missing the point and liking it!

The Guardian has published an excerpt of a book on the future of China. It's kind of interesting in that it starts

The emergence of China as a $2 trillion economy from such inauspicious beginnings only 25 years ago is such a giddy accomplishment that the temptation to see its success as proof positive of your own prejudices is overwhelming. And the west's broad prejudice is that China is growing so rapidly because it has abandoned communism and embraced capitalism.

And yet it goes on to state, one paragraph later:

in China, its so-called capitalism looks nothing like any form of capitalism the west has known and the transition from communism remains fundamentally problematic. The alpha and omega of China's political economy is that the Communist party remains firmly in the driving seat not just of government, but of the economy - a control that goes into the very marrow of how ownership rights are conceived and business strategies devised.

The author seems to be missing the point. While the West seems to see (or perhaps, desperately wants to see) China as proof that communism must fail, giving way to western capitalism, the author indicates for us that China is actually just pretending to be capitalist. What's really under the covers is

... one of the most corrupt organisations the world has ever witnessed. The combination of absolute power and an ideology that palpably no longer describes reality is a virus that is morally and psychologically undermining the regime.

...

Corruption has become part of the system's DNA, now threatening the integrity of the state.

Mr. Hutton goes to great lengths to describe the corruption in China, and the harm it can do to its people (not least of which, apparently, is the suicide of corrupt officials). In fact, he concludes that

Successful businesses have to be successful in business terms - with managers freely exploiting opportunities, developing products and brands and promoting on ability. No such autonomy is possible within Leninist corporatism; party needs come before those of business, enforced by a national system of party committees in every enterprise, finance from state-owned banks and a complex system of accounting and ownership rights that leaves majority ownership of most enterprises with the state. Private shareholders have very limited ownership rights; companies' fixed assets are separated out in company accounts and can still only be legally owned by state and public bodies.

This is to say, capitalism and progress cannot exist in a system which is, by definition, anathema to Western Capitalism. It seems to me that Hutton has forgotten one of the most important tenets of capitalism: Capital.

Capitalism generally refers to an economic system in which the means of production are mostly privately or corporately owned and operated for profit and in which distribution, production and pricing of goods and services are determined in a largely free market.

(via) If we look at the above definition, offered by those most astute of economists, we can see the primary focus of capitalism is not the corporate or private ownership of "distribution, production, and pricing," but rather is the fact that they are operated for profit in a free market. Let us also remember (because there are a few of you screeching at me, I can hear you) that Mr. Hutton and wikipedia are subject to the systemic bias that many of us are subject to:

1. Male
2. Technically inclined
3. Formally educated
4. English-speaking
5. White
6. Aged 15-49
7. From a predominantly Christian country
8. From an industrialized nation
   
9. From the Northern Hemisphere
10. More likely to be employed in intellectual pursuits than in practical skills or physical labor

leading to the presumption that any form of capitalism is likely to be based upon the above ten biases. A profit-driven economy, in a free market

A free market is a market where the price of each item or service is arranged by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers (see supply and demand); the opposite is a controlled market, where supply and price are set by a government.^[1] However, while a free market necessitates that government does not dictate prices, it also requires the traders themselves do not coerce or defraud each other, so that all trades are morally voluntary.^[2]

need not have prices set by consumers, or by citizens (with a nod to Solzhenitsyn). Rather the prices need to be set by the market itself, by the consumers of goods. In the case of the Chinese state-owned capitalist economy, the prices are still set by the consumers, as the government is not — cannot — force people to buy goods. Rather, the Chinese are simply setting prices much the same way they fix the value of their currency. This isn't as sinister as it sounds (although, as somebody who lives in the west, I can say that it does indeed sound sinister; please however remember your and my bias here). All those corrupt officials have one thing in mind: profit. Even if it means they're corrupt to the core, and they're ordering mafiaesque killings and scams, if they are so corrupt as to prove the market untenable, the whole thing collapses on their heads.

We don't need to look any further than Singapore or Viet Nam to see that these sorts of markets actually do work, can and do succeed, and will continue to for quite some time. It may be helpful to think of this system as "capitalism by the few" rather than the western "capitalism of the many" (note distinction of by/of). Even in the west, it isn't clear that the entire society dictates the prices of goods, or the valuation of currency, or labor standards. One can simply examine the economy of Europe (and things like socialized medicine, state-provided narcotics — the value of methadone being substantially higher in a truly consumer-controlled market — and so on), as well as in the United States, where we have a great many (although fewer than many places in the world) socialized programs and products. Corn, for example.

I'd be interested in reading Mr. Kamm's opinion of the book. I suspect it will eventually come across his desk.

There are a couple salient points in the excerpt, the first being

According to one influential estimate, even the tiniest upward movement in interest rates or the slightest decline in sales would mean that 40%-60% of their enormous bank debts would not be serviced, rendering the entire Chinese banking system bankrupt. They are commercial and business disaster areas.

The problem with this argument, however, is that debt is part of any healthy economy. It is helpful to consider the question of American homeowners. One of the typical arguments of armchair financial planners is that the best investment one can make is their home. It's generally the most expensive thing anyone buys. Let us say that tomorrow, I purchase a home, and find myself suddenly in US$1.5M of debt. This is an enormous figure. However, what this ensures is that I will continue to work to pay it off, and my buying it ensures that the people who built the house will be paid for their work. Additionally, there are more nuanced factors, such as my investing elsewhere to hedge bets against a flagging housing market. The point is that debt is not as unhealthy as the author makes it out to be. Consider also, the debt of America as a country, or of its people. I won't pretend I remember the numbers from the last Marketplace, but I do certainly remember American consumer debt is in the many trillions of dollars. Americans will be paying this off in perpetuity, as debts are paid, and new debts are created. Importantly, without debt, there is no payment.

Again, also consider that it is not in the interest of the corrupt state officials to bankrupt their own economy. It is always in the interest of those involved in Capitalism — whatever the strain — to perpetuate the system in order to further increase their profits. In a static system, where prices are fixed not by the consumer, but by Leninist or Marxist ideals (not the case here, certainly), there is no incentive to keep the system working, as there is no way to increase wealth past a certain point. The promise of free-market capitalism is perpetual wealth gain through reinvestment.

The second interesting point in the excerpt is thus:

The cumulative result of all this is economic weakness, despite the eye-catching growth figures. Innovation is poor; half of China's patents come from foreign companies. Its growth depends on huge investment, representing an unsustainable 40% or more of GDP financed by peasant savings. But China now needs $5.4 of extra investment to produce an extra $1 of output, a proportion vastly higher than that in economies such as Britain or the US. But 20 years ago, China needed just $4 to deliver the same result. In other words, an already gravely inefficient economy has become even more inefficient. China's national accounts tell the same story. Hu Angang calculates that China is now back to the Mao years in term of the inefficiency with which it uses capital to generate growth.

which indeed offers actual numbers to demonstrate the health of the Chinese economy. Note that they are numbers relative to the west, which is a meaningless comparison here. All the same, it is worthwhile to note that the trend has changed. It's really too bad that Hutton continues with

Behind all these problems lie Leninist corporatism. Capitalism, I contend, is much more than the profit motive and the freedom to set prices which China's reforms have permitted. It is a system in which many different actors freely take different decisions according to their best judgment; some are right and some are wrong, but the system never has to bet on any one being right for everyone - as in an authoritarian system of centralised economic control.

