独走 dokusou

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:26:58 GMT

This blog is defunct. For a newer blog, please see ar_raqis.

Jazz win! Glee! Mormon glee!

Sun, 06 May 2007 05:49:46 GMT

It has happened, as I prophesied.

Ever since the famous day sometime in 1996 when, having purchased a cool poster with the logos of the 29 teams then in the NBA arranged in a grid, I closed my eyes and picked the Utah Jazz to follow -- to see them go all the way to the NBA Finals, twice (and painfully, watching most of the games with the intensity and single-minded fervor natural to a young child, to see them lose, both times, in heartbreaking fashion) -- I have cherished the Utah Jazz. I may have had a gift for that sort of thing: when young and still receiving three sports magazines, I picked the Tennessee Titans to follow, who achieved similar success for one great season; on the other hand, I followed the Baltimore Orioles, who were a picture of futility at the time and remain so today. But I don't follow those teams anymore.

The Utah Jazz, on the other hand, I stuck with. I'd always been more interested in them, being more into basketball to begin with; the first and only sports games I bought were for the NBA, and for a period of about four years I knew something about the skill level of every player on every team. I remember going to the library and reading every volume of a series of short NBA team histories, and about the Utah Jazz in particular I read widely. After sexy John Stockton retired, a couple of years later, and the immortal Karl Malone finished his career with the Lakers, getting ignominously owned by the young Pistons, my interest faded some, but was rekindled by the temporary emergence of all-star Andrei Kirilenko, perhaps one of the most interesting players in NBA history (he likes Bulgakov and Warcraft.)

When Carlos Boozer and Mehmet Okur were signed by the Jazz in 2004, where Deron Williams had a strong rookie season, I sat up and took notice, some, but injuries prevented us from achieving anything during two years of boring and heartbreaking purgatory. Yet at the beginning of the year, with the Jazz 4-1 and on a customary strong start, encouraged by a sports-fan atmosphere in my new dormitory hall, I took it upon myself to champion the Jazz as a team capable of achieving playoff success. I followed them through a very up-and-down season, and I have followed them with nails metaphorically between teeth, watching the games when I could (as I made the questionable decision not to install a TV in my dorm), GameCasting them otherwise. As sketchy replacement for my questionable Mac power adapter broke down on Friday, I trekked to the library to GameCast game 7, my eyes going back and forth between a decent book and a tense accumlation of numbers and spartan, robotic "play-by-play."

Nobody bought the Jazz winning, and naturally so, after they tanked at the end of the regular season and blew home-court advantage to the Rockets, who had two widely acclaimed superstars in Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming, good role-players, no bench (teams usually tighten their rotation up during the playoffs and play starters huge minutes) and arguably the NBA's best defense. They looked like a great playoff team on paper, but their system was prone to collapse. They relied too heavily on Luther Head or Shane Battier jacking up threes to take defensive pressure off McGrady and Yao; when McGrady's jumper itself was maddeningly inconsistent, and the formerly-considered-soft Okur played increasingly unbelievable defense on the much taller Yao, I think everyone should have been able to read the entrails.

But they couldn't, I guess, since experts still overwhelmingly picked the Jazz to lose Game 6 or Game 7, thus dropping the series But things finally went seriously wrong for the Rockets in the former (the biggest margin of victory of any team all series, a 12-point Jazz win that was meaninglessly reduced from a much larger lead at the end of the fourth quarter). And in the latter, although the Jazz (who led every game at halftime) tanked a bit in the second half, especially at the beginning of the fourth, when crunch time hit they dug deep. AK hit a three, his first in a while. Okur missed one, which was rebounded by Boozer and fired back out to Okur, who drained it the second time around, completing a significant reversal of momentum, killing a lot of the Rockets' fire, and bringing a huge, stupid grin to my face that did a lot to reverse, for the moment, the weighty impact of the personal misfortune that's been owning my life so far.

Bring on the Warriors on Monday. I feel good about this one.

"The Blind Assassin" reflections

Thu, 03 May 2007 16:35:26 GMT

So. Last week I finished Margaret Atwood's ponderous, Booker Prize winning novel The Blind Assassin (review, less positive review). Let's just say I wanted, at any rate, to love it to death. The two previous Atwood books I've read in the last year and a half, The Handmaid's Tale (review) and Oryx and Crake (awesomely weird official web site), were probably among the top ten books of any sort which I've ever even started reading, and I probably couldn't give less than about a 9.5/10 rating to either in good conscience. Those two books had little in common despite the gradual-revelation trope and the fact that they are both, in some sense, dystopian. The latter was a very human, very creepy science fiction yarn that evoked the same feelings in me as Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle save with even less hopefulness and no equanimity. The former, although some people apparently consider it science fiction, has no basis to be so; it's a sort of feminist 1984 that does the job so smashingly better than Orwell did that she really should obliterate him in the high school canon.

