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

meep meep

haz work changes: roster will change to 3 days a week, since it's no use going for a half-time job and sitting the other half of my time on a train or in a station waiting for one. yay!

done some writing on train/lunch break. with pen and paper !gasp! and also a bit on laptop. editing Barynn 1 to make voice and shtuff fit with Barynn 2. this might be a never-ending-cycle, digiblips. thought about that while thinking of some ideas I had to fiddle a bit with Dreams of Cold Stone, and realized editors must be like cameras: it's only when the manuscript passes through their lenses that it becomes immutable, capturing the moment.

started Palmer's Version 43, stuttered. He does annoying characters a bit too well.

picked up Abraham's 2nd omnibus Season of War and breezed through that instead. hooked hubby on Stross, hubby went out and bought all the Stross he could find. now I need a ladder to tackle my to-be-read pile. methinks whenever vampire/Moscow nights runs out of steam, there will be Laundry universe waiting.

hubby also bought all the Le Carré he could find for rereading. keeps telling me I really should read some. I eye the TBR pile and make non-committal noises, or mumble something about him really needing to finish the beta-reading of Tiger of Opal and trying not to sarcasnap about how Le Carré is the new Pynchon in the house.

it snowed. thawed a bit. snowed some more. and some more. making that going to work thing just that little bit more interesting.

some of the flux (not work) imploxidated all over the place. my head turned itself inside out and is now in a much better place. picked up Version 43 again. and finished. note-to-self: need to put a cnepur backup on laptop so I can prep the blog on train (or in station).

started Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief. like the story sofar though it took a while for the narrative to hold my attention, in spite of all the interesting new words, because you see, I don't like your similes, sir, no siree, don't like them at all.

meanwhile still no new government in Belgium:

• good point: apparently not having panicky egos at the helm helped to stabilize the economy, though they keep telling us that's a fluke, an illusion that won't hold until tomorrow, don't believe the hype pretty please
• good point: since the ship doesn't sink, it dawns on the sailors that maybe they don't really need that many captains, mm?
• bad point: during the slow but steady negotiations (they're talking about really big reforms, so give them time and space) it becomes more and more apparent that Europe is like a nirvana and all the serious, experienced politicians of this small but confusing country have transcended the last couple of years leaving only the idiots in this quagmire of communities, languages, and egos. we're left with the dregs, damnit
• bad point: some minor routine stuff running afoul, for instance the signatures needed to hand social institutes the money they've been alotted in budget need to come from areal/ full government. so some governmental social institutes had to loan money from real banks to pay the needy (at stellar rates of course, like as if society ever did something for the banks, innit just so?), meaning said institutes will have less to hand out to the needy, or need more of my tax euros than foreseen which I would be okay with if it wasn't simply to hand some more tax money to the banks. they've already got their fair share for the next century or so, I'd say.

In all: all Belgium seems to need is a Harry Tuttle.

whirligig

One that went down some rapids. That's how I feel. Things been moving fast, all things, in all directions, but things are finally looking up. Short and quick update:

I haz work, 18h in 4 days. Transport to and from work is the absolute epitome of what makes Belgium Belgium, which means for what is basically about 35km in distance I can go by car (1h30 drive in morning traffic if it goes well) or public transport: 2 buses, or 2 trains, or 1 or 2 trains and a bus, or 3 trains, all combinations averaging in principle on 1h, which I can live with if not for the fact that the 2nd train is ALWAYS late, and the either/or choice means the season ticket becomes expensive in case I don't use the bus, and I don't want to use the bus anyways.
See, I'm a "cured" car-sickness person. As a kid, mom or dad always put some anti-emetic in me, and it was no silly ritual. I remember being yanked out of the car at high speed and being held over the gutter so I could safely puke my guts out. Nowadays I only get carsick 1% of the time, and I can on good days even read! Buses tend to have a lower success rate, because of the being packed, usually too hot and smelly, the weird turning motions, not to mention speed bumps and roundabouts.
But trains I've solidly conquered. Only in 0.0001% of the time I might get a queasy stomach, so I prefer the train for transport any day: at least I can write and read without having to take drugs. And if I'm going to lose time by being shuttled from one place to another like cattle, I prefer to do something useful at the time, and somehow trying very hard not to blow chunks in the driver's neck is not what I deem useful. The driver might have another opinion of course.
Anyways, the train route to and from work is something that belongs in Alice's dreamworld or a Brazil bureaucracy: coming and going ain't the same. Even the hour makes a difference in at what station I have to make the connection with the second train. And then considering that with every passing year trains are riding less punctual, you can imagine that this shifting world needs some adapting to before I can slog the laptop along.
But! Cow Watcher has been busy, and with rewriting Barynn 1 no less, and also kicking around some new ideas.The incubator is running at full speed, digiblips, and this is good news!