(emphasis mine). There's a tenet in the "so you're new to investing" school

Investing and religion don’t mix
Amana aside, all of these funds are mediocre performers, at best. That could be reversed at MMA Praxis, because last year’s Morningstar equity-fund managers-of-the-year, Christopher Davis and Kenneth Feinberg, were hired in January to take over the Core Stock fund.

But it’s unlikely that dynamic duo will be able to achieve the kind of greatness they enjoy at their economic-inspired mutual funds, Davis New York Venture A (NYVTX) and Selected American Shares S (SLASX).

You may substitute "religion" here for "morals," "politics," and any other subjective razor you'd like (counterpoint). The point is, if you're going to objectively value something so as to invest (or not) in it, you cannot view it through a lens of what your beliefs are (although here, one could make equivocal arguments that it is either theosophist or capitalist to do so). Mr. Hutton in this case, has done precisely the latter. He has tried and convicted the Chinese economic model in a court of his — not their — views. They may well succeed, continue to grow, in their own particular corrupt fashion, and maybe even step on the little guy in their path to do that. It doesn't mean they won't succeed. They're just going to do it in such a way that causes him to jump up and down, simian-fashion, screeching about how unfair and unjust the world is to conscientious, righteous investors such as himself.

The west is unforgivably ignorant about China's shortcomings and weaknesses, which leads it vastly to exaggerate the extent of the Chinese "threat".

See also: irony.

Big wheel keep on turnin'

(there's some un-work-safe-ness towards the bottom of this entry, but it's pretty small and only a dick would think it was a firing offense)

I really want to finish Limits, but it seems I can't get the next book out of my head (I've tried, and tried, and tried, but it keeps giving me this sort of mental indigestion, where I can't seem to kick its ass back into the small intestine of my superior temporal gyrus for processing later). It's literally keeping me up at night. So tonight, I sat down to start the outline. It had to be done sooner or later, I might as well get that started, I guess. I know it's going to distract me from Limits, but it's doing that already.

For a little bit of context, I generally have all my writing stashed in a single hierarchy in my "directory of stuff to not throw out, and to probably keep backed up." It would look something like:

DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/$title.doc
DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/$title-$branchnum.doc (usually a few)
DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/$title-Outline.doc
DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/Rubbish/
DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/Rubbish/notes
DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/Rubbish/concept
DOSTNTOATPKBU/$title/Rubbish/@stuff_generally_research_related

So I already had the notes and concept put together (where 'notes' is stuff I think is interesting to the topic, and 'concept' is the 'ah hah' moment that I got, inspiring me to, you know, write a book). In the grand scheme of 'how complete' this book is, I have nine $title directories (all of which, by definition, have a 'concept' file), of which four have a 'notes' file, three have an outline, and two have an outline and manuscript. This particular book, while I've been trying very hard not to write it, is one of the outline/manuscript/notes/concept/research conglomerates. That is to say, it's the second most complete pile I've got. It's got about three megs of stuff in it, as compared to Limits' eight megs (doesn't sound like a lot, but consider this is text).

I guess this means it really, really wants to get written. So, as I took my war-mongering contemporary fiction hat off, and replaced it with the Neuromancer hat of cyberpunkish science fiction (note: I'm not writing Neuromancer, but it helps to consider the difference between, say, Clancy and Gibson), I began fleshing out the outline, I also traipsed through my notes and the concept, seeing what I had left for myself. It turns out this is going to be a hard book to write. In many ways, it's going to be a lot harder to write than Limits was (is). It's got significant portions of three languages (only one of which uses a roman character set) — in addition to English — in it. It uses, necessarily, a lot of meme-ish type stuff (which clearly gave Charlie pause in Accelerando). It also requires a little more imagination. I'm not going to go into the particulars of it, but let's say that it's a lot easier to predict where things are in Limits' timeframe than they are in this book. And, this book (no real working title, but I'm toying with Foreigners) has a lot more intimate connection with the characters (in Limits, they're more a part of the story, rather than the story themselves). I'm also having a hard time reconciling a lot of the ... familiar tone required for the book with the need to have it not come across as a 7th grade report on 4chan. But then how does one discuss futanari seriously?

Sometimes I hate it when I set out to challenge myself. Seems to me that I'd be bored if I wasn't trying to do literary backflips, but it would be a lot easier to write books about...

Ashore, Commander Wolfson faces his own death. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, he realizes his life is in shambles. Health gone, marriage a facade, and career now tarnished by the sinking of the USS Manhattan.

Commander Wolfson fights to raise the sub and learn why she sank. The incident was blamed on a faulty seal, but new evidence points towards sabotage.

Aboard the sub, Noah listens intently to the stories of each of his fellow travelers. He uncovers evidence that one sailor might be the enemy within. A suicide bomber, using a nuclear submarine as his delivery vessel.

(via). For those who haven't already read about the Kursk are invited to do so.

In other news, I think I've finally unfucked all those broken tags I created ages ago. Apologies for the CC reference.

Economics in SFF

NPR has a not-quite-interesting piece on the role of economics in contemporary science fiction and fantasy. They speculate that some of this came out of the dot com era (referring to Charlie as a programmer, rather than, say, pharmacist), and that it's only natural for the genre to branch out into new territory. This is, of course, the problem that modern literary criticism (in the classical sense of the word, not as in 'derision') has with contemporary science fiction (or indeed contemporary fiction) in general. As human knowledge increases in depth and breadth, writing which is necessarily cross-genre emerges. To insist that a piece of fiction is 'breaking out of' traditional genres (such as 'science fiction' or 'period piece') is to refuse to recognize that a sort of renaissance has occurred in modern writing. I find myself wondering when people (critics in specific; the authors don't seem to have any difficulty with straddling multiple traditional genres) will just get the clue, and realize that fiction is just that: fiction. There's no need to classify fiction as foofiction or barfiction. Why not just refer to it as fiction?

Perhaps because people are too attached to having a sort of semantic filter for incoming data? Please, for jebus' sake, identify that fiction so I don't have to read any of it to know what it is! I might be tainted by reading some science fiction when I was looking for a book on economics!

Chinese vs. Computers

It has been more than six years since Mr. Li started using a computer for Chinese word processing. It has been just under six years since the characters started slipping away. He estimates that more than 95 percent of his writing is now done by computer.

''I can go for a month without picking up a pen,'' Mr. Li said.

Among Chinese speakers, anecdotal evidence suggests that the use of computers for word processing is mounting a slow but steady assault on their ability to write characters by hand. Many Chinese say that could undermine the written language.

Why would you still spend so much time on handwriting Chinese characters when you are eventually going to use computers?

more crazy writers

Scalzi points this out:

For God's sake, I'll be in the mall and see something, and go, "Oh, it's the perfect gift for (fill in the blank)." I've been in line with the present in my hand, before I go, "Wait, these are make believe people. I can't buy them a Christmas present." I guess I could, but there's no way to give it to them. They aren't THAT real. But they are real enough that I see things that make me think of them in the way you think of a boyfriend or a husband, or a best friend.

I'm not especially a fan of LKH, but I think it's nifty that somebody else is saying this kind of thing. I've brought up characters with Sandy before, "(fill in the blank) would really like (object of current discussion)." It's entirely possible I'm daft or weird or broken, but at least I'm d/w/b in the same way as other people. That's comforting.

obligatory spam

Guy Kawasaki, who is not the worlds most erudite columnist, but who has been around for quite a long time, has published a ... thingie on using Linkedin. I have been told many times, by many different people to use it. As I've told them, I'm generally skeptical, as the only things I get from Orkut, Friendster, and the other social networking sites (including places like Flickr or Wikipedia) tend to be spam of the "hey, I found you on this useless site too" variety.

That having been said, because the people who recommended it to me are generally useful people who I have some modicum of respect for, I am linking it above because they may be right. And for those who I have pestered with the "hey I found you" emails, this may serve to explain why I've been such a chuffish boor.

Apologies in advance for linkspam, socialspam, and every other sort of processed meat the innernets convey.

Uh huh.

Not like having a general who speaks arabic natively isn't useful in the present conflict. Or, for that matter, it certainly isn't such a great idea to have a soldier fighting a ground war (or two).

In other news, I wrote about this, too. Oh, back in, uh, July. We're running out of people to put into these sorts of positions. Bring on Csrnko.

this page exists to fix a bug.

Self-aggrandizement

I am glad to see that Minefield has auto-completed 'self-aggrandizement' as the subject of this here message. Allow me to quote myself, for a second:

And there you have it. Today, I had an ongoing and emotionally very draining conversation with myself, while all the while taking notes so I would remember what I/we had told me/us.

I had previously thought that nobody else actually commented on how they felt when they were writing. I think maybe I'd just forgotten the things I had read, or maybe I was right. In any case, I ran across this today:

The story is taking hold and Justin is talking to me again...that's so good. Y'know, this is one of the only professions where you get paid for hearing voices in your head.

It is so pleasing that CJ Cherryh describes hearing her characters 'talking to her.' Especially Justin, who is kind of a hard guy to talk to.

Happy dance.

How near-term is 'near term'?

Of course, this has happened before. But this time, I hadn't even started writing the book that's being upstaged by current events. I damn near quit writing Limits so that I could figure out what to do about it, and instead decided to lose a whole hell of a lot of specificity in the interest of actually, you know, getting the book out. But I find myself in a position, again, of thinking that maybe I won't be able to get the next book finished because, well, the world won't wait for me to write the book.

Writing is hard.

If I ever...

Write myself into a book/movie, and ask for absolution/guidance from a character therein (which is to say, write myself getting guidance from myself), please shoot me.

In other news, the Tamil Tigers are restless tonight.

One step forward, e steps back

I've made a little progress on the Z. I spoke to about a zillion shops. It turns out that most of the shops in the area are either engine builders or chassis fab (or outright rice). None of them are both. So if you are in my situation, increasing power by a factor of four, you need not just the engine, but also the chassis work.

Julian recently exploded his STI (well actually there's some debate about who blew it up, but it blowed up regardless). He had to get the engine rebuilt (spun rods), and found a local shop, AR Fab.He had the usual stuff done, blueprint, bump compression, forged pistons, etc. This is more or less what I'm going to have to do with the car. I'll be getting an SR20DET that's more or less going to have gone through the wringer on its way over here. So, rather than blow it up and have to rebuild it later, just rebuild it now, and install it.

But the S130, while still more rigid than the S30/31, is still a pretty flimsy chassis. I had all kinds of hell with the car when I started making 300hp, with the engine breaking mounts and jumping forward into the radiator and things (I actually had to change a radiator in the middle of the street in Chula Vista one day, but I'd done it so many times before, I had it done in half an hour). So the SR20 will begin life as a 220-270hp motor, but since the exhaust is going to be near-open, and it's going to be cammed and boosted, we should be looking at at least 350-400hp, and I'd really like to have 600hp (I'll settle for bhp). Remember, the 280ZX Turbo had 180hp, and the 280ZX had 150. And I think those numbers are optimistic.

So, it will need subframe connectors, a cage up front, probably on top and on bottom, and something on the rear to tighten things up (another problem I had was flexing the rear of the car enough that halfshafts would get pissed off). I think the 300ZXT diff will be okay, but in the event it isn't, the STI diff should fit right in (and has LSD). I asked AR Fab if they were comfortable doing the engine work and the chassis work, and they tell me "they do the impossible builds." That sounds good to me.

We'll be moving in March, so I'll need to get the car into shape before then. At that point, the question is whether to get it limping along and ship it to Taiwan, or to get it all the way on the road. $employer will ship it to me as part of the relo, but I'm not sure they will if it sits in the states for another six months getting a heart transplant. I find myself wondering whether there is a shop in Taipei that will want to do the work for me, either. Or, for that matter, what the laws are re: inspection and emissions.

Fret.

Orders of Magnitude

In addition to hacking through the set-up to the last few bits of the book (it's a tiny bit more setup, and then everything happens at once), I've been conferring with Rick about the math. It turns out I had the right idea, but I was about an order of magnitude off. Simple stuff:

R = (V/3)²

E = R*M

E = (V/3)² * M

Where V is velocity in km/s, R is ricks, M is mass in kilograms, and E is impact energy in kg of TNT. If we assume a 1,000kg projectile (1 metric ton), then we need very high velocities (or a 1,000,000 kg projectile). If we achieve 100km/s (ten times escape velocity), or 0.03%c, we can achieve impact in the neighborhood of 1kt of energy. This is where things get ugly.

We also know that it takes 10,000 joules to move 1 metric tons one meter per second. But, we want to move a metric ton one hundred kilometers a second. So we take our 10MJ and increase that by a factor of a thousand, or 10GJ, and we get to one kilometer per second. Crank it a hundredfold, and you need 1TJ to move one metric ton at 100km/s.

Sounds simple enough. 1TJ doesn't sound like a lot, right? Well, let's look at available power sources:

• Hydroelectric: 50KJ, Brasil
• Fission: 24KJ (spec: 5,000MW, attained: 4,100MW), Los Alamos (not designed to actually function as a stable reactor, this was a rocket motor)
• Fusion: 5GJ (Z-Machine, Los Alamos, proposed)

So it would seem that the power would be a problem if you wanted to deliver kilotons from such a weapon. It'd be a lot easier to just drop nuclear weapons on people. This is also not counting for the fact that you can't expect a projectile traveling at ten times escape velocity to actually, you know, come back down. For contrast, the Endeavor orbiter putters along at 7.75 km/s. Additionally, let's say the barrel is 100m long. So you're not just squirting 5GJ into it, you have to sustain it long enough to actually get the fucker to exit at speed.

Now, I know what some of you are saying (those who aren't saying "IM IN UR BLOG, LAUGHING AT UR MATH. LULZ"). "Well, why don't you do what they do with interplanetary flight, just use gravity?"

The answer to this is, sure, you could get vehicles to that sort of speed, and squirt them into outer space. And maybe you could have some really insanely complicated geometry whereby it swung around Luna, Mars, or anything else big enough to avert its path (bear in mind, also, that 100km/s is greater than the escape velocity of Luna or Mars anyways). Let's just propose we use Sol to keep us from flying off into the deep. First, it would take 2,666,666 minutes (5.1 years) to actually get to Sol. Presumably you could pick up some speed on the way back, so let's say it only takes 4 years to get back. Hm, so a nine-year round trip. That doesn't sound so bad, considering how far it's going, but it's entirely ludicrous to plan an attack that delivers one — one — kiloton to your destination of choice, nine years in advance.

