books

by

“In an interstellar burst, I’m back…”

I wish that I could honestly tell you that the reason I didn’t post a post yesterday was because I had been working on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and so I decided to leave the blog dormant.  Alas, that was not the reason for my absence yesterday.  Instead, it was something far more prosaic:  I was out sick.  The cold I’d been fighting for days worsened, and I was very worn out after going to work Monday, and my voice was pretty rough, and I was coughing a bit, and, well…you know, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, all that.

I’m not feeling a whole lot better today, to be fully forthcoming, but I need to do payroll, and of course, when I’m gone for a day or longer, things pile up that I take care of gradually most days, and it can be that much more overwhelming to catch up with everything.  I suppose none of it really matters much.  It probably wouldn’t matter very much if I didn’t do any of the things I do at work.

Also, honestly, I still haven’t been paid last week’s pay.  I think it’s probably just an oversight on my boss’s part because of the chaos of recent weeks.  It’s unlikely that it’s a deliberate tactic to make me want to go away.  Nevertheless, the irrational, paranoid part of me—the part that assumes everyone else will eventually come to hate me, since I hate myself, and I know me better than anyone else does—is hyper alert for possible hostility.

Anyway, I haven’t actually gotten much done on my return to DFandD.  It was only in the evening yesterday that I started rereading it, but I’ve only gotten as far as the point where the Desperado looks into the well and suddenly hears the sound of rushing water.  If you don’t know what I mean, that’s just because you haven’t read any of what I’ve put up for you to read of that story, though it’s been available for months and months.

I wonder if anyone (other than my sister) has actually read it or any other fiction I’ve posted here.  I don’t recall getting any (non-sibling) feedback on any of it.

Maybe that’s to do with the short attention spans we all seem to have now, thanks to the overabundance of easy-to-consume-without-much-mental-effort-media.  Not only do we have all the easily consumable content on YouTube, which at least includes some very high-quality material, but we have little snippet “shorts” and “reels” on almost all sites now that are often heavily manipulative, but which perforce do not contain much information.

And the algorithms that try to steer us to things that will keep us on-site, or to steer those things toward us, seem to have become rather clunky and ham-handed, and they now push us (or at least me) away from things that would have been useful and interesting toward just boring shit that’s often absurd or stupid or at least just vapid.

Probably the lack of feedback on my stories is just because my stories are not that interesting to many people, or at least not to the sort of people who come to read my blog; I may be selecting for a group of readers who prefer nonfiction to fantastical fiction.

Wouldn’t that be ironic?  I started this blog as a way to promote my fiction writing by having a point of interaction with potential readers of my fiction, to give them some ”inside information” if they were interested in it.  Iterations of Zero was supposed to be the separate blog where I talked about my interests or concerns or issues related to science, mathematics, philosophy, politics, or what have you.

Of course, the phenomenon of such things evolving and changing in ways unforeseen during their inception is not unusual, online or in life.  Just look at early Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes (or even Dilbert) comics compared to later ones.  But it’s frustrating to see, in real time as it were, things evolving away from usefulness, evolving toward senescence.  I suppose, in a way, that’s the story of almost everything that evolves—most changes in any RNA world that predated what we would call true life, for instance, were prone to make things less useful.  And by “useful” here I mean just “liable to make many and good copies of itself”.

One would like to imagine that human society, or at least human technology, would be less prone toward changes that make things worse, since it’s guided by actual minds, and in the case of technology, some of these minds are quite high-quality.

And I think, when the technology was actual hardware and needed to compete against other hardware, the changes would tend to be good—not universally so, but pretty impressively so.  It was such technological advance guided by effective minds that led from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in about 60 years.

However, computers have developed—and they have been prone to impressive improvement guided by some very fine minds indeed—and their products have become easier and more thoughtless to use, such that it required almost no mental skill or ability to interact with and consume those products.  And thus the tendency for things to head in good directions became less potent.

Even the finest associated minds, such as they are, don’t fully understand the specific inner workings of things like LLMs and other deep learning computer systems, which we loosely call AI.  And, of course, the computers don’t know how they work, either.  And the complex interactions of the millions and even billions of people who use social media every day and/or constantly is a complex system the dynamics of which can only be modeled for gross tendencies.  Chaos will always apply.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make, other than that there seems to be no point, and that indeed there seem to be mostly anti-points, to so much of what happens in the world.  It’s terribly frustrating and pushes me toward full-on despair.  And I cannot seem to find interest in or derive joy from the things that used to make me at least temporarily joyous.  And that doesn’t really matter to anyone, to be honest.  Probably that’s appropriate.  I am probably not worth any effort from anyone at any level (though I would welcome it).

Or maybe I unconsciously drive people away, and that’s the problem.  Who knows?  I don’t.  And we can be sure that Socrates doesn’t and didn’t know, since reputedly the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing, and this marked him as the wisest person in the world.

As for me, I am not wise, or at least not very wise.  But I am about done, at least for today.  I feel almost done in general.  I’m very tired of going through these motions of pretending to be alive when really I am just a crude mockery of life.

As evidence of my mental stupidity:  When I wrote that last line, I could not help thinking of one of the female leads from Young Frankenstein singing, “Oh…crude mockery of life, at last I’ve found you!”

I hope you readers of my blog all have a good day, but that everyone who doesn’t read my blog has a bad day.  I don’t want them to have too bad a day—nothing tragic—but just enough for them to realize their mistake and come read my blog.

by

“You’ve been out ridin’ fences for so long now.”

