grendelkhan (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} grendelkhan) wrote,@ 2005-02-11 23:00:00 |
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in which i digress further on 'the sandman'.
More interface-design work was done today, this time without the shouting at each other and general unpleasantness that we had last time. This pleases me. What pleases me a bit less is that wxGlade is... dodgy. It's been refusing to generate multiple-file code, refusing to preview my dialog boxes, and sometimes requiring a restart before it'll work right. On the other hand, it's faster than doing it by hand, and it's definitely convenient for rapid prototyping of interfaces. Here's hoping writing the backend will be as straightforward.
We went out on a couple of errands today, but nothing vital. I scored (that is, my father bought me) a companion guide of prose and literary analysis to The Sandman. I'm surprised that Carin isn't already a fan; the book's a semi-canonical "comic for people who don't read comics", as well as very girl-friendly, and containing a Shakespeare plot. Carin is more cultured than I am; she'd surely go for that Bardic stuff.
A medium-length digression on something I've noticed about Sandman's cosmology (and bear in mind, I've only read the first three books): the afterlife is really poorly defined. Maybe this'll be looked at in more detail later, but... okay, Death the Perky!Goth takes people to the "Sunless Lands", which are never seen. But, ah! We travel to a very Christian Hell when Dream gets his helm back. A Christian Hell that contains souls. One of these souls is Nada, who died ten thousand years back, before the first Christians dreamed of Hell, and yet there she is.
It's said in the series, and I'll admit to paraphrasing, that gods die when no one believes in them any more. It stands to reason that they only exist in the first place by our belief. The same would naturally go for their realms and constructions, such as Hell itself. So how did Nada get there? Was she in some primitive analogue of Hell? Gaiman knows better than to pretend that Nada's religion and mythology is Christian mythology with the serial numbers filed down. Doesn't he?
But even if we accept that Nada is in some sort of universal underworld because she committed suicide, are we to believe that suicide is invariably something done by the depressed? Are the forty-seven Ronin there? People dying of cancer who hastened their ends? Islamic suicide bombers? Wouldn't people who committed suicide for (what were obviously at the time) good reasons be a little surprised to find themselves in another religion's Hell?
And if we're picking a set of morals, do all the gays go there too? What about the pedophiles? There have been times and cultures where the former were reviled as absolutely evil, the latter accepted as normal. Perhaps Hell and the (offscreen but ostensible) Heaven change with the dominant belief system (which is a vacuous idea in any case, as there is no single dominant belief system; isn't part of Gaiman's thesis that there's no one true path?), but that would lead to a bit of confusion, as a barbarian lord dining at the table of his ancestors who raped and pillaged as was befitting a successful barbarian lord of the day would find himself suddenly cast into the Pit of Burning Misogynists because some people he never knew decided to Believe Different, or an abortionist being roasted by the demons of the Fetus Pit would find himself whisked up to see Saint Peter, saying "Cheerio, and thanks for the lift, but I'm Hindu" once Roe v. Wade passed. (How US-centric of me!)
I've considered an explanation analogous to Grant Morrison's "morphogenetic field"/"implicate order" thing (the one that DC drained the imagination and weirdness from, and called Hypertime), and found it wanting. It's an idea used to explain how superheroes retain their core essence across a thousand interpretations and varying origin stories. Most of the time, it's a cute tool to explain away kludgey retcon and continuity-cleaning crossovers that preserve the central essence of the characters, though Morrison himself used it to fantastic effect in Animal Man. But saying that the morphogenetic field retcons Nada from the House of the Shamed Dead or whatever into the Grove of Suicides is ridiculous. The morphogenetic field allows for a change in backdrop while retaining the core essence. It's good for writing an Elseworlds tale, bad for trying to map cultures onto each other. I thus have no good explanation.
Neil Gaiman supposedly takes his fantasy really seriously. So I'm going to take it pretty seriously too, because this so far doesn't make any damned sense. And yes, I get all this from a one-off reference to "the Sunless Lands" and seeing Nada in the grove of suicides in Hell. I suppose that means that Gaiman has created a deep work that inspired me to think a bit, but it also means that he was a little lazy with the pen. Either that, or he's got a brilliant explanation for this that I haven't heard yet. I'll keep reading and see; surely Nada makes another appearance.
To his credit, John Dee, from Preludes and Nocturnes, especially from the 24 Hours issue, was a horrifying villain. Really, really horrifying. The Corinthian may have been all about eating the eyeballs of young boys (hey! There's that imperfect gay character I was looking for...) but he never really creeped me out the way that Dee did.
I went out and saw Paula this evening. I originally went out to drop off a boom box for some project or another she was doing for her boy; I ended up sticking around for a few hours, talking. Talking about a whole bunch of things, about our significant others and about what we'd been doing, finishing school, looking for work. That sort of thing. I hadn't talked with Paula in a while, and I always am loathe to leave when I see someone who I haven't in a while. Mostly I gushed about missing Carin and dribbled forth the various insecurities I'm dealing with. She's a good one, Paula is.
