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June 1st writing report

It’s the beginning of June, and a day that, by rights, should be a global holiday.  Perhaps someday it will.

Today I wrote 1,227 “block”* words on Extra Body, and the “Net” word count was almost identical:  1,228.  That’s less than a tenth of a percent difference, which is kind of cool, since I did make quite a few changes as I reread the previous 3 pages of writing to get me into the swing of writing today.

The total word count of the story is now 50,798, so it’s no one’s idea of a short story.  I don’t know, I just am not great at making stories short.  I increased the line spacing from 1 to 1.15 yesterday (or perhaps it was on Wednesday), because it’s easier to look at.  At the time, this changed the total page number from 71 to 74, which is nothing like a 15% increase, as one might expect from a naïve formula for how the page number relates to the line spacing.  I’m not sure what makes it so different, though.

Of course, the type size doesn’t change, only the space between lines of type, and that’s relatively small, to start with, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that it makes such a relative small difference.  It’s like the universe expanding overall but galaxies and galaxy clusters, being gravitationally bound, do not expand, only the space between them does.  When they are still close together, the change is relatively minor.  Of course, if the line spacing in my work were to increase exponentially, the space between lines would very soon come to dominate completely the fractional change in size, as is so with the universe, and then the page number change would track more closely with the spacing change.  But it would be pretty nuts to decide to increase the line spacing in a story.  Who would want to witness the heat death of the novella, after all?

Ah, well, all that doesn’t matter much.  But it does mean that, now, the story is over 80 pages long, and I think it may reach (or even exceed) a hundred before I’m through with the first draft.  It’s not quite going the way of Outlaw’s Mind (which started as a short story idea and became way more than expected) but it’s still really something.  I can’t make myself feel bad about it, though.  I mean, I’m frustrated that it’s taking so long, but the story has to be what it is, and I can’t make it otherwise.

I hope you all have a good weekend.  I should return on Monday, barring–as always–the unforeseen.  

 

 

*If you would like to see the definition of this term as I use it, I describe it in my reply to a comment on yesterday’s post.

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If Tuesday morning is like this, and Tuesday afternoon is never-ending…

It is Tuesday morning, the 28th of May in 2024 AD or CE, depending on how you prefer to write it.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter much to me; I’m okay either way.  I only first encountered the designation “CE” by the time I was in college (or “university”‒again depending on your preference), but I get why people use it.

I guess it’s probably silly to think that anyone should care whether I indicate what calendar era it is in which I’m writing.  I don’t suppose anyone would think I was writing a blog post in 2024 BC (aka “BCE”).  How would one even know toward which year one was counting down, if one were writing such dates?  Still, who knows how dates may change in the future, and whether someone might stumble across my blog posts in some unguessed age, on some weird, digital archaeological expedition.

How will such searches of the past even happen in the future?  If we advance beyond our current kind of online and personal storage, what would even happen to the data presently on the Internet and web and cloud and whatnot?  Heck, if all power went out for a significant amount of time in the near future, I would suspect that much of the stored data on the net might be lost.

Of course, quantum information will be conserved, if we understand that part of nature as well as we seem to understand it.  But the fact that it exists is not the same as being able to recover it.

Online is not forever.  Even if the actual data related to something sticks around, there will be so much other data that it will be as invisible as a single leaf in the Amazon rainforest as seen from space.  Perhaps far more so.  Very little that happens online is salient to anyone even as it happens, let alone after much time has passed.

Anyway…I’m writing this post on my phone in the back of an Uber heading to the office, because I again slept horribly last night, despite taking melatonin early in the evening.  I don’t know what to do about this sleep problem.  As John at the bar said to Bill*, I believe this is killing me.  And I don’t think I’m being melodramatic or hyperbolic**.

I mean to write at least a little bit of fiction this morning, but my last experience using the laptop computer in the backseat of an Uber was unpleasant.  To be honest, though, just about everything is unpleasant now.  There’s little if anything that brings me even transient joy.  There is occasional, momentary escape in the form of humor, for instance, but even that is becoming more and more difficult.  Mainly, I just feel ridiculously tense and guarded and tired and in pain pretty much all the time, or at least the vast majority of it.

I don’t want to keep doing this.  It’s just not worth it.  Nothing I do and nothing about me is worthwhile.

<sigh>  I’ll add an addendum about my fiction writing before I post this.

***

Well, I wrote 798 “block” words and 799 net words, which means that when I reread stuff today I added a word relative to the previous state of the story.  Still, like yesterday, it seems the difference is only one word, so I’m well below the roughly 3% difference seen in the past.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad or merely a neutral fact.

I could feel how foggy and vague I was while writing, so I forced myself to keep it short.  Actually, I had to force myself to write as much as I did, which was one page.  I’m not sure what my average page number per day has been since I started.  Most days that I write, I write well over one page and usually over two pages, but there have been many non-writing days, so it may average about one a day.  It’s a bit over 45 pages long so far, if memory serves.

No, that’s dead wrong.  It’s actually 70 pages long (I just checked).  That can’t be just a page a day, can it?  Have I been working on this story for more than two months?  I can’t remember.  If anyone out there has been paying attention, please let me know.

Okay, well, that’s enough of that.  I’m done for the day, at least on this stuff.  I feel like I’m done for everything else, too, but of course, the workday hasn’t even really gotten started.  I’m so tired.  This has to end soon.  Everything hurts, and nothing is beautiful, to reverse Vonnegut’s famous quote, as I like to do (I think I’ve done this recently, haven’t I?).  I only even keep moving at all out of habit.  I need just to lie down, figuratively, and let the elements*** take me.

I guess we’ll see if I’m strong enough to do that.  Meanwhile, all of you please have a good day.

*In the song Piano Man by Billy Joel

**As far as I know, I’m Euclidean.

***Or the elephants.  I’m not picky.

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And writers say, the most forward bud is eaten by the canker ere it blog

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for my Thursday blog post.  There will be no fiction from me today, other than such ordinary, day-to-day fiction as pretending to be doing better than I really am, as well as using money to buy things*.

I’m writing this on my phone, since I didn’t bring the laptop computer back to the house yesterday.  I was wiped out, and stressed out, and I didn’t feel like carrying any more than necessary.  I did get a bit of walking in, since I had to stop at the store on the way back.  I guess that was good, though something in the way I moved caused a blister on the medial side of my right big toe.  It’s not too bad, but I’ll probably not do any serious walking today.

It’s often questionable why I bother.  Of course, I would like to lose weight and whatnot; I would rather not die the physical travesty that I currently am.  But the best way to do that would be to stop eating completely.  That would be a win-win situation, as the cliché goes.  But that is very difficult to do in ordinary, day-to-day life in the modern United States.

I got a terrible night’s sleep again last night.  It wasn’t as bad as my one-hour night earlier in the week, but it wasn’t a whole lot better.  I’ve been trying to restrict my caffeine intake to the relatively early morning, just to make sure that doesn’t interfere with my sleep, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

I haven’t read anything much in quite a while.  I think it’s been over a month since I read any book, fiction or nonfiction.  I have been doing some stuff on Brilliant dot org, as I’ve mentioned here, but yesterday I didn’t even feel like extending my “streak” by doing some simple work in their computer programming course.  For one thing, the constant prods to “extend one’s streak” are thoroughly irritating.

I really despise all the manipulative tactics undertaken by these companies to get people to keep using their sites.  Even Kindle does it.  I had a “streak” of something like 170 or more weeks of reading pretty much every day on my Kindle app, but that’s now been broken, and already Amazon isn’t even recommending any e-books to me.

Still, it’s not as though I ever read to maintain a “streak”.  I read because I want to read.  Except right now I don’t.  I don’t even want to read my own stuff.

I did practice a little on the guitar yesterday.  I guess that’s something.  And, as you all know, I’ve been writing fiction now for a total of over twenty days (counting only writing days).  But it feels almost disloyal to be writing without reading, though it’s only myself that I’m betraying, and I don’t like myself, anyway.  Still, reading has been a fundamental part of my identity for literally as long as I can remember, and not being able to do it makes me feel very much adrift and puzzled.

It’s getting seriously hot and muggy down here in Florida.  I’m sweating significantly and quite visibly just sitting at the train station.  I suppose, if climate change persists, Florida will at least reap what it has politically sown, since both the heat and the sea levels are likely to drive quite a lot of people out of the state, and make much of the coveted ocean-front property into literal and figurative underwater real estate.

I’m not the sort to laugh in malicious glee when people get their comeuppances; I’m much more the type to tighten my lips grimly and nod in affirmative contempt.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not ego-syntonic for me when people get fucked over because of their own arrogant stupidity.

I don’t expect to be around to see any of it happen.  And, honestly, I would not be disappointed if people actually make headway at fixing the problems and correct them in time to save even people who don’t necessarily deserve to be saved, because innocent and beneficent people will be saved along with them.

Human ingenuity is much rarer than people probably think; however, it is so incredibly powerful that it doesn’t take much of it to accomplish wonders.  I guess it’s worth it for there to be so much arrogant stupidity if that’s necessary or unavoidable in order for the occasional sparks of cleverness and even genius to be found.  But it would be nice if stupidity were more sexually unappealing than it is.  Regrettably, though, stupid people seem more likely to breed than smart ones, especially since the smart ones understand about planning and delaying reproduction, or even choosing not to reproduce at all.

Oh, well.  This is the tragic farce of life.  It can be funny if you like lowbrow slapstick in the vein of the Three Stooges.  Unfortunately, I’m not really a big fan of such things, so I don’t think I’m going to keep watching much longer.

All right.  Time to call this to an end.  My back is flaring up quite a lot, probably from yesterday’s walk, and it’s distracting me.  Please try to nurture cleverness and creativity at all levels, and please don’t feed the trolls in any sense.  They’re not worth it.

TTFN

*Yuval Harari famously pointed out that money is a “fiction”, though it is a useful and important one.  So is law and government and the very existence of rights and stuff like that.  Such things exist only in the minds and works of people.  Nature certainly recognizes no rights, unless you want to count the right to be wiped out if you don’t do what you need to survive.  Indeed, the world seems to promise only one thing:  eventually, you (as well as everything you would recognize as the universe) will die.  That’s probably a truly unalienable right.

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No fiction again today

It’s only Wednesday morning, not Thursday, but again I’m writing a blog post.  I’m on my way into the office even earlier than yesterday, since my sleep and my tension level has been exceptionally bad, even for me.

I was going to work on Extra Body while riding in, but though I opened it in the Word app and started reading through what I wrote Monday, it was too difficult to follow and felt awkward on the phone.  Anyway, I should get to the office in plenty of time to work on it on the mini-laptop computer, which I did not bring with me from the office last night.  I left the quite late, yesterday, because we had things happen right at the end of the day, and I took an Uber back to the house, just as I’m taking an Uber in this morning 

I’m burning a fair amount of money on these Ubers, but it’s not as though I’m saving for retirement or anything.  I don’t expect to live long enough to retire, even if that were an option.

