Of mice and men

Cow Watching
Don't ask me how, for I honestly don't know, but I found this article on escape characters while strolling through Wikipedia:

In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character which invokes an alternative interpretation on subsequent characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharacters.

I couldn't help reading it as a writer (In writing, an escape character is...) and immediately something went "aha!" Into the the baby's toy bag it goes, for somewhere, somewhen I'll actually start working on the New (and as of yet still nameless) Project.


Sockbooze
Last month two stragglers stumbled into my gmailbox, a year after the sockbooze was sent. Both made me laugh:

Analysis of the first (one year later, nearly to the day): opens with a polite but impersonal greeting and explanation how the sockbooze got lost and why the necessity of the impersonal answer (fair enough) and then style-breaches right into a warmer and more personal explanation why it's a pass (schizo much?)

Analysis of the second (13 months later): three short lines that rollercoast from sorry > spam > catching up > resubmit whenever open again ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME? HAHAHA

Anyways, with all my sheep returned, I find it's nearly a year after I said "I'll wait till summer and then we'll see..." The sockbooze returned Dreams of Cold Stone to my attention, and I'm weeding through it for the last time (Really. Promise!) Cutting down some more kudzu. Fluffing up and patting down the eiderdown. And then we'll see for real.


Stuff of life
Two weeks ago changes were in the air.
I quit my job (but I've already landed a new job, I start on Monday, wahay!)
But more importantly: my dad had a thrombosis-stroke, which all-in-all could have turned out far worse for a 75-year old. For now he lost the left hand side of the world (irremediable), and processing speed (remediable). We're all happy/lucky there are no mobility problems. And while after revalidation he probably could live independent (with some ambulant care), we (his not-living-in-girlfriend, my brother and me) have decided his place is too far away and too big to let him return there, to live on his own.
Factoring into that story, is how my dad always has had a thing of finding stuff in the street and keeping it for when it comes in handy, a bolt, a screw... A cute and quaint little tick, you know? Dad always had a thingy if you needed a thingy. And economic household tips, like keeping a couple of water kettles on the stove during winter, which means you don't have to spend extra gas/money on warm water to do the dishes. Cute and quaint, but he was born in 1935, after all, and the war and the consequent scarcity must have made a serious impression on a child who'd become the eldest of seven.

So, two weeks ago we went to his house, mainly to clean out the fridge, since he wasn't going to return soon. For me it had been some time ago, see, I usually see dad when he and I are visiting my brother's. My parents divorced ages ago, so it's sorta, I keep an eye on mom, and my brother keeps an eye on dad. After we decided he wasn't going back to the house, we kept on going to start cleaning up and putting some order into his affairs. From the first day we've been utterly baffled by the OCD levels of hoarding, and how extreme a weakness he has for promotional sales. Seriously, you could keep whole battalions going for months on the clothing, food, wood and tools we've found there. You could stock a nuclear cellar for a large family, cheap shirts and sheets still wrapped in foil included. It shames me, in a shoulda woulda coulda way and makes me feel horrible horrible horrible. So there, that needed off my chest.

nameless child (sonogram)

Been reading up on stuff (1000+ posts that need sorting out in my demonfeeder), and upon flipping through Whatever came upon a post interesting enough to want to click through to the comment (this post which is a blog-to-blog discussion), Cow Watcher snatched a thought here:

#23 by Doc Rocketscience on December 29, 2010 - 1:22 pm

John, as a result of this I just read the original post from 2006 for the first time. I have some questions. I note that comments are still open there.Would you prefer that I contribute to that (albeit quite dusty) discussion, or this?

#24 by John Scalzi on December 29, 2010 - 1:23 pm

Either is fine but if you want people interested in that particular essay to see them, it’s probably better to put them there rather than here.

See how that works, where with all the crossing and linking possible, between computers, information, platforms, programs, whatever,  in the end the thing that is our master remains time. No matter what we invent to help us link, we remain linear creatures and must make linear decisions. Will there come a day where we can develop split personalities for every moment we have to spin off our digital self into old parts of the digital world, or will we develop a sense, a social ritual or handshake to indicate we're visitors from the future and that at the same time allows us to instalink to it. A rollerdex of spinoff blips or something. Am I making sense? I don't mean developing some sort of digital agent to do the job for us (because it's a SF idea and besides I'm already using that idea). Usually, when we humans change the world (as the abstract place the world is after processing by our brain), it's by using old tools. Tools we know, inside and out, and use on new problems. In the same way the first ever smiley (click for archeological reference) changed the language we use to communicate, turning us into embryonic Bester* machines.
Anyways, sense or not digiblips, into the New Project container it goes with other thoughts on digiblippery and networking. Note to self: the baby still needs a name.

On the topic of instalinking and moving from one world/workspace/headspace to the next, my mind finds tabs mightily difficult to sort out the last few days. It happens once in a while, and I don't know how to fix it. At work I was totally lost between the running programs/groups in the taskbar and Excel tabs, always flipping the wrong things to the surface. It's not even a "clickspaces being in the same area" thing, since the Firefox tabs are currently also annoying the crap out of my digital-spatial senses. Like working in a cramped office on a cluttered desk. It only exists in digispace and yet it is so cluttered I can never seem to find the right piece of paper and I'm muttering to myself about "where did I see/put that thing?".
Why is my mind so confused? Is it working on stuff and not communicating, or is it the yello-boogers' influence (sinusitis yay!)?



* I don't mean something made by  Bester Machine Enterprise Co.,Lt from Japan, which makes "printers machinery for cup noodles, ice cream, pudding etc." whatever that actually might be. What I meant was actually the way in which reading Bester (specifically Golem100) teaches your mind to think differently about the tools we use to express language, the ink on paper, the characters defined after centuries of convention. And suddenly a semi-colon is not just punctuation but a reduced image of a set of winking eyes, and math and language are not so different...  

from Alfred Bester's Golem100

Sonogram

I've been reading up on networking and computer models for social studies, ending up in some weird corners of philosophy and science history, all to feed Cow Watcher the fodder it needs to create some order from the chaos of dungeon crawlers.

Meanwhile, in between the menial jobs of the jobless housewife, I've put some thought in characters for this new project. No great hurry with it, I'm just reading stuff, gathering ideas, grabbing some balls Cow Watcher tosses me. I've come to some short notes on possible characters; there's this man, and there's this woman. I'm jotting down some ideas on *what* they are and how they fit into *non-existent plot*⁽¹⁾, and then all of a sudden in walks a real character. Not quite sure if I like him (a goddamned misanthrope if ever there was one), but his voice and attitude tell me he's important. Which makes me wonder if I'll be able to stand him long enough to be the main character.

And so the realization follows that I'll be changing POV in this project, switching from the Misanthrope/Mover&Shaker, to the two who actually live the plot. Not quite sure yet how I'm going to swing that, cuz problem is: Misanthrope is definitely "I", while the two others are "he" and "she". Ack!
Well, that's a problem to be solved later. Or not. Rules exist to be broken or some such nonsense.

So, the excitement is definitely on!

Now I have to make up a real working title; since it was quite embryonic I dubbed this project "embryo", but hey, I can see hands and feet forming: this thing needs a new name asap.



⁽¹⁾ Now, if you try to work like that in Excel you'll get the circular reference error: by fitting these stick-men characters into a non-existing plot, the plot emerges. I love it when a plan comes together!