Apartment-palooza!

Posted on 23 August 2010 | View Comments

Writing:
Three more chapters down in editing.  Three more to go and then I can move on to Lesson 3.  I also got hit over the head with this book’s actual theme.  Up until now I’ve thought the duology’s theme would also be this novel’s, but no, it’s actually quite different, which means I’ll have to rework yet more stuff.  But that’s what learning is for, right?  All of the characters in my story are dealing with grieving the loss of something in their own way.  So the book will be about that.  And Lord help me, I’ll need to read up on this to do it justice.  I’m only 28 and pretty green as far as life goes.  Grief isn’t something I have a lot of experience with yet.  I guess I’ll start with C. S. Lewis since he was written two books on the subject, one before his experiences with grief and the second after.  The study should prove illuminating between the theoretical and the actual.  I’m not about to ask God to teach me, because you know how that goes… He just might say yes.  :S

Store:
The first week managing the store at work has gone well for the most part.  There have been a few dominance issues to work out with the very temporary co-manager who is here from another store to train my actual co-manager, but all in all it’s been a positive experience.

Apartment-Palooza!
I’ve also started apartment hunting, and have two as my chief candidates that while somewhat budget-stretching, fit fairly well into it and are about as cheap as I can get without moving into a high-crime area or driving all the way across town.

One is a 500 square foot studio space on ground level.  The second is a 615 square foot one but is down south and may have hardwood floors instead of carpeting and is also on a third floor.  Also of note is that I haven’t been able to see this one yet as the previous tenants were in the process of moving out.  I should be able to see it this week, but I’m unsure how this factors in just yet.  However, it is the cheapest.  The 500 square footer clocks in next at thirty dollars more expensive per month.

If cost were the only variable, I would go for the cheapest, no doubt.  But there are other factors, such as the relative safety of the neighborhood, level of comfort to budget ratio, and well, just pure raw instinct.  And instinct is telling me to take the studio for some reason that I haven’t yet figured out.

But not without reservations.  I’ve lived in a 580 square foot apartment for a year while I was in Colorado Springs.  And let me tell you, that space got positively claustrophobic once or twice, so I am a little hesitant to cram myself into an even smaller space for at least a year.  But it is a known quantity.  My brother lived there with his wife for a year before moving on up (but to the west side this time).  And the apartment I would move into would be newly renovated.  It’s also closer to family. The downside is that it’s small and offers the worst space-to-cost ratio of all of my options.

And I also have to ask myself… being budget-conscious and on a very small income… is what I know about the 500 square foot studio worth paying thirty more dollars a month ($360 a year) than what I would pay for the 615 square footer apartment on the third floor in the (relatively) poorer section of town?  At least I know the neighborhood around the studio is safe.  I only have my cousin’s friend’s word that the neighborhood around the 615 square foot apartment is okay, and the relative condition of the cars parked outside that it’s “okay”.  Perhaps no worse than where I lived for three years in Colorado Springs.  But I don’t know that.  And I don’t know the condition of the apartment, either.

I am also concerned about moving into a section of town that looks “okay” by day but then when you go to move in the residents are suspiciously eying your stuff; which is what happened when I moved to Colorado Springs.  Yeah.  That lease got terminated pretty fast.  Big mistake.

Hopefully I will be able to see that apartment this week.  Because I’m going to need to make a decision soon or all of this will become moot.

p.s. I should also make a note to ask about tornado shelters.  Being stuck on the third floor in the middle of a severe thunderstorm isn’t something I look forward to.  At least the studio apartment is on the ground floor and has a closet in the center of the space that looks defensible from flying debris.  Don’t know about the other apartment yet.

Categories: Personal, Writing | Tags: apartment hunting, respect mai authoritai

So I’ve Been Promoted to Manager

Posted on 16 August 2010 | View Comments

Yup.  My first day was today, manning a new store for Computer Depot all by myself.  So I haven’t really “managed” anybody yet, but they trust me enough to leave me alone.  During the weekdays I’ll be co-managing with someone else on a different shift so I won’t be stuck there all day for 12 hours straight.

I’ve known about the promotion since the middle of June about 2 weeks after I was hired (If that’s not a record, I don’t know what is), and haven’t been able to say anything about it because the boss didn’t want me to.  But now that the store is open, and I’m in the position, I can say something now.