On the plus side, you're never going to overpenetrate when attacking a planet with kinetic weapons. Unless you're, uh, Galactus, or a Super Star Destroyer, or something.

So, a solution. First, you have to keep under escape velocity, because you're intending the things to come back down. Maybe they go into a really shallow orbital path before coming down, but either way, we're not going to exceed 20km/s (because we have atmosphere between us and Kabul) of muzzle velocity. That leaves us with:

E = (V/3)² * M

11.1 * 1,000kg = .011kt.

and our power requirements become 200KJ.

Okay, so there's a benefit to this. Let's say we use the aforementioned 24KJ fission reactor. We would need to run the thing for 8.3 seconds to hit 200KJ of capacitance. This means you can fire six times per minute. You can deliver a kiloton that way in 1,257 hours, or 52 days, give or take. Now bear in mind, also, that it doesn't take any longer than half an hour for your care package to reach its destination, and the whole time (for two months!) you've been spitting ionized gas out one end of a 150-meter gun which is, by definition, stationary. And you've only just delivered a kiloton, not even a meager nuclear weapon sized yield (well, unless you're Israel).

There are ways to get phenomenal amounts of energy in fiction. The most recent example I can think of was from Cowl by Neal Asher. Before you consider, don't. It's a horrible book. But the energy source in the story was the "sun tap," (not scare quotes, those are mocking quotes) a big ... scoopy thing that trawled the photosphere, sucking up heat (without being destroyed, mind), and somehow, uh, beaming it back to civilization. We could go Michio Kaku, and say something like "oh, well we're a Kardashev 1 now, so we're actually just tapping the entire planet for energy." But aside from spelunking into the hell that is The Core, it's not going to happen either. There's also the mention of fusion causing a global heat epidemic and subsequent serious problems in Hamilton's Night's Dawn books, but those are not as plausible as I'd like, either. Baxter uses "higgs field" energy (Exultant), but he doesn't really quantify just how big a higgs field device is, and I haven't seen anyone else use it.

So this means I am going to have to revise what I think is destructive (rather than just lie outright about what I can do in the next ten years), and how destructive I think "too destructive" is (that is, the point at which people say "HEY! YOU SUNK MY BATTLESHIP!"). And, I have to get that figured out before I bring the Sri Lankans into this.

Positive note: I learned a little sanskrit today.

Pants are overrated

So, I'm probably the last to know. While I've been a long time devotee to talk like a pirate day, I had missed the obvious:

http://www.nopantsday.com/

Free your pants.

Toil, toil

It looks like I may actually exceed the mark I was going for. I think I see enough now that I can write all the way to the end, more or less only stopping for, you know, food and stuff. Which is good, because I've got a giant twig up my ass that is my next book, and I can't wait to write it.

No, it's not the dicks book.

On language

I find myself really shocked at how easy Chinese is to learn. It has this reputation of being incredibly hard to learn, and much has been written on the subject. But I think it's mostly out of date. Because I can speak, I can write in pinyin, and this is quite easy to convert into pictographs (in traditional or simplified Chinese). From the pictographs, which have less concrete meanings than the spoken language (interestingly, the spoken language is not especially coupled to the pictographs), I can infer concepts. So for example, I am looking for the proper noun for double eyelids (this is a trait present in about 50% of Chinese, and is regarded as an attractive feature. have a look at Gong Li for an example). So, I wind up finding 手, which is actually translated as 'hand', but can refer to a plurality (such as a couple of people, a double-edged weapon). Eyelid is pretty clear, and I can just convert pinyin to traditional: 眼皮. And so the final result, 眼皮手, is exactly what I want (眼皮倍 also works, but is used less frequently). I can then search around on the intarweb for it, or I can translate it into pinyin (and thereby romanize it so I can include it in my writing).

Calligraphy still gets me, but I'm becoming rapidly conversant in traditional Chinese. The cool thing about this is, the better I get at traditional Chinese, the better I get at Mandarin, because I am learning both the pictograph and the pinyin (and therefore can pronounce it, and more often than not, it's new vocabulary). Frequently when I find a new pictograph, I remember it (although not all the time), and this means I can read more text (because so much is inferred). Additionally, I get a deeper understanding of the language, as I begin to understand the nuances like the revolver-succor relationship above.

To be clear, I've been using traditional Chinese for less than a week. I can hardly believe somebody would find this difficult to pick up if they already spoke Mandarin. In the past, I suspect that people had a more difficult time. I have a pinyin-english and an english-pinyin dictionary here, and I also have the intarweb for when that doesn't work. On top of that, I can quickly and reliably translate between the phonetics and the pictographs with software that comes with both MacOS and Windows. So while my Mandarin improves, it's actually improving slower than my grasp of traditional Chinese is. It's a crutch, using the software, but it's a very convenient crutch, and nobody's going to complain if I'm typing emails phonetically and sending out traditional/simplified. And since I speak, there's hardly any reason to complain that the "crutch" is preventing my learning.

Depraved indifference

Even /b/ (not even remotely close to work safe; if you don't know who they are, you don't want to) is complaining that Disney has "no soul" in regards to the upcoming release of Bridge to Terabithia. I read the book when I was pretty young (I suppose I was seven, thinking back to when and where I read it, but I read everything in the house at this age, so that could be wrong). It was used as a text in school, but I believe this was some years later (as I remember it being assigned in fourth? fifth? grade). Regardless, it's interesting to note people's reaction to it. I was of course, very fond of the book as a child. Some piece of me is still clutching onto it, even at thirty. I reviewed the wikipedia article, and indeed it looks like my memory of the book is accurate. The trailer doesn't seem to really jive with the book, but then the trailer is designed to get kids into the theater (instead of getting them to fucking read the book!), not to convey literary accuracy.

The reactions seem to be based (as in the case of 4chan) on something "sacred" being defiled in some way by either depraved commercial exploitation of the film, or perhaps by the more benign "totally screwed up the story." I initially was pretty revolted myself, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the seven year old in me is clutching onto a book that's not especially significant, and I suppose it even makes sense that Disney (whores that they are) would filminate it.

I came to this conclusion about remembering other books that were very dear to me when I was a kid. Perhaps the most relevant example is the Asimov books. Good grief, I read every single one of them. I thought they were masterful fiction, that this guy was one of the best authors evar. I was actually pretty hurt when we lost both Roddenberry and Asimov so close together (I was too young to understand who Sagan was at the time). But when I think back to the substance of those books, I inevitably wind up with a comparison of, say, Ring and the Foundation books, especially the latter ones. (or even At The Mountains of Madness and The Hardy Boys...!)

When I think back to how long I've actually been reading "new" books vs the Asimov crowd, it's hard to find the inflection point. I read so voraciously as a child, everything from my mother's textbooks from college to contemporary juvenile fiction, classic fiction, and I even eventually got around to Sagan and Gleick (I suppose reading Chaos and John Gribbin at eleven could be considered precocious). So while I think now that there was a point at which I shifted from juvenile books to !juvenile books ("adult" is not the right term), there probably isn't.

