| Sometimes the best secrets are the ones that do not exist |
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| iPhone Gotcha: Weird NSOperation memory leak |
[2009.12.09|15:49] |
I've been banging my head against ObjC and the iPhone SDK trying to chase down a memory leak exposed by Leaks. The big hint that helped me find the answer was that the last calls in the stack trace were:
WKSetCurrentGraphicsContext
_ZL20CurrentThreadContextv
And both were associated with the WebCore library. Calls higher in the stack trace would vary between different UI Drawing methods and classes. The most obvious were things affecting label drawAtPoint calls and the like.
I narrowed the problem to my misuse of NSOperation callbacks. To make a long story short, if you are doing any sort of UI updating based on the result of an NSOperation make sure the callback into main code is wrapped inside of a performSelectorOnMainThread: call. As in:
[self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(doStuff) withObject:nil waitUntilDone:YES];
Otherwise, the UI updates will occur on something other than the main thread and, apparently, this is bad. I only noticed it because of the memory leak but the interwebs are saying the Apple documentation is saying that UI updates should only happen on the main thread. Good to know.
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| Ignoring the Dumb |
[2009.11.23|16:33] |
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I am amazed at how certain things lodge in my head and will not let go. If I see or hear a comment or remark and think it is wrong, stupid, or incomplete I have an almost irresistible urge to correct or argue with it. Naturally, this is extremely abrasive. I have tried to cut away at the cynical side of myself but still find it ridiculously hard to just let stuff go by without adding my two cents. Worse, when I do let it pass it sticks in my head and bothers me the rest of the day. I find it almost easier to tolerate people ignoring me entirely or writing me off as a cynical jerk than to just shut up and leave it alone. Ah well. I suppose it is just one more personality quirk to work out.
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| Intelligence and Money |
[2009.04.02|08:35] |
Basic common sense argues that the smarter you are, the more money you make. A semi-random travel through the ether found a few sites claiming that it is not so.
First stop: Overcoming Bias talks about College Prestige Lies. Studies done between students of prestigious and less prestigious schools show that it matters. The big interest in this post, however, is how the Media can make a confusing research paper more confusing by coming to the wrong conclusion. The gotcha for me was this paragraph:
STUDENTS WITH HIGHER SAT SCORES EARN LESS MONEY
The regression analysis in the Dale & Krueger study had a coefficient for the person’s SAT score and a second for the square of the SAT score. Based on these two coefficients, earnings peaks at an SAT score of 1100. People who have an SAT score higher than 1100 earn less money.
Second stop: A link from the above quote to HalfSigma's Higher intelligence causes lower income (for people with bachelor's degrees), part III.
A quick summary:
[F]or people whose highest level of educational attainment is a bachelor’s degree, there is a negative correlation between intelligence and income.
Intelligence is essentially measured by the Wordsum vocabulary test and each point higher on the Wordsum test causes a $1,200 decrease in income. But this association only fits for college graduates:
This negative correlation only exists for people who have a bachelor’s degree as their highest level of educational attainment. For respondents whose highest degree is high school, there is a very solid positive correlation.
The reasoning behind the numbers, according to the author, is that smarter people enjoy learning and are more likely to choose a major that seems intellectually interesting yet has no practical use. Average intelligence is more interested in making money from their degree, so they will choose a more lucrative career path.
There are other interesting conclusions that the author makes involving why this only seems to matter to those with college degrees and the exceptions to the generalizations I quoted above. Provocatively, one of the points has to do with teachers being less intelligent and making less money.
The major conclusion of the article is essentially that income is more related to your major than your intelligence. Intelligence may allow you a better choice of majors, but if you want to make money, choose wisely.
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| Vineyard Shows |
[2009.03.27|08:15] |
Recently I have been helping out with shows at Tyler Vineyard. The past two months have had a show every weekend, which is kind of fun, kind of overload. The bands are mostly local death-metal and hardcore, which is kind of fun, kind of overload. Some of the kids in Tyler are impressive. Others, not so much. The headliners tend to be other Texas bands or a band that people in the church know from somewhere. As it turns out, some of the members are connected musically.
