our prejudices. I can buy that. I'm in the South, but near the cusp of North, and even around here, a lot of people think a Southern accent marks someone as having lower intelligence. This ain't necessarily so. Sure, plenty of Southerners are dumb as dirt. So are plenty of everyone else. ...the best linguistic studies today suggest people who say “like” may actually be more intelligent than those that don’t. One, published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, which examined 263 conversational transcripts, found that “conscientious people” and those who are more “thoughtful and aware of themselves and their surroundings” are the most likely to use discourse markers such as “like”. "May" is the key word there. (And don't get me started on may vs. might .) One study does not science make. But it's at least a falsification of the premise "all likers are dumb."Anyway, just another thing I thought I'd, like, share with y'all. |
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