I think I’ve gained some experience already.  I had to deal with a leaky roof first thing in the morning because of the thunderstorm last night.  The rain shower this afternoon also caused the roof tile to collapse, so I got to clean that up.  Dealt with five or six groups of customers today, a really buggy piece of cash register software called Everest, and the store’s entire Internet being funneled through a dinky little cable bandwidth pipe and a cable modem and router that shut off when they got hot.  It was so bad, that I couldn’t even stream audio without having to reset the software, so you can imagine how downloading gigabytes of Windows Updates onto a bunch of PCs went.  And I will do the same tomorrow morning, bright and early at 8:30am.  I can’t wait!

I also can’t wait to share with you my writing news.  I’ve edited through six chapters today in my second pass.  This makes up for least week’s dearth of chapters and puts me back on schedule.  This second pass should be finished in two weeks if I keep doing 3 chapters a week.  I am not sure what day I will be working this weekend, so I will keep my goal at 3 chapters.  Otherwise I would have tried to do four or five.  If I still have Saturday off, I’ll go for four so I will have time to jump into the lesson for the third pass revision in two weeks.

I also started tonight on a new plan for Bible study.  I read the book of Galatians tonight.  I hadn’t been doing very well keeping up with daily devotionals, so I decided this week to spend one good chunk of time per week studying, and I’ve already gotten more out of Galatians than I would have if I had split it up over five or six days.

For example, it occurred to me that from a Christian perspective the entire feud between the Jews and the Arabs is pointless.  This enmity began when Abraham, spurred on by his wife Sarah, sent his second wife Hagar and her son Ishmael into the desert.  Jesus Christ came through Jacob’s line so that all nations would benefit (Galatians 3).  And now through Christ, the descendants of Esau can once again be reunited with their birthright as sons of God.  The simplicity and beauty of this reunification has eluded me until now, but there it has been, sitting there for 2000 years, and I thought I would share it with you.

Categories: Christianity, Job Hunt, Writing | Tags: Bible, Galatians

Of Bigots and Bible Bashers

Posted on 9 August 2010 | View Comments

Everyone who’s been paying attention to the news for the past week knows that federal judge Vaughn Walker overturned the California state constitutional amendment known as Proposition 8 which stated that within that state, marriage would be defined between a man and a woman.

What some of you guys may not realize is that I think the judge is wrong.  And I think I have good reasons to think so.  But I’m not going to go into them here.  If you want to know a little bit about that, I suggest watching the Youtube video I’ve linked below, which starts about 10-11 minutes in.  For the purposes of this post, I just want to point out something I realized this week while talking with various people about what happened.

And that’s that people who are in favor of same-sex marriage intuit that people who don’t want equal treatment of different groups of people must be bigots do so in the same way people on my side intuit that homosexuality is a sin and maybe we as a culture shouldn’t be encouraging it (Note: These are not the best arguments for either position).  It’s because both sides are intuiting a conclusion based upon their most basic starting point; people on my side because of their religious and/or moral convictions and people on the other side because of their sense of fair play.

What I would love to do is find a way to get people past their intuition, which is fine as far as it goes, but with a subject like this it’s more prone to get in the way of understanding the other side’s point of view than it is clarify the other side’s point of view.  And this keeps people from being able to dialogue about same-sex marriage in a civil manner.

Lay people on my side start with “the Bible says” because they think Biblical morality matches reality in the way that makes it the correct moral view.  And they don’t understand that culture doesn’t recognize the Bible as authoritative anymore.

People for same-sex marriage start with their sense of fair play because their attitudes toward marriage isn’t that marriage is done primarily to raise a family and build society, but that marriage is done primarily as a show of love towards a special one.  And if that’s what marriage is about, then why should we keep gays from being able to take that step as well?

What is important about this observation is that when you look between the lines, it becomes clear that one side’s motivations aren’t actually bigoted, and the other side’s motivations really aren’t to intentionally destroy the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of our country.  Let me explain.  These conclusions about the other side are mis-firings of our intuition, I think, because both sides actually have good reasons for doing what they do.  And I think their conclusions are as starkly different as they are because both sides have entirely different conceptions of what marriage is.  But our intuitions about the other side are based entirely on our own conception of what marriage is.  Here there is the disconnect, which means there’s more to the other side than is at first apparent, and they deserve to be heard out.  We should be evaluating the other side’s reasoning and conclusions on their own merits instead of on our own intuitions about them.

Once more and more people start to understand this and endeavor to understand the other side’s best moral reasoning before rendering judgment, then we will actually have better chances at being able to talk about same-sex marriage like adults instead of how the majority of the Twitterverse and Blogosphere are even now carrying on.

