writing

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Learning about science, troubles with reading and socialization, and (not) writing fiction

It’s Saturday morning, and boy was yesterday’s audio blog a little weird.  I think it’s not so much that I said anything particularly weird—certainly not for me—but rather the odd meanderings thing took, from musing on the fact that I’ve been losing any joy of any kind in my life, becoming more and more bored or even irritated by more and more things that used to be interesting, on to the various declining cinematic universes and finally to thoughts about General Relativity.

At least that latter part encouraged me to read some material and watch some relatively hard-core YouTube videos about General Relativity and its mathematics.  By “hard-core”, I don’t mean there was any graphic sex involved.  First of all, I don’t think they allow stuff like that on YouTube, but even more to the point, I don’t see how one could work such a thing into an educational video about matrices and tensors and stuff like that.  I mean “hard-core” as in being more in-depth than just a general information, analogy kind of educational presentation, and especially that it talked about the mathematics underlying the science.

Not that I’m against the more general stuff.  I certainly began all of my interest in science with general knowledge/information.  When I was a kid, growing up (which is what kids do if things go well), I had a whole bookshelf I called my “science shelf” full of various kid-level books about everything from biology to paleontology (there were lots of dinosaur books—my first career ambition was to be a paleontologist) to “how things work” kinds of books and so on.

I didn’t really start to have as much physics and astronomy related material until after Cosmos came out.  That show was the reason our family got our first color TV.  I also asked for (and received) a hardcover copy of the book for my 10th or 11th birthday (it came out in 1980, I think, so it should have been 10th), and I was very pleased.  That book and show really triggered my love of space-oriented and physics-oriented science, including—of course—cosmology.

I chose my undergraduate college precisely because it was where Carl Sagan was a professor, though I never did meet him.  I would have thought it presumptuous and appalling to try to seek him out and bother him with gestures of my admiration and thanks.  I tend to feel that way about inflicting myself upon anybody—friend, foe, or stranger.  I just feel that I don’t have any right to intrude upon anyone else’s life or time, and also that I frankly don’t know what to say if I do meet them.

It’s a bit sad, though.  By most accounts, Professor Sagan tended to be quite pleasant and positive toward people who liked his work, and he considered himself—according to him—first and foremost a teacher.  He certainly taught me a great deal.  Though his books are now somewhat out of date, they are mostly still great repositories of fact and interest, and they remain overflowing founts of wonder.  I feel confident in recommending them to anyone, most prominently Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot, and especially The Demon-Haunted World.

Of course, I’ve read a lot of his intellectual descendants since then, and his cousins as well in other fields (Stephen Jay Gould’s and Richard Dawkins’s books and collections about biology are wonderful, too, for instance).  One thing I like about listening to podcasts that focus on ideas is that the guests are often people who have recently (or not-so-recently) written books, and if the subject is interesting I can read their books to get more deeply into their work.  I first encountered David Deutsch and Max Tegmark (and many others) on Sam Harris’s podcast, for instance.

And, of course, I have also read books by Brian Greene and Sean Carroll (and others) about physics in general.  It was to The Big Picture that I turned yesterday after my audio blog, in addition to the aforementioned video, to review some of the mathematical basics of General Relativity.  From there, maybe I’ll go on to the YouTube videos of Leonard Susskind’s* real graduate level lectures at Stanford, and to reading Sean Carroll’s textbook.  I’d also like to read through Zee’s Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, which I’ve mentioned before (with the thought of going on to his textbook if I can).

I have Zee’s layperson-oriented book in hardcover, but the print is small, and it’s difficult to read.  Still, I took delivery yesterday of a new set of reading glasses that are slightly stronger than the ones I was using, so I hope they’ll make it easier.  I’d really prefer to learn by reading than even by watching videos.

Of course, all this is probably just “pie in the sky” thinking.  My biggest difficulty is just summoning the will, the energy, to do these things.  It’s similar to the trouble I have with writing fiction.  I have quite a few story ideas I could write, but I have no drive, no desire to do the writing.  There’s no percentage in it, so to speak.  It’s not as though I have any fans out there telling me how much they like my books and want more.  I mean, my sister has read them all, and she liked at least most of them, and says she really liked The Chasm and the Collision.  That’s very nice, and I do appreciate it.  Apparently, though, it’s not the required stimulus for me to want to write more fiction.

