Magic Circles (Chapter 6)

Rafael had spent he past few weeks in various classes with various professors, with a healthy dose of Professor Curtis’ philosophy courses.  Despite how he’d felt about them on the first day, he found them surprisingly interesting, mostly because Professor Curtis lectured less and raised questions more, and so he kept inviting them to consider the issues raised by their magical powers instead of lecturing them about how to use them or think about them.  He even managed to tie his lessons into the magical lessons they were having, showing how even the smallest of spells could introduce major issues for knowledge and ethics.

Today was not that sort of class, though.  And it wasn’t even a regular spell casting class.  Instead, it was a special class being taught by Professor Vermillion himself.  “One of the most important things you all will need to learn, ” he began.  “Is the ability to work in groups.  You may be powerful, but you are going to come across situations where even the most powerful among you will not be able to succeed on your own.”

Rafael nodded to himself.  He’d read so many stories in the Magical Fortress about the mages banding together against a huge threat, with even the greatest of rivals being willing to put their differences aside in the service of the greater good.  But the stories that had thrilled him more were the stories where a group of mages banded together into a team, bound together by their loyalty to each other, with each person’s skills balancing the others so that they worked together as a seamless team.  He felt a small surge of excitement as he realized that this might be the first step towards joining one of those teams.

“So today, ” Professor Vermillion continued.  “You are going to be placed into groups, and given a small exercise.  We have quite carefully chosen the groups today, and depending on your performance, you might end up staying in these groups for quite some time.”

He then cast a small spell, and names appeared on the tables in front of them.  “Those are your groups,” he said.

All the students shuffled into their seats, and Rafael found himself in a group with three other people.  The first was a small, brown-haired woman with a big smile on her face.  The second was a fairly handsome Indian man who had an easy air and confidence about him.  And the last was a tall blonde woman with glasses who seemed utterly unimpressed with the entire exercise and with the people she was paired up with.

“So, I’m Rafael … ” he began, but the blonde cut him off.

“I think we know each others’ names, ” she said sarcastically.

“Knock it off, Rachel, ” the Indian man said.  “It doesn’t hurt for us to get to know each other a bit.”

She rolled her eyes at him, but didn’t say anything.

“Hi!” the brown-haired woman jumped in enthusiastically.  “I’m Catherine, but all my friends call me ‘Kitty’!”

“So … should I call you ‘Kitty’?” Rafael asked, puzzled.

Kitty looked puzzled herself for a minute, and then her broad smile returned.  “Sure!” she said.  “After all, we’re all going to be working together for a long time, right?”

Rachel snorted, but didn’t say anything.

“And I’m Brock, ” the other man said.

There was a strained silence for a while, and then Rafael ventured, “So … what do you think the exercise is going to be?”

“All I know is that you guys should just stay out of my way, ” Rachel said.

“Why?”  Rafael asked.  “I mean, this is a group exercise, right?”

She rolled her eyes again.  “Listen, chump, ” she said.  “I was trained by the best mages before you were even being considered for the Magical Fortress.  So if you want to pass this, you need to just shut up and do what I tell you!”

Rafael looked at her, puzzled.  “I don’t think it’s going to work that way … ” he began, but he was interrupted by Professor Vermillion.

“I hope you spent your time getting to know each other, because this exercise requires you to work seamlessly as a team, which will be difficult to do if you’ve been sitting there looking at each other sullenly the entire time, or, God forbid, arguing with each other” he said.

Rafael flushed.  It was almost like he had directed that comment at his group.

Professor Vermillion cast another spell, and a set of pieces appeared at each place.  “Your task is to build a tower out of these pieces with your spells, but there’s a catch:  each level’s pieces are designed so that they need to be set simultaneously.  So while you are strategizing you will also have to be mentally manipulating the pieces, taking up your concentration.  You all have the magical abilities to do that, but are you in sync enough to succeed?  Let’s find out!” he said.

He then paused, and said, “Begin!”.

To say that their task didn’t go well was an understatement.  From the very beginning, they simply couldn’t get on the same page.  Kitty tended to be overexuberant, which mean that she either got her pieces to the tower too quickly or slammed them into it too hard, breaking it up.  Rachel’s moves were painstakingly precise, but so fluid that no one else could match them, which caused the connections to break as she simply could not adjust to the approaches of the others.  Brock’s moves were made with confidence, but he seemed to lack a bit of control and overestimated his own ability.  For his part, Rafael was the only one who was able to get close to Rachel’s precision, but he kept getting distracted by what the others were doing and trying to adjust to them that he kept screwing up Rachel’s as well, annoying her to no end.

