More Musings on Nietzsche

I didn’t really intend to do this regularly, and I’m not even going to quote Nietzsche here so I might be drifting far further from his actual intent than normal, but I’ve just read part of his discussion of Christianity and have some musings about it.

The first musing is that there have always been times when I’ve thought that Nietzsche might have a point, but almost as soon as I’ve done that it has gotten buried under his rants about the things and people he dislikes.  In the other works, that would cause me to not even remember what he said and thus not be able to analyze it any further.  Here, though, I remember what he said and also was able to think it through a bit more.  The basic idea is that he takes the New Testament as his starting point and notes that while Jesus in the New Testament was quite individualistic and anti-hierarchical, Christianity itself — and while he doesn’t say it, it is indeed particularly true of Catholicism — is quite hierarchical, and so it seems like Christianity is in fact the opposite of what Jesus advocated for.  While I think there are indeed a number of things in the New Testament that can save Christianity from such accusations, it’s actually an interesting point.  He then goes on to mostly blame Paul for that shift, which is again an interesting take on it.  However, my having done an examination of historicism vs mythicism, on reflection that doesn’t seem all that credible.  Paul was a contemporary of the earliest Christians and comments on the hierarchy that they themselves had, and if one is taking the New Testament as an accurate representation of the earliest Christians I believe there is plenty of justification for the sort of hierarchy that Paul talks about, although Paul would seem to have formalized it a bit more.  And if Paul was advocating such a radical change from what the earliest Christians who would have been associated with Jesus were doing, then it seems unlikely that he would have been accepted as part of their inner circle, even with the argument that his theology was for the Gentiles while theirs was for the Jews.  And then in pondering that, it seems clear that he was going by his analysis of Paul — to whatever extent he had actually read it, which may well be extensive — and not by anything else or by examining anything else.  And thus his analysis there is suspect, at least.

The other thing to note is that Nietzsche seems to in some way both admire and deride Jesus.  As seen in the previous paragraph, he criticizes Christianity for ignoring Jesus’ stated message in the New Testament, but he also seems to respect those things and so sees Christianity as in some way deviant because it seems to go in the opposite direction.  But he also derides Jesus’ message in the New Testament, mostly because it is self-sacrificing, where Jesus has the power to save himself and yet doesn’t do it.  So it seems like he respects the idea that ultimately ones actions can only be judged in reference to oneself and not to some hierarchy, but derides the idea that people ought to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others.

And this highlights where he and I part ways philosophically.  For him, the pinnacle of humanity is the Will to Power, the will to gain the power to achieve one’s self-interested and possibly hedonistic desires.  For me, though, what separates humans from the beasts is the ability to put aside one’s own self-interests in the service of a greater cause, whether that’s the needs of others or some greater moral purpose.  We always have a reason to pursue our own self-interest, but it takes a transcendental reason to ignore those in favour of some other purpose.  The basic capacity for morality, to me, is to indeed be able to do that, to moderate one’s self-interest by subordinating it to the moral.  This is why I disagree with the atheistic moral philosophies of people like Richard Carrier and Adam Lee, because in the service of finding a morality that everyone will automatically agree that they have a reason to follow they reduce it to self-interest by arguing that we should all want to be moral because it works out better for us to do so, and so it reduces all moral principles to pragmatic ones.  And if we are going to do that, why care about “morality” at all?  Why not ditch moral reasoning and rely only on pragmatic reasoning?

At any rate, this division of views is, I think, exactly why I’m not all that impressed with Nietzsche, as I simply cannot get behind his starting point.  But I’ll see how things go as I progress through “The Will to Power”.

Thoughts on “Combat Shock”

So, finally pushing forward into the “Cs” again, I come to “Combat Shock”.  Now, in general I try not to read the descriptions of these movies too much before watching them, so as to go in more cold.  I will read them if I’m not sure if it’s the sort of movie that I will bother watching — looking for animal horror movies or giallo, mostly — but in general I like to avoid knowing too much about the movie before I watch it.  But I hate caught part of the description for this movie, and it said this:

This low-budget cult classic follows a Vietnam veteran’s slow descent into madness after failing to adjust to life upon returning home.

Huh.  That sounded a bit interesting.  And then in the opening scenes I still felt some enthusiasm for the movie, and then saw the name “Lloyd Kaufman”.  And I thought “Where have I seen that name before?”.  And it hit me about a second or two before the screen confirmed it:  this was going to be a Troma movie.  And my hopes for the movie crashed to the depths of apathy.

