Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction

Since I've been having some trouble coming up with enough interesting topics for blog posts, so I decided to use the blog to just post on whatever.

I have discovered a website that has plans for several dozen different Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction.  For those unfamiliar, these are small, homemade implements made from common household objects and office supplies, designed for launching small projectiles such as paperclips, erasers, or pencils.  They can be found here for those interested. I have already constructed the "#2 Catapult" and the "Pencil Slingshot" and have decided to make the "Maul Gun" and the "Bow-and-Arrow Pen."  The object of this activity, clearly, is to see how many destructive objects and implements we can make out of the innocuous supplies in one's desk.  The combination of creating useful objects and using those objects for (small-scale) destruction is very fun.  Now if only I had some enemies on whom I could use these weapons of mass destruction....any volunteers?

Assigned Blog Post # 1 - And Nothing But the Truth

    Truth in fiction can be a double edged sword.  I have tried my hand at fiction writing before this class started, and each time I do the same thing happens.  I have a great idea for my story and begin to write, but before the story can progress beyond the barest outline of a plot, I lost interest in the story and I stop writing.  I thought about this for a long time and I finally think I know why I can’t keep my story interesting.
    My characters are dull.  Or, more specifically, they’re based far too much off of me.  As Ms Cross pointed out, and as we have seen in “Demonology,” injecting truth or reality into fiction can be a great way to add depth and realism to one’s writing, but only when used skillfully and in moderation.  I found that in my attempted stories the characters were dull because instead of developing them as individuals with their own desires, fears, wishes, and characteristics, I was inserting myself into them.  Instead of using truth as an aid to deepening the believability of my story, I was using it as a crutch to cover up poor development.
    As we read in “Demonology,” truth can make a story much more real and much more important when the characters and plot used are interesting and many-faceted.  My problem, then, is not so much that there is too much of myself in my writing but that there is too little thought, care, and development put into my characters.  Maybe if I can master the correct usage of truth in my fiction, my writing will become more interesting and more believable.

Life Unchanged

I have a fascination with undiscovered peoples; that is, tribes or groups of people that have remained uncontacted and relatively unknown to modern civilization.  In past centuries, these must have been, if not commonplace, then at least numerous, as much of the world was fragmented, unconnected, and uncharted.  But in the modern era, when the whole world is mapped to a precision of mere feet and most land masses are populated by civilization, these people are few and far between, with most of them either in the jungles of South America or on islands of the Pacific and Indian  Oceans. 

Think of what life must be like for those living in these tribes.  Every day, these people live their lives in a manner almost exactly like the way our human ancestors lived theirs tens of thousands of years ago.  They hunt and gather to get food, and they make everything that they use with their own hands.  All the while, they have no idea that a whole different, massive, complex, and completely alien world exists on the rest of the planet.  They must see airplanes or boats go by from time to time, but they have no idea what they are.

I read a news article describing an incident in which several fishermen, who were illegally fishing off of the coast of an island which houses an uncontacted tribe, drifted onto the island and were killed by the tribesmen.  A helicopter was sent to recover their bodies, but was driven off by a hail of arrows sent by the natives.

Imagine being a native living on this island and seeing the helicopter coming to retrieve the bodies, having never seen anything more advanced than a bow and arrow in your life.  It must be similar to the popular perception of an alien abduction; it must have been completely out of their ability to comprehend.  And who can blame them for being hostile and defensive in the face of such unknown and alien happenings.  It must have been rather like the Aztecs greeting the Spanish conquistadors in the days of Cortéz and Montezuma, only the technological discrepancy is even greater.

These people, and many others like them, have been living in their homes for 10,000 years, and could go on living there for another 10,000.  My question is should we let them?  Do they have a right to the advances that civilization has created over thousands of years, advances that could save lives and increase their quality of life?  Does this outweigh their right to independence and self-determination?  Or maybe we could best serve them by leaving them alone, letting them live unchanged for the next thousand years; a living testament to the origin of our species.



Comments welcome.