As one
When I was a child, I sometimes used to wonder why adults would cry over things that didn't involve them. I stopped wondering about that a long time ago, though.
It works, bitches.
"We invented the scientific method because we are naturally terrible at explaining our own experiences. Without the scientific method, there is no way to know what causes simple, everyday things like thunder. Every explanation is as good as another, and if an explanation becomes culturally bound and passed down, that becomes the official explanation for millennia. Our natural tendency is to confirm our assumptions, but science tries to disconfirm our assumptions one by one until the outline of the truth begins to form. Once we realized that approach generates results, we went from horses and tobacco enemas to mapping DNA and walking on the moon in a few generations."
~ David McRaney
The Hunger Games
The following is a very recent post in my soon-to-be-shut-down (end of month) G+ account, whence of course it would soon perish. A friend said, "This would've made a great blog post," so I promised to repost it here.
Please don't feed me any spoilers. I've only read the first book, and not seen the film.
Finally got to read The Hunger Games. I recommend it, though I had a few small issues with it. (NO spoilers, I promise, so don't worry.)
- Suzanne Collins seems to overlook the old "show, don't tell" writing maxim more than I feel is reasonable to give her a pass on.
- The use of present tense appears to be a growing trend in popular fiction. I've gotten over my classical and aesthetic resistance to it, but there's no denying that it can be confusing for the reader when both the narrative and character quotations are in the same verb tense, and the only distinction is a few tiny slashes.
[Edit: I edited a friend's novel years ago, and convinced her to change it from present to past tense, which is no small thing to ask. I started to feel bad about that a third of the way into this book, but got over it by two thirds in. Perhaps Collins felt this choice gave her narrative more immediacy or heightened the drama, but I only found it occasionally confusing.]
- If I had to guess (and I do, since I haven't read anything about her yet), I'd suspect that like more and more contemporary writers, Collins got her start in fanfic. There are a few strong whiffs of Mary Sue in here, and more than a few bits that strike me as gratuitous, even distracting and unnecessary. It's not Vonda McIntyre bad, but it annoyed me a few times.
- I can't argue from the seat of a smash-success writer, but my sense is that planting clues, foreshadowing, and even visual metaphor should be a little more subtle. At least, that's how I like it: I want to be surprised at least some of the time. To her credit, however, every critical element is fully justified in due course, at least within the story's own reality, and there's no sense of deus ex machina or awkward plot devices. Even the parts where I fully expected that came off well and enjoyed them fully.
- For all that, the story's exposition is well paced, and transitions very smoothly into the main narrative, almost seamlessly. There's no sense, as there is in some books, of the opening being bolted onto the main body. I feel quite differently about the ending, however. I won't pull punches: There's no denouement, at least not anything I recognised as such, and the story seems to come to a rather sudden stop. I sense that Collins was going for ambiguity, but for me it was more like when an interviewer tells a guest that time is up. I was left not only feeling I could not guess what happened, but that that might be because I missed something, or something is missing.
- Related to the above, the overall pacing of the story seems a bit rushed to me. It flows well, but it seemed to lack solid cadences: chapters roll into one another, over and over, never stopping to take a breath. (I'm still unsure how she decided to place these breaks where she did. since it's not obvious to me.)
- I might be a bit dull, but some things never quite added up for me, especially the overall geography of the setting. I know it's North America, more or less, or part of, but it seems sometimes enormous and sometimes very small. This detail -- not strictly relevant to the plot or logic, but to the sense of reality -- confused me all the way through, and still does.
[Edit: I've since seen some maps. These appear to be me to be speculative, not canon, mostly because they vary so much between them. I haven't studied them too closely, nor read about them, for fear of spoilers. But my takeaway right now is that it looks like either others are as confused as I am, or some crazy shit happens in the later books.]
Petty whinging aside, it's a great read, a terrific story, and I recommend it. I've already put a reserve on the sequel.
Please don't feed me any spoilers. I've only read the first book, and not seen the film.
Finally got to read The Hunger Games. I recommend it, though I had a few small issues with it. (NO spoilers, I promise, so don't worry.)
- Suzanne Collins seems to overlook the old "show, don't tell" writing maxim more than I feel is reasonable to give her a pass on.
