Author: Robert Elessar

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When there’s nowhere to go but up, all paths are arduous

It’s Wednesday now, in case you were wondering, and I’m once again sitting at the train station.  I’m using the smartphone to write today, because I’m carrying some equipment to the office.  I took delivery of a new bike yesterday, but I had forgotten to bring an air pump, so I couldn’t ride it to the train and then home yesterday.  Thus, I have my pump, and the U lock, and another, backup pump, with me today.  I didn’t want to carry the laptop computer in addition to all that.

It’s probably foolishly optimistic of me to get the bike, but supposedly it’s the right size for me, and the handlebars are a better type than before.  It’s a hybrid type bike‒the sort that might be expected to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins*.  I think it’s going to be okay, though I will need to get used to it.  I’ll give it a brief whirl at lunchtime today, I think, just to acclimate myself.  I won’t be riding it back to the house tonight, because I have a planned occurrence that would not work well with riding a bike.

Yesterday at work, I tried a little experiment, with my boss’s enthusiastic support.  I had heard of, and then watched the first part of, the Danish movie Another Round starring Mads Mikkelsen.  In it, a group of friends, who are teachers‒inspired by an obscure philosopher and tangentially by Ernest Hemingway‒decide to try drinking (only during the workday) to maintain a blood alcohol level of .05% and they find that, as predicted, it has some benefits for them.

Given that I’m quite upright and have a lot of social difficulties and tend to get extremely stressed out during the day, I thought it might be worth a try.  Evidently, my boss agreed and found the idea funny and interesting.  He was far more on-board than I had expected.  So, I looked up the required rate of intake, got a little medicine measuring cup, procured the required supplies, and yesterday gave it a go.

Most of the day, my boss apparently found it hard to believe I had been drinking at all.  It is only a small, if steady, amount of alcohol.  Unfortunately, it didn’t make me feel any better, and though my boss said he thought I had a slight smile or look of amusement on my face, that was an illusion.  It probably just highlights the fact that my face and my feelings do not coincide, which probably explains part of why people around me don’t know how often I am in despair.  Rather than feeling barriers coming down between me and others, I felt, if anything, more alien and separate than usual.  As I said to my boss, I felt “more autistic” than I usually do.  Maybe it’s only tension and stress that lets me pretend to be human most days, at least to myself.

Still, I may try it one more day (today) just to be sure.  I don’t know.  Maybe I won’t.  I don’t think it’s my fate ever to feel normal.  As I think I’ve written before, the only two times in my life when I’ve felt “normal” internally were when I was given Valium for medical procedures‒once for getting my wisdom teeth removed, once for my heart catheterization when I was 18.  I remember both experiences fondly, which in itself is not exactly normal, is it?

Okay, this is bizarre:  they announced, starting a while back, that the northbound train‒my train‒would be boarding on the opposite track than it usually does.  That’s not so strange; it happens from time to time due to maintenance and the like.  However, just a few moments ago, the security people got word that the southbound train is also switching sides.  So, the two trains just swapped tracks, and I don’t see what that could accomplish other than perhaps carrying out a psychological experiment upon riders, and making some people miss their trains.  I’m sure there’s a comedy of errors behind that set of events.

Switching gears again, last night was my second night without using nasal steroids.  That, I think, is probably already having some beneficial effects‒I had energy to walk halfway back to the house from the train last night, though maybe that was due to the other experiment.  But I feel like I’m not holding onto fluid as much and whatnot, and my physical energy is better, so maybe that’s another benefit.  Anyway, I’m using Sinex™ and Astepro™  for allergies, the latter of which smells and tastes even worse than fluticasone.

I don’t know why I’m doing all these things.  Maybe I just feel like I’m supposed to do them.  But why would I bother with attempted self-improvement?  What is there to gain?  I think it’s just a mental habit.

At least there are amusing things to note in the technology of blog writing, to shift topics another time.  Case in point:  in the previous paragraph, in the second from last sentence, I had initially written “What is there…” but apparently my phone’s local autocorrect had changed “there” to “their”, perhaps because many people are prone to write things such as “What is their problem?”  But, of course, after the sentence was finished, Google Docs’** autocorrect rightly highlighted it as needing to be changed back to the way I had written it in the first place.  It’s the battle of the auto-corrects!  And so, artificial stupidity begins to approach a level reminiscent of human stupidity.