Non-local highlights so far: Quiet Company, The Rocketboys, Farewell Flight.
My role is essentially chasing Mark around and helping move stuff off stage, on stage, off stage, and then setting up for church.
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| Magic: The Gathering |
[2009.03.19|08:49] |
I bought up roughly 3000 Magic: The Gathering cards from a friend and am now going through the rather laborious task of sorting and recording all of them. I have 994 done as of this writing.
My current deckbuilding goal is to make 30 card proto-decks that are balanced with each other and simple to play so that I can trick some of my friends here into playing with me. More news will be posted as it happens.
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| On the Relationally Challenged |
[2009.02.26|18:53] |
Some time ago I was poking about the internet and stumbled across a post by someone who is apparently sixteen complaining that he1 was hurt when his girlfriend broke up with him.
Fine. While I raise an eyebrow at the idea of dating someone at sixteen, so be it. I never understood the impulse to date someone that young. It seems ridiculous to me but people have their own choices to make and when things go weird I have no problem with them posting a little something about it for others to read and give them advice and consolation.
But he did post something that did piss me off. Right after he said that she broke up with him, he made this comment:
Usually this wouldn't be a big deal... I've never been hurt by it before...
I have little knowledge of what dating means for this kid but I am guessing that emotional attachment was not part of the process until now. How can you date someone and not be hurt if it falls apart? Am I completely misunderstanding what he meant by dating? What annoys me the most is that he is trying to figure out why he is suddenly hurt but has not realized that he has probably hurt other people by doing the exact same thing.
When I asked why it hurt, when it shouldn't one of my friends said I was in love...
Truthfully, it should hurt. If he does not expect pain and suffering during the aftermath of a relationship how can he respect the devastation that can result from breaking up? How many hells has this kid created for other people?
The advice from his friends tells him it was love. They were wrong. Love is not a term for describing the results of being dumped. The pain and suffering is called Grief. Grief is probably something this kid has dished out on others time and time again without realizing that it hurts to be left.
He then gets predictably melodramatic and wonders if he is doomed to be alone all his life and complains that love is painful and supposes he is "cursed to forever love her".
Granted, sixteen-year-olds are a little short sighted and generally melodramatic in nature, but what an asshole. He deserves his broken heart.
1: I am assuming he is male. I am also making all sorts of assumptions about this kid and really do not care. The points stand.
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| Unfinished projects |
[2009.02.19|09:57] |
I am a project starter. I start projects. I cannot remember the last time I finished a project.
A short list of "current" projects:
- Blogging software that is self-hosted so I can get away from Livejournal
- Board game emulators in Java
- Role-playing game in Java
- AI analysis software in Java
- At least three short stories
- A massive novel-type-thing
- Cryptography analysis software
- Designing a board game with Steven
- Designing a better version of Star Wars: Epic Duels
- Learning to play guitar
- Arcade style shooter game in Flash or Java
Projects that have been basically been scrapped:
- Hosting my website with Keith, Steven, and Dan while coding a library of useful stuff
- A collectable card game involving lots of dice
- Writing consistently for Forge Journal
- Letterboxing
- A different board game design with Steven
I think one of the big problems I have is that I make my projects too epic. The dreams of a plan finished get in the way of actually doing anything. I am often too worried about something being useful or perfect.
The lesson, I suppose, is to stop dreaming and start doing.
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| Biblical Genocide |
[2009.02.05|12:17] |
It is hard to admit certain things when they sound like a chink in your worldview's armor. Something like the fact that genocide occurs in the Bible. There are interesting responses to these passages1 in both theist and anti-theist circles and I am not going down the list of which I like and which I disagree with. The point is that there are things that are hard to swallow in the Bible. Genocide is one of those things and a lot of people like to defend the Bible by making claims that it was justified. The various justifications tend to fit into certain groupings and I am hoping to respond to the overall problem instead of just talking about the particular problem of genocide. The question is fairly simple: if common sense seems to dictate that something is really evil but the Bible appears to show God doing the something, what is going on?
