Social Hooper McFinney's RPF Bar & Grille 7.5 - "Loving the lens flare since 1977!” -!

Exactly, which is why I'm going to post a YouTube video for no reason whatsoever.

 

What I think of when I hear YOLO.....

 

I fail to see how those are all mutually exclusive concepts. Surely one could justify the consumption of Rolo and Oreo via YOLO?

 

Hey guys, I had a big day on Thursday. I went to see Sabaton with Meet and Greet access. Here's some pics.

Me and Joakim Brodén (vocals). Something awesome to note - Joakim, who is known for his own aviator sunglasses complimented me on my 8-bit ones, and actually said he almost wanted to ask me if we could trade. I'M NOT KIDDING!:



Group photo with me and Sabaton. This one really shows how tall I am. I had to hunch over as to not tower over them, even though they are all Swedish (Swedes tend to be tall, I should know as I'm pretty sure my height comes from me being 1/4th Swedish myself):



My signed European Limited Edition copy of Carolus Rex (latest album):

 

That's awesome. Never heard of them, but that's awesome.

 

Rewatching The Dark Knight Rises (for like the fifth time, first on bluray -WOOHOO) made me appreciate it a lot more. It also made me notice how poorly the passage of time is handled. A lot of plots that don't necessarily fit together properly, but that would've meant a four hour film, and it's still awesome.

 

I'd sit through it. I still think the Lord of the Rings Trilogy should have hit theaters with the extended edition. Some of those are close to four hours.

 

Nearly four hours and they still cut out Tom Bombadil.

 

Passage of time need not define a story. We humans live two lives: aware of the passage of time, and yet outside time as defined by what we value - our memories. Haven't we all got events we can remember happening as if they were occurring right now? Pah! Events according to the passage of time. That's a story. A nasty, icky, caveman-like story that a novel should only let hang around like an annoying kid brother.
--E.M. Forster.

 

It's a fantastic story; it's just that when you think about the timeline, it starts to get wonky.

 

That quote smacks of neutral monism and should be thusly shunned for the metaphysical bosh it is.

 

It's pretty insightful on the nature of novels, though. It's from Forster's lectures -- which were collated in the book Aspects of the Novel. (And I have loosely paraphrased, of course.)

What Forster was getting at was that a lot of tales aren't actually novels as such. It's a pure story. He basically drags out Walter Scott as the example of a story. A story (as distinct from a plot) amounts to "this happened, then this happened, then this happened." Loose plot ends are left all over the place; characters are built up but then never heard from again (if they aren't cardboard cutouts to begin with); it's more of a thrill ride that suddenly stops with a wedding (at least in Forster's era).

The story appeals to what Forster describes as the caveman in us: the role of the storyteller in the old days was to tell an account and keep people interested until they all dropped off to sleep, failing which he'd get clubbed to death for failing to entertain them. So you have constant twists and turns out of nowhere, because it keeps the audience guessing. The best example of this concept personified comes from Scheherezade: she only survived execution because she could come up with a gripping tale that appeals to that basic instinct to any reader of fiction. We all want to know what happens next.

Today's soap operas -- and indeed some of our open-ended narratives, even here -- still obey that principle, they still pander to that human desire. We stick with them because the road ahead is not clear. We always want to know what happens next. The thrill comes from ever-more-unlikely twists and turns, none of which are generally well-foreshadowed.

Forster's point was that all novels at their most base, primitive root tell a story in these terms. They do this because they must reflect life as experienced in time; "this happened, then this happened, then this happened". By contrast, a novel deals with more than this: it can reflect life as experienced in values, where memory and the emphasis we put on individual events means we (subjectively at least) look at the world without time. Gertrude Stein experimented with this concept in that most of her novels simply abandon applying any significance to the order of events and giving more significance to their meaning or value. (Forster does say they were failed experiments.)

In summary - there's an old storytelling axiom that "the king died and then the queen died is a history; the king died and then the queen died of grief is a plot." Forster would put it differently: the death of the queen following the king is a story, but the queen dying of grief because of the king's death is at least a potential novel.

I'm still reading the book, of course, but there's some real eye-openers in there, not the least of which is that if these lectures were given as transcribed, they would've been a breezy and clear event to be at.

 

Well, you go and read a Gertrude Stein novel and make sense of it.

 

Sense has no place in considerations of artistic success or merit.



I mean, of course Forster thinks you have to obey certain rules when you're going about making something, he is - 1. writing in the 1920s and therefore almost of necessity reacting to the dada movement and 2. a slave to appearances because he's dangerously afraid that he'll be outed in the traditional sense. Similarly, of course I must object, I am - 1. writing in the 2010s after having read Finnegans Wake twice and not being able to make hide nor hair of it, nor do I want to and 2. totally comfortable with my sexual predilections because I do not have to fear antisodomy laws. He finds universal themes not because they exist but because he thinks they ought to exist, and so he finds them.

 

I just thought that TDKR didn't show the passage of time in a clear way, myself.

 

It's too late, Peng, we've abstracted, there's no going back down now. Nothing is a group, it's just a set together with a group signature.

 

^What the crazy bard said^

(which is oddly how I've thought of Ramza ever since my time in ToF)

 

No! No, we can back out! We can escape! It's never too late!

 

Indeed should Evelios get hit with the result for Confusion which dictates he does nothing but babble incoherently I fully expect ... well, a normal Evelios post.

 

If Evelios gets hit with Confusion, wouldn't he become coherent instead?

 

He goes out through the other end of incoherency, to the place where every word he speaks is brilliant in its clarity.

 

I was really confused why I didn't have any alerts, but alas, new Hoopers.

 

ALERT: New Hooper's.

Like that?

 

I thought you guys would get a kick out of these images: