books

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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.

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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.