A Race of Daemons

This is the week which we finally finished Frankenstein by Mary Shelly. The book ended rather anticlimactically, with the sudden death of Frankenstein, but only after he swore that he would hunt and kill the monster he created. But this outcome was only a result of his refusal to make a female mate for the original monster, due to a fear of creating a master race of these daemons that would cause humanity to curse the name Frankenstein for all eternity. And to see Dr. Frankenstein's fears played out on a slightly modified scale and setting, we only need to look at the Super Mutants of the Fallout series.

The Fallout series depicts a post apocalyptic world that was completely decimated by a global thermonuclear war in which every country seemed to have a "scorched earth" policy. But in anticipation of this war, the US constructed underground habitats that would house citizens selected to carry on either individual characteristics of the human condition, some piece of technology or to continue a science experiment. One such vault was vault 87, the home of the species know colloquially as the "Super Mutants".

Vault 87 was responsible for the continuation of research into Forced Evolutionary Viruses (FEVs) that were designed, much like Frankenstein's monster, to be a better class of human so that the human race would stand a chance in the world after the war. This is not what happens, at least not immediately. There is an accident in one of the FEV strains and it cause many of the subjects to mutate into these tall yellow creatures with super human strength and limited mental faculties, with the population having varying levels of both. Some subject retain their cognitive abilities, while others grow to the size of buildings and kill anything that doesn't look like them. After vault 87 is opened these monsters essentially have free reign over the landscape as they are also not effected by lingering radioactivity and destroy and mutilate much of the human population that created them, and had their fair share of murder and other things you'll have to play the games to find out. Which would confirm Frankenstein's rational behind not giving the monster a companion. However, it is discovered later in the game that the FEV strain has been corrected by a group known as the "Enclave", and it aids in the creation of super humans. But this raises a more interesting question. Had Frankenstein continued his work, instead of giving up, could he have succeeded in his goal; or would he be forever doomed to failure?

The Science of Destruction

The book Frankenstein so far has been focused on science. We can see Victor's obsession with understanding and learning everything he can about life and death. After he is creation of the monster we are forced to ask ourselves if we have gone too far. By creating this monster has he done something that cannot be retracted and will lead to unimaginable horrors.

We have made this mistake before in the exploration of science and the creation of explosives. During World War 2 we created and dropped the first dirty bomb. The Japanese Minister of War pushed for the soldiers to continue fighting, but the Emperor of Japan overruled him saying that Americans have used the first "Cruel Bomb." In a video on youtube by Vsauce he describes how horrible atomic weapons are.

According to the pop culture idea of Frankenstein the monster, Adam, is considered a thoughtless killing machine that just terrorizes villages and attacks everyone it meets. This story was written long before the first "cruel bomb" and obviously before WWII, but Frankenstein seems to be their version of the ultimate weapon. Both of these abominations were created in pursuit of pure science, but they ended up causing massive damage. From what we've read so far we can see that the monster is nothing like what we have all seen from the movies, but it may have been adapted to be like that as a commentary on how science can not be separated from what it creates. It can be seen that Dr. Frankenstein is just trying to pursue the creation of life, and not making a monster, but that is what results. The scientists leading the project on the Atomic Bomb were just creating a way to produce large quantities of energy, but it ended up being turned into a weapon. Just because the scientific work was done for the sole purpose of scientific exploration it's consequences cannot be excused.

Psychopaths on the Moors

   Psychopathy is a mental illness that has been most recently characterized by a general lack on empathy for other humans. This may be counter-intuitive to the view that many people have of psychopaths, which is generally that they are those people that intentionally harm others for the pleasure of it. But this is not the case. One percent of our current population is most probably psychopathic, and while this concentration jumps to 33 percent in our prison population, it does not account for the entirety of the psychopathic population. The rest of this subset concentrates in areas of business and media that require the ability to make decisions that could destroy the lives of other people, a spot light or that involve control over a large group of people, such as cooperate executives, media, the political arena, and even clergy, which spike at ranges of four percent to 15 percent.

Top 10 professions that attract psychopaths

   This is because psychopathy is a illness that is related with either the inability to empathize with other human beings, thus making it easier to manipulate or harm others that are simply seen as obstacles, which is where we see many of the violent psychopaths. Or to control and compensate for their lack of empathy so that they may put on a front for the whole of society, which is many “victim” psychopaths and manipulators come from.