He took a second to look at the other groups.  He could see that one group had built a very impressive tower and seemed to be working flawlessly with each other.  The other groups had made some progress and had decent little towers of various sizes in front of them.

“Hey!  Pay attention!” Rachel yelled at him.

This drew his attention back to their tower, which had a grand total of … no floors.  He sighed and turned his attention back to their tower.

But unsurprisingly as he got more depressed and Rachel grew more frustrated things didn’t get any better.  Brock and Kitty, however, seemed mostly unaffected, as he remained calm and stoic for the most part, and Kitty seemed to having fun … so much fun, in fact, that she was often just playing with her pieces instead of trying to form a tower with them.

So it was pretty much a blessing when Professor Vermillion said, “Time!”.

He then went around to look at all the results, not reacting much at all to any of them until he go to theirs, where he gave a little snort that sounded like a laugh and moved on.

Once he was done, he turned to the class again.  “Most of you did acceptably, and that means that you … will likely not remain in this grouping.”

Most of the students looked surprised, but then he indicated the group with the rather large tower.  “This group is, of course, an exception, ” he said.

The group looked pleased.  Professor Vermillion then moved over to their group.  “And this group is also an exception, ” he said.

Rafael was flabbergasted.  “But … but we sucked!” he exclaimed.

“Exactly!” Professor Vermillion replied.  “And when you figure out why that means that your group should stay exactly as it is, then you’ll stop sucking.”

Thoughts on the Canadian Olympic Curling Trials

So starting from last weekend the Canadian Olympic Curling Trials were on, to select the two teams — men’s and women’s — that will represent Canada in the four-person curling event.  The mixed doubles team is already selected.  As is my wont, I only paid attention to the women’s event, although I did note that Brad Gushue, in his last event — as he’s retiring after this season — didn’t make it to the playoffs.  That was a bit disappointing because he was someone that I cheered for, but on the other hand he had added Brendan Bottcher to his team who I massively dislike — seriously, I like him far, far less than I like Jennifer Jones — so it balances out, I guess.

At any rate, coming in the three favourites to make the three person playoffs were Rachel Homan’s team — and she was the favourite to win it all, given how dominant she’s been the past few seasons –, Kerri Einarson’s team, and Kaitlyn Lawes’ team, with the expectation being that Homan and Einarson would be fighting for top spot and going directly into the best-of-three final, while Lawes would be fighting to get the third spot.

And things pretty much worked out that way.  With tiebreakers eliminated, the main determining factor was going to be head-to-head, which meant that the game between Homan and Einarson on the last day of the round robin was going to be crucial.  Homan and Einarson were quick out of the gate with incredibly dominating wins — in her first game Homan set a record with 16 points — but then Homan stumbled a bit and actually lost a game.  But she recovered to win all of her other games, including against Einarson, which gave her the head-to-head advantage and first place, since Einarson won all of her other games.  On the other end, there was a bit of a logjam for third, as three teams were tied on record going into the last round, none of them played each other, and they had all beaten each other in a rock-paper-scissors type of thing, with one team beating the next team which had beaten the next team which had beaten the first team.  So then it would come down to had the lowest distance in the game opening “draw to the button” (where each team throws a rock to see who can get closest to the centre to see who gets to start with last rock, a huge advantage) … if all of them won their games.  If one of them didn’t, then it would come down to head-to-head.  So what happened was that Selena Sturmay and Christina Black won their games, which eliminated the third team of Kaitlyn Lawes.  But she was still playing, and if she won, then Black would get the playoff spot, and if she lost, then Sturmay would get it.  And it came down to the last rock, and Lawes did manage to get the win … which gave Black the final playoff spot.

Now, for me, I liked all of the teams and so wouldn’t mind seeing any of them make the playoffs.  But despite my liking Black for her enthusiastic attitude and liking most of Lawes team for a long time, I kinda wanted Sturmay to get in.  I think that was because her team and Black’s team were lesser known teams which I often am partial to, but this time around I didn’t get to see Black play while I did get to see Sturmay play, which had me directly cheering for her and so had me carry that forward into who I wanted to make the playoffs.

Now, up to this point things were going more-or-less according to the script, with Homan and Einarson making it in relatively easily and the winner of the game between the two of them deciding first place, with Lawes in tough for third against some good less experienced teams.  Black did manage to flip the script a little bit to get into the playoffs … and then massively flipped the script by upsetting Einarson in the semi-final.  That meant that she made it to the best-of-three final, and so had a chance of becoming the team that would represent Canada at the Olympics.

