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It's not the principles that kill you in the end, it's the books. - Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Daughter
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. - Wittgenstein
Never express yourself more clearly than you think. - Niels Bohr
A labyrinthian man never looks for the truth, but only for his Ariadne. - Nietzsche
What else do you do with dark and sinister forces but play with them? - Deadlock, Khronicles of Khaos
There are three things that are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third. - Valmiki, the Ramayana
If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language and you're dumb and blind. - Salman Rushdie
Even the oldest stories are new to somebody. - Neil Gaiman, The Kindly Ones
Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories... because one isn't always equal to oneself. - Primo Levi
When you set out for Ithaca, ask that your way be long. - Constantine Cavafy
"You can't do that", she said. "You can't have 'fairy tales' without 'fair'! And stuff you find out by determining what words are inside other words is never wrong. Now drink more tea." - Hitherby Dragons |
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This time, I took a different tack with a preemptive statement.
"I'm a Christian, and I believe in honesty, integrity, tolerance, complete equality, women in the workplace, evolution, and sex before gay marriage. If you think any of those things are incompatible with Christianity, there's no point our discussing things."
"Well, some of those, such as evolution, are difficult to reconcile with the Bible - "
"Not for me, they aren't."
"-but we won't keep you, and I hope you have a nice day."
I'm tickled to learn that they (or that one, at least, with the obligatory lurking sidekick) apparently think evolution is worse than gay sex/marriage.
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After reading this, I'm getting tempted to start using Twitter myself. Since I am a very cautious adopter, however (except when I pick something up early on, complain about it, and abandon it for something else) I am not going to do so just from that. I know a lot of you use it; what does it do that's unique and useful? And is there likely to be any benefit to anyone else from my being on it? With most social networking tools, I tend to be about 95% listener and 5% talker. So the ambient-verbal-grooming thing Ellis describes is possibly not ideal for me. On the other hand, I have four blogs, a facebook, a del.icio.us page, my own Coppermine gallery, and a wiki, and I've wandered through more virtual worlds than most people have supermarkets, so I can hardly claim the Luddite high ground. Tags: geek
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Bah. Lost my temper with a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses - well, with the one who did alllllll the talking, while her sidekick lurked ominously in the background - who wouldn't accept evolution. "Everything was created in its kind. Dogs, for instance." (Explains about the mutation clock. There is, provably, a time before dogs. You cannot deny this.) Damn, if I hadn't lost my temper (later on, after a particularly egregious I-am-your-teacher implication) I might actually have managed to confuse her properly. (And yes, I mostly just posted so I could use the phrase "a time before dogs".) Edit: This is not stopping upsetting me. I hadn't previously encountered this particular strain of evolution denial, and hadn't realised just how incredibly bad theology it was, as well as bad science. "God went through a period of creativity, and then stopped." That's just... so sad. Tags: religion
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The methodology here is a bit dodgy (I'm using Google, with site:librarything.com "Author 1" "Author 2" - it's known to return a small number of duplicate results, and an unknown number of false negatives) but frankly it's the best I've got. The percentages for an intersection are the percent of the lower-ranked author who also had the higher-ranked one. 597 people list at least one book by Walter Wink. 5,530 list at least one book by Diane Duane. 44 (7%) list both authors. I wanted to look at a couple of control groups, so I did this two ways. First, by picking two other authors who wrote Star Trek novelizations. 2,260 list at least one book by John M Ford. His intersection with Duane is 648 (29%). 782 list at least one book by Vonda McIntyre. Her intersection with Duane is 171 (22%). Ford & McIntyre intersect at 155 (20%). 58 (10%) list both Ford and Walter Wink; 1 (0%) lists both McIntyre and Wink. A corresponding & connected religious philosopher seemed to me to be Rene Girard. His LibraryThing stats give him 298 fans, and his intersection with Wink is 54, or 18%. Girard's intersection with Duane is 40 (13%); with Ford it's 33 (11%); and with McIntyre it's 2 (0%). (Neither of them the one who also has Wink.) The second method I looked at was to find another religious philosopher who had similar stats to Wink, and another SF author with similar stats to Duane. It turned out to be John Polkinghorne (605) and Elizabeth Bear (5,780). Polkinghorne's intersection with Wink is 49 (8%), and Bear's with Duane is 384 (7%) so they seem to be connected pairwise at about the same distance in L-space. Polkinghorne's intersection with Duane is 32 (5%) while Bear's with Wink is 7 (1%). For completeness' sake, Polkinghorne's intersection with Bear is 17 (3%). So overall, the Duane/Wink match does seem to be a bit more than random noise after all. Tags: sf
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Through the kind offices of webcowgirl, I saw this last night. The title was a bit offputting, but it proved (not really surprisingly) not to be a pretentiously gothy and overpolished job after all. The premise is simple, but ambitious - 16 scenes done in an order determined by the audience beforehand. I got there too late (thanks to the Central Line) to shuffle objects around in the bar, but I'm assured it was fun. (Relatedly - I was impressed and slightly surprised at the degree of audience investment & enthusiasm. It could be a habitual Southwark Playhouse audience... my cynical first reaction was that the actors had awfully large families. But it was a good play.) The really impressive part was in how well the actors managed the scene changes. They were doing all the SM work themselves, and every scene needed up to half a dozen props and/or costume changes. Given that they only found out what order the scenes would be in when the audience finished mucking around in the bar when they did it (see comments), they did it really smoothly and energetically. It helped, of course, that the floor was marked out in different colours of SM's tape, and that the projection screen flashed up the number of the scene before each one. The projection screen formed most of the set, generally with a variety of indefinably Welsh backgrounds. (I'm fairly sure I recognised part of Swansea there.) The only thing that struck me as rather off was a pair of angel wings, projected behind an actor on a stepladder - they were four inches off registration, so that one tip was clipped by the edge of the screen. That might have been deliberate, since they were also a tiny bit crooked and done in the classic slightly-mistuned-TV style, fuzzy and flickering and strewn with analogue artifacts. They did also deliberately do something which I'd normally consider a complete no-no, which is to have the actor standing in front of them lit by an off-centre profile lamp, giving a hard-edged shadow on the screen, but on top of the shoulder joint of one wing rather than in between them. The final effect was extremely disturbing and worrying, which I suspect was precisely what they intended. "Disturbing" covers most of the play, in fact - it was a lot of hard work, continually forcing you to reevaluate your assumptions about the last few lines in an effort to work out what's going on. Gently, though, with none of that depressing twist-in-the-tale shock-revelation business. My mind definitely feels exercised. Interestingly, it felt quite science-fictional in that respect, with the parallel engagement and suspension of critical thinking about the action. Of course, I'd still maintain that treating that as a specifically SFnal trope is a case of genre exceptionalism, but that's a rant for another time. I'm impressed with everyone involved with the production - it's not just an actor's showpiece, but a director's too, given that any of the scenes could have come first and the one which did was riveting from the get-go. The only criticism I could possibly make is that I'd have chosen a more matte paint for the stage (one actor's white top was reflected in it from time to time), but that's down to the venue not the production company. Tags: theatre
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