books

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This is the title, not a deed

It’s Monday morning again, despite popular demand, and here I am again, writing a blog post to start the week (despite lack of more or less any demand).  Welcome!

It’s already stupidly muggy here in south Florida, even though it’s only the last day of the first week (the first seven day stretch, not the first Sunday through Saturday period) of April.  And, of course, the world is stupid overall.

But what else is new?  Individual humans can be quite intelligent (in my experience, often far more so than they would credit themselves to be) but humans in large numbers tend to be dragged down by the lowest common denominators or the weakest links or whatever other metaphor you want to use for the least impressive aspects of human beings, either between or within individuals (or both).

As for anything else, well, I’m steadily getting better from my bronchitis, which is certainly something I prefer to continuing to have it.  I’m also trying some newish shoes (not a new make or model, but a slightly tweaked size) that seems to be better for walking than some of my prior ones.

I haven’t read anything from any books in the last 10 days or so‒more or less since I started getting sick‒and though it’s weird, it may be a useful mental break.  To be honest, I’ve had a hard time getting into any books recently, whether fiction or nonfiction, and maybe I just need to clear my head before starting back into things.

Of course, I could go and do some Brilliant dot org stuff and really bone up on my STEM* knowledge.  I could also work on learning some new languages using Babbel, of which I am a subscriber.  I had thought about learning Russian‒women speaking Russian just sound really…good for some reason, and I thought it might be nice to be able to converse with such women‒but given recent politics and conflicts, it’s slightly awkward to be learning Russian right now.  I’d also love to learn more German, or maybe French, and I could use a bit of refreshing on my Spanish, which is rusty.

Unfortunately, Babbel doesn’t really have any Asian languages, or I’d want to use it to improve my Japanese.  I’m a fan and proponent of learning other languages‒I think doing so helps one understand one’s own native language better and to grasp the structure and nature of languages and of thought itself, or at least the logical conveyance thereof.

More likely and more seriously, I’ve been thinking about doing some more deep learning on, well, deep learning, neural nets, as well as general neuroscience and computer science.  I have some background in many of these areas‒for instance, we had a truly wonderful neuroscience textbook in med school that I really loved‒but I would like to understand more.  I’m also interested in complexity and chaos theory and information theory in general.

Who knows whether any of this will ever come to fruition or if I will ever learn enough for it to matter?  It would be nice to make some contribution to human knowledge in some way, and not just by random pontifications here on a blog that’s read by maybe 30 people on a good day.

This is probably all pie in the sky stuff, anyway.  I don’t know what I’m actually going to do, except that if I’m not able to improve my chronic pain significantly, then all other bets are off.  In the meantime, I almost want to put out an appeal for requests (or a request for appeals) from readers.  It’s the sort of thing people with YouTube channels (and similar) do by getting Patreon accounts, where people pay some nominal amount to be patrons and are supposed to get some form of extra benefits through that, like recommending movies to which to react, or asking “ask me anything” type questions, that sort of thing.

I guess I wouldn’t mind people asking me to write about certain topics or subjects‒it might be better than just shouting into the vacuum, hoping someone notices.  Maybe it would get me more readers.

So , if any of you have any requests about things you want me to discuss‒within reason, of course‒then feel free to mention it in the comments below.  And by below, I mean below here on the website robertelessar.com, not on the website formerly known as Twitter or on Facebook or Bluesky or Threads or whatever.  Maybe if I were doing this as a full time job, I could commit to monitoring such venues thoroughly, but unless there is someone out there who really does want to be my patron, then I can only do this in my spare time‒like now, while I’m commuting to the office.  So please, if you actually want to give me feedback, come here to do it.

Thanks.  In the meantime, I hope you have a good week.

*I recently saw someone recommend the STEM acronym be changed to STEAM in one video from Computerphile, I think‒maybe it was Bill Maher‒because the person was pointing out that we need to have exposure to the “arts” (and humanities in general) if we want people to get exposed to interesting ideas and creativity to apply to their science, technology, engineering, and math stuff.  The argument was well made, and I’m not going to do it justice here, just bringing it up.

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No links to famous people’s works here. They don’t link to ME, after all.

I thought for a moment that someone had been listening to me, because when I started this new Word file from the last blog post I wrote on my mini-laptop computer, it was in Calibri font right from the beginning!  Then I went and closed the earlier file/blog post, and when I had returned to this one, the base font had reverted to Aptos (which I like to call “craptos” because I don’t think it merits a more sophisticated insult).

So, it turns out that no one was listening to me, of course.

It’s Tuesday now, and I’m writing this on my laptop computer as indicated above.  This will probably make it faster to write, but whether it’s any better written than yesterday’s post, I cannot say.  I felt that yesterday’s writing was fairly erratic and disjointed and borderline incoherent, but I often have a difficult time judging how my writing will be perceived by other people.

If it’s fiction, I can only care up to a certain point, because I write fiction that I want to read, so I cannot try to adjust it for others too much.  I can only guess that somewhere out there exists at least one other person whose reading taste is similar to mine, and who might enjoy my stories.  So far, not counting my sister*, I don’t know of more than three people who have read any of my fiction, so it’s hard to tell.

But, of course, though my tastes have been esoteric at times—especially when it comes to my love of relatively deep scientific and mathematical and philosophical reading—I have also enjoyed some massively popular books of certain kinds.  For instance, my very favorite book of all time is The Lord of the Rings (taking it as one large book, as it was initially written), and that’s hardly a rare choice.  Similarly, I’m a great fan of Shakespeare, and it’s not as though no one else ever reads or otherwise enjoys his plays.

There have also been popular series of books for which I waited eagerly and excitedly as each volume came out, including The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Belgariad, the various Dragonlance books**, and of course the Harry Potter books.  I’m sure I’ve written here somewhere about how I read Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince seven times while waiting for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to come out.  All of these books have been quite popular, and I enjoyed them, too.

Then again, I had no interest whatsoever in any of the Twilight books, though I have written about vampires (and a demi-vampire) in one of my own books.  Likewise, I had no interest in Fifty Shades of Grey or the various Dan Brown books, and I haven’t read any new science fiction or fantasy in years, not counting Japanese light novels.

Speaking of that, I am very much impatient for some new volumes in a few light novel series I have read so far, but being light novels, they are much quicker to read than they are to publish.

