Creative Title

I have many talks–particularly within one certain group of friends (if you’d like to call them that; they’re not exactly my peers)–of revolution. Not so much planning one, but more of the theory of the practice (if you’d like to call it that). Thus, it is a topic that is often on my mind–perhaps more-so than it should be for an 18 year-old girl, but that’s the direction my life has taken me thus far.

So let’s define “revolution” in the political sense (for which I’ll simply copy & past from dictionary.com, since I now only have 2.5 hours before my next class): an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed. To be clear, I am not talking about cultural revolution or [damn]commie revolution or anything of the sort. I mean the overthrow of a tyranny to return freedom and liberty to a particular society.

There’s that, and one may now ask why revolution must ever take place to begin with. Surely there are other ways to change a government besides revolution (which, might I add, is more often than not violent. Those in power rarely wish to give up control). I don’t know for sure about the past, but in the majority of governments nowadays, it’s possible to write representatives, hold protests, bring up court cases (recent awesome example: Heller v. DC), and so-on and so-forth. So why do people let governments become more and more oppressive until the only option is overthrow?

In short: they have no choice; individuals have far less control than they think, even in the most democratic societies (nay, perhaps especially in democracies). There is a long-standing pattern in the formation and destruction of governments. If people exist, they will exist in groups. If there is a group of humans, one will be “named” a leader or decision-maker of some sort. Also, if one group of humans exist, it’s highly likely that there is another group somewhere. If those two don’t find each other and begin feuding, the one group will likely grow to such a point that either a) it will split into many groups (more than likely near to one-another), which will eventually begin to compete for land and resources with each other (and one will eventually win and conquer), or b) skip that step and go straight for a state-level society.

Hey, anthropology does have a purpose. Who’d have guessed?

What happens then? The population grows, the control that the governing body has grows (one of those things that might be better explained later or in an entirely different post), and people come up with phrases like “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” People generally don’t like to be controlled by outside forces, no matter how they might vote. But it takes 1) a pretty heinous amount of control and 2) a certain percentage of individuals who detest being controlled with all their being and are aggressive enough to act on their desire for freedom liberty.

So the conditions are right for a revolution, and it happens; the government is overthrown. People then split up (even into a certain amount of anarchy, for a time), soon re-form back into small groups, and the whole cycle starts again; anarchy, feudalism, state, revolution, anarchy, and so-on. Like Pythagoras said (sorry, I have Ancient Philosophy this semester. I’ll probably bring up Socrates a lot (just read Plato’s Apology–I love that guy!)), everything exists in cycles.

So, is it all a fruitless endeavor? Eh… depends on how you look at it. On the one hand, a governing body will always form, and will always grow to hold more power and control over thousands, millions, and billions of people than anyone and anything ever should. It’s one of those inevitabilities (funny thing–my archaeology class stressed that all societies collapse, but failed to even mention the unstoppable force of society formation (which, frankly, I consider to be a more certain event than collapse. Collapse takes effort on someone’s part; people naturally form groups and alliances). Interesting…).

But I digress–I don’t believe revolution to be pointless, even if though people will soon sheep right back up and follow whomever promises the most free lunches. An endless cycle of prosperity and disaster, freedom and oppression, unity and individualism (not exact antonyms, I know), the rise and fall of governments, is a far greater fate for the human race than the one-way violence inherent in a constantly more and more large, controlling, and (purposefully) frightening ruling body. People need to be reminded that they can stop shocking the actor at any time; you do not have to obey the guy in the lab coat.

Switching gears here, how does a revolution happen? My shooting instructor–let’s call him D–once said that people must act individually, without knowledge of or cooperation with any other person. Now, I look up to the guy–he’s like a second father to me, but I have to disagree with him here. No single person has ever overthrown or even attempted to overthrow a government, unless, of course, they were a complete nutbucket. Sure, there might only be one leader, but in the end, it takes an army. The goths invaded Rome (of course, that was independent of the various other groups’ weakening of the army, but it’s still not individuals), the Sons of Liberty essentially kicked off the revolution (eh… facts schmacts), and so-on. A revolution is not made up of individuals acting individually. Sure, perhaps people begin to act out alone against tyranny once the ball gets rolling, but it takes an entire group of people to push it (hah, literally and figuratively!).