   Now, what does this have to do with Wuthering heights? Well, many of the characters in the novel displayed psychopathic tendencies, and together they covered a wide spectrum of psychopathy. Heathcliff took the role of what we think of as the traditional psychopath, violent, manipulative, and generally apathetic to the feelings of others. Catherine Earnshaw and Linton took on the more manipulative mentality that fed off of the kindness of others to get what they wanted and then discarded them. But my fascination in this book is not with the characters, it is with the author that imagined these characters without meeting more than a few dozen people in her entire life. The fact that Emily Bronte was able to recreate the spectrum of psychopathy with her characters suggests that many people around her displayed similar tendencies, or that even she herself was a psychopath. This would mean that the area that Emily lived in would have had a psychopathy rate somewhere between law school and prison, which is an interesting scale in its own right. It is not hard to imagine that a person capable of creating such characters must project themselves onto the page as well, but it is an interesting prospect none the less.

Cat's Cradle

It seems like we accidentally missed a blog post last week, so I’m here to remedy that. In class, we all have our independent reading books, and I read Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

Seen above is a picture of a Cat’s Cradle, which is referenced several times throughout the book, and also in the title. It clearly does not look like a cat sitting in a cradle, it’s just string twisted in such a way that we can say that it kind of looks like a cradle. The use this as a metaphor for how we as people tell ourselves foma, or harmless untruths, in order to make our lives more bearable. I agree that people do this to some degree, but in the book it is a bit over exaggerated. The book applies the concept to everything in the world, while I believe it only applies to certain things. But people definitely do it. We all have a habit of rationalizing things in our mind so that we can stop dwelling on something, or so that we can stop feeling guilty about something. I enjoyed Cat’s Cradle very much, even if it was a bit odd.

A Game of Wuthering Thrones

In class we have been reading Wuthering Heights, which I have not enjoyed. It is definitely well written, but I am simply unable to get into it, and the reading has gone very slowly for me. However, recent events in the book have made it more exciting for me. People are starting to die. Now, I realize that this sounds morbid, but you must admit it always makes it more interesting. With the amount of characters in this book suddenly dying it made me think of one of my favorite book series. A Song of Ice and Fire, more commonly referred to as A Game of Thrones.

One of the most commonly told jokes about this series is simply “Everyone dies.” This is just referencing the very large amount of main characters who die in this series. The character who you would least expect to die, dies. I thought this was like Wuthering Heights because a large amount of the characters you were introduced to at the beginning of the story are suddenly dying, such as Hindley, Catherine, and Isabella. These are a few characters I wouldn’t have expected to die for a few reasons. Hindley and Catherine because they seemed too important to the story to die halfway through, and Isabella because she had not contributed enough to the story so far. So, while Game of Thrones is very different from Wuthering Heights, the unexpected and gratuitous deaths in both led me to relate themselves to each other in my mind.

Books and Bombs

This past week in class we have spent a lot of time focusing on our paper defining what literature is to us. Everyone has a different view point on what actually is literature. Must it be only words, is a T.V. or movie script literature, or is even the T.V. show or movie itself literature. Literature is a very broad topic that I like to think of as anything with artistic qualities and it has to use written words. I actually find this to compare very closely to varying types of explosives.

People use the word bomb to encompass everything that goes boom and is designed to hurt people. I choose a broader range, anything that explodes, releases an incendiary, or gas activated by a trigger mechanism. We can think of different types of literature subdividing like types of bombs. Some are very powerful stories that fly by in a second but they leave a lasting impact. This what we consider to be many of the great works of literature. They are usually big thick books that feel like you're carrying around a ton of bricks. These books are the old classics that just carry a lot of weight and description, and ideas in them. We can also see the same evolution of books as we can explosives. First the big powerful bombs just meant to tear everything apart, and then the incendiary which are quick burning fast paced and exciting. That is what the next era of great literature became. From the big dense books came more exhilarating faster paced books that keep your attention much better. These still continue and have become a mainstay of writing nowadays, but there are also the books that deal with deeper issues. These books like gas focus on your brain. These kinds of books are for a different kind of pleasure, one that causes you to think about real things. It's more than just trying to figure out a mystery novel; the fun is in seeing the problems we face in reality and trying to thin of ways to fix those. Literature and bombs are more closely related than you would think.

Borderland Gooseberries

For one of our reading assignments this week, we were supposed to analyze the story "Gooseberries" by Anton Checkhov for theme. In the story we encounter a man by the name Nicholai Ivanich, who works his entire life to achieve his goal only to find that it was not as satisfying as he had believed it to be. After reading this I could not help but make plot comparisons to one of my favorite game series Borderlands.