As for my writing goals… I’ve been distracted this week, with learning about this phenomenon and, if I’m being honest, with the novel Fatal Alliance (which is turning out to be pretty good) and spending time with friends in Active Worlds.

Some Same-Sex Marriage Resources
ThePublicDiscourse.com – Same-Sex Marriage and the Assault on Moral Reasoning

WhatsWrongWithTheWorld.Net – Some thoughts on Proposition 8

I’m actually on the look-out for pro-same-sex marriage articles that don’t fall into the ad hominem trap I’ve described above, yet make the best case for same-sex marriage.  If you find any well-reasoned ones, please post them in the comments.  Thanks!

Categories: Christianity, Politics | Tags: Prop 8, Proposition 8, Same Sex Marriage

Uhl Eharl Khoehng And A Blast Of Inspiration

Posted on 2 August 2010 | View Comments

This weekend was something of a tsunami of creativity for me.  On Thursday my friend Andrew Gilbertson announced the release of Chapter 3 of his audio drama Star Wars: Marvels*.  So I decided to listen to the first chapter and halfway through became inspired to start writing on something I’ve been wanting to write for a long time, an audio adaptation of Patricia A. Jackson’s short Star Wars story “Uhl Eharl Khoehng,” a story about the Brandl family who is caught up in the machinations of the Emperor’s Jedi Hunting group called the Inquisitors, and about a rebel captain Fable Astin who falls in love with Brandl’s son Jaalib, an accomplished actor. It is loosely based on one of Shakespeare’s plays (I forget exactly which) and it comes out as truly Shakespearian in nature, and it is that quality that has made it stick in the mind of many a Star Wars fan since its publication in the Star Wars Adventure Journals in the 90′s.

So I did.  I wrote it.  I started Friday evening and finished Saturday evening.  The first draft is finished, and the working title is “The Edjian-Prince,” the name of the character that Brandl’s son plays in the story.  I’m not sure if I’m ever going to produce it.  I want to, and I know exactly who I want to play Jaalib and Fable.  But I don’t have the time to oversee it, or the cash to buy the audio editing program I’d need to properly mix it, so for right now it’s remaining a creative writing exercise.  I bet I will get to it eventually, but several things are going to need to change first.  Still, I remain optimistic that my second draft will properly dramatize the story for audio.

Add to that that just this Sunday evening, I edited three entire chapters of my first Vergence novel.  The middle chapter was the longest chapter in the book.  Together all three chapters clocked in at one quarter of the first draft, 15,000 words.  That’s a lot of reading and note taking!  Sadly this isn’t a full editing session, as I’m just going through it to find the story promises I’ve made (intentionally and unintentionally), but I feel a major sense of accomplishment in editing a quarter of my novel in this second level pass, and writing a brand new audio drama script in a single weekend.

I don’t think I’ll be this productive again for awhile, but who knows?

For this week, I’ll mark the same goal; edit three chapters.

*Star Wars: Marvels.  Download all three released episodes.  Now.  Even if you aren’t a Star Wars fan, you will be entertained.  Its crisply written dialogue and well-voiced characters–especially Andrew Gilbertson’s Jaxxon and Jim Perry’s Han Solo–make this a story you won’t want to miss.  Frankly I’m surprised at how good it is, because I listened to the first episode thinking it was going to be something slightly odd (because it’s about a six-foot tall green bunny rabbit), but nothing that stood out.  And I was totally wrong!

Categories: Star Wars, Voice Acting, Writing | Tags: Astin, Brandl, Edjian-Prince, Fable, Han Solo, Jaalib, Jaxxon, Patricia A. Jackson, Uhl Eharl Khoehng

Two Useless Things

Posted on 26 July 2010 | View Comments

This blog post is being posted several hours late because I haven’t written it ahead of time on Sunday like I usually do.  I’ve also been dealing with some Active Worlds stuff.  Some of it is very good news.  And the rest of it is… well it’s still in the oven is probably the best way to describe it.  I’m not sure how it will turn out yet.

I’m pleased to announce I did reach my goal of getting 3 chapters edited in my second-pass revision.  And that last chapter was a double-sized one as well.  So I am happy with my performance thus far.  I hope to do four chapters this week.

