Science Fiction

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“I said he’ll flip ya…flip ya for real.”

It’s Friday today, and though I am not a believer (and, more or less as I say in the meme below, I don’t want to be one, since I’m not impressed by “belief”) I will thank anyone and everyone who might be responsible for the fact that this is the end of my work week this week.  So, thank God it’s Friday, thank Cat it’s Friday, thank Frigg it’s Friday (thank Tony for his “Friggin’ Friday” comment), thank Cthulhu it’s Friday, thank Doom it’s Friday, thank Eru it’s Friday, thank Brahma it’s Friday…

I suspect that you get the idea.

Anyway, I’m very tired and need some rest.  It’s not that it’s been a particularly onerous week; it hasn’t really been.  If anything, it is I who has been more onerous than usual this week even than I usually am.  But I don’t think I’ve been much more onerous than usual.

I suppose that it’s up to those around me to say how much of a burden I’ve been, but I know their answers would be inconsistent and pretty confabulated.  This is not intended to insult them; it’s just the nature of human accounts of things that have happened to them when they are asked without having been paying attention to those things (in particular) in the first place.

Nature didn’t create a brain that keeps a running measure of its mood in relation to each individual around them, like some endless EEG plot.  What would be the use of such a function in the natural world?  Even if useful, would the use be worth the inevitable cost?  And could the drunken walk of the blind idiot god Evolution ever stumble upon such a process even if it were useful?

Well, given infinite time, it probably could, but we haven’t had infinite time to explore the space of possible biological innovations, and we probably will not have it.

Anyway, the point is, as Louis C K pointed out, it’s not up to me whether I’m being an asshole, at least not according to the impressions of others.  And I guess it’s not up to me whether others feel I am onerous or not.

Then again, it’s not up to them whether I consider myself to be a burden or not.  And I have the only front-row seats to me.  I am the one (and only) who is with me all the time*.

And consider something else:  all my meandering oddness (oddity?) that is on display here is me when I am tired, slowed down by literal decades of insufficient sleep.  Imagine how irritating I might be if I were fully rested and energetic!

Don’t make the mistake of imagining that it would necessarily make me calmer and more sedate.  I knew me back in the years when I used to get much more adequate sleep (though I have always slept less than most anyone else in my family).  I was not particularly sedate or calm then.

In closing, I’ll mention a weird thought that occurred to me when I was looking in the mirror (another daily burden) after my shower.  In principle, if one were picked up out of 3D space into 4D space, rotated in the proper way while there, then set down in 3D space again, one would be physically mirror-reversed***.

This would be a big problem, and not just because other people would be freaked out in subtle ways.  Every chiral molecule in one’s body would also be flipped from ortho to sinister, left to right (and vice versa).  That means you would need to eat similarly flipped food****, because your biological molecules only work on one version of most molecules.

Also, your DNA (which has chirality in spades) would be rotated in the other direction, so you certainly couldn’t reproduce.  But you couldn’t build new cells anyway, because many of the requisite molecules in that process are chiral.

Even your neutrinos/W and Z particles would behave differently, because this is one force/process in nature that is not parity-symmetric.  Meaning there is in a sense a handedness to the way the weak force acts.

Of course, that’s also the case with electromagnetism, come to think of it.  There is the famous “right hand rule” for how magnetic fields occur in response to changing electric fields/moving currents, and how electric fields respond to changing magnetic fields (see Maxwell’s equations).

So, heck, if you were so flipped, you might not even be able to interact with the electroweak sector of the quantum fields of our universe, and you might fall apart immediately at the subatomic level.  It would depend very much on whether such constraints are carried along with the stuff of one’s body or if they are imposed (and reimposed) by the fields in the universe around it.

I don’t even know what would happen with electric charge or hypercharge or spin or whatnot.  It almost makes me want to write Changeling in a Shadow World.  But I doubt that will happen.

With that weird stream of consciousness, I will let you go for the week.  I won’t be writing any new posts before Monday, exclusis improvisis.

*At least I’m the only one with a nervous system.  I suppose my skin and gut flora are with me all the time, but as far as I know, they don’t think in any reasonable sense.  Also, can any of them really be said to be with me always?  Their dividing/reproducing rates are very high compared to a human (or humanoid) lifetime, after all.  I guess it depends upon whether I consider a bacterium that undergoes mitosis to be two new organisms or just one increased organism that is continuous**.  Both options are reasonable and plausible, and nature doesn’t appear to care, outside the minds of humans, how such things are considered.

