blogging

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“He thrusts his fists against the posts…”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Friday, and I’m not sure if I will be working tomorrow, so I guess just keep your eyes open for a blog post in case there is one.  I suspect that I will not be working, since many of the silly and tragic and chaotic and even the arguably good (but disruptive) things going on in the lives of people at the office persist, flowing and whirling through the phase space of possibilities, forming vortices and other turbulent and chaotic patterns.  Still, I may be wrong.  It would be far from the first time.  So take a peek tomorrow morning, if you’re up and up for it; if I work, I will (probably) write a post.

Anyway, I want to keep this short for today if I can.  I just feel worn out and over-stressed by the various chaotic things happening and by other things in my life.  Some of them should, on their surface, seem good, at least in some aspects, though I think anyone could imagine that they wouldn’t be exclusively good.  And there is a surprising amount of associated stress* and tension and consequent depression and worsened insomnia‒and it all doesn’t help how I feel about myself.

And then, of course, though I don’t very often talk about it, there is always my chronic pain.  Always.

In addition, despite the silliness from yesterday’s post, the holidays do stress me out.  It’s a frustrating kind of stress, because while I feel very lonely, I’m all but certain I would not be able to tolerate being part of someone’s celebration.  I’m too chronically “on my own”, so I can’t even readily imagine myself taking part in any kind of get together unless I was on some kind of powerful anxiolytic or similar.

Maybe I’ve gone too far down the “stranded alien” rabbit hole.  I guess that’s better than going down the “stranded rabbit” alien hole, though neither one sounds inviting.  Anyway, I’ve just gotten too accustomed to being isolated and non-social and paranoid.  Not that I actually think people are out to get me**; I just don’t think people are safe.  They are not trustworthy.  This is not meant to be an aspersion on their characters.  I don’t think they are (necessarily) malicious.  I just think they’re unreliable in too many, too important ways.

So, despite whatever dreams and wishes I have‒and I do have them, though I try not to waste too much energy on them‒I expect that the state I’m in right now (I don’t mean Florida) is the state I’ll be in for the remainder of my existence.  And that is at least part of why I don’t desire my existences persistence.  It’s not great for me and it seems terribly unlikely that it would be any significant good for anyone else.

One benefit of being isolated is surely that at least one’s existence or nonexistence is unlikely to be very disruptive of other people’s lives, one way or another.  And my personal ethos contains a strong aspect of trying not to cause other people trouble, and feeling horrible if I do.

It’s not even about whether those other people actually feel inconvenienced or troubled; even if they reassure me, it probably will not help.  I am the one who experiences the shame of bothering other people.  It’s not as much an empathy-related phenomenon as a sort of Categorical Imperative kind of problem.  Well, no, that’s not the right reference.  I think the term is Deontology.  It’s a rule I have to follow even if it has no impact on anyone in any way.

To be clear, though, this is not a philosophical stance on my part.  I haven’t chosen to do this based on any reasoning or logic; I’m just using those things to explain it.  It’s very much a setting-point, akin to a black-box strategy devised through gradient descent in machine learning.  As such, it is something preceding and overwhelming any potential rational assessment and judgment on my part.

I don’t think I’m expressing this well.  Perhaps that’s partly because I don’t fully understand it in any kind of systematic, algorithmic fashion.  Perhaps it’s not understandable in such terms, but is rather the product of the various nonlinear processes that entail the brain functions of human beings.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  If I work tomorrow, I’ll probably write a blog post.  If I don’t work tomorrow, I almost certainly will not write a blog post.  This leaves a little gray area in the outcome “no blog post” because it’s not completely impossible that I might work and yet not write a blog post.  So, not working almost certainly implies no blog post, but no blog post does not imply not working with as strong a tendency.  This is a fact of probabilities relating to Bayesian statistics that sometimes throws people off, but it’s important in practical matters, such as in knowing what to make of a “positive” screening test result, say for an infection or cancer.

I leave it as an exercise for you, if you’re interested (also if it’s not just obvious to you), to work out why these things are so.  And I also leave it as an exercise for you to have a good day and a good weekend.

*Not to be confused with the Associated Press, though there are commonalities.

**I don’t rule it out categorically, of course, since it is a physical possibility and thus does not have a truly zero chance of happening.  But it seems unlikely.  Why would anyone be truly out to get me?  Whose priorities could be so out of whack that I would be their focus?  Still, people are stupid (present company included), so I can’t dismiss it completely, and I always have such possibilities at least in the back of my mind.

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Unless you work with leather, awl is vanity

Well, it’s Friday, and I’m writing this on my smartphone again today.  Though writing on my lapcom was definitely better and more fun, I just didn’t have the will to bring it with me at the end of the day.

I had a bad day depression-wise yesterday, and I feel that it had a somewhat contagious effect on the office, though I tried to keep it to myself.  The trouble is, I guess the general negative feeling and my near-catatonia can be felt, in a way, by the others in the office.

Anyway, enough about that.  I’m trying to avoid talking about the dysthymia/depression stuff and its associated thoughts and emotions.  It just serves to bum other people out, it doesn’t seem to help me in and of itself.  It certainly hasn’t led to anyone coming and rescuing me, despite my past open cries for help.  People are far more likely to come to me asking for help with their own issues than to try to help me.

That’s probably my own doing, really.  I mean, I’m a doctor (though I am no longer allowed by the esteemed and wise and intelligent government of Florida to practice medicine).  I’ve always tried to be of benefit, to earn my continued existence and to earn other people’s affection and/or company by being useful.