This raised an issue that calls the whole idea of those “Trials” into question.  Homan has been to two Olympics already and while she didn’t exactly do well either time — she disappointingly didn’t get to play for and didn’t win a medal at both — she at least has the experience there and on the world stage and has been dominant for the past few seasons, and so no one should have a problem with her going to the Olympics.  Einarson has never been to an Olympics and has been struggling this season, but she’s won a bunch of Scotties — in a row, no less — and while she hasn’t done well on the world stage she’s at least been there, so she would be a good choice as well.  But Black, for all her enthusiasm, is a bit inexperienced, and the format of the Trials gives her a chance to make it to the Olympics where she’s likely to be at a disadvantage.  But surely she wasn’t going to beat Rachel Homan as well, right?

Well, the Trials final used to be one game like it will be at the Olympics, and in the first game … Black almost won it.  It was a bit of a seesaw battle, but Black had an admittedly really difficult shot for three to win the game in the tenth end … and didn’t make it.  If she had, and it had been a single game final, she would have been Canada’s Olympic representative.  But Homan got a bit lucky and won, and then in the second game pretty much destroyed Black to become Canada’s representative.

So, should Canada be using that open a Trials to choose the Olympic representative?  Some could argue that the Trials selected the person who most people would have chosen anyway in Homan, but then you could argue that there wasn’t much of a need for a Trials and having one risked choosing someone less experienced like Black.  On the other hand, this seems to have been a rather odd Trials in that there weren’t a lot of mid-level teams that we’d think could do well at an Olympics.  While I like teams like Black, Sturmay and Lawes they have yet to have shown that they can really play at that level, unlike other teams that have had more sustained success in past Trials like Krista McCarville (now Scharf, from what I’ve read) or Tracy Fleury when she almost won it.  I, in fact, thought that McCarville winning that time would be interesting because she had a really good team that would surprise teams at the Olympics since she didn’t play on the Tour, which could make up for that lack of international experience.  In these Trials, there were really only two teams that I was comfortable seeing go to the Olympics … and I wasn’t even all that sure about Einarson given her struggles this season.  The best argument for keeping things open is to help the younger teams develop into the sorts of teams that we could feel comfortable sending to the Olympics, but given how dominant Homan and Einarson were with scores that we’d normally see at a Scotties that bring in some weaker teams because there must be a team from each province and territory against teams that supposedly are not in that category I have to wonder if this isn’t working as well as it should.

But, ultimately, to no one’s surprise, Rachel Homan won.  If she can keep up her play at the Olympics, she might end up proving that the third time is the charm.

“The Joker’s Comedy of Existence”

The next essay in “Supervillains and Philosophy” is “The Joker’s Comedy of Existence” by Daniel Moseley.  The essay starts out as an examination of why Batman and the Joker can’t understand each other, but then moves on to a discussion of good, evil, morality, and sanity.

See, the most obvious contrast between Batman and the Joker is that Batman is good and the Joker is evil.  But if we wanted to classify them that way, we run into the problem that the Joker is completely and totally insane.  If we interpret “evil” as being “immoral”, then we can ask the question of whether we can call the Joker — and most of Batman’s Rogue’s Gallery — evil because it is possible that their insanity makes the concept of morality meaningless to them.  They may all be more sociopathically — or psychopathicallly — insane and so are in fact incapable of grasping the difference between the moral and the conventional and so are ultimately amoral like the psychopaths I talked about in this essay.  If that’s the case, then perhaps we can’t call them evil at all.

The first thing to consider here is whether or not it is the case that them being amoral stops us from calling them “evil”.  We tend to consider evil and immorality to be linked, and yet it seems like not everyone that we would consider immoral — even someone who is deliberately so — to be evil.  Someone who, say, rejects conventional morality and argues that on a social level we should all reject it and yet refuses to ever cause someone else harm is quite possibly immoral on that level if they advocate for acting in opposition to morality and yet don’t seem to be evil.  In fact, someone who argued that they needed to act immorally because acting morally caused more harm than acting immorally would likely be someone that we could not call evil, even though we’d have to call them immoral by definition.

It is clear that the Joker and others in Batman’s Rogue Gallery can fit into that description.  Often, the Joker is presented as someone who does what he does because he is trying to show people the absurdity and even pain of actual life.  It can be argued that, then, he does this with a goal of having people see the truth, and so to ultimately benefit them.  That his actions cause suffering is arguably, then, in service to a greater good, and so while we can call him immoral, maybe we can’t call him evil.