I digress. The point here is that the books I read today are vastly better than the Asimov books. Bridge to Terabithia is a very sweet (if hard to swallow) story. Yeah, Disney will fuck it up. They're good at that. But nobody's desecrating the Talmud here. You may remember that "I, Robot" was recently destroyed in film (and I dearly loved The Robots of Dawn). I was more than a little irritated by this, but it didn't feel like somebody was hurting my story (this is what has /b/ up in arms, they just don't understand it's because their mutant bodies actually contain feelings), because it's a very different kind of book. I, Robot was an interesting, engaging read. Bridge to Terabithia (at least for me) was something one read, by oneself, and had a personal experience with it. I mean, how could you not? At age seven? Or even eleven or fifteen? Discussing death? Or unrequited love in a way every adolescent boy understands? So, when somebody comes along and decides to make a movie out of it, to make money off it, and to most likely clobber the book's story, it kind of stings.

Consider a corollary: a childhood friend is found naked on the internet. Sure, we all see porn, we know it's there and what it is, but it's not our friend with that big glob of ... nevermind. So it seems that the problem is not in the making of the film, but in our not understanding — not wanting to understand — why we are sentimental to this book in particular. I could list a few more that people would feel this way about, but I'd come across as a sappy fool.

Or, maybe I've just said that one can defile children's fiction all they want because it's not important. This is probably wrong.

Numbers time!

In addition to posting a bunch of shit today (have a lot on my mind), I'd like to finish up with this.

What do 1,485,000 people in China, 405,000 people in the United States, 30,907 people in Taiwan, and 8,100 people in Taipei have in common?

Or, if you prefer, 8,100,000 people worldwide.

蚱蜢

Sometimes we forget.

中

I'm Alex. We knew each other a long time ago, I don't think you remember me. We grew up in the same place, and we know the same people. But somehow, it seems like we don't connect at all. Is it because I've changed? It feels to me like you just haven't existed all these years. I mean, look at us. We're obviously similar, and yet you and I have such totally different dreams, different concerns. The world scares both of us, but in such different ways. I just don't understand how it is that we have so much in common, and yet we just can't know each other. We're total strangers. I remember when we were in Del Mar, we went to the same school, and we knew the same people. Yet today, there's a gulf between us. I wish I understood, I wish we could somehow reach a common ground so that I can understand who it is you are, and maybe in that I'll understand myself a little better. We're really similar, you and I. Perhaps sometime we'll meet, and have a long discussion about it, and maybe we'll understand each other then. But you're there, and I'm here, and it's just too far. I don't even recognize you. I'm sorry.

sigh

I should really stop reading weblogs from Taiwan. If the job there doesn't pan out, I'll wind up with more Mandarin and kanji than I know what to do with. How often does one encounter written Chinese and a) need to respond in written Chinese or b) which doesn't have English (or at least pinyin) nearby?

Learning pinyin is a cop-out. Especially if I'm going to be doing Unix stuff with Chinese, I suspect there's no phrase for "grep." (prove me wrong, please) But I am going to have to be able to adequately convey, "Your home directory was taking up 335gb because you have downloaded a lot of porn. I have deleted the porn, and restricted your quota to 256mb. Call me if you have questions."

Of that, let's see what is probably going to be English. Well, 335 translates across. Since the giga- mega- tera- etc notation as a) in Roman characters and b) is based on Greek (γίγας for example), which has no influence on Chinese.

Drat, I just looked this up. There is a prefix/phrase for "giga-". That would be "ギガ". It looks like gigabyte is "ギガバイト". So that is, in fact, [ギガ] (giga) concatenated to [バイト] (byte). Entirely understandable, I suppose. At any rate, all the mentions of ギガバイト actually have "GB" in the same text. It's interesting to note something like this. So here we have:

全國首賣，鏡面型數位相簿

I know the leftmost character. That's "money." Although it alternatively can mean fancy, expensive, "gold" (element, not color), and similar. The idea is that there's context to the first phrase, 全國首賣. Let's figure this out. So the second character refers to geography of China. It's sometimes just simplified to 中国, which makes sense if you look at it. The first character there is "China", although it can be descriptive rather than a noun. So you might have noticed that the character, 國, looks a lot like 汉, which when combined as so: 汉朝, again refers to a location, epoch (in this case, Han dynasty, but other sources have it Qin.) it also refers to the location thereof. So the first character, 汉 is stuffed inside 國, with another character I don't know.

Where are we? We're on the second character. I think we've determined that the first two mean "made in China" or "built in China", or even "for sale in China." That's not really important. Let's continue. So the next two characters I can't seem to make out the radicals for. But we have 賣, which seems to mean sale, or sold, but I can't find the radical in it, and it's always used in conjunction with other characters. The 首 is a tricky one. I am going to have to pass on this. So we have something like "selling chinese good". 首 can mean "radical" (as in character, not as in tubular), but it also seems to mean short (as in a period of time). So maybe it's something like "Sale on this nice Chinese ...".

Actually, I'm going to stop right here. I've been told that this is impossible. That white people — myself in particular, mind you — are only good for teaching English in China. Maybe I should stop before I change somebody's expectations about what a fucking gwailo is capable of.

Also, this.

臺北市新移民會館

So I am going through the requirements for citizenship in taiwan. It's interesting to note that, while I married a chinaman, I must live there for three contiguous years, more than 183 days per year. Now, that's interesting, in that I'll have to have a work visa for the first three years (and a criminal background check, and a financial check, and an education check, and various fees amounting to about $200 per year). But what I found even more interesting is the part about having children.

So in the case that one parent is a foreign national (including a naturalized alien) and the other a citizen (although "citizen" is ambiguous, because there are requirements for having been on the ground for a certain amount of time), and they have a child, the child may apply for citizenship. What really tweaks me is this beauty:

(二) When applying for birth registration or initial household registration, the naming must be made in accordance with the fashion that Taiwan natives are accustomed to.

So, given my last name is anglophone -- Avriette -- should I have children, I will have to give them Chinese names. That's really interesting.

The other thing I noticed that's kind of weird is the distinction between Taiwan and ROC citizenship. To become a citizen of Taiwan, I can apply, go through the requisite visa/etc process, and get a green card. However, to get citizenship on the mainland, I'd need to renounce my American citizenship. Wow. Considering that ROC is fiercely assertive about Taiwan being a provice/property/asset of theirs, you'd think that citizenship (for foreign nationals, it's not clear how it works for Taiwanese nationals) would be the same for both. Single sign on as it were.

Not likely I'll be getting mainland citizenship, that'd make keeping my clearance hard. It's really an interesting idea, though, to have a clearance from two (but allied) governments.

on access and hostilities

Sometimes, I find myself cut off from the rest of the world. During these times, I may have to resort to using somebody else's transit network. Occasionally this is more than just an ISP or two, such as an ad-hoc network that connects to an ISP that subsequently connects me to another ISP, and then to the innernets. An example of this would be a campus network, or that in a coffee shop.

It deeply saddens me, but sometimes people on these networks, for whatever reason, feel the need to exclude, filter, throttle, or otherwise malign packets coming from my machine(s), be they over copper, glass, or wireless. I can't imagine what they think is going through my head. "Uh oh, the innernets are broken, maybe it's time to restart." or "Man, this wireless card is sure giving me trouble!"

To those who would do such things, I didn't get the message. Passive aggression is very bad at conveying explicit data. And also, please remember that I am not your average user, with your average understanding of the way networks work. In fact, I'm not even just a skilled user. I am a highly skilled, trained, and proficient network administrator, systems administrator, and security officer. This means that I don't have any false conceptions of "my hardware isn't working," or "maybe today the innernets are down," or that devices and software are, just temporarily, beyond my understanding and control.