Now… where, exactly, was I going with that? Oh well, I guess I just wanted to get it out of my system before dissent became illegal next week (that, and 1) my laptop battery was about to give, 2) I had to go to class, and 3) it’s now 6:10, I’ve been out since 8am, and there is no way I am coming up with something new to say here for the rest of the night).

Help! Help! I’m being repressed!

That’s my calendar. My mom at first got it as a possible part of some present for the wedding (don’t ask me how it ties in), and I ended up with it. So on Friday, Lethon said, “I can sense the SHADOW on your hearts. There can be no rest for the wicked!” and Thursday was when Bazil Thredd said, “Tell the warden this prison is ours now!”

You may notice a certain lack of absolutely, terribly horrid quality. See, the mom, dad, and sister all got something like this (granted, I think The Sister had had hers for a couple months), so my dad gave me his old one. So I now have a digital camera, thanks to everyone else getting a better one! I can be easy to please, sometimes.

So anyways, we’ll see how long it takes for me to get tired of posting a picture of my calendar each day (or so). I’ll try for a substantial post by the end of the week. Until then (also, I highly recommend the Illegal Danish series by that person).

UPDATE, Wednesday: For some reason, it’s not letting me make new posts today. So… yeah.

The Sister’s been in town this week, which means I’ve been out doing stuff with her essentially all day every day. Thus, I haven’t really been able to relax for my break yet. So I plan to do that this last week before going back to the dorm. Therefore, posting will probably cease for a bit, unless I just happen to get a thought stuck in my head that must be taken care of.

Until then, I leave you with music (really, what else?).

White Room:

…and good ol’ Jimi:

I hold a general disdain for hippies, but I must admit tons of great (perhaps the best) music came out of their generation.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my puzzle–the one with pieces that can pretty succinctly be broken down into sky, eagle, eagle with sky, and miscellaneous background. Nevermind, it’s done now. The internet broke, so I finished it while waiting for it to be fixed (actually, waiting for my mom to call back and tell me how to fix it, but the problem solved itself first).

I have a bone to pick with Hollywood. First off, I love action movies; give me blood spatter and explosions any day of the week and I’ll have fun. Now, this does not necessarily mean that I’ll think anything with such effects is a masterpiece, but it will be enjoyable.

Generally.

However, the assumption that modern writers, producers, and directors make that the public only wants these and no substantial story is… well, come to think of it, probably about dead-on for a large portion of moviegoers (huh… that’s actually a word without hyphens). I get somewhat annoyed by my only choice being girly emotional junk and shallow, pointless fighting.

Yet even that isn’t what’s been bugging me lately. I can live with new stuff being fun crap, so long as I can still find an occasional great story–be it in older (pre-’95 or so) Hollywood ventures, or books or the rare good piece of work by a modern director (they do exist, though the creator’s works often tend to decline within, perhaps, a decade of his hard-earned fame). No, my anger is directed towards reworkings of the truly great stories (not to mention the fact that probably over 80% of new movies are based on someone else’s idea for which copyright has run out). I’m thinking of three particular movies at the moment–and please refrain from reminding me of more–that took the title and basic idea of something great, added CGI, and called the new one genius.

The Time Machine (2002)

Touche, H.G. Wells’s great-grandson. Touche. Now I feel bad about dissing the movie. Now, that won’t completely stop me on the internet, but know that I feel guilty for it. So, this was on TV a few weeks ago, and I watched it–partly because nothing else was on, partly out of curiosity, and partly because I was waiting for Jeremy Irons to finally show up (Shush. Creepy-voiced actors rock). I’ve since been reading the actual book, since I knew the movie was far from strict in its following of the plot. I’m not quite finished (on chapter 7/12), but it was obvious from the first chapter that the deviation was great.