**This implies, in a sense, that all life on Earth could honestly be considered one organism, since there appears to have been one ultimate common ancestor to us all.  Thus, Life would really be a (so far) immortal organism.  I think that’s actually a pretty reasonable way to look at things, and it’s very much a sort of larger-scale, fractally self-similar pattern to how a human body is initiated with one cell−the “ensouled zygote” as I once mockingly made a meme about, after deciding it would be a good name for a band.

***If this is difficult to imagine, consider it in lower-dimensions.  Imagine an asymmetrical trapezoid in Abbot’s Flatland, with one of its two “legs” different than the other.  If it were picked up into three dimensions, flipped over, and then put back down, its asymmetry would now be in the other direction, and other Flatlanders might no longer even recognize it.

****This is part of why the possibility of being eaten by aliens, or of them eating us, makes little sense.  If you tried to eat food from an alien ecosystem, it would at best just go through you unabsorbed, and at worst would give you potentially fatal indigestion.  All your digestive processes are honed to work on other biological substances that occur within the ecosystem that evolved on Earth.  And this entails many lock-and-key enzymes and molecules that digest depending on chirality.  This was part of the motivation behind creating left-handed sugar and left-handed fat, which might physically behave similarly and perhaps even smell or taste somewhat the same, but would not be absorbed.  But such products almost inevitably lead to digestive troubles at best.

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“He had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame”

It’s the day of the moon today.  By which I am not referring to Doctor Who, series 6, episode 2 (the second part of a two-parter) which was called The Day of the Moon, if memory serves.  That was a good episode, and it tied into a long arc of a storyline that Stephen Moffat had put into motion in series 4, when he wasn’t even the show runner yet.  But it has nothing to do with my first sentence, today.

No, I am simply referring to the fact that this is Monday, the weekday named (in English and some other languages) for the moon.  It’s also the last day of August in 2026.

I occasionally wonder, what if Tsukino Usagi, AKA Sailor Moon, recognized that her name was associated with the first day of the work week (and of the school week).  I wonder this because Usagi is notoriously not fond of having to go to school.  She’s also something of a crybaby, and I can just imagine her lamenting the fact that her Sailor Senshi name is linked to the start of the work week.  I can also imagine her being jealous of Sailor Venus, since in Spanish at least, that is associated with Friday (Viernes).  Sailor Venus probably wouldn’t care.

And it also only just occurred to me to wonder what had happened to Sailor Pluto once Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet*.  I mean, if she’s really more associated with the God of the Underworld than with the now-dwarf planet, as does seem to be the case in the manga and anime, then I guess it’s fine.

Perhaps Sailor Pluto wryly smiled and shook her head indulgently upon learning that the humans had named a very small, very icy object among countless other similar objects, with a highly eccentric orbit that isn’t even in the same plane as that of the planets, after her namesake.  And she might indulgently shrug upon hearing of the more recent reclassification.  She probably didn’t care much, but she might well have known.  She was one of the Sailor Senshi who never seemed really to revert to a truly mortal form nor to have been reincarnated as a normal human.

Okay, well, that was a weird little discursion that handily demonstrates some aspects of my rather niche nerd status.  I went from Doctor Who right over to Sailor Moon (while making passing references to planetary astronomy).  That’s fine, though.  I really like both…series, sagas, stories?  I’m not sure the best word to use to encompass them both.  Perhaps “universes” is good.

It does annoy me that we now use the word “universe” when referring to things that might be merely one of many, of perhaps infinite, things, when “uni” means one**, with the implication that it is the only one.  I wish we could find a better term, so we could go back to using Universe, with the inherent capital “U”, to refer to whatever encompasses everything.

I had intended to use the term “metaverse” in my own stories, such as The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, that dealt with many planes and subsections of existence, but then Fuckerberg stole the term.  And I did start thinking about it and using it way before he arrogated it to his pathetic little virtual empire.  Then I had to switch to “Omniverse”, which may actually be a more accurate term than Metaverse, but it doesn’t sound as good in my opinion.

So, yeah, now (even in legitimate physics) there is the general use of (small u) universes, which is almost inherently contradictory.  Many Worlds may be better, but its a little nonspecific.  There are, many worlds, many worlds just in our solar system.

Maybe the term “polyverse” might work?  Perhaps “facets”?  I don’t know.  I suppose it doesn’t matter much.  It’s just me dwelling on and being bothered by things that don’t really even register to most other people.  Thoughts unlike those of my brethren, indeed.