Common responses: it is not really that evil; God did not do the something; it is not evil when God does it.
"Really evil," in this sense, does not mean "bad" or even remotely ambiguous. It means something like genocide which is, generally speaking, only considered okay by the people doing the killing. The response "it is not really that evil" is logical, but makes little sense. Our common sense can be a terrible judge of moral truths, but genocide as not-evil is a hard argument to make.
In the case of genocide, there are all sorts of bendings and dodgings that attempt to remove the responsibility of action from God himself. For the sake of the point, let's assume that it was a fairly obvious passage and a basic understanding of the context and history points toward God actively pursuing genocide. In other words, God did it. What then?
The third option essentially removes God from the requirements of human morality. This is often done by simply declaring God an exception to morality in general or saying that God has a backdoor that justifies his actions when doing something we consider Really Evil. This, essentially, is biting the bullet and saying that, according to typical morality, God does evil things. They are not truly evil when God does them, but they are still Really Evil when comparing them to how humans are supposed to act. Sure, Evil changes definition when applied to God, but under a human definition of Evil, God does evil.
One of these pills is easier to swallow than the other and which it is depends on who you are. But the overall question I have for the ether is this: what if you do not like any of the pills? Do you run and hide from the issue and pretend it disappeared? Do you assume there is some rational explanation no one has thought of yet? Do you simply respond, "I don't know," when someone asks you about it?
It is a tough question. Most of the cases, the annoying question is merely annoying because the question arose from lack of understanding what was written in the Bible. But there are passages that make me stop and wonder about how all of this fits together.
1: I am not actually going to reference the passages. If you want specific examples let me know and we can talk about it in the comments. Genocide is actually not the point of this entry. It was merely the example for the rest of the discussion.
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| Survivor and Surprise Endings |
[2009.01.29|11:49] |
Tamar and I just finished reading Chuck Palahniuk's novel Survivor. This post contains no major spoilers but does assume you have read the book and focuses on vague references to the ending.
The end was... awkward. There are strong hints about the ending's implication but there is no epilogue to neatly define it and set it down for absorption. Which sucks. Sort of.
Surprise Endings and I have an tenuous relationship. I have no problem with plot twists, wherever they appear in a story, as long as they make sense. I have a problem with cheap tricks that amount to deus ex machina for the specific purpose of trying to make people say, "Oh, I didn't see that coming."
The basic principle is this: if I am reading the entire story trying to figure out how it is going to end, than the writing is probably shoddy and the story is not interesting. The end of a novel can only be as good as the previous pages let it be.
Survivor is an awkward exception because the author knowingly set it up for ambiguity at the end. The big plot twist is ironic and a jab at the reader for thinking too hard about the answer to the puzzle. It is both clever and annoying. Figuring out whether the ending was a good ending requires a small dissertation on why one reads books in the first place.
I, personally, thought the ending was the best part of the book. This means I will never read the book again, because I have no desire to sift through an entire novel just to find my favorite part. But I think the cleverness of the ending justifies the annoyance of it.
That being said, it is annoying. It is clever from a literary perspective but, unless you find literary theory entertaining, the book fails as an object of entertainment. Another way of saying this is that the language was good but the story depicted was not. I believe this is because it forgot one of the more common aspects of an ending: an actual end.
To wrap it up with an example: the ending does not bug me and never will. Tamar is much more likely to begrudge the book a proper ending, because she was listening to the story. I was listening to the words. Of course, I was listening to the words because I thought the story was boring. I suppose that the ending would have bothered me more if the story was better.
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| Heresy |
[2009.01.22|07:53] |
Heresy is an introduced change to some system of belief, especially a religion, that conflicts with the previously established canon of that belief. (Wikipedia)
Heresy is one of the heavier labels that can be leveled against a belief. To claim something as heresy is to strictly define it as Other. Something that is heretical is only masquerading as Us, but really it belongs to Them.