The short version of both of these incredibly long games is that you are in a futuristic society that has come across a baron planet named Pandora. On Pandora there it was rumored that their was a secret vault that would give whoever opened it immense fame, power in wealth. You start the game as one of the four vault hunters on the left (I always choose Siren) and work with the help of an AI named Angel to find and open the vault. At the end, you find and open the vault, but a giant monster that you have to immediately kill comes out and tries to eat you instead of the miles of gold you were imagining. The second game picks up some time after this with the same basic premise, but instead you are preventing the antagonist of the story, Handsome Jack, from opening the vault first. The game once again, takes forever to complete and you are finally able to open this second vault, but Handsome Jack opens it first and you have to deal with yet another monster that appears from the vault. This time the vault yields its riches, but you later discover that there are many more vaults in the galaxy you inhabit and are once again left disappointed with all of the hours you have just spent, and I can only guess that the third game will pick up somewhere from there. And yes, that was the short version.

Just from this description it seems that the two plot lines have very similar features, the character has a goal that no one can stop them from achieving, this passion drives them to devote their entire life to the project, and depending on how much you invest much of yours as well. And after gaining a considerable amount of wealth they are finally gifted with what they have spend the better part of their life chasing, only to find that what they wanted was not actually what they would have. With this plot from Gooseberries, along with a heavy handed statement, we can pull that there are very few people that ever actually achieve happiness and that the life long pursuit of an ideal is a gamble at best. While this same theme can be had for the plot of the entire Borderlands series, I think that it can also be shown that the continuous pursuit of such an ideal will most often lead to more work to be done to reach something that proves to be increasingly unobtainable.

Written By: Evan

               

For homework tonight we were told to read A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor. Upon hearing the title I initially assumed that it would be a story about a woman who is either searching for a husband or dealing with an abusive or possibly emotionally detached husband. I incorrectly thought that it would be a mostly innocent story, if a little sad with it possibly ended in divorce or a breakup. But no, the story went in a completely different direction than expected, with the “Good Man” in the title being someone that is not a criminal, a liar, or a cheat.

 

                While the grandmother was in no way the narrator of the story, I came to see her in a similar light, as she was the most active presence in the story. She had thoughts about everything that occurred and didn’t mind making her opinion know. She also seemed to be the sort that was raised with extremely good manners and liked to see others use them as well. All that being said, I was horrified by what occurred with “The Misfit” and how the family that was involved was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think it affected even more because I was going into it with such innocent assumptions as to what the story would contain.

                It’s usually sad to see anyone die in a story (unless of course it is the antagonist and even then it’s not always so black and white) but seeing the children die is even worse. Especially considering the innocent way they had been acting for the entire story. There is a lot of shock value in this story due innocence being met with cold cruelty. This terrible events never would have happened if the grandmother hadn’t tried to go the house, or if she had remembered correctly where the house was actually located at, or if she hadn’t brought the cat along. I also thought that the fact that the husband and son were clearly just murdered, the wife did not seem to realize this and she just went along with the goons (is that politically correct? Should we call them Henchmen? Henchpeople?) when it was time for her and the daughter to die.

                All in all, this story was very sad and very horrifying just because of the unexpected events and the way the innocence of all the characters meets as abrupt an end as the characters themselves do. We can read or watch all sorts of stories where terrible things happen to people without batting an eye, which is why there are so many different variations on CSI and CSI-like shows. But we go into those stories expecting bad things to happen, but in this story our intentions are not met and therefore, we are horrified.

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Written by: Evan  

We recently read Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been in class. This story is a great example for the conflict that can arise between a young adult and their parents during those in between years of teenagism. While this story does not exclusively focus on this topic, it is what I will be referring to in this article.

The story provides an excellent description of how many teenagers can act around their parents. The parent generally doesn't approve of one or many of the activities that the child in question engages in on a regular basis. In this story, it is the repeated action of looking in the mirror. It seems harmless enough, but to the mother it is an act of arrogance and vanity. The daughter just assumes the mother is jealous because she lost the beauty she once had. The two assume the worst of each other and because of that, do not agree with one another.