I hope you have a great day.

*I was resistant to the notion when I first heard about it, from my kids as it turns out.  But I looked into it, and I heard the arguments‒perhaps most accessibly addressed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson‒and I was convinced.  It turns out that the international astronomical community doesn’t lightly go and change the designation of something, knowing there will be many pissed off Boomers and Gen-Xers (Hello!), but does so only with very well thought-out reasons.

**Though, to refer to cartoons again, Uni was also the name of the little unicorn on which the barbarian character doted in the cartoon Dungeons and Dragons from way back when.

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Each paragraph in this post begins with a vowel. This pattern STARTED as an an accident…

Ugh.  I don’t feel quite well this morning.  I woke up in the middle of the night almost throwing up, which was also associated with almost choking on my near-vomit and coughing for quite some time while still feeling queasy.  I think I ate something that didn’t agree with me, as they say.

Either that, or it could have been one (or more) of my medications (all OTC) that gave me trouble, because I took more of them than usual yesterday; it was quite a bad pain day for me.

Oh, yeah, and my coworker was out sick as well, and therefore I was a bit more run around than usual despite having a bad pain day.  So, that wasn’t very good.  It hasn’t been a very good week either, overall, even by my standards, which are not exactly stellar.

On the other hand (he said with uncharacteristic optimism), at least that means that next week is likely to be better than this week.  This is yet another example of the phenomenon of regression to the mean, which I discussed here recently.

Anyway, at least today is Friday, and I am not working tomorrow.  Having the weekend off is something of a mixed blessing, of course.  It’s definitely good for me to get the extra bit of rest, which I need mentally even more than physically.  But the increased isolation that is an inescapable part of me being off work can have a bad impact on my mood.

And as I think I’ve noted here before recently, my various distractions are losing their capacity to distract.  I haven’t been reading or playing music/singing or listening to songs or to podcasts or to audio books.  And I need to search increasingly widely to find YouTube videos that grab my attention even briefly.

Of course, I have whole playlists of videos related to science and to mathematics and to autism and what have you, full of videos I thought looked interesting at the time, and which would probably be interesting, at least in principle, if I were to start watching them now.  But I cannot seem presently to summon up the energy, the interest, even to start a single one of them.

Again, it’s been a particularly bad week for me.  Maybe it was triggered, or influenced, by my long walk in the high heat and my associated sunburn from Sunday.  I suspect that took more out of me than I realized at the time.  I particularly wonder if the sunburn might have been worse than I thought.  Certainly my skin is peeling all over my forehead, nose, and neck.

Alas, there’s not much I can do about it now other than, potentially, to learn from it.  For instance, this weekend, since I don’t work, I can do my things that require walking quite a bit earlier, when it’s cooler, and I can also make sure to wear sunscreen when I do.  At least I do tend always to remember to bring water, and even if I don’t bring it, there are dozens of places where I can buy some along my routes.

Okay, here’s a little aside that occurred to me as I contemplated my own frustration at having to use the stupid smartphone (ha ha) keyboard.  It seems, from what I have heard, that Steve Jobs et al were inspired to try to create the touchpad for the iPhone and related products by watching Star Trek:  The Next Generation when he was younger.

I watched that show, too, after initially being prudishly defiant about it because I loved and supported “original” Trek.  Before long I loved the new show.  But even back then, I thought the concept of their various screens, which had no fixed controls and no actual keys to press and so on, looked revolting.  I hated the idea.  I likewise hated the notion of reading from the flat computer screens, or the handheld screens as was often the case; I thought it looked terrible.

I could see that it would be quite useful, however, and that it would be only too handy not only to be able to bring up whatever pages or diagrams or whatever one needed on the screen but to have variability of controls on a screen, so the same surface could fulfill many purposes.  I could tell how useful it might be, and I could sort of feel the inescapability of it at some level, and aesthetically, it kind of turned my stomach.

And I thought to myself (just now) that if I could avert the existence of the stupid touch-screen crap, but to do so I would have to allow TNG never to have come into existence…

…I think I might choose to let Star Trek go.

Admittedly, some of this verdict is probably related to the fact that I spent a lot of time watching NextGen with my (now-ex) wife, starting from quite early in our relationship.  So, I don’t watch it anymore, not on reruns or whatever else, because that pain outweighs the pleasure by quite a bit.

In addition, there are many songs and shows and movies and musicals and even books in which I do not partake anymore, because they remind me of my ex and all things associated with my ex, and they make me feel very sad and lonely.

