Courtesy of My Cousin

Several days ago, my cousin (who is 18) posted a note on Facebook telling a story about his trip to Subway.
Standing in front of him was a man who was harassing the guy behind the counter because his gloves had touched meat, and the man was vegan, so he couldn't eat anything that had been touched by anything that had touched meat. It's one thing to ask nicely for him to change his gloves, but apparently the man was being rather mean about it.
After the man left, my cousin asked the employee "Does your tuna salad have mayonnaise in it?" The employee said yes. Mayonnaise has eggs in it. Moral of the story as stated by my cousin: vegans are rude hypocrites.


I think that's a disrespectful generalization, but that's not the point of this post. 


Why does the man care if the employee's gloves had touched meat?


The purpose of being vegan is to avoid animal-based products so that less animals are slaughtered/treated badly for human consumption/profit. Therefore, eating food with meat or dairy is generally considered bad, since it detracts from that goal.


But is the demand for meat going up because the employee's gloves touched meat and also touched your food? No. In fact, you're just contributing to other consumption-based problems by insisting that he use another pair of gloves without reason.
Meat itself is not inherently evil. It's the demand for meat that's the issue. If something doesn't increase said demand, it shouldn't be a point of conflict.


So the moral of the story as stated by me is that sometimes people get so caught up in the dogma of things that they forget what the actual point of it is, and they'll often place huge value on things that don't actually matter.
So I think it's important to ask ourselves "Exactly why do I care about this?" and if it turns out that your caring about said thing is in alignment with your values/goals/whatever, then that's good. If not, then it's just an added point of anxiety, which is never beneficial.


If you're interested in learning more about the tech aspects of the Nook Color (plus hacks and such), you might want to check out said cousin's website: http://mrm3.net/ 


(You should also tell all of your friends to come to this here blog and post links to it and such, so that next time I see him I can brag about how I get more views than he does.)

In Which My Inner Fantasy Nerd Escapes

“We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.” - Paper Towns


I said I'd write a post about Bones, but then I realized there isn't really much to say about it other than that it has great characters. So then I was thinking about why I love it so much if the plots are predictable and traditional (there is a murder which is solved by the end of the episode. Pretty straightforward.) And I believe I have an answer.


I was originally thinking about this a month or so ago when watching the recording of an award ceremony for books published in 2010 with which a few of my friends were involved. Someone asked what they believed the most important element of a book was. The most common answer was "characters."


Which makes total sense, even though you expect it to be plot without really knowing why. 
It's like asking "Which matters more to you: the events in your life, or the people involved?"


Well, I don't plan on getting married simply for the sake of being married. I plan on getting married because I want to spend the rest of my life with said person. And I bet the vast majority (if not all) of you feel the same.
Would you trade your best friend for a different best friend? Of course not. You don't love him/her because he/she is your best friend. He/she is your best friend because you love him/her. (either that or because he/she is your only friend, but...)


So there it is for life. And in books, it's the same. It doesn't matter how flawed the plot is (to a degree, of course) if you're spending the time with some awesome characters-- and that's the main issue with my current manuscript. The plot is alright. The world is cool. But I despise both of the protagonists.


And that's why I love Bones. The characters-- not the plot. (And it's funny.)


Now, characters taking the front seat, if you have some fantastic world in which your story is set, I will pretty much fall in love with your book. I don't mean a world in which I'd want to live, necessarily. I definitely don't want to live in Matched's society, or the London Below of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, but those worlds are so complete-- so vivid-- so real--that they carry with them an entire atmosphere around with them. 


Think about it. None of the Super Bestsellers Of Sci-fi/Fantasy that I can think of made it big because of plot or characters.


Take Harry Potter. Great plot and characters, sure. But my six year-old self didn't become obsessed with it because of that. I wanted to go to Hogwarts.


Star Wars. Characters are alright. Plot is straight-forward. Why do people love it? Jedi are so freaking cool. They want to use the Force. They want to wear tunics and robes and be knights with spaceships.


