The NYT Doesn't Get Why We're Bicameral

Althouse posted this story: "Frances E. Lee, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, said the problem was as real as the solution elusive, adding that she and other scholars have tried without success to find a contemporary reason to exempt the Senate from the usual rules of granting citizens an equal voice in their government."

You can tell this is top shelf journalism because some are saying things, while others are saying other things. As for being the least democratic legislature, it's almost like no one remembers the House of Lords still exists. I also note that all the methods suggested to balance the power, particularly the suggested fix for the Electoral College, essentially would completely neuter small states. This whine is a political power play unfounded in the recognition that we're not a pure democracy, and frankly, pure democracies are scary things.

Then again, I'm not a political scientist. Alas, if only there were some papers somewhere, that some people might have written -- perhaps contemporaneously -- that explained all of this. But, I suppose that the reasoning behind the establishment of the Senate is a mystery shrouded in myths forever and ever, amen.

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PS: This is known as "working as intended;" this is a "feature not a bug;" it is "baked into the cake."

Birds!; Mice and Mystics; NaNoWriMo

Birds!

I apologize for lack of blogging, especially for the next few weeks. Here is my one-paragraph review of Mice and Mystics. First, the minis, rulebook and physical stuff is pretty awesome looking. The cards and map tiles aren't extremely durable feeling, but they held up to a day of play just fine. The rules are crisp, easy to pick up and relatively intuitive. Having only played through the first two scenarios (and only partially through the third), one thing I thought was odd was not letting everyone have access to all six heroes in the first scenario to pick from. Splitting the party in the second scenario also was awkward feeling because the player who played Lilly had a pretty boring experience until we got there. Overall, I approve. Next time I play, I'll try and take some pictures of the board and give you some more important thoughts. Below the fold is my NaNoWriMo update.

Algebra: X + Y = What?

Here's a thing from the New York Times. One thing I always think about headlines and titles is that they should very, very rarely be questions. If your reader can answer the question quickly, easily and definitively, the reader will not be a reader for you. That's fine if you just need page views. But if you want to actually persuade people with your persuasive essay, I would ding any editor who changes your headline to a question.

Writing Friendship Is Hard

One interesting, and hard, part of writing is getting interpersonal relationships just right. Romance, for example, is really, really hard to do. I'm talking real romance, not purple prose (though, without having tried it, I'm going to assume that is also hard. I just think things I have not done are hard.) Getting a friendship right is probably harder. Romance you have easy cliches to help ease you into it; that's a different whine for later though.

Friendship is harder; you have buddy cops and awkward friendships that work. But writing them well is hard. Sort of like how writing comics is hard. Ideas of friendship morph over time, as well. So, some friendships that were well-written even just a few years ago, seem awkward today. Tropes that work in some cases (you can go to TV Tropes to look through them yourself) don't work everywhere.

The other reason is that you want to show, not tell, in writing as much as possible. I am lazy; I like to handwave details whenever possible. Saying: "Jon and David knew each other for years and consider themselves friends" is easy. Crafting a whole scene where David and Jon are on the phone after their wives go to sleep talking about comic books and their kids' sports is hard. But, the second one tells you they know each other well, though not necessarily how long they know each other, unless you work in to the conversation how they loaned each other comic books when they were kids, and it is clear their friends. They're staying up late at night to talk with each other just to catch up.


The other problem is that friends act around each other in ways that often they don't bother explaining. You have in-jokes, nicknames, noodle incidents, etc., that you bring up that are never explained with real friends. Outsiders feel like outsiders. You don't want your reader to feel like an insider. He or she should be an insider. As inside as possible! You can try and weasel around this by using a point of view character or first-person narrator. They can fill in the blanks with asides or flashbacks.

Next, you have an issue with body language. When two people are friendly, you can see it. Sense it. This is why movies and plays have it easier. They can cheat and do lots of little things that if you keep describing get repetitive. Jon and David could always glance at each other and smirk at a dinner scene when either could make a dirty joke that would offend their wives or kids. It'd be funny for the audience; it would be tedious to write in every time they do it, and if they only do it once it doesn't show us how much they are on the same wavelength. But, with a visual medium, you suddenly can cheat! You can pack more information in less. Cheating like this is good!

So, writing friendships is hard. By the end of this blog's run, you can probably make a list of things I whined about being hard to write.

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P.S.,

This is a mini-theme at Althouse's blog. She linked over to this NYT piece, that says: "Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends."

You can start the process of turning random people in random places into friends just by talking. Also, it helps for people to be as judgmental as they were in college as opposed to as uptight and narrow-minded as the NYT thinks we become as we age. In college and high school, people my age routinely had friends with radically different beliefs than theirs. If that's not still happening once you get older, ask why.

The NYT is trying to make things harder than they really are. Also? Several of their examples of friends not working out are just people being jerks. Who asks about other people how much they make, and who does not know the proper response is: "Enough?"

On Why We're All So Negative

I'm running a little early for my trip to the Red Cross, so here's an article and my two cents. I think that we all know the negative Nancies of the world, but the NYT throws in that journalistic ambiguous pronoun of 'some:' "Some people do have a more positive outlook, but almost everyone remembers negative things more strongly and in more detail." Either way, apparently, it is all psychological and physiological that you can only remember the glass being half empty, apparently. After all, there's a reason that Fail became an internet meme, but not Success.