In any case, I mean to say that just because I write to my own taste doesn’t mean that my stories are particularly esoteric in their nature and character.  I may be an alien in disguise, even to myself, but that doesn’t mean that stories that are bad are going to interest me.  Good stories have at least some degree of universality.  Even the Klingons love Shakespeare!***

My point is that, though I know I am a peculiar bean, I also think there are probably a lot of people (maybe not a majority, but a lot) who would enjoy at least some of my books and short stories.  But I am not good at promoting myself and making other people aware of my work.  This is probably related to my ASD and the related social anxiety, but also to my general self-hatred.  I tried to do a little promoting of my stuff at first, but it quickly became too stressful and irritating for me to tolerate.

So, if anyone out there has it in them—and so desires—to promote my stuff, even if just by sharing links and references in your own social media, that would be appreciated very much.  And while we’re at it, if anyone out there has a quick and easy cure for chronic pain*****, let me know.  Also, I want a unicorn.  (Actually, I want a dragon, but that might be harder to keep safely.)

Well, this post has probably been just as goofy and incoherent as yesterday’s.  My apologies.  That is, unless you like that sort of thing, in which case:  enjoy.  And try to have a good day.

*Not to imply that she doesn’t “count” in some important sense—she most certainly does—but just that it’s difficult to tease out the family relation from the other variables in the mix, so I cannot draw too many conclusions too easily.

**The ones that involved Raistlin, at least.  I didn’t have much interest in stories involving only the other characters of the stories.  Those of you who know those books can probably understand why this is so.

***Indeed, as the Klingon ambassador said in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country****, “You have never experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”

****The title itself is a Shakespearean reference, though in the movie, the undiscovered country is peace, whereas when Hamlet said it, he explicitly referred to death as the undiscovered country, one from whose bourn no traveler returns.

*****I don’t want to hear anyone saying “death” because that doesn’t count as a cure.  It makes the problem go away; it doesn’t solve it.  There is a difference.  And, don’t worry, as readers of my plan know, that is my own intended course of action if I cannot reduce my pain enough.

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“You gave me no warnin’ of what was to be”

“Monday, Monday…so good to me.”  So sang The Mamas and the Papas, though I’ve always thought those lyrics were strange.  I mean, who thinks that way about Monday?  The singer(s) is/are disabused of their fondness for Mondays already by the end of the first verse, at least if I follow its meaning, but I’ve never met anyone, as far as I can remember, who expressed such initial fondness for Monday, the beginning of the school/work week.

Looking back, I myself am probably the person who came closest to feeling that way of all the people I’ve known, back when I was in grade school and high school.  I’ve never had a great relationship with idle time, honestly, and I liked to learn, so Monday was good.  Also, my friends were at school.

I don’t know what to write about today, to be honest.  I’m working on my “project” of course, and taking steps toward its resolution.  I don’t think very much has changed yet, if anything.  I can certainly tell you that, so far, my pain has not diminished.  But I wouldn’t expect it to have disappeared so quickly with minimal (if any) physical alteration.

I’m getting a bit lost about things with which to fill my mental time.  I’m not really reading much anymore, fiction or nonfiction.  I did start rereading Unanimity:  Book I over the last few days.  I’m liking it, as far as it goes, though I appreciate when we leave Charley Banks’s point of view and get into the heads of the various other characters.  Charley is both the initial protagonist and the definite villain of the book, and boy does he do some truly horrible stuff, and it can be disquieting to be in his POV.

I’ve said to others that while of course the villain and title character of The Vagabond does or means to do more terrible things and more willfully so than Charley, the horror in The Vagabond is mainly supernatural style horror.  Charley, on the other hand, does horrific things that humans could, in principle, do to other humans.  In that sense, it’s a quasi-realistic horror story.  It’s not fully realistic, like Solitaire, but superficially nothing flagrantly supernatural happens.

Mind you, though it may carry the trappings of sci-fi horror, the things that happen in Unanimity are, in my mind at least, really not scientifically plausible, so I consider it supernatural horror.  This is in contrast to The Chasm and the Collision, which seems like a fantasy adventure story but which is, if you look closely, a science fiction story.  It’s wildly speculative science fiction, but so is Stranger in a Strange Land.

Anyway, I obviously don’t have much of consequence to cover.  It’s not as though my discussion is going to give anyone any new insights into my books, because no more than a handful of people have ever read (or ever will read) any of my books.  So I’m mostly just spitting in a high wind and seeing where it lands…which won’t matter, because no matter where it lands, it’s almost immediately going to dry out and be nothing.

Whatever.  I apologize for my constant grumpiness.  I am in pretty significant pain already today, but I’m trying* to work on it.  I’m constantly trying‒trying new shoes, new socks, new spandex joint braces, new medicine combinations, new forms of exercise and ways of doing the exercise I already do, avoiding specific foods, all that stuff and more.  I do not just saunter through life shrugging about my pain and my depression and my horrible social anxiety and giving up and not trying to improve.  I don’t give up on tasks very easily, and I try hard to be as rigorous in my attempts as is feasible in one life without the ability to do controlled (let alone blinded) trials.

I’m not optimistic about good outcomes when it comes to my present goal/strategy/plan of either improving my pain or killing myself.  People who say that, after enough torture, someone will beg for death are not lying.  Everyone has their limits, though some people’s limits are awe-inspiring, and death comes to them before they break.  But to have that strength requires some kind of meaning or purpose or at least a social connection.

We’ve all surely seen human interest reports of people who face terminal (or merely deadly) illnesses or accidents or losses but keep upbeat and positive  and either defeat their illness or come to terms with it or die with dignity in an inspiring manner.  Such stories almost always (in my limited sample, anyway) show people who have strong social supports, of friends or families or groups with solidarity and purpose.

You never see shows about the people who are alone and face a terminal or painful illness without even medical insurance or friends or family or other support nearby.  That’s because those people die like they lived‒alone and unnoticed.  Also, one can’t easily sell advertising with an after-school special about the secluded man who dies of complications of cancer and is only found when his rent is overdue or because the neighbors make a complaint about the smell that turns out to be his rotting corpse.

That’s enough for today, I think.  I’m sure you’re all inspired and uplifted by my beautiful words (ha ha).  I hope that you are inspired and uplifted by something, anyway.