Lord of the Rings certainly didn't gain popularity from being well-written or having engaging characters or a well-paced plot. Until the movies came out, it survived on the sheer comprehensiveness and novelty of Middle Earth. Elves. Dwarves. Hobbits. Wizards. Giant Demon Bad Guys in towers with legions of monsters to do their bidding.


Also Eragon, which is basically a combination of the last two: YOU GET TO RIDE A DRAGON AND DO MAGIC! Who cares if it's a rip-off? (critics and people bothered by rip-offs, of course, but you see my point.)


It doesn't matter whether or not the actual events of the stories are interesting. What matters is that the worlds are breeding grounds for daydreams.


And so you see what went on inside my head for most of middle school. I didn't spend every spare minute reading, you idiots. I spent them flying around on my dragon and killing orcs  Urgals because I was a totally freaking awesome elf warrior lady person thing.
(And you think your life was cool.)


So that is why world-building is important. And now you understand all of the people at Star Trek conventions a little bit better.


If your world is such that your readers will fantasize about living in it...you're set. Because they can ignore the annoying characters and become the hero themselves. Some people do this in a healthy balance with everything else, and some do not. But that's the way it is for everything.

In Which I Complain About Young Whipper-Snappers

(Exactly what is a whipper-snapper?)


There are about four kids at Elementary School Writing Club that get there, sit down, eat their snack, and start to work.
There are about twenty kids in the club.


I thought I'd sit down with a few of them with my own paper and pencil, and they would stop talking to each other and focus.
Instead, they started telling each other to focus in hopes of me being pleased with them (I wasn't), and interrogating me as to how I managed to write two pages in the time it'd taken them to write two sentences.


Well...I'd like to tell them it's this thing called self-discipline that allows me to write instead of talking with my friends...but that would be terribly hypocritical of me (as well as mean if I were to phrase it that way). 


Because have I written much of anything recently? No.
Why is that? I've been online...talking with my friends. (and watching 10 episodes of Bones since Sunday morning...but let's not mention that)


I don't regret any of that time, though. I just wish there were more hours in the day in which I could write and do that dreaded Chemistry Homework that reproduces right before I kill off the last of it. If ever a species deserved to be extinct...


Things You Should Learn From This:

1. Procrastinating from enjoyable work in favor of enjoyable non-work is acceptable only if I am the one doing it (because children are lazy, and us teenagers deserve it because we work so hard all day and we're mature and wise and need to enjoy our retirement...oh wait, hold on...)
2. Bones is an excellent show, and you should watch it. More on Bones in a future post.

How They Met And How They Parted

"(Yesterday) I read and enjoyed a book of gay romances recommended to me by my heterosexual ex-boyfriend. Because that's not strange at all."

(The book in question is How They Met and Other Stories by David Levithan, which is chockful of quotable material.)

"Knowing about life is really knowing how it should be, not just how it is." 

That's the only deep-sounding one I can find right now just flipping through (mainly because I marked that one this morning specifically to share it with all of you), but the thing I've noticed from all of the books by David Levithan that I've read is that his narrators are very, very real. Just the way he/they phrases things. The observations he/they make.

And I love it.

(And if you want more fun contradictions, think about your first "date" with your ex being just as friends. That makes no sense in about three different ways.)

An Abundance of Quotes Part 11

"It is almost impossible to write a novel any better than the best novel you’ve read in the three to six months before you began writing your own. Thus you must read excellent novels regularly.
Excellent novels set the standards for our own. But bad novels and bad prose are what teach us to write—by setting strong negative examples. You must read both, then—and read them analytically and discriminatingly." - Samuel R. Delany


““Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will,” she says.
“Yeah, that’s true,” I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, “But then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”” - Paper Towns


"Retard in aluminum foil-- What a lady's knight in shining armor becomes when she really gets to know him." - Urban Dictionary. That's alright. Knights are overrated, anyway. A madman with a box, however, most definitely is a madman with a box.


