perfidy

XKCD is my hero. Today, more than ever:

Maybe the problem of stagnation in our space program over the last 40 years is not government mismanagement, lack of vision, underfunding, red tape or any of that. Maybe...

<whispers>

We just ran out of Nazis

To go read the Veil War, and then tell all your friends. I've got 9000 words up, and plenty more where that came from.

I was flipping through some old notebooks today. Amidst the dross and deranged scribbling, this, verbatim:

Outline for Autobiography

1. Confused from the outset (birth to 1985)
2. Working at apathy (1985-1988)
3. An opportunity for future nostalgia (1988-1991)
4. A legacy of poor personal investments (1991-1996)
5. A moment of clarity (1996)
6. The moment passes (1996-1999)
7. A leap into the unknown, or running with futility (1999-2000)

CHAPTER ONE

It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was dark. And it was stormy. It was also Friday the 13th, which Bulwer-Lytton hadn't the wit to include. Somewhere in the Midwest below an unseen full moon, I was born. The nurses in the maternity ward were joking about Rosemary's Baby, which was either ironic or eerily prophetic depending on whose side you take.

At this point, my parents had been married for seven years and I guess this was their shit or get off the pot moment. Three years later, they got off the pot and separated. They had met at one of the thousands of fully interchangeable liberal arts colleges that can be found interrupting the otherwise scenic beauty of Ohio with their faux-gothic halls and industrial brutalist dorms and cafeterias.

Dad was in Columbus, pursuing an advanced degree in Russian history, getting a pilot's license starting a classic car collection and generally hooting it up in a very subdued academic way. My mom worked for an insurance company and got very politely angry.

I began my career with failure. My purpose in life was to bring order and comity to my parents marriage. For a time, it seemed that this ploy might actually work - in this brief sojourn in the sunlit uplands of marital happiness that surrounded my birth by about six months on either side, life was good. My parents were distracted from selfishness on the one hand and passive-aggressiveness on the other by the immediate demands of pre- and post natal care.

But I could only maintain that level of effort for so long. Inexorably, I became more self-sufficient and less time consuming and I could not hold my parents together. Having failed to provide for my family, I went on wild spree of campus protests, martial law and tear gas. This was brought to an end by Governor Rhodes' ill-fated and ill-considered attempt to be tough like Ronald Reagan in California, the end result of which was the Kent State shootings.

My early career in rabble-rousing was thus strangled in its crib by the sudden onset of the seventies, just as I was getting going. I decided to retreat and formulate a new plan.

***

"Praise not the day until night has come."

That's as far as I got. My best estimate is that I wrote that sometime in the Spring of 2000.

Your weekly reminder that today you can go over to Veilwar dot com and read the next gripping installment of the Veil War.

Lewis blocked two handed with his rifle, and the sword chopped into his rifle, right through the rail and into the receiver. The goblin growled in rage when Lewis twisted the rifle, tearing the sword from his grasp. Lewis threw the ruined rifle and attached sword to the side and reached for his sidearm, backpedaling.

The monster was fast; unbelievably fast. He jumped and low tackled Lewis to the ground. Lewis’ head smacked the ground and his vision narrowed. All he could see was the green-hued snarling face in front of him. He couldn’t find the grip of his .45, and the goblin had his hands on his throat.

I have to say I'm slipping into the full time writer thing with shocking ease. It's going to be painful to go back to work. Cranked out over 5000 words yesterday, and looking to top that today.

Me=Happy.  

I think I could really dig being a professional novelist.

Granted, this is not at all surprising. I am a professional writer already. I work at home most of the week. I had a pretty good idea. There is nevertheless a big attitudinal difference between writing boring crap for a large corporate entity and writing ripping yarns.

Yesterday I did over 4000 words. The day before was only a little over a 1000, but I had to take the whole fricken family to the dentist, which killed half the day; plus errands and whatnot. Today my goal is north of 5000 words and finish part two of the Veil War. If I maintain that pace through the end of my two weeks, I should clear over 50000 words, which would be a nanowrimo in a fortnight. Nanowrifrt.

Since the completion of an actual novel length chunk of prose is now a goal that is much less airy dreaming and more a reasonable near-term prospect the next thing is just to get to the point where I can get people to buy it and therefore enable me to do it forever.