The only problem (although I guess it is a good thing to have this problem) is that I discovered a character who is for all intents and purposes completely useless.  Ethander Ryn is a character who is the “father” of another character that works quite well.  Ironically she wasn’t planned at all while Ethander was.  He exists merely as a plot device to get the characters where they need to go, but he is presented as a valued member of the party.  The other characters would not miss him if he were gone, and I think this means the character is a waste of my reader’s time unless I do something to make him valuable to the team.

And believe me, I want to.  At this point I have no intention of writing him out of the story.  He just needs to be given his own character arc.  This I’m still letting my muse toy with.  It may be awhile before I think of an adequate solution because along with this, he ties into the plot in a way that will be difficult to extricate him out of if I change even one thing about his character.

This means I will have to make even more significant rewrites and plot restructuring than I’ve already known was coming.  I’ve been holding out hope that my novel wasn’t broken, but I think it is with the discovery of this broken character along with what I’ve already known about needing to add another one that had his own subplot.  I’m fearing that rewriting this is going to be major suckage.  I’m also thinking that I probably should have thrown my original plot out back when I was doing the How To Think Sideways course on plotting and done it like Holly said I should do it instead of trying to make my plot fit into her method.  ;)

Either way, one other thing I discovered about my writing style is that I tend to summarize what the main characters have just done or said right after they’ve done or said it.  This will change in future projects.  Definitely.

As to that other useless thing, I thought this quote worthy of sharing with you all.  It comes from the book Intellectuals by Paul Johnson.  At the end of the book, he writes:

We are now at an end of our inquiry.  It is just about two hundred years since the secular intellectuals began to replace the old clericy as the guides and mentors of mankind.  We have looked at a number of individual cases of those who sought to counsel humanity. We have examined the moral and judgmental qualifications for this task.  In particular we have examined their attitude to truth, the way in which they seek for and evaluate evidence, their response not just to humanity in general, but to human beings in particular, the way they treat their friends, colleagues, servants, and above all, their own families.  We have touched on the social and political consequences of following their advice.

Now, what conclusions should be drawn?  Readers will judge for themselves.  But I will go on to say this: One of the principle lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity is this; beware intellectuals.  Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.

Beware committees, conferences, and leagues of intellectuals.  Distrust their public statements, issued from their surried ranks.  Discount their verdicts on political leaders and important events.  For intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and nonconformist people, follow certain regular patterns of behavior.  Taken as a group, they’re often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value.  That is what makes them en masse so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxies which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action.

Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget; that people matter more than concepts and must come first.  The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.

Categories: Writing | Tags: Ethander Ryn, How to Think Sideways, Intellectuals, Paul Johnson

Procastination Clarifies

Posted on 19 July 2010 | View Comments

I‘ve finally gotten three more chapters edited in my lesson two revision pass, and it’s become apparent that with just over 8 months separating my writing this from the time I’m editing this that my writing royally sucks.  This, I think, is what procrastination does.  It puts a separation between your writing and you and gives you clarity in evaluating your prose in return.

This is a good thing because I’m missing less in my revisions than I think I did on my lesson one revision pass at this point.

But the problem is I’m also procrastinating and its taking longer to make those revisions.  I’ve had a job for over a month now, meaning I have been off of my self-imposed exile into the land of job hunting since then, and I’m only three chapters beyond where I was then.

This will not do.  Time to set goals.  I want to be through three more chapters by this time next week.  Keep me honest, readers!

Categories: Writing |

Active Worlds: The Musical

Posted on 12 July 2010 | View Comments

I am oddly introspective as I write this tonight.  The Active Worlds community is in something of a state of flux right now.  Its discussion forum is being plagued by a troll called ‘Freedomf’.  If you’ve ever read the comments of a certain user by the name of syntaxgs on Digg, think of Freedomf as a malicious version of syntaxgs and you’ll have a fair approximation of the kind of uproar she causes on a monthly (and sometimes daily) basis.

Tom the moderator (who is also the primary moderator for the virtual reality of Active Worlds itself as well as the forum) does not believe that she is a troll, or at least shouldn’t be banned, because she doesn’t exhibit some of the more usual trollish behavior like calling users names, spamming threads, and so on.  Rather, she deliberately incites other users to react to her feigned idiocy by starting threads about “Lynsie Lowhand” and other similar caricaturizations of peoples’ names and activities.  This is a point of disagreement that has sharply divided a lot of the movers and shakers in Active Worlds into two camps; those who want her banned for the sake of peace and quiet and those who think she should just be ignored and allowed to look mean and petty.

