May 2002, 37 entries

I have this plan, it involves $60,000, or, as I like to call it, 60 Gs.

With 60 Gs, I could live without working for 2 years, not really changing much about my current lifestyle. With 2 years, I thoroughly and honestly believe that I could make something (a novel) that would start a chain reaction that would propel me through the rest of my life, and would be the best version of my life possible.

Sure, skeptics and rationalists will reason, “Why do you need 60 Gs? Shouldn’t half that, or a quarter of that, be sufficient to support you for two years, with a few lifestyle changes?” And the truth is, yes, it would be sufficient… and I’m willing to barter if someone is trying to strike a deal. As long as I’m making demands, I might as well start at the status quo. And realistically, 60 Gs is NOT that much! People buy art at K’s gallery every week that cost that much or more.

The truth is, there are hundreds if not thousands of people in Seattle alone who have this kind of money sitting, completely uselessly, in bank accounts, being spent every day on useless items of luxury. The fact that this could completely change my life, and hopefully produce something greater than anything these richie rich kids will ever produce (yes, I discarded modesty a while ago concerning this topic… it’s the truth!), it kills me!

At the same time that I beg like this, I know that, in the end, whether or not I get this money, I’ll still be able to get the end result, God willing and weather permitting. Life would be too cruel to turn otherwise. Nevertheless, my focus on 60 Magical Gs does not abate, and continues to be a thought in the forefront of my attention at least one or two minutes a day. Some days, like today, I think about it for hours.

So, if you know anyone, or are someone, who is willing to spare 60 Gs, not as a loan but as an investment in a person who has an over-inflated sense of their own potential to contribute to the world of literature, please contact me. Immediately!

This stuff cannot wait.

I decided that the book would be moved to Andom Bay (previously it lived in Seattle).

The process was interesting, because I was having a really difficult time thinking of a name. Every morning for the last week or so, on my walk to work, I would spend a couple city blocks thinking about the name of the city that the book would take place in. My first instinct was to think of what other famous fictional cities there are out there. Twin Peaks, Yoknapatawpha County, the Shire, and a few others come to mind, but not many. I’m sure there are millions, but for some reason they aren’t forthcoming. What others are there?

So, after that, I started trying to think of city names out of the blue. Thinking of anything out of the blue is difficult for me. I basically just spin my wheels. In order to think, I need points of reference, something to take for granted and work from. And then I started thinking that maybe all of symbolism is just a symptom of people trying to think with no point of reference. Soon, the brain begins looking for small steps to take, like… what is a word or idea that I’d like the city name to reflect. I find a word, say, “aesthetic” and come up with horrible names like Aesthetica. So I look for another unrelated idea or phrase that I could couple with “aesthetic” and create a hopefully meaningful yet non-derivable city name. One thing I don’t like is a name that you can tell “means” something. Like in that new movie Insomnia, which, after talking with K about it afterwards I didn’t like nearly as much as I did with my first impression… but anyway, the main character’s last name is “Dormer”. It’s a movie titled Insomnia and the main character’s last name has a root that means sleep. Lame. Sometimes it works okay though, like with Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (yes, I watch it, no, I didn’t like the season finale).

Several blocks later (this entry is beginning to feel a lot like how my actual thoughts tangentialize over time), I was thinking about the process of randomization. Flipping a coin seems to be the stereotypical method of producing random results. This process, despite being random, is actually pretty predictable. It’s going to be heads 50% of the time, and tails 50% of the time. Does it bother you that this happens… that the universe is built in such a way that even seemingly random events can be predicted, if you look at them from a macro level? Why doesn’t it happen that every time you flip a coin, there is a completely random chance (not 50/50) that it will be heads or tails? I think that for it to be truly random, after flipping the coin 1 million times, the percentage of head/tails should have no ability to be predicted, even roughly. It should just as easily be 1/99 as it would be 50/50. Not an unreasonable request, is it?

Would that be true randomness? Does true randomness exist anywhere?

I was getting no closer to thinking of a city name though. Just for the heck of it, I decided to try and think of the first random city name off the top of my head. In order to force myself, I said it out loud. I said, “Rock Reak.” Later, I interpreted it to be Rock Creek, or Raw Creek, and for some reason I liked Rock Creek. Rhymes with Twin Peaks though, and has similar nature-theme, which might indicate that it wasn’t very random at all. I think I will name a creek in Andom Bay Rock Creek, just for fun. Is it more obvious now where Andom Bay came from? It should be. So that’s how I got it.

I think I arrived at work shortly after this.

Where the book was set, before I switched it to Andom Bay due to research in planned communities and artificial societies.

Andom Bay it is. I’ve been thinking for a couple weeks about what the name of the city in the book would be. Along the way, variations of nonsense from Contexeville, Rock Creek, and Anhedonia popped into my head.

I won’t tell you how I thought of Andom Bay (and who knows, it may change again), but I can tell you that the process arriving at it came only after a long examination of the process that I should use to arrive at it. I’ll go into that elsewhere, but I liken the process to picking up a completed Rubix Cube, twisting it once, then removing and switching two of the colored stickers. The result, seeming disorder, probably hundreds of moves from being completed again, yet if you can reverse engineer it, so close.

At some point, I’ll re-engineer the previous 90 pages of The Most Beautiful One to exist in Andom Bay.

The first page was lost at some point in the past, gone forever. We now have a growing collection of pages, folded in thirds, bound with a paperclip, written alternatively on two different typewritters and a computer, smudged with dirt and coffee stains, passed from mailbox to mailbox (even though we live next door to one another).

So far, there is no plot, but several conspiracies, no central character, but several deaths.

The is what the muse asks for from the script project.

