A few people have been talking recently about how depressing The Office is. Put simply, they argue that Jim and Pam’s settling into life at the Office – a common thread running through most of the early seasons was Pam’s desire for success as an artist and Jim’s unwillingness to move on to greener pastures because Pam was still there – turns the show into a lesson in failed dreams.

I’m 25 now, and still have accomplished shockingly little with my life, so I sympathize with this view. Watching Jim Halpert settle into a life that we’ve all been silently (or not) rooting for him to escape is a little sad, wistful perhaps. But depressing? No. Because Jim isn’t settling, he’s settling down.

I don’t know why people don’t see this. From the first moment Jim Halpert graced our televisions, his life’s purpose has been little more than sharing said life with Pam Beasley. Jim didn’t want to change the world, he wanted to be Pam’s world. Mission accomplished. Time to hunker down and start a family. It might be a little banal, but that’s what he wants out of life.

Similarly, Pam wanted to be an artist, but more than that she wanted to not be a receptionist for the rest of her life. Now she’s a saleswoman. Mission accomplished.

They probably could leave the office and become more successful somewhere else, and maybe when the show ends, the finale will be them moving on with their lives, I don’t know. But the last couple seasons haven’t been leading us down that road. The Office seems to be about what a family is.

Last year, when Jim and Pam almost eloped they stopped because their coworkers – their friends – were having a goofy dance party and they realized that they wanted the odd little community they’ve joined to be there, to take part in the celebration.

I think it was the second season when Jim invited the office over to his apartment to have a little shindig of sorts. He had a roommate and there have been references to non-work friends in the past, so to claim that Jim has no friends outside of work is disingenuous. Maybe he’s not friends with most of those people anymore, but to me that’s more an after-effect of growing closer to his office mates.

Work relationships, romantic or not, are very very common in the real world. Settling down and starting a family is very common in the real world. The Office is about the real world. There’s a bitter taste to that, because not many people have the desire for a simple uneventful life shared calmly with a lifelong best friend. But, quite frankly, if that ending is depressing to you, well that’s just depressing.

I can’t fathom why it is so difficult to make a shitty little site like mine, one with pageviews in the range from hilariously low to not terrible, operate with a modicum of responsiveness. I’m hosted with Dreamhost at the moment. I’ve thought about getting one of their private server deals that supposedly make these problems less of a problem, but at that point I might as well go full-bore and go with a shared host somewhere where I’d have real control and real responsiveness.

Is it really necessary to either pay these ridiculous costs for a barely functional website that times out more frequently than it returns a page? Well, no, I can have a blog on any number of the free blogging services and it would suit 99% of my needs. But there’s something to be said for having your own domain, the agency it exerts.

I still haven’t decided what, if anything, I’m going to do about this. I’ll probably end up simply buckling under the monopoly of shitty shared hosting and get something more dedicated. Though, should I do that, I hope I’ll also put some more effort into making this site something that couldn’t be hosted by any random free blogging service. If I’m paying for something, I might as well use it.

I’m still neck deep in NaNoWriMo and still hoping to get the requisite 50,000 words finished in the next week and a half, but before I go on, I gotta post this amazing video, a riff on Lil Wayne’s “Let The Beat Build” by Nyle.

The thing that takes this beyond being just a great song, which it is on its own merits I think, is that the video is all one shot and the audio was recorded live. As the beat builds (har har) each new instrument gets shown on screen as it gets introduced, building it all up until you have this huge choral routine at the end. It’s just great.

Aside from that, you can really tell that the people involved are just having a lot of fun. All the little moments in there are great: when Nyle walks in front of the trombonist and almost gets hit by slide and nobody misses a beat, they’re all just having so much fun with it; the way the taller violinist bounces around to the rhythm when she’s not playing; the nods of approval when that random dancer slides into the shot at the group outro. I’ve watched this video a dozen times today, and I just keep enjoying it more each viewing.

I finished Dracula last night — around three in the morning so technically it was November but I still count it as completing the book according to the Infinite Summer schedule — and I thought it was a really great book. Not one of The Greats, but a good story with a decent amount of emotion and pathos underpinning the basic plot.