As you can see, I followed through on my threat and did indeed write a post today (Saturday the 3rd of January in 2026) because I am going to the office today.  My new (and old) tinnitus persists, which is annoying, and I’ve still got some minor cold symptoms.  There’s no real coughing or sneezing, though, so I don’t think I’m terribly contagious.  If I am, well, I’ve spent a lot of time tilting at the windmill of getting people to take disease prevention and so on seriously, but things continue to get worse, so to hell with the world, I guess.  But it doesn’t really matter much.

I initially thought that I had only received feedback from one person here‒as I suspected might happen‒in response to my request for feedback on what I should try to restart writing.  That person made a recommendation/expressed his preference for what he thought sounded most interesting for me to work on.  But, alas, that’s only one person, so I couldn’t draw too many conclusions from that feedback.

However, it turns out that on Facebook I also received a comment from someone who probably didn’t see the comments here on my actual blog, so the comment was probably unbiased.  The interesting thing is that both people, in two separate spaces, said they were interested in the same story:  The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.

So, needless to say, I intend to start working again on Outlaw’s Mind.

I’m kidding.  I’m not that perverse.  I feel a bit disappointed that no one could really even consider my other story HELIOS, but no one else but me really knows anything about it.  That story was originally‒way back in the depths of time‒a comic book superhero story that I invented and for which I even drew some comic book style drawings when I was in grade school and maybe into junior high.  But the modern version of the story, though arguably still a kind of superhero, or at least superhuman, story, is much more sophisticated than the inevitably derivative character I had invented as a child.

Anyway, HELIOS is probably my oldest story notion that I’m considering writing again nowadays, even older than Ends of the Maelstrom.  That doesn’t mean it’s my favorite or anything, it just means there’s a wee bit of nostalgia in it.

So, I shall begin rereading and editing and then, hopefully, writing more on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado.  This story was conceived as a manga, and so it is not a single-book notion, but is planned as a series of some form or another*.  That might be very good, actually, because it would mean I can publish it in smaller chunks, so to speak.

Unanimity took forever first to write and then to edit, but it was one self-contained story with a beginning, middle, and end (half a million words long overall).  I can make the first volume of DFandD end with the ending of the “heroes’” first quest, which has already begun so far in what I’ve already written.  Maybe that will be good.  I can even put some illustrations in the book (maybe) since I have done some of them**.

Anyway, that is currently my plan, if it merits the term.  I’ll try to work my work on that work into lull times at work***, and make some progress on it.  Then maybe it will take off and become hugely, internationally popular, and I’ll become rich, famous, and powerful.

Stranger things have happened, after all‒and that series has done quite well, I understand, though I lost interest in it not even halfway through the first series.  I think it’s the sort of show that I could only enjoy if I were watching it with someone.  In many cases, watching shows or movies or similar is my only way to connect with other people and with the shows or movies.  I have to have some means to connect; I cannot seem to do it on my own, and I don’t know if I ever have been able to do so.

Anyway, I guess that’s my plan for the moment.  It will always be dependent upon my physical and especially my mental health.  But that goes for everything.

Anyway, I hope you all have a good weekend.  Here, in closing, is a recording of me trying to practice the song, Desperado, which would make a lovely theme to a TV series based on my stories, I think.  I’ve gotten better since I recorded this.

*This was the idea for Mark Red as well, for which I have at least two more books lying fallow.  Unfortunately, no one loves that story apart from me, so it doesn’t look like the other two volumes will be written anytime soon, if at all.  It probably suffers from the fact that it was the first book I published, and so there were rough edges.  Qué lástima.

**As an aside, I wish I still had an illustration of the Vagabond that I did years ago, because I wanted to use that as the cover picture when I published the novel, but alas, it is gone with almost everything else I used to own.

***Yes, that was deliberate.  Sorry if it comes across as awkward, but I tend to like to play with words.

by

I have no title for this post. Oh, wait…

Well, it’s Friday, the end of the “traditional” work week, though I suspect many people have today off.  A traditional workplace at this time of year would have had people take yesterday (and possibly the day before) off, and one might as well make it a four-day (or five-day) weekend.  Heck, if I remember correctly, it was typical for schools in my youth to take the equivalent of a four-day weekend two weeks in a row.  Though, come to think of it, maybe we just had winter break around then.  I’m not sure now; I think it was the latter situation, actually.

Anyway, in the modern environment, which has been allowed to become very skewed between businesses and employees, competition for scarce resources has led to a kind of mission creep in which people are led to feel that it is good and impressive and necessary to work as much as one can physically (and mentally) work, even to one’s net detriment.

Yes, we are meant to think it is impressive, but there is only very little marginal reward (and almost no true thankfulness and appreciation) for the extra work.  At the higher levels of the economic food chain, of course, the accumulation of even minor incremental wealth at each level of the pyramid adds up to seemingly large amounts, like the proverbial accumulation of DDT in birds’ bones and eggs, or mercury sequestering in certain kinds of tuna.

There’s not actually all that much of it, that extra scavenged wealth, and everyone, including the very rich, would enjoy a much healthier economy, a healthier world, if more money were in circulation‒buying, selling, making more things‒rather than accumulated into the hands of a few individuals who are not nearly as impressive as their hoarded wealth makes them imagine they are.

Hoarded wealth is useless, because money does not have any inherent value.  It is a tool of exchange, one that allows economic interactions to be both more efficient and broader and more productive, more fecund if you will.

If only “home economics” courses taught young people about actual economics‒supply and demand, markets, the effects of various regulations for better and worse, all that.

And if only we had Civics class again, or the equivalent, so people could actually learn about the Constitution, so they could recognize when elected public servants are violating it and hold them accountable.  Why, just the act of reading the second part of the Declaration of Independence (the part that begins “We hold these truths to be self evident…”) might reorient the attitude some people have toward their government and the people they hire (by electing them) to serve what are supposed to be the interests of the members of the public.

Perhaps after whatever horrendous upheaval occurs in the imminent future, when society is trying to repair itself, we will improve our metaphorical infrastructure, much as we did after the last world war (though the situation then was very different).  Perhaps we will try to find new safeguards for the systems, to decrease the risk of gross unfairness and economic stagnation, as well as of government corruption.

I don’t know.  I don’t have high hopes.  Humans‒or humanity, really‒forget the lessons of their past so easily.  And though nearly all of human knowledge is so easily available to nearly anyone, the low barriers to entry for putting things online mean that the noise on the internet is prone quite strongly to wash out any signals.  It’s like some weird grand ballroom full of “scholars” of wildly varying quality, all of them talking at once as loudly as they can about whatever topic strikes their fancy.

It’s a bit like this blog, huh?  Pot, meet kettle.  Oh, well.  On to other matters.

I’m feeling slightly better this morning than I did yesterday, though I’m still under the weather, and my (now) maddeningly bilateral tinnitus persists.  But a fortuitous thing did happen:  I was looking for something on a shelf and found a bunch of old papers, including the only remaining bit of my first novel, Ends of the Maelstrom.  It’s only the first chapter, which I had typed into an oldish computer and printed on that good old continuous feed printer paper back in the late eighties or early nineties.  It’s not much, but it’s kind of nostalgic, and it fed into thoughts I’d already been having.

I had been thinking about rereading and maybe starting again to write one of my unfinished stories‒Outlaw’s Mind, or The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, or HELIOS, or perhaps something else entirely.  I wouldn’t have to give up blogging at least to begin that process.  I can read and edit the stories on my mini lapcom at the office during downtime, instead of doing that ADHD-style thing of skimming through various news sites and social media and online manga and so on when things are slow at work.  It would honestly be more productive, and probably more ego syntonic.

What do you all think?  Maybe I should run one of those polls that people can do here on WordPress.  I’ve never really looked into how to do them, and it probably wouldn’t be very useful to do one‒indeed it might be depressing‒because I would probably get one response, if that, and that’s not a good statistical sample of pretty much anything.

Okay, well, I’m not going to do one of those.  I don’t have the spare mental energy to look into how it’s done.  However, if anyone reading would care just to say in the comments (in addition to anything else you want to say, if there is anything else) whether you think I should reread and then get to work on finishing one of the above-mentioned books, or perhaps on some other story I’ve mentioned at some time, or perhaps some older story…or even just to do something completely new.  I would truly welcome your input, but please at least try to be specific.

If you need guilt to compel you, I think your input might really help my mental state, which is extremely prone to negativity and self-hatred and self-destruction.  See, I can manipulate people, at least in principle.  I just find it “low key” repulsive.

But, heck, if you want, you can tell me I’m better off not writing any new fiction, or that my writing sucks in general and you wish I’d just stop writing, or even that I should just die already.

You’re unlikely to say anything to me that’s worse than the things I say to myself pretty much every day.  And if you can say some such thing, I’m honestly curious what it could be.  But you could easily say nicer and more productive things than I have ever probably said to myself, or at least better than I’ve said in a long time.  If that’s your preference, have at you!

I’ll be back tomorrow, I think.  Have a good weekend.

by

Wednesday woes of a weary worrier who wishes he would write more worlds

It’s Wednesday now, and I’m writing this on my mini lapcom for the first time in 12 days.  Well, actually, I’m writing this for the first time, full stop.  I’ve never written this particular blog post before.  But I haven’t written anything at all using the lapcom—the mini one, anyway—since December 5th, twelve days ago.  I know because that was the last time I wrote a blog post on the lapcom, a fact easy to discern since I save all the files with the date as part of the title and list them in order from most recent to oldest in my blog post saves file.

Am I ruining the magic?  I work with this stuff, you know.

Anyway, I’m not going to get into explorations of the nature of days or human interactions and inadequate equilibria like I did yesterday.  At least, I don’t think I’m going to do that.  I wasn’t planning  to do it yesterday, though—it just sort of spewed out when I opened my figurative mouth, as much to my surprise as to yours—so I cannot rule out the possibility entirely.  Still, it would be a strange thing indeed for me to start writing about the same subject(s).  I don’t even remember very clearly what I wrote yesterday.  That’s one of the side-effects of writing it all down:  I don’t need to use my own disk space to store it in my head.

But I don’t feel like writing anything about external reality on any kind of large scale today.  I don’t really feel like writing anything at all; I’m just doing this out of habit, which has tremendous power over me.  Of course, it’s my habit, initiated by me, so in a way I’m saying that I have tremendous power over me.  Unfortunately, that power is not something readily consciously seized.

I had a good habit going when I was writing fiction for a long time there.  Starting when I was up at FSP West I wrote three to four pages of fiction every day, and kept that up for nearly ten years, I think, writing or editing on every work morning but Thursdays, and I produced a lot of material given that time frame.  Here, just take a look on Amazon at my list of author’s works*.  There are many titles there.  Mind you, there is some redundancy, in that my short stories that are available individually only for Kindle are also collected into Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities** along with two stories that don’t appear elsewhere.

I was “triggered” to think about such things yesterday afternoon when my coworker was telling me about watching It: Welcome to Derry, and discussing how other things from the Stephen King universe are involved in it, as well as other characters.  It sounded pretty nifty, though I don’t know that I’ll ever watch it.  What it made me think most, though, was how my fictional universe(s) is/are interconnected in many ways, and that they’re all also connected back to the first full-length novel I ever wrote back in high school, called Ends of the Maelstrom.

I lost the original draft of that when I lost nearly everything else I owned—and things far more important even than all that—back in 2012.  But I know the story, of course, and I could probably rewrite it more or less as it was, if I just chose to do it.

But I bemoaned the fact—as I said to my coworker—that I don’t seem able to write fiction anymore, even though thinking about that combined universe writing makes me think about my many unwritten stories.  As I said to my coworker, I really wish I could finish Outlaw’s Mind, though it will end quite sadly, and is already very sad.  I gave him some minor spoilers, which I felt were fine, since he’s unlikely to read any of it, ever.

Of course, not too long ago I wrote my little sci-fi story Extra Body, which is really meant to be kind of funny, in a way, but I couldn’t even get to the point of editing that very much, let alone publishing it.  And I haven’t made any further progress on DFandD.

I wish I had the energy to write new fiction, but all my energy reserves seem to be used up, or at least I am trying to get the dregs out of the container every day.  But every day it gets harder just to make it to the next day.  I’m exhausted, I’m always in pain, I have no real rest and nothing to which I look forward.  If I had a simple “off” switch, I might just flip it.

The trouble with that, of course, is that if it literally just stopped me, it might be possible for someone else to flip it back on and I would have to resume just as I had been when I flipped it off (so to speak).  It might be better to go into a cocoon like Adam Warlock and metamorphose into the next stage of my existence, but I don’t appear to have that option.

I’m very tired.  So very tired.  Indeed, I’m so tired that I’m writing sentence fragments.

Maybe I’ll try to share my various works on social media, to see if anyone picks up on any of them.  I doubt they will, but it’s possible.  After that, I don’t know.  It’s nearly the end of another pointless year, albeit one with one saving grace, perhaps two.  I don’t really look forward to seeing the next year.

But I probably will see myself to writing tomorrow’s blog post.  In the meantime, I hope you’re all doing okay.

*There’s some book in there by someone else that has a sort of similar title to one of my books (Son of Man), but the author’s name is nothing like mine, so I don’t know what the heck is up with Amazon’s software that it put that there.  It’s sort of annoying, but it’s not worth the effort to try to get them to fix it.  They didn’t even carry any Hanukkah-themed gift card boxes or envelopes this year, which really makes me feel a bit disinclined to buy from them as much as I have in the past.

**That one is available in hardcover, and it ought to arrive before Christmas for most people if you wanted to order it as a gift for someone.

by

“Vainly I had sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow…”

Well, it’s Friday at last, and the day I mentioned earlier this week—you know, 11-14-25.  I’m sure you all “got” the slight fun I found in this date, and I’m not going to go into it any farther.  If you’re interested, you could go back and look at that earlier post.

I’m writing this on my lapcom today, for the first time since last week.  It will—or should—be the last post before Monday, because I don’t think we’re going to be working tomorrow.  At least one of our best closers who comes in on weekends when we’re open has a family crisis, and it’s a serious one, so he won’t be coming in, and that means the rest probably wouldn’t find it worthwhile.  If that situation changes, I might write a post, but I doubt it.  The boss himself suggested we won’t be working tomorrow, so there’s a pretty strong inclination in that direction.

I hope to be doing something rather enjoyable at the office after work this evening, but I won’t get into it now.  It’s nothing most of you would probably care about, and many of you might not find it interesting, but I’m looking forward to it.  Hopefully it all goes well.

I did not read any Principles of Neural Science yesterday, nor indeed any of my other science books.  I’m afraid my stomach (or, really, my whole GI tract) was giving me quite a bit of trouble during the day, and so I didn’t really do anything that required any significant focus or imagination.  I hope to read something today—my GI tract appears to be responding to my attempts at remediation—but we shall see.

The GI tract has its own, dedicated sub-nervous system, which by some measures is reputedly at least as sophisticated as a cat’s brain, and mine is pretty clearly about as stubborn and willful as any cat.  I guess I don’t have much right to complain, since I am also rather stubborn and willful, and in some senses catlike*; I’ve got little leg to stand on for complaining.

Let’s see, let’s see, what else should I write about…or, rather, about what else should I write?  I’m really not sure.  I’m trying very hard not to share too many too negative thoughts here, but it’s hard, since that’s a lot of my thoughts.  It also hasn’t seemed to do anything to improve the circulation of this blog.  I have returned to the old numbers of typical daily readers—roughly a few dozen—and if anything the number seems to have shrunk slightly.  I don’t really know what to make of it.

It would be nice to have a wider audience, and especially one that was widening, but I am not good at self-promotion.  It makes me feel very uncomfortable.  That’s largely because of poor self-esteem, I guess.  Or maybe it’s just social anxiety/awkwardness, or just a general sense of rudeness, or ASD, I don’t know for sure.

It would be nice if more people read my blog, though, or listened to my music, or read my books.  I would really love to have people enjoy my creations, and maybe even have a few of them tell me so and tell me what they liked about them—especially the books, of course.

Maybe my work will become popular after I die.  I guess I’ll never know whether that happens, but it’s something onto which I can hold to console myself when next to no one reads anything I write, especially fiction, or listens to my music, or whatever.

I’m at least still trying to keep my posts somewhat short, setting my target now for 701 words as I have for the last week or so.  Indeed, I’m getting pretty close to that number now, already.  I don’t know whether my readers are grateful for the slightly shorter posts, or if they dislike them, or if they are thoroughly indifferent.

I frequently wrestle with just giving up the whole process as a bad bet.  Writing this blog never did seem to improve the sales of my books, which was the whole reason I first started doing it.  It certainly hasn’t helped my mental illnesses; or if it has, I don’t even want to consider what they would have been like without it.

And it certainly hasn’t made my life into anything anyone sane would want to have.  I don’t think even Hill House would want it, and it’s not sane**.  Hell, I’m not entirely sane, myself—whatever that means—and I don’t really want my life, either.

Oh, well, there’s probably nothing I can do.  Maybe I should just stop trying.  I wish I were able simply to give up and let go.  Maybe someday soon I will be so able.  That would be a relief, certainly for me, and maybe for all of you.

I guess it doesn’t really much matter to anyone but me, though, certainly in the relatively long term.

Oh, well.  I hope you all have a very good day and a very good weekend and a very good week after that, and so on and on.

*Not my agility, though.  That’s not horrible, but it’s far from catlike.  And my dexterity leaves even more to be desired, unless I’m paying close attention.  My default state seems to leave me rather disconnected from my body in certain senses, and that tends to lead to a bit of clumsiness.

**So said Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House, and she has authority.

by

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t”

Well, first let me apologize for yesterday’s blog that largely concerned the weather, and in a trivial sense at that.  It was rather lamentable, I know, with emphasis on the first four letters of that adjective.

On the other hand, I don’t apologize for having had my little bit of fun with the date.  That may have been even less interesting to most of you than my jabbering on about the weather, but I like it.  I fully expect that I will do such things again.  For instance, in a similar vein, today is a bit fun because it is 11-12*, so the numbers are in appropriate ordinal sequence with no gaps.

That’s not very fun.  More fun will be had (by me, anyway) on Friday, when it will be 11-14-25.  If you don’t immediately see the fun there, it may help that a similar fun date next month will be available on 12-13-25.  This fun also works with the European date order (but in both you have to leave out the digits that denote the century).  Also, there were no equivalently fun dates in any month before October.

This is the most fun I’ve had on any kind of date in at least 16 years, I would guess.  That’s an easy call, because I haven’t been on any date at all in at least that long.  See what I did there with the multiple meanings of the word “date”?  Of course you did.  What do I think you are, a moron?

No, I do not think that.  You are reading a blog post, so you are a reader, which gives you a serious leg-up, moronia-wise.  You draw from the well of that greatest of all human inventions:  written language.  Your taste in reading material may be somewhat questionable, but I cannot legitimately complain about that.

Wow, I feel like I ought to be almost done with this post, but I’ve barely passed 300 words.

On to other things.  I’m going to try to do a better job about science reading during my downtime in the office.  It’s not that I’m completely slacking; I’m reading Shape by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg, and I just read his earlier book How Not to Be Wrong.  I’ve read both before and/or listened to the audio books, but they are well worth rereading.  He’s a great math professor, and has a gift for explaining potentially abstract concepts.  I think he’s slightly better at this than Steven Strogatz, the author of The Joy of X and Infinite Powers, but they’re all good.

I also just yesterday gave in to an urge I’ve had for some time:  I ordered a textbook I liked in med school but which we didn’t really get into as deeply as I would like:  Principles of Neural Science, by Kandel et al.  The edition I had was by Kandel and Schwartz, if memory serves, but Dr. Schwartz is no longer involved, it seems.

It’s a textbook, so it’s pricey, even in paperback, but I discovered that I could put it on a payment plan through Amazon, so that’s what I did.  It arrives today.

I’ve also resolved, at least tentatively, to try to take the heat off my reading of my science books‒including the above newcomer‒by doing something I did when reviewing/studying in med school:  I would get a text that I was reviewing, and I would pick a section to read/review by flipping a coin.

Actually, it was a series of flips, each one dividing the “remaining” part of the book in half.  In other words, for the first flip, heads would mean I would look in the front half of the book, tails would mean the back half.  Then the next flip would decide to which half of that half I would narrow things down further.

Anyone who has spent any time dealing with computers and/or binary numbers can readily recognize that, with 10 flips of the coin, one could choose a specific page in a 1024 page book.  I guess every flip would count as a kind of “half-life” for the book’s pages.  If one wanted, one could even choose one’s pages not with a coin flip, which is not truly random, but with a quantum event that has a 50-50 chance, like measuring whether a given electron’s spin is up or down.

Of course, I don’t have a Stern-Gerlach gate, so I would have to “farm out” that process.  But I understand that there are apps that you can use that have their sources at labs where each decision is truly made by a quantum measurement.

It’s not terribly practical nor more useful for pickling book pages than is a coin flip, but if you’re a convinced advocate of the Everettian, “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics, it has the added “benefit” that each “flip” will divide the universe into two “worlds”, one where you choose from the earlier half, another where you choose from the latter.

Coin flips do not enact such splitting, not in anything but the trivial sense that every quantum level interaction potentially does so.  The experience will be the same for you, though, except whatever glee you might derive from splitting the universe to choose a section to read.

Anyway, I’ll be trying to read my books, random section by random section.  Believe it or not, this works for me.  I don’t have to learn things in order, usually, and this method avoids me feeling bored while trying to trudge through a text in order.

Perhaps I do have some aspects of ADHD up in there in my brain.

Well, I’ve now passed my target length for this post by some margin, so I’ll call this enough for today.  I expect to be writing another post tomorrow, but like everything else**, it is not absolutely certain.  I hope you have a very good day.

*Only in the American style Month-Day-Year format, though.  It is less fun in the European Day-Month-Year format.

**Yes, even death and taxes, in principle.

by

“I turn the trouble of my countenance merely upon myself.”