On that note, I’m calling it finished for today.  Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to call it finished for everything soon, though I would like to make it through to this evening, at least…which, knowing me, may make it more likely that I will not do so.  (That’s, of course, a bullshit characterization of reality born of selective memory and confirmation bias, as when people remember only those occasions when it rains after they forgot their umbrella.  It’s a tough illusion to avoid, though.)

Please try to have a good day.  You could be excused for not thinking so, but believe it or not, I always try.

*That’s a 9th (modern) series Doctor Who reference for any fellow Whovians out there.

**It’s a bit unclear to me whether this should really be “Google Docs’” or” Google Docs’s”.  Of course, when putting a possessive on a plural, one merely uses the apostrophe, but if a word to which the possessive is being applied simply ends in an “s”, as in the case of names and titles and the like (e.g., Davis’s), one adds an apostrophe and then an “s”.  But, although “Docs” is a plural in form here, it’s also part of the name of the program, and it is to that name‒and not to any collection of more than one Doc***‒that I was applying the possessive.  So, which form is most appropriate according to standard usage?  Hmm.

***Of course, there can really be only one true Doc…“and that I am he, let me a little show it, even in this:  that I was constant Cimber should be banished, and constant do remain to keep him so.”****

****Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1, quoted off the top of my head.  Huzzah for me.

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Laptop computers and steroids in noses; rough economics and thoughts on typos-es; multiple footnotes with time travel zings; these are a few of…well, you know the rest

After yesterday’s brief discussion about the pitfalls of using the smartphone to write my blog posts, I decided to do this one on my laptop computer, so I brought it back with me at the end of the day.  So far, so good:  my typing speed is definitely faster, and though there are certainly mistakes being made (and, yes, by me…obviously), they are relatively easy**** and quick to correct, and are of a much more typical kind than the ones I make on the phone.

Mostly, these mistakes are the products of trying to type too fast and so not completely pressing down on some of the keys as I go along.  Occasionally, my brain finishes the wrong word once I start typing, because it’s used to typing that other word much more often than some word that begins with many of the same letters.

Shifting topics abruptly:  Last night, for the first time in several months, I did not take any nasal steroids at all.  I’ve been using them to treat my allergic rhinitis, and they seem to have helped some of the symptoms thereof, but unfortunately, I suspect—because I have been using the maximum dose for quite a while—that I’ve begun to have systemic corticosteroid effects, among which are weight gain, glucose intolerance, weakening of various tissues, and so on.

This would explain at least some of my physical travails.  Corticosteroids can, of course, have mental effects as well—the brain being a physical organ, after all—but these are more subtle and difficult to recognize, let alone ascertain.  It is, alas, not likely that stopping the fluticasone will have a significant effect on my depression.  That is something with which I’ve dealt* since I was a teenager, and probably is at least partly a consequence of my apparent ASD.  If someone wants, I can get into how I think that happens in my particular case, but otherwise, I won’t discuss it, at least for now.

I still haven’t done the “videos” for my last two audio blogs; I’m sorry if anyone is waiting with figuratively bated breath.  On the other hand, this means that, for the moment, those audio blogs are exclusively available for people who follow my blog directly.  That’s almost like the Patreon rewards people offer to their patrons, but I don’t use Patreon, so I don’t even charge you for them.  Aren’t you lucky?

I sometimes think that maybe I should sign up for Patreon—as a creator, I mean.  I do follow two creators on Patreon, so in that sense, I’m already signed up.  And, of course, episodically, Patreon tries to encourage me to start using it for my content.  I mean, they would, wouldn’t they?  It’s how they make their money.

Not that I hold that against them; I don’t.  We all have to make a living one way or another, and since none of us animals (or fungi) photosynthesize—even coral polyps need algal cells living within them for that kind of thing—we’re forced to scrape our continued existence out of the various resources and means and skills and whatnot in the world around us, which includes all the other people.  Economics is really a branch of both biology and thermodynamics.

