ere are the best mails I received during the month of June, 2003, with comments added where they are needed or funny, snarky, and sometimes, when the stars align, all three.

Due to endless delays in actually creating this page, this mailbag was compiled and captioned in early September, 2003, and got online in August 2004.

Mails are presented chronologically.

Date: June 1, 2003
From: Stephan
Subject: Fatalism...

Taking everything into account what happened to you and your girlfriend, the way it set off, the way things turned out, getting rid of your personal martyr etc, would you consider the course of affairs as being predestined or from your point of view just a series of coincidences (e.g without any of you two being into Diablo2 at some point you might have never met).

Love of course is an emotional thing, thus any rational approach sort of fails. However any strong emotion be it pain or joy is looking for a way to be expressed, be it words, music, or even physical acts. People usually don't ask themselves why they are happy, whereas sadness is constantly oppressing us with that hard-to-answer question.

Looking back at your visit, the way it affected you, do you believe in fatalism, even still, even stronger? 

It's an interesting question but no, I don't believe in fate or destiny or predestination, or anything like that. Could any *real* atheist?  I'm not asking that rhetorically, I'm really pondering it.  Of course just because someone is an atheist doesn't mean they are a rationalist; just because a person doesn't believe in god doesn't mean they don't believe in a ton of other wacky stuff like Scientology, Astrology, lucky numbers, and so on. However in my case, I don't believe in anything magical or unprovable.  And yeah, I could go into a big debate about the definition of "proof," but I'm not going there today either.

So no, I don't believe in destiny or fate or anything.  I sort of wish I did; it would make life more fun.  I could pretend that bad things were tests, good things were rewards I'd earned, that Malaya was my soulmate in waiting and that mystical events had conspired to keep me from being in a relationship when I met her, and so on.  Since I don't believe any of that, I just have reality, as I define it.  We're two individuals who led our own lives for nearly 30 years before our overlapping interest in Diablo II brought me to her attention, and then brought her to my blog, and her interest in horror and fantasy motivated her to write an email to that Flux guy about one of his stories, and about symbolism in writing.

I think the thing is that any chain of events that leads to a known conclusion seems very improbable if you look at it with hindsight, from a loaded PoV.  If I assumed that Malaya and I were destined to meet, then I'd look back and see how unlikely it was that we ever would have, with her living 500 miles away.  And how unlikely it was that we would both be interested in D2. And how unlikely it was that I'd stay as a volunteer worker on a D2 fansite for over 5 years.  And how unlikely it was that she'd be interested in fantasy/horror fiction and therefore want to write me for more info about my writing.  And so on.

My feeling is that you can construct a chain of great improbabilities for just about any situation, down to what you had for lunch.  I mean when you got up this morning, if someone had predicted exactly what you would eat for lunch, down to the portion size and location in which you consumed it, that would seem amazing. What if you'd gotten a phone call just as you were about to make a sandwich, and by the time you got off the phone you had changed your mind and wanted soup?  What if you saw a commercial for Subway and decided you just had to have a turkey classic with extra mustard?

The difference is that with major life events, such as how I feel about meeting Malaya, it matters hugely whether or not they work out, so events that led up to that major event seem very important.  It really doesn't matter one way or the other if you had a grilled cheese sandwich or cold pizza for lunch.

And while I think Malaya is about the best match for me (and me for her) that I will/would have ever met in my life, I don't think we were destined to be together. If I'd gotten a better job 2 years ago and hadn't had the time to keep working on the D2 site, she would have never read my Decahedron columns and never followed a link to my home page, and never read any of my fiction, and never mailed me to ask about symbolism in story telling.  I suppose that we might have somehow met anyway, say she read my first (upcoming) novel and really liked it and wrote me a fan mail and it was such an interesting mail that I mailed her back, and it went from there.  So it's possible, and since I'm going to be a writer and she reads my type of fiction, it's maybe even remotely probable.  But even if it had happened that way, the odds would have been against us ever hitting it off, or getting to know each other, etc.

In other words, though it's not very romantic, I don't think anything about our relationship, or anything else that has ever happened in my life or anyone else's life, was magical or predestined or meant to be.  No matter how much I wish I could think that, since it would make our love feel even more special.

_________________

Date: June 1, 2003
From: Vixen
Subject: Congrats =)

The congrats are for your site in general (altho I don't get it all, being German, so some US-specific topics and allusions just leave me dumbfounded), I like your writing in general, be it fiction or non-fiction.

The congrats are more specifically for your relationship w/ Malaya! I wish the two of you all the best, may it work out! :)

I admire you for having the guts to reveal the VERY personal problems you had in the first days, and I am glad you could resolve them together. And I admire Malaya for her patience and for her letting you write about some rather personal issues which involve her. (Btw, I can't find her first email to you in the Feb mailbag, but maybe I am just blind) And..., being curious like all women: is Malaya her real name?

Thx for referring me to Dooce's site, I like her writing, too, altho it's totally different from yours. Dooce is a hoot :) 

Relatives... DON'T get me started on this!!!
I am the only child of parents who have their flaws just like I do. I didn't turn out how they wanted me to be, but they're still kinda content the way I turned out to be (never gonna be a good housewife, for instant, but my mother accepted it). We kinda got rid of the rest of the family about 9 years ago, so our birthday dinners are usually very nice, just my parents and me at a nice restaurant, having a good time w/o anyone else, having a nice dinner, drinking some and chatting, and having good laughs.