Christianity has had its long history filled with many heretics, some of which became their own denominations or religions of their own. The most obvious example would be Martin Luther. Other examples include Joseph Smith or David Koresh.
Each of these three have been labeled as heretics for their heresy. Luther is generally not considered a Christian heretic. Smith is up for debate, depending on whether you consider Mormonism to be a Christian sect or a heretical cult. Koresh still has his followers, but Branch Davidians are not commonly associated with mainstream Christianity.
But here is the question for today: is heresy good or bad? Obviously, some of the response will depend on context and perspective. Chances are high that the Catholic Church thought of Luther's heresy as a bad thing. Typical Christian denominations likely have a similar view of Mormonism or the Brach Davidians as bad things. But typical Christian denominations probably view the Protestant Reformation as a step in the right direction.
So, is heresy good or bad? Does it depend on its truthiness? Part of the issue at hand is the source of religious truth. Luther's heresy came from his interpretation of the Bible. Smith received visions. Koresh... actually I have no idea where Koresh claimed his authority came from. Obviously they all thought they were in the right even though the majority said they were wrong.
So is heresy good or bad?
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| Not-friends and online friends |
[2009.01.18|21:29] |
Facebook does not quite suck yet, but it gets close sometimes. For awhile, it did suck. Then they finally let me block applications, so the suck lessened. The integration with things like Twitter is nice, but the clutter has skyrocketed. To make things easier on myself I went through and trimmed out "friends" that I have not talked to since I lived on the same campus and am guessing I will never really talk to again.
Online friends are strange things. I have had various talks with various people about the nature of online friends and the lines of communication usually employed. There have been varying opinions on the subject ranging from those who banned AIM entirely to people who are willing to meet in person after meeting online. I know of some people who have gone so far as to get married to people they met online.
I suppose online friends are not necessarily different than offline friends. But I know they are for me. Facebook, being the current example, is something I was using to document past friendships. Then Facebook changed and at some point they removed (or severely displaced) the features that let you mark what classes you had with whom and when you lived with them and yada yada yada. So, now it is a central hub for communicating with... Friends. Hence the removal of a lot of people I would not consider my friends.
But online friends are strange things. Even if they were once an offline friend, they can end up online friends. Some online friends become offline friends, but some do not. The current question is, how do you dump an online friend? An offline friend is easy to leave behind: stop communicating or interacting with them. They eventually go away. I am good at that and accidently do it to friends I like all the time. Online friends are not like that. They stay in your friends list until you forcefully and consciously remove them. Ditching an online friend, from what little experience I have, seems to be more like breaking up with a significant other than just letting a friendship fizzle out. The implication that you have defriended someone is not implied. You did exactly that.
I guess I have no more thoughts on the subject as of now. I figured a half-thought was better than nothing.
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| Where were you, Hawaii? |
[2009.01.18|18:48] |
While laid up from the remnants of some sort of flu/cold/nasty-icky-thing-that-makes-you-throw-up I decided to catch up on some reading from my Tome of Arthur C. Clarke.1 It has every of his published short stories in chronological order. One amusing thing I noticed was that during World War II, his stories were excessively dark and often involved humans or aliens destroying themselves or other races. As the years progressed into the late '50s they became much more bizarre and whimsical. But today I ran into this and it utterly confused me:
Any of you who are familiar with domestic American affairs may know that Florida's claim to be the Sunshine State is strongly disputed by some of the other forty-seven members of the Union.
Forty-seven? That would imply forty-eight states. As much as Clarke is not American, I figured he would be able to notice a simple fact such as that. But then I remembered that the story was written in 1957 and Alaska and Hawaii were added to the Union in 1959. Strange, the things time does to literature.
1: It is actually called The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke.
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| Failing Arguments for God |
[2008.10.21|12:25] |
There is an inherent issue with arguing for the existence of God. Other than the monumental task of defining God in terms that make sense within the framework of Logic, the basic problem is that someone will eventually come along with a counter-argument. Assuming the counter-argument is valid, it will draw attention to weaknesses in the argument and this is extremely uncomfortable for someone whose world-view depends strongly on the existence of God. The position that the believer finds themself in is difficult. Should they change their entire world-view because their argument for God had a few holes? Should they change their argument? What should they do?