So the point of this movie: you can’t change the past. Well, that’s very nice, but it doesn’t really matter, as no human has ever built or is anywhere near building any form of time machine. The point of the book (and the old movie)? Well, as with everything from about 1880-1980, it was all an allegory for communism. Certainly, I can understand how that can’t be translated into modern thought. The general populace doesn’t care about communism, and would never see a movie about it. But do you have to try to twist and mutilate the story for a modern audience? Every piece of art is a product of its time, can’t you people just leave it where it belongs. If someone’s interested, they’ll enjoy and appreciate it much more than the bunch of idiots seeing it for special effects.

The thing is, it would’ve been pretty enjoyable in its own right.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Ditto. Just leave the communism allegories alone; don’t ruin the story for the people who actually give a damn. Seriously, I’m not even seeing this one.

Star Trek (2009)

Probably won’t see this one either, but I’m torn. See, on the one hand, it looks exciting (to say the least), and I tend to like Simon Pegg, Winona Ryder, John Cho, Zoe Saldana, Alias, and… well, apparently Epic Nerd God Leonard Nimoy is in there, too. But it just doesn’t seem right. I can’t trust it to be the same Star Trek that I’ve been watching on cbs.com (and heck, even that doesn’t have all of the really great episodes).

Honestly, I think they’re trying to trick us. They’re hiring the best most famous of each demographic (let’s see… black-haired guy (his eyebrows are pure evil, though. I hate them), guy with any UK accent, black woman, asian… yeah, we got ‘em all), throw in a few more utterly random celebrities, make it look really, really cool, slap on a treasured and sacred title, and hope for the best. I’m sorry, but Admiral Ackbar keeps yelling at me.

Ah, well… at least these do one good thing: convince me to finally watch/read the original so my anger can be fully justified (unfortunately, the need to completely understand references isn’t quite enough of a push on its own). Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve only just now been able to find The City on the Edge of Forever.

Overall impression: Sure, it’s for a 5th grade reading level, but it was pretty awesome, actually.

So my mom has recently been looking into writing again lately. To help her decide upon a genre and target audience (and, I suspect, to procrastinate some), she’s bought a number of books of various kinds and been reading them like crazy. One of these was Among the Hidden, a story about a boy, Luke, who is the third child in his family in a time (supposedly in the near future) where it’s illegal to have more than two kids. My mom then went and bought the entire series about his and his friends’ struggle against the government to gain freedom.

So there are seven books: Among the Hidden, Among the Impostors, Among the Betrayed, Among the Barons, Among the Brave, Among the Enemy, and Among the Free. They’re all relatively short–able to be read 2-3 books in one day, if you have nothing better to do–but they manage to go into great depth (especially for a 5th grader) about government, freedom, and generally what is right, all while keeping the action and the plot moving forward.

There are a couple issues I had with it, though, the first being that even though the protagonist in each book changed sometimes (4 were Luke, and 3 were various friends of his), the personality from which it was told was completely static. They all cared at different levels about different things, sure, but they all also consistently made the same decisions as all the others. It was like the author picked a character at random to be the Luke for that story. She didn’t quite manage to get completely into the mind of someone completely different.

One other minor thing that I considered not so much a flaw as simply annoying. The ending seemed, to me, to be somewhat idealistic. Admittedly, it is a children’s book, so my personal preferences are probably playing into that more than anything, but the anticlimactic nature of the resolution just bugged me a bit.

Besides that, however, I have little or no complaints (well… there was the ending of the third book, but that’s easy to get over). It was extremely well-written to keep the reader’s attention the whole way through, and had a very, very good underlying theme. The story itself is pretty amazing, and the author does not shy away from tragedy just because her audience is children. Granted, she softens it a tad for them, but allows the truth of the world have its effect. I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone. Highly. It’s really quite impressive.