Another thing that added to my tension yesterday (and today) is that my coworker had to get some medical testing done yesterday, and so he was out after lunch and will probably be out at least this morning if not the entire day.  I don’t begrudge him his healthcare, of course.  I want him to be healthy, for his own sake and that of his family.  But it does make me more stressed out, especially on Wednesday (today), when I have to do payroll.  That’s a big part of why I’m going in so early, apart from the fact that I was awake anyway and just felt confined and disgusted in my room.  It’s much easier to do work that requires concentration when I’m the only one in the office.

It’s a strange thing, and it’s pretty contemptible, but I know a few people with serious health issues and several with moderate ones, and of course, as a doctor, I saw many people with serious and even terminal health problems‒and I sometimes envy these people.  I know, they suffer and/or suffered, obviously, and I don’t think that is enviable in and of itself.  But if I could take their illness into me, curing them and sickening myself, I think that would be a real multiple boon.  They could get their health back and decrease their expenses.  I in turn would be able to let myself stop trying; I would not be a big burden on society, because I would only want palliative care, just enough to control the pain as much as possible and bide the end.

It would be nice to be able to do some good by taking someone else’s illness, especially if that someone has close friends and family who would miss them.

Of course, that’s very silly and fanciful, and of course, it’s contemptible, but then I hold myself in contempt, anyway.  And I don’t think much better of the world at large, so it’s not like there’s much motivation to stay in it.  On an individual level, or a few at a time, people can be interesting and quite admirable, but when they come together in very large numbers, they rapidly reduce to the lowest level present in each aspect‒a higher-dimensional chain that is only as strong as its weakest link in each dimension of character, so to speak.  And there are so many people in the world that the lowest level on any given axis is very low indeed.

Anyway, I’m tired of the world, and of being tired, and of being in pain, and of not being able to rest.  It would be nice to see my kids again and be part of their lives, but I don’t believe that’s going to happen.  Maybe if I did have some terminal illness, that might trigger something, some final meeting or other, I don’t know.  But that’s a stupid and contemptible thought, as I said, and though I do find myself contemptible, I don’t like it.

***

I’m at the office now, but I don’t feel like writing any fiction.  I guess I should make sure to take home my laptop computer tonight, if I really plan to do any fiction writing tomorrow‒although, come to think of it, tomorrow is Thursday, so I should probably write my traditional blog post.  I guess I’ll do that.  But I can write it on the laptop computer, anyway.  That’s what I always used to do.

I was thinking of ordering some of those smaller spiral-bound notebooks, the six by nine ones, or whatever their specific measurements might be.  I have two of the bigger five-star notebooks, but I found that those were unwieldy, especially for the commute.  However, I did write Solitaire originally in a smaller spiral-bound notebook, and though it’s quite a dark tale, I think it’s one of my best-written stories.

Also, my thumb bases are hurting a lot even though I’m trying not to use the phone to write too much; they’re even hurting when using the regular computer keyboard to some degree, and my left thumb, hand, arm, and shoulder are particularly stiff and sore.  So maybe writing some things by (right) hand in a smaller spiral-bound notebook would be good.  I don’t know.

Sorry, I know this is all exceptionally lame and boring.  What I really ought to do is just stop writing anything at all, and stop doing anything at all, and just give up.  I make even myself sick; goodness knows how other people can tolerate me.

Anyway, I don’t think there’s much else to say today, though that doesn’t usually stop me.  If I do end up writing any fiction today, maybe I’ll make an addendum, but I don’t think I will.  I did doodle an anime style face yesterday, so I accomplished something at least mildly creative.  Huzzah for me, right?

I’m very tired.  But I’m not sleepy.  It’s a frustrating conundrum, and there’s no good reason to expect that nature is so arranged as to provide any solution to the problem.  Just ask the dinosaurs.

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And this weak and idle blog, no more yielding but a dream

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, as I suspect you will already know, so I’m writing my old-style weekly blog post again.

Of course, I’ve been writing little, brief snippet reports on a daily basis to keep you all updated about how my writing is going.  Or, like yesterday, I wrote one to let you know that I didn’t write fiction at all because I got almost no sleep, which is bad even for me.  I just felt awful.

I left work as soon as I was finished getting things set for the payroll and sent out to the company, and I went back to the house and took two diphenhydramine (that’s the generic of Benadryl®).  It did help me sleep a little in the afternoon, and then I woke up and got some food and relaxed a bit before taking another diphenhydramine before lying down for bed.  I don’t know how truly effective my sleep was; the general consensus is that sedated sleep is not a good substitute for natural sleep, but it almost has to be better than essentially no sleep.

I had some odd dreams, or at least I had one odd dream, during the afternoon or night.  This is unusual mainly in that I almost never have any dreams that I remember nowadays.  This one was some manner of nature documentary about ocean-going predators, particularly “killer whales” AKA “Orcas” and—this is a weird part—large, oceangoing crocodiles.

As far as I know, there are no deep-water crocodiles, but the ones featured in my dream seemed more like mosasaurs, anyway.  They were big and vicious, and there was “footage” of them attacking various large creatures in the ocean, but I couldn’t ever recognize the prey of either predator.  Also, there was a voiceover, but I think it was my voice.  Odd.

There was never really any scariness to it, because there were never really any human victims, but it’s a peculiar subject about which to have a dream.  If MLK ever had a dream like that, I don’t think he made a speech about it.