It was easy enough for John Lennon to sing of imagining no possessions, but I wonder if even he could, sitting at his white grand piano in his very fancy place, with his rock star money***.  I don’t think he really imagined a plausible  world in which there were no possessions.  Hunter-gatherer societies might be the closest realistic version of such a thing, but I strongly suspect they were not the sort of society about which John was singing.  They certain do not entail any “brotherhood of man”, especially if other tribes were encountered—see Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Soon, my train will come—though it’s running ten minutes late, it seems.  The auto announcement is calling it a southbound train, even though it’s northbound; at least it has the track correct.  This error has been going on for several days now, at least.  I’m guessing it’s a software problem, perhaps due to some virus.  If it were a simple mistake, I imagine they could have fixed it by now; I don’t think they’re that incompetent.  Also, the Wi-Fi on all the trains seems to be hosed, lately, as do at least some of the position signals for the Tri-rail tracker app.

I’ll wrap this up for now.  By all means, give me feedback if you’re interested.  And “thank you” to those who already do so.  I’ll try to work on those “videos” I mentioned, but I make no promises.  Have a good day, if you can.

*That is an example of a word my brain often accidentally mixes with another.  When I start typing d-e-a-l-t, although my system finishes the intended word, it also seems to call up the subroutine that spells the word “death”, and so, frequently—maybe half the time—I add an “h” to the end of the word, producing “dealth”.  It’s odd**, but mildly interesting.

**And I often write “off” when I intend to write “odd”.  Indeed, I did it just now.  This typo, however, is at least partly due to the fact that “d” and “f” are adjacent on the keyboard.

***Don’t get me wrong; I revere John Lennon.  All the money he ever could have had in any reasonable version of reality could never have adequately compensated him for the beauty and joy he and his bandmates brought to the world.

****I only caught this typo on the edit, not while I was writing the first draft:  I had initially typed this word as “east”, an error at least partly due again to the position of the letters.  I left it as footnote four—with four asterisks—even though it will now be the first footnote in the linear reading of the blog post, because its content and subject matter make it, still, the logical fourth one.  Is this an analogy for time travel stories?  Perhaps.  Maybe I’ll write about that some other time*****.

*****Or maybe I already have.

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Monday, Monday, heavy as a ton day (why is there no Qunday?)

It’s another Monday morning at the train station, and I’m waiting for my morning train.  I don’t feel much like writing today. but I don’t feel like passing my time doing nothing, either.  Similarly, I really don’t have any wish to go to the office, but I likewise have no desire to stay at the house.  I have very little desire for anything.

I have not yet turned either of my two previous “audio blogs” into “video audio blogs” yet.  Perhaps I’ll do that today.  Probably not.

I do sometimes (as I’ve noted before) get irked by the terrible waste of storage space necessary for audio and especially for video, given that written language is such a storage-efficient means of communication once mastered*.  Also, one doesn’t need a microphone or a camera if one chooses to write.  I suppose it may be easier to convey emotions in some sense through audio and video, but I don’t seem to be very good at conveying my emotions in any format, even in person; hell, I often don’t recognize them, myself.

I admit that writing on my phone, as I am doing now, is not nearly as satisfying as doing so on my laptop computer; it is also slower.  Additionally, I make far more typos, since the keys are so small, and the autocorrect is often wildly and stupidly incorrect in its suggestions.  Using the phone likewise exacerbates whatever arthropathy I have at the base of my thumbs.  But I’m always in pain, anyway, so that doesn’t matter very much.

I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I ought to get a new bicycle (a mountain bike style one) to try once again to do my morning and evening train station runs on the bike.  I never did fix the previous one’s front tire, but that was partly because riding it hurt my back.  In fact, I put that one out for the large trash pickup day last week, and it was gone within an hour.  This is something that makes me glad.  I hope whoever picked it up makes good use of it.

I’ve had mountain bikes before and they didn’t seem to hurt my back.  Maybe that style of bike would just work better for me.  Plus, they come in a wide range of prices.  The thing that keeps bringing it back up in my mind is that it would give me greater mobility in more reasonable time than walking gives me.  But bikes are frustrating because they require maintenance, and I’m not great with that sort of thing.  I can readily enough do the work once I start it‒it’s nothing terribly arcane, after all.  But I simply have no motivation to do so.