The plot is basically as the introduction describes.  A Vietnam veteran has had dreams of the time when his entire squad was killed except for him, and on awakening we discover that he’s jobless, with a wife and horribly deformed child — because what kind of Troma movie would it be without that — and that they have absolutely no food in the apartment and no money for food.  We find out later that his wife is pregnant again as well, and that they are about to be evicted for non-payment of rent.  It seems that he’s on the outs with his father — at least in part because his father didn’t like his wife — but that his father was wealthy and so she wants him to ask his father for help and he doesn’t.  He goes out to wander the streets ostensibly to find a job, but as “Telegraph Road” said the issue seems to be that there’s no work there to be found, and it turns out that he owes money to some kind of loan shark who want it by the end of the day or they’ll break his arms, which while watching the movie I pondered about how doing that was not going to help them get their money back but I guess it works as an example so that other people try really, really hard to give them their money back, but then it seems like the smarter egoist approach would be to make examples of the people who are either trying to play them or who aren’t working at it hard enough, while finding … other ways to relieve the debt from the people who simply can’t pay them back no matter how many threats are made.  And, as it turns out, they threaten that too, saying that they’ll get his wife — who used to be a prostitute — back in the saddle if he can’t pay, and she at one point suggests that herself.  Her having been a prostitute might also be a reason why the father didn’t like her.  Anyway, the guy wanders around having flashbacks to his time in Vietnam with him having been captured at some point which is interspersed with hints about how bad things are in the neighbourhood, like with a little girl who was turned into a prostitute to make money.  He does eventually cave in and call his father … only to discover that his father, despite still having a fancy house and servant is broke and is dying on top of all that, so he can’t help him.  Soon after, he has a flashback to a village that all committed suicide to avoid the horrors of what the U.S. military would do to them, but after that it is revealed that he was the one responsible for the slaughter.  He ends up killing the loan shark and his minions, and then returns home and ends up killing his wife, his kid, and then himself.

Now, a low budget exploration of these sorts of issues can work, and I’m sure has been done by a number of other films (I can’t really quote any because it’s not my style of movie, and the ones I remember like “The Deer Hunter” are probably not low budget).  But the problem here is that Troma is not low budget.  Troma is cheap.  And the movie and the acting and everything done to the deformed baby seem out-and-out cheap.  And the cheapness is distracting, especially given that most of the movie is just him wandering around the cheaply filmed and acted movie so that we can revel in the cheapness.  That style works for a kinda parody like “The Toxic Avenger” but not for something that we really need to be taking seriously.

The movie also suffers from a complete lack of a theme for us to focus on so that we can take these events seriously.  From the description, it is implied that this might be an examination of Reagan’s America, but there’s nothing here that would really imply that unless someone lived in that time and recognized everything in it, but then again all those elements have been in these sorts of movies that examine someone in poor economic straits for ages and ages.  After all, “Telegraph Road” (the song) was not inspired by that as far as I know — being written by a Brit — and as noted above the comment it makes about that sort of situation fits quite well with this movie.  So instead of it coming across as social commentary it simply comes across as the story of one poor schlub who’s in over his head economically — at least in part due to his own issues, given that he had one kid and then another kid when he didn’t have the money to support them, and the movie implies that they decided to start a family then — who also has some things wrong in his head.

But the theme should have been either the slow descent into madness mentioned above, or the link between what happened to him in Vietnam and what is happening now and will happen later in the movie.  But he doesn’t seem to really “descend” into madness as mostly being there already — which we can assume causes the issues with getting and keeping a job — and with all the misfortunes foisted upon him ultimately driving him back there, as the movie shows him being in a hospital and being insane — presumably from the torture in captivity, if that even happened — so this has to be seen as his having somewhat recovered but still potentially being a bit on the edge.  What they had that could have been interesting was the idea of the entire village deciding to commit suicide to avoid the worse outcome of what the soldiers were going to do with them, because then that would have tied into the ending where, ultimately, he decides that for him and his family that’s the only solution, which then could have tied to a theme that the horrific things that soldiers in Vietnam were noted for doing can be compared to the despair that these sorts of economic issues can cause for people which could get people to reconsider our ideas towards that.  But, as noted above, that’s all scuppered by the at least implied revelation that their deaths were caused by him and so were not suicides at all, and so then his murder-suicide is just him acting the way he acts when he breaks, and all the symbolism and theme are lost, and unless we accept that this is the result of complete desperation we won’t feel at all sorry for him that he ends up doing this.  And I didn’t feel sorry for him.