To cap off this month of reading Dracula, I’m writing up this post to talk about a few of the interesting things I found about Dracula, as well as try to find some connection between it and Infinite Jest.

Vampire Lore

In truth, I’ve never seen a Dracula story in all my years of Vampire stories, so I wasn’t sure how much of the traditional Vampire lore we are familiar with came from Dracula. It turns out that it was a surprising amount. I look to Whedon lore before others so they are the standard against which I compare and the comparison is mostly favorable.

Vampire’s require an invitation to enter buildings; killing a vampire does turn them to dust, though only if they are so old as their natural bodies would be dust by then; to become a vampire you have to be drained of blood and then drink the Vampire’s blood, though you do not have to be drained to death and the effect is permanent: once this procedure occurs, no matter when you die you will become a vampire, provided your sire remains among the undead; a vampire, or someone on the way to vampirism, also has a special psychic link with their sire, something not made explicit with Whedon but the master/sire relationship is strong there as well; you lose your soul when you become a vampire; and finally, vampires show no reflection in mirrors.

However there are a few notable differences: vampire’s also cast no shadow; they can turn to mist or creatures of the night; from my reading of the book, their fangs are not retractable; their physical powers seem to be limited to strength, with no enhancement to vision of hearing; vampires must rest on holy land, that of a church or a graveyard; to be immersed in water is death for a Stoker vampire, and while on the sea a vampire can control the weather; and most importantly, they can walk the streets by day, though their powers are linked to the night and they are unusable in the day.

Novel Structure

The novel is structured as a collection of diaries, memos, letters, and news articles. There are two interesting side-effects of this. The first is that all the characters correspond with each other but with varying levels of delay. So while Lucy has already died, we read Mina’s letters of joy to her, and later on experience her sorrow at learning of Lucy’s death, undeath, and destruction. These delayed emotions play to the reader well, I thought, giving a level of sympathy to the characters, and also establishing a world of hidden truths that can only be noticed when seeing the story in its entirety, something the writers of these individual pieces cannot enjoy — well actually they do, which brings me to the second point.

Around half-way through the novel, the two main stories collide with Mina and Van Helsing discussing her husband’s strange story out of Transylvania and Van Helsing telling of Lucy’s sordid end. At this point, Mina begins to collect the various diaries and articles, essentially creating all the previous sections of the novel for the group of Vampire hunters to use as a tool for finding and killing Dracula. From this point on in the novel, the diaries continue and they are all shaped by the open sharing of all the diaries in uncaptured scenes. This is a very meta-y type of storytelling, almost post-modern in construction, something that perhaps inspired the Infinite Summer people to read Dracula.

Gayness

This isn’t actually a real thing, but rather a construction of modern minds, I think. Still, as I read this book, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if everybody was banging everybody else, regardless of gender, with the heaps of praise and love they throw on each other. I mean, some of the early letters between Mina and Lucy are almost lascivious, they talk about sleeping together, dressing each other, long walks on the beach, it’s kind of ridiculous. The man on man action isn’t quite as explicit, but I found more than a few moments in the novel where it seems like the men were moments away from a gay-ass tongue bath.

Feminism

Mina Harker is a really bad-ass woman. She’s the one who first puts all the diaries together, she’s the one who figures out where Dracula is living, what some of his motives are. She determines that the psychic link between her and Dracula, one created when she is forced to drink his blood in a siring ceremony, can be exploited to find Dracula’s location. She’s basically the smartest one of the bunch. She’s also pretty tough:

When the terrible story of Lucy’s death, and all that followed, was done, I lay back in my chair powerless. Fortunately I am not of a fainting disposition.

That sounds like a line from a fucking superhero. Later on, when she’s done all the Batman-esque super-sleuthing for the men, and it is time to go to Dracula’s lair and kill him, the men tell her to go to bed because ‘we are men, and we are able to bear’ and she quietly accepts it, but only because she fears they will remove her entirely from the venture if she protests on this; she isn’t some pussy glad to be away from all the danger, she’s afraid they’ll put her further away from it.