So I wanted to love this book. And I refuse to say that I never did. Atwood's cleverness of structure is still there, and though more ambitious than usual hasn't lost its potency. Her imagery is still evocative, her capacity to reveal characters' inner turmoil still addictively present; these things make even a bad novel by Atwood better than a good novel by some of her peers. But her novel has a hard time keeping my interest when she moves her usual dystopia into a reinterpretation of the past. It's supposed to be thought-provoking revisionism, I guess, when she says that maybe life for upper-class people in 20th century Canada sucked, or was ossified and lifeless, or abused women. But this is all sort of unfamiliar territory to me because I'm 18 -- even stuff that happened in the late 1980s I learned secondhand. Furthermore, I have little interest in recent North American history and I know by now that almost nothing (dating after this, anyhow) can possibly capture it. Nor do I get the sense that Atwood tried very hard; she merely painted some stuff she sort of knew about, being my grandma's age and Canadian, atop a frank discussion of how she felt being old.

This might explain why The Blind Assassin won a Booker Prize, more honor than all of her other novels combined have ever been given. The themes in this book speak to the old people who judge that prize, and to their own personal interests in history that cannot but have been activated via actually having lived through them. The confusing, rambling structure is lauded as somehow turning the novel into a "murder mystery" (as back-cover and inside reviews repeatedly emphasize), when it's in fact a failed, too-ambitious interpretation of what Atwood has been doing with nonpareil skill all along; geriatric narrator Iris Griffen's obnoxious asides, rarely trimmed by Atwood, are seen as playful. Which they would be, if there weren't one on nearly every page she narrates.

I still like this novel, I learned a lot from it (I even got to bring up the "starving Armenians" during Issues in US History), and I won't be storming Ottawa anytime soon demanding my loonies back. If you take the subject matter and something of the style for granted, it's still a Margaret Atwood novel, and there's something in the very definition of that term that implies goodness. So I have to give it something like a positive review and recommendation. After all, I would much rather read it than the superficially similar in style, but rather more overgrown, The Poisonwood Bible... but that's a post for another day.

David Shi is off his rocker

Tue, 01 May 2007 02:06:35 GMT

As the president of Furman, David Shi can get an editorial published in the Greenville News pretty much any time he wants. Throughout his sabbatical he's been publishing roughly one a month. These are usually thoughtful and intriguing reflections that make me proud that my univresity has such a great president, and hopeful that I might sit down with him some day and just talk.

After today, however, my first question will have to be: Dr. Shi, what were you thinking when you wrote this!?

It's a reflection on the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech, which is great. Lots of people, especially public figures, feel a strong urge to respond, to console themselves and others, to try to make some sense out of a tragedy -- as after every tragedy, from 9/11 to Columbine. Especially so for the president of a Southeastern university. But the tone of his editorial very quickly shifts from pained regret to magical theology, insulting to the mind:

Expert commentators -- sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists -- have offered many sophisticated explanations for Cho Seung-Hui's tortured psyche and barren intensity. He was, we are told, suffering from a cluster of toxic syndromes: psychotic depression, pathological alienation and avoidant personality disorder. His curdled mind saw conspiracies everywhere and found love nowhere.

Yet the sophisticated diagnoses never congeal into an inclusive explanation. [...] Understanding our innate propensity for malicious destructiveness requires venturing beyond sociology and psychology into the realms of metaphysics and theology.

No! The observation that criminally deranged people do criminally deranged things does not require postulating the existence of God or spiritual constants like the religiously-charged term "evil." The reason a lot of us "don't feel comfortable invoking a mossbacked word like evil" is not because anyone has some irrational faith that science -- or especially psychiatric therapy -- can be omnipotent, as Shi implies in anti-psychiatric rhetoric that verges on the Scientological. The reason is that a lot of us think that trying to help people is a more reliable solution to problems like Cho Seung-Hui's than immobile prayer -- than throwing in the towel and saying "it's evil, we couldn't have done anything."

But it gets worse. Dr. Shi doesn't merely want those tasked with trying to save others afflicted as Cho Seung-Hui was to reject psychology and evidence. Unfortunately, he advocates a blind leap into religious demonology as the only answer:

In the Jewish and Christian traditions, evil is not a function of ignorance, poverty or broken families. Nor is it a state of mind, moral inconvenience or chemical imbalance in the brain. Instead it is a malevolent thread woven into the very fabric of our being. As Theodore Roosevelt reminded people just a century ago, "There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us."

[...] Like Mother Teresa, we need to acknowledge our inner demon and confront its perplexing impulses -- even as we acknowledge that evil will never be eliminated.

Yeah. Okay. So Cho Seung-Hui, I suppose, either had a particularly aggressive demon that overpowered him so thoroughly that he had to shoot everyone, or else he was just too weak to fight off the same demon that everyone else has to. If only everyone were as tough as the Bull Moose was...

Well, okay. Having rejected modern science, whence does he draw his evidentiary support?

