for yesterday, really, since it's already tomorrow.
I've got 450 more words here, so I'm 280 behind...
1/29/2011 11:51 PM
[Notes: That last post was a stab at a vague idea I’ve had for many years now: to re-tell a Tolkien-clone story where the Wizard is a big fake. Actually a young girl (or boy) who pretends to be an old man on the theory that people will respect them more. I’m not sure I want to start with the fakery known to the reader. Better, perhaps, to start from the POV of the ordinary farm-boy hero. The slightly crazy ugly kid tries to tell him about the big danger and gets brushed off. Then the (fake) Wizard shows up. This requires the wizard to be able to fake wizardry. Maybe they really can do it.
[There must be a big scene where the Wizard is revealed as a fake, maybe ¾ of the way through. The rest of the ‘fellowship’ mostly abandons the Wizard and the Quest.
[The Wizard will discover true power of some kind—maybe the power of physics and engineering? And have another big scene where he/she defeats, maybe, the Big Bad Guy’s chief lieutenant.
[More notes:
[I’m working on several different stories at the moment: The Mad Scientists in Spaaace, the two boys lost in the weed patch that’s a jungle, and fragments of some other stories.
[So what are some scenes I want for the space story?
[The scientists try to leave the stowaway girl with their friend the brothel manager.
[The scientists meet their old mentor, and discover there’s a single intent of some kind behind the seemingly random events they’ve experienced.
[The octopuses in the moat explore the main castle, looking for fish, and discover the scientist’s troubles.
[The scientists must take the girl to the galactic core with them, because the glowing gadget she is carrying around, and that she can’t get rid of, is of some crucial importance to the plot.
[Scenes for the jungle story:
[The jungle-king’s mate (the jungle queen) is summoned by the monkey to find one or the other of the boys. She’s just as awesome, if not more so, as the jungle king.
[The boys are chased by a cannibal village.
[the hunters in the elephants graveyard are chased by angry natives? Rescued by the jungle king?
[A correlation between the jungle and the weed patch must be present.
[this will require a more precise explanation of the layout of the weed patch: a streamlet trickling through the patch corresponds to a river, a puddle is a lake, an anthill is a lost city… the elephant graveyard is a small pile of animal skeletons.]
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Resurrection of the Blog
Here I am, trying to write 360 words per day until Oct 31, which will give me 100K words, the moral authority to blow off NaNoWriMo.
What'll happen?
Cassie Jonsdotter wakes up with a gasp. It's the Dream again, the bad one. And in a short time--years? months? she doesn't know--It'll be more than a dream. But how can she convince anyone? Crazy Cassie, skinny, flat-chested, pimply, going gray already at less than twenty (she was pretty sure), with the cross-eye. Who'd believe her? Nobody. But if nobody does anything...
She has to try, at least.
She kicks off the mess of ratty furs and rattier blankets that serves her as a bed, jumps to her feet and throws the pile into a corner. Can't have a regulation bed. Have to play the part of the crazy witch girl, after all. She crosses the cold wood floor of the hut on bare feet to the wood stove and cracks open the stove door to peep inside. The carefully banked coals still radiate heat and a few minutes of work stirs the fire to roaring life again. She's almost out of wood, have to see if she can talk Fred Davidson into chopping her some more. She mentally runs through her collection of mostly useless charms, wondering if Davidson would want one to ward off skunks... Maybe.
Maybe she can talk Davidson into doing something about the Dream.
"Fred," she'll say, "I have something Very Important to tell you," only it'll come out with a stammer and a mumble, or else a shriek. "You have to stop the Dream."
"What Dream? What are you talking about?"
But as usual by the time she's boiled a pan of oatmeal on the stove for breakfast, the exact details of the Dream are gone from her mind.
What can she tell him? "A bad Dream I can't remember?"
Why, she wonders in frustration, *can't* she remember? If the Dream is that important, and she knows it is, why does it *fade*? If the Higher Power, whoever, whatever, it is, wants her to *Do* *Something*, why does it make it so difficult to do it?
Whoever or Whatever is maybe not the Highest Power, she supposes.
What'll happen?