More interface-design work was done today, this time without the shouting at each other and general unpleasantness that we had last time. This pleases me. What pleases me a bit less is that wxGlade is... dodgy. It's been refusing to generate multiple-file code, refusing to preview my dialog boxes, and sometimes requiring a restart before it'll work right. On the other hand, it's faster than doing it by hand, and it's definitely convenient for rapid prototyping of interfaces. Here's hoping writing the backend will be as straightforward.
We went out on a couple of errands today, but nothing vital. I scored (that is, my father bought me) a companion guide of prose and literary analysis to The Sandman. I'm surprised that Carin isn't already a fan; the book's a semi-canonical "comic for people who don't read comics", as well as very girl-friendly, and containing a Shakespeare plot. Carin is more cultured than I am; she'd surely go for that Bardic stuff.
A medium-length digression on something I've noticed about Sandman's cosmology (and bear in mind, I've only read the first three books): the afterlife is really poorly defined. Maybe this'll be looked at in more detail later, but... okay, Death the Perky!Goth takes people to the "Sunless Lands", which are never seen. But, ah! We travel to a very Christian Hell when Dream gets his helm back. A Christian Hell that contains souls. One of these souls is Nada, who died ten thousand years back, before the first Christians dreamed of Hell, and yet there she is.
It's said in the series, and I'll admit to paraphrasing, that gods die when no one believes in them any more. It stands to reason that they only exist in the first place by our belief. The same would naturally go for their realms and constructions, such as Hell itself. So how did Nada get there? Was she in some primitive analogue of Hell? Gaiman knows better than to pretend that Nada's religion and mythology is Christian mythology with the serial numbers filed down. Doesn't he?
But even if we accept that Nada is in some sort of universal underworld because she committed suicide, are we to believe that suicide is invariably something done by the depressed? Are the forty-seven Ronin there? People dying of cancer who hastened their ends? Islamic suicide bombers? Wouldn't people who committed suicide for (what were obviously at the time) good reasons be a little surprised to find themselves in another religion's Hell?
And if we're picking a set of morals, do all the gays go there too? What about the pedophiles? There have been times and cultures where the former were reviled as absolutely evil, the latter accepted as normal. Perhaps Hell and the (offscreen but ostensible) Heaven change with the dominant belief system (which is a vacuous idea in any case, as there is no single dominant belief system; isn't part of Gaiman's thesis that there's no one true path?), but that would lead to a bit of confusion, as a barbarian lord dining at the table of his ancestors who raped and pillaged as was befitting a successful barbarian lord of the day would find himself suddenly cast into the Pit of Burning Misogynists because some people he never knew decided to Believe Different, or an abortionist being roasted by the demons of the Fetus Pit would find himself whisked up to see Saint Peter, saying "Cheerio, and thanks for the lift, but I'm Hindu" once Roe v. Wade passed. (How US-centric of me!)
I've considered an explanation analogous to Grant Morrison's "morphogenetic field"/"implicate order" thing (the one that DC drained the imagination and weirdness from, and called Hypertime), and found it wanting. It's an idea used to explain how superheroes retain their core essence across a thousand interpretations and varying origin stories. Most of the time, it's a cute tool to explain away kludgey retcon and continuity-cleaning crossovers that preserve the central essence of the characters, though Morrison himself used it to fantastic effect in Animal Man. But saying that the morphogenetic field retcons Nada from the House of the Shamed Dead or whatever into the Grove of Suicides is ridiculous. The morphogenetic field allows for a change in backdrop while retaining the core essence. It's good for writing an Elseworlds tale, bad for trying to map cultures onto each other. I thus have no good explanation.
Neil Gaiman supposedly takes his fantasy really seriously. So I'm going to take it pretty seriously too, because this so far doesn't make any damned sense. And yes, I get all this from a one-off reference to "the Sunless Lands" and seeing Nada in the grove of suicides in Hell. I suppose that means that Gaiman has created a deep work that inspired me to think a bit, but it also means that he was a little lazy with the pen. Either that, or he's got a brilliant explanation for this that I haven't heard yet. I'll keep reading and see; surely Nada makes another appearance.
To his credit, John Dee, from Preludes and Nocturnes, especially from the 24 Hours issue, was a horrifying villain. Really, really horrifying. The Corinthian may have been all about eating the eyeballs of young boys (hey! There's that imperfect gay character I was looking for...) but he never really creeped me out the way that Dee did.
I went out and saw Paula this evening. I originally went out to drop off a boom box for some project or another she was doing for her boy; I ended up sticking around for a few hours, talking. Talking about a whole bunch of things, about our significant others and about what we'd been doing, finishing school, looking for work. That sort of thing. I hadn't talked with Paula in a while, and I always am loathe to leave when I see someone who I haven't in a while. Mostly I gushed about missing Carin and dribbled forth the various insecurities I'm dealing with. She's a good one, Paula is.
