What does it mean to truly express yourself? At first glance, it may seem that this is a pointless question, since the truth value of self-expression can only really be measured by the subject. But that’s not how it really works, and generally we’re well able to spot falsity, artificiality, and posturing. I don’t mean that we’re able to detect lies, as I’m not really talking about objective truth here, but more about what we believe about ourselves and the use of our genuine voice, where “genuine” is something that can’t necessarily be pinned down by a solid definition.

This lack of a solid definition, and of empirical testability, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It’s probably easiest to observe “non-genuine self-expression” when children do it, or when we ourselves remember doing it as children. Children will generally do this imitatively, trying to act in some way that they’ve seen others act, most likely in an attempt to be treated similarly to how those others are treated. It’s clear to an observer that it’s an act, and the child knows it’s an act but is committed to denying that knowledge. That is an example of the inverse of self-expression, but probably only one of the easiest forms to spot—after all, which is more likely to occur as we grow older, that we give up posturing and posing to attract the kinds of attention we desire, or that we become far more adept at so doing?
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The most common tag I applied to blog posts in 2010 was: personal, 63 times. (Unfortunately it isn’t clear how to link to WordPress posts with a combined tag and year constraints, so the links go to all the posts with the tag, not just 2010’s). I’m a little surprised that was the most common tag.
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Some statistics on my posts from 2010.

• Total Posts: 263.
• Total Wordcount: 85697.
• Total Writing Time: 128 hours 24 minutes.

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2010 is the first year in which I consistently kept metadata such as tags, writing time, and wordcount for my morning pages, which means it’s the first year in which I can do certain kinds of data analysis on them; this post covers what I think is interesting data about the 392,582 words that I wrote in my morning pages in over 240 hours in 2010.
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My goals for 2011.
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I once again had eight goals for 2010, and it’s not too likely that any more of them will be accomplished before the end of the year.
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My best posts this year.
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Yikoon did not announce his presence, and his skill was sufficient to evade the wards set by the Temple Elders. He hid himself in disused spaces, and waited patiently before moving from one to another. For weeks he used his sorceries to blunt his hunger, and watched. Dedication to his goal kept him silent, observant, and still. Finally he had knowledge and confidence enough, and he made his way into the compound of the Temple’s child sorcerers.
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I recently had a chunk of inspiration hit me, and am considering a fairly large-scale science fiction project. It’s in a far-future, large-scale, “big SF” vein, also known as “space opera” (although that genre is rather loosely defined). I don’t think it’s in the same universe as my science fiction novel, although I might change my mind on that. In any case, I do want to go over the major factors that I think define a setting of that kind. The first one of these is the presence/absence/nature of faster-than-light travel.
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Walking the night city. Do all cities share some quality that can be sensed when in them, or is it merely a dry definition? I think there’s something underneath that; as cityborn I like the notion that feeling it is in my blood, but this is questionable affectation.
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Somewhat related to Friday’s post, I quite liked this rendition of Hamlet as a series of status updates.

Near the start of July I mentioned the idea of keeping a “gratitude journal”. I’ve been doing that, more or less, since then.
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I haven’t been that happy with my blog posts recently. It’s not that I think all of them are terrible, or that the quality suddenly dropped off a cliff, but I feel as if there’s been a decline. It’s tough to measure this, of course, with no clear criteria. But that I feel this way is indicative of some problem.

At the same time, I feel as if I haven’t been writing what I want to write, mainly because I’ve shied away from a lot of topics that I’ve wanted to write about.
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I don’t tend to think of myself as a particularly disciplined or organized person, a view often at odds with how others perceive me, but I will admit to liking to organize and order things in specific ways. This may be related to my left-handedness, and/or to my attraction to precision (which attraction falls short of achieving precision, although I hope that in language I occasionally come close).
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Some time ago I wrote a feature film with Graham Jones: How to Cheat in the Leaving Certificate, a heist movie about the Irish education system. It is now available on YouTube.

I’m leery of YouTube as a venue for feature films, since it’s geared much more towards short clips. On the other hand, if the film is insufficiently gripping, that’s down to mistakes we made.

The film has been in the news again recently, mentioned in stories concerning allegedly widespread cheating.

I’m amused that one of the primary funding sources for the film was the now-nationalized Anglo Irish Bank.

Here’s a review of the original draft. It’s my favorite of the films, and finding out it was the least successful one made me sad. The original is interesting, although probably inferior to the final film—for example, giving Han a father (or any family) would have weakened his character.

After a highly enjoyable, productive, and extended period, it’s time for me to return to the world of paid work.

I’m quite happy with the things I’ve done during my time off. Many of them are important only to me, but then, it’s been my time off.
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This post could be summarized as “regular expressions are a lot faster than naive for loops”.

I’ve been working on improving the script I use for live wordcount in Vim, partly for performance and partly so that I can package it up as a plugin and share it with other people. Along the way I’ve improved the speed of the script rather significantly, and will go through the key part of that change here.
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The mind wanders around and around. It might be in a maze, for often the spaces look eerily familiar. The paths seem different, the distinction between path and destination murky.
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Refactoring is rewriting source code while preserving the functionality of that code. I’m currently refactoring my Python script for Subversion status, because I want to experiment with sharing code on bitbucket and it seemed like a reasonable first project to put up there.

Some people hate refactoring, but I often enjoy it. I get a kick out of figuring out how to make code “better”, although that’s often a subjective judgment. In this case, when I opened up the script to have a look at it, I immediately saw a function that I knew I wanted to refactor. I’m amused by the enjoyment I derived from making the fairly simple change.
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At the beginning of March I kicked off a roleplaying campaign, the first I’ve run since early 1995. The setting is essentially the one I laid out last year in my fantasy world sketch, which now as the name “Q’Rith”.
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Yes, clearly my progress (or lack thereof) needs quarterly reports. And here’s the first one for this year.
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