Quotes

[jack]

Mark Rosewater

"At the end of one class, she asked for us to write a short story about a college student having breakfast and at the end of the next she asked us to write a short story about a serial killer having breakfast. When we turned the second paper in, she had the class discuss the differences between the two assignments."
-- Mark Rosewater

"But I was a smart alec, and submitted the same essay both times."
-- me

The original class went on (I think) to decide that it was easier because they were familiar with college students, but not with serial killers, so would need to do a lot of research for that. My philosophical point is that the chilling thing is, most of the time, a serial killer is just like everyone else.

Edsger Dijkstra

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
-- Edsger Dijkstra

"The question of whether a human can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
-- me

I liked this quote because it gets truer the more you look at it. It doesn't necessarily say the question is uninteresting, but that it's likely irrelevant to whatever you wanted to do. I decided to generalise this and apply it with gay abandon to any meaning of any word I wanted to temporarily mock out of existence.

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

But is a serial killer just like everyone else, or are they merely skilled in appearing so? After all, to be a serial killer rather than a one-off murderer implies by its very nature a highly developed ability to dissemble. If you don't look thoroughly plausible, you get caught and don't get to kill again.

[naath.livejournal.com]

True, perhaps if you were writing a story in the second person about watching a serial killer eat then you might have a boring "he got some cornflakes and nommed them" story. But in the first person you might have all sorts of gory details (also puns, bad bad bad puns) floating around the killer's head, along with the narrative of "how to not look odd".

Cerial killer

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

he got some cornflakes and nommed them

ROFL! Best title ever.

also puns, bad bad bad puns

:) Would you believe, I'd forgotten this pun until your comment? :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Good point. I think it could be either, ranging from someone mostly sane but with a specific agenda, to someone inherently broken. I knew it's not necessarily accurate, but for a smart alec it seemed like a great comeback :)

At any rate, a serial killer and a college student could be the same person.

[simont]

I liked this quote because it gets truer the more you look at it

It's reminding me, for some reason, of a quote I have in my sig collection: "The distinction between the enlightened and the terminally confused is only apparent to the latter."

What I like about that quote is that it can be true on very different levels. Clearly what it's intending to imply is that the terminally confused person has a hope of eventually becoming unconfused whereas the enlightened person is terminally confused but knows that this is the natural and unavoidable state; it's also got the nice piece of almost-paradox in its wording since it simultaneously asserts that there is no difference (since enlightened people think this, implying that it's the true state of affairs) and yet that there is (enlightened and confused people clearly do differ on the point of whether they think there is a difference).

But the crowning glory of the statement, for me, is that it would become literally and unparadoxically true if one were to redefine "enlightened", or replace it with another word, meaning something like "in a permanent vegetative state" or "dead" or otherwise unaware of anything whatsoever. Then clearly there is a difference between being in that state and being conscious-but-confused, and equally clearly only the latter can perceive that difference – since only the latter can perceive anything at all!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:)

To be fair, I should accept the quote is very good at making the a hard-to-describe point clearly and with emotional force, but that I might have to unpack it for the benefit of any terminally confused.

I'd forgotten, but I mentioned on thurs my favourite examples of sentences that get truer the more you look at them, didn't I?

PS. Thanks for the Leo Rosten, you're right, it's really funny.

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

With respect to the essays, you could probably quite easily write a story about what was going on in the (non-serial-killer) student's head as s/he eats breakfast, that only takes on sinister meanings if you call your subject a serial killer. As well as it being clearly easier to do a single assignment on a person whose attention is focused entirely on waffles throughout the narrative.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yes. Except that would actually be interesting, so isn't very smart-alec-y :)

[alextfish.livejournal.com]

Someone made some suggestions for how this could work, on the forum thread for Mark Rosewater's article:

showing the character washing knives along with the breakfast dishes, having her remind herself to buy a new tarp, because she would be disposing of her current one along with its contents, feel a sense of progress in getting another step further in a serial project, etc. It could be a great story with the right setup.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. I see "submit the same two essays" is the third most obvious response (after "first post" and "cereal killer") :)

[redbird]

Also w.r.t. the essays: either short story could be mostly descriptive of actions from outside. In which case, we might learn what kind of person the writer thought was likely to be a serial killer: are they eating alone, at a diner, with their dysfunctional parents? How tidy are they? Is what they eat supposed to be significant, or is it likely, as with the college student, to be whatever's handy, or whatever the writer thinks of as a normal breakfast? Or you get the internal monologues, both of which are probably partial and stereotyped in different directions, but probably differ mostly in that the writer will make the college student like her/himself, with similar thoughts over coffee or cereal, perhaps slightly sanitized, and try to make the serial killer different. Research is unlikely to help much here.