And when it comes to the troll, SW City’s involvement in that unfortunate situation has stressed our relationship with said moderator.  The city and him used to be on real good–dare I say, friendly–terms, but that is no longer the case, and I think it’s very unfortunate.  I’m a part of SW City.  We’ve created SW City, which is the largest communal build in any virtual reality environment on earth, to the best of my knowledge.  We are a power house in the Active Worlds community for the sheer amount of content and building tutorials we provide to AW’s users.  So what we think and write can affect a large part of AW’s community and how they react.  Most of us have decided she ought to be banned because after some trial and error, we adopted a three-strikes policy several years ago on our forum and it has worked wonders for creating a positive community environment.  She’s close to matching Sammy Sosa’s record in home runs, except this time with strikes.  Tom sees things differently, and I think I can see his point of view.

First, Tom moderates according to the set of rules he has established in the forum.  These rules are intended to foster a positive and freeing community atmosphere.  Tom doesn’t just rule based on his emotions, as some have argued, but within a defined set of parameters. We do this as well on the SW City forum.

Second, Tom believes the troll has every right to make herself look mean and petty, but can’t understand why other users care.  He believes moderation isn’t necessary when mature adult users can and should ignore the troublemaker. And so he puts the kibosh on those who fall short of those he expects ought to know better and yet respond to the troll.

I see two problems with this system.  First, his rules fall short of their intended goal to foster a positive and freeing community of users, as evidenced by the prolonged existence of this troll, who manages to avoid overtly breaking the rules while breaking their spirit.  A user who intentionally plays the fool to incite other users to react negatively to her cannot be banned under the current set of rules because there’s no rule outlawing such behavior.  And worse, Tom doesn’t seem to understand the need for such a rule because he seems blinded by his expectations of how respectable forum users should act.  Tom is correct in expecting mature forum users to not react to trolls.  But the fact that they do anyway in every forum on the Internet is precisely why we need moderators.

This brings me to my second point.   What the moderator expects of other users shouldn’t enter into a moderator’s consideration, because being human, he will expect different things from different people, and as a side effect those he expects less of are allowed to get away with more before he notices them crossing the line.  Expectations shouldn’t even play a part, but rather the rules should be applied equally to all persons, regardless of standing or situation.  The way Freedomf has taken advantage of this gap of expectations is exactly the reason why philosophers of law first touted the equal application of the law.  It is precisely the opposite of the other big reason for introducing that ethical standard; that of cronyism, which is when one ignores applying the law equally when a friend comes under its judgment.

So Tom needs to do three things to fix the situation.

First, he should put equal expectations on each user to follow the rules.  Flattering as it is that he puts higher expectations on those he respects more, justice is supposed to be blind.  This means clamping down on Freedomf for inciting people to respond negatively to her as well as clamping down on those who disrupt the forum atmosphere by doing so.  Both the cause and the effect should be dealt with.

Second, since the forum rules should create and encourage a positive and freeing atmosphere, Tom needs to look for any holes in the current policies that allow people to diminish the positive and free atmosphere and plug them with more specific guidelines.

Third, and perhaps most controversially, Tom needs to start completely over on the entire ‘Freedomf’ situation, and act as if the last few years have never happened.  If he’s going to be changing the way he approaches the issue, it is simpler just to start completely over and ignore any variables that complicated the issue in the past. And yes, that means putting her recent admission of guilt into the category of inadmissible evidence.

Of course, it’s not all Tom’s fault.  Not by a long shot.  SW City had a few of its staff involve themselves in trying to force the moderator to take action on the troll about a year or so ago.  This, in hindsight, was extremely wrong-headed.  In trying to oust the troll, they only became annoyances to the one man they needed most on their side; Tom. And it seems to have just caused Tom to have dug in on his position.

It’s also soured some SW’ians’ (SW City people) experience with Active Worlds.  The fellow who spearheaded the attempted ouster has decided to move on to Second Life because he in good conscience can’t build in a program where Tom is in charge.  Tom, on the other hand, thinks this guy is an intentionally malicious user who let a personal feud with Freedomf spill over into the forum.  I take something of the middle of the road.  This guy is a really good guy.  He stands on principle to a fault.  It’s an admirable quality, but it’s gotten him into trouble and probably was what guided him to try to make the moderator ban the troll.  Yet I cannot say he should have compromised his principles.

