Link round-up, comment notes

A few interesting things I've run across recently:

Jo Walton wrote a long post in her journal about Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series and what she liked best about them, couched in the form of a review of two of the continuations of the series by other authors. Even if I don't agree with her about Mercedes Lackey (whose books fill the same role for me as the Darkover books apparently do for her), this is a very interesting discussion of what goes into good, memorable comfort reading.

Hal Duncan (author of Vellum, one of the best bits of experimental, non-linear fantasy that I've ever read and one of the best books of last year), has made multiple posts about his intense dislike of monotheistic religions. It started as yet more on the cartoon thing, which frankly I'm sick of hearing about (mostly because nearly everything I've read ignores complexities in order to push their own agenda), but then it got much more interesting. It's horribly long-winded, as Hal Ducan tends to be in his blog, but embedded in here are a lot of the reasons why the whole Christian mythological structure just doesn't work for me. See one, two, and particularly three, and four. Worth skimming, I think, and the third post really clicked for me.

Note that I'm not interested in discussing what Hal is saying here. He doesn't like monotheism, he particularly doesn't like Christianity, and if you're Christian and are going to take attacks on your religion personally, you're probably going to hate his posts. Please, spare yourself the stress and don't read them if you don't want to deal. Otherwise, read them, don't read them, it's up to you.

That leads to the other note, which is that after thinking about this for a while (and stressing over it), I'm going to drop the political discussion in the earlier comments on my terrorism essay. I realized that I wasn't getting anything out of talking about this more, I don't really believe in my ability to convince someone else that they're wrong, and I don't feel like having the discussion can possibly accomplish enough to justify the (very high) emotional energy cost for me. And by this I mean nothing against the people who commented; I'm more apologizing for not being in the right mental space to be able to usefully have a discussion.

I'm thinking about cutting way back on my exposure to political discussion, actually, as it's not doing much good for me and it's making me angry and frustrated right now. Many of my friends have done the same, several have dropped the subject completely in their journals, and I've already stopped discussing politics in one place where I used to. I feel some sadness at the breakdown of meaningful political discourse, and I suppose that if people who are capable of it stop talking about politics with those who disagree it will only get worse, but at this point politics is so polarized it requires the patience of a saint to try to have a meaningful conversation.

On a different note, and unrelated to the terrorism thread, please note that this is my personal journal and I can, will, and have simply deleted comments from people who act like asses. The most recent instance of this was from someone who decided to decided to call me fifth-grader names because I didn't like Green Rider. If you want to disagree with a review, please, feel free, but I expect either a polite statement of personal opinion or some real analysis. If you start throwing around insults, if you're incoherent, if you start saying things that piss me off, and particularly if you spam the comments with multiple made-up names, I'm going to just delete your comment without a second thought. This is my soap box and you're a guest; if you want to say whatever you want, go get your own soap box. Livejournal gives them away for free.