So, no, I don't love my relatives (except for my parents, and I fear the day even one of them will die, my mother will be 70 on July 1st, my father is 69), they're NOT on my wavelength, and I don't need them. I have online friends whom I've never met in RL that I care A LOT more about than my RL relatives... Last time I met my RL relatives was two years ago at a funeral, my granny had died at the age of almost 94, having spent some miserable years at a home for the elderly... and w/in seconds of meeting them I knew why I hadn't missed them in 7 years for even a second.

Yikes, I've rambled!

Cheerful, isn't she?  I'm not sure why non-Americans always often seem to be so chipper and full of life and energy in their emails to me.  Even ones who are going on English as their 2nd or 3rd or 5th language have far more to say and more vitality than 99% of the mails I get from US citizens/native speakers.  And I don't think we can blame this entirely on George Bush Jr, can we?

Vixen here obviously had a lot to say and while she was spurred by my Malaya visit report, she threw in much more about other things I'd said in recent blogs while she was at it.  I have no criticism of this; it's nice to get an email from someone with something to say. And she was one of many people who were kind enough to write with best wishes for Malaya and me, and one of several who said how impressed or thankful they were that I shared so much of my feelings during that fateful first visit.

I was surprised how many people really took to and enjoyed my discussion; I thought it might be too personal and weird for most, when I was writing it, but after feeling such intense emotions so recently, I really couldn't self censor it down to something pointless.  (See the 2nd to last email from last month's mailbag.)

_________________

Date: June 6, 2003
From: versitan
Subject: Webcomics Section -- Black Champagne

Dear Flux,

I enjoyed reading over your WebComics section recently, and I was curious to know if you'd come across the strips "Fans" and "Ubersoft". (www.faans.com, and www.ubersoft.net)

The first is fascinating and often disturbing, the second being usually pretty good computer-humor.

Enjoying your site, and the D2 site as always... ever since the game arrived.

I didn't get around to checking them for months and months, and by then Faans was behind a subscriber-only wall, aside from some early strips which were very Mad Magazine-esque in art and humor about Trekkies and other uber-fans.  The other one isn't bad, sort of along the lines of a less-inventive and more "inside" Dilbert.  Check them out if you like, that's what recommendations are for.

_________________

Date: June 5, 2003
From: Justin
Subject: About love between relatives

I am a faithful reader of yours. I always find your opinions very interesting, especially on the subjects of politics and religion. I also admire your courage in revealing very personal aspects of your life and the honesty of your views and arguments, let alone the humor. Enough compliments, or you might become used to them.

I've never written to you before (except an insignificant feedback on one of your D2 decahedron, yes another one who discovered your blog via Dii.net, sorry for this lack of originality…) but I think I could add a somewhat interesting contribution on the "love between relatives" topic (Sunday, 1st of july blog) .

I am on my PhD studies in evolutionary ecology so I have, whether I want it or not, a bias towards evolutionary explanations on natural phenomena. So here is a little theory about love between relatives.

In evolution, there is a concept called kin selection. It tries to explains what can't be explained by individual selection. For example, in many ant (or bee) societies, there is only one female individual that will reproduce : the queen. So, what is the evolutionary benefit for the huge mass of the female workers (males are very few and they serve only as "sperm banks" in many cases in these species) ? They will die without descendants so what's the point ? Evolution should get rid of such a behaviour. That is where kin selection comes into play. By definition, you share a part of your genes with your relatives (1/2 exactly with your parents and children, in probability 1/4 with your brothers or sisters, 1/16 with your first degree cousins and so on). So, if there is a risk for you to not transmit your genes to the next generation via reproduction, you had better favor the reproduction of your kin because they transmit part of your own genes. In other words, if you can't reproduce but one of your kin is able to, you haven't lost everything in the great game of life (a bit "corny" I know).

Another thing to know is that you do not transmit only your genes to your children. Your transmit also social behaviour (that is what parental education is all about).

You may now be able to see my point : an individual whose behaviour favors his kins will have a better fitness (=selective value, an evolutionary concept) than those who don't, via kin selection. Thus, this behaviour is favored by natural selection. And voilà !

I've written all this only by memory and theoretical considerations. If you are interested and want me to give you literature references, I could have a look. Of course it is a biological explanation, not a psychological one. But it's still interesting don't you think ?

An interesting mail, eh? Nice to hear from someone who actually knows what they're talking about, rather than just bullshitting along, like I do.

I wasn't sure what prompted it though, since while I can remember writing about incest and related issues a few times, I couldn't find any mentions of those subjects in early June, plus he mistakenly said "July" in his mail, which threw me off.  However I eventually realized that in part one of my long and overly-personal discussion of the first Malaya visit and my extended freak out during it, I talked briefly about relatives and the reasons we tend to love them, even if they do things that we wouldn't put up with for an instant if they were just someone off the street.

Nothing past June 5 since the rest of the month's emails were lost in the email client crash that claimed the rest of the year's mails as well.

If you would like to be included in a future mail bag, give it a try.

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