I would like to apologize to anyone who was worried about me* on Saturday (and possibly through the rest of the weekend) because I did not post on that day.  One of our two weekend closers was unable to make it in because of serious personal things happening, and our newest fronter‒the only remaining active one‒also could not make it.  If we had opened the office, there would have been very little to accomplish, so the office did not open.

Thus, I had the weekend “off”, for whatever that’s worth.  I was at least able to get some rest and to get some walking in (trying to be careful not to overdo it).  It was all very boring, though.

I’ve chewed up and digested (and passed) a lot of the things that I do for distraction, like YouTube videos, and the Algorithm** cannot seem to grasp my desires and interests as well as it used to do.  It’s quite frustrating at times.  But I suspect the fault lies not in my algorithms but in myself.  I am running out of capacity to divert myself adequately.  To quote the Pink Floyd song One of My Turns, “nothing is very much fun anymore.”

It shouldn’t be so, of course (though what “should” be anything is quite debatable).  I have oodles of books in my Kindle and even a fair few “real” books.  I have a stack of science books above my desk including Spacetime and Geometry by Sean Carroll, and the whole “Theoretical Minimum” series by Leonard Susskind et al, and Quantum Field Theory As Simply As Possible by Anthony Zee, and even a text coauthored by Stephen Hawking called Euclidean Quantum Gravity.

These are all books I chose and in which I have real, serious interest, but I cannot seem to muster the focus to take them down and read them during breaks and down time.  I could even be using my membership to Brilliant to review things and to learn new things‒it’s a lovely service/site/app.  I also have a lifetime membership to Babbel that was surprisingly cheap, which I have hardly used at all.

This is all stuff in which I am seriously interested; no one is asking me to study this material, let alone making me do it.  But I cannot seem to focus on any of it.

I guess I’ve always done better, academically, when I was in a formal program, with quizzes and tests and discussions and so on.  But even in those situations, I often got distracted and sometimes had to forbid myself to do anything but classwork during the week.  Even then, my approach was never typical.

My ex-wife used to say that I was the only medical student she knew that never studied but still passed everything.  Now, that was a serious exaggeration; I studied in my way, but not when she was around.  Also, how many medical students had she known other than me?

Still, I don’t and didn’t study the way other people seem to tend to study.  I don’t memorize things, generally.  I make a sort of model or mechanism of the subject in my head, putting the pieces together, and though this might make me slower to learn initially, it keeps the knowledge in my head, because it’s not rote memorization, it’s more of a system or a construct.  I have a kind of picture or shape or edifice, and if I “look at it”, the answers are almost implicit.

It sounds sexier than it is, probably.

In any case, I’m fortunate that I can learn that way, because cranking through things has always been…well, not quite anathema to me, but I do have a hard time.

According to what I have read, between 30% and 70% of people with autism spectrum disorder also have diagnosable ADHD.  Now, I don’t know whether this might be behind some issues for me, but my studying, though relatively successful for me in the past, has never been very sensible.

For instance, the one thing common to pretty much all my notebooks in undergrad and in med school is that nearly every page was packed, not with notes from whatever the lecture was, but with doodles of varying kinds, some quite intricate.

Many of these doodles were dark (it’s me, after all) but there were also a lot of whimsical things.  For instance, in a lecture in anatomy class that included descriptions of the lactiferous duct, I drew an elaborate cartoon of a “lactiferous duck” which was a caricature of a mallard swimming along with a bottle of milk slung around its neck in the fashion of the stereotypical rescue Saint Bernard’s bottle of booze.

My friend Chivano thought it was pretty funny.  He was sitting next to me while I drew it.

Well…this has been a weird blog post, has it not?  And I’ve passed the 701 word target, so it’s time to draw this weirdness to a close.  Also, I’m not really interested in writing more at the moment.  It, like everything else, is in a superposition of boring and irritating.  It probably gets that from me.

I hope you all have a good day and a good week, and so on, and so on, and so on…

*See, I still occasionally write some fiction.

**As if there were only one.

by

For ’tis your thoughts that now must blog our kings

Hello and good morning.  It’s the first Thursday in November today—it has to be so, since it’s the 6th, and there are only 7 days in a week, so there could not have been a prior Thursday in November, there being no “negative numbered days”.  QED*.

I’m writing today’s post on my mini lapcom, as I call it, which I decided to bring with me to the house yesterday, just in case.  Possibly I was persuaded by my discussion in yesterday’s post about the prospect of writing and writing and writing, on some future day, to see how long I could just keep writing off the cuff, impromptu, without a script and without an agenda, with only bathroom (and food) breaks.

I realized that was not something I would ever want to do on my smartphone.  Not that it couldn’t be done, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.  Also, I think the bases of my thumbs would probably swell up to twice their baseline size if I did that, and I might never be able to use them again.

I don’t know what subject or subjects to address on this first Thursday post of November in 2025 (AD or CE, whichever you prefer), but that didn’t stop me from writing nearly two hundred words before even beginning this paragraph.  I guess maybe this is how most casual conversations go, isn’t it?  People just sort of start talking and see what comes out of their own mouths and the mouths of their interlocutor(s).

I suspect that, a decent portion of the time, most people in a conversation are only slightly more “surprised”** by what another person says than they are about what they say themselves.  We don’t tend to think ahead before we speak, at least not in most interactions; we hear our own thoughts even as we’re enunciating them.

So it is with my writing—at least my nonfiction (though my fiction very much also just happens).  I rarely know ahead of time what the next word will be.  I certainly don’t know more than a word or two in advance, unless I’m really focused on making some specific point that’s going to require specific words.

I guess it’s not entirely unlike the way LLMs produce words and so on.  They don’t exactly plan it out ahead of time.  The various weights in the network interact in whatever way they do, which has been influenced by their “training”, and they come out with the next word and the next.  They don’t really have any clearer, linear, step-by-step processes that they would understand (in detail) themselves.