It’s curious enough for me to have a dream that I recall, nowadays, even if the dream is boringly strange (though not, I think, strangely boring).  I hope it means that I got a decent amount of sleep.  Certainly, I feel better this morning than I did yesterday morning, but that’s a very low bar to clear—it’s certainly too low to limbo.  It’s a bit like being more handsome than one of the zombies in Dawn of the Dead (although I’m not sure the latter is literally true of me).

I’ve not written on Extra Body since Tuesday, but that’s okay.  I made pretty good progress on it the previous two writing days.  As I’ve said, it’s basically reached novella length, more or less, as do many, if not most, of my “short stories”.

I don’t seem to have a knack for writing truly short tales.

I think my shortest story is Solitaire, which I wrote in one night, and which is also probably by far the darkest story I’ve ever written.  Really, if any of my works should come with some manner of “trigger warning”, that’s the one.  I was in a good mood when I wrote it—which I did in a spiral-bound, half-sized notebook I had with me.  It was just an idea that popped into my head because, at the time, I tended to play a lot of solitaire (with real cards).  I’m sure I’ve written about all this here before, so I’ll try not to rehash it.

I probably would tend to write shorter stories if I used such notebooks nowadays, but the base of my thumbs really gets sore when I try to write too much by hand.  Anyway, to be fair to me, I wrote Paradox City by hand, after writing both Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision by hand, and none of those stories are short.  The latter two are novels, and the “short story”, Paradox City, was about sixty pages long, hand-written, if memory serves.  It would arguably count as a novella itself, as would Hole for a Heart, I For One Welcome Our New Computer Overlords, and certainly In the Shade.

I was thinking maybe I should publish this latest story not just in Kindle format—which is what I tend to do with my “short” stories—but also in a small paperback form.  I’m not sure if the price would make it prohibitive, but there’s no real shame in paperback novellas.  Of Mice and Men (about 30,000 words long) was a paperback in the form in which I read it originally (twice in one day) when I was in junior high or my first year of high school.

Also, each “chapter” of The Green Mile was published as an individual paperback when it first came out, and those were shorter than most of my short stories.  Mind you, that was Stephen King, so there was a ready market for the books, and there were no e-books back then, let alone for Steinbeck, so I may be giving poorly chosen examples.

I think I’ve said that I have the notion of writing HELIOS as a sort of serial light novel, in the style of Japanese light novels.  Each volume would be longer than one of my short stories, of course, but I can try to keep them from getting prohibitively long.

Then again, if I’m going to write a series, I’m committing myself to a fairly long time writing the same story.  On the other hand, Mark Red is also supposed to be a series—there are at least two sequels to it in my head.  But no one has expressed any real interest in those, nor really in the first story, to be honest, so I haven’t gotten back to it.

I would love to get some feedback from any of the readers of my blog, especially if they have read any of my books, about what they would do if they were me (other than try to reverse whatever curse had made such a thing happen to them).  Please, leave a comment below.

In other news, I’ve continued to work on the calculus course on Brilliant dot org, which is perhaps not the ideal way to review calculus, but isn’t at all bad, either, now that I’m doing it on my smartphone.  I’m thinking of doing some other courses—maybe some reviews of basic physics, and of course, eventually, linear algebra and differential geometry to prepare me for greater study of GR—because taking more than one course at a time is the way one does things in university.

I haven’t really been reading any other new books for the moment.  As before, I’ve had a hard time getting into any new fiction, which is depressing, but it’s a fact to which I’ve become resigned for the time being.  Maybe if I weren’t working full time, I would find that easier; I don’t know.

If anyone out there wants to buy the movie options for any of my stories, and by doing so give me enough money on which to live for a while so I can write “full time” and so on, I’m open to the possibility!  Ha ha.

Anyway, I think that’s enough for now.  I don’t want to go on and on and on and on like I did last Thursday.  I think that post was too daunting for most readers to bother trying to work all the way through it.  So I’ll leave this post for now, with just a “Happy First Thursday of May of 2024”.  Please try to take good care of yourselves and of those you love.  And try to be charitable, even toward those with whom you have profound disagreements.  Most arguments are ephemeral, and they are almost all about ephemeral things (even if they feel deeply important in the moment), so it’s foolish to sour your days and the culture at large with hostility and vindictiveness.

Maybe I really did get a decent amount of sleep!

TTFN

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Monday morning report for 4-22-2024

I’m writing a quick blog post this morning before I write any fiction, just to pass the time while I ride into the office.  I had a fairly bad stomach bug this weekend, I don’t really feel up to riding the train, and I didn’t bring my laptop computer back to the house with me on Friday.  I also did not work on Saturday, which is good, since I was busy throwing up.  Now I’m kind sore from all that, but the worst seems over, so I’m going to the office.

I mean to do my fiction writing on the laptop computer at the office this morning, mainly for tradition’s sake.  Though the smartphone writing has been pretty successful so far, I still want to write on the computer mostly.

Of course, the smartphone is a computer as well, but its keyboard isn’t nearly as well-designed for human-type hands to use‒thus all the software add-ons like auto-correct that are necessary to make it tolerable for most people to use.  As for me, I don’t like the auto-fill options, especially in word processing, though suggestions are sometimes useful when one is typing a long word.  Still, the fact that these systems seem to learn from the great masses of illiterati using them doesn’t reassure me.  The fact that the system keeps wanting to add an apostrophe when I’m writing the possessive form of “it” shows that it’s not getting its grammar suggestions from any formal guidelines, and so it’s actually miseducating people who are unaware of the apostrophe convention in this circumstance.

Most people probably don’t pay much attention, of course, so I suppose that’s not a very big worry.

