Ugh

Revising story.
Finding out I'm linked from TDWTF.
Staying up late reading comments and looking at readership impact.
Getting up early to print story if necessary.
And buy tutoring supplies.
Story still not done.
Class wanted to know blog address.
Tutoring postponed.
Fell asleep at Leonardo's Basement.
Still tired.
Still need to finish story.
Still need to write new story for Monday.
Still need to write this Winnipeg library piece to keep new blog visitors coming back.

How to do this?

Dunno.

Sleep.

Call me a pessimist...

...but the prospect of an economic breakdown in China triggers my "major global disaster" sense. Many people have noted that in many ways China, as the world's foremost manufacturer, occupies a spot analogous to the US in the 1920s. Add to that the trillion dollars of US debt held by China, and today's economy could look like paradise compared to that in two or three years.

Fortunately, my track record on these kinds of worries is not particularly good, but if you do have a spare minute and some plans for weathering this Great Recession, they may be worth reviewing.

As for me, I don't know what I would do anyway. If I had a house I would start collecting cardboard, bits of string, and scrap pieces of metal and other things that you might be tempted to throw out, but since I don't even have that I guess I will just need to learn how to fish the Mississippi River.

How to get 100,000 players

[This is the original e-mail I sent to Calvin after the the infamous interview just featured in the Daily WTF. John, for one, thought this version of the story much more humorous than the one I eventually submitted to the Daily WTF, so I will preserve it here for posterity.]

Calvin,

I interviewed this afternoon for a programming position with a game development company.

By game development company, I mean a man who has played some video games before.

He is designing a massively multiplayer online game that will have both steam locomotives and sail-driven ships.

By designing, I mean he has some ideas.

Some of them are even written down.

This man claimed to have an idea every day. Can you imagine how it must feel for him to walk among the rest of us?

Oh, actually.

He doesn't. Walk among us, I mean. He never leaves his apartment.

He told me that.

He will charge $15/month, but the income will not stop there. He will also have in-game advertising. For a fee players and businesses can put up banners in the game and even send each other messages.

The game is going to be so popular Google will advertise in it.

I showed him Venture the Void and mentioned that as an example of how long it can take to develop a game.

And how few people might sign up.

He is outsourcing most of the development to the Philippines and India. He found programmers there who said they would work for royalties only.

The game would take three to six months to finish. I would be the go-between. And also work for royalties only.

Not paltry pay. $75,000 a month when they start pouring in. That's 2% of his expected income.

Did you know, you can easily get 100,000 players by posting your game to mmorpg.com?

You might try that.

Please send me 2% of the proceeds if you do.

Because for some reason,

I decided not to take the job.

Kevin

Sacrifice

I wrote up about 24K of text today, which is the longest piece of fiction I've ever done. I will probably spend most of tomorrow revising it, which is probably not enough time given its current state, but I guess this is a workshop after all.

At some point I need to check how long this is. It only needs to be under 30 pages, and I'm pretty sure it's shorter than that, although it probably is longer than the other pieces that have been reviewed.

Ending still stinks too.

Anyway, I did get a lot of writing done today even if it doesn't show here.

Sometimes

Sometimes I cannot tell the difference between Christ and Quixote:

The Legend of Master Legend

Even if you've read this article before, it's worth re-reading. Here, I'll post another link:

The Legend of Master Legend

It's a Rolling Stone article about real-life superheroes.

Social Skills

So there is this ad going around on the tubes with the text:

I'm popular. You're not.

#1 Guide to Social Skills.

My first thought was how few social skills one would need to have to say something like "I'm popular. You're not." Then I thought that someone who had poor social skills might think this is a good thing to say, so the ad is actually extremely well targetted. I am flummoxed.

I'm reminded of a sign on the door of SCUM -- the Society for Collegiate Undergraduate Mathematics -- at the University of Calgary. When I first arrived, the sign read

Welcome to SCUM!
No social skills required.