But there does seem to be a way where we can call the Joker evil and not someone more amoral like Two-Face.  Both the Joker and Two-Face cause other people suffering, and both often seem to do it in service of their own selfish interests.  But it can easily be argued that Two-Face’s immorality is caused by his internal struggle between his good and “evil” side, and the coin flip is what determines which of them wins out, because he can’t settle the battle in any other way.  So as a whole, he neither enjoys nor hates causing other people suffering, because his conflict is between the two sides of him that arguably take either position.  But as Moseley notes, the Joker quite often seems to enjoy causing people suffering and killing them in horrible ways.  Even if his insanity causes him to enjoy those things as opposed to more normal things, it can easily be argued that that enjoyment is what makes him evil.  Doing “evil” things may not be enough to make one evil if one is deluded enough, but enjoying evil things and doing those evil things because one enjoys doing those evil things.  So the Joker, then, in enjoying evil things and treating them as the funniest joke in the world, might well be evil because of that.

Another more minor point is that in all of these cases they are acting in the name of what they at least consider to be “good”, and Moseley notes that that might make it so that they are not evil as they are technically acting in the cause of “good” as they see it.  The issue here is that this is an equivocation on “good”, because the “good” in that case refers purely to their self-interest in the name of satisfying their desires, and the “good” that is contrasted with evil is in general a moral one.  So even if the Joker really, really likes hurting people and finds that to be his most fervent desire, that desire might not be “good” in the moral sense, and most importantly not in the sense that would make him be not evil.

Another more minor point is that Moseley talks about the Joker making a rational argument that life is irrational and so that we should be irrational, and Moseley comments that this is self-defeating because it relies on reason to make the argument work.  But this is in fact the beauty of his argument.  His goal is to get people to reject rationality, so if he builds a rational argument for irrationality and they accept that reasoning and cannot refute it, then reason itself leads to irrationality, and so at best reason itself is self-defeating not his argument.  But if his opponents cannot use reason to refute it, then to reject it would have to mean rejecting reason … which is then what he wants them to do.  So either they are forced to reject reason by the rational argument that they cannot refute, or they are forced to reject reason because that’s the only way to avoid the rational conclusion that they must reject reason.  Either way, the result is the same:  reason must be rejected and, ideally, irrationality must be embraced.

Thoughts on “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors”

Continuing through the “A Nightmare on Elm Street” movies, I arrive at this one.  I knew that this one was coming up and that it featured Nancy instead of my favourite character in the series, but I wasn’t sure if it came up here or if it was a bit later.  I should have realized that Nancy’s saga would end before Alice’s would begin, and so this is indeed the movie that ends Nancy’s run at Freddy.

We start with a group of teenagers who are noted as being the children of the people who killed Freddy the first time in an insane asylum because of various sleep disorders, mostly them being in some way stalked by Freddy in their dreams … or, at least, talking about it and not wanting to sleep, which is enough for the doctors to not believe them.  One girl arrives who seems to have the ability to bring them all together in their dreams, and then Nancy arrives as an expert in sleep disorders — mostly as a graduate student/recent graduate — to help as well, and a mutual attraction develops between her and the doctor who is in charge of the kids.  After a few murders by Freddy that look like suicides — another reason the kids are in the asylum — they all get together to attempt to use hypnosis to all enter the dream and use the powers and personas they give themselves in their dreams to attack Freddy.  This goes disastrously — more kids get killed — and this gets Nancy and the doctor kicked out of the asylum.  However, they had learned that if they properly buried Freddy’s body it would end his power, and so the doctor goes to do that while Nancy goes into the dream to help them with Freddy.  The doctor manages to pull it off with the reluctant help of Nancy’s bitter father — the same actor from the first movie — but Nancy and a couple of the other kids are killed in the dream before that can happen.  And we get the traditional ending that hints that Freddy is not really dead.

One thing that struck me about this movie is the acting.  It’s pretty bad across the board.  The reason it struck me is that as noted above John Saxon returns as Nancy’s father and he’s the only actor who does a consistently good job, making all of his lines and actions seem natural and not forced, while pretty much all of the other actors do that at times.  Since the cast includes Laurence Fishburne, I probably have to blame the director here more than the actors.  It’s notable, but doesn’t really hurt the movie much.