In unrelated news, I got a calculus problem and solution review book that was free through Kindle unlimited last week, and on Saturday I worked through the problems in the first chapter.  There weren’t very many, and they were pretty easy‒it is chapter one‒but it was also rather unsatisfying to do problems though a Kindle book on a Samsung tablet (I used pencil and paper to do the problems); I just find a physical text more satisfying, probably because that’s the way I did such things throughout my life before.  I don’t know if I’ll do any more of them, though.

Everything seems almost completely dreary and uninteresting, and I feel rotten to the core‒by which I don’t mean that I feel sick**, but that I feel that I am a horrible, horrible person, who tends to bring pain and heartache to the people closest to him, to those about whom he cares the most.  And so, because of that, I am alone.  Which really sucks, but is at least appropriate.

On the way back from work on Saturday, I stopped in at the Yellow Green Farmers Market, which I’ve been meaning to visit, and it was indeed all that I expected:  a lovely place full of stalls and stands and local musicians, just the sort of thing I would really have loved if I had someone with whom to share the experience.  By myself, although it was interesting, it was also rather hollow and depressing.  I didn’t stay for long, and I didn’t buy anything.

I’ve gradually come to realize that things like movies and TV shows and farmers markets and malls and so on are all things that, at least partly, I’ve enjoyed because they let me connect with other people.  I don’t know how to connect directly, but even work and school and reading were and are conduits through which I could actually have friends and be able to interact because there was something about which to interact.  Without such conduits, I seem to tend to involute and wither away.

Even now, once I’ve watched an episode of Doctor Who, which is the only new show I’ve enjoyed since The Big Bang Theory (though that got boring after a few seasons), what I like to do after is just watch other people’s “reaction videos” to Doctor Who episodes.  It’s almost like having friends with whom you’re sharing an interest in something, except there’s no actual back and forth.

Anyway, that’s enough about nothing.  I’m already tired and I’ve just barely started on the way to the office.  Every day is more pointless than the previous one, if such a thing is possible.  The most interesting thing that I’ve done lately is that yesterday I made a makeshift “flame-squirter” as I call it.  It’s pretty neat, but it’s not as intimidating to raccoons as you might expect, and I’m not ready actually to use it on them.  They would probably make a really annoying amount of noise.  And then, of course, they might join the Guardians of the Galaxy or something, I don’t know.  Anyway, the cats I try to feed are hanging around less often these days‒maybe they’re finding food that they prefer somewhere else, and seeing me is certainly not a good enough reason to come to the yard.  If I had any choice in the matter, I wouldn’t even see myself.  So, let the raccoons eat a bit.

Oh, well.  Try to have a good day.

*This despite the fact that the English language is a quite redundant code.  For instance, you will almost never see a “q” that is not immediately followed by a “u”.  When it does happen, you will probably be inclined to notice it, precisely because it is so rare, and so, a q without a u is probably even less common than you imagine it is.

**Apart from in the head.  I feel quite sick in the head, honestly, but I haven’t been able to find any way to treat that.

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Stories and simulated universes and Laplace’s Demon and related stuff

Here are just some thoughts I spoke out loud this morning because I didn’t feel like writing.  They took a surprising course, but I hope they might be interesting.  Please let me know what you think.

Here are some links to my stories/books to which I referred in this audio blog.

Penal Colony

Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Welcome to Paradox City

And here’s the home page for Nick Bostrum, a very smart philosopher (he’s younger than I am!  I didn’t realize that before).

And here’s the link to Sean Carroll’s podcast, which I readily recommend.

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…sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds…

It’s Friday, but I work tomorrow, so the fact that it’s the last regular workday of the week means little to me.  I hope all of you (or y’all) are looking forward to the weekend.

Thanks for the kind words about my taking the day off from doing any writing or speaking yesterday.  I had a weird Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning, so I was not really up to trying to write anything other than my note about how I wasn’t going to write anything.

I felt a strange surge of somewhat reckless energy on Wednesday afternoon‒possibly because I had finished payroll, possibly for some other reason‒and decided that it might be neat to try to walk all the way back from the office to the house.  It’s 30 miles, so I didn’t expect to be able to make it the whole distance, but I figured I’d get as far as I could and then Uber the rest of the way.  I really meant to do it.

Then, late in the afternoon, my sort of subacute-bordering-on-chronic lower GI discomfort came to a head, and I had to use the head several times in quick succession.  I realized that this would not be a good time to attempt my feat of endurance; I had no wish to be “caught short” on the streets of south Florida…or in some poor Uber driver’s car, for that matter.