Unbelievable:  that “aside” took up more info-space than the rest of this post entirely!

I suppose that happened with Shakespeare sometimes, too, so I shouldn’t feel too bad.  But, of course, I do.  Hey…it’s me after all.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you like, you can probably rather safely look forward to next week’s blogs being better than this week’s.

I know I do.

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Movie and comic book villains, some songs, weekend plans, and a slightly improving mood

Well, it’s Friday at long last, the end of the “official”* work week.  My mood is at least somewhat better than it has been previously this week; starting midmorning yesterday, my mood increased and I even became somewhat playful and a bit silly.  This was, hopefully, thanks to certain interventions I have undertaken, and not just because of some low-grade cycling of my mood.

As far as I know, I don’t have any form of bipolar disorder; certainly no therapist has even mentioned considering that as one of my issues.  Then again, none of them (to my recollection and knowledge) considered the possibility of undiagnosed ASD.  But I have, apparently, done quite a good job at masking over time.  Or so I believe.

Anyway, I’m not going to be working tomorrow after all (my improved mood long preceded my learning this fact).  In fact, I’m going to be getting together with my youngest to have a late Father’s Day outing.  That also came about hours and hours after my mood had improved, and after I had learned I would not be working.

That’s about as good as my life gets, and has gotten, in nearly a decade and a half, but it is quite good.  The only thing that might be better would be if my son were also coming, but I cannot get my hopes up about such things.  He does as he must.

I’ve lately taken to rubbing Aspercream™ with lidocaine all over the MCP joints and the interphalangeal joints of my thumbs, and it seems to be doing at least a little to ease the pain of my arthropathy therein.  This helped make me willing at least to try to play guitar (and sing) a little bit yesterday.  I was still a bit stiff, but it wasn’t too bad.  Mind you, I didn’t do anything particularly fancy; the Bach piece I’ve mentioned was the most challenging part of the session.

I have a whole repertoire of songs I can sing and for which I can play chords from memory.  It’s not a big playlist, but it’s there.  Ironically, it doesn’t include any of my songs, which I would have to relearn at this point!  That’s kind of sad, really.  But it is a weird thing that I’ve noticed, that once I’ve made and shared a video (or even just audio) of me doing a song, I tend to stop playing it at all.  It’s quite strange, at least to me.  Have any of you encountered anything like this?

This shouldn’t be confused with the general anhedonia I’ve been experiencing lately (not for the first time); that makes me not really interested in playing anything.  I also have not been able to find anything that I can keep reading for more than 10 or, at most, 20 minutes before getting bored of it**.

I’m trying to read something different now, so I downloaded some Star Trek and Star Wars novels from Kindle Unlimited, and we’ll see how they go.  Currently, I’m reading the novelization of Into Darkness, which I think was an underrated movie.  Did it play fast and loose with certain aspects of important characters from TOS?  Absolutely!  Even so, the surprise was fun, and the casting, I thought, was very good, as were the performances.

The book is by Alan Dean Foster, who is one of the most reliable science fiction authors out there.  He has written quite a few of the best novelizations of science fiction movies.

I also downloaded the novelization of The Wrath of Khan, one of my favorite movies.  I’ve read the book before (by Vonda McIntyre, who is at least as good, if not as prolific, as Foster), a long time ago, and it was good, so hopefully I’ll enjoy it again.

On a somewhat related note, as a very big fan of Doctor Doom, I am rather nervous about how he will be portrayed in the upcoming MCU movies.  He has been badly written so far in the movies that have featured him, though I thought Julian McMahon (RIP) was well cast and did what he could with the role.

But I’ve long said that if anyone wants to know how to portray Doom onscreen, there is a nearly perfect performance on which to model one’s acting, and that was Ricardo Montalban as Khan, especially in the movie (though the original Trek episode Space Seed is also great).  Khan is a lot like Doom, though he has a more sentimental, romantic aspect to his character (it’s the death of his wife that leads to his wrath in the movie, after all).  Still, the charisma, the brilliance, the arrogance (and, alas, the overconfidence and the tendency to be consumed by vendetta) match the best-written aspects of Doctor Doom’s character.

To be fair to Khan, he is kinder to his subordinates than Doom sometimes tends to be.  This, I think, is one of Doom’s biggest flaws.  Then again, I suspect Doom is “on the spectrum”, so he doesn’t necessarily really get how to manage people at a personal level, though as a national leader he is unsurpassed.

