Has anyone here ever seen a hawk up close? I haven't.

@Mitch okay we need more Venn diagrams because people might think I'm a nerd but I'm somewhere between a dweeb and a dork, never both

@FaheemMitha They become the de facto winners of their communities. Ged is not a winner, unless to understand oneself is to be a winner.

There's a lot that's fun in the Matrix stuff - the 'Neo = the One' part is pretty nauseating.

@M.A.R. So virgo intacto despite multiple encounters along the Line of Purples distributed about the diagram?

@Robusto He gets to be Archmage. For a while, at least.

@FaheemMitha All things must pass.

@M.A.R. Only a goofball would say that. And they're not in the diagram

Whether that is "winning" is debatable, of course.

@tchrist I must be very heterosexual. Good genes, very good genes, the best genes

I must say I like Le Guin's version of magic much more than Rowlings.

@M.A.R. hot genes make for flaming jeans

@FaheemMitha See? I knew you were a person of taste and discernment.

Though really, if magic was real, it would probably just be scary. And the Pentagon would weaponize it, in order to kill more brown people.

@FaheemMitha What's her version?

Along the lines of "The Magicians", perhaps. If anyone has read that.

@Cerberus When it comes to magic, I suppose the real question is "What can't wizards do?"

@Cerberus Hard to describe in a few words. There is a lot of stuff about order and balance. Not tearing holes in the fabric of reality, because that would be bad. That sort of thing.

@FaheemMitha If you want to have a book about magic, written for adults, that isn't stupid, and you can stand to not read it, then Jonathan Strange 🙵 Mr Norrell is worth the 500 pages.

P.S. Has anyone ever read anything by Modesitt? I really liked his magic. Though most of his books were rather samey without a very interesting plot otherwise, at least to me as an adult.

If they're close to being omnipotent I would tend to think the system sucks

@FaheemMitha OK thanks.

@Mitch I've heard of that, of course. So you've read it?

500 strong pages that will last years of coffee cups and muffins holding down the cover.

@M.A.R. I agree.

@Mitch gonna try it sometime

Magic needs to be in a system whose rules you can ponder, or it isn't interesting → childish.

There's always more procrastination to be done

@M.A.R. Magic is the weakest plot device... you can essentially do anything you want because you can make up the rules as you go along.

@Cerberus There is also emphasis on not using magic unnecessarily. Because that can cause problems.

@M.A.R. Yeah, that's certainly not LeGuin's take. Ged even loses his powers eventually.

I think that was the problem I had with Narnia and the way Star Wars appeared to me: no system, much like a fairytale/Bible.

@Mitch except if like Le Guin you bind it down so much you can't do that

@FaheemMitha Can be a good plot device.

@FaheemMitha Yes

@Cerberus Narnia isn't a consistent piece of worldbuilding.

No, indeed.

And that's part of why I hated it.

Rather egregiously fails to be, in fact.

Even as a child.

Just as I hated Bible stories.

Not that I ever read many.

Well, it has an enormous fan club, and clearly appeals to a lot of people. I myself read it very young, and sort of carry it around in my head.

@Cerberus The appeal of Star Wars is not its treatment of technology

That's another idiotic 'the chosen one' arc.

Ever since my first encounter with Narnia, I've always for some reason thought it's a Tolkien ripoff, and I've believed that to varying extent these years. The movies are bland, for sure

@Mitch I have not seen it, but it hold little appeal to me from what I hear.

@Robusto Loses them saving the world. Heroically.

@FaheemMitha Things one reads as a child can be fun even though they are not of high quality.

@M.A.R. It's not really a Tolkien ripoff, but does borrow ideas from Tolkien.

@FaheemMitha It's about sacrifice, not heroism. And he's not particularly happy about the outcome.

"I'm just a poor sharecropper's son, but you say it turns out I'm the son of the evil mastermind ruling our world and I have to kill my own father?"

@FaheemMitha it wasn't really like that though. It wasn't glorious. He just went to some poorly lit valley and came back.

What I read as a child was all SF and fantasy we had at home: Tolkien and Vance. I liked those. And still very much do.

@Robusto Well, it's about both. And I wouldn't expect him to be.

The entirety of the third novel was about decay, and that's why it worked

@M.A.R. Not glorious. But still heroic. In my opinion, anyway.

@Cerberus It took me years, and lots of people saying it, for me to realise that it -is- a Bible story.

It's not exactly upbeat, but why would it be? He was trying to fix someone else's mistakes.

A good question might be, "Can there be any heroism without sacrifice?"

@Mitch Narnia? Yeah.

@Mitch It's obviously a Bible story. In a manner of speaking, anyway. Though as a child I think a lot of the subtext totally passed me by.