I say that throwing away Logic is the wrong path. In my opinion, the natural world and all of its minutiae operate within the framework of Logic. Arguing about why this should be the case can roughly as irritating as finding evidence for the belief that all beliefs should be backed by evidence. It tends to regress into the minor definitions of the words involved and I cannot tell you how many times I have been annoyed at people who try to end the discussion by pulling a dictionary from their shelf.1 So, to make things simple, I propose it as a Guiding Principle of Life.
Unfortunately, Logic makes it difficult for the aforementioned believer. If the argument that was previously used to found the belief in God is suddenly removed, does the entire world-view topple down? Usually not. Usually there is a swift replacement in the foundation with another argument or a complete disregard for the argument's failure. In the former case, I find the "foundation" rather suspect and submit that the supposed foundation is not actually holding anything up. My guess is that the real foundation is hidden away somewhere much harder to approach, possibly using an argument from personal experience or maybe simply really, really, really wanting it to be true. Disregarding the argument's failure is mostly an acknowledgement that Logic was not extending any system of beliefs from the argument and this again questions whether the argument was holding up anything important at all.
1: Dictionaries were not created to give any sort of logical consistency to language and they are not an authority on semantics. They may provide some form of forced agreement about how to use a word, but that rarely addresses the actual issue being discussed. (This is, unless it turns out everyone was saying the same thing with different words.)
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| Lost Friendships |
[2008.10.18|17:24] |
What happens with friends? I have had a long and consistent history of falling out of friendships slowly and with no other cause than lack of communication. The annoying part is that there is no moment of turning around and realizing that I have not spoken to someone in years; I know it is happening the entire time. But I give the time it takes to keep relationships to other things. Years go by and I end up far away from people I dearly love.
I believe that part of my problem is that I am not good at communication unless it is in person. I can talk to a person and enjoy being with people (to an extent) but, even in the age of Facebook, I hardly drop someone a note or ask how they are doing. Letters are beyond me.
If a long-ago friend writes me a letter or an email I take months to write them back. There is actually one sitting in my inbox now, and I am choosing to spend the time talking to myself here than writing her back. Why is that? Does anybody know?
It makes me sad. I know or knew all of these wonderful people out in the world somewhere and I miss them. I remember the time I had with them and I want to know why I drift away so quickly. I have never felt attached to any place except Guatemala. Every other place I have been has been nothing but a place. When I move away I rarely take anything emotional with me. Places are just places.
Guatemala stands as the lone exception. Today I received an update from Mary Margaret and it brought back the memories and emotions. They are stronger than I expected, and I began to severely miss certain people that I have no contact with anymore. I miss the Scotts. I miss Joseph. I miss my dear cousin Abby. For one week they were my family. And now they are in completely separate lives.
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| Anthropomorphic Intelligence |
[2008.10.06|13:30] |
Artificial Intelligence has been a long-term interest of mine. I love all things AI, from Deep Blue to Red Queen to swarming programs to robots that balance themselves. But AI has a PR problem.
Topics in AI can be split into two categories: fiction and non-fiction. Fiction includes Sonny, HAL 9000, and Brent Spiner in face paint. Non-fiction includes all of the boring science stuff that is assumed to be under the hood of the fictional characters. In reality, there is less cyborg and more math, psychology, and engineering. Every now and again you can get a Turing Test, but mostly AI deals with problems like traveling between points A to B or creating languages machines understand.
This is a far cry from Skynet, an AI that takes over the world and oppresses humanity. Most of these doomsday species revolve around a principle coined the Singularity. The basic concept is that we (humanity) will eventually create a them (computer) that is smarter than us. Since they are as smart as we are, they can create a them as well. Them 2.0 will be able to create 3.0 and soon they will be leaps and bounds beyond what humanity can accomplish. If they are evil, we tick them off, or they just feel like it, we end up in a dystopian future akin to The Matix. But until then, we can see AI star in movies such as A.I., Bicentennial Man, and Short Circuit.