A good theme could have saved this low budget movie despite its cheapness.  But the cheapness and the goofiness that is inherent to Troma movies simply couldn’t build in a properly dramatic movie without that sort of solid theme.  This leaves this movie as nothing more than the audience watching a not particularly sympathetic guy wander around and have enough misfortune for us to feel at least a bit sorry for him until the revelation that he’s a mass murderer and then decides to visit that on his family as well.  So what we have here is a movie that is mostly boring that has a completely unsatisfying ending because the ending doesn’t say anything and the main character is the victim of character assassination right at the end with no real realization of that to make us feel sympathetic towards him again.  I will not watch this movie again.

 

Uninterested in Losing …

I’ve always commented that I missed arcades.  A while ago, I bought myself a system that I could hook up to a TV that contained a whole group of arcade games, featuring some of the ones that I had played when I was, in fact, going to arcades.  I, in fact, even made a list of all the games that I wanted to play.  For the most part, though, the only games that I really played on it was going through the entire X-Men game with all of the characters — easy to do since the system gives me unlimited continues — and then playing a bit of the WWF games, a bit of the Avengers game, and a bit of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game.  I also took a couple of shots at a couple of other games — like Pole Position, where I had to learn how the game worked, meaning how to shift into high gear — but for the most part that was all I did, mostly because I never found a good time to slide regularly playing them into my schedule, although I kept musing about playing them.  And I noticed something interesting in my musings.

One of the sorts of games that I used to play frequently in the arcades were the fighting games like X-Men:  Children of the Atom, Marvel vs Capcom, World Heroes, Street Fighter II, Darkstalkers, and so on and so forth.  And as it turns out, the system I bought has quite a number of those games on the system.  In fact, it was entirely designed around fighting games, and so it’s only good fortune that it has a lot of other games that I like.  Well, not just good fortune but it seems like design, but there are more versions of various fighting games than it has of anything else (although its Mortal Kombat version performed very poorly when I tried it).  But the issue that kept coming up when I mused about playing those games was that I wasn’t very successful at those games.  I’d only get through a round or two and then would be beaten, often handily.  And I didn’t really feel like doing that.

Now, the thing is that when I was playing them in the arcades, I wasn’t actually all that much better, although I almost beat Marvel Super Heroes once with Iron Man when I got the Unibeam timing right — and did pretty well with that one on this system until I ran into Magneto — and did almost manage to beat World Heroes with Jeanne.  But, yeah, I wasn’t in general all that much more successful with those games in the arcades than I was here at home.  And yet then I went and paid for the privilege of only getting in that many rounds, while here while it’s free I don’t feel like doing that.  Why is that?

One could argue that now that I’m older I don’t have the time and thus the patience to keep pounding away at these games only to lose without getting very far, and there probably is some truth to that.  Every time I start that system up I play for a little bit but if I’m not really getting anywhere or, more importantly, if I’m not getting really engaged in the game I tend to lose motivation and interest and quit to go do other things.  Playing the X-Men game will keep me engaged, and the wrestling game can do that if I give it enough time for me to get involved, but playing those short fighting game rounds doesn’t give me enough time to get engaged with it and knowing that I’m not going to get much further if I keep continuing doesn’t encourage me to try getting engaged with it.  So that might be part of it.

But just when I consider playing the games I think about how bad I am at them and decide not to play them.  I think the issue is something that calls back to my post on the different types of games:  I know that I could get better at these games if I learned the moves and practiced, and I don’t really want to practice.  For the unlimited continue games like X-Men, I know that I will make it to the end with this system, but that’s clearly not the case with the fighting games.  In the arcades, I was just going there to kill some time or to get the experience of the game, with no intention to practice at all or, really, to get to the end.  If I got to the end or made it further than expected I was happy, but for the most part I was playing to play as Morrigan or Wolverine or Jeanne or Vega or whoever.  Even with the console versions I tended to play more to fight as that character instead of playing to really win, although with things like Mortal Kombat I would tend towards characters whose moves I could do easily and avoided the ones I couldn’t.  But still, I was playing to fight as those characters, with no thought of trying to perfect my play.  There’s no way I would have had the time or money to do that.