I know, I know, I’m being fanciful, but I really do love these characters.  They are bad guys, certainly, but they are not really evil, or at least not psychopathically selfish and shallow the way, say, Voldemort is.  I’ve said before, Doom and Batman are in many ways very similar characters.  Both have similar tragic backstories and are obsessively driven, implacable, indeed all but unstoppable, and neither of them has actual super powers (contrary to what was represented in the first two Fantastic Four movies).

I wish Julian McMahon had a chance to play a well-written Doctor Doom, because I thought he was an excellent casting choice (and I’m pretty sure Ricardo Montalban was not available).

Okay, I’ll draw things to a close for the day and for the week.  As a parting “bonus”, I’ll embed below some old audio files (NOT high quality recordings – lots of clipping and some flubs and occasional pitchiness) of songs I have recorded me practicing and singing, just for fun, in case you’re interested.

I hope you all have a nice Friday and a good weekend.  There’s a big sporting event on Sunday, I think; if you like those kinds of things, why not take that in?

Sore dewa.

Nothing Compares 2U – originally by Prince

Karma Police – Radiohead

Just the Way You Are – Billy Joel

Here, There, and Everywhere – the Beatles

Here Comes the Sun – the Beatles

Desperado – Eagles

Fake Plastic Trees – Radiohead

Julia – the Beatles

*I’m not sure what exact office might be involved in that determination, but whataya gonna do?

**Though I have been doing some exercises on Brilliant dot Org lately, focusing for the moment on vectors and working into matrices and related stuff, with an eye toward General Relativity.

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Had I but pens enough, and time…

Here we go again, again.  It’s Monday‒the last one in April this year‒and I’m writing another effing blog post.

I keep trying weird little things in the hope that they engender or otherwise encourage something positive in my life.  For instance, after briefly using a blue Bic® Round Stic™ pen on Friday, I realized that I had on some level missed writing with them.

I wrote Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision, and the “short story” Paradox City all with blue and/or black medium Bic™ Round Stic® pens.  These were the only ones available through commissary up at FSP.  After a while, the guys who did tattoos would just give me new ones to use as long as I gave them back when empty/traded an empty one for the new one, so they could use them to make tattoo guns, and I went through such pens pretty quickly.

I thought to myself (since I have trouble thinking to anyone else*) that maybe if I started using these pens regularly again, I might help give myself the energy to start doing some new fiction writing.  So, I ordered a box of them, which is at least quite inexpensive, and I have one in my pocket now.

It’s a fairly childish notion, perhaps, but just because something is childish does not mean it’s wrong or bad.  Adults get rid of too many childish things‒sometimes on the advice of effing Saul of Tarsus of all the pathetic losers to whom to listen‒and adopt too many “adultish” things that are no more sensible, not as rewarding, and are reliably productive of negative outcomes.

Of course, some childish things do need to be left behind.  Ideally, one does not want to keep believing in Santa Claus or monsters in the closet or that stepping on a crack will break your mother’s back any longer than one must.  Wetting the bed is also worth stopping as early as one can.

But it can be good for one to keep asking questions about how things work and what they are and what they do and how they got to be the way they are, and being delighted in seeing and learning new things, and enjoying simple games and going outside and stuff like that.

Anyway, I doubt this particular choice of pens will actually get me to write any fiction again, but maybe it will at least feel good to use them again for a while.

As you know, I have at least a few stories, such as Outlaw’s Mind and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado that I have started that I’d like to finish, and I have some other stories on the back burner that I’d like to start and write.  If I could just find a patron to support me while I write, so I didn’t have to do anything else, I could probably do it.  But despite its name, even Patreon doesn’t really work that way.

People who support “creators” on Patreon pay regular, specified amounts and expect regular, piecemeal output (like daily blogs, for instance, though being the intellectually stunted populace that we are, people more often seem to want video stuff).  If I put up a Patreon, or a “Go fund me” thing (whatever the proper term for that is) I doubt that I would get a lot of people supporting me and just waiting while I work on a long form writing project.

If anyone wants to do that, and is able to do it, let me know.  Just remember, I’m slightly paranoid, so I will probably suspect some scam at first if you approach me‒unless I already know you, of course.

All of this is really just fantasizing, obviously.  I might as well request that the person who wants to be my patron for writing fiction is also a beautiful woman who is just my type (whatever that might be) and who wants to be in a long-term relationship with me.  Oh, and also, she owns a dragon, as well as an FTL spaceship.  Hey, maybe she’s a Time Lord and has her own TARDIS!

