Except for the part where you did it again, actually laying out background and data and doing the work, allowing me to come wandering through and say, Interesting how that totally intersects with an idea I sort of had but couldn't be bothered to fully work through or articulate. And I would totally have you send me those novels, but you wouldn't like what would happen. I invariably tell people that I think their books should be longer, and I have to practically sit on my own hands to avoid adding such useful comments as, "Do your main characters really have to keep being angry and having conflicts and stuff all the time? because all that plot and those fights and stuff, it gets in the way of things like that really amazing description of the Mercury orbital anomaly, could I have more of that?" The only time I'm actually useful is when you want to make some particular kind of thing happen, and need a good rationalization for it.
Overall, this gets tempers up as much as my mother once told me tempers rose over the question of whether or not it should be made an illegal act to burn the American flag.
Yeah. It's true even when current events haven't added an extra layer of fraught-ness to the discussion, and of course it's worse now. There are plenty of constructive things that could be done, and maybe some of them even will be. I only hope that our response as a culture is better than our response to, say, issues of airline security following 9/11.
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Date: 18 Dec 2012 03:21 am (UTC)Overall, this gets tempers up as much as my mother once told me tempers rose over the question of whether or not it should be made an illegal act to burn the American flag.
Yeah. It's true even when current events haven't added an extra layer of fraught-ness to the discussion, and of course it's worse now. There are plenty of constructive things that could be done, and maybe some of them even will be. I only hope that our response as a culture is better than our response to, say, issues of airline security following 9/11.