The problem is that most fictional AI assume that these AI are nothing more than humans made from mechanical parts. Replacing the machinery with other humans and the only difference is power. AI are more powerful but their behavior is the same. Fiction roughly defines "AI" as a superhuman built by humans. They are anthropomorphic machines with the ability to learn.
The truth is that AI, if it ever reaches that point, will probably act differently than we do. The simple reason: they are different than we are. If I tell my mother's dogs to piddle in the yard, they will process the commands and perform the requested actions. But they do not think about it in human terms. They think like a dog. In much the same way, Deep Blue does not play chess like a human does. It can't: it isn't human. Computers solve problems differently. There are programs designed to solve mathematical equations or walk across a room but, while their behavior mimics ours, they process it differently.
The issue that I have with projections like the Singularity is that it assumes AI will "want" the same thing we do. There is an implicit assumption that Them 1.0 wants Them 2.0. It assumes that Skynet wants to take over the world. It assumes that Deep Blue wants to beat Kasparov. But these desires must be built into the program. Deep Blue did not beat Kasparov. Deep Blue had no idea Kasparov was there. It just played chess until its operator turned it off. It took no glory and no pride from the match.
For an AI to act human it would have to want to act human. It would correctly be called an Artificial Human. While there would be uses for such a program, it would remain the significant minority in the field of AI. Yet, it is probably the most commonly addressed form of AI in fiction.
AI, therefore, is commonly associated with Anthropomorphic Intelligence and the common, everyday uses are completely unseen. AI, as a whole, has been completely misunderstood.
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| Five Crows |
[2008.09.24|19:58] |
I wrote this tonight, amongst a burgeoning story I have decided to write without trying to plot it out beforehand. I thought it was interesting enough to post here.
Instead, she asked me about the field. I was still there almost every night. The field looked sad more than it used to and was hardly ever happy. It seemed glum or distracted. The only animals were dogs that kept looking over their shoulders and small flocks of crows. Last month I watched four crows attacking and killing a fifth. It was the first time I had ever seen the field angry. The lonely crow was larger and fought back for nearly thirty minutes. When it had died, the other four flew into the power lines and watched a mangy dog pick it apart. That took the rest of the afternoon. The dog left before the birds did, and then they began eyeing each other as if deciding which of them was the next target.
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| Hostage Situations |
[2008.09.12|18:39] |
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The most basic of hostage situations can easily be described as such:
Alfred takes Bob hostage and will kill them unless Carl gives him money.
I have always found these sorts of situations utterly inane. Generally speaking, there are a few ways to respond to the situation:
- Comply with Alfred
- Ignore the situation
- Retaliate against Alfred
The short term goal of option 1 is that Bob will survive and the cost is whatever demands that Alfred wanted. In terms of cost/benefit ratios, this makes sense: Carl is making a "trade" for something more valuable.
The inherent problem of this response, however, is that it encourages Alfred to keep kidnapping Bob. If Bob remains safe, there is no reason to trade with Alfred. Alfred only becomes a player by "stealing" Carl's asset, Bob, from you. The issue becomes doing whatever can be done to prevent Alfred from stealing from Carl.1
Option 2, on the other hand, directly addresses this aspect of the problem: if the situation is ignored, Alfred's valuable (Bob) is destroyed and Alfred is left in the same position he was in before he went through all of the trouble to catch Bob. Carl loses Bob, which is a significant loss, but it removes the incentive to kidnap Bob in the first place. If there is a history of simply ignoring the situation, Alfred could not reasonably expect any payout for the kidnapping: the proposed trade will never happen.
The problem with option 2 is that Bob dies. He dies for the purpose of preventing future kidnappings, but this strongly assumes that Alfred will learn from the past and realize there is no point in kidnapping anymore people. Unfortunately, even if Alfred decides it is not worth it, it does not prevent Arthur from taking his place. People do not learn as a collective and it may take some time before Carl's reputation is strong enough.