Perhaps nothing would be.  Perhaps I’m just deteriorating too much, or have deteriorated too much.

Or perhaps it’s that I feel that a truly tiny minority even of people who engage with fiction do so in written form nowadays.  There’s too much competing immediate gratification out there, and primates—probably almost all life forms—are prone to fall for immediate gratification, and to someone else doing the imaginative work for them.

I fear that much of the general population has allowed their personal imaginations to atrophy, much as physical health atrophies when someone goes everywhere by car.  People even play Dungeons & Dragons online now, apparently.  That seems weird to me.  I don’t think I could really stand to play role playing games with strangers.  Playing them with my friends, as I did back in junior high and high school, for countless hours, was greatly enjoyable, and I think it did exercise and improve my imagination and my story-telling and story-creating “muscles”.

Oh, well.  I don’t have anyone with whom to do any of that stuff now, and I can’t even really imagine trying to find new people with whom to do it—see my above discussion about inflicting myself on people for part of the reason, but that’s not the only one.  I also don’t want to invest the considerable necessary stress and effort and anxiety into trying to find friends with whom I actually share interests—if such people even exist—and then have it all go sour or just go away as nearly every other relationship of any kind that I’ve ever had has done.  The juice, however delicious, is not worth that old vice-grip-on-the-testicles (and on all the joints and tips of one’s fingers) level squeeze.  The juice doesn’t last, anyway.

I’m on the train now, and I’m not exactly producing anything edifying, am I?  I’ll bring this week’s writing to an end, but I hope I’ll have the will to keep studying, at least.  And, of course, I hope most fervently and sincerely that all of you have a very good weekend.

*I also have his series The Theoretical Minimum in kindle and/or paperback and/or hardback form; his most recent one was about GR.  But I’ve had trouble reading physical books of any kind (let alone the Suss kind…ha ha) lately; I’m hoping my new reading glasses will help that.

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This is NOT a quote from Shakespeare (as far as I know)

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the first of February in 2024 (AD or CE) and I’m writing a blog post for the day even though I’m not at all sure of any good reason to do so.  I even began it in the traditional way (“Hello and good morning”) in which I have usually started my Thursday blogs, going back to when Thursday was the only day of the week I wrote them, reserving all other days for writing fiction.

I don’t think I’m going to do a modified Shakespeare quote for the title, today, though.  It’s too much of a pain and takes too long, since all of the most obvious ones have already been used.  I suppose I might change my mind before the time I publish this, in which case, you will already know, though I do not know as I’m writing it.

As the 11th Doctor said:  “Time travel; you can’t keep it straight in your head.”

Yesterday’s blog post title was an actual quote from the song I referenced in the footnote.  It’s a good song (off OK Computer).  Radiohead did an amazing job making sounds that were evocative of the notion of aliens and the like, and it has the wonderful little riff at the beginning and end.

That album really is one of the greatest albums ever.  It’s not a concept album.  Radiohead is too eclectic a band, I think, ever to try to make a concept album, though their albums tend to have an internal cohesiveness to them.  They often are very careful and strict about the order in which to put their songs, and which ones to include.

For instance, in OK/not OK, their rerelease of OK Computer a few years ago, they included several songs on the “not OK” portion that they hadn’t included in the original, some of which they left out because they didn’t match the tone of the album.  I certainly understand where they were coming from, but it’s a mild shame to have had to wait so long for songs such as Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), Man of War, I Promise, and Lift.

That last one is one of my very favorite Radiohead songs.  It sounds too upbeat and hopeful for the tone of OK Computer, but I take that as “deliberately” misleading, a slightly different version of what they did with No Suprises (in which the song sounds like a beautiful lullaby, but the lyrics tell a very different story—I did my own “live” cover of that song, because it’s so representative of how I feel much of the time).  Alternatively, one could say that the tone of Lift is positive because the singer takes a very different attitude toward the subject matter as I take it from the song compared to most people, and is optimistic about it.

