Archive: Effortful Study

Effortful Study: Continuously taking challenges that lie just beyond one's level of competence. When performance becomes automatic, it becomes impervious to further improvement.

An expert keeps the lid of his mind open all the time to inspect, critique, question, and augment its contents, and thereby approach and exceed the standards set by leaders in the field.

Photograph: Snoqualmie Falls

Snoqualmie Falls [full size]

Lisakit and I had a lovely afternoon recently climbing up and down the trails around Tiger Mountain, one of the nicer (if more popular) trail sets within King County, only a few minutes outside of Seattle.

As we drove around the mountain toward the western set of trails, one of our paths took us past Snoqualmie, as an I've never seen the famous falls there, we decided to stop and take a look. Snoqualmie Falls and the Sahalish Lodge, visible in the upper right hand of the photograph, is best known as the setting for the TV show Twin Peaks, which was once my favorite show for its dream-like, bizarre look at small-town life.

The falls are very pretty and impressive. There were, of course, about a gazillion tourists there along with me and Lisakit.

My stitcher software says that the fifteen or so frames that make up this shot constitute a "very bad fit." Funny, for a very bad fit it's a pretty fabulous photograph.

Seriously hot furry action.

Do not mess with the tigress.

Safe for work, unless you're excessively into this sort of thing.

More here.

Timing is everything: Little Brother and the Australian Netbook Initiative

Yamaraashi-chan and I are reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother out loud. It's a much geekier book than she'd usually be willing to read, but to spend time with Dad she's willing to put up with a geeky book.

Last Thursday, we read the section where Marcus describes his SchoolBook computer:

The SchoolBooks were the snitchiest technology of them all, logging every keystroke, watching all the network traffic for suspicious keywords, counting every click, keeping track of every fleeting thought you put out over the net. We'd gotten them in my junior year, and it only took a couple months for the shininess to wear off. Once people figured out that these "free" laptops worked for the man -- and showed a never-ending parade of obnoxious ads to boot -- they suddenly started to feel very heavy and burdensome.

Imagine my amusement when I showed her the news out of Australia:

Australia's Federal Government decided to give 240,000 Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbooks to Year 9-12 students. Officials are calling them 'unhackable. While the netbooks are loaded with many hundreds of dollars worth of software, 2GB of RAM, and a 6-hour battery, the cost to the NSW Department of Education is under $435 (US) a unit. Wilson praised Windows' new OS: 'There was no way we could do any of this on XP,' he said. 'Windows 7 nailed it for us.' At the physical layer, each netbook is password-protected and embedded with tracking software that is embedded at the BIOS level of the machine. If a netbook were to be stolen or sold, the Department of Education is able to remotely disable the device over the network. Each netbook is also fitted with a passive RFID chip which will enable the netbooks to be identified 'even if they were dropped in a bathtub.'

I asked her if she thought the RFID chips would be used only to identify sold or stolen laptops, and not to track kids. She looked kinda dubious at the prospect.

Attn Code Fairy, the answer is still "No."

Fairy came to me last night. She's Muse's geekier sister, and she says to me, "So, here's the plan. First, we troll through Google Maps for the right scale at which to render cities and terrain for a tactical wargame like Ogre or Crimson Fields or something like that. You capture that information and render the hex map over them. Viola! 22nd Century Battle for Seattle."

Blearily, I look at her and say, "And the other?"

"Once you've isolated the map tiles, you can cut them out into hexes algorithmically, arrange them in sheets, and rebuild the tiles into squares-with-hexes on transparencies. Using a combination of viewport and CSS sprite technologies, you could build entire maps, with scrolling and zooming."

"Go back to bed, Fairy."

Taking catgirls seriously…

draconispax asked, “What is the Yowlerverse?”

The Yowler series is a collection of short stories set in “the real world” that I’ve been doodling with for a few years now, but haven’t really gotten all that serious about until recently.  I’ve finished about 70,000 words or so (don’t worry, I won’t ask you read them all at once) in about a dozen short stories, plus about a half dozen more “in progress” and one fragmentary novel.

The point of the series was to take catgirls and catboys seriously.  I’m of the One Big Thing school of writing: your readers will forgive you One Big Thing in their suspension of disbelief.  My One Big Thing is that catgirls and catboys exist.  There is an entire backstory that explains how we got a contemporary universe with catboys and catgirls, and the explanation even solves the Drake equation, which I think is bizarre but fun in a way.  And it sends a big bright red raspberry to Copernicus.

As I wrote it, though, I realized that being a catgirl or a catboy, although fun, if you take them seriously it kinda sucks.  Because they have to, by tradition, be youthful and beautiful their whole lives, their lives must be short.  They’re as smart as human beings, but because of their biological incompatibility with humans (both reproductively and as carriers of disease), they will have proven conveniently useful to the decadent and unscrupulous rich over the centuries.  Their feline nature makes them very sensual, so this isn’t as bad as it seems, which drives the humans who want to “free” them crazy.  It also drives wedges between the “we’re as good as humans” camp and the “we’re different from them and we should enjoy that difference” camp.

Which brings me to the most difficult aspect of the series, that whole writing the other stuff.  I’ve been reading a lot of what some bookstores call “Black fiction,” which is that section where Terry McMillan and Eric Dickey and Samuel Delaney all get pressed together on one shelf because they all happen to be, you know, black, rather than a romance writer, a mystery writer, or a science-fiction writer (cue George Carlin’s “Where’s the surprise?” monologue).  Most of the stories I’ve written involve caucasians of American or European descent interacting with Bastet, and there’s one really unpleasant story set in the midst of the Hutu/Tutsi slaughter, so I’m a little queasy about where I’ve gone with some of these stories, but hey, if I didn’t write challenging stuff I’d get bored.

Anyway, that’s the Yowlerverse: Contemporary fiction that takes catgirls seriously.  The first episode, Black Tattoo, comes out Friday.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.