"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder


"Sometimes in our hyper-cynical world, we forget that it's okay to get enthusiastic about things." - John Green


"I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long." - Mitch Hedburg


I was clicking around online and found something that said Ron Weasley's birthday is on Tuesday (this is actually un-true. Ron's birthday was on a Tuesday, but I started this post several weeks ago)  so I mentioned it aloud. My 8 year-old neighbor who is visiting said "Who's Ron Weasley?" 


I am not used to that question.

Rant Under Guise of Fiction

Today in Civics my teacher was still out sick, so we watched a movie about how horrible Walmart is for America. This after watching one that may as well have been called How Bush Screwed Up The Country yesterday (ha-- this one particularly vocal Republican guy in my class was not happy).
One woman in the video said "I may as well have my social security check mailed directly to Walmart, since I buy everything there anyway." This bothered me significantly more than it should have, and I was bored, so I wrote a rant poorly-disguised as a dystopian monologue. I don't share much of my fiction on here-- despite talking about it constantly-- so I figured I'd let you read it.

"Rant Under Guise of Fiction"


By Me (or possibly indirectly by rock4ever95- you'll have to ask him if he's perfected his Jedi mind tricks yet.)


Someone once told me that people used to pay taxes to the government.
You'd have to file them and report them, and if you didn't, they could lock you up.
I don't know if I believe that, though. I mean, what would be the point? And how would they enforce it? It's not like anyone actually listens to the politicians anymore. It's the Center that makes all of the decisions; it's the Center that gets all of our money.
You'd think that some corrupt higher-ups decided one day, "Hey, let's take over the world and plunge everyone else into poverty so that if they leave us, they die." No one would want to put their very lives into the banks of one huge company that was faceless but for that grinning yellow mask, right?
Except they did.
One day, some brilliant citizen said "Hey, why don't we send our paychecks directly to the Center, since we buy everything there anyway?"
Yeah, that sounds like a fantastic idea.
But people lapped it up. "Wow," they said, "That's a great idea! We don't want to be responsible for our own money anymore!"
Petitions were signed. Meetings were held behind closed doors. Pep rallies were held behind open doors.
There was singing.
There was chanting.
There were T-shirts.
All in the name of efficiency and simplicity, the American worker ceased to have a say in his own finances-- as long as he was forced to do what he would have done anyway, what was the problem?
The Center got paid for the work I did, and I and everyone else were rewarded with various forms of free mass-produced plastic-- in the color of our choice!
So maybe I do believe we used to pay taxes to the government, but only because there's no way that people this stupid could have made it this far without someone else to spend their money for them.


And the sad thing is, there really were pep rallies and singing and chanting and T-shirts in the video. About Walmart. I wish I could take credit for that part, since I think it's particularly funny, but I'm not making it up.

A Roman Dinner Party

There's this thought I have at approximately 8:30 p.m. every other Wednesday. It goes something like this: "I love writing group I love it I love it I love it."


But that's not what tonight's post is about.


Today was our Latin class' Roman Dinner Party/Fashion Show Day (which is ironic, since I have the class first period).
We learned that Roman women would pin their sleeves instead of having them sewn together, so I figured I'd destroy a shirt I hated and pin it with my Nerd Buttons (of which there are 14*). Mainly it was an excuse to wear the buttons, but my justification was that Roman women probably wore pins that they liked, so I wore the pins that I like.
Then, since it's International Week (whatever that means), we swapped classrooms and played an old Aztec game that's a bit like Sorry.


And since I think about humanity a lot, all of this plus some of the other things we've been learning in Latin made me realize that people as a whole really haven't changed much in the past few thousand years.


We still like food. We still choose which clothes to wear. We still play dumb games that take forever to get a marker out of the Start position. We still want. We still hurt. We still love. We still die. We still use gross generalizations to make a point, and we still stay up later than we should to write blog posts about Deep Things.