I interpret Lift, consistent with my biases and attitude, to be a song about escaping from life (by dying).  “This is the place.  Sit down.  You’re safe now.  You’ve been stuck in a lift.  We’ve been trying to reach you, Thom*.  This is the place.  It won’t hurt ever again.”  And, of course, later there’s the line, “You’ve been stuck in a lift, in the belly of a whale, at the bottom of the ocean**.”

I interpret this as expressing the thoughts of someone who’s finally getting out of all the stress and pain and horror of life (the lift, the two words being only off by one letter) into the safety and freedom from pain that is death.

On the other hand, the song ends with the words, “Today is the first day of the rest of your days.  So lighten up, Squirt.”  That could be taken as life-affirming and optimistic, and I’m by no means certain that Radiohead intended the song to be about what I take it to be about—my biases are clear and obvious, even to me—but that last line can still work in my interpretation.  After all, he doesn’t say it’s the first day of the rest of your life but of the rest of your days.

I’m overreading things, probably.  In any case, it’s a great song, and if you want to interpret it in a positive, life-affirming way, by all means, please do so.  It’s art, innit?  You can interpret it according to your impressions.  Just remember, this was a song from the time in which the band created (or at least finished) such tracks as Exit Music (For A Film), Climbing Up the Walls, Let Down, Fitter Happier, and of course, the aforementioned No Surprises.

As for other “not OK” songs, I really love Man of War, which was reportedly inspired by James Bond.  The video for the modern release is brilliant and haunting.  I also really like both to listen to and to play and sing Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2), though I haven’t done so in quite a long time.  I did a video of myself playing and singing it once, but it’s not up on YouTube.  I didn’t think it was very good, and I think my voice broke at one point.  I might have shared it here, though.  Yes?  No?  I’ll try to find out before I publish this.  If so, I’ll put a link:  Here.

If not, I won’t***.

By the way, I’m writing this post on my laptop computer (is it an OK computer?  It’s pretty darn good, at least), for the same reason I did so yesterday:  to give my thumbs some rest.  That does seem to be doing at least some good.  The bases of my thumbs are still quite sore when I rub them, and they feel stiff, but at least typing doesn’t make it worse, since I don’t use my thumbs during regular typing.

Anyway, that’s probably all I need to inflict on you today.  I did not know, when I started this post, that I would be mostly discussing Radiohead songs.  I do really like them, though.  And the new mini-band, The Smile, that Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke have formed, along with Tom Skinner, has some good songs as well, though I haven’t listened to all of them.  Their recent video for Friend of a Friend has the trio performing for what seems to be a group of elementary school students, and at the end, after bowing to the pleased audience, Thom has a nice little smile on his face.

Who could not smile after having a bunch of young kids cheer for your song?

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  The train is going to be here in a moment, and it’s not as though I have any further agenda.  My pain is nearly back to its usual baseline level, which is not great, but at least I’m more or less accustomed to it.  I’m not going to insert a picture in this blog post, unless I change my mind, but if I do, you’ll already know.

I may write a post tomorrow, but I may not.  It’s more likely than the possibility of me writing some fiction tomorrow, though, sad though that fact may be.

TTFN

*I usually sing it as “We’ve been trying to reach you, Rob.”

**This line “reminds” me of the ending of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, another brilliant song, which closes with the words, “I…I hit the bottom…hit the bottom and escape…escape.”

***I have no such link, but I do have the original video file.  I decided not to share or upload that, but quickly rendered the audio from it, did a little noise reduction, compression, added some reverb and so on.  You can hear my voice really break at 2:13 or so, but that’s not the only time.  I think you can hear why I didn’t put this video on YouTube, but I like my little comment at the end, so I didn’t even edit out my cringey “Ohhhhh”s, though they are embarrassing.  Here it is:

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A monotone audio blog that may or may not be monotonous in other senses

Here is the audio recording I did this morning because I didn’t feel like typing anything.  As you will hear (if you listen) I am not really feeling very upbeat, even for me.  Sorry.  I don’t know if I have anything at all interesting to say.  If I do, well…enjoy, I guess.

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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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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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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.