The idea of opposing Freddy directly through the powers one grants oneself in one’s dreams is an interesting one, but it isn’t really used here as Freddy seems to rather easily overcome them even in their areas of power, like strength.  On retrospect, that’s probably the way these things have to go, because if they had the power to directly oppose him and turn it into a straight up fight then you’d lose a good chunk of the horror, as it would be more of an action movie than a horror movie.  As it turns out, I mused about this sort of thing in my teenage years when I was considering my own writing, because when it comes to horror — and especially horror where they were opposing an evil force — I always disliked the idea that the “good” forces were totally helpless in the face of the evil forces.  While it was more horrific for the heroes to be helpless in the face of these powers, there had to be some sort of hope that this could be overcome, and doing it by luck never really sit right with me.  My conclusion at the time is that one can have a good force or set of forces that could oppose the evil and still have a horror movie if those forces couldn’t always be there, and so the evil was victimizing others that the good forces were trying to protect.  And this is itself a relatively common trope in horror, as even when the good forces are mundane there is always a race to set up and use the tools that will destroy the evil before it manages to kill off other people … or, even, the people who are trying to destroy the evil so that their plan will fail.  This movie doesn’t go anywhere near as deeply into that sort of thing as other movies, but the failure of the powers seems to fit with that model.

This is also the movie that goes more deeply into Freddy’s background, with him being the child of the rape of a nun in an insane asylum, the very one that the kids are now in.  There’s no explanation for why that gave him supernaturally evil powers, but again this is not that sort of movie.

Ultimately, again I could nitpick this movie, but it is entertaining enough and does what it sets out to do.  Nancy is a fine protagonist even if she isn’t my favourite, and even here where she steps aside a bit her replacement works fine as well, and I was sad that she ultimately died in this movie.  I could watch this movie again as part of watching the rest of the series.

Accomplishments Update …

It’s been about three months since the last one, and with Christmas rapidly approaching that means two things.  First, it means that my traditional Christmas vacation time is coming up, which changes up the schedule and doesn’t really fit into my normal Accomplishments posts.  Second, it also means that I’m approaching my traditional New Year’s Day reassessment of my projects and my schedule, which overturns the apple cart and gets me to start fresh.  So it’s a good time to write about where I’ve gotten in preparation for doing things differently in the New Year.

TV shows, as usual, worked out pretty well, but seem to be proceeding slower than normal.  The big half hour show that I finished was “The New Addams Family”, and from there finished off the new episodes of “Thundermans Undercover” and started on “Gargoyles”.  As for the hour long shows, I’m still working my way through “Once Upon a Time”, at least partly because it’s just a very, very long series.  But still, progress is being made, and I’ve even watched some James Bond movies before other things have taken away the time I had to do that (while eating) but I do still intend to pick that up when I have more regular time for it.

With reading, again things seem to be going slower than normal, but then perhaps it’s not going as slowly as I think.  I was working my way through Pierre Berton’s “War of 1812” when I wrote the last post and I finished that one off and three more, so a pace of about a book a month, which is reasonable given the change in my schedule.  I also managed to finish off “Determined” and got through “Beyond Good and Evil”, so philosophical reading it going pretty well as well.  More “classic” reading seems to be going slower, as I am still working through “The Pendragon Cycle” and I think I might still be working my way through “Pendragon”, which is a really, really long time for a book like that.  I’ve been re-reading that for a long, long time now and it looks like I will still be re-reading it into next year.

With video games, I finished off “Conception Plus” and then meandered around for a bit before picking up a PS5 and starting to play “Suikoden”.  I haven’t finished that one yet, though.

I managed to keep up with stories, but pretty much bailed on doing programming for the rest of the year when I didn’t do anything on my vacation.  Well, okay, I might do some when I’m off — I really, really want to write a scheduling program that fits my rather … unique way of scheduling — but I have to concede that I might not do that.

At any rate, that’s it for the attempt to finish accomplishments for this year, and on New Year’s Day I will reset and re-evaluate all the things I am trying to accomplish.

More Thoughts on “The Thundermans Undercover”

This is the first time I’ve really been hit by it, but how “The Thundermans Undercover” was rolled out really makes me dislike streaming.  I waited for quite a while for the first episodes to roll out, and then finally watched the first run, and then soon after noticed that six more episodes dropped.  And then I started watching other things, and when I finished “The New Addams Family” I decided to just push through them before moving on … and then I think the last few episodes dropped right before I started watching it.  The more I have to wait for episodes and the more confused I am about when they will roll out, the more likely I am to forget to watch it (I’m looking at you “Twisted Metal”).  You need to keep the momentum going, and this sort of schedule is not how to keep momentum going.

But anyway, onto the show.  To remind us of the premise, the Thunderman twins from the previous series get a mission to go undercover to uncover a new threat, and take little sister Chloe along to give her a bit of a normal life like they had.  The show combines the adventures of Chloe with her pretty much loser … er, I mean quirky friends with some superhero action, along with the normal banter and competition between Phoebe and Max.