I myself got banned for a few days in January when I joined in on a thread in which a bunch of users decided to publicly state that we had ignored the troll in an effort to get everyone else to join in, and bypass Tom completely.  Tom locked the thread and cut it short before it could gain critical mass and (imho) allow the community to solve the problem itself.  Thinking back on it, I’m not so sure he was wrong, as at that time it was still fairly nebulous as to whether the troll was actually trolling or if she was just unstable and stupid.  But it still would have been effective. Regardless of the legitimacy of Tom’s actions, this event caused me to re-evaluate how much time I was putting into community projects in Active Worlds, and that and a combination of real-life events led me to step back from wider community involvement to just involving myself in activities in SW City itself.  I think it also caused a few other people to do the same thing.

Fast-forward to this week, where the troll publicly admitted to intentionally inciting users to respond negatively to her and somehow avoiding punishment, and you see why I’m ruminating on this issue this week.

Where does the community go from here?  A user by the name of Bach Zhaa is making an admirable effort to make AW a cooler place by holding events and weekly town hall meetings.  But I don’t think that alone would help the community to grow.  It needs nurture from the caretaker.  And like a gardener and his garden, the weeds need to be uprooted by someone.  Active Worlds is a small garden, and even one weed can stunt the growth of the garden.  The questions then present themselves; how does a community grow?  And what is each person’s role in the community to help it grow?  I’ve presented some ways I think Tom as this community’s gardener can best fulfill his role and why I think his efforts to date have fallen short of his goals.  And I hope he listens and adopts an idea or two.  Furthermore, I hope I articulated Tom’s position as if it were my own.

Right now, I think the Freedomf situation has more of an effect on this community than it first appears.  And that’s because it’s gotten a lot of the users’ attentions due to how long it’s gone on, the attention people like SW City and others have given it, and past moderating decisions.  It has hurt my own and my friends’ morale.  And unfortunately because of all this, its now becoming seen as representative of the state of the community.  It baffles me how one user can have such an effect, but here we are.  It happened with Eep, and it’s happening again.

Speaking of Eep, I ran across this post that I made shortly after he was banned about Facter (who had Tom’s job) leaving his job and the community in 2001.

Oh, but there still is a problem. You are leaving, and you’ll be sorely
missed.

I’m not going to preach, but if you want a good example of a backfired
“community”, head on over to http://www.xwlegacy.net/ This little haven of
the Star Wars gaming elite is a hell hole. I was a staff member there
before political infighting, like this whole Eep situation only much much
much much worse, drove me away.

Before then, I’ve been in many situations on the losing side that have been
as bad as this (losing side meaning the side that didn’t agree with a
certain person who decided he wanted to control everything). Activeworlds
and its newsgroups are heaven compared to them.

It’s just a bump in the road, Facter. Please don’t leave.

SW Chris

Active Worlds and its forum are no longer that heaven.  It’s not exactly to the state of xwlegacy, though.  I think it can go both ways at this point.  Will AW’s community devolve into something like xwlegacy where the trolls run or ruin everything?  Will it stay neutral, or will it improve?  Will this play be a tragedy or a comedy?  Will our protagonist overcome his character flaws in time to save the day?  And will Freedomf get what she deserves in the end?  I’m not sure, but it seems as if Freedomf is running the show right now; she’s getting all the attention she wants and she is now starting to be seen as the person that will make or break the community.  She is right where she wants to be.

End of Act 2.

Categories: SW City | Tags: Active Worlds, Freedomf, Syntaxgs

Update From the Road

Posted on 5 July 2010 | View Comments

I’m sitting here right before bed typing this on my iPod Touch, so this may not be up to my usual standard of formatting.  How was your Fourth of July?  I had a great one.  After I returned here from work, of course.

That’s right, I got a job!  And I had to work on a national holiday.  I’m not sure which is more shocking.  But I am now gainfully employed at the Computer Depot in Wichita, KS and have been for about three and a half weeks. 

That means I can now return to focussing on writing, which I haven’t yet done beyond taking an hour this weekend to refamiliarize myself on where I left off in my revision. I’m hoping some of you readers can help keep me accountable, either via here in the comments or via my Twitter (see the feed in the right margin of this page.)

This weekend we feasted on grilled chicken, brats, hot dogs, and pizza this weekend.  We watched movies, shot off fireworks, and launched tin cans into the air with fire crackers.  And long talks on the porch.  I love those talks.

I also learned that I apparently owe Joe Harrison a viewing of Prince of Persia.  It’s not in theaters anymore but I promise to do so.  The rest of you should check out Joe’s The Oblivion Continuum Podcast on iTunes.  

My fingers are cramping on this tiny keyboard, so that’s it for this blog entry.  See you next week!

