try to comprehend that which you'll never comprehend
In an amazing followup to recent conversations about face-macing, Housemate Abby actually maced herself in the face at dinner recently. Apparently, she thought the mace distribution mechanism was a flashlight.
...
Quick quotation fun times:
"He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love -- first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage."
~ Camus, quoted in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
...
Let's talk about Rational Characters in Fiction.
Housemate Mike recently forwarded me a post from the excellent blog Overcoming Bias that talks about the science fiction and fantasy author Lawrence Watt-Evans. Yudkowsky, the blog's eminently rational writer, makes the point that most fictional characters are not especially rational, and goes on to praise Watt-Evans for writing characters who are quite rational. Intrigued, I checked some Watt-Evans books out of the library -- and now I'm pleased, because I liked them, and I have a whole new prolific author to explore. Yes!
Watt-Evans' writing style isn't poetic or original or incredibly stirring; I wouldn't call most of his characters vivid or incredibly compelling. He has "romances" in all the books I've read -- but they're positively boring, and I wish they'd been left out. His rationalism makes interesting books because the plots are unpredictable in a realistic way; characters' actions can and do fail, and the characters tend to have simple thought patterns along the lines of those of a real person. It also leads to a sometimes rather, er, stiltedly precise narrative. * If he reminds me of anyone, it's Isaac Asimov -- whose introduction to Nemesis, for instance, talks about how his major goal has always been clarity over everything, and whose romances aren't great either -- or Steven Brust, whose characters also tend to be specifically quite rational. ** Again, I like Watt-Evans' books; it's not like I wasn't at all stirred or compelled, and the books are definitely fun, with interesting twists. But.
"I'd like to see more rationalist fiction. Not necessarily in Watt-Evans's exact vein, because we already have Watt-Evans, and thus, there is no need to invent him. But rationalist fiction is hard to do well; there are plenty of clichés out there, but few depictions that say something new or true."
... says Yudkowsky.
One: Maybe rationalist fiction isn't so popular because, well, people aren't interested in a huge amount of rationality in their fiction. Don't get me wrong -- I hate it when the main character in a book does something blindingly stupid for no reason save to advance the plot, too. And I try to be pragmatic, and revelations on the subject of human rationality never cease to fascinate me. I certainly don't want stupid characters, or characters whose actions I can't comprehend. But aren't most people looking for emotional connection, emotional insight from fiction, more than a clear outline of a character's rational actions? ***
I'm not saying that emotional characters and rational characters are mutually exclusive. But I wonder ... if you're focusing on making your narrative "clear" or your characters "rational", how much are you probably going to end up saying about emotions? And if you're not saying much about emotions, how much are you really saying about people? How much is there to depict that's "new" or "true", as Yudkowsky says, about particularly rational people and their rational, totally comprehensible actions?
Two: How rational are actual people, anyway? The other night I did something I haven't done in a while, and read over ye olde Shataina. (For those coming late to my audience: most of my senior thesis was basically game fanfiction, based on a roleplaying game that I played through myself. Yeah, I know. Even now, I still think it's pretty good, though.) I see a number of things in the story that I would pare down stylistically, now ... etc. **** But I think I did a decent enough job on the emotional passages.
The interesting thing about this is that Shataina's story is based on real actions, in that I played Shataina in a game, and then I wrote a story from the game. But there are definitely irrational things that she did, because I did them. She/I missed important details; I got distracted and confused; I made decisions that don't necessarily make a lot of sense in retrospect -- one of them led to the most distressing part of the game, which I still can't review without my heart clenching and my breath stopping. It still hurts; I really hurt myself -- she really hurt herself -- with irrationality. I think she's (I am) pretty rational, and I think I wrote her that way. But I also think that the best parts are the irrational ones. Sure, I think I did a reasonable job describing her random everyday actions too, and I think those tended to be pretty rational, but are those descriptions compelling or just amusing?
If I were to go back and redo the narrative to make S. less stupid and irrational, I think the story would be harmed. More to the point, it would be untrue. It would not be faithful to the stupid and irrational real actions that informed it.
Going back to the Brust comparison, I think he writes more successful emotional interactions than Watt-Evans because he's willing to describe irrational actions. Brust doesn't use a lot of emotional language, but he does show his characters doing things that are not necessarily well-thought-out or in their best interest.
Conclusion: I'm not trying to argue with or "disprove" Yudkowsky, exactly. I like rational characters, this boils down to taste as per Footnote 3, etc. I think Yudkowsky wrote a pretty reasonable thing over there, and this is less a response to his post than a tangent in a different direction.
Less than a discussion about whether rationalist novels / characters are "better" or "worse", I think what I'm trying to get at here is the question of whether eminently rational characters can be hard-hitting emotionally. I want to avoid saying something like, "Rational characters can't be emotional" or "Emotional characters can't be rational". I mean, rational characters are still greatly motivated by emotion. Lawrence Watt-Evans definitely throws in some emotional motivations (such as the romances I mentioned), though a lot of them are sort of unconvincing. So here's the question: could Watt-Evans have made his characters' emotions more convincing, more hard-hitting, if he'd included some evidence or description that could be described as "irrational"?
Maybe this isn't a real distinction that I'm making, here. And hmm, I should have defined my terms better. But here I am with this post and late for a wedding, so let's see if any of you have anything to say on what I've got.
* Upon the second page of Night of Madness, we arrive at this paragraph: "This lovely afternoon was the fourth day of Summerheat; so far this year the month had not lived up to its name, and the weather was mild. Hanner was sweating, his shirt sticking to his back, but it was from exertion, not the day's heat." The whole book is like that: "This thing might be true, but might not, and might have been caused by this other thing, though there could always be an alternate explanation."
** My favorite Steven Brust book is probably Agyar, a vampire novel that manages to be cool and pragmatic, but still actually touching. My second favorite is not focused on rationality at all -- The Gypsy, with Megan Lindholm -- a novel most remarkable for, as I recall, its fine sense of strangeness. But the books I'm really comparing Watt-Evans to are the Vlad books (starting with Jhereg), whose main character = raw, hot pragmatism.
*** I suppose this probably boils down to a different-strokes-for-different-folks kinda thing, and I am particularly biased in one direction (were you to check my LiveJournal profile, you would soon spot the following among my listed interests: "despair", "extremes", "unknowable and unspoken things"). I recommend Tanith Lee, who is very long on emotions and vivid drama and tends short on plots.
**** If I ever publish a novel, I wonder if I'll be able to edit later editions for no reason other than awesomeness? I've only ever seen, like, one author do this.
...
Notify Chicago: Sign Up With Your Cell Phone!
NotifyChicago is a new free city service that provides residents with recorded telephone messages, text messages and/or e-mail alerts on various emergency and non-emergency situations taking place throughout Chicago.
from ericrogers_wp, who notes: "One glaring flaw (IMHO): you're required to login at least once every 60 days and change or at least confirm your password, and they don't send out reminders about that, they just deactivate your account if you don't. You shouldn't have to put 'update emergency alert account' on your calendar every two months forever. I hope they change that."
A "people's atlas" of Chicago (more like an art project really)
Google Maps can tell you how to get from point A to point B, but it’s the journey in between that holds the most interesting information. Those details get the spotlight in Notes for a People’s Atlas of Chicago, a project launched in February 2006 by AREA Chicago, a local biannual magazine that weighs in on art, education and grassroots activism. AREA distributes sheets featuring the geographic outline of Chicago and invites people to map out their specific knowledge of the city then submit it at one of eight specified drop boxes (see chicagoatlas.areaprojects.com). Through October 1, AREA is taking submissions for maps about 1968 Chicago.
I love the one that trumpets, "This shit ain't Detroit."
from Housemate Lisa, who has a map featured!