Dracula has a weird sort of feminism to it. Throughout the novel, Mina is praised by Van Helsing for her bravery, her wit, her sharp detective skills, pretty much everything. But he still says things like ‘she has a man’s brain’ as though it were a compliment. It’s struggling to establish a female lead as at least close to an equal, but falls slightly short. Still, I’m impressed that the novel was so willing to have even a remotely powerful female lead.

Horror

This is not the scariest novel I’ve ever read — there are moments in Stephen King’s Misery that almost made we sweat with horror — but it still managed to evoke real terror at times. In particular, the section which recounts the face-off against the vampire Lucy is great: so far as I can tell, it has the very first instance of the phrase ‘if looks could kill,’ a cliche now perhaps, but surely a terrifying description, and one that struck me with the instant I read it as well.

Infinite Jest Connections

The connections to Infinite Jest are mostly tangential or internal fabrications, but there are some interesting ones. There are a few explicit references to Hamlet early on, but those seem purely incidental. And I’ve already mentioned the self-referential writing which seems a very modern conceit for a novel written over a century ago, and one reminiscent of the Infinite Jest film inside Wallace’s novel.

Another particularly compelling connection comes from the closing chapters of Dracula. In them, Mina Harker is racing toward Dracula’s castle with Van Helsing hoping to consecrate his resting place in order to refuse him safe harbor from their hunt. In the superstitious Carpathian mountains, the scar upon Mina’s forehead — a burn from the placing of Holy Water on her flesh — causes their journey ill will from the villagers; in order to avoid these hassles, she takes to wearing a veil to hide her deformity. If that’s not an Infinite Jest connection, I don’t know what is.

Actual closing thoughts

Overall, I’m glad I read Dracula. I’ve always liked Vampire stories, so it seemed like I had to read it eventually and the month deadline really helped with that — I read over 140 pages yesterday to ensure I would finish it according to the schedule. Beyond that though, it opened me up to a very different writing style. I’ve mostly avoided classical novels for fear of being bogged down by archaic language, but I found Dracula to be fairly readable, which makes me more willing to read other classic novels I’ve put off for too long. So go read a classic or something.

Well with a new version of Windows out, it’s time for Mac zealots to begincontinue the bashing. One of the earliest posts I have on this incarnation of my blog was griping about Mac fanboys and their relentless need to criticise Windows. At the time I didn’t use a Mac, and now I do. My opinion about Mac and Windows zealotry remains the same. I like Macs and I like PCs, but I don’t see the need for this constant sniping at each other.

John August tweeted a couple days ago regarding the Windows 7 release:

Windows 7 is here! My favorite feature? An excuse to dredge up articles praising Vista when it launched.

Sigh. I think tech reviews are, in general, not good predictors of success, for a variety of reasons. But, more importantly than that, praise in the tech world is a moving target. Vista probably was the best Windows released to that point. Windows 7 probably is the best Windows released to this point. It’s not as if when the new Mac OS comes out, the reviews all trash it as the worst Mac operating system yet. Technology improves, whether through leaps, hobbles, or bounds, why would anyone think otherwise?

I thought I should clarify how ‘white’ I am as it relates to that BET Cypher I posted last night. I didn’t really know of Mos Def as a musician until earlier this year — I remember him performing on Chappelle’s show, but I never made the connection that he was an actual musical artist — having first seen him in the Italian Job and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I hadn’t heard of this guy Black Thought, who I thought ‘won’ that Cypher despite all three guys being amazing, at all though I knew very vaguely of his band The Roots.

Still though, I feel a little cheap writing about how ‘white’ I am when just last night I wrote a critique of Andrew Sullivan for talking about how ‘black’ America is. I also didn’t really do this completely by accident. I think that talking about how we talk about race is sort of a big deal. When Sullivan spoke about the blackness of America, what he seemed to be writing about was the culture of the South. Most of his readers who wrote in spoke about being white and Southern. It’s apt that I woke this morning to Ta-Nehisi Coates doing what he does best:

There are many reasons why it’s wrong to presume that your particular, specific, individual narrative of blackness is The Only Narrative Of Blackness Ever In All History.

