I feel bleary, oh so bleary, I feel bleary and weary and bleh!

Today I am off to scenic Minesing, Ontario, a place without even its own wiki entry (although apprently with both a public school, a slo-pitch tournament, and a swamp) for my first offsite committee with the Dayjob.

I'm leaving in 20 minutes to make the bus on time. And it is still pitch black out.

Terrible things I do for this Dayjob.

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Also, an interim book report:

( This year's books, so far... )

#57 -- Emma Bull and Steven Brust, Freedom & Necessity

This started somewhat slow, and I wasn't sure about it, and I kept reading anyways because sometimes you just do. And once the plot kicked in? It was like a Jane Austen novel married a spy thriller and had a baby, and then the baby saw its parents gunned down and became the Batman.

So ostensibly this is a period epistolary slightly-magical spy thriller. Really, what I think it is? Competence porn. It's getting to watch people be stupidly competent at things and/or on the learning curve to such without getting that feeling of Suedom, and the great thing about competence porn is that when you really have it going, the stakes matter. The stakes are everything.

The other thing this is so far (I'm not yet finished) that I'm really appreciating is a book where a Dangerous Man (tm) is clearly infatuated with and interested in the protagonist, but it's because she is so freaking competent. He keeps looking at her and shaking his head like, "Geez, does everyone underestimate you or am I the only idiot in the house?" instead of looking at her like a Dark Highlander does some kind of prey. And this? Makes the Dangerous Man/Our Heroine romance trope actually believable, for once in its life. It makes me respect the heroine, consider that the Dangerous Man is worthy of respect (after all, good reason to have a crush, man) and feel the legitimacy of the potential romance.

That's cool. More books should do that.

And now, I'm off to Minesing.

(no subject)

Okay, so a couple of us are talking about The Box aka "Button, Button" and just how terribly easy it is to break that plot. I mean:

"Hi, push this killing button and I'll give you all this money!"
"No, thanks."
"Moving on, then."

Or, as tanaise paraphrases the NPR blog on the matter, "It is not a hard decision for me because I AM NOT A HITMAN."

And this makes me wonder whether many specimens of that sort of moral-choice horror story aren't actually about the moral choice, about Would you kill someone? but more, subtextually, about "So...if it was like this and this, would I be allowed to kill someone? How 'bout now?"

When is it okay, socially, for me to just kill someone?*

Because, y'know, sometimes people are just getting so much joy out of the thing.

*This also applies to the "Ethnic drug lords killed my family/kidnapped my blond daughter/etc. and now I must middle-class raaaaaaaage!" genre of film.