"Super Booker"
Cute short story about an agent who books superheroes.
from v1c1ous.
Tiny Living
created as a response to new york city’s cramped living conditions, tiny living is a store that aims to provide solutions for small spaces. the founders, a husband and wife team, have spent many years living in cramped new york city apartments- one of which was a studio that measured a mere 200 sq. ft. tiny living offers a range of cleverly designed, affordable items that are small in scale, multi-purpose, flexible or organizational.
from cooper_korman.
"Monogamy gene" found in people
Hasse Walum at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues looked at the various forms of the gene coding for a vasopressin receptor in 552 Swedish people, who were all in heterosexual partnerships. The researchers also investigated the quality of their relationships.
They found that variation in a section of the gene called RS3 334 was linked to how men bond with their partners. Men can have none, one or two copies of the RS3 334 section, and the higher the number of copies, the worse men scored on a measure of pair bonding.
Not only that, men with two copies of RS3 334 were more likely to be unmarried than men with one or none, and if they were married, they were twice as likely to have a marital crisis.
I don't like the tone of the article very much, and really it sounds overall a bit suspect. But it does support my whole poly/mono as a sexual orientation thing ( minor followup here), so I had to post it!
from miketodd13.
Russian Scam Check: check on your mail order bride
One thing that all professional flower and gift delivery companies have in common is the fact that they have the misfortune of dealing with scammers. Scamming is tarnishing the reputation of an otherwise prospering dating community. It is a shame how human emotions are played with, how hopes for a better future are crushed by dishonest, money-hungry men and women.
... It is because of this, that we have started this site, dedicated to the prevention of future financial losses and emotional heartache, as well as an answer to the question - is she real? Flower sites might not give you much information about a failed order, and you will be left in a state of doubt thinking that maybe they were wrong, or there was a big misunderstanding. We offer a unique service where we will personally visit the address you provide us with, and give you an eyewitness account of what we find.
Warning: annoying sound thing immediately as you enter site, but you can close it out easily. Although really, all you need of this site is the concept. That's enough for anyone. Unless some of you have Ukrainian brides incoming that I haven't heard about.
...
Quick quotation fun times:
"He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love -- first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage."
~ Camus, quoted in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
...
Let's talk about Rational Characters in Fiction.
Housemate Mike recently forwarded me a post from the excellent blog Overcoming Bias that talks about the science fiction and fantasy author Lawrence Watt-Evans. Yudkowsky, the blog's eminently rational writer, makes the point that most fictional characters are not especially rational, and goes on to praise Watt-Evans for writing characters who are quite rational. Intrigued, I checked some Watt-Evans books out of the library -- and now I'm pleased, because I liked them, and I have a whole new prolific author to explore. Yes!
Watt-Evans' writing style isn't poetic or original or incredibly stirring; I wouldn't call most of his characters vivid or incredibly compelling. He has "romances" in all the books I've read -- but they're positively boring, and I wish they'd been left out. His rationalism makes interesting books because the plots are unpredictable in a realistic way; characters' actions can and do fail, and the characters tend to have simple thought patterns along the lines of those of a real person. It also leads to a sometimes rather, er, stiltedly precise narrative. * If he reminds me of anyone, it's Isaac Asimov -- whose introduction to Nemesis, for instance, talks about how his major goal has always been clarity over everything, and whose romances aren't great either -- or Steven Brust, whose characters also tend to be specifically quite rational. ** Again, I like Watt-Evans' books; it's not like I wasn't at all stirred or compelled, and the books are definitely fun, with interesting twists. But.
"I'd like to see more rationalist fiction. Not necessarily in Watt-Evans's exact vein, because we already have Watt-Evans, and thus, there is no need to invent him. But rationalist fiction is hard to do well; there are plenty of clichés out there, but few depictions that say something new or true."
... says Yudkowsky.