1. Write novel
2. ???
3. Profit!

Today, my grandfather would have turned 100. He didn't make it here. Pancreatic cancer got him two decades back. But I've been thinking about him all day, today, every time I see the 11-11. My grandfather had a thing about numbers. There were good numbers, and there were bad numbers. He'd have my dad get him license plates from the other side of the state because the license plate numbers issued in NW Ohio were better than the ones in NE Ohio. One time, my dad pranked him, though. Told him he'd gotten a license plate XQ-5381. "Oh, no." He liked numbers that had patterns, or were in some subtle way harmonious. I like to think that that all started because of his birthday, which like today was 11-11-11. He also liked writing on things. He annotated his physical world. When I was five, he took me down to his cabin in Tennessee. We went hiking over to Cumberland Gap, and he made me a walking stick, just my size. He whittled a handle for me, but he didn't stop there. He took a pen and wrote

Cumberland Gap, Tennessee 8-26-1974

I may have the date wrong. My mom sent me a picture today. There was a beautiful tree on the hill behind the farm house he retired to. Grandpa posted this warning: I miss Grandpa.  I wish he could have lived long enough to meet his great-grandchildren.

Installment two of the novel is now up over at The Veil War. Be the first kid on your block to have one. The other kids will be oh, so, jealous.

Copy Paste Character allows you to click on useful symbols to pop them into your clipboard. Then, just paste where needed. Now updated with thousands instead of merely hundreds of symbols. Check it out.

Well, I set up a site for it to live on. Go and see The Veil War, where you can read the first 2000 words. I've got almost 30000 in the bag, and a couple weeks worth of vacation before Thanksgiving scheduled to add more, so there will definitely be more coming soon.

Read.  And tell your friends.

Fun new blogs.  Fun and new for me, at least:

• DR. BOLI'S CELEBRATED MAGAZINE I like the cut of this man's jib.  For instance, he includes in his justly celebrated magazine actual facts.  Which are not the same as, but very similar to, these actual facts.  He also has advertisements, one of which is eerily apposite of a post from earlier today:  
• By way of Foseti, Patriactionary.  I was sold when I saw that they had a whole page called "Finnolatry."  When I discovered that that page contains many, many videos of a Finnish metal band singing about alcohol, I immediately added them to the feed.

If the black market were a single national economy, it would be larger than every nation save only the US.

Jetpacks, dammit.  But the coolest thing in that article is this:

Jetpacks, sure.  But look at the egress - it's a bouncy slide.  It looks something like a DC-X, and it seems that whoever came up with the idea thought that it would operate in the same way.  An SSTO capability implies a point-to-point transport to anywhere on earth.

Alrenous has an interesting post on the Genovesi, a proposed new category of human to exist alongside long-familiar Spartan and Athenian types.  I like it, but I have two questions:

• Wars between Athenians and Spartans seem to be the particularly nasty ones.  Spartan-Spartan wars have a certain restraint - like the wars of the 18thC.  Would you imagine that the American Civil War and WWII were Spartan-Athenian wars?  And why the Athenian West managed not to have a war with faux-Athenian USSR?
• What city would be most emblematic, and therefore deserving of being the namesake of the lumpenproletariat?  Off the top of my head, I would nominate Detroit or Youngstown, but what other cities would be appropriate?

As I mentioned just a bit ago, I am writing an actual novel. So, I'll like be a novelist and stuff. Sweet.

The actual writing of the novel has been surprisingly pain free, given that I'd been putting it off for almost a quarter century. Once I started typing, it came out at nearly a 1000 words an hour, which is a pretty respectable rate. What has bothered me though, is the lack of decent writing tools that actually do what I want them to do.

As of late last night I seem to have solved at least one aspect of my problem - the need to be able to seamlessly move devices without having to worry about whether I'm working on the most current version. I downloaded iA Writer for both the iPad and Mac, which uses Dropbox for sync.  Dropbox, btw, totally rocks.

I'd been aiming for a stripped down writing interface - I don't want to deal with formatting. I don't want to deal with most things aside from typing. I didn't want to use a full-featured word processor. As a technical writer, I fully appreciate the capabilities offered by this sort of tool, but have become increasingly disenchanted with them except for the very final stages of creating a finished document. I find that I do most of my actual writing for work with WordPad. So OpenOffice, Word, Pages - all out. There's too much in there to distract from actually writing.