It may be a fool’s errand, philosophically, to try even to begin to discern who deserves happiness.  But heck, you might as well try to be happy if you can, as long as you’re not doing it by making other people less happy.  Mutual exchange to mutual benefit is entirely possible, and is responsible for many if not most of the good and pleasant things we have in the world.  The universe may be truly zero sum and zero outcome in the end‒if the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics holds true‒but it can nevertheless have a positive integral, the sum of the area under the curve across time.  It is mathematically possible.

There’s nothing that guarantees it, of course.  It can also have a negative overall integral in principle.  Whether that will be the case or the other will depend, at least locally, on human behavior and choices.

I’m not optimistic.

*Fuck you, Yoda, you’re just wrong about the “trying” thing.  It was your self-important arrogance that contributed more than anyone else’s input, to the decadence of the Jedi that left them vulnerable to the Sith.

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Add title, stir until no lumps remain

Well, it’s Friday, after a foreshortened week (for me) but I still feel exhausted.  I’m scheduled to work tomorrow, but I’m not sure whether or not we will open the office; there don’t seem to be that many people who are going to be there, and apparently last week only one person showed up.  We shall see.  For business purposes, I hope we do well; for rest purposes, I hope we stay closed; and for my purposes…well, I have no useful purpose, so I just want to go to sleep and stay that way.

Today I have my autism assessment at around lunch time, and I’m at least a bit nervous.  I don’t enjoy meeting new people at the best of times*, but I think this is important.  I filled out all the paperwork and whatnot, which took quite a while for one of the portions, and there was another form my sister filled out, though I don’t know the contents thereof.

I honestly don’t know what to expect.  I also don’t know for sure what effect the results will have on me, positive or negative (meaning the “test result” not its effect on me, though that is certainly important).

Meanwhile, I’m trying to do a little promotion of my work via the various social media on which I have more recently become “active”, though that’s a relative term, of course.  I’m also rereading some of my books, just to try to see if there’s any hope at all of getting back to writing fiction.  If people actually showed any interest in it or shared it or read any of it, it would be a lot easier to be enthusiastic.  I just recently finished The Chasm and the Collision, which I still think is quite a good “fantasy” adventure**.  And now I’m rereading Son of Man, which I’m liking a lot again.  It’s an oddly intimate story, given the stakes involved in it.

I really wish I could get word out about my books to more people.  I really think there are plenty of readers who might enjoy them.  I think they’re pretty good stories, and they are pretty well written.

I also think my music is decent.  I know the production quality isn’t up to professional standards, but then again, I recorded the stuff using USB mics and practice amps and whatnot in the back storage room off the office, and I mixed it using free software that I had to figure out as I went along.  Considering that, I think my music is pretty good.

Anyway, if anyone reading this has any kind of following and is interested, it’d be great if you could share the links I share to this, and to my books and my music and so on.  I know I don’t have any right to ask for such things, but if the mood strikes you, it would be greatly appreciated.

It’s very weird to me that this blog is probably the most popular thing that I do.  I of course make no income from it.  I suppose I could set up a Patreon account and try to make money that way, but it’s hard for me to imagine someone paying to read this blog.  Also, I don’t have any idea what extra benefits I would give to Patreon supporters.

It probably all is just a series of exercises in even short-term futility, let alone accomplishing anything durable.  The world will little note nor long remember my words or my existence.  Even my kids would not notice much if I were to disappear at this very instant.  It certainly would have no significant impact on their futures.

“All is vanity” as is proclaimed in Ecclesiastes***.  Or as the Buddha said of a particularly painful kidney stone, “this too shall pass”.

I know, that’s a stupid joke.  But I’m a stupid person, so I guess it’s par for the course.

Anyway, I hope you have a good day today.  If I go to work tomorrow, I will probably write a post.  If not, I almost certainly shall not.  But no matter what, I hope you all have a good weekend.

*Well, at average times, anyway.  I’m not even sure what “the best of times” means for me.  I suspect that, at such a time, I would be at my best, and meeting new people would be unthreatening or at least easily tolerable.

**I’ve said it many times before, CatC is technically science fiction, since nothing that happens in it is “supernatural” in character.

***See, I’ve read the Bible, parts of it even in Hebrew, unlike most of the IgnoraMaga people who are nominally Christian nationalists, a flagrantly non-historical movement that relies upon the idiocy of millions of under informed people.

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Desperate but not undaunted

This may be short, but I thought I’d share a bit of info since I brought the general topic up earlier this week.  Just this morning, while I was getting ready for work (and indeed, just as I was about to brush my teeth) the idea for a story popped into my head.  This happens a fair amount, as I think I’ve said, with weird little scenarios triggered by something that’s been going through my mind or that I see, and they coalesce into the root of what might be a possible story.  Well, since I had spoken (so to speak, ha ha) with all of you about this earlier, I decided to pause my oral hygiene routine briefly and go write the story idea down in the notebook function of my smartphone.

I don’t want to overreact or to ask anyone to get their hopes up.  That latter bit would be utter hypocrisy.  It’s always difficult to say what will come of a story idea, or even the shape it will take‒just look at Outlaw’s Mind*, at how much it changed and improved (to me) from its simpler beginning.

I’m writing all this on my phone once again, by the way.  And the fact that I’ve written at least the roots of this story and most of this week’s posts on my phone leads me to toy with the idea of writing a next story wholly on the phone.  I know, I know, I’ve gone back and forth about hand-writing stories versus word processor/laptop computer versus phones, and I got all those notebooks and pens and everything, thinking that I’d write HELIOS in long hand, and now I’m thinking of the opposite.

This is an example of the workings of a desperate mind, one trying, scrambling, scrounging, looking for answers to getting back to writing, or music, or trying to help my chronic pain, or my insomnia, or my depression, and whether or not to pursue the possibility of an ASD diagnosis (not the heart kind‒I know I had that).  I’m trying to find something that has some meaning at all for my life to persist.

I guess that means I haven’t given up yet, but that’s more a matter of habit than anything else.  I am extremely stubborn, and I have trouble letting go of a process once it’s a habit.  Maybe that’s the ASD doing its thing, assuming it’s there.  Maybe I’m just dysfunctional and odd and alien.  I suppose those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Still, writing about this idea got me thinking of potential scenes and events for the story I mentioned above, so please forgive me if I space out a bit.  Just wait a moment or two; I’ll be back**.