No, when I come across this sort of behavior, I am not likely to walk away shaking my head, taking my laptop and going home because you've so stealthily and cleverly done whatever it is you hoped to achieve. Rather, I am inclined to swap a good defense for a good offense. Where I cannot circumvent, I will aim to commandeer. Where a firewall exists, I will tunnel ports, reshape traffic, or indeed commandeer said firewall. The only network that is certain to exclude me from it is a network that is airgapped. Should that happen, I am about as equally pleased that I have excluded you from your network, as I would have normally been, having retained use of it.

There's no need to be a martyr. Not everyone out there is a drone. Sometimes, it's just better sense to let the red team have the run of things, while reducing the damage wrought by hostile residents of your network.

War. The packets will burn. The networks will run with the anguished cries of defeated countermeasures and the cancerous arteries that are your commandeered or destroyed applications and devices.

Ask yourself whether your agenda is worth loss of data or loss of access.

Pleased

Very, very pleased. I have run into a problem I did not expect. This is particularly frustrating for me, but not entirely surprising. I have been writing (up until yesterday afternoon) between eight and twelve hours a day. I stop when I reach a "saturation point," when writing is simply putting words on paper, rather than crafting the rest of the story. At that point, I could actually write more of the story, but it's just throwing a pale framework on what I want to see happen, which I'll have to go back on and rewrite substantially anyways. So, do I leave a placeholder there? No, because the drek that comes out of me at that point isn't very inspiring at all when I go back to flesh it out and write what I really wanted.

And so, because I've been writing a lot of stuff at a stretch (I've talked about this in the past), I have to go back and make sure things jibe between the largish sections ("to meet up in the middle" per Charlie). As I do this, I wind up reading a hundred or more pages of my own writing, as I have to read the previous bit and the latter bit, going through and making sure everything fits. This isn't to say that it's details like a fifteen in the former part winds up a twenty-five in the latter; that stuff I am marking for later (using word's highlighting feature, I have a legend of several colors such as "check for accuracy", "this is broken, come back to it later", and so on). Really, it's more a process of making sure the mood and the verbiage fits. One can't have a character despondent in ch3 and suddenly elated (without good reason) in ch5. This, I think, is a byproduct of writing a whole pile at once and having an enormous rewrite well after I'd written a lot (which included going through and revising faces, places, dialogue, and particulars of items), rather than some typical process, although time will tell.

Anyhow, the solution I've found to having my own crap pouring out my ears is to sit back and read somebody else's work. At first, I thought, well maybe I'll read Solzhenitsyn or Kafka, somebody really substantially different than what I'm writing. But, upon doing that, I realized they were so completely different and separate concepts/data/voices that they seemed to occupy different places in my head. I could still be mulling over my own book while reading Ivan Denisovitch. So, I've had to recruit a few authors that are a little closer to the mark.

In so doing, I've actually been thwacked upside the head by a ... distillation filter, whereby I can now clearly associate certain concepts where none was before; picking out the gestalt from a vast aggregate of heterogeneous data. It was forceful enough that I've written a bunch of it down (it surprised me substantially), and may make an essay of it. I think it's fair to say that it's something that hasn't been said that needs to be said, as it will clarify some of the problems we're having in fiction (and I say this as a reader only) today. Gibson, for example, hinted at the problem in Burning Chrome, and others have had the same issue with contemporary fiction such as that of Mieville's. Ask yourself, "What do Chrichton and Lovecraft have in common?" I'll leave it at that.

五笔字型输入法

Google just gave me a christmas present.

more laptoppery

The aforementioned behemoth.

I also sat down and used my sister's 13" black macbook. Sandy wants one of these. The first thing that comes to mind is the keyboard is just a touch too big. The keys are spaced out, rather than abutting one another as they do on the ibook. The other thing I noticed is that the keys are damn near flat. Mary of course says "well, they're curved a little..." Yes, they're curved. Imperceptibly, but if you get out a caliper or electron microscope, you can see they are. There are big, generous dents in the iBook keys, and I think that keeps my fingers from slipping off when I hit some of the more rapid spurts of activity.

So, having been absolutely insane with writing this week, I did what I had been doing. I sat down, configured Word to view two pages, side by side, and begin to write a story about albino ravens. I may post that later if she hasn't thrown it out. About a thousand words (maybe 2.5 pages?) later, I took stock of what I'd done.

First, I'd been typing slower. This is probably because I'm not used to the new keyboard. The flat keys is very disconcerting for me. The keys are also farther apart, and that bothers me. I also notice that while the screen is wider, it is shorter, top to bottom. I first thought this would be an issue, as I couldn't get the pages to fit top to bottom, but it turns out I can only get 77% zoom on the iBook, and I get to 85% on the macbook (this is because of the resolution).

It also creaks when I move it around. Mary says it doesn't do this for her, and she demonstrated. However, when I pick it up (I'm pretty rough with laptops -- I carry them by the screen, hold them by a corner, etc), it creaks. Maybe it's scared, whatever. The iBook seems to be better put together (and it felt cheap when I moved to it from the powerbook).

The screen is nice. I was writing with my back to a window, and flouro lights above me. That's typically a pretty bad place to be. But because of the glaze on the screen, I didn't have anything obstructing my vision. It's also pretty sharp. The ibook has a tendency to fuzz when I'm viewing fonts that are, say, 10.8 pixels tall, and full side-by-side pages. I can read them, because my eyes are (for now) pretty good. They were easier to read on the macbook (this could also be due to a better video card, but I dunno).

It's a tiny tiny bit lighter than the ibook. The case doesn't feel as rugged. Now, it's polycarbonate, and my polycarbonate glasses are supposed to be able to take a bullet. So it's probably pretty sturdy stuff. However, as it's so glossy, it's got to be very easy to scuff it up. The ibook skin is actually a little porous. As an exercise, get a really dark beer (like the smoked porter from Stone or the chocolate stout or coffee stout from Rogue, or the dogfish head 'very dark beer'). Have a pint of it. It's really good, right, so you're salivating, and a little dribbles down the side. Have another pint. This time, you're really excited, so you spill a little down the side, again. Or it overflows. Whatever. Now, take said pintglass and rest it on the top of your case (the thing the lcd is attached to). Let it sit there for a while. Get another pint, maybe. The ibook is a big coaster. Notice, the beer actually soaks into the case. You can keep stains on it for quite a while. It turns out that the case is slightly porous. It's also slightly soft. While it feels like "plastic," it's also pretty pliable. This means you have to gouge the fucker with a key to scratch it. You could scratch the macbook by putting it on a flat surface, dropping a little salt on it, and then moving the macbook around on top of the salt. Kinda sucks.

As for speed, well, it's fast, but I have no idea how "fast" it is. I still maintain that nobody really needs a faster computer anymore. Almost none of what any of us do actually requires dual cores, two gigahertz processors, etc. The ibook is a 1.07 ghz g4, the macbook is a 2.0ghz core duo (not c2d). i've got 1.25gb and she's got 1gb. They are functionally identical. They paged up and down in Word just the same, got to disk things just the same, the browser worked the same, etc. So speed just isn't an issue for me.

Lastly, you may say "hey, i'm really demanding on a laptop." You're not. Well, most of you. I have developed calluses on my fingertips in the last four days. I feel like I'm typing through latex.