Cassie Jonsdotter wakes up with a gasp. It's the Dream again, the bad one. And in a short time--years? months? she doesn't know--It'll be more than a dream. But how can she convince anyone? Crazy Cassie, skinny, flat-chested, pimply, going gray already at less than twenty (she was pretty sure), with the cross-eye. Who'd believe her? Nobody. But if nobody does anything...
She has to try, at least.
She kicks off the mess of ratty furs and rattier blankets that serves her as a bed, jumps to her feet and throws the pile into a corner. Can't have a regulation bed. Have to play the part of the crazy witch girl, after all. She crosses the cold wood floor of the hut on bare feet to the wood stove and cracks open the stove door to peep inside. The carefully banked coals still radiate heat and a few minutes of work stirs the fire to roaring life again. She's almost out of wood, have to see if she can talk Fred Davidson into chopping her some more. She mentally runs through her collection of mostly useless charms, wondering if Davidson would want one to ward off skunks... Maybe.
Maybe she can talk Davidson into doing something about the Dream.
"Fred," she'll say, "I have something Very Important to tell you," only it'll come out with a stammer and a mumble, or else a shriek. "You have to stop the Dream."
"What Dream? What are you talking about?"
But as usual by the time she's boiled a pan of oatmeal on the stove for breakfast, the exact details of the Dream are gone from her mind.
What can she tell him? "A bad Dream I can't remember?"
Why, she wonders in frustration, *can't* she remember? If the Dream is that important, and she knows it is, why does it *fade*? If the Higher Power, whoever, whatever, it is, wants her to *Do* *Something*, why does it make it so difficult to do it?
Whoever or Whatever is maybe not the Highest Power, she supposes.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
L'Hopital's rule
I was talking to one of my not-girlfriends the other day, so called because she's a girl and a friend but not a girlfriend, and she was asking me why people are always asking her “why are you still single”. You know, because she’s smart and funny and cute and interesting and has a good job and so on and so forth. After I suppressed my first reaction of immediately offering marriage, which I knew she would decline but that’s another story, I got to thinking about the issue, and I realized I have just the opposite problem.
Namely, nobody ever asks me why *I’m* still single, which presumably means I’m either dimwitted, humorless, fat, boring or unemployed. But I think I have a solution, which I got part from an old Monty Python episode (which is a bit redundant, isn’t it, since there aren’t any new Monty Python episodes) about a scheme to sell boring people bits of the lives of interesting people, which reminds me of the story of L’Hopital’s rule, something you learn about in calculus, and it doesn’t really matter what the rule is, the point is, L’Hopital’s rule wasn’t actually invented by L’Hopital, but by Johann Bernoulli, who (are you ready for this?) sold the rights to the discovery to L’Hopital. So you see the Monty Python skit had more truth to it that you might suspect.
But L’Hopital was a French nobleman who could afford to buy stuff and I’m not (unless maybe I have a long lost great uncle in France I’ve never heard about, which is not completely impossible) so I had to come up with a different idea, which I think will be the next eBay. I’ll set up an on-line computer system to trade the parts of my life I’ve got too much of, like brains, to someone else for something they’ve got too much of, like money or girlfriends, cause I’m sure that lots of people think they could do with a little less money or fewer friends...
Well, I still have to get some of the bugs worked out of the idea, but it’s viable, Monty Python and L’Hopital prove that.
I just now thought of a much easier way to solve the problem. I’ll just get a t-shirt made that says, “ask me why I’m still single”, and that’ll solve that problem, although I don’t know if people will really want to hold still while I explain about how I don’t have any long-long great uncles who are French nobles, let alone about L’Hopital’s rule, because people’s eyes tend to glaze over the minute they hear the word calculus, or even math. So I’ll have to find a similar story about some other topic, like maybe statistics, or economics.
Alternatively, I can get my not-girlfriend a t-shirt that says, “don’t ask me why I’m still single”. I guess I might have to get her several in case she wants to change clothes every now and then, and that’ll solve her problem.
I’m just a natural problem solver, I guess. Maybe I can go into business, telling people how to solve these problems like how to get rid of excess money.