One: Maybe rationalist fiction isn't so popular because, well, people aren't interested in a huge amount of rationality in their fiction. Don't get me wrong -- I hate it when the main character in a book does something blindingly stupid for no reason save to advance the plot, too. And I try to be pragmatic, and revelations on the subject of human rationality never cease to fascinate me. I certainly don't want stupid characters, or characters whose actions I can't comprehend. But aren't most people looking for emotional connection, emotional insight from fiction, more than a clear outline of a character's rational actions? ***
I'm not saying that emotional characters and rational characters are mutually exclusive. But I wonder ... if you're focusing on making your narrative "clear" or your characters "rational", how much are you probably going to end up saying about emotions? And if you're not saying much about emotions, how much are you really saying about people? How much is there to depict that's "new" or "true", as Yudkowsky says, about particularly rational people and their rational, totally comprehensible actions?
Two: How rational are actual people, anyway? The other night I did something I haven't done in a while, and read over ye olde Shataina. (For those coming late to my audience: most of my senior thesis was basically game fanfiction, based on a roleplaying game that I played through myself. Yeah, I know. Even now, I still think it's pretty good, though.) I see a number of things in the story that I would pare down stylistically, now ... etc. **** But I think I did a decent enough job on the emotional passages.
The interesting thing about this is that Shataina's story is based on real actions, in that I played Shataina in a game, and then I wrote a story from the game. But there are definitely irrational things that she did, because I did them. She/I missed important details; I got distracted and confused; I made decisions that don't necessarily make a lot of sense in retrospect -- one of them led to the most distressing part of the game, which I still can't review without my heart clenching and my breath stopping. It still hurts; I really hurt myself -- she really hurt herself -- with irrationality. I think she's (I am) pretty rational, and I think I wrote her that way. But I also think that the best parts are the irrational ones. Sure, I think I did a reasonable job describing her random everyday actions too, and I think those tended to be pretty rational, but are those descriptions compelling or just amusing?
If I were to go back and redo the narrative to make S. less stupid and irrational, I think the story would be harmed. More to the point, it would be untrue. It would not be faithful to the stupid and irrational real actions that informed it.
Going back to the Brust comparison, I think he writes more successful emotional interactions than Watt-Evans because he's willing to describe irrational actions. Brust doesn't use a lot of emotional language, but he does show his characters doing things that are not necessarily well-thought-out or in their best interest.
Conclusion: I'm not trying to argue with or "disprove" Yudkowsky, exactly. I like rational characters, this boils down to taste as per Footnote 3, etc. I think Yudkowsky wrote a pretty reasonable thing over there, and this is less a response to his post than a tangent in a different direction.
Less than a discussion about whether rationalist novels / characters are "better" or "worse", I think what I'm trying to get at here is the question of whether eminently rational characters can be hard-hitting emotionally. I want to avoid saying something like, "Rational characters can't be emotional" or "Emotional characters can't be rational". I mean, rational characters are still greatly motivated by emotion. Lawrence Watt-Evans definitely throws in some emotional motivations (such as the romances I mentioned), though a lot of them are sort of unconvincing. So here's the question: could Watt-Evans have made his characters' emotions more convincing, more hard-hitting, if he'd included some evidence or description that could be described as "irrational"?
Maybe this isn't a real distinction that I'm making, here. And hmm, I should have defined my terms better. But here I am with this post and late for a wedding, so let's see if any of you have anything to say on what I've got.
* Upon the second page of Night of Madness, we arrive at this paragraph: "This lovely afternoon was the fourth day of Summerheat; so far this year the month had not lived up to its name, and the weather was mild. Hanner was sweating, his shirt sticking to his back, but it was from exertion, not the day's heat." The whole book is like that: "This thing might be true, but might not, and might have been caused by this other thing, though there could always be an alternate explanation."
** My favorite Steven Brust book is probably Agyar, a vampire novel that manages to be cool and pragmatic, but still actually touching. My second favorite is not focused on rationality at all -- The Gypsy, with Megan Lindholm -- a novel most remarkable for, as I recall, its fine sense of strangeness. But the books I'm really comparing Watt-Evans to are the Vlad books (starting with Jhereg), whose main character = raw, hot pragmatism.