…even though I spend an average of ~1/2 hour a day (including actually taking them, and probably even less) on them and have spend most of my time watching Star Trek. It’s not a waste of time; it’s a good show I hadn’t seen yet.

To commemorate these finals–and perhaps just because I’m a little lazy at the moment–I present to you a short playlist of songs vaguely related in some way or another to each of my subjects (in which I have a final). Now, Abnormal Psych. was pretty straightforward, but the others were a lot harder to try to think up. Any post-posting suggestions are welcome! Oh, and this should be the last time I mention these classes.

Abnormal Psychology - Psycho, Puddle of Mudd. Duh.
Greek Tragedy - I settled for Metallica’s The Unforgiven III, since it vaguely reminded me of The Odyssey while I was half-asleep and trying to think of a song for Greek Tragedy. Again, further suggestions are welcome.
Archaeology - This was a tricky one. I had four songs in the running, going from subject matter to what I hummed during the final (if you’re curious…and you can probably guess why it was on my mind). I finally decided upon simple and topical–Indiana Jones Theme.
Linguistics - I should’ve saved that mention of The Picard Song for this. Oh well, I’ll just go with something in which the lyrics are hard to understand… for whatever reason. That really has nothing to do with the class.
Geology - Yeah, the professor was Canadian, so I’m just going with Rush.

Ah, but that’s not all that’s been happening. I have pictures! The first has no particular significance, but I saw it on a dumpster after my final today:

Like I said, no significance, but it still had meaning for me. One of those “too true” things or something.

The second one comes with a story. Now, my weekend office-cleaning job is typically pretty tame. Once in a while, though, something crazy happens there. I can’t explain it; the rest of my life is sitting on the computer and occasionally an interesting conversation with a human, but this kind of thing never happens anywhere else.

Now, if you’re expecting something as interesting as that last time, it’s not quite that eventful, but still crazy. Now, of course, cleaning entails cleaning the bathroom, where my tale takes place. The time is noonish 2 Saturdays ago. I scrubbed the toilets, got out the all-purpose Windex, and moved the soap off the sink in order to clean it. I then screamed and jumped back 6.3857 feet. Why, you ask? Because of this:

A gigantic beetle sitting on top of the faucet. Let me stress again, this thing is huge. That picture is nowhere near doing its size justice. I calmed down, took a closer look, and determined that it was no longer with us. Thus, I snapped a quick picture (see above) as close as I dared, and sucked the bloody thing into the vacuum, where it now rests. Yet the question remains, how did it get there? There are a couple possibilities, all of which seem fairly improbable. Either it climbed up there and died; died in the ceiling, fell out, and landed on its feet perfectly balanced on the faucet; or my dad–who, I believe, is the boss at the office–found it elsewhere and put it there. Well, surely my father wouldn’t be so immature at work, right?

Right?

So for a while, I was assuming the best of my family and even considered looking up how 10-ft. beetles like that one like to die, just to see if it says anything about preferring open spaces (really, I try unreasonably hard to think the best of people). Then I remembered, my dad can be a jerk. He’d been there the previous week, though all the other employees had as well. However, their daughters aren’t going to be there cleaning, and I don’t know how likely they are to play pranks like this. But my dad has done this kind of thing at home…

Oh well, it made for a nice giggle and story to tell within a blog post of random stuff. Topical posts will resume in a few days; and fret not, for I do have topics.

Watch The Soup–the concept of ridiculous titles gets stuck in your head.

So! Welcome to the first ever edition of Stupid Things I Heard in Liberal Arts This Semester, a soon-to-be-semiannual Creative Title post. As you have probably already reasoned, this is a compilation of idiotic quotes, topics, and general sounds from professors and students in my classes (and one from my dorm) throughout the semester. Let’s just jump right in, shall we?