@FaheemMitha yeah but my point is the former is what's so unappealing about Chosen Ones. The flying colors and the recognition they get for the little effort they put in everything, except they set everything right because of good genes and stuff

I mean, Tolkien's stories are also clearly inspired by Christianity, but he mostly didn't take any of the uninteresting, subliterary stuff from Christian writings.

So it's unlike Ged's story

@M.A.R. Yeah, that's super annoying.

But also the very concept of a Messiah, it's just so utterly cliché and boring.

@M.A.R. Well, Ged's story (or stories) don't end in celebrations. And mostly people don't know what he did. But that's pretty realistic, I'd say.

Childish, even.

@Cerberus What? Perhaps you mean Lewis, not Tolkien. I don't see the Christianity in Tolkien.

I do!

@Cerberus lazy and escapist.

Even the name of the Devil is probably based on the name of a Phoenician god. Just as the old Jews did things.

Ged gets to be Archmage eventually, but one doesn't get the sense that he's super thrilled about it. And anyway, he loses his powers, and then stops being Archmage.

Melkor, Beëlzebub.

@M.A.R. CS Lewis's 'cs lewis out of the silent planet' trilogy was I think I remember an actual attempt by Lewis to react to Tolkien and provide something a little more christiany. But the Narnia series was not a reaction to Tolkien, just a reworking of Christian Bible stories.

@Robusto well um, it's all over the place but I can't pinpoint it right now

@Mitch Those are quite weird books. Especially the last one.

Le Guin's books aren't really: vanquish the villain, then have a big feast with all your friends.

At the end of "The Furthest Shore", he just disappears, I think.

@FaheemMitha Yes, that was what I was saying. I just thought it was about this big closet "What' the hell is a 'war drobe'?", and some dumng goat man and the younger brother being a dick and some mice eating the ropes around Aslan kinda gross.

@Mitch yeah I've always been sure my impression is wrong but I am too ignorantly arrogant about the whole thing to change my mind

@Mitch LOL. There's a bit more to it than that.

@Cerberus It's a common childhood psychopathy, you -are- the only one that matters.

@Cerberus wait.. what does subliterary mean?

Below literary

@Robusto Ya gotta read the Silmarillion. The parallels are there. It's not a great parallel but there are whiffs.

@Mitch I didn't realize one could actually read that. It's like finding a bunch of old odds and ends in someone's attic.

@FaheemMitha Oh yeah.. sorry... it's snowing too. That should cover the rest.

@Mitch You forgot the lamp post.

@Robusto Oh sure. It bored the shit out of me.

Just like most of the Christian bible

But seriously, that's hardly fair to one of English literature's more significant attempts at myth building.

@Mitch Haha bleh.

@FaheemMitha goddammit

the wardrobe, edmund's a dick, a weirdo with deer legs, snow, and the lamppost. That should be it.

> And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.

That's from Hogfather, of course.

@Mitch It means less than literature.

@Mitch There's quite a lot more, actually. But never mind.

Could be anything from Kitsch to a grocery list.

Narnia has more cultural presence than people sometimes think. Try doing a Google search for "lamp post in the woods".

@Cerberus yeah but... in what way is the christian stuff less than literature? The rule listing of Leviticus and Deuteronomy? The preaching of the entire New testament after Acts?

Eh it's hard to say.

I don't even know that stuff.

You could say that a lot of Tolkien is subliterary then too? (if I understand what you mean by it)

No, I would say Tolkien is mostly literary.

How about... well are there other examples of subliterary writing?

Perhaps not all of purely fairytale-like stories?

@Mitch Grocery lists.

Television scripts.

Children's books (mostly).

Harry Potter (probably).

aw man you had me with grocery lists but lost me with TV and children's books

That just sound like you don't think they are very good literature rather than writing that is -not- literature.

I think Green Eggs and Ham would be sub-literary

But as inane as I think it is 'Friends' is surely literary.

I gagged when I wrote that

@Cerberus Also, depends on what's on the laundry list.

Also

I'm pretty sure Queneau wrote a grocery list that would have been considered literary by your standards.

@Mitch Much the same distinction.

Sir, I demand a definition of literature from you and that you give exemplars of and not

Otherwise

this may come to

blows

blows

I mean 'À la recherche du temps perdu' is barely literature, it's just some bored dude looking up at a ceiling while recuperating from the flu and listing some things he liked when he was a child.

Full disclosure, I didn't get past page 2 without passing out asleep.

God that was boring.

Maybe there was a plot?

Did someone jump in front of train?

Was the insane wife locked in the attic trapped when the house burned down?

She burned to death.