But as noted in the post referenced above, I noticed that, yeah, with this system I could do that.  Money, at least, was no option, although of course time was a much bigger factor.  And so when I play the games and even when I consider playing the games I can’t help but think that if I looked up the moves and tried to learn I’d do better and might even be able to beat them.  And so if I, say, take Cyclops out for his optic blast — which is normally an easier way to advance in the game — and get slaughtered by Storm in the second or third round, it’s not that I managed to play as him for a bit and was satisfied, but instead that I had hoped to do better and, with practice, could do better.  And I don’t have time to practice, nor do I think it would be very fun to practice.  And so I don’t play those games that I would have played at least once every day or two when I was in university.

As a result, I don’t play arcade games all that much and always feel bad for not playing arcade games, given how much I miss them and did, in fact, enjoy playing the X-Men game on the system.  Perhaps I need to simply let go of worrying about how good I would be at the games and just play them to play them again.  Then again, if I did that then maybe I’d kill as much time playing them as I did in the arcades when I was in university.

So maybe this isn’t that bad after all.

Final Thoughts on “Once Upon a Time”

Before going into watching this series, all I knew about “Once Upon a Time” was that it had some sort of modern fairy tale theme and that the actress playing the Evil Queen was kinda hot.  Oh, and that Jennifer Morrison was in it, and I liked her in “House”.  Given that, it was worth giving it a try, even though it was seven seasons long and so would take a really, really long time to get through given my more limited TV watching time.  And now that I’ve finished the entire series, what did I ultimately think of it?

The premise is done fairly well, I have to say.  It takes the classic fairy tales and legends and blends them into the modern world, and yet for most of the series into a modern world that is still somewhat separated from the world we know, which lets them be more fairy-taleish without having to explain why no one notices the odd things that keep happening there:  people from the outside world don’t get to go there, and the people inside the town are all cursed to for the most part not notice those things.  And the structure of flipping between the modern world and the world of the Enchanted Forest works fairly well and allows it to properly implement what is probably its best feature:  that while these fairy tale and legendary characters are familiar, they aren’t the ones you remember.  That, then, makes it easier to accept a Snow White that isn’t as attractive as the Evil Queen because the show can rewrite their history to make their conflict something different, and it makes it easier to accept a more … active Snow White because, again, her history isn’t the same as it was in the fairy tales we remember.  This allows them to do what they want to do with the characters while still, on some level, having them be the characters we remember, which opens up more options for them.

However, this of course ends up being a bit of an expiring premise, as eventually we’d expect that they’d have told all the important backstory and so the flashbacks would be more meaningless.  The show thus found ways to make it relevant, by curing the curse but then creating new ones so that we could be shown what had happened even if the characters didn’t, and also by introducing new characters whose histories could be shown in flashbacks.  However, that couldn’t completely mask the fact that most of this was there just so that they could keep doing the flashbacks, and so it didn’t really solve the problem of the flashbacks seeming unimportant and meaningless at times.  I was definitely getting tired of the flashbacks by the later seasons.

Another issue was the show was that it tended to stuff a lot of plots into short periods of time and so ended up quite soap-operaish … and more so than most soap operas that I remember watching.  A big part of why this was the case was the now traditional mid-season cliffhangers, which meant that they had to build towards a climax at mid-season and then continue on to the full season climax and cliffhanger.  The show tried to do this by creating a first plot that they then more or less resolved at mid-season, only to replace it with something else for the rest of the season.  This caused a number of problems.  First, as noted above, it caused there to be many plots going at once, which got a bit frustrating at times.  Second, in order to build up and then resolve the plots, things were often quite contrived to cause and then resolve problems.  And third, it caused them to make their villains utterly unbeatable until some contrivance appeared so that they could be rather handily defeated, making the villains mostly uninteresting.  Nothing could touch their villains and they were always a few steps ahead of the heroes right up until the end when everything collapsed.  Zelena was probably the most annoying example of all of these aspects, but aside from Rumpelstiltskin and the Evil Queen — who had some justification for being in their position and tended to get there through planning and knowledge instead of raw power — pretty much all the villains were like this.

