People who know me pretty well know I’m not really political. I have a personal moral code, I like philosophy, and I was fascinated by Empire, but I’m not really political. (In some ways when it comes to politics, and a few other things, I get this sort of disinterested, “ha ha, let’s watch the foolish humans” attitude, a la xkcd #164. Other times it just makes me sad.)

But this fall, there’s a rather infamous proposition on the ballet to prevent homosexual marriage. And while I’m not gay, several of my friends are. (And as I’ve said…

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Like Aragorn in the movie of The Two Towers, Christine pushed open the doors of the tower and walked through dramatically, flanked by the grim figures of Flora and Jin. While the speech rounds they had gone through hadn’t been too fierce, the two parli rounds had definitely taken their toll on the pair of debators. Christine had, for the most part, been forced to stand on the sidelines and cringe with every hit scored.

But now they were about to reach their goal. Jin straightened up and walked with a determination he hadn’t shown since he had, fatefully,…

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“Come on!” Elaine shouted to Edward.

“I was never in track!” he shouted back.

The two of them raced through the streets of the Tournament City, hardly recognizing what they saw. There was no battlefront, no line between the heroic defenders of Speech and the villainous demons that wished to bend the tournament to their own will. Instead, there were spontaneous rounds forming all over the place, and just as suddenly, ending. Rounds without a judge, rounds with uneven numbers of contestants, rounds starting on time. It was chaos.

Elaine glanced to her left and skidded to a stop. “The…

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