Blackness is a lot of things, and I think conflating it with ‘Southern’ is probably not a great idea. It’s not wrong, but it’s not all right.

Dave Weigel over at The Washington Independent wrote last night about a Fox News poll last night asking people who they thought wants victory more, Obama or the Taliban. Now, it’s a fairly ridiculous question to ask — because that’s totally irrelevant unless the gusto with which terrorists try to attack you somehow makes them endearing — but I think the results do reveal a worrying bias.

The fact that Democrats overwhelmingly feel that Obama wants it more is a little troubling. Terrorists (and freedom fighters, if you so choose to think of the Taliban in such terms) do outrageous things for their causes. Like, for example, fly jet planes into building and strap explosives to themselves. I’m sure Obama wants to win in Afghanistan, if only for the political capital it will give to the Democratic party after seven years of Republican negligence in Afghanistan, but I think claiming he ‘wants it more’ than the Taliban stretches the point a bit too far.

A fair point that can be made is that the poll specifically targets the ‘Leadership of the Taliban,’ who might not be willing to strap bombs to themselves so much as they are willing to strap bombs to other people in an attempt to build their own power. I don’t really know enough about the hierarchy of the Taliban and such groups to say if there’s a difference in the radicalism of the leaders vs the ground soldiers, but even targeting the ‘Lords’ of the terrorist movements seems incredulous. When it comes down to it, I can’t imagine Obama worrying that the Taliban will eventually kill him, except in some existential abstract manner, but America wiping out every last Taliban member seems like it would be a fairly realistic worry.

PostBourgie linked earlier today to a sick video that reminded me why white¹ is so frequently, and so deservedly, seen as a synonym for lame²:

Update: YouTube took down the original video I linked to, but there are many copies out there so I changed my post to point to an active one.

I also wanted to describe a little bit about how I feel about each of the three raps in the video. Mos Def’s is the first and probably the weakest, but it’s got a real laid back delivery that makes it feel more casual than most of the rap freestyles I’m accustomed to. Black Thought’s is the best overall with a throughline to the lyrics, lots of great similes, and just so smooth and controlled. Eminem’s, the one that seems to be seen as the best by the majority of people, is probably the best from a pure rhyme spitting level. He’s got a couple great lines in there, and he doesn’t let the beat slow down his frenetic flow. That said, he doesn’t win it in my eyes because he hasn’t grown up and started rapping about something other than teen pop stars, prescription drugs, and general violence. He can get a lot of rhymes out of that material — ‘kill a koala’ and ‘maul a chihuahua’ come to mind as does the killer line ‘My dick is so big, if I add another inch to it, you would swear when I raped you that you was actually into it’ — but I’m over it and so should he.

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1. Nobody thinks of Eminem as white [↩]
2. I had slightly more to write about this awesome video, mostly related to how white I am and was ignorant of the existence of these ‘cyphers’ and whatnot, but my browser crashed without auto-saving. C’est la vie. [↩]

A couple weeks ago, Adam Serwer wrote a great post trashing Pat Buchanan and his offensive talk about white American’s ‘losing their country.’ Cutting to the quick, Adam says:

Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today’s legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets.

I have trouble not cheering that paragraph on as I read it, it reads so fucking true. And obviously true. Maybe it’s because I’m from Canada, a nation more forward about its mosaic-esque nature, but it seems so clear to me that what America is all about is not white Americans or black Americans or any colour or creed. They’re all a part of the big beautiful conglomeration.

But while I cheered on that post, the follow ups that came from Andrew Sullivan and his horde of purple prose packed readers gave me that sort of sighed chagrin you get when you see the point, and then you see the person trying to make it drive right on by.

Sullivan was so busy trying to describe how white England is and how black America is, he forgot that the real point was that America isn’t white. The Banjo is an African instrument, and Cajuns originate from the Canadian East coast. America is the people who are there and what they brought with them.