- The use of present tense appears to be a growing trend in popular fiction. I've gotten over my classical and aesthetic resistance to it, but there's no denying that it can be confusing for the reader when both the narrative and character quotations are in the same verb tense, and the only distinction is a few tiny slashes.
[Edit: I edited a friend's novel years ago, and convinced her to change it from present to past tense, which is no small thing to ask. I started to feel bad about that a third of the way into this book, but got over it by two thirds in. Perhaps Collins felt this choice gave her narrative more immediacy or heightened the drama, but I only found it occasionally confusing.]
- If I had to guess (and I do, since I haven't read anything about her yet), I'd suspect that like more and more contemporary writers, Collins got her start in fanfic. There are a few strong whiffs of Mary Sue in here, and more than a few bits that strike me as gratuitous, even distracting and unnecessary. It's not Vonda McIntyre bad, but it annoyed me a few times.
- I can't argue from the seat of a smash-success writer, but my sense is that planting clues, foreshadowing, and even visual metaphor should be a little more subtle. At least, that's how I like it: I want to be surprised at least some of the time. To her credit, however, every critical element is fully justified in due course, at least within the story's own reality, and there's no sense of deus ex machina or awkward plot devices. Even the parts where I fully expected that came off well and enjoyed them fully.
- For all that, the story's exposition is well paced, and transitions very smoothly into the main narrative, almost seamlessly. There's no sense, as there is in some books, of the opening being bolted onto the main body. I feel quite differently about the ending, however. I won't pull punches: There's no denouement, at least not anything I recognised as such, and the story seems to come to a rather sudden stop. I sense that Collins was going for ambiguity, but for me it was more like when an interviewer tells a guest that time is up. I was left not only feeling I could not guess what happened, but that that might be because I missed something, or something is missing.
- Related to the above, the overall pacing of the story seems a bit rushed to me. It flows well, but it seemed to lack solid cadences: chapters roll into one another, over and over, never stopping to take a breath. (I'm still unsure how she decided to place these breaks where she did. since it's not obvious to me.)
- I might be a bit dull, but some things never quite added up for me, especially the overall geography of the setting. I know it's North America, more or less, or part of, but it seems sometimes enormous and sometimes very small. This detail -- not strictly relevant to the plot or logic, but to the sense of reality -- confused me all the way through, and still does.
[Edit: I've since seen some maps. These appear to be me to be speculative, not canon, mostly because they vary so much between them. I haven't studied them too closely, nor read about them, for fear of spoilers. But my takeaway right now is that it looks like either others are as confused as I am, or some crazy shit happens in the later books.]
Petty whinging aside, it's a great read, a terrific story, and I recommend it. I've already put a reserve on the sequel.
Writer's Block: Musically inclined
Do you play a musical instrument? For how long?
I play an egg shaker. Sometimes for several minutes at a time.
The Nekkit Time
I'm not very much into clothing, generally. I consider them mostly functional, and often unnecessary. Their main functions, as I see it, are: 1) make or keep me comfortable; 2) keep other people from hassling me more than necessary. From that view, the idea that I must wear anything, especially any particular thing, just to make someone else happy, seems asinine, and an unwarranted infringement. I think if someone else wants you to wear a particular thing, they should be ready and willing to provide it to you for that purpose, or say nothing: put up or shut up. To the extent that I do wear clothes, I wear whatever works, and don't worry about what it looks like. And I spend money on clothes only to the extent necessary to achieve those basic ends.
I described myself in an online profile some years back as dressing "like every day is laundry day," and that's pretty accurate most days. You know those dumpy clothes you wear when everything else is in the laundry? Yeah, that's most of my clothes, and so it's what I wear most days. Beyond that, clothing serves to amuse me, and if amuses others then that's because it amuses me to do that. I own very little in the way of 'nice' clothes, but a lot of wacky tee-shirts.
That describes my personal philosophy of clothing, not my actual practice. Nor even what I concede is probably a better philosophy and way of living with clothing.
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I described myself in an online profile some years back as dressing "like every day is laundry day," and that's pretty accurate most days. You know those dumpy clothes you wear when everything else is in the laundry? Yeah, that's most of my clothes, and so it's what I wear most days. Beyond that, clothing serves to amuse me, and if amuses others then that's because it amuses me to do that. I own very little in the way of 'nice' clothes, but a lot of wacky tee-shirts.