Another issue with the series was, unfortunately, Emma.  The big issue with her is that other than being perhaps a bit cynical and skeptical she really didn’t have a personality, and most of her past was dribbled out over the seasons so we didn’t really get to know her all that well either.  And for the most part even her history was there to facilitate the stories of other people — Pinocchio and Neil, for starters — and so didn’t really reveal that much about her as opposed to what the writers wanted to be true about her to make their plot work.  And that was really the downfall of the character, because she was essentially written to be whatever the writers needed her to be to make the plot work.  She was cynical and skeptical when they wanted her to be, a believer when they wanted her to be, angry when they wanted her to be, heroic when they wanted her to be, and so on and so forth.  It really felt like she didn’t have a personality of her own, or at least not a consistent one, which made her not particularly interesting as a character, despite her being the focus character for most of the series.  Add in that Jennifer Morrison’s acting was sometimes not particularly compelling — especially in Season 6, her last season — and the purported focus character was not really one that I wanted to focus on.  But when Season 7 focused on an aged-up Henry instead, it didn’t work any better, although that was more due to a less interesting move into the “real world” instead of staying in Storybrooke, and a repetition of the original premise with a new character and less interesting love interests and supporting characters.

But the show has some good points.  In his “Mr. Gold” persona and when the writers remember that he’s an antagonist and not a villain, Rumpelstiltskin works really well, and even his impish character has his good points.  Regina works really well and is probably one of the more interesting and best-acted characters in the series.  And Charming does channel Chris Evans’ Captain America’s blinding sincerity to work as a character.  And, as I said, the premise is interesting and mostly works when the plots aren’t being too convoluted and the villains aren’t being really annoying.

So, then, would I watch this series again?  Despite the fact that as I went through it it often annoyed me enough that I wasn’t all that thrilled about coming back for the next episode, in terms of pure quality it would fall into the “I might watch this again at some point” category.  For all of its flaws, there’s enough good in it for that.  However, this is balanced by the fact that the series is really, really long.  It has 156 episodes, which is about 117 hours to watch.  It’s good enough to maybe watch again, but not good enough to spend 117 hours to watch again, especially since right now my normal pace would be about 12 episodes a week at best and so it would take me over three months to get through.  There are many, many better shows that I could spend three months watching.  Like “House, M.D.”, if I wanted to see Jennifer Morrison.  So I don’t think I will rewatch this series anytime soon.

Thoughts on “The Scotties”

Normally, I get watch pretty much all of the Scotties (the Canadian Women’s Curling Championhips) because I take vacation time when it is on.  This year, it was a few weeks earlier in the schedule, and so my vacation time would align with the Olympics instead of with it, and so I only got to watch a few draws here and there.  And, of course, that it was moved earlier to avoid clashing with the Olympics had another effect, much more monumental than my simply not being able to watch it, which was that Rachel Homan, last year’s winner, was not going to attend as she was preparing for the Olympics, which left Kerri Einarson the mantle of Team Canada and the prohibitive favourite to win it for a fifth time.  And ultimately, she did manage to win it, in a close game against Kaitlyn Lawes’ team, who had managed to beat her handily in two previous matches but couldn’t repeat that for a third time in this event.

Now, I would have rathered Lawes win, and then that got me thinking why I am so tired of Einarson winning and yet still cheer for Rachel Homan, who wins as much.  Sure, Einarson won more years in a row than Homan, which helps, but I find that I dislike Einarson herself more than I dislike Homan, despite the fact that both of them are … well, let’s just say aggressively competitive and leave it at that.  One reason is that I think that Homan herself has lightened up a little bit over the past few years while Einarson doesn’t seem to have changed very much, and my impression was that Homan is more aggressive while Einarson at times can be a bit more smug.  But then I remembered why it is that it is hard for me to like Einarson:  she abandoned her old team to form the all-skip team that she has had such success with — although when Tracy Fleury took over she managed to beat Einarson a couple of times in their first meetings — and then dumped Briane Harris later on, replacing her with Karlee Burgess … which, oh yeah, also helped Jennifer Jones wipe out the promising team that Mackenzie Zacharias had founded.  Homan dumped Lisa Weagle in a fairly perfunctory manner, but Einarson has, at least, treated more people and teams that I care about badly.  So that kinda does it, despite the fact that Val Sweeting is probably one of my favourite curlers, which really helps me to actually cheer for Einarson when I need to (like when she’s playing to win the Worlds, like she will be this year).