1. “Abnormal” as defined by my Abnormal Psychology class. It can’t just be not normal; it has to be maladaptive, since, you know, the term abnormal might be insulting to some.
2. My Archaeology professor says, “There’s a reason we can’t have automatic weapons… and it’s a good reason.
3. Archaeology professor’s rant on how he doesn’t understand people around here (in terms of not recycling, knowing what county we’re in (knowing, not not knowing), etc.)
4. Archaeology professor’s rant on how roads in Raleigh don’t make sense (particularly due to the lack of numbered streets). Frankly, I took offense at this one; my great-grandfather was a civil engineer specializing in highways and had a large hand in the NCSU Civil Engineering curriculum.
5. The large majority of students in my Linguistics class laughing when listening to samples of the Southern Vowel Shift (that is, this area).
6. “I’m just wondering why men hated women so much.” and, of course, all subsequent conversation.
   
7. Any and all of The Technician’s coverage of racist comments on the Free Expression Tunnel (ex: search for “free expression tunnel”). I mean, really? The NAACP?
8. Archaeology professor asks, “What expensive bureaucratic systems do we have? The military?” That is, his first thought is the most useful one. PLUS: there’s a member of the military in the first row. The next three were road-building, extracting materials, and salaries.
9. Frankly, I just found the title of a seminar on the Free Expression Tunnel “incident” offensive. “The Gun, the Flag, and the Noose.” Since, you know, only racists have guns.
10. On election night, I was going to the bathroom and heard the following exchange between a girl in my dorm suite and one of her friends. Note: These are the people being encouraged to vote. Girl: I can’t believe West Virginia went for McCain! Guy: Well, West Virginia’s real southern.
11. Archaeology professor’s rant on how one of the things you see before every society collapses is the rich getting greedy, and how we see that exact thing happening today. (I’m not saying it’s not necessarily true, just that the implications about why is off-base).

• My Geology professor (who, until further notice, is the speaker for all following) gives advice: “Go be a bum in Europe … because if you try to be anything other than a bum, it’ll cost you too much.”
• “If you get a research grant, don’t ever figure out what you’re figuring out, or funding will stop.”
• When talking about earthquakes, referred to the Ring of Fire as the “Ring of Shake n’ Bake”
• When explaining about why we put chlorine in water, “… ’cause the bugs are not expecting the Spanish Inquisition!”
• “… so we tied ropes around grad. students and threw them off the side [of the Grand canyon].”
• In Linguistics (further notice), “Joe Biden is a Republican.” was the primary sentence used to demonstrate truth conditions.
• Also in Linguistics, I just couldn’t help but think of The Picard Song when the professor mentioned diagramming particularly long sentences. You get one guess as to the exact line.
• Some poor guy’s ringtone in Greek Tragedy sings, “… don’t want none unless you got buns, hun.”

Essentially this entire semester, I’ve been reading this book–mostly just before class, thus inhibiting my ability to go through quickly. The review may potentially be brief, since I finished it last week and returned it to its owner yesterday, thereby probably somewhat blocking my ability to remember too many specific details, but we’ll see.

Overall Impression: Generally a very great book, but it could be rather slow-moving.

So, a few months ago, a friend told me about this great book called World War Z. Basically, it’s about a zombie apocalypse, so how could I possibly refuse?

The interesting thing I found out in my reading, though, is that the zombies themselves are not a major staple in the story. It’s more about the people’s and government’s reactions to such a crazy, hopeless-seeming situation, which I actually found to be spot-on, particularly considering today’s world. While I did, of course, miss the plethora of blood and gore and zombies that today’s movies use (not that it wasn’t present; just not the central point of the whole thing), it was a good deal more intelligent, deep, and… well… non-cookie-cutter than those (or even a lot of books written these days. So formulaic!)

It’s told by way of a series of interviews with various people involved in the war–or who simply got caught in the middle of it all. Frankly, that was one of the more ingenious parts, but it also caused a sort of choppiness in the storytelling that made it run far less smoothly and caused more difficulty in wanting to pick it up and read the next chapter. Additionally, it was somewhat rare (though most certainly present–especially in one particular “interview”) for the speech of each interviewee to be as individualized as would more likely be in real life, but I fully understand the complications in both reading and writing anything in a manner even mildly resembling that. Truthfully, I’m rather glad it was as consistent as it was.