Anyways, meanwhile I had to content myself with books that other people wrote. I finished Palmer's Red Claw (*love*), struggled through Charlie Stross' Atrocity Archives (struggle was my own head's fault: shifting world, getting up at silly hours to go to work, getting head filled with new important information about what job entails, waiting long time for trains that may or may not come, and then being just the halfbreed nerd that gets stalled on the technobabble because I know too little or too much), breezed through Daniel Abraham's Shadow and Betrayal in 4 days so much did I love it. I'm considering what to pick for the train tomorrow, but I think reading 600-some pages in 4 days has sprained my reading muscle. I'll see what entices me come morning.

Oh, and we're having a polar week, snow included. And guess who once again forgot to buy salt to ice-proof the pavement and bicycle lane in front of the house, mm? Tomorrow morning is going to be interesting indeed...

Paris

was fun, exhausting, and it was great to see that even on the scale of a world championship event organizers can manage to screw up pretty big. But there was great fencing to see, and quite some surprises.

Things I'll remember of Satur/Sabreday: the American Homer who was up against a French opponent twice in a row (first Apithy, and what a match that was!, then Lopez), which means having the whole of the Grand Palais, as in hundreds of Frenchies cheering their fencer on and pin-drop silence when you score a point, and just marching on. That's quite some mental strength there. And of course the beautiful final: the German Limbach (who's 194cm but uses this length with surprising elegance and explosiveness) against the Korean Won (who can jump impressively high, probably over Limbach if he really wants to) and Won won.

Spent Sunday in my favorite Parisian museum, l'Hotel National Des Invalides, though the expo on the Tsars was a bit thin. But for all you digiblips that like to see weapons of all sorts, real fighting ones to beautifully inlaid hunting weapons and honorary sabres and uniforms and half the collection of Vauban's architectural models (the other half is kept in Lille) and also a good expo on the world wars: get there early, and you can easily while away a whole day in whatever period you like, and your ticket remains valid for the day (so you can leave and do something else if you're the kind of digiblip that could actually get enough of weaponry).

Monday was Epee day at the Championships, and though not my weapon, saw some great stuff too, even if our favorites managed to shoot themselves in the foot whenever they could. Had to leave before the finale to catch our Thalys, and then found out that the finalists we predicted did everything the other way around. Silly epeists...

On the writing front: on the train to the international station of Brussels Cow Watcher handed me an excellent solution for a problem that came out of something it thought up for part 3 in the Barynn trilogy and which has been bugging me for a very long time. Alas not an easy and simple solution, but damnit, a good one.

flux continued

this week running around to get what's needed done to get this job which already had me running around for the last two weeks. Yes, a job! Ain't that cool?
And of course, now also running around to get the stuff done I kept postponing since the life of the jobless stretched out into infinity and well who cares when this or that trash finally gets brought to the recycling center? Well it doesn't stretch into infinity, not really, so...
And this weekend we're off to Paris to see some World Championship class Fencing, which means some more flux, as I'll need to plan the packing carefully.

I've got this feeling this month, even if it's only just starting, is going to be over in a blink of an eye.
But the good news/job prospect has Cow Watcher singing with joy. I mean seriously, soon there will be trains again, and cows, and no way to avoid writing.

Meanwhile I've finished reading Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, currently into Palmer's Red Claw.

Tired

• of people who should know better, since writing is what they do, than to contribute to the easy pegging of names/words to people, whether the issues are racism, religiously inspired dumbassery, feminism, and all other sorts of morality based judgments. We've got enough crap like that going on TV and the blogosphere as it is.
• of people who should know better twice-over, since writing Sfaich is what they do, than to contribute to reigning and ever-growing dumbassery that everything can be reduced to one simple word, one single issue. If world-making is already such a daunting task, why not learn from the experience and deduce that the real world is an even more daunting place to describe accurately?
• of people who should know better thrice-over, since they have hands-on experience on dealing with readers who may or may not give the whole extent of their lifework but a casual glance before making an easy single-word judgment based on a paragraph or even one book out of many. If you're not prepared to read up on the complicated field of ethics, don't make simple judgments based on an article or two, and especially don't parrot others who were obviously just as lazy.

Or, to quote my man Marcus:

Word after word, every one by itself, must the things that are spoken be conceived and understood; and so the things that are done, purpose after purpose, every one by itself likewise. And as in matter of purposes and actions, we must presently see what is the proper use and relation of every one; so of words must we be as ready, to consider of every one what is the true meaning, and signification of it according to truth and nature, however it be taken in common use
~Meditations, Book VII.4

d'oh

Yup, still alive a good beating with a sabre and a flu-now-turning-into-snotfest later. Been a naughty girl with the digiblippery, I know, I'm sure y'all missed me heaps. Promise I'll do better. Soon. Too much things in flux right now.