So, instead, I waited at the office even after everyone left‒the train also not being a good place for GI emergencies‒and took some Imodium.  By the time everything settled, it was quite late, and so I just slept at the office.

Oddly enough, I slept better there than I usually do, and I half hoped that I might feel pretty good for the day.  That didn’t really pan out, and as you know, I didn’t even feel enough energy to write a post or do a voice recording.  I know I had already said that I’m not sure I’m going to continue this blog at all, but since I have been tending at least to post something on these days, I figured it would be polite to give notice.

It all just seems quite futile, though.  Of course it seems futile.  Everything seems‒and it may turn out to be feels‒that it will undoubtedly looks‒futile.  I don’t see any point in my continued life whatsoever.  I still haven’t gotten or even seriously investigated health insurance, partly because of the very severe tension and anxiety I have about initiating the process, but also because of my lack of desire to protect my health.

I really didn’t expect to be alive to see this year‒I didn’t plan to be alive, anyway.  Several times in the relatively recent past, I made plans to enact the end of my life, but one thing after another has gotten in the way.

I suspect there will be people who will say that I let things get in the way because I didn’t really want to die, and of course, at some level that was true.  I didn’t so much want to die as I wanted to be dead, but since there’s no quantum tunneling-style option, the one has to lead to the other.

I’ve often pointed out that the biological drive to survive can be absurd but is doggedly persistent, and it is very difficult to overcome via conscious thought.  I’ve tried.  I threw away a bunch of things I owned, I gave away some other things, and just in general attempted to put my house in order, so to speak.  I even wrote a draft of a will, of sorts, which I’ve updated a few times since.  But many things got in the way, not least the simple wish not to make things too inconvenient for other people.

And there’s the fact that, as I noted earlier, rather than say “I want to die”, it makes more sense to say “I want to be dead.”  If I had an “off” switch that could just be flipped, that might be the best thing.  But, of course, that’s not how biological organisms tend to operate, and the process of dying tends to be extremely unpleasant, for good, sound, biological reasons.

Sometimes I think if I could just get actual, restful sleep, that might be enough.  The last restful night of sleep I remember happened in the mid-1990s, and I remember it because it was such an outlier.  I was not used to waking up and feeling refreshed and rested and alive.  It was glorious.

Sleep clearly serves some important biological function; probably it serves more than one.  What it does is clearly complex, but I sometimes imagine it as a kind of automated pipe-scrubbing system in some intricate network of steam-punk machinery.  Every day, the system goes into idle, and the pipe-scrubbing/exhaust clearing system goes to work.  But my auto-maintenance, pipe-clearing system is faulty.  It doesn’t ever completely clear out the day’s accumulated debris and grime.

When the system is relatively new‒when one is young‒it’s possible for things to work relatively well, even if all the grime of a given day is never quite cleared away.  But the grime accumulates, the system accrues varying levels of obstruction, its auto-repair doesn’t work as well as it should, and gradually, over time, everything builds up, pipes get leaky, some junctions and connections get severely constricted and some fail altogether, and it gets harder and harder for the system to continue to function well.

People think I’m fairly smart; just imagine how clever I might be if I could just get a decent night’s sleep once in a while.

Probably the lack of sleep contributes to my chronic pain‒and then, of course, the chronic pain contributes to my sleep problems, which is not a paradox, but is actually an almost predictable occurrence in such spontaneously self-assembling, complex adaptive systems with all sorts of internal feedback systems and self interaction and all that.

“For want of a horseshoe nail, the kingdom was lost.”

“For want of the price of tea and a slice, the old man died.”

Oh, well.  Since I work tomorrow, I think I might try my walking home quest after work, then.  I have new socks that I ordered for just such a thing after Wednesday.  It would be cool if they help.  Perhaps I would sleep really well afterwards.  Or, hey, who knows, maybe I’ll get hit by a car (or other vehicle) on the way, and this will all be taken out of my hands.

There are worse things I can imagine.  One of them is simply my life continuing, as it currently is, indefinitely into the future.  The prospect of facing several thousand pounds of rapidly moving metal, perhaps steered by someone who has been drinking, seems much less unpleasant than that other, more banal and yet supposedly desirable alternative. 