Option 3 takes the situation and tries to turn it against Alfred by threatening some asset of his. The commonplace example is to surround him with police and make it obvious that if Bob dies, Alfred dies too. Other variations would be to threaten Derrick, who happens be Alfred's brother-in-law or possibly scratch up his spiffy car.
Option 3 puts the burden back on Alfred and seemingly makes Alfred choose what will result. The basic idea is that it is no longer a net gain if Alfred kills Bob because if he did he would lose Derrick. The implication is that Derrick is worth at least as much and the stakes of the contest just went up.
The basic problem with Option 3 is that it can degrade into a weird feedback loop if Alfred hunts down Edward and kidnaps him, too, placing the total threat against Carl to be greater than that of Alfred. Alfred and Carl can keep kidnapping people until one of them decides to: pull the trigger and let the hostages die or pay whatever the other person wants. If Carl pays Alfred the money and releases Derrick and his other hostages, the assumption is that Alfred will release all of his hostages as well and everything returns to a stable situation where Alfred ended up getting paid for the initial situation. If Alfred decides to "pay" Carl, that would simply mean giving back the hostages.
So which of the three options are correct? Is there some fourth option? Ideally, of course, Bob would never be kidnapped and Carl could avoid the entire decision tree, but assuming the situation, which is the best way to respond?
1: While referring to Bob as an asset may seem a little impersonal, Bob is just an example. The hostage could be anything ranging from a pet dog to children to extremely valuable data stored on a disc.
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| Conquesting the Guitar |
[2008.09.09|16:39] |
Ages ago I received a guitar for my birthday. The goal was to take class guitar or lessons from Bethel the following semester, but all of my Computer Science classes overlapped with whatever was offered and I was too lazy to get private lessons. As such, the guitar sat mostly unused until recently.
Recently, I picked it up and started playing around with it, downloading basic chord and note charts along with a few "easy" songs. Yeah, guitar is hard. But it is fun and very cool and I am starting to get the general concept wrapped into my fingers.
I have the advantage of piano lesson from second (third?) grade, so I get the general concept of notes, chords, and scales. Translating the structure of a guitar with standard tuning came quickly. Getting my hand to obey my mind is decidedly not.
But progress comes and I am reaping some simple rewards and pleasures from the work invested so far, such as making good sounds. The biggest advantage, however, is that I can now scribble relevant notes next to song ideas I may have instead of just turning everything into poetry because I had no way to get the music out. This bodes well for my current writing goals as I count guitar as a perfectly valid outlet.
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| No news, no writing, and much annoyed |
[2008.08.25|16:29] |
As much as I tell myself and others that I will finally get around to writing again I still have not. Ironically, I keep reading things and thinking that I could do better. But I don't.
My tolerance for bad writing is waning again. I find myself annoyed when authors butcher their stories with the intent to make them interesting or suspenseful. Flash-forwards are not the same thing as foretelling and walking the line between a plot twist and devolving into deus ex machina is more difficult that letting the reader know about something before it actually happens.
There are other current peeves but I fear that I will simply become another critic too focused on everyone else's work than my own. My perfectionism seems to be my doom, however, and I never finish most of the ideas I have. The energy is just not there.
Tamar goes back to school and has a Saturday class. I am hoping to whip myself into taking advantage of the time alone.
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| Writing Projects |
[2008.07.30|16:23] |
I have finally decided to get started on filling out the content for a series of stories I have been thinking about for years. The tools I have decided to use are my trusty keyboard and the software that runs Wikipedia. It turns out that it works really well for keeping track of characters, plotlines, and anything else I want.
Hopefully I can actually get this project to escape velocity. Most of my random goals seem to fall back towards Earth and burn up in the atmosphere. I still have scattered programming projects lying around, ideas for stories, video games, board games, movies, and music stuck in my head wondering if they will ever be finished or started.
I expect that this will take a significant toll on the amount of material you see here. If you do see an increase, it will probably be random snippets of prose since that is where I am trying to keep my mind focused.
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2){kind=small}
mrhen's journal