Pull up a board, my friend! Let me offer you some water!

A (largely rhetorical) question does occur to me. If the practice now known as "waterboarding"* is not torture, then what exactly is the point of the exercise?

Is it perhaps intended to relax the recipients of the treatment by simulating a return to the water-bound existence they experienced in the womb?

Is it supposed to lull them into a false sense of invincibility when they repeatedly experience the sensation of drowning and do not die?

Cracked tells me that at least one employer has used waterboarding as a team-building motivational exercise, so maybe it's to foster a sense of camaraderie between the interrogators and detainees! It's like that falling backwards thing: once the detainees know they can trust their captors to not let them actually die, they'll be able to confide in them with confidence!

Seriously, if it's not torture, what is the whole thing meant to actually accomplish**, vis-a-vis making someone who's unwilling to cooperate more willing to cooperate and how is it meant to accomplish it?

---

*This is a relatively recent term, as William Safire noted*** in 2008. "Waterboarding" as a verb is first attested in 2004. Apparently, the use of the term "water board" first appeared in 1976, as part of the longer phrase "water board torture". This was, I gather, viewed as more precise than the umbrella term which for all of the history of the modern English language had covered it and many similar practices: "water torture".

It's like making an "all-beef hamburger" into a vegetarian option by taking out the word "beef": "I am a vegetarian. I only eat all hamburgers."

**This, of course, is a separate question from the matter of what torture actually accomplishes, which may include any number of things that don't involve getting clear and reliable intel.

***Read the last line of that article. Chilling, isn't it?

Story problems.

An interesting thing popped up on my Facebook feed, via pretzelcoatl: Why It's Hard To Write For Bugs Bunny:

There’s not a single aspect of a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon that wouldn’t be thrown out of a screenwriting class, or that would get past an executive giving notes on good story structure. So the classic-style cartoon might be unrevivable, not because there aren’t people who can do it, but because no TV network would accept it in that form.

A good Bugs Bunny story, in other words, is not at all the same thing as what we are taught and told constitutes a good story. They are mutually exclusive. While the author of the piece notes (in comparing how Bugs's cartoons compare to those featuring the Road Runner) that a Bugs Bunny cartoon does depend on a strong story, I've encountered many folks who use such a strict definition of "story" as to exclude most of the canon of Bugs completely.

(Sidenote: I wouldn't say the typical coyote-and-roadrunner cartoon has no story. I'd say rather that the bulk of them show but one part of an ongoing story that lacks a clear beginning or a definitive ending not of the "now what?" variety.)

So what does make a good story, then? The same thing that makes a good anything: a good story serves its purpose well. This purpose might be to divert, it might be to amuse, it might be to inform, it might be to inflame passions or induce catharsis. Sometimes, tautologically enough, the purpose of a story is simply to tell a story. All the structures we've recognized, all the rules we've codified... these things are just recognized paths that can be taken to reach certain of these destinations.

But they aren't the only such paths, and they won't always be the best paths to take depending upon the needs of the project. The question you ask yourself when you analyze whether a story is good or bad shouldn't be how well it hews to or uses well-worn tropes or how strictly it follows any established structure. Rather, you should ask yourself... well, I believe that noted pop culture critic Maximus Decimus Meridius* said it best:

* C.A.N., G.F.L., L.S. T.E. M.A., F.M.S., H.M.W.

It's Wednesday, Wednesday, getting down is completely optional on Wednesday...

News For The Day

Today is a semi-dead day. As I suggested in my last post, I took a little extra melatonin last night and as a result I got to sleep earlier but I woke up with a head full of concrete fog.</PERSONAL ASSESSMENT> That's why if you saw my first blog post of the day (the one about waterboarding) before I edited it, there were a lot of weird errors in it.

So today I'm doing a little more miscellaneous writing... getting a bit further ahead on Fantasy In Miniature. It occurred to me after I put the update schedule for it into my phone calendar that Wordpress can have a queue of posts slated for future release, so I did that, too.

...

Wow. Random idea: I can go days without writing a blog post, and then I get days like today where I have a bee in one of my bonnets and that seems to be the main thing I can write. As long as I'm writing other things in advance and then spacing out their publication, then why not do the same thing there? Obviously some posts are "for immediate release", but I don't think anybody actually needs to read my post about the intersection of Bugs Bunny and the Eleventh Doctor right this minute. (Though now that I've mentioned it, several of you probably want to.)

Seems like a better way to go.

This is like the least organized status post I've ever written. I'm leaving the subject heading for "News For The Day" up at the top even though it's now obviously a hollow lie. The point is I made it. :P