That was kind of fun.  It could be an interesting story, this new idea.  We’ll see if anything happens with it.  I wouldn’t put serious money on the possibility, and I certainly don’t recommend holding your breath.  But if I were to write a novel or novella on the phone, the portability would be a big plus.

That reminds me of those old “palm pilot” things people used to have, the little personal data notebook digital things, with the plastic styluses.  Some people thought they were so cool using those things.  They were always so geeked out about them and seemed to look for excuses to get them out all the time.

Don’t get me wrong; if someone was just having a great time, enjoying using a brilliant piece of then-new technology, then have at them!  Enjoy!  Why not be happy with a new, useful tool, especially if it’s a cool tool?

At least some of the people who ostentatiously used the “personal data assistants”, though, were mainly status hungry.  I get it (though I may not grok it).  Humans in general tend to be status hungry; for ancestral humans, in-group status could have a big effect on reproductive opportunities (and even just basic survival chances), so any genes that pushed toward such behavior would tend, ceteris paribus, to be at an advantage, locally (i.e., in that particular gene pool).

But it is rather bizarre to watch from the outside, and instances of the phenomenon vary between the amusing and the contemptible, with many a superposition of the two.  It still happens today, of course.

Humans also haven’t shown any sign of ceasing to select status hungry people as the ones they follow, even though there are such obvious conflicts of interest and so much bias that makes such people unreliable in the long run.

Oh, well.  I guess it doesn’t matter, because in the truly long run there will be nothing but random elementary particles and forever-expanding spacetime, if the current understanding is correct.

Or, of course, there could be even worse alternatives.

There’s probably no possible horrible situation that couldn’t in principle be made even worse.  Even Sam Harris’s “worst possible misery for everyone” could be made even “worse” just by adding more people to the situation, each one of whom is in the worst possible misery they can be.

I suppose that fact implies the theoretical possibility of its opposite:  the best possible well-being for everyone.  Why does that feel so much more unrealistic?  Well, I could get into some of the potential reasons, many involving the biological necessity and crucial importance of fear and pain.  But that’s for another time, or you can read a bunch of my blog posts here and on Iterations of Zero.  I’m sure you can find my thoughts on the subject.

Aaaaand that’s enough meandering.  You all hopefully are going to have a good weekend.  I am tentatively scheduled to work tomorrow, but we shall see.

*Seriously, go take a look.  If you like it, why not buy some of my published stuff?  And then tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.

**Ha ha.  That’s a trick.  You can’t tell when or for how long I spaced out while writing, unless I tell you, or put a space or row of asterisks in the body of the writing.  I could begin a sentence one day and finish it years later.  It’s a bit like listening to a studio recording that had overdubs and one person doing more than one part.  You hear it all at once, but that’s not how it came to be.

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“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

And here…we…go, as the Joker said.

I’m writing something now on Wednesday on the way to work, in the back seat of a Lyft.  This time, I’m writing it on my little laptop computer, which has the disadvantage that its keys are not illuminated, and the back seat is dark, so I have to type by memory, to do my own bespoke version of touch-typing.  This isn’t too great of a burden, since I’ve been typing for more than 40 years*, but it does take away some degree of the advantage in speed that typing on a real keyboard otherwise gives me over the phone.

If I ever get another small laptop like this one, I mean to make sure that the keyboard lights up.  It’s just too useful.

Anyway, upon opening this laptop for the first time in a few weeks, I found that it was still at the point in Outlaw’s Mind where I had stopped when rereading through and further editing it.  It’s right after Timothy’s encounter with the policeman.  He’s about to be brought to the Vipassana Center, where things will begin to become stranger for him.

I really am more pleased with the nature of the story as it is than with the more straightforward idea that had sparked it initially and had been prefigured by the original opening, which I am removing.  Really, I have removed it, but it’s still there in my postings here on my blog, of course.  If I were ever to finish it and publish, I suppose I would take it down from here on my site, as would also be the case with Extra Body.

I doubt that any of that will ever happen, though.  I don’t have the impetus to do either thing, nor to start HELIOS, nor any of the oodles of other stories waiting in the back of my mind, some of which are already well-developed and involve an overall universe, linking to others in my stories’ omniverse.

I guess it would be nice to continue with them.  It would be nice not to have to worry about so many little things day by day that drain my hit points and my spirit points.  If I were to win a large lottery payoff**, I guess I would use it to move back up north and just write full time.  I could even spend my spare time studying mathematics and physics and other sciences, if I had the energy.  Why not?

It’s darned unlikely that anything like that is going to happen, unfortunately.  I have no rich relatives or friends, and even if I did, it’s hard to see one of them wanting to support me while I’m writing.

I have so many story ideas in the back of my mind, written down in quick notes in my phone and other systems, or just swimming through my brain.  And I still think of new little ideas for self-contained stories (I hesitate to call them “short” given past experience) as I go along, but unlike before, I don’t jot them down anywhere.  That’s a huge surrender on my part, but I have to be realistic.

If the Everettian quantum multiverse exists, then it’s likely that in some proportion of the wave function I succeed at doing all these things.  Likewise, if the universe is infinite in spatial extent, there are certainly a fraction of the infinite copies of me out there who will have some inordinate luck and go on writing.  However, these possibilities are no consolation, as I have no experience of what they experience anymore than of some small, furry thing from Alpha Centauri.

I guess that’s also a good thing, though, since there are certainly versions of my life that are much, much worse than this one.  I wouldn’t want to experience them.  But, of course, experiencing is one of the functions of the individual, separate identities, not of the conglomerate of those that share some common characteristics or past.  No one should expect to be able to experience both worlds that split after some quantum “measurement”.  It’s not logical.

Once their cells have split, identical twins are separate beings, individuals each in his or her own right, and there is no mingling or superposition of their experiences.  Thank goodness.  Because we are all descendants of an unbroken line of cellular ancestors, and have common past with every living thing on the planet (and a few orbiting in space).  Imagine if we somehow were able to experience every other living thing at some level.  It would be a bit like that weird Gaia planet in the later Foundation novels.

Anyway, while I can dream of having some benefactor or patron who takes care of my living logistics while I write, and maybe even who helps me market and promote my books and related items, I can also, any time I like, dream about having superpowers, or being universally loved, or some other such nonsense.

