Watching What Happens
February 13, 2012 in Blogs
I had a very strange weekend. Half of what I should have done I never did, and half of what I did was probably unnecessary. On Sunday evening it suddenly occurred to me to ask whether I was supposed to be somewhere on Sunday afternoon, thinking that that would be today, and was told rather that I missed it. Nothing went terribly wrong, but nothing went particularly right, either.
There was supposed to be a Collision rehearsal Friday night, but the guy with the key cancelled it and rescheduled it for this week; I have to try to organize everyone and everything for that, but I’m not sure whether that’s going to work or not, and I’m far enough behind schedule tonight that there won’t be any calls. I tried to grab a bit of time to practice myself Friday night, and was asked to stop on the basis that someone had gone to bed early–someone who then got up and went out when it was past the noise curfew and I was up to my elbows in making dinner, so I was a bit annoyed at that. Maybe, though, I’m irritable overall, and so I’m just irritated by everything.
In any case, I have launched the new temporal anomalies series on The Examiner, starting with Watchmen part 1: possibilities. It introduces the temporal problems created by statements made by Dr. Manhattan concerning his abilities. I also finished tweaking the series on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, and managed to watch about half of the new one, 11 Minutes Ago. Normally I don’t care for efforts to entertain through the pain of the characters, but in this case the absurdity of an already bad situation at a wedding reception being complicated by the fact that the crew filming the festivities–and only them–become aware that one of the guests is a time traveler from the future who keeps bouncing back and forth visiting the event out of sequence, and they divert their attention to documenting his trips instead of preserving the nightmarish proceedings is just funny in a really sad way, and you almost feel sorry for bridezilla as she yells at everyone to pay attention to her.
Ah, I just remembered something else I was supposed to mention, and that is for those who did not see it over the weekend I posted an article entitled Off Topic: On Homosexuality in Animals. It’s less an article and more a response to a specific argument in a larger discussion, but I will want to be able to find it again I expect, as it is something that is raised rather frequently. It also has me involved in time-consuming discussions on three fronts, but at least some of the posters are on my side, which is an encouragement.
I’m raking through my brain looking for what else I’m supposed to remember, but all I can recall at this point is that there’s a new article from Eric Ashley, Practise Bits: Cures, in which an interesting start of a story introduces a character and his equipment. Eric elsewhere mentioned what inspired this, but I don’t think I got the connection, so I’m not going to try to explain it.
–M. J. Young
Tadeusz said on February 14, 2012
Your friend Raven seems to have a bit of what we might call ‘the Plantation idea’. If you’re gay, or black, or atheist…you couldn’t possibly vote non-liberal. In my story, I have an atheist verser who is happy to live in a religiously dominated society because he’s a reasonable person, and realizes that an occasional ‘hey, why don’t you come to church’ or ‘Jesus loves you’ or ‘Merry Christmas’ does not seem to compare to getting his head chopped off.
We have added that Blackadder film to our Netflix list.
M. J. Young said on February 14, 2012
The Blackadder film is indeed funny and worth watching, and less than an hour long. It may be funnier if you are already familiar with the Rowan Atkinson series characters.
Raven comes by his personal emphasis on defense of the rights of others honestly; he is the subject of my article Faith and Gaming: Pagans.
It is interesting that Hispanic voters (largely Catholic) are one of the more identifiable groups opposed to the approval of homosexual marriage.
–M. J. Young
JTM said on February 15, 2012
The sense I got from Dr. Manhattan in the comic was that his fatalism was actually what made the future fixed. Specifically, the oddest case in Watchmen was the conversation on Mars. Manhattan is persuaded to return to Earth by the events of the conversation, but it is clear that he already knew exactly how the conversation would play out, leading to the question of why he bothered having it. The only explanation I could think of was that he refused to act on information he would obtain in the future in such a way as to prevent him from obtaining it.
It’s something of an inherent paradox with fixed-time futuresight; if the information you obtain is detailed enough to be useful, it can only really be fixed time if you decide to act like you see yourself acting.
M. J. Young said on February 16, 2012
I start talking about the problems in that conversation in today’s article, but I’ll cover that in today’s Blogless Lepolt.
–M. J. Young