Happily, there have been many apps released that purport to be the perfect tool in this space. Unhappily, most of them are wrong in this assertion. The closest was Byword, which has an elegant, non-eye-straining page for typing. It does the full screen, block-out-all-distractions thing. It does typewriter focus, so your cursor doesn't always end up at the bottom of the screen.

Yet - it uses three different formats for saving files, each with different capabilities. When you fire up the app, if you hadn't closed your documents from the last session, it will open them in new, untitled files. So if you start typing, Bam! you've got a new version whether you wanted to or not. And it didn't have a companion iPad app, so syncing presented issues.

iA Writer was going for a buck on the iPad, so I had a what the hell moment and bought it. I quickly discovered that it is the best text editor I have yet used on the pad, and I've used a lot of them. Advantages: extra bar on the virtual keyboard with left and right arrow, left and right word (jump a word instead of a space) and common punctuation like quotes, dashes and parentheses. Clean typography - it's very easy to read. (I only wish I could make the text a little smaller, so a little more could fit on the screen.) Word counts. Dropbox sync. Email as body or attachment. Very nice, I thought.

So, I sprung for the $10 Mac App. It doesn't look as good as Byword, but doesn't behave oddly. Syncs perfectly with the iPad app. The big type doesn’t look as bad on a 24" monitor. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

I can now write on the computer, get up and grab the iPad and keep going.  I find it amusing that after 30 years of software evolution; and enhancements in infrastructure, networking and computer power; the very best writing app that I've found mimics almost perfectly the functions and behavior of a typewriter from 1950.

That's part of the problem. The other part is organization of background material. For my novel, I have tons of background notes to keep everything straight. Lists of characters major and minor, notes on the locations, notes on the various entities and their capabilities, notes on things that the characters don't and likely won't ever know but which certainly effect how the story goes. Putting all this in, say, one long word file would work in the sense that all the information would be stored on my computer.

But it wouldn't be easy to access. If I were careful, and did everything up with headings, I could use the document map sidebar to be able to easily see any one part of it. But often, I want to look at more than one part of my notes. I always want the cast of characters visible, so I can reference that, and usually one or more other things that are relevant to what I'm typing. Word falls down there unless I want more than one document, which kind of defeats the purpose.

And I haven't found anything significantly better. Right now I'm using Ulysses, which basically organizes text files into bundles, with a navigator at the side. I got it cheap, and it works, but there is no good way to really organize the files. I'd almost be better having small text files in a folder hierarchy - but only almost. Its saving grace is that I can view two (and no more than two) of the individual files. So I can have my cast of characters and one other thing visible.

I've tried Scrivener, which is a little better, but not much, and I don't want to pony up $50 just to see if it works a little better than Ulysses.  (Though they just upgraded to version 2.1...)  I'm tempted to see if I can make Yojimbo work - which I've used to keep track of clippings and receipts and the like. If I did make individual text files and dropped them into Yojimbo collections, that might conceivably work. And, as a bonus, all the textual material would not be in proprietary formats.

What I really want is this, which I first wrote about over five years ago. A visual way of navigating files. If any coders out there would like to help me build this, I'd be more than willing to share the profits.

Aside from that gaping wound in my workflow, other bits have fallen into place. Sigil is a nice little app that creates ePubs pretty easily - and allows you to edit them if you discover some last second thing that needs changing. TextWrangler is a nice power editing tool useful taking .txt files and making bulk changes and has a good search function. Finally, Pages makes nice pdfs if you're into that sort of thing.

While I'm being all Mr. Blog Chatty Cathy, look at this:

Ominous volcanic lightning pics are like catnip for Buckethead.

My son, having become cognizant of the existence of this blog, has offered to participate. If anyone has any questions - about anything whatsoever - ask and he will make up an answer for you. Just leave a question in the comments and I'll pass it on to him.

Here's a small one to get you started:

Q: Son of Buckethead, who killed President Kennedy?

A: It was the butterflies. Butterflies ate Oswald's brain, enraging him. Enraged, he went to the Book Depository building and shot the president.

Q: Son of Buckethead, why did the butterflies hate Kennedy? And were they responsible for Oswald's death as well?