Such dreams are nice (as the Radiohead song admits), but reality is not obligated to make any of our dreams come true, good or bad.  It doesn’t even make some aggregated average of people’s dreams come true.  It just does what it does, and it is what it is, and we are merely one little, evanescent—although relatively interesting—corner of a universe that may be infinite in space and in time, and perhaps in other ways beyond those.

*Man, are my fingers tired.

**Difficult, since I don’t play.

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Doubt is called the beacon of the wise, the blog that searches to th’ bottom of the worst.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for my “regular” weekly blog post.  It’s the first Thursday in October of 2024.  It’s also Rosh Hashanah, so for those of you who celebrate it, L’shana Tovah.

I haven’t been working on any fiction at all since my last report‒unless you count my façade of being a normal person or living a normal life, of course.  That’s doing what it does, and I continue to do it for whatever reason(s)‒perhaps habit, perhaps duty (to whom or what, though?), perhaps out of self-punishment or self-harm, I don’t know.

I wish I had something interesting to discuss.  I’m nearly done with Authority, the second book in the Southern Reach novels.  They are (so far) much better than the movie Annihilation was.  But they are disorienting, as I’ve mentioned before, and given my own chronic and worsening insomnia and pain, they make me feel as though I might not be experiencing my own life as what it really is.  Not that I actually think I’m being fooled or am hallucinating in any serious ways.  But I do feel disconnected, separate, as though I’m not fully within or fully a denizen of this universe, but of some nearby, partly overlapping one.

I’ve long suspected that it would be difficult to “gaslight” me, because I have always found my own memory and understanding (certainly of my experiences) to be better than that of anyone around me.  Yet I don’t “trust” myself, either, which means I tend to keep checking and confirming aspects of reality to test the consistency of my impressions.  It may smack of OCD a bit, but it means that, at least intellectually, I find my own take on reality to be more coherent and consistent than that of most people with whom I interact.  Though there are always things one can learn from others, too.  One just has to be rigorous and strict in assigning credences.

As Descartes pointed out, we can never truly be certain that some powerful enough entity has not pulled the world over our eyes*.  He famously came down to the conclusion, or rather the starting point, of cogito ergo sum‒“I think, therefore I am”, the point being that he knows, to his own satisfaction at least, that he is there and is thinking, because he experiences it even if all else is an illusion.

Of course, even subjectivity could be an “illusion” in some sense, in principle.  The characters in all my stories have thoughts and subjective experiences‒they “think” they exist‒but that subjectivity only exists when they are being read, or when I wrote them.

And of course, we could be within an immensely complex “simulation”, and “merely” be aspects thereof.  Such a simulation could be paused, say, and this could happen frequently or for tremendous periods of time up in the level of reality in which the simulation is being run, and as long as the simulation picks up right where it left off, no one here would ever have any way to notice or to know.

There could be a googol “higher-level” years between every Planck time in our universe** and as long as the simulation wasn’t changed, or was changed in ways that were logically consistent, there would be no way to see it from inside.  This is one of the implications of the “simulation hypothesis” or whatever the “official” term is, put forward by such notables as Nick Bostrum, who apparently has a new book out called Deep Utopia.  I have not read it; I never finished his book Superintelligence, because it dragged on a bit and I didn’t find it as challenging or revelatory as I hoped it would be.  Maybe if I started again, the experience would be different.

I am reading at least two other books, though.  I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Nexus, which is quite good so far, though nothing is likely to surpass his first book, Sapiens, which is one of the best books I’ve read.

I’m also working through Now: The Physics of Time, by Richard A. Muller.  He’s trying to describe his notion of the true source and nature not only of time’s arrow, but of time itself.  It’s reasonably good so far, but his arguments have not been as interesting or as impressive as I’d hoped they might be.  Still, I look forward to getting to the point in which he elaborates on his idea that not merely space is expanding, but time is also doing so, and this is the source of time’s arrow and the nature of “now” and so on.  It’s intriguing, and it’s far from nonsensical, considering that Einstein/Minkowsky showed that space and time are one entity.

I’m sort of on hiatus from Nate Silver’s On the Edge, which is a good book, but is quite long and in-depth, and some things he discusses are more interesting than others, to me.

Other than that, I continue to feel discordant, or hazy or separate, like everything, including me, is “a copy of a copy of a copy of itself”.  Last night, the feeling of being disconnected, rootless, and that I am in the process of disintegrating felt highly distressing***.  I wished I could find a way to feel connected with the daily, normal processes of my life, instead of feeling as though I am, for instance, one of the people exploring Area X and trying to understand it without much chance or hope of success.  Or perhaps it felt more that I am the analogy of Area X, I am the alien thing/environment in the more “ordinary” world, dropped here perhaps by accident, with no idea where I really belong or whence I really came.

Now, this morning, those notions are not gone, but the alarm associated with them is not as intense, replaced more and more by fatigue, a kind of learned helplessness.  As time goes by, I tend more and more toward apathy‒not acceptance but merely giving up, just not having the energy to continue to care.  I would like to connect in some way, to feel as though I belonged somewhere, but I am a Nexus 13 in a world of humans‒a world where, inexplicably, nobody seems ever to have manufactured such replicants, and yet here I am, making everything ever more drearily baffling.

Oh, well.  Maybe as the disjunction progresses, I will reach some turning point, and I will melt, thaw, and resolve myself into a dew.  Or maybe I’ll have to try Hamlet’s next mentioned option and make my own quietus as I intended to do on the 22nd‒I don’t believe in any “Everlasting” being, fixed canons or otherwise, that could prohibit “self-slaughter”.

Or maybe I will find some answers; or if answers don’t already exist, maybe I’ll create some answers.  It seems unlikely, given my personal experience and understanding, but the odds are not zero.  Though they may well be close enough for all practical purposes.

TTFN

rosh-hashanah-merged

*To borrow a lovely expression from The Matrix.

**Ignore Relativity’s problems with simultaneity for…well, for now.

***So many “dis” words.

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And nature, as it blogs again toward earth, is fashioned for the journey

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so:  here’s another blog post—meaning another regular, weekly, Thursday morning blog post.  Of course, people who receive notifications about my blog posts will have seen already that not only did I publish an impromptu entry on Monday, but also that, starting on Tuesday, I’ve been sharing a chapter at a time, three times a day, of Extra Body.

