More slow going. On another note, reading good science fiction (in this case Blindsight by Peter Watts) while editing/writing this is somewhat demoralizing. But if I’m ever going to get to the point of writing good stuff myself, I need practice.
Word count: 26120
Really slow. Need more sleep.
Word count: 25976
This is a side-scrolling platform/puzzle game based on the idea of a “portal gun” that can create portals on surfaces. Fire one onto one wall, the second onto another wall, step through the first, emerge through the second. It’s essentially an ad for the three-dimensional version from Valve, but it’s still fun.
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By which I do not mean magickal thinking… I mean thinking that tremendous change can be effected through events, speech or revelations that are talismanic in nature. The idea that if the correct words could just be spoken, or if the truth revealed, that “the people” would rise up/awaken/revolt/vote differently/stop watching television/reject their role as imperialist enablers/cast off their self-accepted shackles/achieve enlightenment/achieve whatever your particular goal for them is. A certain brand of tax evader in the US falls into this category.
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Better than no progress, naturally.
Word count: 25865
Bah. Still not giving up though. Feel like I should be able to get some traction tomorrow.
Stalled, but I’m not giving up yet. I still intend to get it done by the end of the month.
A colleague of mine who until recently was part owner of an apartment building received today a copy of a magazine aimed at apartment owners, and I thought that the cover was a work of art.
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I’m still behind, but I haven’t stopped. Chapter five is slowly being fleshed out.
Word count: 25414
At any given moment, while thinking (or thinking about thinking), we appear to ourselves to be somewhat rational, free-willed beings. We’re able to think (I think), and to control what we think about to some extent. We conceive of ourselves, mostly, as discrete and singular “I”s who are conscious and whose selves somehow belong to us.
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Bad time management really doesn’t make catching up any easier. I’m still behind. I should find time to watch this lecture on time management by Randy Pausch. One of the things I did catch while skimming it was that bad time management causes stress—I think I have empirical data confirming this hypothesis.
If one is feeling generous, then they might be following two conflicting purposes: actual education (teaching students to think, teaching them techniques and tools such as math, science, and so on) and obedience/conformity. The tension between those two things should be clear, but an awful lot of people are prepared to put up with it. And perhaps that’s not too bad, depending on where the balance is. In this country, the focus has been shifting steadily towards obedience more or less since the start of modern schooling in the US.
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Terrible time management and needing to do a lot of new writing caught up with me tonight. I haven’t finished Chapter Five, and so I need to play catchup tomorrow (and, possibly, thereafter).
Word count: 24610.
Toughest section so far, writing much of the first half of chapter five from scratch.
Word count: 24035.
In the latest demonstration of what they’re really about, the Democratic Party didn’t even try to stop the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General. Despite holding a majority in the Senate, the Democrats caved in two ways. (Three if you count the Judiciary Committee vote.) First, seven Democrats crossed the line to support Mukasey. Second, and far more important, the Democrats didn’t filibuster. The Republicans in the Senate have spent the whole damn year filibustering everything, essentially imposing a 60-vote requirement to pass bills—but the Democrats let this one go by with a simple majority. In essence, they mostly want to be seen to be against the nomination without being willing to stop it even though they have the power to do so.
In an amazing display of political cowardice, the four Democratic Senators running for the Presidency didn’t even show up for the vote: Biden, Clinton, Dodd, and Obama. Mukasey was a nominee so compromised that he refused to say whether or not waterboarding (which the US has in the past prosecuted soldiers of other nations for using) was a crime, and in that context Mukasey also claimed that the President might somehow have powers that go beyond the law. But the presidential hopefuls didn’t want to get involved either way. I wasn’t likely to vote for them before, but now I don’t see any way whatsoever that any of those four could get my vote, even if it means voting for some obscure third-party candidate.
More major surgery, and chapter four is finished.
Word count: 21368.
San Francisco held city elections on Tuesday. The important issues were the competing Propositions A and H, concerning public transport and parking. There was also a mayoral election, although its result was a foregone conclusion.
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Slogging through the bloat.
Word count: 18701.
End of chapter three. I had to add a few hundred words this time, which I suspect means that I’ve divided some of the sections up incorrectly… but we’ll see. The bulk of the bloat for this part of the draft remains to be tackled over the next chapter.
Word count: 16035.
The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Michael Mukasey’s nomination for Attorney General today. Mukasey is clearly another Bush stooge (otherwise he wouldn’t be their nominee) and hardly the person to roll back the assaults on civil liberties perpetrated by his predecessors. Not that Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer, the two Democrats on the committee to vote for approval, really care about that. The AP report I link to contains this beautiful paragraph:
The 11-8 vote came only after two key Democrats accepted his assurance to enforce any law Congress might enact against waterboarding.
—“Mukasey nomination sent to full Senate”, Laurie Kellman, Associated Press, 6 November 2007
Harder going, but it’s still going.
Word count: 13368.
Every few months I get a wave of bounceback messages from a variety of email servers, caused by some spammer(s) using my domain as the domain for their From addresses. This morning I probably received over three hundred of them, and that was a relatively small number in comparison to some prior instances.
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I’m done with the second chapter, and done with the easy parts. The next two chapters are based on material that I’ve already edited heavily, but it’s a great deal messier than the material for the first two was. I know it’s going to be difficult to chop it down and keep it coherent.
Word count: 10702.