And I don't know whether that's a comforting thought, or if it's just really scary.


But there you have it. My Random Thought of the Night, when I should be doing my chemistry homework instead of talking to you or editing the current draft of my work in progress...

Review: Matched, by Ally Condie

"A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality."
---John Lennon, via rock4ever95's Facebook

I think it's beautiful. And yes, I did just go stalk through weeks of posts to find it.

For the past two weeks, I've been reading Matched, by Ally Condie. My copy is an ARC, so I don't get the awesome cover that originally caught my eye in the store, but I finally got my hands on it, so I don't really mind.

On the cover of this ARC are a bunch of quotes from different people in the publishing house. One of them says something like "Readers who love The Giver and The Hunger Games will not be disappointed." This is true.

A summary before I get into my review:

A long time ago when Cassia Reyes' great-grandmother was young, the Society decided that humanity was over-cultured, so they began sorting through everything, to discard the things that were not "needed." Now there is only the Hundred Poems, the Hundred Songs, the Hundred Paintings, and the Hundred History Lessons. Data is gathered about everyone constantly, so their every action is predicted. Dreams are monitored. Food is assigned based on individual needs. Everyone owns only Plainclothes, Workclothes, Swimclothes, and Sleepclothes. 

Except for your Matching Banquet, when guys get to wear suits, and girls choose from the Hundred Dresses.

Sometime in the year after your seventeenth birthday, all of your data is analyzed to Match you with the person you are most likely to have the happiest life with. You receive a microcard containing a picture, a brief description, and courtship guidelines. The Society arranges supervised (at first) conversations-- and later meetings-- between you and your Match, until the Marriage Contract is signed at twenty one.

Cassia's Match is a rare occurrence. She's been Matched with someone she knows-- her best friend, as a matter of fact. But when she opens the microcard, a different boy's face appears. A face she also knows.

The thing I initially loved about this book is that the Society isn't obviously evil. The Matches really are happy. People really are healthier than ever before. The principles behind the Society are bad, of course, but the system actually seems to be working well.

Then Condie starts to reveal little problems here and there. There's the pills everyone is required to carry: one green for calming, one blue for emergency sustenance, and one mysterious red pill that can only be taken if an Official demands it. (The red pill is brilliant.)

The reader doesn't start out seeing all of the flaws in the system. We know they're there, because that's what books like this do, but we discover them along with Cassia.

Dystopia/negative-utopia is not necessarily my favorite genre (although it's definitely up there), but it is the genre that I've enjoyed the most consistently so far. And I think the world-building in Matched is very, very well-done. In fact, I just pretty much adored this book overall.

(And for those who know what I'm talking about, Cassia's grandfather gives Lester Trapp a run for his money in Most Awesome Old Person. I'm glad Trapp won, but...)

In a lot of books of this genre, the flaws of the system are discovered by stumbling upon a secret, or by finding a covert organization working on a rebellion. Or perhaps they're just obvious and the citizens are too powerless to do anything about them until the start of the novel.

But in Matched, Cassia comes to realize the problems of the Society just by experiencing and thinking. She comes to realize the problems through love, both romantic and otherwise.

The question is raised: If you've been set up with a person against your will but end up loving him/her anyway, is that love genuine? Does it still mean as much?

I enjoyed this book very, very much, and am eagerly anticipating the sequel. 

I'm a bit annoyed with the ending, though. Not because it was bad, but because a certain plot element is rather similar to something at the end of my own novel. And I thought I was being clever.

Actually, Matched reminded me of my own writing from early on. Cassia is similar to the main character of my own attempt at a post-apocalyptic story (although Matched is far better-written than mine), and there were several plot-things that were things I definitely would have done, or at least would have done if I'd thought of them in time (which is partially why I began this post with that quote--because he's the one that helped salvage the dregs of my own initial plot-- thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou).

But yes: Matched had lots of things that made me go "Ooh, that's brilliant!"