Anyway, back to the event itself.  What struck me this time was how much of the games were determined by out-and-out misses.  And by that, I mean clean misses and unforced errors.  I rather enjoy misses that are caused by one team setting up things so that really tough shots are needed, which then can be missed, but rather easy draws were quite often missed.  And a lot of time the teams, as Russ Howard puts it, “missed the wrong way”.  So if you were trying to put the rock in a specific place, and being deep was a big issue while being short wasn’t as big a deal, one might expect them to “pull the string” and end up short, but a lot of time the teams would at least do the equivalent of going deep (which in some cases might be hitting a rock on the wrong side or the wrong way, and so on).  That games so often turned on misses on relatively easy shots was very frustrating.

I didn’t get to see it, but there was one game and one end that I had a hard time understanding.  Selena Sturmay was down by 1 going into the tenth and final end against Melodie Forsythe … and ended up scoring seven in that end to win the game.  To explain just how difficult that is, each team only gets eight rocks in an end, and scoring in curling is determined by how many of one team’s rocks is closer to the center of the rings than the rocks of the other team.  So this meant that Sturmay had to have almost all of her rocks in play and in the rings, and there had to be none of Forsythe’s in the rings — or, at least, none closer than any of Sturmay’s, but Sturmay had removed the only rock Forsythe had in the rings to score the seven — when Forsythe had incentive to remove as many of Sturmay’s rocks as she could as soon as she could.  In thinking about it after, it could have been the case that Sturmay had set herself up for two points early on and Forsythe was desperately trying to avoid giving her the two points and there were no doubles or triples available that would allow her to prevent her getting two, but it’s still puzzling.

With Homan away this year, it really drove home that in Canadian Women’s Curling we have a bit of a dearth of what would be known as top tier teams.  Based on their performance in the Grand Slam of Curling, only Einarson really counted, as Lawes was on the tour but was generally not all that successful, while the others barely made an appearance there.  Now, many of them had played in other events that are not, at least, televised in a way that it is easy for me to watch, but that only gets them to the mid-tier of teams, above the also-rans and fighting it out for the playoff spots.  Lawes performed better than anyone would have expected, but the others did about as well as expected, beating the also-rans and looking like on a good day they could give a team like Einarson a run for their money, but that it ended up being Einarson who won was not much of a surprise.  The good news is that a lot of them are relatively young teams and so might be up-and-coming, but it will be interesting to see if this is a transition to a new crop of elite teams or a transition to Canadian Women’s Curling being dominated by a couple of teams with middling teams slotting in behind them.

Anyway, next up is the Olympics, and I will get some time to pay attention to that one, since that fits into my normal vacation time.  We’ll see if Homan can finally put it all together and cap off her dominant last couple of years with finally getting a gold medal.

Tori Vega Diary: Rose Tint My World

So the last planet that contained a member of the old Havoc Squad was Alderaan.  At least this was a really pretty planet.  Like, really pretty, with lots of trees and flowers and grass and cute animals and … some big bugs but otherwise just a really pretty place.

And, of course, it had some planet buster weapons hanging around the spaceport that was mentioned to me by the local general and I decided that I probably should go and do something about that.

After that, I met with the general and was introduced to the head of the Organa noble family on Alderaan.  He wanted to throw me a big feast for stopping the bombs, but I declined on the basis that I was watching my calories and, well, when you’ve almost been destroyed by bombs you probably have more important things to do!  And, as it turned out, there were, as the big enemy of the Organa’s was taking over some of their big defensive emplacements and so they needed to be dealt with.  And then the guy running the show for them wanted the Duke to come and meet him, but it turns out that he wanted me, and he had taken hostages to ensure that I went along with it.  I probably could have fought, but then the hostages would have been killed, so I went along with it.  But then the hostages broke me out, and then I was asked to kill some Sith because their normal soldiers couldn’t handle it.  I wasn’t all that thrilled about going after Sith myself, but I just had to remember my training, which boiled down to “If a lightsaber blocks an explosive, it still goes boom!”.  So that’s what I did, for the most part.

After all of that, the attack was broken and the Duke wanted to throw another feast — seriously, what’s with this guy and eating — but I wanted to head out and get on with my mission.

Yeah, about that.  Turns out that the Organas had a prisoner of House Thul — the guys who were opposing them — who knew where the techie guy Gearbox was.  Well, I guess the weapony techie guy, maybe?  Anyway, he said that he’d tell me what he knew, but only if I saved his family, because once he told me and I went after Gearbox his family would know he talked and kill them.  Well, I didn’t want to get innocent people killed because of my mission, so I agreed.  The guard was okay with my doing it, but some noble wasn’t happy with that or with any deals, but the Organas had given the prisoner to the Republic so I got my way.

