nerds vs jocks
Also, read part two of John Hodgman's AV Club interview. The theme of this one is giving advice, nerds vs. jocks, and celebrity.
I really liked this one section where he talks about some advice he gave to a man thinking of doing the Ironman Triathlon. Hodgman got a lot of shit for telling the man not to do it, mainly because he'd made a promise to his wife not to do it and he'd cited inspiring his children as a motivation FOR doing it. The argument was, if he really wanted to inspire his kids he wouldn't blatantly go against a promise he'd made to his life partner to do something essentially selfish. Because let's face it, training for the iron man isn't exactly going to give you a whole lot of free time to play with your kids and make love to your wife.
Hodgman made a good point that if this man had decided he wanted to move to Antarctica and rebuild the set from John Carpenter's The Thing or spend the next year making a miniature model of Middle Earth in the basement for every waking hour of the day everyone would've agreed with his decision to shoot the man down. But because what this man was doing was a display of athleticism, denying him that honor was seen as a bad call. But how are the two things different fundamentally? Sure they use different muscles of the body and task you in different ways but both involve you spending gross amounts of time away from your family to be by yourself and do something wholy for yourself in order to fulfill a dream that is specifically yours. So really the criticism wasn't so much about Hodgman crushing a man's dream as Hodgman preventing someone from being an athlete.
But that's the thing about society. Obsessions, neurosis, and abnormalities aren't acceptable as a general rule but there are so many accepted venues within the context of culture in which a person with these issues could flourish. And most of them have to do with sports. On one side it's great that these people can find a place to belong. But on the other side, it seems unfair that people who have these same problems should be ashamed of them simply because they weren't able to employ them toward a socially accepted venu.
Take the triathlon man for example. His lazer focus and physical stamina is completely ok if he wants to do the Iron Man. If he decided that instead he wanted to train in sword play and became the found of an elite LARP community in which he was the king and its greatest swordsman then I'm guessing everyone would think he was crazy. But are the two really that different? In one you train for an entire year non-stop so that you can first swim 2.4 miles, then bike 112 miles, before finally running another 26 miles without pause. If you don't consider that some sort of rationalized insanity I don't know what is. In the other you train for the same amount of time in order to employ your efforts into making a live action roleplaying game about fantasy/medieval societies. Obviously the context is different but do either sound more prepostrous than the other?
::shrugs::
In NaNo news, I'm slowly catching up on my word count and I think I'm picking up steam some what on the plot. I'm almost there, I'm getting close, I'm not quite there yet. It's feeling a little painful but I'm going to get through it. Also, why is it only day 9 and I feel like this? T_T;;;;;
A main issue I'm having right now is trying to better define my characters. They all seem to be globbing together into a faceless mass of teenagers and one of my main characters is wooden and boring. I really like my villains but I've been sidelining them to flesh out my heros but they're being annoying and are refusing to be three dimensional. It's really bad when, only 10k in, I'm already thinking about which ones I should kill in order to not have to write about them anymore. Ahaha. It's not even that I dislike them. It's that I'm sick of dealing with so many characters and not being to get one who's actually dynamic and three dimensional.
I really liked this one section where he talks about some advice he gave to a man thinking of doing the Ironman Triathlon. Hodgman got a lot of shit for telling the man not to do it, mainly because he'd made a promise to his wife not to do it and he'd cited inspiring his children as a motivation FOR doing it. The argument was, if he really wanted to inspire his kids he wouldn't blatantly go against a promise he'd made to his life partner to do something essentially selfish. Because let's face it, training for the iron man isn't exactly going to give you a whole lot of free time to play with your kids and make love to your wife.
Hodgman made a good point that if this man had decided he wanted to move to Antarctica and rebuild the set from John Carpenter's The Thing or spend the next year making a miniature model of Middle Earth in the basement for every waking hour of the day everyone would've agreed with his decision to shoot the man down. But because what this man was doing was a display of athleticism, denying him that honor was seen as a bad call. But how are the two things different fundamentally? Sure they use different muscles of the body and task you in different ways but both involve you spending gross amounts of time away from your family to be by yourself and do something wholy for yourself in order to fulfill a dream that is specifically yours. So really the criticism wasn't so much about Hodgman crushing a man's dream as Hodgman preventing someone from being an athlete.
But that's the thing about society. Obsessions, neurosis, and abnormalities aren't acceptable as a general rule but there are so many accepted venues within the context of culture in which a person with these issues could flourish. And most of them have to do with sports. On one side it's great that these people can find a place to belong. But on the other side, it seems unfair that people who have these same problems should be ashamed of them simply because they weren't able to employ them toward a socially accepted venu.
Take the triathlon man for example. His lazer focus and physical stamina is completely ok if he wants to do the Iron Man. If he decided that instead he wanted to train in sword play and became the found of an elite LARP community in which he was the king and its greatest swordsman then I'm guessing everyone would think he was crazy. But are the two really that different? In one you train for an entire year non-stop so that you can first swim 2.4 miles, then bike 112 miles, before finally running another 26 miles without pause. If you don't consider that some sort of rationalized insanity I don't know what is. In the other you train for the same amount of time in order to employ your efforts into making a live action roleplaying game about fantasy/medieval societies. Obviously the context is different but do either sound more prepostrous than the other?
::shrugs::
In NaNo news, I'm slowly catching up on my word count and I think I'm picking up steam some what on the plot. I'm almost there, I'm getting close, I'm not quite there yet. It's feeling a little painful but I'm going to get through it. Also, why is it only day 9 and I feel like this? T_T;;;;;
A main issue I'm having right now is trying to better define my characters. They all seem to be globbing together into a faceless mass of teenagers and one of my main characters is wooden and boring. I really like my villains but I've been sidelining them to flesh out my heros but they're being annoying and are refusing to be three dimensional. It's really bad when, only 10k in, I'm already thinking about which ones I should kill in order to not have to write about them anymore. Ahaha. It's not even that I dislike them. It's that I'm sick of dealing with so many characters and not being to get one who's actually dynamic and three dimensional.