I have a bit of a headache from all my queasiness and such this weekend‒at least, I suspect that’s the source‒so I’m not going to make this much longer.  I will come back before I post it and add a summary of the writing I’ve done today on my fiction.  I hope you all have a good day and a good week, and for those who celebrate it, have a good Passover (it starts tonight).

***

Well, even though I’m not feeling well, and had to lie down for a bit in the middle, I wrote 1952 words on Extra Body this morning.  But now I’m quite discouraged, because my coworker with whom I share responsibilities is not going to be in today, since his back is acting up.  I can’t fail to sympathize‒my back has been acting up for just over 20 years, so I know how bad it can get.  But it’s discouraging, since I really still don’t feel well, and was thinking of ducking out early, today.

I guess there will be no rest for the wicked, of which I am surely one.  At least I got some decent writing done.

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Had I pow’r, I should Pour the sweet blog of concord into hell

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday yet again, and I’m writing my more traditional blog post, but for those of you who weren’t expecting them, and so did not look, you should know that I also wrote posts on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  I had no drive or desire to write any fiction; it has felt utterly pointless to do so all week.  Everything pretty much feels pointless.

I did spend a bit of time yesterday sharing all my blog post links to my published works‒not counting music‒to X and LinkedIn and Facebook.  I don’t know if many people saw them, though my sister did leave a comment on Facebook on the shared link for Hole for a Heart, stating that it is one of my scariest stories.  Thankfully, it was intended to be scary, so that’s quite a good compliment.  If I’d meant it to be a light-hearted children’s fairy tale and it was one of my scariest stories, that would have been troubling.

I’ve long since noticed, from early on in my writing, that I tend to put horror elements into a lot of my work.  For instance, in Ends of the Maelstrom, my lost work from my teenage years‒which was an overlap of science fiction and fantasy‒I ended up having quite a few sequences that followed a large and powerful (and quite mad) cy-goyle named Chrayd, who was basically a horror monster, and whose actions didn’t directly push the plot forward.  His portions of the book were clearly little horror stories.

Also, my son read the original 2nd chapter of The Chasm and the Collision (which became the second half of the first chapter, “A Fruitful Day and a Frightful Night”) back when he was, I guess, about 11 or 12, and he said specifically that it was scary.  Of course, obviously it was meant to be scary for the main character‒I did call it “A Frightful Night” after all‒but I guess I did a good job of conveying Alex’s fear and making it at least slightly contagious.

I feel that at least some of the portions of Outlaw’s Mind ought to be quite scary‒it’s certainly meant to be a horror story‒but that may just be because I know what’s happening, and that at least some of events of the story were inspired by one of my two experiences of sleep paralysis (which is a truly frightening thing).

Of course, the two stories that are currently on my burners are not horror stories at all.  One is sort of a whimsical, light science fiction tale (set in the “ordinary” world), and the other is a more “light-novel” science fiction adventure, possibly good for young adults, based on a comic book I had long-ago envisioned.  I’m sure I will throw some horror elements in the latter by accident‒it seems to be how my writing works‒but it’s not any primary part of it.

Here I am writing as if any of those stories will be published and read by people.  Isn’t it cute?

One good thing about writing horror is that there is no reason to have any “trigger warnings”.  If you’re the sort of person who needs trigger warnings, you probably shouldn’t be reading horror stories.  I admit, though, that a few of my works probably merit greater-than-average caution; I’m thinking most specifically of Solitaire and both parts of Unanimity.  These are stories in which some quite “realistic” horrors take place‒things that could, in principle, happen in the real world.

Not that Unanimity itself could happen in the real world.  It couldn’t.  But many of the things done in the book that are horrific are possible and even realistic in a sense.

As for Solitaire, well…yeah, there’s nothing supernatural there at all.  It’s an entirely realistic story, probably too much so.  It’s short though, so a potential reader wouldn’t be troubled for long.  Still, that story is probably for “grown-ups” only.  Yet, as I’ve noted before, I wrote the story, all in one night, while I was in a perfectly good mood, keeping my then-future-fiancée company while she worked overnight on a project.

It’s curious to think about where these ideas originate and how they arise.

Even if we ever have a full description of the workings of a human brain, I doubt it will ever be possible to model, predictively and precisely, the specific outputs of any given one.  There are hundreds of trillions to a quadrillion synapses in a typical (or even divergent) brain, and those synapses are not simple And, Or, Xor, Not, Nand or other basic binary logic gates.  Their connections are almost continuously variable, and the reactivity and set-points can vary over time as well, in response to intracellular and extracellular conditions.

A quadrillion-bit system would never be close to big enough to model a human brain, even if we knew how to write the program.  And the possible outcomes of different processes in such a system would rapidly grow to numbers so vast they make the number of cubic Planck lengths in the accessible universe vanishingly close to zero.

As for “neural networks”, well, don’t let the name fool you too much.  They aren’t really modeling neurons or even acting very much like them.  I mean, they are super-cool*, don’t get me wrong!  But I don’t suspect that any of them, at least not by itself, will ever be a true AGI, not without also incorporating some analog of basal ganglia, limbic systems, and brain stems‒drives and motivations (general and partly alterable utility functions) in other words.

It’s also a concern (mainly orthogonal to the above) that, as more of what is out there on the anti-social webernet has been produced by LLM-based chat programs, the programs will more and more be modeling their future responses on responses not created by humans but by previous uses of the GPT style bots, and so they will more and more model only themselves‒a kind of solipsistic spiral that could rapidly degenerate into a huge, steaming pile of crap.