As part of tracking them down, I had to go to different areas to set everything up, and so while I was there I kept helping out the local Republic forces.  It was in the next area that I came across the giant bugs.  They had some kind of ability to make people join their Hive and become “Joiners”, but right now the issue was that they were attacking the Republic forces and really hurting them.  The reason was that the Empire was broadcasting a signal to drive them mad right into that hivemind thing they had, and so I set out to stop them doing that.  The place was absolutely horrible, but the scientist lady who sent me out there wanted me to grab the data so we could use it against the Empire.  I balked, because, well, it was horrible.  She wasn’t happy, but came around later.

Further out, I came across a major whose daughter had gone off on her own to infiltrate the house of another noble family and gotten captured, but said that she had found some key information.  He wanted me to get the information, get her out, and most importantly convince her to stop trying to do that.  When I got to her, she tried to bluff it out by talking about how many troops we had or something like that but, really, I wasn’t paying attention and figured if having Havoc Squad in front of him wasn’t going to intimidate him, a set of insane lies wasn’t gonna do it.  But eventually I freed her, but I didn’t tell her to give up on the spying gig.  After all, she’d found out some good information, and while I could understand the guy not wanting to lose the last of his family really it was her choice.

Anyway, the information she had was about the Imperials going to blow up a bridge and destroy the Republic reinforcements, so I went there to stop that.  So, see, her information was important and useful.  She did good!  Er, more or less.

Anyway, after that I got the guy’s family out, and they joined him in prison.  His wife really, really didn’t like me, but his daughter took it as an adventure, so I’m gonna say that … both of them were nuts.  Anyway, after that he told me where to find Gearbox, and then I tracked him down.  He’d built some kind of mech and tried to pilot it against me, but again explosives won the day, and he ended up having to fight me directly and, well, didn’t win.  So then I went back to the prison and decided to release all three of them, and the noble was really unhappy with me, but I didn’t think executing the guy who helped me in front of his family was a good thing to do, and again they’d given the Republic — and thus me — the guy and so it was my choice.  Suck it, noble!

After that, I met with the supposedly true rulers of Alderaan, who had had their throne usurped, and they wanted me to deal with the usurper.  The nobles wanted me to kill him, while the Republic wanted me to capture him for trial.  My choice was to capture him, because again I didn’t join the military to kill people, no matter how much they keep trying to make me!

Anyway, he ranted at me a bit about how the Republic betrayed Alderaan and that’s why he ditched them and took over, but then he hid behind a force field and forced me to run around blowing up the generators.  Again, explosives saved the day!  After being defeated, I turned him over for trial, and then headed back to my ship.

Garza had gotten a nasty message from that noble, but I didn’t really care about that and my ticking off Garza made it a day of the week, and she eventually just let it slide.  And then she asked me to come back to Coruscant to go after the former leader of Havoc Squad.

Magic Circles (Chapter 9)

Natalia really wished she had Rafe to talk to.

She had spent the week mostly avoiding Alice.  Not because she was avoiding Alice herself, but instead because she knew that Alice was going to want an answer to the question of whether she wanted to join Alice in learning magic, and she’d spent the week completely uncertain about whether that was something she wanted to do.

If she’d tried to talk to pretty much anyone about it, she knew that the first thing they’d say was that it was all some kind of trick and that she should avoid getting into whatever scam Alice was running.  To be honest, she’d told herself that a lot this week, too.  But as she reviewed everything Alice had shown her and told her, she couldn’t imagine that it was just a scam.  The magic looked too real, and Alice didn’t seem to be pushing to get something from her for that.  Or, at least, nothing mundane.  Natalia got the impression that Alice saw something in her and wanted her on her side for some reason.  Of course, people would say, that’s exactly the impression that a scam artist would want to give someone they were scamming.  Still, she was pretty confident that it wasn’t, at least, just a simple scam.

So, if it wasn’t a scam, or at least if she felt confident that she wouldn’t end up getting scammed if it was, then all that was left was to ask if she wanted to enter into this strange world of magic.  Given how addicted she’d been to “The Magic Fortress”, it would seem like she would have jumped at the chance.  But while she’d imagined a world of magic and living in it, when confronted with that idea things … didn’t seem so clear.  That sort of world would be different, strange, and disconnected from the life she was currently living and striving to live.  Her fantasies had involved magic but her plans were as mundane as they come.  Did she really want to give all of that up for the vague promise of magic?  Yes, she really wanted to learn magic, but was it really going to be as good as she’d always imagined?  Would it be worth giving up her mundane life for that vague promise that might turn out to be less than advertised?  And she had the feeling that once she entered into the world of magic, that world of endless wonder, that returning to the mundane world wasn’t going to be possible.