Back to the choppiness, though, it was still written about as well as it possibly could have been to get the point across. It reads more like a history book than a novel, but it was meant to. That’s the point. It was meant to be reality, but with zombies; not zombies with… not much else. Overall, I highly recommend it to any intelligent person who happens to also find zombies really cool (just don’t expect them to be all over the place).

Hah! I’m pretty sure I managed to avoid spoilers in this one, even while explaining why it’s so good. Now why couldn’t Watchmen have been that kind of story? Seriously, I loved that one. It’s still on my mind.

Now, generally, I try to be a very logical person… despite my major being a humanity. This is strongly counteracted by my natural inclination towards emotionality, but I believe I’ve been relatively successful at this endeavor. However, a large part of being regularly logical is having a specific outlet through which one may allow emotion to be expressed. For the majority of people, I’m sure, this is through the various arts.

Now, artwork is a funny thing. As with anything in the physical world, it can be studied and somewhat described in terms of what does or doesn’t work (see Aristotle’s Poetics for an example of this type of interpretation). That is to say, it can be broken up into individual pieces to be, say, taught or more deeply observed, and then discussed in various ways in the search for meaning.

Of course, a defining feature of art is the manipulation of emotion, which is a thing more difficult to measure than… well, it’s practically immeasurable. Not only that, but the emotional effect for one person could easily be different than–or even the complete opposite of–someone else’s feelings upon observation. This, then, makes it hard to determine whether or not a piece “works” in a certain sense. Since we’re nearing a point at which I risk losing myself, I’ll go ahead and break up types of art into four categories.

There is the ambiguous, the beautiful, the meaningful, and the emotional. Then, of course, there can be a fifth category, perhaps as a sub-section of the ambiguous art, of basically “stuff I don’t get” or–more commonly–modern art.

By ambiguous, I mean something that holds multiple possible meanings. Frankly, this is perhaps my favorite of these. It is somewhat all-encompassing of the others in that, no matter what the creator was trying to get across (not that that isn’t important to the piece), each observer can pull any number of different messages, emotions, or even (perhaps) types of beauty from it. This is part of why I enjoy Muse so much (told you I’d bring them up again); it’s often unclear what, exactly, a given song by them is about. Probably the most inexplicit example if one is to judge by lyrics alone is Hoodoo (lyrics here, since Brits apparently can’t enunciate (just kidding, redcoats!)). Another somewhat lesser example might be Invincible, which only comes to mind since the engine of this train was a conversation with my mom about that song. The video, actually, has a wider variety of meaning than the work itself, but I feel it counts, regardless.

Then, there are more levels of ambiguity to be analyzed. The next consists of things that at first seem somewhat odd, but maybe even turn out to tell something about the observer. Sort of like an inkblot test-type thing (yeah, it’s on the mind now). My aunt recently gave me something that may be categorized under this sub-category, pictured here:

In case the camera-phone picture quality isn’t absolutely perfect, it’s a man sitting cross-legged with his head in his hands. The aunt saw it as a sort of buddha, meditation-like figure, whereas I immediately said he was crying, and my mom thought he was just tired. If you knew us, it could easily be inferred that this might be a mere reflection of our general personalities (not that I cry constantly, but I can be somewhat prone to depression).

There is an incredibly thin line between that and artwork so abstract as to be meaningless without some snob to interpret (often based on what the creator intended, I might add). You know what I mean by this; starting with Picasso, moving on to lazy deepness (1st picture) and Homer Simpson (WTF? No picture anywhere of the grill in that episode? Geez…). I mean, I guess it could theoretically fall under the last category described, with the exception that those spoken of above are clearly something (the inkblot tests are not art, by the way; merely a psychoanalytical tool). I’ll concede that they are somewhat abstract compared to other ambiguous pieces of artwork, but are still recognizable.