After the first season, they had a small arc called “Summer School”, where Max, as vice principal, forgets to get Chloe’s absences excused and gets her sent to summer school.  He then gets roped in by the principal to teach it.  Meanwhile, a new superhero shows up to help Phoebe out as she goes to fight crime on her own, and ends up being there to evaluate their partnership and decide if they should continue to work on the mission.  Then as part of that Chloe gets a crush and his father is hinted at being the Mastermind … but it ends up being her crush.

The Summer School arc was a fairly poor one.  The issue, I think, is that it tries to balance the superheroics and the normal life arcs like the previous show and even season did and is what gave the show its charm, but what it missed was that in the previous arcs there was a focus on the twins and so on them as the main characters, and so they were involved in both the superheroics and the normal life stuff and so there was a better balance between them.  After all, you had to find the time to fit those characters into the normal life stuff around the superheroics, so you had good transitions and it was never the case that there was dramatic superhero stuff happening that then immediately cut to normal life stuff.  But here what we had was the twins doing the superheroics and Chloe doing all the normal life stuff, so we cut from dramatic superheroics to Chloe’s normal life, which then seemed incredibly unimportant given the superheroics that were going on, like at the end where there was a big superhero fight while Chloe was at a dance and being nervous about slow dancing with her crush.  That entire arc up until that ending point really didn’t work at all.  But after that, it settled down to them all being together and focusing more on the superheroics, and then returned to being the sort of show that made the original series so interesting in the first place.

The superhero arc has the introduction of a control chip that is used on Max to turn him evil, and has Phoebe believe that he has turned evil.  He is quite upset at her for believing this despite his protesting that he didn’t do it, and while she had enough evidence to believe that it is a bit weak.  I would have rathered the series either make Phoebe the controlled villain — and use a disguise gadget to look like him — or to have the chip not work on Max because he’s already been evil and so all it does is have him act the way he would normally, having realized that it’s better for him to work with his family.  Outside of that, it was all right, although Captain Perfect was just a bit annoying and a better arc there could have been created, it seems to me.

That being said, the series was fine.  Max and Phoebe still have good chemistry together and their banter really works.  My biggest problem with the series is that Chloe is made more prominent but is a less interesting character, and her friends are more losers than nicely quirky.  I liked Kambucha for being more quirky, but in the Summer School arc she seemed to get hyped up on a sugar rush or something and ended up acting incredibly over-the-top, which took away the one interesting friend Chloe had, although she got better in the last few episodes.  Ultimately, I don’t think it’s as good as the original series but think that it had a lot of the elements that made it good, and it wouldn’t be too hard to smooth things out and make the series better.  I would watch this as part of rewatching the entire Thundermans series, but don’t think I’d watch it just on its own.

Tori Vega Diary: Intro

The smallest of things can have a great impact on the galaxy, albeit tangentially.

A slipped shoe at the wrong time in a performance can cause the rather dramatic breakup of a … well, not particularly successful singing group, forcing the member to take rather drastic measures to earn their survival.  One shifts to the other side of the law, interacting with the scum of the galaxy and yet retaining a nobility that is foreign to them, and manage a great feat to preserve the Republic in its time of need.  And the other becomes a smuggler.

But sometimes those events that seem tangential can also spur a more … direct impact.  And after an accidental encounter, the perpetrator of the accident will find herself caught up in the struggle for the galaxy quite directly, and become a bad, beautiful babe with really big guns.

Ordinary Heroes (Chapter 13)

Rachel burst into The Stoic’s room.  “How come you didn’t tell me?!?” she demanded.

The Stoic looked from the book he was reading at her with a puzzled expression.  “Tell you what?” he asked.

“Oh, come on, you can’t tell me you didn’t know!” she exclaimed.

“Know what?” he asked again.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!” she exclaimed again.

“I assure you, I have no … ” The Stoic began, before pausing in thought for an instant, thinking about what could have possibly caused her to be so upset.

“Oh.  That, ” he said.

“Yeah, that!” she exclaimed.  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why should I have told you?” he retorted.

That brought her up short.   “Why … why wouldn’t you tell me?” she asked.  “Did you just want to humiliate me?”

“When we first met, ” he said, “We didn’t have any reason to trust you.  You were just one more ‘cape’ who was trying to make us into something we weren’t and didn’t want to be.”

“But … but I never wanted to do that!  I thought you wanted to be superheroes!” she protested.