I finished the third editing run-through of that story by Tuesday morning, and I decided, “that’s good enough, I’m done with that, I’m tired of working on it, or on anything else”.  I considered just publishing it through Amazon, but that would have involved designing a cover and getting the formatting right for the paperback and e-book versions, and even then it would have been far from likely that anyone (except my sister) would read any of it, ever.  At least this way, maybe someone who is idly curious but wouldn’t go to the trouble of actually buying the book from Amazon (or other sources) might idly start reading it and even might read the whole thing.

Speaking of the whole thing, it will be completely published by Friday afternoon, which is when Chapter 12 is scheduled to go up.

I don’t know whether the story is any good or not.  I suppose that would depend upon the criteria one uses to judge the “goodness” of a story, and no two people would probably have precisely the same implicit criteria.  I say “implicit” because I doubt most people (or anyone, really) would actually apply any formal judgement criteria to such things.  I think it’s a much more “analog” process, a weighted neural network/high-dimension vector addition (or possibly vector calculus) sort of problem.  As such, it probably changes from day to day and even from moment to moment for every person.

It may be mathematically possible in principle for two people to have exactly the same judgment criteria about fiction*, but I suspect that there aren’t anything like enough people in all the universe—not just spatially but temporally, past and future—to have exactly the same mental state regarding how they judge and react to fiction at any given time, or even in their entire lifetimes (this discounts the potential “quilted multiverse”, if the universe is spatially infinite, in which all states would recur an infinite number of times).

I’m giving this more thought than it probably deserves.  I tend to do that.

On to other matters, or at least, let’s move away from that subject.

This Sunday will be the day of the Autumnal Equinox, the official beginning of Autumn in the northern hemisphere.  It’s also September 22nd (this is often the case with the Autumnal Equinox) and is thus the date of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins’s birthdays (according to Shire reckoning, anyway—I’m not sure precisely how that lines up with the Gregorian calendar, but I suspect Tolkien just kind of took them as roughly aligning, though the hobbits apparently took the 5 (and a quarter-ish) extra days of the year as a non-month in midsummer and had 30-day months for all the rest of the year).  That was also the day on which Frodo left Bag End to begin his long and arduous and torturous path to destroy the One Ring.

So it is an auspicious day in more than one sense, a day on which momentous or portentous things may begin or end or begin to end.

Though Frodo survived, of course, he never was quite the same after his journey, having suffered from the stab of the Morgul blade on Weathertop, and the bite of Shelob, and—most of all—the terrible effects of the Ring itself when it was at its most perilous, its most awake, and its most desperate.

The voice-over near the end of the movie The Return of the King really expresses Frodo’s sense of enduring damage and suffering:  “How do you pick up the threads of an old life?  How do you go on when you begin to understand there is no going back?  There are some things that time cannot mend.  Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”  How, indeed?

Nietzsche is famously quoted as having said that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.  In response to that, I would simply say to him, “syphilis”**.

There are many things that do not kill us that nevertheless wear us down, leave scars and damage and dysfunction in their wake.  Of course, one could reply that such things are killing us, they are merely doing it slowly, in a cumulative and collective fashion.  But if one is going to reach for that linguistic/semantic escape clause from the dichotomy of Nietzsche’s statement, then one is merely engaging in tautology.  If one says that anything that doesn’t make us stronger is, by our definition, killing us (even if only slowly), then saying that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger is just saying the same thing.  No insight is gained.

In any case, things wear out and fall apart no matter what.  As far as we can see, that is a fundamental aspect of the nature of reality.  New things do arise, lives are born, stars form, perhaps new “universes” are constantly emerging in an eternal inflationary universe.  But mathematics dictates that all things eventually seek out the most entropic states—not out of any desire, any “telos”, just out of the tendency of the math of complex systems.

Things fall apart.  The center cannot hold.  And Darkness and Decay and the Second Law of Thermodynamics hold illimitable dominion over all***.

TTFN

*Though if the process is truly continuous, in the “real numbers” sense of continuous (quantum mechanics suggests this cannot be so), then there would be literally, uncountably infinite possible arrangements, and so it would be “infinitely improbable” for any two people ever to match exactly.  That seems appropriate, given the story being discussed.

**Perhaps the real “Montezuma’s Revenge”.

***This is a mashup of and paraphrasing of separate literary works, so I’m not surrounding it with quotation marks, but:  credit to Yeats and to Poe****.

****No, NOT the heroic pilot from the newer, Disney-Star-Wars films.  You Philistines*****.

*****This is, ultimately, a reference to the fact that the Philistines, according to legend, stole the Ark of the Covenant from the Temple of Solomon, and thus their name is used as an epithet referring to those who show no respect for sacred or artistic or cultural worth.

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There’s the respect that makes calamity of so long blogs

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another weekly blog post.  Last Thursday I was out sick, so I only posted a very brief, almost telegraphic announcement of the fact that I wasn’t going to write a “true” post that day, and I said that I might write a true post on Friday if I was feeling better.  Of course, I was not feeling better by Friday, so there was no such post.

I’ve nearly recovered from my acute illness—probably some respiratory virus, but nothing too terribly severe—and now I am more or less back on my normal schedule.

Speaking of being “back”, though, my back has been acting up severely this week, and in an atypical fashion.  I’m not sure what triggered it.  Possibly it’s just due to being sick, with the coughing and the lying around more than usual and so on.  Possibly it’s something else.  Anyway, I’ve had to go to a combination of near-overdoses on my various OTC pain medications, and that’s not wonderful.  It got so severe yesterday that I was actually saying out loud that, if it didn’t improve, I was going to have to find some relatively high parking garage nearby and jump off it.  I was not exaggerating, as I think was obvious to those around me.

It’s easy enough to wonder why I don’t do that anyway, given that there is very little in my life that’s positive, and what positivity exists is episodic, and it can’t make up for the constant negatives of pain and illness and sleeplessness and depression and so on.  The closest I come to any comradely activity is streaming YouTube videos of people reacting to songs or movies that I like.  It’s almost, but not quite, exactly unlike watching a movie with a friend who has never seen it before.

