The shattered light of Virginia Tech

Like everyone else I've been following the news at VA Tech. Probably the single most reliable summary of the incident is the Wikipedia page, VA Tech Massacre, and it's doubtless the best place to go if you don't want to wade through the low-bandwidth nonsense of Fox or CNN.

It took me a while to process the tragedy. I tend not to automatically "get" things like this, and my initial reaction was that we were in for another round of grief pimping by the media and finger pointing at gun owners. It wasn't until a day or two later that I started to process just how horrific this must be for the survivors: classmates, parents, and children of the victims. The Lebrescu shooting was particularly painful to read. The grief is real now.

Everyone is now processing this event through their broken prisms. What disappoints me is that the prisms seem to be even more fractured than usual. I mean, sure, there's the usual pimping: Jack Thompson blamed video games, the psuedonazi wankers at Stormfront blamed multiculturalism (no link; I'm sure their roboposter will get me eventually) (why yes, I did just put Jack Thompsons and white supremacists on the same level). Barack Obama misstepped badly when he tried to claim the violence was bad but the violence visited upon families by outsourcing was even worse. Fred Phelps announced he would picket the funerals. The Huffington Post blames Iraq; the creationists blame Darwin.

This morning while flipping through the AM dial I stopped on Kirby Wilbur's show. Wilbur is a local conservative talk show host. He's pretty firmly in the FOX camp but in all the years I've been hearing him he's never been viciously stupid; he may have been shallow but he never struck me as the sort of man who turned his brain over to Karl Rove's machine.

This morning as he was talking to a caller he said that Sueng-Hi's suicide note was filled with "complaints about rich kids and debauchery, just full of typical liberal things."

I always thought complaining about debauchery was a conservative pasttime. Isn't it liberals and the left who supposedly have no morals or family values?

I was disappointed to hear this tripe this morning because I realized just how far apart this country has been driven: normally sensible conservative (and liberals) will now say absolutely anything they can to vilify and demonize the other side of the aisle. I could understand if it was members of the meritocracy of the mediocre, but to want to join that group willingly just disappoints me: even in the age of the Internet, we abandon our American principles for tribalism and strong man politics, and this incident has made it clear that this has become even more acceptable than usual.

(Oh, yeah, Kirby also called this "The worst mass murder in American history." Uh, no, that happened on September 11th, 2001. History is another weak point in our collective knowledge.)

Deboning

No, this is not about removing the love scenes.

I recently wrote a commentary to the effect that I was underwhelmed by John Harris's essay about how "worldbuilding is a waste of time" and the triumph of geekiness over craft.

A long time ago at a convention I heard Bujold use the term "fishhead" for the first few chapters of a story that the writer ultimately discards after the story is finally moving: they're the unnecessary world building and character establishment the writer needed as warmup, the undigestible start of the story that don't really serve the reader. If the story really starts in chapter three, smart writers ultimately delete chapters one and two from their final draft.

Despite my lack of whelm, I found Harris's essay a reasonable reminder, so much so that I've gone through Sterlings and started to tear out all of the paragraphs and even the sentences where I intrude and add to the conversation those elements that the conversants themselves would never bother bringing to consciousness. The story reads better for it, stronger. And given the nitpicking way in which it's done, as opposed to just lopping off the fishhead, I have decided to call this process "deboning".

Don't piss off the Omaha

Omaha and I settled down to play a new Quake4 map. Along the way of researching the map installation, I discovered a new kind of kill. There's the Humiliation (you kill someone with the chainsaw), and the Impressive (a head shot with the rail gun, not necessarily fatal) but there's also the Combination (wound with the rocket, the kill with the rail gun within three seconds).

I'd never had a combo before. So I started chasing Omaha around, going for exactly that kill. When I did it, she said, "What the Hell was that?" When I explained, she said, "You used me as your experiment! You've been pulling your shots all this time! You could kill me anytime you wanted to!"

Actually, no. I usually am better than she is, but not by very much. There are certain maps (we have over a hundred now) that really favor her style of play, too, where she kicks my butt across the territory. She's a very good camper especially when it's dark. When I learned about the Combo, I got into a very different head space, one where making the Combo was more important than beating her. Once I'd done it, I fell back into just playing the game and whatever skillset I had conjured up to make the combo just disappeared. I could not bring them back.

And I'd made her mad. She started to beat me up badly, only to make two really bad mistakes and lose two points (not win two, lose two: she succeeded in killing herself). She managed to stage a second comeback and won by one point.

I'm still trying to figure out why I became so successfully reckless about the Combo, and I why couldn't repeat the experience after I'd done it once. At one point I tried to do it, fat fingered the gun switch, and got blown apart by Omaha's shotgun while I was trying to hit her with the chainsaw at range. Which just doesn't work.

But mostly, don't make the Omaha mad.