That describes my personal philosophy of clothing, not my actual practice. Nor even what I concede is probably a better philosophy and way of living with clothing.
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happy
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Long Time Gone
I don't actually remember exactly when I stopped posting to LJ. It was not planned. It just sort of happened, and not all at once. I mean, obviously, the posts stopped coming at some discrete point. (And no, I haven't bothered to look up exactly when; it's only academic, after all.) I mean, it was only after a good while that I sat up and realised I hadn't posted in a good long while. But I do believe I know at least partly why.
Mainly, I let myself get distracted with a lot of other things, including a lot of other online things. I've since set most of those aside, in order to return to my regularly scheduled life, already in progress.
A number of major events have also happened in that time, and I found it increasingly difficult to force myself to sit down and write while feeling that my life was swirling around me like a hurricane. My mother's passing, now nearing a year ago, was of particular note, in that it sharply defined for me a meridian in my life that I'd long known was coming but had little or no conception of in realistic terms. In a number of ways, I'm still sorting that out, and may yet for some time to come. Not long later, I also saw fit -- or perhaps was finally forced -- to uproot myself from the fading soils of Rhode Island and return to my homeground of Connecticut, where I've now been since the end of May. That, too, has been a lot different than I naively imagined, and I'm still dealing with that reality as a matter of daily life, until further notice.
There's more, and that will all come, in time, but for now I just want to say that though I haven't posted in a long time, I have been visiting. Not always regularly, but often enough to keep reasonable track of what's going on in this quieter and more sober and thoughtful corner of teh intarwebz. I've missed being a more active part of it, and I'm glad to be back.
Mainly, I let myself get distracted with a lot of other things, including a lot of other online things. I've since set most of those aside, in order to return to my regularly scheduled life, already in progress.
A number of major events have also happened in that time, and I found it increasingly difficult to force myself to sit down and write while feeling that my life was swirling around me like a hurricane. My mother's passing, now nearing a year ago, was of particular note, in that it sharply defined for me a meridian in my life that I'd long known was coming but had little or no conception of in realistic terms. In a number of ways, I'm still sorting that out, and may yet for some time to come. Not long later, I also saw fit -- or perhaps was finally forced -- to uproot myself from the fading soils of Rhode Island and return to my homeground of Connecticut, where I've now been since the end of May. That, too, has been a lot different than I naively imagined, and I'm still dealing with that reality as a matter of daily life, until further notice.
There's more, and that will all come, in time, but for now I just want to say that though I haven't posted in a long time, I have been visiting. Not always regularly, but often enough to keep reasonable track of what's going on in this quieter and more sober and thoughtful corner of teh intarwebz. I've missed being a more active part of it, and I'm glad to be back.
Writer's Block: Auld Lang Syne
What are your New Year's resolutions? Do you think you'll stick to any of them? If so, for how long?
Red saffron ideas?
I got 2 g (0.07 oz.) of Greek red saffron as a gift. This is apparently "the good stuff," supposedly superior to 'regular' saffron. I think it's properly called Mancha.
I've worked in restaurants that used saffron, but I've never used it myself. I figure it might be a long time before I use it again, if ever, so I want to make this count.
Can anyone recommend some dishes worthy of this rare and costly spice?
I've worked in restaurants that used saffron, but I've never used it myself. I figure it might be a long time before I use it again, if ever, so I want to make this count.
Can anyone recommend some dishes worthy of this rare and costly spice?
Writer's Block: So close to reality.
Imagine an online game which is so close to reality, that you can feel and touch your opponent. What sport, activity or game would you want to play?
You're kidding, right?
Remember what Scott Adams said.
Jacob's cattle beans
I have a pound of 'em, and guests coming in from Maine in a few days, so I thought they might like something made with some real Maine cattle beans.
Most of what I've turned up online are baked bean recipes. I'm sure they're all awesome, but I don't have a pot for making baked beans, so..
I'd ideally like to make some kind of rich, hearty stew to serve homemade bread with. I found a couple soup-type recipes, but I'd like to see a few more options.
Anyone?
Most of what I've turned up online are baked bean recipes. I'm sure they're all awesome, but I don't have a pot for making baked beans, so..
I'd ideally like to make some kind of rich, hearty stew to serve homemade bread with. I found a couple soup-type recipes, but I'd like to see a few more options.
Anyone?