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No blog post today

This is just a little announcement to everyone that there will be no blog post or audio blog today*.  I just don’t feel up to doing one.  There are reasons, and maybe I’ll discuss them tomorrow if I write (or say) something, but for right now, I’ll just say that I feel like being idle.  I will give a minor hint at least in the categories and possibly the tags.

Thanks!

*Other than this announcement, of course, which I guess technically counts as a blog post.

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Thoughts on confident statements about scientific fallibility

This is some audio I recorded this morning trying to follow up on the subject I brought up near the end of my last “audio blog”.  It relates to overconfidence about scientific pronouncements and so on both by the experts and by those who think they know the “real” motivations of the experts, particularly relating to the issues in the pandemic and so on.  It was triggered by a snippet of a conversation between Bill Maher and Seth MacFarlane, but I’m not sure where to find the original snippet.

As you will note, I did NOT make it shorter than my last audio.

[There is an interruption in the middle–presaged and followed by three chirps–in which I say what I had meant to say upon bringing up a particular subject, but then distracted myself completely by discussing some excellent YouTube channels about science and math.]

Here are some links to the YouTube channels I mentioned (along with one or two I did not) and which distracted me.  I heartily endorse them:

PBS Spacetime

PBS Eons

PBS Infinite Series

Be Smart

Numberphile

Sixty Symbols

Deep Sky Videos

Periodic Videos

Computerphile

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My gruntlement is low today

It’s Tuesday morning.  I wasn’t actually planning to write anything when I got up today, but then I remembered that, more or less on a whim, I had brought my little laptop computer with me, so I figured I might as well write something.

For one thing, I’ll embed the “video” of my last audio blog—the one about Morgoth and whatnot—below, so if anyone prefers to do their listening via YouTube, they can do so.  Evidently, the Google podcast app is going to be phased out, and one is going to have to listen to podcasts via YouTube Music at some point in the future (or use some other service/app).  That’s a bit frustrating, because there’s at least one podcast that I get via subscription that one cannot get in its entirety on YouTube, but can get through the app.  I guess they’ll figure out a way to deliver that, but it’s irritating to have to change my settings once again.

I guess it shouldn’t matter.  I should just cancel all my subscriptions and services and platforms and even cable and internet.  They’re not really doing me any good, and they cost money, and honestly, I really would expect not to be alive starting sometime soon.  I’ve been expecting that for a long time, now, though, and I haven’t really been able to work up the gumption to bring it about.

I have at least been creeping my way in that direction.  I have flammable liquids for potential immolation—useful for other, more traditional things as well, of course.  I have scalpels and utility knives, useful for cutting various things, including oneself, but of course, they’re also generally useful for many things.  And recently I bought a nice length of rope—too long, really—and learned how to tie a hangman’s knot.  That last bit is rather surprisingly easy, and it’s a pleasant and useful knot, it turns out, especially to someone who used to be in the Boy Scouts a lifetime ago.  Ironically, it has many similarities to an informal necktie knot.

But, I’m still alive for the moment, though I’m very uncomfortable and unhappy in general, and I still haven’t gotten health insurance.  I get a near-panic feeling when I even think seriously about getting insurance.  I’m not entirely sure why that is.

Yesterday morning I felt really horrible, and I think it’s because I was trying to reintroduce some things I like into my diet to see if I can tolerate them.  I guess I can’t, at least not in the state I’m in (Florida).  It seems I can’t even enjoy the things I like to eat, but then again, I can’t expect nature to be there for my convenience.

I could try to work against nature’s convenience, in return, I guess.  At the very least, I could do my best to add to global warming and disrupt the biosphere and cause toxins and pollutants to accumulate, as a silly sort of revenge.  It might be fun.

I did feel less bad as the afternoon wore on and I avoided any indulgences, to the point where, near the end of the day, in idle moments, I got out Spacetime and Geometry, Gravitation, Euclidean Quantum Gravity, and even the old Thomas and Finney calculus text—the latter because sometimes I feel like I want to re-hone and improve my skills with mathematics, and Brilliant, for all that it’s a wonderful site, just doesn’t seem to work for me for some things.