Or did the working class genius die from a heart attack when the book shelf fell on him?

@FaheemMitha What?

@Mitch That one doesn't ring any bells.

@FaheemMitha I saw it in a movie

Howard's End

@Mitch I'm sorry, but I must fail you at this moment.

@Mitch It's a shame, really. She was probably just misunderstood.

@Mitch Ah, a different insane wife?

I have non-fond memories of reading 4 pages a minute the day before school started as it was required summer reading.

@Mitch Of which book?

@Cerberus Naw it's cool bro. There'll be a time, I don't know when, when I'll come to you and ask you for a favor.

@FaheemMitha Howard's End, of which knowledge I gained only from the movie. Leonard Bast is the character.

@Mitch Required reading is the worst.

@FaheemMitha OMG. I don't know if they planned it that way, but I read so much -not- reading the required reading.

@Mitch Yes, I personally feel what education I got was despite my school, not because of it.

I never got the feeling they were very interested in teaching me anything. Though perhaps I did them too little credit.

@Mitch Like what?

@FaheemMitha Now that we're on the other side, I kind get it now.

@Mitch Get what?

@FaheemMitha The job can be repetitive. "Didn't I teach these dumb kids this stuff last year?"

@Mitch Do you teach, then?

@FaheemMitha Get the whole point of institutionalized education.

It's the 21st century, we're not working in the fields.

@Mitch It's to keep children out of the way. And make them hate learning.

It's good at both those things. Hence the state of the world.

@FaheemMitha 1) yes sometimes , but 2) I meant being out of school, seeing what is necessary and what was filler.

@Mitch Not sure I follow (2).

@FaheemMitha A lot of secondary school education is wasted on a lot of people. But that same stuff is necessary for -someone- to know and the educational system doesn't know which people that will be necessary for.

It's kinda like that all the way to the edges.

@Mitch It's possible to sort people, you know.

Find out what they are interested in. Specialise.

My point is just that my school was terrible. And I had to spend my day with a lot of stupid little thugs.

I used to know a whole bunch of radiologists (full on physicians) and the one's transitioning from residency to certified physicians had to take 'board' exams which included stuff like radiation physics and they used to complain how totally useles it was for day to day helping people. But -some- radiologists totally needed to know that stuff for their day job.

@FaheemMitha Yes, 42% of moviegoers being over 40 strikes me as suspect, too.

@Mitch Well, OK. Not really comparable, though.

@FaheemMitha Those thugs. probably should be in other kinds of educational environments.

@tchrist Quite so. I would have thought the novelty would have worn off by then.

@Mitch Yes, that's what I thought at the time. And afterwards. Actually, at the time I think I mostly wished I were dead. I was not a happy child. At least from around 13/14 to 18.

@FaheemMitha I kind of think it is. Take highschool students. Some take calculus... from my personal experience in high math environments, there is rarely an integral to be found. But -somebody- needs to know that.

@FaheemMitha I don't think the studios target that audience much. Look at all the maddening and incessant teen-oriented movies.

@Mitch I think my general point is that my school didn't teach me much of anything, and were generally appallingly unresponsive to my needs and interests.

Take highschool students, Some take English poetry. from my personal experience in literary writing, I've -never- had to compose in iambic pentameter. But -somebody-...

wait

@tchrist Perhaps so. But really, why would someone in their 40s want to spend a couple of hours in a darkened room watching tripe with a bunch of strangers?

@tchrist Every other movie shown in the US is a Marvel comic adaptation

@Mitch I take your general point. But my complaint wasn't about lack of specialization. It was about lack of quality.

History was particularly terrible. Maths was almost not existent. Science in general was not much better. When I became interested in maths around 14, nobody cared.

@FaheemMitha You are probably in the 1% of teachable people. It's what secondary and graduate education are directed at. It's just they have to deal with...how shall I say this as diplomatically as possible... they have to also deal with the..

they have to deal with those who will be manning the assembly lines and serving soda.

@Mitch I wish I could have transferred somewhere else. But my parents wouldn't listen to me.

I suppose if we had been very very rich, it might have happened.

Also, this was supposed to be a "good" school.

Life isn't perfect

You have actual standards

No kidding. Anyway, I should try to get to sleep.

Nice talking to you, folks. Later.

@FaheemMitha later. sleep is good for you

@FaheemMitha No idea whatsoever. Plus covid.

@Mitch But that is not the title.

B.

@RowanParkinson Compare the stems of physicist, publicist, lyricist, geneticist.

@RowanParkinson We do have lyricism, but not physicism, publicism, geneticism.

OK. Thank you very much all. :-)

What other words end in -isticist? I believe there aren't any.

These are "bad enough":