This is a three-person script-writing project which rotates from Rick, to me, to Jim, and then back to Rick. When received, the person has 2 days to complete a page worth of the script, building off the previous 2 pages from the other 2 members. The system employed actually inspired the Novel Accountability Program where I write 10 pages a month in The Most Beautiful One.

If the person doesn’t complete his page within 2 days, he has to do 50 pushups. I have yet to do pushups, since I always finish my contribution on time, but Jim and Rick have probably both done 300-400 pushups each for the cause. If this script should continue for many years, they may outlast me due to their finer fitness.

The title of the script? The Mona Lisa Conspiracy.

Similarities are collections of items (in Amazon’s case) that are connected to one another by some criteria that is determined by software, usually using a method known as collaborative filtering. It’s a very simple idea, but for some reason very difficult to do well, usually because of the huge amount of data that is required to find quality connections.

My Novel Accountability Program seems to be a success so far: I’m now on page 90, and by next month, due to the easy math provided in the 10 pages a month plan, I’ll have broken 100.

Alan, co-creator of Seattle Stories has done it again. Check out how Seattle looked in 1907 versus 2002 with his Seattle Waterfront Viewer.

Read the entry for Indians, American in an 1886 Encyclopedia Brittanica that I found at Top Pot.

Was this entry-writer lying, or were his sources lying, or were his source’s sources lying? Truth is such a fickle thing.

Do you ever think something, and then worry that that thought might actually change you? This happens to me all the time, and from what I can tell, others have similar experiences. For example, someone starts telling you what hotdogs are made of, and, because you like hotdogs, you cover your ears. Merely hearing the ingredients may force you to change your behavior regarding hotdogs. This is interesting because it calls into question just how much our free-will is tied to knowledge.

Is it possible that our free-will is only free to the extent that we can choose to seek out whatever knowledge supports our free-will’s whim? For example, I freely choose to eat meat… and I also freely choose to not seek out all the information that might pursuade me to become a vegetarian. In some ways, I make choices and then find information to support those choices. If information becomes evident that makes it appear that my choices are not to my best benefit (which is a fuzzy thing, I guess), do I actually choose to change, or do I have to change? Is information the only thing that is free?

Yeah, this is a very nerdy thing for me to say.

On page 400 of Encyclopedia Brittanica (1886 edition), the entry for “Indians, American” begins as follows:

On account of the uniform testimony of so-called historians, and the settled convictions, at least, of the enemies of Indians that the Indian population of the United States has been constantly decreasing, it is pleasant for their friends and the friends of humanity to discover by actual counts that this testimony, taking in the whole field, is erroneous. Several histories have told us that the remnants of once powerful tribes are very small; that some have disappeared; that should the ratio of decrease continue, there will be few, if any, Indians remaining at the close of the next century; certainly that their total extinction in time is inevitable. It appears taken for granted that the Indian has something in his nature unfitting him to live in contact with civilization.

Plain facts lead us to doubt these statements; that this population is decreasing or ever has decreased on a large scale, from the time of the discovery of America till to day.”

I’ll file this in the lies folder.

Oh digital. My bets are on analog as far as which one I think is more fundamental to the way our universe works.

The world that will never be fully captured digitally. Some scientists wonder whether or not the universe is intrinsically analog or digital. Things like DNA are digital, but the chemical interactions of neurons is analog. I don’t know the specifics, though, perhaps I should study up a bit more via Google: analog vs digital.

Update: For the latest Book Watch related development, check out All Consuming.

This is a simple implementation of onfocus.com’s wonderful Book Watch web service. Basically, I’ve retrieved his list via his xml feed, then found news information using the Google API, and found the item information via my Amazon API. The result, a constantly changing of list of books that are generating buzz around the weblog community, with links to current news items via google. Read more. See also: Media Watch.

Today, for the first time this year, I walked to workout with a coat. For the last 2 weeks, I’ve been arriving at home or work completely burning up, but I’ve finally modified my behavior to compensate for this fact. I am a smart animal.

Three of my co-workers/ex-co-workers have recently redesigned their sites: Stephen, Jeff Seifert, and Jeff Miller (more of a repurposing than redesign so far, but I predict good things). Very nice. I am resisting the temptation to redesign this site as well… must… not… give in!

I’ve always been the type of person who wants to be perceived as a person who is trying to better himself. That desire is a huge obstacle between me and the goal, since the desire of being perceived as a better person is often acheived prior to the goal being reached, and that last mile often feels like it’s mostly unnecessary. I fear that my strength of will, and my true convictions, aren’t strong enough, or have actually been of a completely selfish nature all along. This is a very simple and often-articulated problem, but I think many of the most complicated problems with our minds have long been trivialized in cliché, and that prevents us from trying to overcome them with the same energy that we would a non-cliche, unique, problem.

Anyway, I’ve set up a couple activities in my daily life that I believe will test my strength of will. Activities that would in fact better me in some minor way, but which require more energy than I’d normally permit to be spent on relatively minor benefits. For reasons of superstition, I’m not going to elaborate upon them here.

Of course, the mere fact that I’ve mentioned that I’m doing this here has already compromised my ability to say that I’m not in fact doing this only for perception’s benefit.

I like this quote of Robert Heinlein’s:

“There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years , the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped ,or turned back, for their private benefit.”

I read it in the context of 10 New Copyright Crimes, which is a commentary on some of the crazy things Jamie Kellner (CEO of Turner Broadcasting) said in this interview: Content’s KingThe article, ironically, requires a paid subscription, sorry. I just love seeing big corporations whine about things like this. At the same time, I have a deep dark suspicion that they, in the end, will win. Big corporations don’t rule this world for lack of power.

A local coffee house, nice and open, has an upstairs perfect for playing cards. See citysearch’s entry.