Categories: Job Hunt |

Better Arguments #2: Does the NoH8 Campaign Understand Their Opponents?

Posted on 28 June 2010 | View Comments

NoH8 posted their latest PSA this week (embedded above), and it had two effects on me.  First I thought, Wow, that’s a good PSA.  It gets their point across, does it in a compelling way, and summarizes the best argument I’ve heard for state-licensed same-sex marriage.  The second thought that ran through my mind was… That’s the best argument I’ve heard for state-licensed same sex marriage.  Even David Boies, the attorney for the plaintiffs in the Proposition 8 case in California used it as his main argument… and that’s it?

Now, it wouldn’t be fair of me to require that the PSA should make an intellectual argument when PSA’s are axiomatically designed to persuade in the way audiences are persuaded, which these days is by appealing to their emotions. But having followed the live tweets of the court case, there doesn’t seem to be any intellectual argument at all that addresses their opponents’ arguments.  If there were, you’d think the plaintiffs would have offered it.  So it appears that the PSA really does represent the best argument we’re likely to get for some time for same sex marriage.

Which is why I wonder whether those in favor of same sex marriage even understand their opponents best arguments, or if they do realize emotional appeals are all they have to support their case and are moving forward anyway.  It’s probably a bit of both, and it probably depends on who you ask, so let me just ask about the NoH8 campaign.  Do they get it?

One glance at the name suggests that they don’t; it makes the mistake of assuming that those who disagree with them about Proposition 8 and the state licensing of same-sex marriage must do so because they hate gay people.  But that was then, when they started their organization.  This is now.  Perhaps they’ve been educated and are stuck with the name.  Perhaps.  But I kind of doubt it.

Like I said, the PSA was well-executed. It uses the concept of language to communicate their point that same sex partnerships and heterosexual partnerships are just different “languages” or expressions of love and have no bearing on the purpose of marriage; and that the purpose of marriage is as an expression of love itself between two human beings.

I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but they chose the mutable (that means ‘changeable’) characteristic of language to symbolize sexual orientation.  Since they probably don’t agree that sexual orientation is mutable, I realized a few minutes into thinking about the PSA that they might be making the implicit argument that whether one is born gay or not and whether it can be changed or not are really beside the point.  Instead, the question of same sex marriage is about whether the people in the relationship being of the same sex interferes with the purposes of marriage.

And I would agree with that assessment.  I’m just not sure if they actually made that point or if I’m giving them too much credit and am reading too much into this.  Regardless, it’s a question worth asking, just as asking whether the number of people in the relationship interfere with the purposes of marriage or whether the species of the beings involved in the relationship interfere with the purposes of marriage.  They’re all good questions to ask.

And to answer those questions we have to figure out what we mean by marriage.  So what does NoH8 mean by ‘marriage’?  Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that what they mean by marriage is each person’s commitment to the same sex relationship itself.  The argument made in favor of same sex relationships conflates whether the state ought to allow those relationships with the question of whether states ought to license those relationships and call them marriage.  And that I think is where their argument fails.  It assumes they are the same thing when they are not.  (Side Note: This seems to explain their insistence that state licensed marriage is a human right, because then I’m forced to wonder in what non-arbitrary fashion is it considered a human right that doesn’t cause it to cease to exist as a concept distinct from the generic word ‘relationship’, and that’s worth another blog post right there, so I will leave it for another time.)  See, no one in their right mind has any problem with allowing same sex relationships.  Its the licensing of them and calling them marriage that is the sticking point, so proponents of same sex marriage need to make that distinction if they want to be relevant and avoid setting up a straw man.

Now I can understand why the distinction isn’t made.  It doesn’t occur to us to ask why states license marriages in the first place.  I think that’s pretty normal.  When each of us get married, we are getting married because we love the other person.  The PSA makes good use of tapping into this idea and applying it to same sex couples.  And a lot of heterosexuals think that because they view marriage primarily as a means of commitment to the person they love that that’s all there is to it.  And so they assume that if that’s all there is to marriage, they correctly conclude based on that assumption that homosexuals should be able to marry too.  Based on that reasoning, the only reason they can fathom for opposing same sex marriage is because of bigotry.

But is there more to it?  Or are they right and is that all there is to marriage?  Is it just the commitment and love two partners have toward each other?