This is not me trying to downplay the Blackness of America, but all this talk about how Black America is was tiring me. The world is not that black and white, pardon the pun, which was the whole point of Serwer’s original post; not that America is black, but that it isn’t wholly white.

Maybe I’m quibbling over semantics — and some of this is about southern white people sharing many cultural commonalities with southern black people, which is more about cultural regionalism than about racial identity, though perhaps they’re overly conflated in the American South — but I think it’s an important distinction.

For reasons unknown, I recently undertook a re-watch of the first eight seasons of Scrubs. The ninth season which will be airing on ABC sometime during this season of network broadcasting will retain a few original cast members but according to all reports will be a new show in the same universe as the original. Perhaps its this (supposed as yet unverified) distinct dichotomy between the first eight seasons and whatever subsequent seasons are left in the workhorse comedy that made me go back to the beginning and reevaluate the show.

I finished it a couple days ago and coincidentally the ‘Zach Braff is Dead’ rumour had just started popping up online, so I thought I’d talk about both in one post. First off, because it dovetails nicely into the discussion of the rumours and subsequent refutations by Braff, is my reevaluation of the show.

If you follow me on twitter, you’ll know I’ve been expressing my disapproval of Scrubs there for a few weeks so you might think my final decision on Scrubs is going to be decidedly negative, but in the end I still love the show. Growing up with Scrubs was a fantastic experience for me, I related to JD like no other character on television at the time; he was funny, quirky, romantic, and was a whole bunch of me wrapped up in a grown-up (but not too grown-up) shell. Still, going back to the show, the biggest problem I had with it was the seemingly nonexistent growth for JD over the first six seasons.

Every episode had at its core a lesson for JD to learn, whether it was being more accepting of people’s flaws, more attentive to your friends, less selfish, more professional, or even being willing to relax and have fun on occasion, the show always had a message. Those consistent messages were what made Scrubs something more than just a screwball medical comedy — an interesting enough subgenre as it is — those morals gave the show real gravitas, a weight against which the antics on-screen were contrasted making the ultimate message that much more stark and demanding of attention.

But there are exactly two problems at the core of Scrubs, problems the show couldn’t eliminate until the seventh and eighth seasons when the show was coming to an end. If you want the show to last, and you want the message of the week style that made the show something special, you need to essentially hit the reboot button at the end of every episode. Some plot might carry through, and JD will be ostensibly ‘improved’ for as much as a few episodes; but ultimately that lesson needs to be recycled and he’s right back in the thick of his previously conquered faults.

While the middle (and middling) seasons of Scrubs are often criticised by fans they are usually criticised for the increasingly screwball antics the show resorted to for laughs, so finding this shocking lack of character growth during my re-watch impacted me with great force at first. In retrospect, it seems like that flaw is only noticed in these sorts of high frequency viewing spurts, something someone watching as the seasons aired wouldn’t notice easily.

Still, characters relapsing into their old habits despite a struggle to grow, is not inherently a bad thing; in fact, it’s ripe for drama and a very human reaction. Just because you know what’s wrong with you doesn’t mean you’ll be able to magically fix it. Being better means vigilance, it means never forgetting where you are and who you want to be. So it’s easy for complacency to lead to backsliding. But this leads us to the show’s second core problem: it’s a comedy.

What I described above is more akin to a drama and while Scrubs incorporated dramatic elements it was fundamentally a comedy. What’s more, it was a comedy with frequent fantasy sequences, many which seemed to leak into the ‘real world’ resulting in an increasingly screwball ‘real world’ and therefore greater abuses of original character quirks. Now, being a comedy isn’t a flaw in the show per se, but it develops into a flaw when the show becomes long-running and maintains its desire to deftly interweave comedic and dramatic elements. So the relapses in behaviour were frequently either ignored, because the relapse was necessary to make a joke work, or referenced in a humourous way, belying the drama of the relapse. Both of these approaches led to funny scenes but made the characters, JD especially, seem like aloof douches who never tried to improve themselves.