A: Butterflies hate everybody. Usually, they just flutter around and stuff. But sometimes, they get mean. The ninja butterflies ate Jack Ruby's brain to cover up the eating of Oswald's brain. Butterflies are pretty sneaky.

In pursuit of my life long dream of having a career that involves nothing more than sitting in front of a computer in my jammies, I have been writing a novel. It became apparent to me that sitting in front of a computer in my jammies four out of five days a week as a technical writer and web developer is not enough. I need that last day. The novel is about 1/4 done, and the initial feedback has been very positive. Yay, me! I will shortly be setting up another website for that novel to live on, and you'll see a link here.

Also, I have remembered that I never finished my series on state mottoes. Expect updates soonish.

I would like to state for the record that it has become almost impossible for me to have normal conversations about politics with, well, anyone. I no longer have common referents with the average interlocutor. And I can't really say, go read the last six months of Zero Hedge, the entire corpus of Moldbug, and a hundred other things and get back to me when you can understand what I'm talking about. And can you summarize Austrian economics and the history of the Great Depression and the formation of modern banking every time you're talking to someone about the state of the economy? And God forbid trying to explain where I'm coming from on politics.

And, on that note, thanks Chris for having read Zero Hedge and Moldbug and Charleton so that I can talk to you. You're a mensch.

I have been, as is my wont, supremely lax in posting.  This despite my setting up an automated process to post.  So there you go.

I would say that the spirit moved me to the post this, but that would not be true.  Even without the spirit motivation, Bruce Charleton has had some very interesting posts over the last little while.  The one that caused me to actually pull the trigger on this post is this one:

Pagan missionaries?

Charleton's knife of insight is sharp, here.  If a modern St. Patrick were sent to us by real Christians from some parallel world, maybe from a Patriarch of Constantinople who didn't live in Istanbul, what would he think of us?  I imagine that this hypothetical Apostle to the Americans would see us in our secular glory rather like the Conquistadors saw the Aztecs.  With horror.

What common ground could our St. Patrick find with us when the core assumptions of our daily life are so far removed from what, historically, people have always believed?  Oh sure, we don't put people on altars and rip their hearts out.  Yet.  But at least the Aztecs believed in the divine.

I have what others have described as an interesting relationship with Christianity.  (And there's a draft post that needs finished...)  I find that I need a Pagan Missionary, really.

Then we have this:

Therefore deification does not mean the “actualization” or “realization” of one’s latent divinity, a belief that is less Christian than monistic or pantheistic.

Actualization is a fingernails on blackboards kind of word for me.  It makes me want to punch somebody.  Kind of like the feeling I get when I see someone wearing a Che tshirt.  It is indicative of the depths to which we have sunk that even the people pretending to traditional faith still feel that it's all about them, and not, you know, God or something.

And finally this:

But in Orthodoxy (so far as I see it, not far) there is not the same sense of trying to reach an intellectually coherent and satisfying answer as there is with Western Catholicism.

For the Orthodox there are these parable-like narrative theological explanations, mostly comprehensible to the common man - and beyond these simple explanations there is mystery.

If you want to go further, the path is spiritual not philosophical. The understanding aimed-at, therefore, is not more complex or logical, but (presumably) an understanding which comes directly by revelation, and is not (perhaps) communicable to those of lower levels of holiness.

This is the one thing in Orthodoxy that most appealed to me, when long ago I formally converted. I was raised in a particularly dry and dusty sort of Lutheranism. A comfortable enough community, in its way, especially if you can't sing and like potluck dinners. Which, as it happens, is me all the way. However, the efforts of our Pastor to explain to me the passion and mystery of Christ, redemption, and the like fell a little flat. Largely because it sounded like he was relating to me the minutes of the local Rotary club. Of which he was a member. Look at the benefits that accrue, to you - the local business man, if you become a Rotarian!

Exciting.

And the Roman Catholic hyper legalism is just as annoying. But here's these guys, the Orthodox, with a rich, nay, baroque iconography, beautiful liturgical music, they don't do any of that. They go up to a certain point, stop, and say, "It's a mystery." I like that. I may not have the spiritual development to understand. Might not ever. But at least I'm not treated like a prospective Chamber of Commerce supporter, or bedeviled with hair-splitting exegesis.