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.