IM IN UR BOOK

FUCKING UR PROTAGONIST

four

What was I thinking? I look back on things I wrote even three months ago, and I wonder how I let small pieces get out for review. How I read that stuff, and even remotely considered that anyone other than me would actually read it. So much of it is just drivel.

The process is thus. I came up with an outline. And the outline included things like dialogue, places, themes, specific settings, and the like. So the outline became fleshed out into the basic structure of what I wanted. When I would have more thoughts about what I wanted to say, or more specifically, how I would say it, I would go to the outline at that specific point, and write it in. So I had pieces of the beginning pretty well fleshed out, some in the middle, and a tiny bit at the end.

But as I go through -- I've been doing a lot of rewriting, I mentioned -- I am starting from the first, and working through to the last. As I go through the book, working my way to the end, I occasionally find pieces of what I wrote that haven't been rewritten or revised in some way. I'm horrified. I have become a lot better writer since I started, but it seems so unlikely that the majority of it has occurred in the last six weeks. That doesn't really bode well for this actually being worth reading.

Fret.

three

Forty thousand words since Friday. I started the rewrite eighty-two hours ago. I've been able to keep a scene or two here and there, but mostly I have to rewrite everything, using the previous text as a guideline (I saved the earlier drafts at each fork so I can look at them later). Where before cardboard figures lobbed ideas at eachother across shoebox dioramas, now people speak to eachother. The grass moves with the wind. Sweat glistens on foreheads and the ocean cries in its sleep.

If I sound melodramatic, it's probably because I am. I can't even describe what the process has done for me. Years just grinding away at this story. I met every single one of the characters in this book. I've been to every site in it. I've sat in their seats, eaten at their restaurants, and had drinks with them after work.

A woman I know told me a long time ago that she didn't like to read too many books by any one author, because she got too acquainted with what was going on in their heads. Every author writes themselves into their book, whether they intend to or not. There's no point in naming names. I, for one, refused to let myself do that. I went to incredible lengths to avoid it. And yet, there they are, using my words in ways I never intended. Try it yourself. Pick up a book, written by somebody you know, and spend a day or two with one of the characters. You'll know where everything came from if you know them well enough.

I find the characters growing, changing, learning, and every once in a while something I have wanted to say for years just blurts out of their mouth before I even realize it. That's what this process has been for me. It's a sort of catharsis: reaching into a blackbody, finding a string, and pulling on it. You keep pulling, and it just keeps streaming out of the hole.

Tonight (an all nighter, I couldn't sleep, and there are exigent circumstances), I picked up where I had left off this afternoon. I had spent all day setting the scene for three pivotal characters to meet and really interact with the others, not just inhabit the same room. Things I had no idea would happen, did. And people who were irredeemable found redemption in the strangest places. The substance of it, and who did what, is not especially important.

What's really important here is the part of me that was writing found itself detached from the part of me that was actually creating the scene. I had been convinced I knew how the book would play out back in January/February in the month from hell in Seattle. I wrote an outline. I even wrote out some of the things they were going to say, because those were the things I wanted to say, and the characters were puppets, tools to bring a message out of a story that would otherwise just be a parable -- not a fable. I wasn't even really thinking about what they were saying as I was writing it down. The only way I can really describe it is as though processes were forked off and running in the background as I raced madly around the foreground taking notes. What they said happened without much input from whatever it was taking notes. Instead, when somebody speaks with conviction, or fear, or even love, their faces were important. The way they sat or stood in a room. Their shoulders and eyelids. Hair and skin. Lips, pursed, or mouth agape. A desk was not just a piece of wood carelessly thrown into a set, it was between one character and another, with everything that entails.

To understand this, allow yourself to be cast for a second. Picture yourself sitting at a desk. Another character, with whom you have some emotional history, bursts into the room, face red, and ready to scream at you. You don't know he's going to scream at you because you're not reading the book, you're looking at him. You can see his pupils and his respiration. He's sweating, and his hands are clenched into tight fists. His right foot is fore of his left foot, and he's slightly crouched as though he wants to rip the desk right in half and tell you what was so urgent, so necessary, that he came here and must tell you now.

That may be easy enough to picture, I think we've all been there at one time or another, perhaps even on both sides of that scene. The hard part is what happens when you ask yourself what the desk is doing. Remove it. What happens then? You're sitting in a chair and of a sudden, he's right in front of you, fists clenched, and ready to jump at you -- and there's nothing to stop him from doing it.

So the desk isn't just furniture. You're behind the desk. It separates the room, it separates your perspective and his. When he starts yelling at you, you might grab hold of it to keep the room from swimming. You might push your chair back a little, cross your arms, and (carefully) look at him, ascertaining what kind of threat he poses, if any.

It seems intuitive, and even Jung (font of knowledge that he is...) talked about this a little bit (you walk into a room and sit in a chair. who is the chair, who are you, and how do you and the chair feel about your roles?). But we mostly don't think of our environment as a major factor in how we feel, what we say, what we think, et cetera.

I included the desk in the story tonight. Last night, I painted a picture: a huge cloud, swirling ominously over Seattle. Think Raiders of the Lost Ark. I flew the cast in, and let them just talk to eachother as the world melted around them and Nazis tied them to a post.

Don't look!

And there you have it. Today, I had an ongoing and emotionally very draining conversation with myself, while all the while taking notes so I would remember what I/we had told me/us.

I don't see a lot written about how a person feels when they write a book. And my taste tends towards the interesting, the carefully crafted work. So undoubtedly people pour themselves into a book for $interval, and all we hear about it is how many words they put down, or what piece of research they were irritated with, or even how they're sick and couldn't write today. But we never hear, "that guy was a son of a bitch until I sat him down with $woman and they talked openly, trying to find an understanding. I had no idea both of them were such decent people, regardless of the Nazis, angry God, and so on." I really doubt I'm alone.

A little piece of me is screeching, "holy shit, if you print this and people read it, they'll know what's going on in your head! flee! terror!" But I think the important thing is that writing it puts a face on it, and lots of thinking is required. Whether it takes you fifty pages or three thousand (Hi, Peter), nobody wants to just leave it hanging without getting resolution from whatever crawled up their ass and compelled them to write a book about it in the first place. So, while I spent a year on this book, grew a little, learned a whole lot more, and put down some very honest things, people will read it in a few days and think they've learned something about the author. The person who wrote the book they read, however, is a different person. Nobody sits down to write The Wasp Factory to come out the other end of it stuffing heads onto stakes. You're holding the proof of it.

There will be a quiz tomorrow.

(if you're still reading and thinking, whoa, alex is once again the kook i remember from high school/xyz job/that one time we got drunk/etc, take heart. there's levity. i'm very pleased with some of the bits scattered throughout to lighten the mood a little. as the aforementioned woman also said to me, "even shakespeare had clowns.")

two

As I've forged ahead today, I've mostly been ignoring the page/word count. I find it easier to write when I have two pages side-by-side on the screen, and on the 12" iBook, that's only possible by zooming to 75%, and expanding the window to fill the entire screen, minus the menu bar. This had a significant advantage: I am no longer distracted by terminals blinking at me, nor the silly animations Word puts at the bottom of the window, and I don't worry about how much I've written or how much is 'left to go.'

I stopped a moment ago, though, to have a look, to see what I'd done here in San Diego. It's interesting.