I liked the blatant nerdiness on display there, but the next year I noticed a change:

Welcome to SCUM!
SOME social skills required.

That was somehow disappointing, but another year later it changed again:

Welcome to SCUM!
Few social skills required.

The only undergraduate mathematician I ever knew well was Robert. His opinions, in fact, were rarely a mystery. I asked him one day about the sign, and he told me. I cannot quote Robert on a blog read by my family, nor even paraphrase him because his speech is essentially a long string of vulgarities punctuated by descriptions of obscene acts. I survived middle school and high school but Robert showed me that it was still possible for language to shock me. So really the best I can do is give a paraphrase of a translation from Robert-speak to normal-person-speak.

In short, Robert admitted that both changes to the sign were his fault.

The first time he had managed to say, or do, something so awful it shattered the limits of SCUM's tolerance. He was banned and the sign was changed from "No social skills" to "SOME social skills", that word SOME in uppercase and underlined multiple times. After meeting other members of SCUM it horrifies me to imagine what this could possibly have been. Robert would not tell me.

The second change occurred when Robert was elected president of SCUM and had the sign changed to "Few social skills" as a rational compromise.

I had a class with Robert my last semester there as he was trying to finish school. He spent most of the semester in a drug-induced haze, skipping classes and dressing as a pirate, until he realized that he needed to pass all his classes in order to graduate. In an astonishing period of a month he was able to finish his backlog of homework and tests, complete his final projects, and, also astonishingly, beg and plead the professors he had been verbally insulting for mercy.

I left school to live on the river, and Robert left Calgary to work on a doctorate at the University of Toronto. He said his real calling was to become an evangelical missionary, and a PhD would lend authority to his claims that science does not disprove the existence of God.

He is one of many Calgarians I miss dearly.

Update

Well, I turned in a last-minute job in class today that I was really unhappy with, and was duly pounded in review. Hopefully this drought passes soon. I still need to write a story for Thursday.

Potok

So with all the writing I was supposed to do this weekend here is what I have accomplished:

1. Drew a picture of Potok:
2. ...
   

Yeah, not much else to say.

(Potok is from a "webcomic" called Order of Tales. If you don't know what Order of Tales is, go read Rice Boy instead.)

I haven't left bed yet

But I did finish the Fall of Endymion. I guess I will get my annoyances with these books out of the way first.

1. Raft and kayak travel is too fast in this series. A canoe or kayak is rarely faster than walking speed plus current speed, while a raft is locked to the speed of the current; a river like the Mississippi rarely exceeds three miles per hour. Still, they sometimes travel more than 100 miles in a day. I wonder if Simmons is conflating experience from a short canoe trip with a long motorboat trip. I did enjoy these elements but I felt they were too short.
2. Way too much retconning. Simmons denies most of the major revelations of the Hyperion books, and the Rise of Endymion even ignores things in Endymion. There is a very humorous scene at the beginning of Endymion where one character makes a list of ludicrous demands of the hero, in such a way that you know these things are meant to be accomplished by the end of the series. However, at least one of these demands is never accomplished, nor mentioned again by either character, although there were at least good opportunities to bring it up.
3. The characters in Hyperion sparkle with rivalries, which they mostly resolve by the Fall of Hyperion. The inter-character conflict is not as compelling in Endymion. The protagonists are simply too nice and the antagonists have no apparent motive for the political intrigues. I wasn't given any reason to care which of the multiple bad factions came out on top, and I wasn't even sure why the baddies cared. If you are lusting for power it is presumably for love or hate or at least change, but none of the characters seemed to have significant plans for how to use the power they plotted for.
4. Everyone blinked. A lot. I started to think I was in the land of Tink Tonk.

My impression of this series overall is that Hyperion is a very strong, character-driven work. The Fall of Hyperion is a satisfying conclusion. Endymion and the Rise of Endymion have amazing settings which are generally let down by the plot and characters.