I did find the two physics texts (which I opened in the middle, since I was looking for rather specific information relating to Λ, the cosmological constant) much more accessible and relatively easy to follow compared to what I was expecting.  Gravitation, in particular, is an intimidatingly large tome, but is nevertheless a bit of a “my first reader” in overall impression when compared to Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine.  I didn’t get very far in any of them in the time I had yesterday, but it was nice to realize that—though some mathematical formalisms are beyond my current expertise (thus the Thomas and Finney)—all of it made sense to me.  Credit the writers as much as my own cleverness, but I do give myself some credit.

Maybe I should get a biology textbook, just to reinvigorate my interest in that general subject as well.  I’m more of a literal expert in that subject than I am in GR or quantum mechanics or mathematics, though, so maybe a basic college text would be too repetitive?  I don’t know.

I’m having a bit of trouble with my laptop today; Word has frozen up on me twice this morning, which is a bit frustrating.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.  I’m not sure how long I’ve had this laptop, but it’s been a few years, at least.  Ordinarily, I would think of getting a new one to replace it, but that seems like entirely too much work, and is rather pointless.  I don’t expect to write any more fiction.

The thing that led me to bring the laptop computer back with me last night was the thought of maybe at least rereading what I have so far of Outlaw’s Mind and maybe even DFandD.  I talked to my sister on Sunday and gave her a bit of a (probably rather tedious) rundown of how those stories, especially the former, interconnect with the larger universe of my books, including particularly The Chasm and the Collision, and the potential novel Changeling in a Shadow World, and other stories, all going back to the first novel I ever “finished”, back in high school—Ends of the Maelstrom—which I could probably recreate* if I had the gumption.  I certainly still know all the main characters’ names and stories and arcs and all.  I even remember my opening line:  “Horraban was happy now.”  I also remember my rather ominous ending, though not the precise words.

Many of the universes of my stories are connected to each other.  In effect, I suppose, they’re all connected via what the wizard in DFandD refers to as the “omniverse”.  I had long thought of it as the metaverse, but then Mark Fuckerberg arrogated that term to his pathetic attempt at virtual reality, and so I had to find another term.  I guess “omniverse” is actually more accurate and descriptive, but I thought the other sounded cooler.  Now it doesn’t.

Anyway, I have scads of potential stories I could write, some interconnected and some stand-alone, but I doubt that I will ever write any of them.  I just don’t have the energy nor do I have the motivation.  Merely going to work and getting back to the house uses up all the mental energy I have, and then some; much of my mental energy I need is sucked from my future, shortening my potential span of mental life as I go.

I suppose if some wealthy benefactor were to show up and offer to pay my expenses in return for getting me to write full time, I might do so.  Perhaps that could happen, but I won’t hold my breath, and I don’t encourage you to do so either.

In the meantime, though, here is the “video” from my last audio blog.  If you watch it on YouTube, please give a thumbs up, and subscribe, and share, and all that, if you’re at all willing to do so.  Thanks.

*It was 574 pages (and roughly 250,000 words, I think), handwritten on thin-ruled notebook paper, with many additions that ran into the margins, though some of these were tattered because I habitually ate paper from the edges of notebook sheets back then.  Anyway, I lost that original book when I lost all my belongings thanks to the depredations of the counties and state of Florida.  For that, I hold at least something of a grudge.

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A post triggered by an ongoing problem with WordPress comments

I’m writing this on Monday morning, on my smartphone, on the heels of an issue relating to WordPress*.  Apparently, there are people trying to leave comments on this blog on WordPress, and many of those comments are not actually appearing, which I know from experience can be very frustrating‒especially if it was a comment behind which there was any care and thought‒and which can lead commenters to wonder if they are being blocked.

Just to address that last point, I want to assure all you readers that I am not blocking comments.  I don’t know if I have ever blocked any comment on this blog.  If I have, it was quite a long time ago, and I don’t remember it.

The problem seems to be some manner of ongoing glitch in WordPress, one of which I think I too have been a victim on other sites.  You’d think they’d try to do a bit better for long-term, paying customers, but they appear to be too busy trying to add flashy, unwanted new things to keep up with the various brain-dead social media out there, but not paying enough attention just to keeping their basic functions running as smoothly as possible.

They call their workers “happiness engineers”, which is a cheesy enough title, but at least they could take that job title seriously and try to do what they can to engineer, effectively, the happiness of their customers.