That’s not to say they couldn’t in principle know the weight values of their nodes (I think that’s the term usually used), and could literally copy those weights into other places to run an AI that starts off identical to the original—it’s much easier for software to do this than for wetware like human brains/minds.  But they couldn’t discern and work out the logic, the steps, the process in detail of how and why they work they way they do specifically.

This is the good ol’ Elessar’s Conjecture (which I suspect is a law, or else I wouldn’t conject it):  No mind can ever fully and completely understand itself, because each data processing unit, be it neuron or a transistor or whatever, does not have the information processing power to describe itself, let alone its interaction with the rest of the network of which it is a part.

Intelligence cannot ever be a simple process, I’m very nearly certain of that.  And nonlinear, neural network style “programs” are not simpler just because we can grow them far more easily than we can write out the program for an actual AI.  We don’t know how they work—not in detail, sometimes barely even in vague terms.  They just “grow” if we follow certain steps.

But you can grow a plant in a similar fashion.  Heck, you can grow a new human if you follow a few relatively simple and often not unpleasant*** steps.  But could you “write” a human?  Could you design and them build one, biochemistry to brain and all?

If you can honestly and correctly answer “yes” to that question, what the hell are you doing reading this?  We need you out there solving all the world’s problems!  Maybe you are, though.  I could hardly expect to know better than you what actions you should take if you are such an incredible mind.  Maybe you know exactly what you’re doing.

I doubt it, though.

Nevertheless, perhaps we only truly understand something when we can actually design and build it, piece by piece.  We do not understand our AIs.  What’s more, they do not understand themselves, any more than you and I understand ourselves in detail (though I think we’re currently better at that than AIs, but we’ve had a lot more practice).

Okay, well, I passed 701 words just a moment ago, so I’ll bring this post to a close, having once again meandered into surprising territory, though I hope it’s at least mildly interesting and thought provoking.  I’ll just close with the notion that, perhaps, if one wishes to take drastic, revolutionary action to save the world from great crisis, one should not act against specific human political leaders and the like, but one should rather sabotage server farms and related parts of computer infrastructure.  It is relatively fragile.

I’m not saying I recommend this, I’m just…thinking “out loud” on a keyboard.

TTFN

*That’s the old quod erat demonstrandum, not quantum electrodynamics, though kudos indeed to the Physics community for making one of the best science acronyms ever in QED.

**By which I don’t mean “startled” in any sense, though that can happen.  I just mean that one doesn’t know ahead of time and so one’s own speech is as much a revelation to one’s consciousness as is that of others.

***For good, sound, biological reasons:  Creatures that enjoy sex are far more likely to leave offspring than those that do not, so over time, such creatures will tend to comprise the vast majority of any population that reproduces sexually.

by

Words about fear and words about words

Well, it’s Saturday again, and for the second week in a row, I am writing a blog post.  I warned you that I probably would:  here, go take a look.  See?  I told you.

Of course, a blog post means I’m going to the office today.  It’s not a full day, but it chews up so much of the middle part that there’s no possibility of getting any extra rest, at least not for me.  For instance, I have awakened well before I would need to go to the office, but my anxiety or tension or whatever it might best be called does not let me sleep‒for fear of oversleeping, I guess.  It’s some manner of fear, anyway.  It’s not a fear of physical attack (I think) but it sort of feels like I have to watch my back, as though someone or something is out to get me.

Fear is not the mind killer, of course, despite the popular mantra from Dune.  Fear (up to a point) can sharpen the mind, if it’s not resisted inappropriately.  I think the 12th Doctor’s take on being scared is far better than that from Dune.  See below:

–

Obviously, too much fear is bad, but as Stephen Fry, playing the unscrupulous tobacconist points out (starting at roughly the 2:45 point here), that’s what the term too much means.

Too much of anything, more or less by definition, is bad.  This is one of those somewhat rare circumstances in which one can say “by definition” and not be relaying a merely semantic point without substance.

This is in contrast to the silly old conundrum “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound?”  If you simply define your terms precisely, there is not going to be any ambiguity in the answer‒but you have to choose your “definitions”* of each word clearly, especially ones like “hear” and “sound”.

If you’re ever arguing about something (other than etymology and/or usage and/or diction) and you want to go to the dictionary to settle it, then you’ve probably been arguing about something without substance‒arguing past each other, as they say.  I’ve heard such arguments, even between people with seemingly above-average intelligence.

Of course, if they’re arguing for fun, as a sort of mental sport and exercise, and if they both (or all) are enjoying the process, then I have no trouble with it.  It probably sharpens their thinking skills, as long as they don’t let themselves forget that they’re just arguing over misaligned coding and the logical implications thereof.  Even a skilled martial artist who trains purely for exhibitions may be in real trouble in a street fight against serious opponents.

But even the OED doesn’t decide or define what English words mean; it records what words have been used to mean, their origins, their etymology, all that good, interesting stuff.

How did I get on this subject?  I guess I’ll see as I do the editing.  I certainly do bounce and meander in my head, don’t I?  And that process is often inextricably intertwined with writing.

That can be a good thing, sometimes, I suppose.  I would think it’s at least related to the nature of creativity.  But it’s also important to be able to focus and stay on point, to be disciplined, if one is truly to create anything of depth.  One of my biggest problems in the past was that I would come up with, for instance, good story ideas, but I would soon get distracted by some new story idea and get diverted from the first.