Or t-shirt design, I have several ideas for t-shirts, and I hear there’s incredible profits to be made in t-shirt sales. Or was it that there are incredibly small profits? These distinctions are important: as Mark Twain observed, you don’t want to confuse the lightning with the lightning bug, and what a story Twain would have made of the case of L’Hopital’s rule. He had something of a sad life, although I don’t think he had people asking him why are you still single, or for that matter, people not-asking him the same thing, which just goes to show that you really can find a silver lining in most clouds, although if it’s a thunderstorm the lining might just make things even worse, since silver conducts electricity. On the other hand, maybe it will ground out the lightning, and there’s an application: figure out where the silver lining is in the cloud and reduce your risk of getting struck by lightning, but possibly increasing the risk of being swarmed by lightning bugs, depending on how they react to electricity, which I think would pretty thoroughly explain the issue of still being single. I’ll have to run that one by my not-girlfriend, see what she thinks.
Namely, nobody ever asks me why *I’m* still single, which presumably means I’m either dimwitted, humorless, fat, boring or unemployed. But I think I have a solution, which I got part from an old Monty Python episode (which is a bit redundant, isn’t it, since there aren’t any new Monty Python episodes) about a scheme to sell boring people bits of the lives of interesting people, which reminds me of the story of L’Hopital’s rule, something you learn about in calculus, and it doesn’t really matter what the rule is, the point is, L’Hopital’s rule wasn’t actually invented by L’Hopital, but by Johann Bernoulli, who (are you ready for this?) sold the rights to the discovery to L’Hopital. So you see the Monty Python skit had more truth to it that you might suspect.
But L’Hopital was a French nobleman who could afford to buy stuff and I’m not (unless maybe I have a long lost great uncle in France I’ve never heard about, which is not completely impossible) so I had to come up with a different idea, which I think will be the next eBay. I’ll set up an on-line computer system to trade the parts of my life I’ve got too much of, like brains, to someone else for something they’ve got too much of, like money or girlfriends, cause I’m sure that lots of people think they could do with a little less money or fewer friends...
Well, I still have to get some of the bugs worked out of the idea, but it’s viable, Monty Python and L’Hopital prove that.
I just now thought of a much easier way to solve the problem. I’ll just get a t-shirt made that says, “ask me why I’m still single”, and that’ll solve that problem, although I don’t know if people will really want to hold still while I explain about how I don’t have any long-long great uncles who are French nobles, let alone about L’Hopital’s rule, because people’s eyes tend to glaze over the minute they hear the word calculus, or even math. So I’ll have to find a similar story about some other topic, like maybe statistics, or economics.
Alternatively, I can get my not-girlfriend a t-shirt that says, “don’t ask me why I’m still single”. I guess I might have to get her several in case she wants to change clothes every now and then, and that’ll solve her problem.
I’m just a natural problem solver, I guess. Maybe I can go into business, telling people how to solve these problems like how to get rid of excess money.
Or t-shirt design, I have several ideas for t-shirts, and I hear there’s incredible profits to be made in t-shirt sales. Or was it that there are incredibly small profits? These distinctions are important: as Mark Twain observed, you don’t want to confuse the lightning with the lightning bug, and what a story Twain would have made of the case of L’Hopital’s rule. He had something of a sad life, although I don’t think he had people asking him why are you still single, or for that matter, people not-asking him the same thing, which just goes to show that you really can find a silver lining in most clouds, although if it’s a thunderstorm the lining might just make things even worse, since silver conducts electricity. On the other hand, maybe it will ground out the lightning, and there’s an application: figure out where the silver lining is in the cloud and reduce your risk of getting struck by lightning, but possibly increasing the risk of being swarmed by lightning bugs, depending on how they react to electricity, which I think would pretty thoroughly explain the issue of still being single. I’ll have to run that one by my not-girlfriend, see what she thinks.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Well, I haven't got anything better to do at the moment than blog...
Blog blog blog. Blog Bloggerson of Blogistan. I feel like Hobbes (of Calvin and Hobbes) saying 'smock smock smock' until Calvin was moved to scream 'what in the world is wrong with you?' Blog.
The Blog. The Return of the Blog. It can only be destroyed by, by, I don't know. Mint-flavored toothpicks. Which reminds me of one of my other pet peeves, about movies. Typically the movie sets up some problem, heroes try some solution, which almost works. Most people at that point would say, well, that almost worked, let's try again but with more explosives. But movies characters almost never do this. Which no doubt has more to do with narrative structure than common sense, and there are lots of movie traditions like that which don't bother me at all so I guess I don't have to complain.