The trouble with that is that people will tend to drop you like a ninety pound cockroach once you’re no longer useful, or if you become inconvenient.  And yet, in contrast, many selfish dotards‒like the present dotard-in-chief‒will garner loyal followers who get abused and lied to and taken advantage of in every nasty way, only to respond with a (metaphorical), “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”

Humans are so very stupid, but plainly, so am I.

I should be working tomorrow, so I will write another post then, assuming nothing catastrophic (or dogastrophic) happens between now and then.  Does that statement entail a promise or is it a threat?  That’s very much up to the person receiving the message, but as for my intention, it’s just to inform you.

Oh, hey, maybe some of you might know the answer to my following bit of curiosity.  During the latter part of last week, my blog abruptly spiked in readership, peaking at more than 10 times my usual number of visits and views.  This is still nothing about which to write home*, but it’s quite startling.  Now, it’s sliding back to more normal numbers, which I guess is just regression to the mean, but I am basically curious as to why so many new people (apparently) came to read my blog at the end of last week and into the very early part of this one.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but when I saw that initial little spike begin and then persist and increase for a few days, I wondered whether maybe I had suddenly found a bigger audience, and maybe my writing situation was going to change thereby.  Obviously, though, that’s not what happened.  That’s fine; I didn’t really expect it to be that way, I just had a little frisson of “ooh, what if…”

I did get an “official” check mark on Twitter not long ago, just to try to improve my reach, and I wonder if that had anything to do with my brief readership bump.  I was about to get the same “official check mark” through the Meta based platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) as well, but I am going to wait a bit just because of the added expense.  I don’t know why, exactly, since I have nothing better to do, and I honestly like Threads better than the website formerly known as Twitter, and more people whom I actually know are on Facebook.

Oh, well, it’s not the first time I’ve been unable to explain my actions in a purely rational way.  That’s par for the universe, though; there are always causes, for everything, but there are only very rarely reasons.  Telos is a human-invented concept, like justice, like money, and like so many other things people take so seriously.

I guess I can’t complain too much about people taking justice seriously.  While there are unending struggles to determine just what justice is‒I always say that true justice must be based on compassion, for how can you possibly judge someone’s actions without knowing as much about what led to them as possible‒it’s hard to make a good, honest case that justice is unimportant, at least within human civilization.

[Weird aside:  the thought just popped into my head that someone should write an anti-Wuthering Heights story and call it Withering Depths.  I don’t know why I thought that; I’ve never even read Wuthering Heights nor seen any production of it other than the semaphore version by Monty Python’s Flying Circus.]

Okay, well, that’s enough for now.  If any of you accidentally boosted my readership last week, I would just like to say “Thank you.”  So here it is:  Thank you.

May I have another?

*I don’t have a home to which to write, anyway, nor anyone to whom to send such a homeward-bound missive should I write one.

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Mon Dieu, it’s Mon day

Well, it’s Monday again and here I go again…on my own…going down the only road I’ve ever known.  Like a drifter, I was born to wear cologne*.

Anyway, I’m starting a new blog post at the beginning of a new work week, and the number of words in the footnotes is already significantly larger than the number here in the “main body” of the post.  That’s not all that unusual for me, but it is probably above the mean by at least a standard deviation.  I don’t see any practical way to check that, though, and I certainly don’t have enough interest to try to figure out such a way.  If any readers want to figure it out and share their results, please feel free to share them (but not with me).

I wonder if I’ve ever written a blog post in which the number of words in the footnotes is larger overall than the number of words in the main body.  It’s not impossible.  I wouldn’t be surprised either way, honestly.  But I’m not going to check.  You guys can if you want, and you should definitely share the results if you do (but again, not with me***).

[Quick aside‒I just thought of a spoof term, “Alexathymia”:  a condition that occurs when a person is so ensnared by the internet, web, and social media, that they need to ask their “digital assistant” how they feel (or should feel) about some product or issue or person.]

I’m sorry, I know this is a fairly strange sequence of thoughts to convey in a beginning-of-the-week blog post, even for me.  At least it feels that way from the inside.  I guess that’s one of the perks and the drawbacks of not having an agenda when one starts writing a post.  It can go anywhere (yay!), but also, well…it can go anywhere (ugh!).

Still, however erratic or hard to follow or annoying my writing here is, it’s at least better than me writing about all the negative thoughts and feelings that run through my poor excuse for a mind.  I hope it’s better.  If my dark, crumbly center is the best of me, well, I’m not sure what to make of that.  Probably, I would just make a mess.

However jerkily erratic my writing might be this morning, at least I’m sticking with my new word count “goal” of 701, so hopefully I won’t bore you for too long with my weirdnesses.  Also, I hope I won’t bore you with my banalities.  To be too unremarkable or to be too unusual are both negative things; you can tell by the use of the word “too”, which in this case refers to detrimental excess (though it can also mean “also”, but that wouldn’t make much sense here).

As for anything else, well…I guess this is the first full week of the new month, November****.  We also had the daylight savings time flip over this weekend here in the US, the one where we “fall back”, i.e., we set all clocks back an hour.  I’m never sure whether this constitutes the start or the stop of “Daylight Savings Time”, but it really doesn’t matter, so I don’t waste any time trying to memorize it.

It’s a strange thing, this hour shift, and it can throw one’s circadian rhythms off a bit, which is troubling if one is subject to seasonal affective problems, which I am.  It’s particularly annoying for nightfall to come suddenly much sooner than it did the day before.  I know that the nighttime grows longer during the time between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice anyway, but it’s easier to stomach without the sudden jump.