One of the best things about having been to prison‒yeah, there were a few good things, though they were strongly overwhelmed by the bad‒was that I was in a situation in which I could discipline myself to write every morning, when lights came on (about 3 am) for 3 to 4 pages, and not go on to a new story until I finished the first.  I mailed the pages out to my Mom, Dad, and sister as I went along, after rewriting them for a bit of legibility**.

In this fashion, I wrote first Mark Red, then CatC, then Paradox City.  Then, after I got out, I continued writing, finishing one story before starting the next, right up until I began Outlaw’s Mind.  That was the last story I started in that pattern, though I’ve since written a bit on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and even less on HELIOS.

Currently, I just write this every work day.  I cannot explain why in any quick and simple fashion, but it is what it is, as the tautology goes.

I hope you have a good day.  I should be back on Monday.

*I put that in scare quotes because in nearly all cases, words don’t have real, singular, exclusive definitions, but instead have usages.  Now, as the person who coined various words in, for instance, The Chasm and the Collision, I can actually and literally define those words.  I have actual authority over those words; I created those words and I created those worlds.

**I kept my first draft so I would be able to go back and check things if I needed to do so.

by

“They tumble blindly as they make their way…”

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m beginning the process of making my way to the office.  By the time I finish writing this, and certainly by the time it’s posted, I will be there.

I thought I might stay out sick today, because yesterday at the office I felt pretty crummy and almost as if I had a fever.  I checked, and my temperature was normal, but that’s hard to interpret, because I almost never don’t have NSAIDS and other analgesic/antipyretics on board*.  So I could pretty easily have something brewing that would cause a fever, but my fever response is too suppressed.

That’s not an ideal situation, I know, but the alternative is to try to ignore the chronic pain I have.  That’s not so easy, for good, sound, biological reasons.  I’m not saying it’s impossible, and with the proper motivation I could probably do it, but I have no such motivation.

What would I be trying to achieve by not treating my pain as best I can?  Increased longevity?  Hah!  What would be the point of that?  This life that I have is not really something worth prolonging.

If one has a delicious meal one may want to eat slowly, to relish** it.  If one is spending time with a good friend or spouse or other beloved family member, certainly that’s worth making things last as long as one reasonably can do.  But even people who consider themselves masochists don’t really want to prolong their own suffering.  They tend only to want the pain that gets them excited, which is not really “suffering” as most people would think of it.  In any case, I am no masochist; my inclinations are, if anything, in the opposite direction.

I don’t mean to imply that my own suffering is particularly odious or anything.  I’m sure there are many people who suffer much more than I do.  Some of them have to suffer with being moral and intellectual imbeciles, and that’s pretty horrifying to contemplate; many such people are involved in government, even though these are probably the last people one would reasonably want to have the job of keeping the machinery of the state functioning.

I mean, we can all see how badly that works, though some are deluded enough that they would claim not to know whereof I speak.  Still, what are you going to do?  Force the more competent, moral, disciplined, intellectually humble but rigorous people to be governors and legislators and administrators?  What if they got really pissed off about it and decided just to wreck everything as much as they could because they’ve been forced to work in positions of governance?

You think things are bad now?  Beware the wrath of smart, patient, disciplined, creative people.

Anyway, that’s just a tangential thought, something in which I seem to specialize, though it is not deliberate.  I just tend to let my thoughts meander***.

Speaking of which, yesterday, in recognition of that tendency, I titled my post by paraphrasing the catchphrase of the old cartoon character Ricochet Rabbit.  Since then, I had a related memory pop up of the old toy “Ricochet Racers”.  I never actually owned one of those, but I can vaguely recall the jingle that went with their ads:  “Ricochet Racers on target!  Have a real play [or was it a great play?] with a ricochet.”  Something like that.  That second line may be slightly off, but it gets the gist.

I wish I could convey the tune in writing.  Instead, here’s a video with a later version of the toy, and the guy sings a bit of the original theme, but with a changed second line.  He’s not a great singer, though, and these aren’t exactly the original words.

Thinking about it, I realize that the rhythm of that jingle is at least a little bit interesting.  The song appears to be in some version of 4/4 time, but the first line is sung in a set of slow-ish triplets, each triplet being equivalent to 4 quarter notes.  That’s mildly impressive for a jingle written to sell a long-defunct kids’ toy.

I wonder how many truly skilled composers end up doing such less-than-glorified work because they’ve got to make a living somehow.

We know that many movie composers are truly brilliant, from John Williams and Hans Zimmer through to people who primarily work in other genres but sometimes do films, such as Jonny Greenwood.  But those are large scale, respectable composing jobs.  What of the could-be Mozart who must write songs for McDonalds commercials?

I guess if such a person finds joy and satisfaction in that work, then there’s nothing to lament****.  Perhaps they can do enough composing to make a living that way, and otherwise compose things of their own in their spare time, which might one day be played by fancier musicians for more high-falutin’ purposes.  That seems okay, too.

That might be analogous to what I do here, except that none of my writing makes me any money at all, so it’s a bit less rewarding.  Still, if anyone reading wants to send me money, we could probably figure out a way to do it.

I won’t hold my breath.  But, whatever.  I hope at least some of you, some of the time, enjoy my posts.  And heck, if you like them, you could certainly share them, if you can think about someone who might be interested in reading them.

Here, I wrote a song about such liking and sharing.  It’s no “Ricochet Racers” theme, but I think it’s pretty good.

Have a nice day.

*That means “in my system”, in typical medical jargon, in case that wasn’t clear.  It probably was clear, though, wasn’t it?

**Or whatever garnish or condiment one might like on one’s food.

***Like a restless wind inside a letter box, if you will.

****Imagine a lament for a writer of jingles.  Rather “meta” isn’t it?