To go to the other end of the spectrum, there is art created for the simple purpose of being beautiful. Any story that’s told just to be a good story, Michelangelo’s David (SFW? Eh, everyone knows what I’m talking about anyways), and really anything of the sort. Frankly, this is somewhat of a rarity. Generally, creative inspiration spawns from something the artist feels or thinks that needs to be let out and shown to the world. That’s not to say things can’t be created for non-emotional purposes and be interpreted to have meaning that wasn’t intended; nor is it impossible that one may fully appreciate something purely on basis of its beauty, meaning be damned (guilty of that one, here). Frankly, this whole thing is just observation since, again, this is the only extent to which art can be more definitively interpreted; the rest is purely from the artist’s mind.

I called this next one meaningful for the sake of not having to go look for a more accurate term. Really, though, it’s the kind of art that is created in order to get a message across–some sort of larger purpose, perhaps. To most extremely illustrate this point, there’s Atlas Shrugged. There are also, of course, various pro- and anti-warAmerica(?) songs (the latter of which I refuse to listen to. You’ll be forgiven if you don’t click the link), along with every Disney movie ever made (for the most part). These are made to teach rather than please, and indeed can be far closer to rhetoric than a strict definition of art. However, I still believe it counts, because not only is it indirect and usually very subtle in the presentation of its arguments, but it also manages to (usually!) make something beautiful and/or pathetic (you really need to click the link to get the correct meaning from that) in the process.

Which brings me to emotional types of art, which somewhat radiates throughout all aforementioned categories. It is created of emotion, by emotion, and for emotion. Not only is it present in all of my former categories, but it transverses across all artistic mediums. Paint, poetry, prose, music (old and new. And new about old, somewhat), photography, cooking, quiltmaking, and so on forever (I decided not to try for some of the more obscure forms). Artwork at its best inspires feeling in the audience, plain and simple. Doesn’t much matter what it is, though one would hope they don’t laugh at at your tragedy or vice versa.

Wow. So, uh, yeah… apparently Wrath of the Lich King has made WoW rather fun for me (not to mention the fact that my sister, mom, and I have a sort of bet about reaching 80 by Christmas). Of course, there have also been other contributing factors to my lack of posting, most notably a renewed interest in the line of stories begun by my graduation project, and my actually making a friend.

I’d link to some post mentioning the grad. project, but I’m really kind of embarassed about my earlier posts (heck even some of the more recent stuff). Basically, if you are of the uninitiated, it was a novella. I’ve realized this week that the beginning really kind of sucked, but am viewing that as a good thing. Particularly since my beginnings have been starting to be pretty nice lately (er… nice as in good. I think someone dies in all of them). Now I just need to work on middles and ends.

So, in relation to making the friend (Devil’s Advocate Guy), I read Watchmen this week. I borrowed it from him, actually. There’s the connection, then.

Un-Spoiler version:

Overall impression: Rather awesome! The movie had better not screw it up (ironically, that trailer uses a song by Muse, which I plan to talk about in another post soon). Zack Snyder generally seems good about that (I think?), but we’ll see.

So, it begins where The Comedian, one of a number of retired superheroes, is murdered. Rorschach–one of the best characters ever invented, and emphasized in my mind by the Psychology reference–thinks it’s because he was a superhero, and tries to convince oter heroes of this since they all may be in danger, but they all think he’s just gone nuts… which, frankly, isn’t a terribly far-fetched suspicion. Sure enough, more events transpire within the next… something like 2 weeks that lend credence to this theory.

Well, that’s probably about all I can say about the main plot without giving away too much. Of course, there are a number of other storylines intersecting this one and each other; everyone’s past lives, how they all know each other, the probable upcoming nuclear war (note: this takes place in 1985; wasn’t published long after), the odd bits of pirate comic some guy keeps reading at a newsstand… all strangely–and perhaps ingeniously–interconnected.