“Yeah, and when we realized that, the reason we didn’t want to tell you was because we didn’t want to humiliate you, ” he said.

“But you knew I’d find out eventually!” she protested.

“Yeah, but at that point … we were hoping that someone else would have to do it.  Hopefully the big shots who put you in that position in the first place, ” he replied.

All the anger drained out of her at that point, to be replaced with an emptiness.  She’d thought that she had been given this position because everyone thought she was good, and that it was an honour, and it turned out that she had only been given the position as a sop, and everyone was laughing at her.  Yes, even the team that she was supposed to lead.  And then the very people that she’d spent that much time helping still kept it from her … but only out of pity.  She’d felt like a big hero.  She’d felt like a great leader.  And ultimately, no one saw her that way, and instead everyone saw her as someone who was getting screwed over and didn’t even know it.

As tears flooded her eyes, she said, “I … I have to go, ” and she ran out of the room.

The Stoic looked at her with a pained expression on his face, and then put down his book and headed out into the halls.

Thoughts on “Beyond Good and Evil”

A while ago I picked up and started reading “The Will to Power”, and wasn’t all that thrilled by it, and so got distracted by other philosophical works.  At the same time, a co-worker noted that it was assembled later and might not have been accurate (although further reading suggests that might not be true), and I managed to get a cheap copy of “Beyond God and Evil”, and then also got “Thus Spake Zarathustra”.  I put them in my stack of philosophical books to read, and after “Determined”, they were next in the stack.  I then Googled around to see what was the best order to read them in, and while there were some dissenting views, I think that at least one of them said to read “Beyond Good and Evil” first.  After reading it, I think that advice was incorrect … and wonder if it was even worth bothering to read it at all.

To be fair, if I had read to paid attention to the back of the book, I would have done things differently.  It says this:

Expanding on his ideas from Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s radical polemic Beyond Good and Evil undermines the assumptions of traditional morality and encourages us to think more critically about the world in which we live.

Philosophically speaking, if “Beyond Good and Evil” expands on the ideas from “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, the it would make sense to read the latter first to get a sense of the ideas to be able to understand how they are expanded.  But in reading it, that “polemic” part is quite important, as much of the book is spent mostly railing against specific ideas and specific philosophers and people and even nations and races, but what I found lacking was a philosophical discussion of those ideas, as well as a strong outline of what Nietzsche’s actually alternatives and ideas were.  If this is supposed to be an expansion of the ideas, it seems like there isn’t much expansion happening, at least in a philosophical sense.  Given that his tone is mostly polemical as opposed to philosophical, the book really struck me as a book that are like modern social media comments:  if you agree with him already, you will be amused by his attacks on the people and ideas you already think are wrong, but if you don’t, you won’t be convinced.

The key concept is, of course, the Will to Power, and Nietzsche might be forgiven for not focusing on it, assuming that it is expanded on in “Thus Spake Zarathustra”.  But in reading about it here, it is difficult for me to see a “Will to Power” that can make sense and can do the work that Nietzsche wants it to.  It seems a bit nonsensical for a Will to actual Power to be a definitional trait of humans because power is an instrumental and not an intrinsic good.  Unless Nietzsche is interpreting it as a desire or will for capabilities, any idea of a Will to Power will run into the issue that the rational person only desires power as a means to the end of achieving what they want, or as a way to protect the things they have.  If someone has enough power to get the things they want and hold onto them, what need do they have for more power?  And then, what is the importance of the Will to Power at that point?

I do think that a definitional trait of humans is indeed the Will, but I think the Will is best reflected in Nietzsche’s comment about what religions demand of people, in that they demand the sacrifice of what someone would think of as their interests as a symbol of their dedication.  Someone who can sacrifice what they consider their own interests and can indeed endure deprivation and suffering for a greater cause is exercising their Will and dominating their inner animal nature (which at one point Nietzsche seems to suggest is a bad thing).  A reasonable criticism of religion is that people are encouraged to do that not for a greater cause, but for greater pleasures and self-interest in heaven, but the idea that someone can use their Will to control themselves and strive for the greater good is, I think, the best reflection of humanity and what makes us human.