Another point of conflict between parent and child is authority. In the story, Connie clearly dislikes her mother’s strict attitude. She is allowed to do things only because her older sister does so.  This is also a sort of jealousy, when being compared to the “perfect sibling.” While Connie’s mother is actually being more than fair by allowing her do the same things as her much older sister, Connie doesn't see it that way and feels resentment. You can see a little of this in the title. Where are you Going?, and Where have you Been? are probably common questions Connie hears from her mother, while her sister  can come and go as she pleases. This is probably the reason she relishes her trips into town. They spend the whole day doing whatever they please, and no one asks anything about it. She enjoys this freedom and also views it as a bit of rebellion, which teenagers are traditionally portrayed as relishing in.

Connie also hates being compared to her sister. In her mother’s eyes, the older sister is the perfect child. Connie doesn’t think so. She seems to view her sister in disdain which is mostly based off of her mother’s intense approval of her and Connie’s opinion that her sister and all her friends are much less pretty than she is herself. In this case neither party has it correct. The sister clearly isn’t perfect due to the fact that she is 24 years old and still lives at home, but she clearly isn’t as bad as Connie makes her out to be either. What we get from the two perspectives is a mixture of the viewpoints from both the mother and the daughter.

So, in conclusion, the story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been is a great example of how teenagers can come to odd with their parents due to the many differences between the two generations. While both the parents and the child clearly have some flaws, which they attack each other about, they also have great qualities about them which the other refuses to acknowledge, even to themselves.

The Art of Selling

The Art of Selling

By: James Birchfield

   The topic of this post will focus on the power that singular words can have on the reaction to a statement or even toward another person.

   One of our opening assignments this week was to analyze the effect that an adjective had on the implications to the surrounding sentence. For example "The man sighed hugely." At its face one might say that this man sighed with exaggerated motions to make his sigh huge, or possibly he took a very deep breath so that the duration of the sigh was "huge", it is also a possibility that the man simply opened his mouth very wide and sighed with his mouth open. But now what if we changed the word "hugely", which was the focus of the assignment. If the second possible explanation is taken, then we can safely assume that with his deep breath he was also very loud, so that the sentence becomes "The man sighed loudly." But now what does this imply about the situation? Well, it could still mean that the man was just loud, not necessarily that he took a long time, but just loud. The sentence could also imply that the man was upset and needed to let the surrounding people know without saying it. The point being that our sentence and its meaning has just changed, possibly in ways that are not immediately obvious.

   This same principle applies to selling any product, let it be candy or a program at school. The sales person has a short amount of time to become friends with the customer and to sell them the product. For instance when selling candy one often meets people that don't have money. From past experience I can say that while they may not have the money on them, which they might, they usually have money around them, often in the form of friends. All that needs to be said after they turn you down by saying "I don't have any money." is simply "Yes you do." According to coppyblogger this happens because the word "You" addresses the person directly and builds instant report with them because they now associate the sales person with someone that they know. As opposed to saying "I'm sure he does." which is what you are trying to get them to think about on their own. This second sentence doesn't build that link between the sales person and their customer and instead can come off as pushy and rude by simply telling the target that they have money around them without focusing on them. It is almost the same as going up to a crowd of people, asking each person if they wanted candy, and moving to the next person immediately after you are rejected. Not so say that this would not work with time, but it will not be as successful.

Daily Manipulation

Written by: Aidan

We all use the art of manipulation everyday, whether it be small to make them swap seats at a movie theatre, or large enough to change their world views and opinions. This is clearly shown in Saturday by Ian McEwan where Henry Perowne convinces Baxter to leave him alone. Henry gets inside Baxter's head thinking like a man who has nothing to lose so he puts everything on the line to be someone important. But more than that Baxter just wishes for a cure to his endless torment that is ever growing worse and worse. Henry forces Baxter to let down his guard by shaming him with his condition that he has been struggling to overcome.



 Henry held the key to Baxter's actions by revealing what Baxter wished nobody would ever know. Through his manipulation of Baxter's shame Henry is able to escape mostly unharmed, but through this he psychologically maimed Baxter. Baxter lays in wait for a short while brooding over the pain dealt to him by Henry. Because Henry was smarter than Baxter, Baxter had to outclass him in a different area, with a show of force. Later Baxter returned again, and again Henry manipulated Baxter's emotions concerning his genetic disorder.

 

Henry Promises to Baxter that he has searched for and found a new experimental cure for Huntingtons disease. Baxter thinks that Henry holds in his hands what he most dearly desires. This time Henry manipulated him not by shame but by desire. Knowing Baxter's mindset and how he would give anything for the cure, Henry seduced him into doing exactly what he wanted to ring his family out of harms way.