I guess I should get up now and start on my own poor writing.

UPDATE: I forgot the most important thing, which is while browsing Dan Simmons website I ran across a link to this.

Saturday Considerations

Okay, if I don't get to the Minneapolis Institute of Art today I will probably die.

Also, I'm reading The Rise of Endymion. Dan Simmons's Hyperion books were definitely stronger. The Endymion series demonstrates the weaknesses of an alternating plot structure. In Endymion every other chapter was written from the antagonist's perspective and ended with the apparent destruction of at least one protagonist, which you know can't happen because the author has clearly fated the characters to greater things.

With an alternating structure, if one of the storylines is more engaging, the other will feel like filler. If they are equally engaging, then you still need to decide if you really have two works there instead of just one. Hyperion was more than the sum of its parts, but Endymion isn't. The Rise of Endymion adds to the flaws by increasing the number of sides I don't care about, and I am just skimming some pages completely.

Still, I have to hand it to him for creating a universe in which

1. Characters can be resurrected in a long, error-prone process.
2. Instantaneous interstellar travel is possible, but...
3. ...it's fatal

Also, he apparently floods the entire Earth just so he can have a character kayak through the St Louis Arch. I appreciate that.

Oh, in other news the next adventure post concerns the library in Winnipeg. I want to include lots of special effects and it is hard to do on a blogger's budget, so it is likely to be delayed.

The September 27th post

Well, I finished it and I'm not really sure what day it is right now or if this is any good. I am pretty sure I did not get across what I wanted to, and not really sure what I wanted to communicate made any sense!

I just had this feeling when I was out on the river that I was living close to the metal, so to speak, and somehow the arts were like this rarefied privileged thing, which well, they aren't.

So maybe it is appropriate that I finally wrote it up in a haze between nap and sleep after pointlessly reading websites for an hour that I knew would make me angry.

Which, well, suggests I need another blog.

If we accept Freud's classification of ego, superego, and id, which is trite but somehow useful, I think this blog could end up functioning as ego, the excuses excuses thing as superego, and I still need some place for the id to rage. I suspect this should be anonymous.

At least that is what the superego tells me.

Sorry about this blog's annoucement

So the announcement for this blog on the main floating adventure site went off okay, I think. One thing I didn't like about it is that I wanted to mention the fact that, even if we have an infinite progression of meta-blog, meta-meta-blog, and so on, we may still need a meta^omega-blog to apologize for failures in that infinite progression.

And this would have to continue indefinitely, with a blog for each ordinal.

Of course, any addressing scheme we develop can only distinguish between countably many blogs, so there is a kind of limit there. This is a limit of modern computing but may be a limit of the universe as a whole. My guess is that the information content of the universe is at most countable. If it were uncountable, I would suppose that every particle has an uncountable amount of information associated with it, which seems unlikely.

No doubt someone better versed in quantum and later physics could tell me if any theory admits the possibility of uncountable information.

It's Friday

It's Friday. That seems like a good reason not to post, doesn't it?

Well, no. At the little floating adventure we are all about quality content every day, including weekends and bank holidays.

However, in this coming week I need to write a four page non-fiction story to be read by about five people, and a longer story to be read in my fiction class by everyone. Even the people whose stories I no doubt unfairly ravaged in my reviews.

I have some other things to accomplish in this time period as well, such as finding a late Christmas present for my sister and preventing zombie invasions.

All of which is to say that I may or may not post something substantive today, and if I do, it is likely to be later tonight.

That is just the way things go in the high-stakes world of not really having a job but posting on multiple blogs!

Introduction

Okay, this new blog is primarily an adjunct to my blog Kevin's little floating adventure. My goal is to update that blog every day with quality content, but this led to posting excuses for poor or infrequent content when I ran into problems reaching that goal.

Such excuses are of interest to only a subset of that blog's readers, so I've decided to split them off into this separate blog.