I don't think I have any real point here, I just wanted to natter. I can't brag about writing 555 words a day since I haven't in 3 days and I'm not going to tonight either because as usually happens in NaNoWriMo I'm getting bored with my own story so maybe I should switch stories.
Or something.
Blogging, not to be confused with logging, is the removal of b-trees for the manufacture of blunder (instead of lumber), which is a natural consequence, since b-trees are a means of storing and retrieving data and if your data disappears you'll have to guess what to do. Unlike logging, blogging is a hostile act performed on an enemy.
...eh.
The Blog. The Return of the Blog. It can only be destroyed by, by, I don't know. Mint-flavored toothpicks. Which reminds me of one of my other pet peeves, about movies. Typically the movie sets up some problem, heroes try some solution, which almost works. Most people at that point would say, well, that almost worked, let's try again but with more explosives. But movies characters almost never do this. Which no doubt has more to do with narrative structure than common sense, and there are lots of movie traditions like that which don't bother me at all so I guess I don't have to complain.
I don't think I have any real point here, I just wanted to natter. I can't brag about writing 555 words a day since I haven't in 3 days and I'm not going to tonight either because as usually happens in NaNoWriMo I'm getting bored with my own story so maybe I should switch stories.
Or something.
Blogging, not to be confused with logging, is the removal of b-trees for the manufacture of blunder (instead of lumber), which is a natural consequence, since b-trees are a means of storing and retrieving data and if your data disappears you'll have to guess what to do. Unlike logging, blogging is a hostile act performed on an enemy.
...eh.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Pet peeve
"No one is saying X".
Hello? This is the Internet, people. I guarantee you, someone is saying X, and give me five minutes with Google and I'll prove it.
That is all.
Hello? This is the Internet, people. I guarantee you, someone is saying X, and give me five minutes with Google and I'll prove it.
That is all.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Today's random word: Montage
...which reminds me of the (in)famous 'training montage', that scene, or series of scenes, in an action flick demonstrating how the hero learns the new skill he or she will need to kick the bad guy's, ah, backside. You know the one: to the sound of inspiring music we see the hero practicing, practicing, practicing, and in only a minute or two: Kung Fu! The Violin! Math! I want to have a training montage or two to learn, oh, I don't know. Japanese, maybe. Glider piloting. Heck, why not King Fu! Although I gather the martial arts guys generally teach you not to get into fights, which would seem to rather defeat the point of learning Kung Fu: you can't kick anyone's backside if you don't ever get into a fight. The only winning move is not to play, as the movie War Games taught us, although I don't recall that that one had any training montages in it. Unless you count the scene where the computer (named after a fast food, if I recall: the Big Mac or the whopper or something) plays the nuclear war game with itself a zillion times. But I definitely don't count that. What Whoppers have to do with it is beyond me, but not doubt the Illuminati know what they're doing. And I have 2 minutes left with no particular idea of where I'm going. The opposite of Illuminati is what? The Dark-ati? Freedom fighters against the Man, the Dark-ati have opposed the Illuminati since even before they existed!
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Scoundrels
So I decided to upgrade my ancient Nokia cell phone. AT&T's web site has several low-end (but still better than my Nokia) phones advertised as 'FREE', if you sign up for a 2-year contract.
'FREE' turns out to mean 'except for the $18.99 "upgrade" fee'.
What baloney.
Dear AT&T: "FREE" means $0.00, not $18.99. Sincerely, ex-customer.
The (relatively insignificant) money doesn't bother me 1/10th as much as the blatant dishonesty. If the new phone costs $18.99 then call it $18.99, don't lie and say it's 'FREE' when it isn't.
razzzle fraztzn bumble brack.
'FREE' turns out to mean 'except for the $18.99 "upgrade" fee'.
What baloney.
Dear AT&T: "FREE" means $0.00, not $18.99. Sincerely, ex-customer.
The (relatively insignificant) money doesn't bother me 1/10th as much as the blatant dishonesty. If the new phone costs $18.99 then call it $18.99, don't lie and say it's 'FREE' when it isn't.
razzzle fraztzn bumble brack.
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