Frankly, I was also fascinated by the various ways in which some characters talked, but that’s only due to my currently taking a course in Linguistics, so I’ll not go into it. It’s just the communicativity of obviously somewhat broken English.

Beyond that, again, there’s not too much that can allowably be said. It was far more interesting than I can possibly make it sound here; well-drawn, well-told, great story. Didn’t actually see the ending coming; the foreshadowing wasn’t anywhere near obvious, though still present. You just don’t know what it all means until it comes together.

Spoiler Version: Only read if you already know the ending.

The moral is, kids, don’t ever stick to your morals.

So, Jon (blue guy) is sort of pushed into going to Mars, the rich sellout guy who’s interested in Ancient Egypt is almost assassinated, and Rorschach himself is framed and taken in by the police where his identity is revealed–an incredibly terrible thing to happen to him, considering he’d kept it completely secret from even his closest comrades up until that point. Man, was he pissed off about that. So those are the events that lead some of the others to believe the original theory of someone picking off the old heroes.

Unfortunately for them, Rorschach is still in prison. So, long story short, they (sort of) eventually bust him out and he once again becomes awesome. They find out that Ozymandias–the sellout guy–is the one behind it all. Gasp! Rorschach writes it all in his journal and drops the journal off at a news outlet. This becomes significant at the very, very end.

And it was the very end that really has me still thinking. The fact that one of their old friends was really the one pulling the strings is only a minor surprise. No, the real shocker is that he gets away with it. He somehow manages to convince all but Rorschach to keep quiet about the fact that he’d just killed 1/2 of New York (in order to bring solidarity to the world and thereby an end to all war… yeah). Still don’t really get why they all decided to “compromise” as they put it, but I can suspend disbelief–particularly due to the upcoming war in the comic. Rorschach walks away all awesome-like to head back to America and tell the world, despite knowing that he’s almost completely discredited amongst everyone there, particularly since his arrest. But that doesn’t really matter in the end, since Jon, the blue guy, comes out and vaporizes him, bringing a somewhat anticlimactic end to the great Rorschach.

So, later on, the world is still united over the people Ozymandias killed in New York, and the people at the news outlet where Rorschach dropped his journal off finally pick up the damn thing… and that’s the end.

Originally, I was really kind of annoyed at this all. I mean, Rorschach died a miserable death after a rather miserable life that was far worse than he deserved, the amoral guy that caused it all got completely off the hook, and it’s pretty clear that the plan worked–the murder of 3 million people by teleporting some grotesque creature into the middle of New York put an end to all war. Perhaps this is something harder to swallow now than in the 1980’s, since a tragedy like 9/11 did unite America (note: only one single country/commnunity) for a short while, we soon grew to be at least just as divided as only seven years ago before the attacks. Heck, even World War Z (which I’ll review shortly, once I finish it) makes the point that I am; even in the face of Armageddon, even one not at all caused by humans, people will still be fighting each other. It is simply not in human nature to love and care for everyone. Disagreements become fights, fights grow into battles, battles create wars. It’s part of the independent thought processes that make us great.

But hey, perhaps that’s mildly implied in the very last scene. The boss at the newspaper is angry that he has nothing to run since the Russians are no longer America’s enemies–so much so that there’s even a new Russian burger place down the street. The sort of assistant there, of course after dropping some ketchup on his smiley-face shirt to resemble the repeated imagery of the bloody smiley-face pin from when The Comedian was killed, then reaches for Rorschach’s journal in the pile of junk to run if there’s nothing else, and that’s the end of the story. Sort of. It is stated in there that “nothing ever ends”, so perhaps the point wasn’t so much that the plan worked as that it couldn’t work. There’s no real ending making it certain either way; only everybody thinking and saying that there will be world peace because of the devastation, and then everyone will soon read Rorschach’s journal. That’s it.

There’s a very fine line between making the reader think and making no damn sense whatsoever. This comes very close to that, but still ends up on the right side. Just barely, but frankly, I loved it.