In his novel "Billy Budd, Sailor," Herman Melville wrestled explicitly with the "mystery of iniquity." At one point he characterizes Petty Officer Claggart as having "the mania of an evil nature, not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short 'a depravity according to nature.'"

Bully.

Well, I'm glad you've read that novel, Dr. Shi. So have I. I wrote a paper on it last fall. Melville is extremely explicit about the fact that Claggart's evil was connected to his eye color -- in this case, a piercing violet. Billy Budd, on the other hand, could be seen to be an innocent because he had blue eyes, while Captain Vere was an impartial administrator of justice because his were grey.

It's easier to believe that the novel is a religious allegory in which Claggart is actually the devil (and Billy is Jesus, and Vere is God, and the Dansker is... eh, I dunno, Daniel?) than to believe that Melville meant Claggart to be possessed. Either way, though, the whole book takes place in a world in which different rules apply than they do in real world. It's a fact of which I'd like to think Melville was aware, since he takes such pains to suffuse the narratives with what are either miracles or fragments of uncanny unreality, as when Budd was hanged. (Hanged for killing Claggart, of course. By God.)

Regardless of whether Melville was aware of the unreality of his fiction -- or whether, as many of his contemporaries thought, he was insane -- I'm a bit surprised that a university president would decide that where facts can't explain the genesis of a disaster, rambling 19th century novels should be marshalled to do so. I'm really in need of an explanation, here, because I don't want to believe the obvious one.

An easier-to-follow flash-free Mt. Silver guide for Crystal

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:33:55 GMT

In Pokemon Crystal, lots of players -- myself included -- prefer to get to the final boss, Red, without having to slot Flash, a move near-useless for battle, on one of their Pokemon just to get through the cave. Accordingly there's a proliferation of guides telling how to get through the first, darkened, part of the cave by following a set number of steps. Unfortunately, they can be difficult to follow, as they state the path in "go right 5 steps, go up 6 steps" terms. These directions are difficult for anyone to follow in the dark, and for someone with a poorly-responsive D-pad, or using an emulator (especially one with frameskip), they are simply unworkable. It's not as if Crystal has the Step Counter.

Accordingly, I decided to make an alternate such guide that relies primarily on mashing the arrows as far as they will go, and only requires a short number of set steps in between. I can't possibly be the first person to think of this, but I can't readily find such a guide, so I feel obligated to provide mine here, which I have tested and used successfully. It appears after the cut.

After you enter the cave, go:
    1. As far as possible up, then one step back.
    2. Three steps right.
    3. As far as possible up.
    4. As far as possible left.
    5. As far as possible up.
    6. As far as possible right.
    7. As far as possible down.
    8. As far as possible right, then one step back.
    9. As far as possible up.
    10. As far as possible left.
    11. As far as possible up.
    12. As far as possible left.
    13. As far as possible up.
    14. As far as possible right.
    15. As far as possible down, then one step back.
    16. As far as possible right, then one step back.
    17. As far as possible up.

With the last step, you should pass through the door to the second area of the Mt. Silver cave, which is lit.

By the way, I haven't a clue whether Mt. Silver's map is the same in Gold/Silver as it is in Crystal; I have not yet tested this guide in those games.

Sup, internet?

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 02:46:12 GMT

First post whee.

Whee.

So, anyway, I was a little over-enthusiastic in Religion class today and monopolized some class time just being exuberant. But who can blame me? We were learning about Sophia. I'm afraid Wikipedia doesn't do her justice, shoving a rather crappy account of a figure who has often been considered actually part of the Trinity (later as equivalent to the Holy Breath, but once as equivalent to Jesus; basically he was seen as her incarnation) in many major Christian traditions into an awkward rider to an article that's supposed to be about her importance about Gnosticism. A casual reader would come away with the completely absurd idea that Sophia was only important to Gnosticism. (I would node my homework there, but I'm sure I could never see it through the inevitable edit war.)

My professor discusses Sophia as if she is a woman, while questioning the masculinity of other members of the Godhead. This is okay because her intent is merely to expose the students, most of them dedicated and fairly orthodox Protestant Christians, to different ideas. However, the different stories to which I was exposed -- the ideal wife characterized by "chokhmah" in Proverbs, the deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom, the sparse New Testament references -- don't strike me as pointing in the same direction.

Why all this talk about Judeo-Christianity? Let's just say my institution is at fault, not my prof. Due to its curriculum standards, which haven't undergone a major overhaul since 1968, a religion course is required. A student may choose among two, one focusing on the Bible and one also focusing on the Bible. I chose the one focusing less on the Bible. Two-thirds through the term, I've not even been asked once to read from any sacred text other than the Bible (and tiny, tiny snippets from the Talmud and a few apocryphal works).

You can, of course, take a course called "Religions of the World." Every time my professor is forced to breeze through Islam or "Hinduism" in a day and a half to get to the next super-obscure facet of Christian symbolism or iconography, she urges us to take that class for more information. I have only one question.

If I have to take a religion class -- and I shouldn't, because this is supposedly not a religious institution -- why isn't it that one?