Of course, the programmers are clever, and they may well find ways to circumvent such issues.  I suppose we shall see what happens, unless civilization fails and falls before that comes to pass.

Wow, all that was a curious course of thought, wasn’t it?  I certainly neither planned for nor predicted it.  It just happened (like everything else).

As for what will happen for the rest of the week, well, I’m far from sure and can’t even give a very good guess.  I may write blog posts tomorrow and Saturday, or I may write fiction, or I may do neither.  I may take a long walk off a short pier, literally or metaphorically.  If Hugh Everett was right, there will probably be some versions of me “somewhere” who take each of all possible actions.

In the meantime, I sincerely hope that the only possible Everettian branches in your futures are ones in which you are happy.

TTFN

*Though at least most of them don’t need literally to be supercooled, unlike most modern quantum computing systems.

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Be sure to warm up before kipling

Here I am at the train station, to which I arrived quite a bit later than I ought to have done, because Uber switched drivers on me twice, meaning I was assigned to 3 different people, resetting the waiting clock each time.  Then the last driver didn’t follow the route recommended by his own company’s app, apparently thinking that taking the interstate would be faster.  Long experience with the area leaves me with the knowledge that the route that the app recommended really is the fastest route, especially at this time of day.  I was very tempted to give the driver a low tip and a low rating, but since I recognized that some of my animosity is due to matters outside his control‒specifically, the changed drivers‒I would not let him bear the brunt of the consequences.

I need to quit taking Uber.  I’ve curtailed my morning walk for now‒working on a different form of exercise‒because it’s been causing my left knee to act up with greater and greater severity.  But taking the bus to the other train station adds nearly an hour to my commute, or at least it makes me get to the office an hour later.  It’s very frustrating.

Obviously, I’m not writing any fiction today.  I’m not really doing much of anything that matters at all to me today (except, perhaps to a small extent, this blog).  I don’t think I’ll write fiction or play guitar or sing or study any interesting subject today.  By yesterday already, I was too drained and distracted to be able to consider focusing on studying any mathematics or physics or whatever, even just by watching videos.  Ear plugs and hearing protectors don’t help noticeably.

Today, I think I’m going to use double ear plugs in each ear.  They’re the little squishy, compressible, throw-away earplugs, so they can be rolled down to small enough size to insert even when doubled, I’ll wager.  I’m not terribly fond of having crap stuck in my ear canals, but it’s better than being exposed to all the loud voices and noises.  At least, I suspect it is.

You’re probably wondering why I keep going to the office and back and all that.  It’s a fair question, but the answer is neither profound nor very interesting:  it’s just all I have.  I can’t see myself trying to find a different job.  At least I know the people at this job, and I even like most of them.  And I’m at least used to the place where I live.  It’s decent.

I am frustrated about the fiction writing thing, though.  I haven’t even bothered taking the laptop computer back with me at the end of the day so far this week.  I know I’m not going to use it.

I sometimes wish I’d never started doing this daily blog, but it seems I don’t want not to do it.  It’s my pathetic little scent-marking on the world, I guess, though it’s probably not very interesting most of the time.  For instance, I doubt many people enjoyed my weird asides about cosmology yesterday.

It’s hard to remember writing much of Son of Man on my tiny old smartphone back in the day, but I know I did.  I think I didn’t do indenting, but instead just did double line breaks for paragraphs and then corrected the layout after the draft was done.  I suppose, in principle, I could do that here also, but I fiddled with it last week at one point using the Word mobile app, and found it very unsatisfying.

Of course, I did not use Word to write the initial part of Son of Man.  I used the notepad function on my smartphone at the time, which is reasonably impressive, even to me.  But it would seem a shame not to use my laptop computer, now that I have it.  I suppose I could bring it with me and write fiction in the morning before even leaving the house, and take the southbound bus to catch the northbound train‒that bus route doesn’t begin until far too late for the early trains.  I hate the idea of arriving so late, though, especially since I’m awake anyway in the very early morning, no matter how much trouble I have falling and staying asleep.

I really hate my life, to be honest.  I’m sure you picked that up by now; it’s not as though I’m being particularly subtle.  I’m just so tired.  I’ve lost almost everything that ever mattered to me.  What is it Kipling wrote, “If you can bear to hear the truths you’ve spoken / twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools / or watch the things you gave your life to, broken / and stoop build ’em up with worn-out tools…”?

If so, then…well, you’re probably just a stubborn idiot, I don’t know.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice poem, very stirring and well-written, and obviously quite memorable.  But at the end, your big reward for all the listed attributes is, “you’ll be a man, my son”.  That’s it?  You get to be “a man” according to the criteria set by Rudyard Kipling?  Well, bully for you, I guess.  I don’t even feel human, let alone that I’m a man according to a nineteenth century author and poet’s* judgment.  I frankly feel dishonest when I have to check the Captcha box that says I’m not a robot, for crying out loud.

Anyway, that’s enough of my shit for today.  Unless we’re all lucky and something kills me or severely injures me between now and then, I guess I’ll write another blog post tomorrow, and I’ll probably be no closer to solving my difficulty with fiction writing than I am today.

I hope you’re all doing as well as you can do.

*He was a good one, though.  Gunga Din, The Jungle Book, all that kind of stuff was not half bad.

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Tuesday for the price of one day

Okay, well…it’s Tuesday morning, and this is the first of two planned blog posts for this week.  If there is any person out there in Hell’s creation who really used to look forward to starting his or her week with my Monday morning blog post, I apologize.  I regret causing you any disappointment.  On the other hand, causing disappointment is one of my greatest talents, so at least you’ve been exposed to that facet of my character.  I don’t know if one could properly call it a creative ability, but it is something for which I have a knack.