Which brings me to the ‘Zach Braff is Dead’ rumours. I heard about the rumours and found debunkings of them less than a minute later so it didn’t prey on my mind for long. What I have thought about in some detail were the videos Zach Braff posted online responding to the hoax. In those videos he’s an affable guy, clearly very funny, but on the edge of all that there’s an tinge of douchery. It comes as no surprise to me that Zach Braff is a douche, I’ve been hearing reports from all around of his douchiness for years. Still, he can clearly be a friendly and overall ‘nice guy’ when he wants to as evidenced by those videos. In this respect, he reminds me of JD. They’re both, at a very low level, arrogant douches but they can put on the mask of friendliness and quirky appeal when they need to. Not really a critique, just an observation.

But, you know, even with this reevaluation, I still hold Scrubs and JD and even Zach Braff to something resembling high regard. Sure they’ve got their flaws, but who doesn’t? Scrubs is still a very funny show with a talented cast and funny writers and I certainly don’t regret the first viewing or the recent re-watch. I might not consider the show as weighty as I once did, but the laughs are still there, and the memories from the years of watching it remain.

So is Scrubs worth it? Well, I don’t know. It’s certainly funny enough to be worth watching, but I can’t promise you the stasis the characters suffer through over the years won’t bother those of you looking for some life lessons thrown into the mix. So here’s a cop out if there ever was one: is it worth it? Watch it and find out for yourself.

Susanna Breslin, the writer of porn industry blog Reverse Cowgirl, has published an essay, “They Shoot Porn Stars Don’t They,” about the porn industry, its realities, and its fantasies. Its ultimate focus is how the recession and new media are affecting porn, perhaps inordinately, but along the way it takes several fascinating, and disturbing, detours to explore some of the unseen corners of the porn world.

In my last post about porn, I wrote mostly about the new wave of pornographers, specifically the new female porn stars who are more involved in the business side of the business. Women like Joanna Angel and Jilly Kelly run their own porn studios, and I’m sure they, along with like-minded male porn producers, treat their stars with respect, don’t bully them into doing things they’re not ready for, don’t traumatize them into a fugue prior to shooting scenes; that said, some of the stories told in Breslin’s essay are hard to swallow. It’s hard to imagine defending an industry that supports such outright emotional abuse and exploitation, even if only in the edge cases, even if only when things go too far. I recommend you read the whole thing. It’s not a hit job on the porn industry, but it shines a light on it, letting you see some parts you might want to forget about.

I saw a great video thanks to Phil Plait today that tried to show that people will do things that are more ‘fun.’

It’s a great video, and it did make me smile, but I have to wonder if it’s not ‘The Fun Theory’ as much as it is ‘The Novel Theory.’ We all enjoy novel experiences, but thanks to habituation we tend to become less enthralled by them as we adjust. They become less fun. So the piano staircase sounds fun for the first day, but eventually people will get used to the shifting tones as they climb the stairs or, even worse, they will become increasingly annoyed and repelled by them. Either way, it seems to me that the escalator will return to dominance over time.

So what we’d need is something that continually adjusts to human interaction. The more we interact with it, the more it adjusts and changes. We’d need an anti-habituation staircase. Now that’d be real fun.

Don’t you need to actually accomplish something to be awarded the Nobel prize?

It’s probably premature in Obama’s case but he’s certainly got a few things he can cite as evidence that he’s been an agent of peace. What has Neda done? She got shot. I don’t mean this as a knock on her sacrifice or her nation’s desire to be free of a theocratic dictatorship, but that’s really all she did.

Ignoring the obvious rules regarding posthumous Nobel prizes I sincerely don’t understand what anyone is thinking when they espouse awarding a Nobel peace prize to a young Iranian university student who happened to get shot during a political protest.

What’s more, the idea of granting it to one of the reformists in Iran seems equally vapid. While it can be said that Obama won the Nobel primarily because he’s not George Bush, I think we forget how negatively the world viewed President Bush. The simple fact that America is represented on a global scale by Barack Obama has already vastly shifted the rhetoric regarding America world-wide. Add in his accomplishments with respect to nuclear proliferation, and his national-level climate change legislation, and his (supposed) desire to end the Bush administrations abuses of human rights, and we’re a lot closer to world peace right now than we were just a year ago. I still think it’s premature for Obama to win the Nobel, but to consider Neda, or her fellow reformers, as a better choice seem laughably parochial.