In college, though, I liked getting that extra hour on one weekend in the autumn, though I rued its reverse in the spring.  Mind you, I suspect it had little actual impact, but the psychological reward/punishment effect on my affect was not to be entirely dismissed.

And, with that, I think I’ll draw this fairly disjointed blog post to a close and put it out of your misery, if not its own.  Thank you for joining me here in the month of November.  I say “here” as if it referred to a place rather than a time (or a range of time, though we rarely refer only to dimensionless points when we refer to places in space, so I guess that’s okay).  ANYWAY, I hope you all have a week this week that is better than the last was, and that this trend continues, even if only in the most gradual fashion, for the rest of your lives.

*That’s a Mondegreen‒a misheard lyric‒from the song Here I Go Again by Whitesnake (which I thought came out much later in the ‘80s than it actually did, which was 1982).  Well, the last sentence was a Mondegreen**, the previous ones were accurate.

**Though I often do wear cologne, because I like having a pleasant odor.  But I’m not wearing any today, and I certainly was not born to do so.

***Okay, I’m trying to be funny and to seem coolly uninterested, but I would hate for someone to figure those things out and yet not share them with me, so please do share it if you gather that data.

****“November” almost seems like it might mean “new” something…a new ember perhaps, the first cast-off remnant of a dying fire symbolizing the fading of the year.  But, of course, the Nov- here refers to the number nine rather than to newness, as in “nova”*****.

*****Of course, in Spanish, nova could mean “no go”, as in, “it doesn’t go”, which partly explains why the Chevrolet Nova didn’t sell that well in Latin America.

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Near the bottom of the week there lies…this blog post

It’s Friday, in case you’re fairly out of it, or in case you’re reading this some day other than the day on which I’m writing it.  I’m surprised, actually, how many people who first start to follow my blog go back and read earlier posts, and even “like” them (which may or may not indicate that they actually like them).

It’s quite heartening, when it happens, even if it’s only because suddenly my blog gets a lot more views and I get lots of notifications when I get on the site.  I also feel impressed, because there is a rather intimidating—or so I would imagine—number of my blog posts on here.  There probably aren’t all  that many people who don’t write for a living who have written more than I have on this blog, going back almost 10 years.

Of course, when I say things like “how many” in the first paragraph, that’s a relative term.  I only get a few dozen or so people coming to my blog on a regular basis, even though I share it on pretty much all my social media (other than Instagram, which isn’t well suited to sharing links to blog posts, and TikTok, which I simply don’t have or use).  It would be great, of course, if I could get the sorts of visits and views and shares as some of the young women who just dance around a bit in cosplay, lip-syncing to snippets of songs and so on.  It’s charming sometimes, of course—I like to see the costumes, and some of the little skits can be funny—but it gets to be very much the same thing over and over again after a while.

It can be more fun seeing some of the compilations of people’s antics while they’re playing a game and streaming on Twitch.  That’s another social media platform with which I have no connection, since I don’t spend a great deal of time playing, let alone watching, many games (more’s the pity, since I do tend to like video games, all other things being equal).

Still, the best (to me) non-written material on the various social media are the ones where people discuss new findings in science or who discuss economic issues and international relations and so on, from professional points of view.  It’s not as good as reading a good blog post about a topic in which I’m interested, or better yet a book, but it can be hard to find blog posts about things in which I’m interested.  Podcasts are more reliable in this region, but I really only regularly listen to two of those:  Sean Carroll’s Mindscape and Sam Harris’s Making Sense.

I do subscribe to several people on Substack, but it’s hard even to see notifications of articles being posted by people in whom I’m interested.  And, of course, there are a number of blogs here on WordPress that I follow, but that number is so large that I miss quite a lot of them a lot of the time.

Of course, my interests aren’t necessarily like a lot of other people’s.  Science (especially but by no means exclusively physics), mathematics, a bit of economics, a bit of political philosophy and other philosophy, those sorts of topics and subjects are what interest me mostly.

I like movies and shows of certain kinds, though I watch fewer and fewer of them nowadays since I have no one with whom to watch them, and that takes a lot of the fun out of them.  I don’t have much interest in reading about shows and movies, though watching reaction videos for movies I’ve seen can be fun—it’s almost like sharing a movie one likes with a friend or friends who haven’t seen it.  Of course, it’s not fully like that, since one certainly can’t interact with those people, and in all honesty, most of them would probably find hanging out with me tedious to unpleasant.

I don’t know why I’m writing about this stuff, today.  As you probably know, I don’t plan these posts out in advance; they are very much stream-of-consciousness.  I hope they’re easier to follow than the first section of The Sound and the Fury, or something by James Joyce, but they still are very much just a sample of what comes out of my mind, which I am discovering with almost as much surprise as any of you are.

I started doing this every work day since I stopped writing fiction—which has been a while now—and I thought perhaps to use it as a form of therapy, but one for which I don’t have to pay nearly as much as the therapists I have seen in the past.  I don’t know if it’s doing me any good or not, but at least it lets me feel that I exist in something other than a purely local, ephemeral, and virtual sense.  That’s worth something at least.

With that, I’ll call this good for today and for toweek*.  I truly hope you all have a great day and a great weekend, and that you can look forward both to the arrival of autumn and to Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday next Monday.  I’m sure I’ll mention those things in my next post, but it shouldn’t hurt to prepare you.