I did do some fiction writing yesterday, after walking to the train.  In fact, I mistook how much I had written, feeling that I hadn’t gotten even one page done, so I continued to the top of the following page only to realize it was the second page of the day.  I wrote over 1400 words; I’m at least making progress.

As I said, I walked to the train yesterday, and in addition, I walked back to the house in the evening.  Indeed, according to my pedometer, I walked about 14.7 miles yesterday in total.  I did not walk this morning because I have developed a modest blister on the bottom of my right big toe.  It’s quite annoying, because it’s not as though I just started walking again.  Last week I walked well over thirty miles in total, wearing the same effing make and model of shoes I wore yesterday.  Why should I have just yesterday developed a blister?  It seems absurd, but reality, for better or worse, is not amenable to appeals.

I suppose it’s good for me to take a break after a day that included nearly three fifths of a marathon worth of walking, though apart from the blister and my left knee soreness‒the latter of which is almost chronic‒I don’t feel particularly worn down.  I did have trouble getting to sleep last night after having walked so much in the evening, which was somewhat annoying, since I had already gotten back to the house later than usual.  It would have been nice if at least I could have slept more deeply once I did fall asleep, but that was of course not going to happen.  So, I’m quite tired.

What else is new, right?

I don’t know what else to discuss today.  The equinox is coming this week, but I figure Thursday would be a better day to talk about that.  It’s not exactly exciting, to be honest.  Up north, the coming of Spring is a positive thing, but in Florida, mostly it just presages the bulk of the year during which the heat and humidity are stultifyingly intense.  Believe me, when you walk 6 miles in Florida most of the year, you look as if you’d just gone swimming, because your sweat does not evaporate.

There’s a bit of a cool and rather strong breeze blowing this morning, which is a surprise, and I did not wear a jacket or a heavy shirt.  That’s okay.  The train will be here within the next 5 minutes according to the schedule and the announcement.  By evening, unless prior weather reports have been completely superseded, it will be plenty warm.

Oh, I did stumble upon an interesting book yesterday while skimming through recommendations based on a decision-theory book I bought.  It was a computer science book, geared toward undergrads and grad students but not really requiring that one be in that situation.  Its purpose is to teach a broad primer on computer science from the bottom up by walking through the process of building a (fairly simple) computer, writing and setting up an operating system, and then making it able to play games such as Tetris.  The authors even provide links to resources so the reader can actually do that building, so it’s not just an intellectual exercise.  They start with logic gates and go to the end, so the overall system is called “Nand to Tetris”, though that isn’t the title of the book.

I think this is great, because modern computers have become so sophisticated and complex that most people who program probably learn to do it without getting educated in the underlying systems and how they work, how Boolean Logic works and is instantiated, up to machine code and the like.  But these are the things I have always wanted to understand better.  My CS 100 class in college just taught us how to program in Pascal.  That was fine, as far as it went, but that kind of programming is just following more ordinary kinds of logic and instruction-giving.

If I had taken extensive coursework in computer science and electrical engineering, I’m sure I would have gotten into such things.  But that wasn’t my major, and I didn’t have time to take a boatload of electives.  If I could have taken courses in all the possible areas in which I might have been interested, I would probably still be in college, and my educational costs would probably have reached a level comparable to the price of an aircraft carrier, or at least of one of the military planes that uses them.

Anyway, I got the Kindle edition of the book.  Being a book by and about computers, it is well formatted to work with the e-book reader format, which is itself a good sign.  Also, the reviews in general are glowing, and the comments they make seem to demonstrate that this is exactly the sort of book I’d like to bring my basic understanding to a better level, from my point of view.  Who knows, maybe I’ll end up doing the project?

If I’m going to be a supervillain, I’m going to need to be able to build my own doomsday devices and robot servants, after all!

Of course, I have a whole slew of books I want to read in addition to this, and I haven’t gone any farther on Quantum Field Theory.  The audio files in which I read aloud just take up so much memory when I use them, and Google starts trying to entice me to buy more storage because (gasp!) I’ve now reached 80% of present capacity.  That’s only taken, what, seven or eight years?  Better send Google more money or before I know it I’ll be at 85%.

Anyway, I don’t think the audio has made me read any better or improved my understanding.  It nudged me a little, but not enough.

That’s enough for today, I think.  I mean to do some walking tomorrow, and some fiction writing, and I keep dreaming that I might write something more topical here in the afternoon and post it, but with the noise and nonsense at work, that often becomes all but impossible.

I guess we’ll find out what happens together.

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“It’s like…writing on the surface of a lake”

It’s Saturday, and hopefully most of you reading this are doing so from your homes, relaxing‒sipping your favorite beverage, perhaps‒and enjoying your weekend.

As I begin writing this, I am at the train station, waiting for the first morning train to bring me to the office.  This is my third Tuesday-Thursday-every-other-Saturday blog post.  It seems that, so far, fewer people are reading the blog on the days when I post it than usually had read it when I posted “daily”*.  I don’t know whether this trend will continue‒three data points is not a great basis from which to extrapolate, unless you’re picking out a plane by getting three non-collinear points.  I am not doing that, so it would be premature of me to pay too much attention to the statistics that WordPress throws in my face when I log in.

