Author: Eneasz

One might wonder why I take off for the holidays. Since I work a standard office job, the holidays should mean extra time for podcasting, not less. And indeed, I had originally intended to run 52 episodes a year. I don’t have any family that celebrates holidays in state (raised Jehovah’s Witness), and I was happily single. My first holiday non-episode was forced on me by a new relationship that exploded into my life back in Summer of 2011 (damn, has it really been that long?).

Now I’ve got a much larger social circle and all sorts of social obligations around the holidays that take up the extra time I gained from having work off, and then some. Not that I’m complaining, life is great. I try to always keep a one-episode buffer in case of emergencies. I’ve had to dig into it once this year due to sickness, and it’s a bit stressful running for several weeks afterwards with no margin for error while I build up another episode buffer. But it did allow me to continue putting out episodes without any unscheduled interruption. :)

So Happy Holidays everyone! There’s a brief Omake next week, and we’ll be back to regular episodes in the new year!

This is a hard chapter for me, because I am not a hero or a god. Eliezer endorsed a Reddit thread about this chapter, not for the initial post, but for the replies that it received. I’ll be borrowing from it a bit. To quote PlacidPlatypus:

“ it doesn’t really matter whose “fault” it is. What matters is that it happened. The idea of responsibility doesn’t refer to anything real about what happened or is going to happen, it refers to what you are willing to do about it.”

This concept of responsibility was taught me by my parents. It was also one of the major reasons I started doubting their religion – the real world plainly demonstrated that God did not hold to this moral code. Perhaps foolishly, I continued to hold to it while also continuing to watch the nightly news. It ended up damn near breaking me. It was just one factor of many, of course, including a genetic disposition to mental instability. But I believe that this is a moral code that only gods can uphold, and that only Heroes try to.

“When you say, “This is not my responsibility,” all you really mean is, “I am not willing to do anything to make this turn out right.””

I have had to come to terms with the fact that there are a lot of things I’m not willing to do. And yet, it still remains the gold standard for me. The ideal moral code to implement if it were possible. The fact that I can’t still tears at me when it’s brought to my attention. Bujold once said that a large part of SF is the fantasy of political agency (paraphrased). The ability to make things right. In my opinion SF/F has always been the genre of the idealist. And perhaps anything that can get the reader to live some of that idealism in the world is a good thing, even if it’s a bit hard to take at times.

Also, this is taken from Eliezer’s Author’s Notes for November:

To anyone who wants to live in a saner world: the Center for Applied Rationality is now in that vital startup stage where every dollar matters – where donations greatly shorten the timeline to better research, and determine who can be hired as the first employees.  There’s a chance here to reach up toward that impossible dream of a better world where people aren’t crazy all the damn time, because believe it or not, nobody’s really tried anything like this before.  If you’ve got the power to fund this sort of thing – drop by our Berkeley office and talk to us, or attend a workshop and see for yourself what’s going on.  Or just act immediately.  Science, reason, and rationality – it’s what Muggles use instead of magic, and it’s all we’ve got.

It is with a melancholy regret that I turn the page on SPHEW. This has been a great deal of fun, and has really opened my eyes to what a good cast can do. Every actress brings her own unique interpretation to things that I wouldn’t have gotten by myself, and the zeal that they threw into the roles was inspiring. When I’m reading sometimes the names of the non-Main Characters blur together, so I didn’t really realize until I had distinct voices acting them just how unique and interesting all these secondary characters had been written. Maybe it’s because I grew up on Trek: Next Generation, but I really love mid-sized group dynamics in stories, and I’ll miss weaving these voices together every week. On the other hand, I’ll be glad to go back to a more normal schedule… splicing together 8 different audio tracks every week increased production time a fair bit.

To everyone involved – thank you! And lest we forget, thanks to Eliezer for writing all this in the first place. :)