Actually, if I had the use of a TARDIS, it would probably distract me completely from writing fiction.  But I probably wouldn’t spend as much time (har) just traveling and having adventures as most of, for instance, the Doctor’s companions do.  I would want to learn how this technology works!

I don’t understand why none of the people who enter the TARDIS and gape at the whole “bigger on the inside” thing don’t right then and there ask how it works!  (Occasionally some do so, rather halfheartedly).

And when the trite little, dismissive answers such as Nardole gives are offered, they should say, “No, no, I mean how does it actually work?  What is the science and technology involved, how is it carried out and maintained?  What is the physics underlying it, how was it discovered, how was it harnessed?  Do you have any primers on that, any online courses, any textbooks, even any ‘how does it work’ for kids books?  And for that matter, how does the time stream and everything work, how is it traversed, what is the physics behind the functioning of the TARDIS?  We’ll get to the biology of regeneration in due time, but I want to understand all this.  To Hell with going and fighting Daleks or whatever, you can literally do that whenever you feel like, because you have a time machine!”

I guess it wouldn’t be a very fun show, just to watch someone studying Time Lord science and technology, but in real life, if I had access, I like to think that’s how I would spend a lot of my time.  And I think I think correctly.

All right, that’s enough stupid fantasizing for today, wouldn’t you say?  None of those or any other good things are likely to happen to me (some are far more probable than others, but none are worth betting on).

I am much more likely to keep developing new and harder to control pain and more frequently recurring and persistent pain and greater and greater frustration and despondency and depression until finally, at long last, it kills me.  Then, at least, everyone in the universe overall will be just a little bit happier.  On average, anyway.

*Though in a certain sense, this blog is an instance of me thinking to other people.  But that requires the other people to be active participants, and it certainly cannot be done all day every day or any such thing. 

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Discussions of my “first draft” styles and a bit of shameful self-promotion

I wrote yesterday’s post on my miniature laptop computer‒what I call a “lapcom” if you remember, and even if you don’t‒and today I am writing this on my smartphone, because I didn’t feel like lugging the lapcom when I left the office.  It’s not done deliberately (by me), but I am curious about something.

You see, to my surprise, yesterday’s post appears to have been rather popular and successful.  I say “to my surprise” because to me it felt rather disjointed and erratic and like it didn’t go anywhere.  I’m not sure why that is or to what it is in response, or indeed, whether it was merely a fluctuation in a chaotic system and had nothing whatsoever to do with any particular thing I had done.

Still, as you may know, I do feel that I write differently when using different tools for doing it.  On the lapcom, I tend more easily to run off at the page, if you will, because typing on a word processor is just so easy and natural for me.  That doesn’t necessarily make the writing better, though.  I fear that I get too verbose sometimes.

And, of course, writing on the smartphone is less fluid, more cumbersome.  It also tends to exacerbate the arthropathy in my thumbs, for what are probably obvious reasons.

Pen and paper‒for first drafts, anyway‒ is certainly my most long-standing method of writing, and I don’t think I tend to get quite as carried away with that as with typing.  I suspect, but don’t by any means know for certain, that the things I write by pen and paper‒the fiction, at least‒are somewhat better, or at least more fun, than what I write on either a phone or a computer.

Here’s a bit of a rundown.  The following stories I wrote by hand in the first draft, having no other options:  Mark Red, The Chasm and the Collision, and my long short story Paradox City.  I also wrote my stories House Guest and Solitaire with paper and pen, the latter in one sitting, the former way back in high school.

I wrote the first draft of Son of Man at least partly on a very small smartphone that I really liked.

The Vagabond is a bit of a mixed bag.  I started it while at university, and finished the first draft while in med school.  Part of the first draft was written by hand (i.e., with pen on paper) but most of it was written on a Mac SE using the good old word processing program WriteNow.  Does anyone out there remember that one?

The rest of my stories, at least the published ones, were written on mini laptop computers (well, some here and there would have been on full-sized ones) from the beginning.  Most notable of these, perhaps, is Unanimity, which is very long.  But many of my “short stories” were written on regular keyboards, including the other two stories in Welcome to Paradox City, and my “short” stories, Prometheus and Chiron, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, Hole for a Heart, Penal Colony, Free Range Meat, and In the Shade, the latter of which‒like House Guest‒appears only in my collection Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Oh, right, and of course Outlaw’s Mind, Extra Body, and The Dark Fairy and the Desperado have all been written (so far) on the lapcom.