*This is one of my neologisms, emulating the pattern from the word “today”, which means more or less “this day”.  That’s probably obvious, but just in case it wasn’t, I figured I’d leave a little explainer.

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Tear down the wall(s)!

I saw a video on YouTube yesterday in which a neuroscientist was being interviewed and asked to “grade” the danger level of various drugs—obviously not all of them since that would have taken far longer than the hour the video lasted.  Mind you, the video ran much more quickly for me, because this is one of those that I watch at 1.5 times speed, which I can get away with if I have the subtitles on and the speaker doesn’t speak too quickly.  I don’t do this for reaction videos or comedy videos, of course, and I certainly don’t do it with music or music reaction videos.  That would be absurd.

Anyway, watching the video, in which the scientist discussed the effects and mechanisms of action of the various drugs, made me think of something that has occurred to me before in recent months and years:  What if someone slipped MDMA (aka Ecstasy) into the food and/or water of all the members of the Senate and House of Representatives* before every legislative session?

This drug has the tendency to lower psychological barriers between people, to encourage a feeling of acceptance and a kind of “unconditional love”, without many other serious untoward effects in most cases (I have never tried it, but I have never tried most non-prescription drugs).  It would be rather interesting to see what legislatures could accomplish if they felt real warmth toward each other rather than seeing each other as opponents and even frank enemies**.  I wonder what might happen.

Alternatively, or similarly, it would be interesting to see a similar experiment involving the UN.  Heck, it would be great just to infuse every water-supply throughout the middle-east with MDMA.  I would not want to use any true hallucinogens in that region of the world, though—we don’t need new religions or spiritual notions popping up in a region that is already the wellspring of the western world’s absurd religious conflicts.

It would be great just to calm the overactive amygdalae of the people in the various legislatures and international organizations, to encourage their prefrontal cortices to be more active, so they can work together for the good of the people they have chosen (and competed) to represent—and whom they fail every time they put partisan hostility above the best interests of the people of the country.  Maybe it would be simpler just to fit all legislators and similar officials with shock collars that activate any time that individual’s voice goes above a certain decibel level, or when a localized EEG detects too much activity in the limbic system and not enough in the frontal lobes.

This is all pipe dreaming, of course, though there’s nothing in the laws of physics that prevents either of these notions from being brought to bear.  Still, it’s probably refreshing to see me thinking of plots and plans intended to work to help people get along better rather than just to obliterate them from the face of the cosmos***.  Though that may well be more likely to happen, considering the warnings of a recent book I just got.

This book is If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a warning book about the dangers of superintelligent AI, written by one of my favorite thinkers, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and his coauthor, Nate Soares.  They appeared (so to speak) on Sam Harris’s podcast that came out yesterday.  Now, I have not listened to the entire podcast yet, and I certainly haven’t read the book yet, but I have little doubt that the authors are at least not far wrong in their warnings.

I’m not going to go into those arguments now, because you can (and should) read the book or at least look into Eliezer Yudkowsky’s work and ideas.  His book Rationality:  From AI to Zombies is a masterpiece, and though it is long, it is divided into easily ingested chunks, since it started out as a long series of blog posts.

I occasionally toy with the idea of doing podcast type stuff like Sam Harris and so many others—indeed, I have done several of what I call “audio blogs” since I don’t know if they would technically count as podcasts—because people really seem to prefer listening to people talk more than they prefer reading.  This is despite the fact that reading is faster and requires less data to convey the same number of ideas.

I don’t know.  It’s probably better for the world if my thoughts and ideas achieve the least penetration into the zeitgeist as possible.  Still, maybe I’ll embed a few examples of my “audio blogs” here for anyone interested in listening, to see if you think it would be worth it for me to do more.

Please have a good day.

On fatigue, depression, general relativity, and spaceships becoming discoid black holes:

___

Morgoth, Arda, redemption, morality, and blame:

___

The Cosmic Perspective:

*If you live in a country other than the US—as most people do—then substitute your own legislative bodies for these.

**It astonishes me how people in the same legislature, in the same country, see each other as opponents and even as “evil” based almost entirely upon the arbitrary and absurd notion of political party.  It’s ridiculous enough when people arbitrarily choose to be loyal to some specific sports team and then hate other ones based purely on that arbitrary self-identification, but when it involves people who are supposed to be trying to manage the governance of the nation, or state, or county, or what have you, it smacks of a complete lack of seriousness and maturity, of childishness.

***Though I still like my idea of getting someone to engineer the mumps virus to make it more likely to cause orchitis****, especially if it can be encouraged to make males more likely to be sterile.  That way we would decrease the population of those who are prone to avoid vaccinations.  But that’s me in my mad scientist mode.

****Inflammation of the testes, a relatively rare complication of mumps.

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This post is not entitled to a headline

I’m writing this on my “smart” phone this morning.  When I left the office yesterday, I was just too exhausted to want to deal with carrying the miniature laptop computer.  I don’t know exactly why; maybe it’s because I’ve been burning my limited energy trying to force myself to be positive and upbeat.

I’ve even used the old autosuggestion, “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better” whenever walking or mentally idle.  But it wears me out after a while, and it feels so false as to be unsustainable in my head, just like when I found I couldn’t even think the words “I love my life and I love myself.”  I don’t believe any of it.