This is why she was missing talking to Rafe, because while she was torn about what to do she knew that he would be certain.  He’d always been the sort to quickly commit to the action that he thought was the best one, even if he didn’t always think everything through.  She’d always had to drag him back when his impulses were going to get him in trouble, and between the two of them they did a lot of amazing things without getting into too much trouble.  Here, she knew that he would jump into the world of magic with both feet and never think twice about what it would mean, and if she was still in contact with him he’d drag her along with him.

Maybe it was a good thing that she had to handle this on her own.

She was doing all of this pondering as she walked back to her apartment, and as she got there she noticed that her neighbour Richard was just leaving his.  She’d gotten to know him a bit since the time she’d first met him, and they’d had a number of conversations about a number of things in the past.  “Hello, Richard, ” she said as she got to her apartment.

He looked up from where he was fumbling with his keys to lock his door.  “Oh, hello Natasha!” he said.  “How are things going?”

“All right, ” she said, with a decided lack of enthusiasm.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, with a concerned look on his face.

“No, it’s just … I kinda have to make a big decision and I’m not sure what to do, ” she replied.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

“Not really, ” she replied.

He still looked concerned, but then returned to fumbling with his keys, as she turned towards her own door.

She wasn’t really sure why she did it.  It wasn’t what she’d normally do, as she was in general a pretty private person and while she liked him she didn’t know him well enough to confide in him.  That’s why she’d said she didn’t want to talk about it.  But something made her want to talk to him about it, in some way.

So she turned around and said, “Can I ask you a question?”

He looked up.  “Certainly, ” he replied.

“If you suddenly had an opportunity to use magic — real magic — would you?” she asked.

“Ah, a philosophical question!” he replied lightly.

But then he saw the look on her face, and got more serious.  “Well the first question I’d have to ask myself is:  why do I want to use magic?” he said.

“Doesn’t everyone want to use magic?” she asked.

“Well, most people, at some point, do indeed wish they had magical powers, ” he replied.  “But that’s just fantasy, a wish spawned by a seemingly fictional world where we can do things that seem really, really cool.  But a real magical world might be quite different.  If I thought that I wanted to use magic just to feel like I was living in that sort of idealized magical world, I’d probably have to think twice about doing it.”

Natasha nodded.  Wanting to live in a magical world was exactly what would push Rafe into diving right into magic without a second thought, and that that was something she herself wanted was exactly what was making her question whether that would be all that great.

“So, ” he continued, “I’d have to wonder what a real magical world would be like.  And as it turns out, we’re woefully unprepared to imagine that, because all our experience of magical worlds is idealized — or deliberately dystopian — and this world just doesn’t seem to have anything like magic.  So that’s not going to be all that helpful.”

Natasha nodded again.  She’d been trying to imagine some sort of realistic magical world and ended up either with something overly perfect that almost certainly wouldn’t be the case, or something mostly mundane that almost certainly wouldn’t be the case either.  Her conclusion was the same as his:  it’s really, really hard to imagine a realistic magical world.

“So then, ” he continued, “I would ask why I want to use magic?  Is it simply to have power?  If it was, then I doubt I’d be thinking about it this long.  Is it just to be able to do some things that I can’t do now?  What use would it be to learn magic just so I could do parlour tricks or use it for mundane tasks that I could do myself?  So I’d want it to be special in some way, to change my life, and then in thinking about it I’d have to conclude that any magic worth thinking about would be life-changing, and so I’d only even consider it if I truly believed that.

“And then, ” he said, “there would only be one question to answer:  could I go back to my normal life knowing that I had turned my back on that world of endless wonder?

He paused for an instant, looking her straight in the eye, and then said, “But this is all an academic exercise, of course.”

Natasha laughed.  “Of course!” she replied.

He smiled.  “Well, I’m glad that my meandering allowed you to escape your decision for long enough to laugh, ” he said.  “And I hope that you are able to find a satisfying conclusion to your dilemma.

“Whatever that decision might be.”