If anyone out there has read a sampling of some of these, or all of them, and can give me any considered feedback on any overall difference in quality between the means of writing, pros and cons, I would certainly appreciate it.

And if any of you haven’t read any of the above, well…what are you waiting for?  If you’re a fan of fantasy/sci-fi/horror, you might like some or all of my stuff.  If you’re not sure where to start, by all means, I’ll give you recommendations based on your personal preferences, if I can.

I suspect that The Chasm and the Collision would have the broadest popular appeal, especially for people who like the Harry Potter books and similar stories.  Son of Man is probably my purest science fiction story, but this is not “space opera” type science fiction.  “I for one welcome my new computer overlords” is basically science fiction*, too, in case the title didn’t clue you in.

Everything else is horror of one kind or another.  Most of my horror is supernatural in one sense or another, and I veer into the borders of Lovecraft’s universes in at least two stories**.  Mark Red is supernatural and in some senses horror-adjacent, since it involves vampires and so on, but it’s really more a teen/young-adult supernatural adventure, a story originally intended to be a manga.

My darkest story has no supernatural elements in it at all.  That’s Solitaire; it can be had in stand-alone form for Kindle, and it also appears in the middle of Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

Well, that’s been about as much self-promotion as I think I’ve ever done here before.  I didn’t really intend to do it, but once I got going on discussing my various story drafts, it just seemed to go that way.  I hope I haven’t been too insufferable.  I’m really not a raving egomaniac, though I may be some other type of raving maniac.

I hope you all have a good day.

*And I guess Extra Body is sort of light-hearted sci-fi.  It’s even somewhat comical, as my story If the Spirit Moves You is a sort of supernatural comedy (expect no laugh-out-loud moments, though, since they are dry comedy at most).

**The Death Sentence, which appears in Welcome to Paradox City, and In the Shade, mentioned above and in my other collection.

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Thoughts on real versus virtual keyboards, books, and quantum teleportation

It’s Friday, and I’m writing this post on my mini laptop computer, because although yesterday I forgot it and had to use the smartphone, it was really quite nice the other day to be able to type for real and not tap around on some simulated keyboard with no aesthetic appeal, on which one cannot feel the keys responding to one’s touch (and which gives this one arthritic pain in the base of his thumbs).

I remember when the notion of such a virtual keyboard first appeared to me—this was in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I thought the idea seemed terribly unsatisfactory despite being very clever.  I mean, I recognized the efficiency of it, but when the characters would read books and such things on their little portable “tablets”, it seemed almost heartbreaking.

Obviously, in a star ship in deep space, they’re not going to have room for a vast physical library such as the virtual one they clearly have in the ship’s computer.  It’s much like the fact that I have many more books in my Kindle library than I have in my physical living space (though I used to have way more physical books than I have current Kindle books).  But something is lost a bit, nevertheless, at least for me, with such virtual collections.

Actually, it just occurred to me:  in Star Trek, they use replicators to make their food and so on, applying the transporter technology to reproduce scanned items that include food.  Why could they not use that to replicate books as needed, then scan them away when they were done?

Of course, the quantum mechanics of potential real world transporter-type technology is such that you couldn’t mass produce anything from “scanning” any one particular item; as part of the required entanglement process for quantum teleportation, one destroys the quantum states of the particles in the original item (or person, if it’s a person, so Dr. McCoy was right to be leery of the transporter).

Also, the entangled particles used to reconstruct the item by creating a new set of particles in identical quantum states to the original, could not be kept in their transitional states indefinitely; such states are not inherently stable.  Even if they could be maintained thanks to advanced technology, once they were used to recreate the original item or person, those entangled particles would also have their own quantum states irreparably altered, and could not be used to make another copy.

You can never make more than one copy of a thing sent by quantum teleportation, The Enemy Within notwithstanding*.

Still, maybe the people in TNG could “scan” a bunch of real books, as if about to transport them using the ship’s transporters, and just…save them for later.  You couldn’t make multiple copies, again because the originals would not still exist after being scanned—as I noted before, such scanning destroys the initial quantum states of all the constituents of the scanned item (or person).  But they could just be singly stored in the “buffer”, saving the quantum state of the entangled particles used to apply quantum teleportation.

But wait, I hear you say, storing all those books “in transition” would entail a tremendous amount of stored quantum information that would need to be maintained in its entangled state indefinitely, at presumably great cost in data and energy.  Not only that, one would have to have the equivalent of the mass of those items in the ship at all times, no matter** what.