So, I wrote a few halfway positive blog posts in recent days and weeks, and hopefully they’ve been mildly entertaining from time to time, but I don’t know that I’m going to be able to keep that up.  I don’t feel good about myself or about the world in general.  I don’t feel in any way optimistic‒though I wouldn’t say I’m truly pessimistic, either.  It’s not even really what I would call fatalism.

I can only say that my attitude is that things in general will only ever be as good as they have to be, as they are forced to be, because there’s no percentage in being any better than that overall, just as there is no need in biology for organisms to be any better than the minimum required to survive and reproduce.

I could go into the reasons for these facts, but I’ve gone into them before on this blog, and I have done so more than once, so you can look around and find such posts here somewhere.  I’ve probably also discussed them on Iterations of Zero.  Today, I simply do not have the energy available to do so‒and it’s not even 4:30 in the morning yet.

Obviously my insomnia continues, but that’s not new.  I just haven’t been writing about it, because I thought people would be sick of it.  Similarly, I always have my chronic pain, which waxes and wanes a bit, but doesn’t ever take a day off, not for more than 20 years.  And my depression and anxiety continue, probably inescapably, since they are probably related to (or at least exacerbated by) my ASD.

It’s pretty sad, but I’ve realized‒or I have at least faced the fact‒that my time at the office is better than my time back at the house.  I have to go to the house, of course, because I need a place of privacy and rest, but I don’t like it there.  Especially in the morning, before everyone else arrives, the office is very much more comfortable.

And let’s be honest, pretty much all of my socializing happens at the office.  That’s more or less always been my pattern:  I make my friends either at work or school or what have you, though especially when I was younger, those friendships expanded from school and became broader and better.

That sort of thing doesn’t seem to happen anymore.  I am less and less able to connect with people as time goes by, partly because my energy budget is so low, and I have fewer and fewer interests and pastimes and distractions.  Everything in my life‒well, nearly everything‒sucks, and that’s because I suck.  The things in my life that don’t suck are as they are in spite of me.  Some people and things are just inherently good enough to be better than I am worse.  But that doesn’t make me any better.

I’m tired, and I don’t know any good, real reasons to keep trying.  I have and take very little joy in my nature.  Also, in general, I feel that my body is rotting throughout, and has been doing so for a few decades now.  I’m like a fruit that fell to the ground in infertile soil a long time ago, and there’s nothing for me to do but get first mushy and then dry and to slowly, grossly, wither away, surrounded only by various kinds of flies and ants.

Okay, that’s a bit purple and melodramatic.  My apologies.  But it captures a lot of how I feel about myself, my disgust and self-loathing; I make myself want just to throw up.

I wish I had the willpower to stop eating for good, just never to eat again.  That would be kind of nice.  Then I could just wither and fade out, and even get skinny before the end‒unless something else killed me before I reached that point.  I guess that would be okay.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll write tomorrow.  I am working then, of course, but I make no promises about writing a blog post.  The office is actually going to be closed on Friday for Independence Day, the first time I can remember us being closed for that holiday, but I’ve already got a pre-programmed post prepared for propagation that day.

Having the holiday off isn’t any particularly great thing from my point of view.  It’s not as though I’ll be doing anything to celebrate (other than my pre-programmed post), nor will I spend my time doing anything fun or interesting.  I’ll probably try just to knock myself out with Benadryl on Thursday night as I do on Friday nights, and then just…lie around.

I’m getting pretty bored with the movies and shows available, even ones that I know already and like, and YouTube is getting overdone, too.  There’s no new science that’s especially interesting, and certainly no new fiction that catches my eye.  And humanity in general, and America in particular, is just disappointing (I have never expected much from them, but they find so many ways to let me down, nevertheless).

Oh, well.  Whatever.  It’s not important, and it certainly doesn’t matter.  It’s just so wearying.  And I am tired.

I guess if I write a post tomorrow, you can read it.  If I don’t, you can’t.  That’s how that works.  But Friday will bring my preprogrammed post, and then Saturday and Sunday of course there will be nothing.

I’m not optimistic enough to start planning for next week.  Honestly, it doesn’t seem worth the wait.

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If I could write the beauty of your eyes and in fresh numbers number all your blogs

Hello and good morning, and welcome to another Thursday morning blog post.

I’m not sure how many of these I’ve written, but since I’ve done them nearly every Thursday, even when I was writing fiction on all other weekdays (and excusing the occasional sick day), we can guess that I wrote on the order of fifty such posts a year for about ten years.  Thus, there are on the order of five hundred such daily posts over the years, each one nearly a thousand words long (and some going beyond that).  So, overall, the number of words I’ve written in these Thursday blog posts alone is comparable to the number of words in my longest novel (Unanimity…so long I had to publish it as two separate books).

Of course, when we approach it from the point of view of actual information, à la Claude Shannon’s information theory and whatnot, I would have a hard time estimating how much actual information there is in such a post.  In the first draft of the preceding paragraph and a half, there were 174 words, which comprise 940-ish characters (counting spaces, which I think one should count, since a space or the lack thereof can matter quite a bit in English).

Now, each character in a typewritten document, not counting ”special” characters, can have one of 26 letters (not counting upper and lower case as separate things for my current purposes) ten numerals, and maybe a comparable number of punctuation marks.  So, each potential space in the writing would have a total of roughly 26 plus 10 plus, say, 8 other characters, so 44 possible characters.  Rounding up, that’s about six bits per character (26 = 64).  Rounding down would give five bits (which is only 32 possibilities), so it’s something closer to 6 bits than 5.

