Chris

BEEF 2: MORE INTERNET BEEFS

I moved it

Yeah, I agree with this. I still try to find movies and TV that have more substance and nuance to them, but with books it's much more important to me.

I think there are a few benefits. The world itself is subtle. Rarely are people's relationships, motives, and choices as clearly defined as in good vs. evil stories. Humans are incredibly complicated creatures who live in incredibly complicated societies. I think the most responsible way to mirror those lives and societies is to bring a corresponding level of subtlety and nuance. Subtlety also opens up the range of topics and themes that can be discussed in depth. Some things simply can't be discussed bluntly without doing them a disservice. There's also, as you suggest, the simple joy that can result from figuring something out--or, just as likely, by hypothesizing about something--that isn't concretely explained. I've often seen literature semi-derided by video game people as a "passive" art form, as compared to video games which are "active," and I just couldn't possibly disagree with that more. I think that, when it comes to the experience of the reader/player/listener/viewer, good literature is probably the most active narrative form. Not only does it require an uninterrupted stream of effort to read the words themselves, it requires continual engagement to bring those words to life. There's a version of that involved with the books children read, when they first learn how the written word can stimulate their imagination, and as we get older we gain the capacity to exercise those same basic faculties to a higher degree. I think good literature should strive to take advantage of that, not to simply deliver everything ready-digested on a platter. I think there is inherent value in working to understand art. The human brain is amazing; I don't really know why we've evolved in a way such that we are capable of creating and parsing works of such incredible sophistication and beauty, but since we have, I think we should take advantage of it. I think reading literature that traffics in the full range of subtlety of human experience increases our capacity for empathy and makes us better people, more willing to understand the experiences of others. That's not to say that everything we read should always be dense and inscrutable; that's a recipe for burnout. And literature (or any art) should not be so concerned with sophistication that it discards qualities that allow for genuine joy of reading. But I don't think those things are mutually exclusive. I don't think you should have to "turn off your brain" to enjoy something, and I think you can find evidence of this in books, movies, games, and every other major form of expression. Hooray for subtlety.

The game was principally developed in the US and is set in a location that doesn't exist at all, so I'm not sure it has much bearing on the title of the game.

It lengthens Booker's jump distance a bit, to reduce the frustration of being JUST out of range of a Sky-Line or something like that, but it doesn't turn him into a crazy jetpacker.

Yeah, every once in a while these are awesome, when your unit has already fired a reaction shot due to overwatch, then panics and gets another free potential kill.

Welcome to the forum, new people!

This is really bothering me, mainly because it so often seems completely at odds with the interior voice of the character with whom it's paired. Early on, the novel compares something Gwen is doing with what seemed to be a bit of obscure Star Trek trivia, which made no sense to me. If it were being invoked in a Julie scene, I would have been more accepting of it, but it just seemed really poorly-pitched to me, because nothing Gwen ever says or does (at least 400 pages in, where I am) suggests she has any interest in Star Trek or sci-fi. And that kind of thing keeps happening. Also, that scene in while not entirely implausible, strained credulity a bit for me and made me think Chabon really just wanted an excuse to bring that material in. (There's a lot of extreme coincidence going on in the plotting throughout, which wears on me.) I can imagine making this argument but it doesn't work for me, whether intended by Chabon or not. There's nothing structurally wacky going on, nothing hyper-stylized, and the conflicts (neither internalized or externalized) strike me much as very Tarantino-like. Ultimately though I really like these characters a lot. To me (again, not yet having finished the book) this is a novel about a pretty strong collection of characters, with strongly-drawn interpersonal relationships, who are set in a somewhat unconvincing overarching plot and overwritten prose. The characters are enough for me to like the book on balance so far. Not sure where I'll end up more specifically than that.

That's an interesting reaction. I haven't had that, because the game feels very consciously abstracted in the way a board game is--or many other strategy video games, for that matter.

I haven't finished it yet

Same here. It drives me crazy. I really wish I could figure out a job that I can do that isn't so dependent on being online.