You are very clever, and you are, of course, correct; it wouldn’t be efficient in any sense, and would add to the power requirements of the ship.  Also, in any serious disruption of the ship’s stability and power—such as happens in nearly every episode, so more than twenty times a year on average—much of that quantum information would probably be lost.

Maybe it really doesn’t make practical sense to try to do such a thing.  After all, I’m the person who has bemoaned the incredible data wastage necessary to store audio, let alone video, files rather than the much more efficient written word.  And I have not changed my mind on that set of subjects.  I could record a video, or even an audio, of me reading the words of this blog post, and it would have a file size in the hundreds of K at least; for a video, it would probably be many megabytes in size.

Meanwhile, my average blog posts, as stored in Word, are 16 to 20 K in size.  It’s quite a difference.  Even just using the RAM of this small computer (4 gigabytes) I could load up as many as a quarter of a million blog posts (assuming nothing else were in the random-access memory, which in not the way things work).  That’s about 250 million words.  Even I am unlikely to write that much during my lifetime.

More importantly, with the written word no one has to look at my ugly mug (though I will admit that my voice is absolutely lovely, so it might be worth hearing any audio file I produce…Ha-ha, just kidding).

Anyway, as I noted, it’s Friday, and I’m almost certain we’re not working tomorrow—I’m inclined to say that, even if the office is open, I’m not working tomorrow, but I tend not to follow through on such ultimata, because I’m a pushover—so there won’t be another post until Monday, at the earliest (barring, as always, the unforeseen).

I hope you all have a good weekend, but at least I know, as I pointed out yesterday, that you will have the best weekend you possibly can, since whatever happens becomes inevitable as soon as it happens, and it may have always been so (if quantum superdeterminism is correct).  Of course, that means you will also have the worst weekend possible.  But for most weekends, that’s a comfort.  For most such weekends, you could honestly say, “Well, if that was the worst weekend I could possibly have had, it’s not so bad.”

Usually, you could honestly say and feel that.  And it’s very likely that this weekend will be one such usual weekend.

Have a good one.

*In any case, that episode is really more of a fable than anything truly science fiction.  It assumes a bizarre kind of dualism between body and mind and a further, cleanly divisible dualism even in the mind itself, which in the episode is split into discrete but very broad personality aspects that can be separated out into different bodies.  It’s an interesting exploration of the tension between aspects of a person’s character, and engages speculation about whether a dark/violent side is a necessary aspect for a good leader.

**No pun intended, but I’m leaving it.

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Extra Body: Chapter 12

As Albert began the luxurious climb back to consciousness, he became aware that, during his sleep—a duration he didn’t yet know—Walter had indeed not finished unlocking the first lock on his door.  In fact, just after Albert had drifted off, Walter had found that his tension, his anger, his jealousy, and his hostility had all started to wane.  His nervous system quickly went from reckless agitation to a state of real calm, of equanimity.

Walter looked down at himself, kneeling before Albert’s door, holding and attempting to use a set of lockpicking tools he had once ordered from Amazon out of curiosity, but which he had never been able to master.  He pulled the torsion bar and the pick out of the lower lock, looked at them, and thought, “What am I even doing?” Continue reading →

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Extra Body: Chapter 11

Roughly an hour had passed since Albert had last left the bathroom.  He had eaten, and he had drunk his cup of coffee, and he was quietly scrolling through some of the stories on the Google news page, when a feeling of strange disquiet rather suddenly grew upon him.

He lifted his head from his contemplation of his home computer screen and looked around.  His small living space was fairly well circumscribed, and almost all of it was in view from any other point within it.  There really was no place for anyone or anything to hide—at least, nothing much larger than a spider or an occasional roach.

Nevertheless, he felt a sense of unseen threat, or at least some worry, developing.  He looked down at his forearms and was mildly surprised to see them riddled with goosebumps. Continue reading →

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Extra Body: Chapter 10

Albert awakened quite early the next morning, which wasn’t much of a surprise, considering that—as he now realized—he had gone to bed barely an hour after getting home from work and had fallen asleep not long after that.  At some point it seemed he had laid the book he’d been reading on his bedside table, though he didn’t recall doing so.

He looked at his bedside clock—a relic of sorts that he kept despite the fact that he could use his cell phone or computer for the same purposes it served.  It was just before six in the morning.  It was good that he hadn’t actually needed to get up in the middle of the night to check on the response to the question he was supposedly going to ask, based on what he had told Walter.  He had certainly not set any alarm. Continue reading →