Given my last post on Teresa Nielsen Hayden and a post to go up shortly on Amanda Palmer, I've decided to make this a full-blown People I Admire Week here at DeusExEm. If you want to play along, that would be just peachy; feel free to link to yourself in the comments. I'd love to see who you all are looking up to these days!
Here are the rules I'm using. If you're playing the home game, of course you can play by your own rules, but I think this framework will lead us toward much more interesting responses:
- Friends and family don't count. It would be easy to fill a week with the obvious stuff: I could say I admire Sean Stewart and Jan Libby, my mom and dad, Naomi Alderman and the Brothers Hon. But I want to dig a little deeper, here. If you know somebody well enough to have their IM information, or if they'd likely know who you were if your name came up in conversation, you know them too well for this purpose.
- You really want to be like them. Look, we all admire Mother Teresa, but not many of us get fired up over giving our lives over to helping the sick and poor. I want this admiration to be actionable in a more than theoretical way.
- Your lifetime and their lifetime have to at least overlap at the edges. Even better if the person you admire is still alive! This keeps out people we've been taught by rote to admire since we were small; your Abe Lincoln and Jesus, Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin and Hammurabi. I want to hear about admiration you probably don't have in common with millions of other people.
- They have to be real people. Seriously, folks, no Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Captain Kirk, OK?
We're cool? Awesome. Ready... set... go!
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