Proponents of Prop 8 make the point that marriage plays a far larger role, one that isn’t intuitive or obvious, but is there and vital nonetheless.  They reason that how children grow up affects their character and how they interact with others as adults.  Therefore the more stable a child’s environment is and the better they are able to learn about themselves, and the more stable environments and proper role models there are for children, the more stable that generation’s society will be because there will be more well-rounded people in that generation.  These children will have children, who will have children, who have children, all rippling into the future, creating a long tail effect that affects the stability of that society over the course of the next century or two and beyond.  So it seems that how children grow up is very important to the future of society. And what’s the most stable environment for a child to grow up in?  As the defendant attorneys argued in the courtroom, the research with the best methodologies all tended to show that it is a two-person, committed and loving household with parents of the opposite sexes.  This they say is why the state has an interest in licensing only to heterosexual couples and taking children out of abusive households.  That’s the argument for Prop 8 in a nutshell, with a million qualifications left unsaid.

So if marriage is about love but also about child-rearing and contributing to the stability of society over the course of centuries, and the best households for raising children are heterosexual two-person committed and loving households, then yes, licensing same sex marriages and encouraging them interferes with the purpose of marriage.

So perhaps opponents of Prop 8 should focus on those propositions, instead of appeals to equal rights and accidentally setting up straw men, as they are the lynch pin for the Proposition 8 argument.

Obviously, how you view what marriage is affects how you answer the question of whether or not the societal approval and encouragement of same sex marriage interferes with the purposes of marriage.  It also affects how you answer who or what can marry each other.  Hopefully this post will provide some understanding to each side’s arguments, and provide some of you a few good ideas for arguing for same sex marriage that will actually move the debate forward instead of repeating what David Boies repeated in the court room, or worse, stymieing it in the morass of politics and name calling.  Hopefully I have described each side as if I were in favor of it.  If I haven’t, please correct me in the comments.  I’ve no interest in debating the merits of each argument, but I do want to know if I have represented each side accurately and not set up a straw man.  What do you think?

Categories: Better Arguments | Tags: NoH8, Prop 8, Proposition 8, Same Sex Marriage

ConCarolinas – Day 3

Posted on 21 June 2010 | View Comments

My flight to Denver from Dallas/Fort Worth has been delayed.  Actually, it would be more accurate to say that it was never really on time.  It started out on one side of the country, left late, flew all over the country, leaving a little bit later each time.  Then it stopped at O’Hare, and now it’s really late.  If you know anything about O’Hare, nothing leaves there on time.  So I sit here at the mercy of the sky gods typing up my thoughts on an iPod Touch about the last day of the con and the whole thing in general.

Nathan left early, at about 8 in the morning. By the time I made it to the airport, he was already home.  I woke up at about 9:30 and met Joe and the Gilbertsons at their room around ten.  Sarah really wanted to go to an acting workshop that The Hatch was putting on at ten.

We arrive late, along with a few others.  The Hatch quickly hides a flash of annoyance and is forced to start over.  Ah, small pleasures.

After what happened to Rich yesterday, I was hesitant to give The Hatch any more attention.  Nathan and I decided not to tell Sarah, Andrew, and Joe about how he treated the con staff behind the scenes because they seemed really gun-ho for his acting class, and we didn’t want to ruin that pleasure for them.

The Hatch went 45 minutes over.  We didn’t get to do any acting exercises, even though he said we would.  He just talked.  Say what you will about the man though, because even though he liked to talk, he gave great acting advice.  I can already see a dozen ways to improve previous performances, and learned some new techniques to use for future ones.

After the class, we piled into Andrew’s compact and he drove me to the airport.  Joe had to sit with a large cooler on his lap because it wouldn’t fit anywhere else except in the space that I took up. I felt a little guilty about that, but was grateful that they were willing to take me so that I wouldn’t have to spend money on another taxi.

A conversation ensues about how the acting techniques we learned could negatively affect our personality if we didn’t protect ourselves from delving so deeply into our own darker aspect of our own natures.  In fact, The Hatch warned that if an actor couldn’t pull himself out such a mood, he shouldn’t even try going there.  I am once again reminded of how The Hatch treated Rich yesterday and am strangely comforted.

I say goodbye to Joe, Andrew, and Sarah, and tell them I hope I can see them again next year.  ConCarolinas was a positive experience.  I made a few new acquaintances, shored up budding friendships, and reinvigorated older ones. I hope I can make it again next year, if only so I can give Indiana Jim the surprise we had planned.  Maybe you’ll find out about that when I write about ConCarolinas 2011. >:)

Categories: Star Wars | Tags: ConCarolinas

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