Assuming the ratio of characters to words in the average blog posts stays fairly consistent, that would be, for a 900 word post:  (900/174) x 940, which rounding here and there* gives about 810,000 divided by, say, 180.  This can be reduced first to 81,000 divided by 18, or 9,000 divided by 2, or 4,500 characters per post.  Checking the math on the calculator gets roughly the same amount.

So, 4,500 characters, times five and some fraction bits per character, gives us between 22,500 and 27,000 bits of information per blog post.  Let’s say 25,000 bits.

But when I look at the storage space of my average blog post, they are almost all between 17 and 20 K (which is actually as much as 160,000 bits) in size.

This mismatch shouldn’t be surprising, because while English is (like most written languages) a “redundant code”, storing a word processor document entails storing more than just the individual characters.

Returning to what we mean when we refer to the redundancy of written English, we mean that not every new character gives you as much information as is potentially available.  For instance, if one types the letter “q”, what follows will almost always** be a letter “u” in English, and so we would be quite justified, at least in this, in writing the word “quite” as “qite”.  But, of course, redundancy in any kind of code is useful for counteracting the problem of lost data in transmission, which was one of the things Claude Shannon was thinking about in founding information theory.

There are surely other ways in which the data in a given blog post is “compressed” during the process of saving, but I don’t know enough about the computer science of word processors to know the specifics of how that’s done off the top of my head.  And since, of course, I write these blog posts “off the top of my head” each morning, I’m not going to try to research that subject for now.  That would make writing my daily blog much less pleasant, and make the process quite (ha) a bit (ha ha) longer than it would otherwise be.

Now that I’ve thought about it and mentioned it, I’ll probably be on moderate alert for information regarding the process if I should happen to come across it, and if I do, I’ll be more likely to focus on it and add it to my model of reality than I would have otherwise.

And now I am rapidly approaching the 800 word mark for this post, a mark which I will no doubt pass before I have finished writing the first draft of this sentence.  And, indeed, I did.  So let’s draw this very peculiar post to its close, today.

I’m sure many of you*** are thinking something along the lines of, “Geez, I hope he goes back to just writing about depression and chronic pain and all that shit tomorrow…this post has been really boring.”  To those people, I can only apologize.  To anyone who shares my idiosyncratic interest in esoteric (but highly amateur in my case) things like information theory and whatnot, well—I hope at least you have enjoyed this.

TTFN

*It’s okay to do this since I’m not trying to be terribly precise, just to get “back of the envelope” numbers for fun, anyway.

**Not in this case, of course, since there is a quotation mark after that last “q”…and this one here, as well.  So, the “u” is not a completely redundant character, but it certainly doesn’t give anything like 5 more bits of information.

***If a fraction of my few dozen readers can really be called “many”; I’ll let myself get away with using it as at least a relative term.

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“Or play the game ‘existence’ to the end…of the beginning”

You’d think that people would have had enough of silly blog posts.  But I look around me and I see…well, nothing particularly revealing in any direction.  For all I can tell, the people reading this blog may be the last people in the world who read blog posts, and everyone else is sick of them (the blog posts, not the people who read blog posts).

Perhaps the people reading this are sick of them, too, but have some peculiar masochistic streak, some deep need for punishment in the form of inane reading material that must be satisfied once a day whenever possible.  It’s a  big world; there could, in principle, be such people, and enough of them to account for almost everyone who reads my blog with any regularity.

On the other hand, blog posts could be more like the silly love songs mentioned in Paul McCartney’s tune.  They may not be everybody’s cup of tea*, but maybe a lot of people really love them and enjoy them and are moved by them.  In which case, it may be that the only reason that my blog only gets a few readers every day is that I write weird stuff about weird stuff a lot, and I often come across as nihilistic and/or pessimistic**, and I certainly I have much trouble with my chronic issues.

Not that being a downer or focusing on difficult (or even quite odd) things is necessarily going to make people not want to read a blog.  Quite apart from the possible cliché that misery loves company (which I doubt would have much influence on blog posts) it is a fact that people who have their own troubles will often try to find others with similar issues, perhaps to see if they have different insights, perhaps just to share solidarity or even inspiration.

Maybe the only reason that my blog isn’t the most read thing in the history of the world is that not enough people know about it.  We do know that PR campaigns can make a huge difference, can turn mediocre stories into international bestsellers, or can bring an entirely unqualified (indeed, an antiqualified) person into high political office.  When the promotion is promoting something that’s actually good, and the promotion itself is good enough, truly amazing results can happen.

What a crime it would be if I were writing the best writing ever known to humanity and only a few dozen people ever regularly read it, just because I’m no good at promoting myself due to low self-esteem and/or ASD.  Thank goodness I’m not writing the best writing ever, right?  That’s a real load off, as they say.

But I am writing, it seems, and I will try to continue to write every morning when I’m going to work.  I don’t know for certain whether I will be working tomorrow—watch this space and see if I write a post, I guess.  I hope I’m not working.  Though I’ve been trying hard to present the façade of upbeatness, I am very mentally fatigued, as I tend to be.

I don’t know, maybe I’ve been mentally fatigued for years, or even decades, now.  I know I don’t ever tend to give my mind or myself a break if I can help it.  And apparently, for those with ASD, just the process of daily living among humans is draining, partly because of masking (pretending to be normal, pretending to be fine, pretending to understand nonverbal social cues, or even just tolerating the inanities of primate social dominance displays and rituals among the naked house apes), partly because of having to deal with sensory assaults, partly from just not being able naturally to connect with those around them.