Which is important, because early on Nietzsche does raise an interesting question about the nature and basis of morality, one that is raised by moral relativists like former commenter Coel:  how can we have an objective morality if we don’t know what it is or what its basis is?  But for me, moral truths are conceptual truths, built around the concept of morality at all.  And what characterizes us as moral agents is the capacity to sacrifice our own personal pragmatic interests for a greater cause.  This is not to say that any time we do that we are being moral, as we can push for greater causes that are amoral or even immoral.  But what makes us moral agents and not animals is that we can act compassionately or out of a sense of justice consciously, and do things just because it is morally right to do that regardless of our own personal interests.  Nietzsche seems to hint that egoistic moralities are the better ones — again, because he doesn’t develop here I am not certain about that — but this model notes that egoistic moralities aren’t moralities at all, because they reduce morality to the pragmatic and so we are not acting in the service of a cause greater than ourselves, but instead in the cause of ourselves.  And focusing on that would take away the human Will entirely.

But, again, “Beyond Good and Evil” doesn’t really go into any of that, so I am not at all clear on what Nietzsche’s position here.  I can only presume that “Thus Spake Zarathustra” will in fact build out and argue for his position.  But if that’s the case, then it seems unlikely that I will end up thinking that “Beyond Good and Evil” expanded that in any meaningful way, given that it is mostly railing with little development of any ideas.  So I absolutely should not have read it first, and I think I should not have read it at all.

At any rate, “Thus Spake Zarathustra” is up next, so I’ll see if it really does outline Nietzsche’s ideas better.

Thoughts on “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge”

This is indeed the movie that I gave short shrift to the first time around, and is also the only movie, I think, with a male primary protagonist.  And it turns out that there’s also a good reason why I couldn’t remember much about it the last time, as it is pretty lackluster.

A family has just moved in to Nancy’s old house on Elm Street, but the movie opens with a dream with the son of the new on the school bus and attacked by Freddy with two other girls, ultimately waking up screaming.  It turns out that he doesn’t usually take the bus as he drives his beater car to school, and gives a ride to a local girl who is, it seems, somewhat wealthy.  He also runs afoul of what seems like the local bully, although as they do push-ups after an altercation in gym class they seem to be a little more friendly, which is when the bully mentions that his house was the one that Nancy was in.  Later, he and his girlfriend discover Nancy’s diary and learn the story.  But as the movie progresses, we see more interactions with Freddy, but it starts to be in the real world, and there are even some murders … which are implied to be by the boy himself.  So the impression is that Freddy is trying to take over his body to continue his spree in the real world, and he manages to do that at a party the girl is throwing.  She eventually faces Freddy and appeals to him based on the fact that she loves him, which returns the boy to normal and seemingly destroys Freddy.  But as with the first movie the end seems to be Freddy taking over the bus again and driving them off into the desert.

The big things that struck me about this movie is that it’s quite … jerky.  It lurches from scene to scene without having the proper connectors and without the proper development.  We get scenes with the boy and his family and weird things happening, but they are disconnected from the rest of the plot as they are not referenced and the family themselves don’t get involved in the ending, and their relationships don’t play into the boy’s transformation or recovery.  The relationship with the bully wavers back and forth between bullying and an odd friendship, again with little development.  The girls moves quite quickly between calling him someone she gets a ride from to being essentially a girlfriend.  Freddy’s takeover proceeds through dreams and through the real world in the same manner.  And all of these are interspersed with each other so it makes it feel like scenes from a completely different movie that were stitched together to make one movie.  It’s a bit disconcerting.

In addition, the move from primarily being in the dream world to being in the real world hurts the movie.  In the dream world, anything can happen and so it is easier to make Freddy incredibly powerful, but it’s also easier to imagine a way to defeat him, either by dragging him into the real world as Nancy tried to do or by turning the power of dreams against him as I believe is tried in the next movie.  In the real world, for Freddy to be overwhelming requires supernatural power that is a bit unbelievable and is also incredibly hard to oppose.  For Freddy to be an overwhelming threat in the real world, he has to be incredibly powerful and there is no way to drag him into a world with the real world with real physics that would limit it.  That requires him to be defeated with “The Power of Love”, but as per the rest of the movie that relationship developed a bit too quickly to be believed.

That being said, despite its flaws the movie is still, in general, pretty entertaining.  Freddy gets to talk more and be more intimidating, and while I found the protagonist lackluster he’s mostly inoffensive.  As I noted when talking about the first movie, Heather Langenkamp did feisty well and emotionally devastated poorly, but here the actor doesn’t really get to do anything other than be fearful, which makes for a dull character.  But the movie moves along well, regardless.  If this was the first or the only movie in the series I would definitely be filing it as something to maybe watch at some point when I got the chance, but I could indeed rewatch it.  As part of the entire series, though, it becomes worth watching it as part of watching the series, and the first movie rises a bit above that mark … and later movies, as per my memory, will definitely rise above that level.