*** I suppose this probably boils down to a different-strokes-for-different-folks kinda thing, and I am particularly biased in one direction (were you to check my LiveJournal profile, you would soon spot the following among my listed interests: "despair", "extremes", "unknowable and unspoken things"). I recommend Tanith Lee, who is very long on emotions and vivid drama and tends short on plots.
**** If I ever publish a novel, I wonder if I'll be able to edit later editions for no reason other than awesomeness? I've only ever seen, like, one author do this.
...
Notify Chicago: Sign Up With Your Cell Phone!
NotifyChicago is a new free city service that provides residents with recorded telephone messages, text messages and/or e-mail alerts on various emergency and non-emergency situations taking place throughout Chicago.
from ericrogers_wp, who notes: "One glaring flaw (IMHO): you're required to login at least once every 60 days and change or at least confirm your password, and they don't send out reminders about that, they just deactivate your account if you don't. You shouldn't have to put 'update emergency alert account' on your calendar every two months forever. I hope they change that."
A "people's atlas" of Chicago (more like an art project really)
Google Maps can tell you how to get from point A to point B, but it’s the journey in between that holds the most interesting information. Those details get the spotlight in Notes for a People’s Atlas of Chicago, a project launched in February 2006 by AREA Chicago, a local biannual magazine that weighs in on art, education and grassroots activism. AREA distributes sheets featuring the geographic outline of Chicago and invites people to map out their specific knowledge of the city then submit it at one of eight specified drop boxes (see chicagoatlas.areaprojects.com). Through October 1, AREA is taking submissions for maps about 1968 Chicago.
I love the one that trumpets, "This shit ain't Detroit."
from Housemate Lisa, who has a map featured!
"Super Booker"
Cute short story about an agent who books superheroes.
from v1c1ous.
Tiny Living
created as a response to new york city’s cramped living conditions, tiny living is a store that aims to provide solutions for small spaces. the founders, a husband and wife team, have spent many years living in cramped new york city apartments- one of which was a studio that measured a mere 200 sq. ft. tiny living offers a range of cleverly designed, affordable items that are small in scale, multi-purpose, flexible or organizational.
from cooper_korman.
"Monogamy gene" found in people
Hasse Walum at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues looked at the various forms of the gene coding for a vasopressin receptor in 552 Swedish people, who were all in heterosexual partnerships. The researchers also investigated the quality of their relationships.
They found that variation in a section of the gene called RS3 334 was linked to how men bond with their partners. Men can have none, one or two copies of the RS3 334 section, and the higher the number of copies, the worse men scored on a measure of pair bonding.
Not only that, men with two copies of RS3 334 were more likely to be unmarried than men with one or none, and if they were married, they were twice as likely to have a marital crisis.
I don't like the tone of the article very much, and really it sounds overall a bit suspect. But it does support my whole poly/mono as a sexual orientation thing ( minor followup here), so I had to post it!
from miketodd13.
Russian Scam Check: check on your mail order bride
One thing that all professional flower and gift delivery companies have in common is the fact that they have the misfortune of dealing with scammers. Scamming is tarnishing the reputation of an otherwise prospering dating community. It is a shame how human emotions are played with, how hopes for a better future are crushed by dishonest, money-hungry men and women.
... It is because of this, that we have started this site, dedicated to the prevention of future financial losses and emotional heartache, as well as an answer to the question - is she real? Flower sites might not give you much information about a failed order, and you will be left in a state of doubt thinking that maybe they were wrong, or there was a big misunderstanding. We offer a unique service where we will personally visit the address you provide us with, and give you an eyewitness account of what we find.
Warning: annoying sound thing immediately as you enter site, but you can close it out easily. Although really, all you need of this site is the concept. That's enough for anyone. Unless some of you have Ukrainian brides incoming that I haven't heard about.