Speaking of paraphrasing or otherwise referring to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’m most of the way through the first run of editing Extra Body.  There’s a long way to go, since I usually do as many as seven such iterations before considering my editing done.  I figure by that time I’ll usually have lost any proprietary affection for a story and it will begin to bore me, so it’ll be easier to cut out extraneous material.

That’s the principle, at least.  I don’t know how well it’s worked hitherto; I’m too deep inside the process to trust my evaluation.  I did at least transcribe the material I had written so far, in passing, on HELIOS, so that if/when I’m ready, I’ll be able to pick up writing that by hand in its first draft.

Extra Body is my first non-horror story in a while (unless you count the beginning I made on writing The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, which is certainly not horror, but is also certainly nowhere near done, if it ever will be).  It’s hard for me to tell if it’s a good choice to have reverted to a sort of lighthearted science fiction story set in the modern world, but at least I was able to squeeze the first draft out.

Of course, I’m paring down the word count as I go.  As I’m sure is obvious to all of you, I get rather wordy when I write, especially when I’m using the computer keyboard, since I type quickly and usually can do so more readily even than I can speak out loud.

I’ve been reading some more books about quantum field theory (and related subjects) lately.  It’s still very intro level stuff, of course, but either because recurrent exposure to increasingly technical material is gradually sinking into my head, or because I’m just getting a tiny bit “smarter” overall over time, I’m actually finding some of it more familiar and understandable than before.

I must say that I was a little bit proud of myself not too long ago when I was thinking about how complex numbers are represented using a two-dimensional plane, with internally consistent mathematics and whatnot, and I wondered if one could have three-part complex numbers.  I soon realized that only even-numbered ones would work, and then I learned that these were indeed a thing (i.e., quaternions) and that indeed only even-numbered versions of such things can work.  Of course, it’s very difficult to visualize something that has four dimensions, so you just have to do the math, and I haven’t started to work on or learn that seriously, but I played with some “higher order” complex-number multiplications a few times, which was how I saw that only even-numbered ones, with separate “imaginary” roots would work.

On a vaguely related note:  I was listening to Sean Carroll’s podcast yesterday evening.  He was speaking to Doris Tsao, a neuroscientist who specializes in facial recognition and processing centers of the brain, and she mentioned that the attributes of a face can be thought of as many-dimensional, in the sense that there are numerous “variables” that can be represented about any given face, and that they effectively comprise a higher-dimensional space.

Then she turned the matter around and noted that there are apparently those who consider using such things as faces as ways of intuiting mathematical or related systems with higher dimensions, thus representing them in ways that the human mind is capable of visualizing.  I though that was a fascinating notion*.

It reminds me little bit of the concept of the “memory palace”, a mnemonic/rhetorical tool that originated in ancient Greece (so I understand) in which one associates the aspects of, say, a speech one is going to give with imagined artifacts or decorations in some imagined hall or room, so that the aspects of that speech can more readily be remembered and brought to mind when needed.

There are several fictional characters, most notably Hannibal Lecter and the BBC’s Sherlock, who use rather exaggerated versions of these memory palaces.  The one described in Hannibal is more coherent than the one in Sherlock, but they both take great liberties with how the concept was originally used.  Nevertheless, for the longest time, thanks to the amusing tableau** Thomas Harris described for how Hannibal Lecter had “stored” Clarice Starling’s (fictional) home address, I could readily reconstruct her address at will.  I think I may still be able to do it.  It should be something like “#33 Tindall Ave, Arlington, Virginia, 22308”.  If anyone wants to check my recollection, that would be welcome.  I’m not certain I got it right.

I’ve usually found such mnemonics more trouble than they’re worth.  It’s easier for me to connect concepts in the real world, building mental models of the way things work rather than trying to memorize.  This means I probably don’t learn as quickly as some do, but I learn deeply when I do, and it’s easier to connect one model to another and to spot analogies and similarities and possible connections between systems that might at first seem unrelated.  That was quite useful in medical practice, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Oh, I almost forgot:  Welcome to the first day of August in 2024!

That’s all I have to say about that.

Apparently the summer Olympics are currently taking place, but I’ve been unable to muster any interest in them, though I used to love them, and I find that the manufactured controversies about some apparent misconstrual of the opening ceremony or some such (and the juvenile ripostes by political antagonists of the original misconstruers responding to the supposed offense) all serves simply to reinforce my feeling that not just the human race, but indeed all life of any kind, is a bad idea.  Thank goodness for the apparent inescapability of the second law of thermodynamics.

Anyway, I feel I’ve been meandering about here, randomly bouncing from topic to topic, without any consistency or coherency, so I’ll bring this to a close soon.  I fear that this once-weekly blog posting suffers from the fact that there are topics I probably would have brought up as solitary daily blog posts when I was doing them, but that I now want to try to squeeze in here.

I just can’t write (or edit) new fiction and write daily blog posts too, not while I’m forced to keep my day job.  If anyone out there wants to pay for my living expenses and support me so I can both write new fiction and write daily blog posts while still studying physics and programming and the like in the meantime, please, let yourself be known!  I’d be pleased to hear from you.

Otherwise, I’m pretty sure none of this is going to last very much longer.  My pain and dysthymia and alienation and insomnia are increasingly unpleasant, and there are fewer and fewer things in my life that compensate.

Here’s to Macbeth’s proverbial last syllable of recorded time.  L’mavet!***

TTFN

*It does come up against difficulties when considering the notion of orthogonal axes of vector spaces being able to be rotated into one-another.  It’s hard to see how one could intuitively consider rotating the variables of, say, eye size and cheek color into one another, or what an inner (or “dot”) product or cross product of two such variables could mean…though with the latter, it makes the use of the “right hand rule” an amusing invocation of a slap in the face…or at least poking someone’s cheek.

**Involving Jesus (age 33) marching along with a .308 Enfield rifle at shoulder arms, followed by J. Edgar Hoover in a tutu, followed by Clarice driving a “Tin Lizzy” model T Ford, going past Arlington National Cemetery.  Something like that, anyway.

***This is an expression I invented this morning, the counter-toast to the famous L’chaim, which in Hebrew means “to life”.  Then, being me, I jotted down some words for the first verse of a parody song of “To Life” from Fiddler on the Roof:


“To death!  To death!  L’mavet!

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death!