Topless Robot, a really cool nerdy blog, had a contest to find awesome nerdy theories. There are a lot of gems in there, but the one that semi-blew my mind the most was the one that attempts to justify midichlorians in the Star Wars universe as a Sith creation. You can read the whole thing at the link, but I’m going to describe a few of my favourite aspects of the theory.

Here’s the setup. Midichlorians are not the cause of Force powers, they are a parasite which feeds on light side Force powers, a parasite designed by the Sith long ago. In addition to feeding on the light side, midichlorians die in the face of the dark side.

So what does this explain? Well, when a Jedi comes up against a Sith they always seem to lose the battle for a while before coming back and winning the day. Why? Well the Sith’s dark side Force powers start to kill off the midichlorians and eventually the Jedi’s powers increase because of the decrease.

What’s more, because of the universal pairing of Force powers with midichlorians — and the Jedis’ failure to understand that correlation does not equal causation — the Jedis have this idea that if you don’t have a midichlorian count you cannot have Force powers. And so the Sith are able to operate in plain sight by merely exerting their dark side powers to limit their exposure.

It’s a really clever theory and there are a few more nuances I’d encourage you to read about at the original post.

For a long time, I’ve valued reading books, except I didn’t really read books myself. I bought books, I planned to read books, but that’s as far as it went. When I decided to read Infinite Jest along with the Infinite Summer website this spring, it was an active decision to reevaluate my reading habits.

I’ve read perhaps a dozen books in the last five years, most of which have been read in very quick bursts followed by long lulls in reading, and that’s an abysmal rate in my opinion. So I’ve started being more proactive in my reading of late, trying to jump right into a new book each time I finish one.

Related to that, I recently finished Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon, a book not considered science fiction by its author but widely seen as one of the most influential early science fiction novels. It is written as a chronicling of the future iterations of humanity for the next two billions years.

The time scale is exponential in nature; the first four chapters cover a mere five thousand years, whereas the last three chapters cover a full billion.

Some of the initial ‘history’ is obviously wrong. His ‘predictions’ that France and England would war to such an extent that both nations would be decimated, that Europe and America would come to violent throes leaving Europe a biological wasteland, were both quickly proven wrong by World War 2.

But the end result of those early events is that Russia’s Bolshevik revolution slowly morphs to a capitalist nation and grows stronger connections with America. China also develops into a communist nation working not as a vassal of America but a strong economic competitor. These details aren’t quite the world we live in, but to consider them outlandish is also cutting Stapledon short.

From there, the world goes through epic changes, the rise and inevitable fall of countless world governments, cataclysms that shatter the world, and much much more. Humanity evolves into 18 unique forms, some more advanced than us, others vastly more primitive, even more so foreign as to barely recognize their origins.

Having read this book, my old post about people’s terrifying pessimism seems not strongly worded enough. These are troubling times, but every time in history has been troubling. The world isn’t ever going to magically become a utopia. We’re going to continually struggle against our needs, our wants, our vices, our neuroses. But we will, in the long run, improve.

The global temperature might rise five degrees, destroying island nations with rising sea levels, crippling the economy and agriculture of the world, but we will adjust. We all won’t adjust because a lot of us will be dead. But we will persist. I think that any one who is so pessimistic as to look at the state the world is in rate now and imagine it can only get worse, or that it’s just not worth it to live a longer life in these dire times, or any of these sorts of things suffers from an extreme, almost hysteric, lack of imagination.

I’m still not sold on immortality, I still suffer from the belief that life would eventually get boring and I’d prefer the nothingness to continued life. But this book has shown that there’s so much more out there than we can even imagine, from the sheer quantity alone. If any one person lived forever, who knows what they’d discover, what truths they’d develop, what intractable problems they’d swat away with a few millennia of concerted effort.

I’ll close this post with a video that, every time I see it, reinforces the idea (among others) that even immortality isn’t enough time. There’s simply too much to experience, too much to do.