Yeah, it's a real low point. Not a good idea.

One thing I'm curious about is whether you think the tropes of science fiction outrank the tropes of other genres in terms of classification. In other words, why is Cloud Atlas "sci-fi" rather than "historical fiction" or "thriller," when it contains significant portions that are very straightforward examples of those genres? The majority of the book, by any measure, is not set in a fantastical or futuristic world, so would you contend that the inclusion of any fantastical or speculative elements in any novel makes it a science fiction novel (in the way that people often self-identify as a particular ethnic group even if their ancestry contains only a fractional representation of that group), or is there sort of a critical mass thing going on?

I think, as Greg Brown sort of implies above (or I could be misreading his implication), in the modern era genre tends to demarcate communities of readers first and foremost. There are clearly many, many people, even in this very thread, who explicitly indicate that they pretty much always stick to sci-fi or fantasy, or escapist fiction generally. There are many other people who explicitly stick to crime fiction or mysteries or thrillers (that's the biggest block of fiction readers by far these days), and others who identify strongly as readers of young adult fiction. That's a big reason I think genre distinctions are indeed valid. I take Chabon's point, but I don't think genre distinctions just come handed from the literati or whatever as pejoratives, I think they are very strongly tied to signifiers of personal taste that are self-identified by readers of those genres themselves. Although they might be hard to pin down in a bulleted list, there are clearly some kinds of properties that distinguish fiction of a particular genre, properties that cause such a work to become absorbed into the canon of that genre as identified by the people who are self-described readers of said genre. And although I'm aware both Cloud Atlas and The Yiddish Policemen's Union have received nods from various sci-fi award organizations, I get the strong sense that they don't really fit into the sci-fi genre canon. I could be wrong about that, obviously. But there do seem to be various properties of a given book that, again, might be hard to concretely demarcate but which seem to place a book in one genre or another as far as most people are concerned.

It's a fuzzy distinction, obviously, but I just can't imagine putting Cloud Atlas in a genre category. It straddles too many genre lines to convincingly place it in one, I think.

I agree, I love the choice to take class choice out of the player's hands. As Rummy said, you go to war with the army you have.

I would say Cloud Atlas contains many explorations of different genres, but does not ultimately slot into a particular genre as an overall work. For that matter, though, I don't think that containing science fiction elements inherently makes a book a work of genre fiction. I would still classify, say, Kurt Vonnegut as general "fiction" even though many of his novels include speculative or supernatural elements.

I've been playing on Normal and that really makes me want to restart on Classic. The only real thing I dislike about the AI is that you have to trigger them through LOS. It feels very goofy.

It wasn't out of disrespect; in the midst of the conversation I assume my brain just latched on to the nickname I've known them by for most of their careers. I've only seen two Wachowski films and I don't really pay attention to them much at all, so even though I was aware of Lana's identity, I haven't had enough discussions or considerations of the them for the proper collective noun to fully propagate into my brain. It was an unfortunate slip. It usually takes me at four meetings of someone to remember their name when I actually meet them in person, let alone someone I've never met whose personal affairs I am only dimly aware of.

Yeah, not a bad idea. The reason it didn't work that way is because for several months, the blog was the actual homepage for the entire site. But yeah it probably makes more sense now to have it link to its own RSS.

Do you mean this page? http://blog.idlethumbs.net It's actually a Tumblr blog, so if you have Tumblr, you can follow it through that, or you can use this RSS feed: http://blog.idlethumbs.net/rss It's not very well-advertised, I know. We need to figure out a better solution for the blog in general.

I guarantee it is not as competitive as SF right now. It's truly unreal.

This is 100% fucking true. Please do not move to San Francisco. However, feel free to move to Oakland or Berkeley, which are right across the bay from San Francisco and share the BART transit system, and are cool and fun and hip places to live in their own right.

Evidence of Things Unseen by Marianne Wiggins, released in 2003.