If a bridge over a gorge had been built by civil engineers as reliable as these happiness engineers (to be fair, perhaps it’s really more of a management problem), I think I would be inclined to rappel down, then swim across, and then climb up to get to the other side, rather than driving or walking.  The Tay Bridge itself, subject of one of the worst disasters (and reputedly one of the worst poems) in early rail history, was not much more poorly engineered.

Or perhaps I should say “poorly executed”; again, I cannot be sure that it’s actually a problem with the happiness engineers so much as with the people making decisions at “higher” levels.  All the engineers I’ve known‒and all but one of my roommates at college and many of my other friends at the time were engineers or were at least in the engineering school at Cornell‒have been people who did not like solving a problem poorly if it could be avoided.

Of course, I don’t know how many of the people at WordPress have actual engineering degrees.  Presumably, there are at least some people with degrees in computer science and engineering at the company.  Then again, perhaps I shouldn’t so presume.  After all, “when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me”.

Anyway, I will at least put an inquiry in to WordPress about what might be happening, and it would be good if any of you who are account holders might inquire as well.

I hope you all had a decent (or better than decent) weekend.  Mine was not great; I’m still not feeling too well physically, and mentally I almost never feel very well for very long at a time.  I had a rather minor but personally large disappointment brought about by circumstance that I won’t get into specifically, but it reinforces the notion, which I make in my story “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, that hope is dangerous, particularly to a person who has tried to become used to and to embrace despair.

I am trying to do otherwise.  I dwell on the negative a lot, here, but I do try to do otherwise.  I’m damned if I know why I try; it’s probably just those stupid, mindless, biological drives and nothing more.  I wish I could rewrite my base code to blunt or eliminate those urges.

But then again, if I could rewrite my base code that way, I might as well rewrite myself to be happy and healthy, right?  Also, I could rewrite myself to be motivated and ambitious and charismatic, so I could become rich and powerful and immortal and eventually take over the world and even the universe!  I would make everything better than it is now, I can say that with little fear of contradiction.  Also, I want a unicorn pony with dragon wings that gets its sustenance by absorbing all the excess calories that I eat, so I never become overweight.

Anyway, my train will be coming soon, and I want to keep this relatively short.  I just want to apologize to the people who have tried to comment but have had difficulty doing so.  I hope you didn’t think I was ignoring you or that I had blocked you; I was not and had not.  I couldn’t honestly say that discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me**, but it is unpleasant, and I try to avoid it.  I don’t know if I’ll be writing or doing audio the rest of this week, but I will probably make my latest audio into a “video” at least.  In the meantime, try to keep your spirits up.

*Isn’t it interesting how the same preposition‒“on”‒can be used with reference to time, to things being used, and to metaphorical situations?  It’s interesting to me anyway.  Also, of course, it can literally be used to refer to placement, as in “I’m sitting on a bench.”  It could also be used for metaphorical placement, as in “I’m on top of the world”, but I have only rarely been in that state, and it’s been a very long time since the last occurrence‒the last time was 22 years ago, I think, though there were other good times somewhat more recently, at least up until about eleven years ago.  After that, pretty much everything has been shit.

**For one thing, that very phrase contradicts itself, since it’s speaking about how ugly one finds discourtesy.

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Morgoth, Arda, redemption, morality, and blame (not the name of a law firm)

I was out sick yesterday, but the following is audio I recorded this morning about ideas of redemption and recreation in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, especially as goes for beings and characters such as Melkor/Morgoth and Sauron and the like.  It’s a bit meandering, I fear, and it’s longer than other recent stuff has been, but please let me know if you find it interesting, and if you have any comments on the subject(s), or on such audio posts in general, I would be glad to receive your feedback. I’ll probably be turning it into a “video” eventually, for YouTube.  I don’t know, are those easier to partake of than the audio here on the blog?  Certainly the storage availability on YouTube is functionally unlimited, but I’m not yet anywhere near the limits of my personal storage here on WordPress yet, anyway.

This probably almost would count as a podcast, though I don’t know whether I feel comfortable arrogating that status to my measly ponderings.

Let me know what you think, please, and thank you.

Addendum:  Here is the link to In Deep Geek.  

I also highly recommend Nerd of the Rings.