So, maybe through this blog I might connect with—or at least provide connection for—people who have similar issues, at least if they are similar enough.  Though, even the thought of making connections with new people, or of people even wanting to connect with me, has made me feel suddenly tense and defensive—anxious, you might say—even as I write about it.

It’s so strange, isn’t it?  Just an imaginary social encounter, even through the medium of a blog, feels like a potential, literal attack.  And yet, I’ve had friends before—very good friends—and I always enjoyed my time with them, and I never wanted to be away from my wife and kids any more than I had to be.

Of course, that didn’t pan out; like most things that really matter to me, I managed to screw it up in various ways.  Not all of it was my doing, of course—back injuries and chronic pain, along with congenital neurodevelopmental conditions, are difficult to blame on anyone, or on any particular thing, though some morons try—but events often do seem to go against my dearest, most heartfelt, wishes.

Maybe I should find a way to wish that I was not an internationally famous, hugely best-selling author with hundreds of millions of devoted fans and good relationships, real and virtual, with people who make sense to me, and vice versa, and even potentially some strong romantic relationship of some kind.  If I could come to really want to avoid those things, then they would, for me, seem more likely to come to pass.

Either way I would be unhappy of course—in a kind of Twilight Zone style inversion of expectations delivering what someone thought they wanted but really didn’t—but at least one way I would be someone whose writing reached out and touched*** millions of people.

Whatever.  If wishes were horses, we’d all be neck deep in horseshit—and not just in the figurative way we already are.

I hope you have a good day, and that you have a good weekend as well.  If I write on Saturday, it shall be here.  If not, it will likely mean I am not working.  If something happens and I never write here again…well, it’s been nice writing to you.

*But then again, even tea isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

**An accurate impression, to be fair.

***Not in an inappropriate way.

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Viewing his progress through, what perils past, what crosses to ensue, would shut the blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my “usual” weekly Thursday blog post.  Aren’t you lucky?

I was a bit surprised that yesterday’s post seemed to be rather successful, at least in that people commented on it, here and on social media (where I share it).  I don’t know if anyone else shared it—I encourage anyone who enjoys any of my posts to share it to your own social media, and of course, I encourage you to “like” it if you like it, though I’m falling afoul of my own cautionary song Like and Share by encouraging such activities.

Still, it would be nice if people could share my stuff or comment on it.  I’ll say again:  comments on social media aren’t as useful to me as comments here, on my main page.  Here is where all* the readers come together (over me, so to speak).  So, if one person makes a comment, it might be something that another person finds interesting or insightful, and they might comment back and even get a conversation going.

I don’t know.  I’m probably being unreasonable.  I usually am.  I just have a bit of a hard time sustaining conversation, myself, so I’m always hoping that other people will do so in response to the prompts of my random thoughts, like the ones from yesterday.

Here I’m using a rather constrained version of the term “random”; my thoughts are not random in any true, nondeterministic, quantum mechanical kind of way.  They’re just stochastic, as well as being occasionally sarcastic**, as in my third sentence above.  So, while in practice they are unpredictable, in principle, each follows directly from some individual cause or set of causes.

Of course, nowadays, many people creating “content” on the various social media ask for “likes” or “thumbs up” or whatever the specific equivalent on their site is, as well as sharing and subscribing when that applies.  They also often have things like Patreon accounts, or Ko-fi accounts or whatever (those latter ones allow people to send them small amounts—the price of a cup of coffee, for instance—to help support them), so that some of them can make an actual living by making their “content”.

Of course, it would be nice to make a living by making content, i.e., by these blog posts.  I suppose one can also write posts on Substack nowadays; they are set up to allow people to give paid subscriptions in addition to free subscriptions.

Actually, I think WordPress has instituted something along those lines as well; I’ve gotten notifications of some such things at some point, but I haven’t paid that much attention to them.  All the social media and search engine companies and streaming services are all changing things far too often, so I don’t even try to keep up.

This constant updating gives one (this one, anyway) the impression that the companies really don’t know what they’re doing, and that they haven’t made a good product before they put it out to the public, so they have to keep tweaking it.

I suspect, though, that it’s more that they think they have to keep changing things to keep up with all the competition.  It’s a bit as if seals and sea lions tried to grow tentacles because they saw that squid and octopuses have a fair amount of success using them.

It might be worth it to remind them (the software companies and the pinnipeds) that, while all improvement is change, not all change is improvement.  In fact, most potential change is at best neutral, and more often detrimental, especially in situations in which something is working at least reasonably well.

This is the root of the admission in the Declaration of Independence that prudence dictates that established governments should not be changed due to light or transient causes (something like that, anyway).  It’s also part of why I hate when organizations or people call for “change” without being more specific.  I have more patience with the label “progressive”, because at least it gives tacit recognition to the notion that progress (by whatever definition) is what we want, not mere random change.

It’s true that evolution by natural selection happens with random mutations and non-random survival, and that over time, progress can be made that way, but it is a grim, ungainly, blundering, low, ghastly, ominous, wasteful, and horribly cruel process (here I’m combining words from Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Darwin).  It’s better to use engineering principles rather than random trial and error if one wants to head more swiftly and surely in better directions***.

Anyway, I don’t have any direct way to monetize this blog, though there are probably ways it can be done.  And so, I keep going to work every day, as I am doing now.  If people want to support me, of course, giving “likes” and commenting and (if such a thing ever happens) sharing the link to the posts is also very nice.