So, I've been editing this book between the main trunk and this fork, since 10 July of this year. In that time, my editing has averaged about twenty-six minutes per each checkpoint (save). I've been averaging about 225 words per each save across the period I've been working on this document. I am mildly surprised to see that I'm typing about ten words per minute. The average word length, incidentally, is 4.8 characters.

What this means upon averaging everything out is that I've been typing 50 characters a minute -- almost one a second! -- for almost exactly a six months, about a half hour a day.

I'm intrigued by this, and looking forward to seeing the finished product and finding out whether that holds true to the end.

one

I don't really know how to put this into words. A family-related situation has me sequestered in Escondido, California. I'll be here almost through the end of the year.

When I got on the plane at Dulles on Friday, my book, Limits, was smoldering wreckage. I realized pieces I had left in the book were little more than a skeletal shadow of what I felt and wanted to say. In fact, they weren't even written especially well. I had painted myself into a corner in many senses. By rigidly sticking to a time line, dictated to the reader as the scenes cut back and forth from one place to another, I forced myself to spend enormous amounts of time verifying. Similarly, by rigidly sticking to the near-term, and documenting it, I forced myself to remain in the near-term, a tight focus without much perspective. Anyone who has taken macro photography will understand that macro photos are serene, sometimes surreal, and often absolutely magnificent in their composition and structure. Eyes on insects suddenly become pools of color rather than dots on some crawly thing. And it's stunning.

So the viewer gets an incredibly intimate view of a very tiny space. But consider a Monet. A vast stippled landscape of pastels and whorls the viewer can get lost in. The eye leads them along lines that converge and diverge, displaying arcs or even just meandering off into the distance. A wide shot, properly displayed, invites the viewer to insert themselves into the scene.

And so it is with reading fiction. Charlie will probably tell me I'm a tool for referring to his work as frequently I do, but he just happens to be the guy on the top of my Stack Of Books. I'd been experimenting with writing in the first person, and found it to be tedious. It just so happened that $book[0] was Glasshouse. Glasshouse is more or less narrated in the first person. When I started reading it, I thought it fortuitous that I had picked up a first-person book while writing a first-person book.

Yet as I read on, I was kind of irritated by the incredible detail he goes into, describing things such as the mechanism of attaching a second set of arms to a person. Going into where the vertebrae had gotten in the way, what had been done about it, using metaphor and implicit references. I felt a mix of confusion and even mild irritation. Why go into the ultra minute detail? What does it accomplish?

Fortunately, I left Glasshouse at home before I boarded the plane (this was an accident, but a lucky one). As I went back into the work I was doing in the February through May period (Days of Lance, if you prefer), I began fleshing out the twigs I'd lain out along the path I had originally seen. Details began to come to me, as I tried to better understand the situation. Then, a torrent. I know you're snickering as you read this, but I felt the grass, the breeze and sun in some abstract way as I put the feelings -- rather than the cop-out placeholders I had been using.

I thought initially that I'd be able to provide a before-and-after sample. This proved impossible. As I compare the original document to the fork, there is very little in common, save some dialogue.

Sure, it's dramatic and maybe even a little over the top. But not for the sake of hurling additional adjectives into the fracas. It's a dramatic moment, and an important point.

What I'm really getting at here is that I find I really love doing this. Getting out of my apartment, out of Virginia, away from my job, and just spending hours a day walking through my book has done enormous good for both the book and my overall outlook and demeanor. Really love it.

I ripped out a pile of garbage that amounted to maybe 25,000 words, and rewrote the pieces I elected to keep, borrowing when the transition wouldn't harm the forked document (not ready to call it a 'manuscript' yet...). I've since written another ten or fifteen thousand words, in the last three days. It's really more than I've ever written in any kind of sustained way.

It's December 17. I've got fourteen days. I didn't think I'd finish, and now I'm starting to see a chance that I could. A knot in my stomach is forming, knowing that finishing the book means nothing. I'll have to go back to Unix, Perl, the government, and all the mundane day-to-day stuff that's given me such a complex the last ten years. I don't know how I'll ever go back. If I manage to get paid for the book, I think I'd like to tap the same well again. Spend a while locked in a room, just writing. Maybe in Kihei or Hilo. Maybe even Hana or Peahi (god but that fish joint is magnificent). I've also spent the last few days mostly internet-free. The minutiae of making all the little details click into place distracts from actually getting any work done. There will be a time for editing. There are galleys, copyeditors, editor-editors, and then the layout people. Write now. To borrow a line from Kevin Smith, "finish your fucking manuscript!" Later on I can make it perfect. But if it never gets written, nobody will ever read it, and there's no point in making all the facts click.



Why didn't I start this ten years ago?

in other news

As I expunge data from my powerbook as it is being sold on ebay, I am positively stunned at how large and heavy this behemoth is. I've been using the 12" iBook for about a year, and it suits me just fine. To think I wondered to myself if I could stomach that 19" behemoth Alienware is selling. Hayzooooos!

Iran and the Ho.

Oliver Kamm has rather intelligently put to words what I've been getting indigestion over for the last few days.

What is wrong with the Iranian conference is thus not that it's offensive, but that it's a fraudulent gathering designed to generate hatred through lies. It's an offence not against our feelings but against truth and against history. The problem with the puppet-President of Iran is not only (or at all) that he is ill-mannered: it is that he's a bigot, a racist and a messianic crank. The proper task for Western diplomacy is to say so.

I am stunned by the amount of coverage it's been getting. Especially on NPR, which I normally find to be of better quality than the rest of the news apparatus. Why has anyone sent reporters to cover this? Why has anyone mentioned David Duke at all? Why mention (gasp!) that there are rabbis there from Israel?

Kamm has it right. It's just entirely pathetic. It's not just distasteful, it's not noteworthy, and it's not even interesting. It's a vile pack of lies and a congregation of vermin gathered to roll around in their own filth. To "report" upon it, to discuss the "motivations" of the event, to describe it as anything other than state-funded, state-sanctioned fraud is to give non-zero credence to the disgusting hatred spewing from these people.

If I were, instead of this, to discuss the feasibility of Curtis LeMay's limited (and unlimited) nuclear war, I am certain people would not be forwarding it around to people saying "Hey, that Alex guy thinks that nuclear war is an effective form of warfare." Such a proposition is lunacy. It's factually inaccurate. It's strategically untenable. The only predictable outcome of any form of nuclear war is total war, and the extermination of much of the life on the planet. Nobody would welcome this as an interesting viewpoint, or worthy of discussion. All one can do when faced with this sort of thing is to turn away in disgust. To recognize it, discuss it, mention it at all, is to give credence where none is due. (yes, I realize the irony herein)

It's not a dissenting opinion, or a "differing viewpoint," it's simply wrong.

For the win

Perhaps I should treat myself to a couple cisco certifications while in Taiwan.

galaxies far, far away

There was a time, once, when I was afraid of IVs and hospitals, or at the very least mildly uncomfortable about them. It's a depressing commentary on my recent time in this particular neck of the woods that I am so complacent and bored with the entire process so as to concern my esteemed caretakers in the medical community.

Make mine a nuclear medicine, hold the catheter, please.

The New York Times continues to excel

And Mr. Prodi does have an unusual tie to the Moro kidnapping. In 1978, he and other professors at the University of Bologna held a séance in which a Ouija board spelled the word “Gradoli,” which turned out to be the street name in Rome of a Red Brigades safe house.

If only it were a joke.

levity

It's true, muslims have a sense of humor.