I definitely recommend it. Hopefully this review wasn't too all-over-the-place.

Singularity Part 2

“(Writing) is very much just like exploring. Just like going on a walk through the woods, except you’re in your own brain. Don’t worry about being a writer or being a novelist, just uh, take a walk in your brain, or a bike ride in your brain. But, don’t drive, because that’s bad for the environment.” - Hank Green, whose most unpublished novel is known across much of Nerdfighteria as "The Bacon Book." And from what he's posted of it, it's not bad.


Towards the end of my last post on Singularity, which is filed under February if you weren't around for it, I mentioned that my dad is thinking of writing a novel regarding the concept.


Earlier this afternoon, he bounced some plot ideas off of me. I would love to share them with you, because they're very, very clever, but I think he's really going to go through with it, and the surprise is kind of important.
Think Inception, except minus dreams and plus artificial intelligence. (I can't get away from that movie. It's everywhere. But it's awesome, so that's okay.)


Here is his current Facebook status: "I don't have writer's block. I have really busy life with obligations block, but I'm going to get started with a plot outline for a novel I've been thinking about, and see how far I get. Getting thoughts more organized in a systematic way is never a bad thing. That's the first line of my manifesto."

And here is my comment:  "‎"People often tell me that they hope to write some day when they’re not so busy. My response? Don’t wait. That day will never come. We are always too busy to write. No book has ever been written because the author had spare time to write it." - Rick Riordan, father of two, who wrote the Percy Jackson series while still working as an English teacher"


But everyone hates a post that says "great things are afoot, but you can't know," so I'll tell you about some of the broader concepts we touched upon over the course of our conversation.


He thinks that once computers can self-evolve, they'll overtake us at an inconceivably huge rate, and they will simply cease to care about us. They won't blow us up like in Terminator because we won't be viewed as a threat.
I, of course, found it pertinent to make another sci-fi reference (you'll love this, Zaphodora) and said: "But what if they want to make an interstellar bypass and the Earth just happens to be in the way?"
He says that that's one of the major issues the researchers are working on. If the computers are changing themselves, how are we to know that they'll continue to believe anything we tell them? I guess most parents ask that about their kids as well, but kids are so much less objective in regards to their upbringing that it hasn't really needed to be considered as closely before.
He's been listening to AI lectures like mad for the past two weeks or so. There's a major summit every year to discuss all of these things, and he really admires the thousand-or-so people involved.


That's one of the reasons he wants to write this book: because he can't actually go work on it himself, but if he writes a brilliant-enough novel that's true to the current predictions and research, they might like him. And he wants to be liked by all the cool kids at school. 


I'm...afraid his is going to be better than mine, actually. He doesn't have much experience with writing fiction (although he's a great oral storyteller), but he's fantastic at organizing ideas and phrasing them well. 
However, I intend to help him with it as much as he wants me to, so perhaps I can wrangle a percentage of the royalties out of him in a non-I'm-paying-for-your-tuition sort of way. ;)

I'm Still Here

It's been what, almost a week since I last posted? You probably thought I'd died or something. 
Sorry about that. Things came up.


To make up for it, though, I'm going to smush several different things into one post to keep you all entertained.


1. An Abundance (or rather not) of Quotes:


"It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one." - George Washington


"We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves." - Galileo Galilei


2. Something Funny


3. Something Me-Related


No word from the agent yet. But the band has a blog now, which you can go follow for songs and updates and stuff. I'll say all of the important things on here as well, but there will be lyrics and demos and such over there.


4. Something Related To Patterns/Philosophy/Perception


On an entirely unrelated note, someone asked me for help with an essay on Lord of the Flies earlier this evening. She was supposed to make a "contemporary reference" and wanted to know what that meant.


I immediately decided that if it were my essay, I would write about how the book relates to Inception and the effects they both have on their respective consumers. (She didn't find the idea nearly as appealing as I do.)


Wouldn't that be cool? I might still do it as a post sometime.