I walked to the station yesterday, and then‒since I had brought my laptop computer with me‒I wrote a bit on Extra Body while on the train.  It felt like a very small amount, but it was about 750 words, which is not terrible for the length of a train ride.  I get the idea that only writing roughly a page at a time, especially only three days a week, really will make me write faster stories, because I’m impatient to get to the end.  But I’m not sure it’ll make the story any better.  I don’t know if maybe I should try to write fiction every day and then, during the day, write blog posts on my phone, the way I’m writing this one.  It’s hard for me to do fiction on my phone**, largely because of indentations and quotation marks and all that stuff.  But these blog posts seem okay, more or less.

I don’t know what the best thing to do is.  This blog is really my sole daily communication with the outside world; it’s not as though I have any friends with whom I hang out, and I cannot do online groups or what have you.  I considered joining some “autism related” groups, though I am not at all sure I even merit the diagnosis, but they all seem to be run by and populated by people who are much more comfortable with other people they don’t already know, at least online, than I am.

Also, the whole thing feels almost faddish and cliquey, like “all the cool kids are joining autistic support groups”, which is fairly ironic, when you think about it.  Anyway, I’ve never really been good at “defining” myself by any group membership, other than my core group of friends, back when I had such a thing, and of course my original family, and then, of course, even more strongly by my married family, with my wife and kids.  But I’m no longer a member of that latter group, and the first group doesn’t exist anymore, and unfortunately, though I do talk to my sister on the phone and text and stuff with my brother, they live 1100 and 1300 miles away, roughly, so my original family is rather scattered.

I used to feel almost like a member of the community at Jerry Coyne’s website, Why Evolution is True, but that site’s parameters have changed, and it’s not possible to read and like and comment all from the WordPress “reader function”, so I have to open each post in at least 2 tabs to be able to interact with the site fully, and that discourages me a lot of the time.  Anyway, I’ve long had the impression that PCC(E) found my comments irritating.  Likewise, I almost always find any comments I make on that site or anyplace else to be stupid and embarrassing if I look back on them, unless they’re just jokey throw-aways, like a funny-oid response to someone’s tweet.

I’m not sure what to do about all this.  No matter what, I feel like I’m spitting into the ocean or shouting in a hurricane.  Maybe I’m not even shouting; maybe I’m whispering.  Anyway, I don’t think it’s reaching very far or having any benefit, whether for me or for anyone else.  I guess I occasionally get to “show off” my familiarity with a very broad array of concepts and ideas and fields of study; that’s ego-syntonic in and of itself, I suppose, though the fact that it is ego-syntonic for me is rather embarrassing and even humiliating.  I mean, just how pathetic am I that I need to show off online in some blog that barely a dozen or so people even look at when I post it?

Still, it’s not as though I’m in some academic setting, where I could bounce ideas off colleagues and so on.  I guess I could try to get back into doing my “audio blogs” which are sort of mini-podcasts, but the process of dealing with audio and converting it to video is a pain in the ass.  I don’t think many people “watch” them, anyway.

Speaking of audio recordings, I have done audio recordings of two “chapters” (so far) of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible.  I guess that’s good.  It’s at least “forced” me to muscle through part of the book.  It’s not that the subject matter is hard‒so far it’s old hat, really, since he’s laying the foundations‒it’s that the print is small on the hardcover edition, and the Kindle version is just a PDF of that, so you can’t adjust the type size to suit your smartphone, not without expanding the page until most of it is off your screen.  That’s no way to read a book, especially one about a relatively complex subject.

Anyway, if I can keep it up and finish it, I may do something similar for some of my other books that don’t have audio versions, like Spacetime and Geometry and Gravitation and so on.  I don’t think doing audio for mathematics texts would be terribly useful, but maybe it would.  Maybe I’m fooling myself about all of it.

Oh, but I’m pleased to report that there’s now an Audible version of Rationality from AI to Zombies, and I used my credit this month to get it.  I’m in the midst of rereading the Kindle version of the book even now‒about 75% of the way through.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about the other stuff, but then, I don’t really know why I’m doing anything at all.  I have no particular goal or purpose in mind.  I certainly don’t look forward to anything, beyond just trying to find new stuff to learn about or to learn better, but it’s not as though I’m making any contribution to the world, or doing any good of any kind.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m just “a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics”, but I certainly don’t have much more consequence than any solitary wild pig.

That’s enough for now.  I don’t need to write a post that’s twice as long just because I’m writing it half as frequently.  Also, I’m getting close to my stop.  I hope you all have a good weekend, and if you’re celebrating it, a happy Saint Patrick’s Day tomorrow.  I mean to write fiction on Monday, but maybe I’ll do a blog on the phone afterwards, sometime during the day.  I’m making no promises, so don’t act in reliance.

*I used scare quotes because I effectively never post on Sundays.  There were a few times, way back in the day, when I posted on Iterations of Zero on Sundays, because that was supposed to be my blog that was not related to promoting my creative writing, but was to be about my various thoughts on science, philosophy, politics, psychology, and so on.  I haven’t written very many posts on it over time, especially since this blog took over being a catch-all for whatever thoughts come to me on any given day after I just start writing and see what happens.

**Though I wrote a significant part of Son of Man on my first, tiny little smartphone, because I had no other choice.  That was a great little phone, an LG from back when they still made them.  Once, it fell about 12 feet onto concrete and the back popped off and the battery fell out, but that was it.  It ran perfectly afterward, and the screen didn’t crack at all.  Some of that is just down to physics‒smaller screens have less local torque and also can only resonate at higher pitched frequencies.  Also, the back popping off and the battery popping out absorbed a lot of kinetic energy, so that was dissipated away from more sensitive things.