Of course, if anyone wants to support me monetarily, they can certainly do so—in principle—by buying my published books and talking about them to other people (and rating and reviewing them on Amazon, for instance).  And, of course, they can play/stream my music on Spotify and YouTube Music and iTunes and so on.  Some of my songs are even available to use as background music for reels on Instagram and TikTok and Facebook.

But I am more or less certain that I’ve made a staggering**** net loss on my music.  That’s okay.  People have listened to my songs, and some people have said that they really like them.  I even had one work friend who was a former professional musician/singer/songwriter say that he thought if my song Breaking Me Down had been released (in a professionally produced version shortened for radio) in the seventies, it would have been a hit.

So, if you so desire, please do listen to my music, share my posts, buy and read my books, all that stuff.  I would be grateful.  And hey, if any of you out there think I ought to try to monetize this blog, please let me know.

It seems unlikely that anyone actually reads far enough even to let me know their response, but if that’s the case, well, I guess I don’t mind being a voice crying out in the wilderness—I’ve always felt that way no matter what.

TTFN

*Though it may be a bit much to use the word “all”, considering that I don’t exactly have that many regular readers—a few dozen at most, most days.

**Oh, noooo, I would never be sarcastic.  Batman forbid!

***Of course, there are many possible ways to think of something as “better”, so making that judgment should also be an important part of the process if one wants actually to make things improve in a way upon which most, if not all, can agree.

****As a matter of percentage in versus percentage out.  The actual amounts are not great in either direction.

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Crystallized thought and civilizational axle grease

It’s Friday, and I suspect I will be working tomorrow, and if I do, I will probably write a blog post.  Further bulletins on that subject as events warrant.

I’m really, really exhausted.  I think the events of the past few weeks are finally just catching up to me, now that I don’t literally have constant tension and discomfort from the stent, which truly made me unable to rest for more than an hour at a time, maximum.  Yesterday at work was really rough; by the end I was just lying my head back limply in my seat and kind of staring and trying to doze off‒at which I succeeded for a few minutes at a time.  But I certainly haven’t recovered.

I wish I could spend about 24 hours straight just sleeping in a comfortable bed in an air conditioned room with no interruptions.  Oh, and I would want plenty of water and other beverages to drink.

Well, my portable AC unit is supposed to arrive today, and if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll even have the energy to set it up and turn it on this evening.  I hope I will.  It would be a shame not to be able to take advantage of it.

I really hope it works well.

As for everything else, well, I have no idea, really.  I certainly feel no urge or drive to create anything, unless you count this blog as a creative endeavor, which I’m not sure I do.  Maybe if I get the AC in and running I’ll have more creative energy.  I don’t know.  I’m somewhat pessimistic, but that’s more down to my character than to a balanced assessment of the situation.

I still have my overarching plan about either losing weight and diminishing my chronic pain or else…well, you know, but I haven’t made much headway yet on that, because a number of events have gotten in the way.  These last few weeks even my upper body workout in the mornings has been erratic; it’s hard to keep my discipline up.

I wish there were some patron out there, perhaps some manner of “sugar mama” or whatever it would be, to sponsor me in doing some creative endeavors.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t want such a person to have the rights to any intellectual property I produced, so it’s not as though I would just welcome and work for anyone.

It would be nice to have some help, though, on a regular basis.  But, of course, I know I have no right to expect that nor do I in any possible sense deserve it.

Of course, the very concept of “deserving” things is one that I find vague and nebulous, and often without substance.  I can understand it in a situation in which one has been part of a contract and one has fulfilled one’s agreed upon end of the bargain‒then such a person deserves the payment (or whatever) to which they agreed in the contract.

Other than that, though, I think the term is usually vacuous, at least the way most people seem to use it, as in, “You deserve someone who treats you like a queen/king” or some such sentiments.  Really?  Someone deserves that?  How so?  What service did that person perform for the world or what attributes do they embody that make them deserve such treatment?

I don’t think most people actually really ever think about it when they say such things.  And yet, they fill themselves and each other with these concepts of entitlement without basis, and this leads them to a cycle of letting the “perfect”* be the enemy of the good.  It’s a kind of narcissism, in a way, and as usually seems to be the case (to an outside observer such as I am) such attributes almost always bring misery to the person who embodies them, and often to those around them.

I do wish people would be more careful with their words‒even in private, impromptu interactions to some degree.  Language is crystallized thought, and sloppy language doesn’t merely reflect sloppy thought; it engenders it.

But, of course, while language, especially written language, is the lifeblood of civilization, courtesy is the lubricant**, without which the machinery of civilization grinds itself down and rapidly ceases to function well, if at all.  Thus, it’s worth applying the principle of charity to other people when interacting, rather than trying to pounce on any potential cause of offense, or to “pwn” them (as they used to say) or to “destroy” them in a discussion.

Besides being hyperbolic (and inaccurate in other ways) such notions surely miss the whole point of a discussion (or, Batman forbid, a debate) which should be about interacting with others’ thoughts and trying to improve one’s own (and mutual) understanding and to try to achieve an ever-improving understanding of the reality in which everyone exists.

It’s frustrating.  But so are many other things, I suppose.  I wish there were more rewards to compensate for the frustrations, but it’s been a long time since that has been anything approaching a balance for me.

Whatever.  I hope you all have a good day, and a good weekend, whether or not I write a post tomorrow.

*Another word that is almost always vacuous.

**I know, I’m mixing metaphors here, but I’m doing it with full and deliberate awareness, so I hope it’s not too grating.