Here’s to the father I tried to be

Here’s to that travesty

Drink L’mavet, to death,

To death, L’mavet.

L’mavet, L’mavet, to death.

Death has a way of releasing us

Luring and teasing us

Drink L’mavet, to deeeeeaaaath…”

That’s as far as I got, but I did only work on it for about five minutes, so, it’s not too bad.

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That but this blog might be the be-all and the end-all here

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time once again for what has become once again my weekly blog post.

I miss doing daily posts, but it’s hard to fit them in along with writing new fiction and the like.  I could probably do it, but that would pack the time before work every day, and probably would overflow into the beginning of my usual work time, and I’m already always so tired from pain and insomnia and anxiety and depression.

I’ve even been doing a very modest amount of guitar playing, though the arthralgia/arthropathy in the base of my thumbs, and in my other fingers as well, has made that frustrating.  There are songs I could play quite well before that I’m having trouble playing now, though I’ve been insistently practicing them out of frustration and stubbornness.  I suppose it doesn’t matter; it’s not as though anyone else is ever likely to hear me play guitar again.

I also don’t really see the point to the daily blogs.  I’ve occasionally used them as rants to express some of my thoughts on things that were irritating me, but though I put those thoughts out into the world, I doubt that they have ever had any impact at all on any issue.  But to a greater degree, I had hoped that the blog would serve as a kind of therapy and a cry for help at the same time.

Perhaps the therapy part worked occasionally.  I am still alive for the moment, though I don’t necessarily call that a success, since I seem to feel steadily more anhedonic with every passing moment.  Every day is dominated by discomfort, physically and mentally, and there are very few compensatory positives in my life.  No change I can envision making on my own seems likely to improve anything…at least no change I have the wherewithal to make.

Obviously, the other, related purpose I mentioned for my daily blog (the “cry for help” part) hasn’t played out.

I guess it’s a bit like those whistles they attach to flotation devices on airlines, for you to use if you have a “water landing” and actually survive.  You can blow them and…I guess, what, alert the coast guard or whomever is searching for you?  But that assumes someone is searching for you and knows where to look for you, and can even hear that pathetic little whistle in the middle of the ocean.  It’s laughable.  I guess it’s more “cry for help theater” than it is a cry that might succeed in summoning help.

That’s the way it is, I suppose.  Everyone is helpless and adrift, some of them are just more deluded than others.  It’s those who are most able to be objective, by choice or by nature, who tend to be more depressed, not just because the universe is vast and civilization so puny, but more because almost all humans imagine that they are important to the universe.  It’s not necessarily bad if they think that they have the potential to become important—that’s not necessarily delusional (as discussed in David Deutsch’s book, The Beginning of Infinity).  No, they imagine that they are currently important.  They imagine that their moment in human history, let alone cosmic history, is the crux of causality, and many of them believe that the very universe itself was created so that they (or those like them) could exist.

Pathetic.

In their self-importance, they cause so many problems.  This in itself is not inexcusable; no one can foresee all possible outcomes of any actions.  But then, instead of seeking the means to fix problems that arise, many of them seek to blame the problems, to find scapegoats, whether among other people or among imagined supernatural devils and demons, because of course, since the universe was made for them, they could not have caused the problems.

Ugh.  Let’s get off that train of thought.  It’s too frustrating.

It’s July 11th today, which in the American date ordering fashion is 7-11, so there are no doubt specials and sales going on in the international convenience store chain 7-Eleven®.  Enjoy them if there are branches near you and if you like that kind of thing.  You can probably get a deal on a Slurpee® or something similar.

Now let’s briefly discuss my fiction writing, going back to the original intended subject of this blog*.  I have written a decent amount this week:  4,824 words since last tally, bringing the total to 75,070 words.  That’s 114 pages long in the current format.

I am within striking distance of the end of the story, though it may seem that I’ve said that before.  But in this case, I am literally on the cusp of the final major event of the tale.  It’s not impossible that I could finish the first draft within this coming week, barring (as always) the unforeseen, and assuming I write some on every workday.  I am not scheduled to work this Saturday, so there will be fewer days for writing than last week, but when stories get near to their climaxes, I tend to write a bit more, daily.  It’s even possible that I’ll write more this week, though there are fewer writing days, than during this last week.

Then will begin the editing process.  I may also start writing HELIOS, which I intend to do with pen and paper, since I think most of my best books have been written in first draft, solely or substantially, by that means.

As for everything else—well, there is nothing else.  I have no friends (other than work acquaintances), no nearby family (at least no nearby family with whom I speak or who want to see me), and no real hobbies other than this writing and my minimal guitar piddling around.

There’s basically nothing I do for fun.  There are a few things I do for distraction, but they end up annoying me because they draw me away from doing things I would feel better about, like learning more physics and mathematics and languages and computer science and so on.

I’m reading a tiny bit of fiction, but I can’t do very much of it, since it often exacerbates my depression.  When I read stories, I tend to be very much pulled into their mindset and worlds, but there are almost always multiple characters in any story, and there are usually friendships and social interactions, and after I stop reading them, I’m left feeling the relative coldness and emptiness of daily life more acutely than before.  That may be a big part of why I haven’t easily been able to read fiction in recent years.

Be that as it may.  I expect I shall probably write another blog post next week, though I make no promises.  I can’t promise ever actually to publish even Extra Body, let alone HELIOS or any other of the dozens of stories for which I have ideas waiting in idea-space.  But I seriously doubt that anyone would be much the worse for that lack, anyway.

I hope you all have a good day and a good week.  I may have a tendency to misanthropy and even pan-antipathy, but the people who read my stuff can’t help but hold a special place in my heart (meaning my mind).  So I do honestly wish you all well; indeed, I wish you the best possible lives and days available to you.

TTFN

[Side note:  I doubt anyone noticed, but last week’s post was exactly the same number of words long as the Declaration of Independence is purported to be, counting signatures and title.  You’re welcome.]

*It was meant as a form of promotion for my fiction.  As someone who is not good at self-promotion, partly due to an essential and apparently inherent self-hatred, it was the best I was able to do to try to get word of my books out into the wider world.  If you’re interested in looking at and considering reading some of my already-published fiction, you can either look at the My Books page of this blog or go to my Amazon author’s page.  Of course, I would welcome anyone who wants to read my fiction, and would also welcome feedback about it.