any sufficiently advanced blogging is indistinguishable from blather

Stupid pointless dream

I was on a huge train, the sort of train that doesn’t exist in the real world; the inside looked like an old Victorian mansion, yet I somehow knew it was a train. The guy who owned the train was my great grandfather (I never knew or saw any of my real great grandfathers, so the character is completely made up), and he had grown very forgetful in his old age. One morning someone had cooked waffles and pancakes for breakfast. I was the last one to get up, and by that time most of the other members of the train had already eaten and were getting sick and passing out; it seemed the waffles and pancakes had been poisoned! (House influence?) For some reason, I ate some anyway, but I magically didn’t get sick.

Other members of the train blamed my great grandfather for the poisoning, and the police were called. I don’t know how the police make it onto a moving a train, but there must’ve been ways. But I knew my great grandfather was innocent; he was just forgetful, but he would never harm anyone.

Nevertheless, my great grandfather said he had a deep dark secret, he just couldn’t remember what it was. I tried questioning him, trying to find out his secret. Then I saw him on TV in old historical Nazi footage, and there he was! That was his secret: he had been a Nazi! I told him this, but he couldn’t remember whether it was true or not. But someone on the train suddenly discovered that my great grandfather’s American flag hanging on the wall was a Nazi flag on the other side!

Then I woke up, so I don’t know what happened next… but upon waking up I did realize that the notion of some old guy having secretly been a Nazi is horribly cliche. So… subconscious fail.

Mixed in there somewhere were two other random incidents: I got in a fight with one of the other passengers over seating issues, and I thought I could speak French with some French-speaking people, but they told me I was only speaking French-gibberish, which I thought was the same thing…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Philosophic dream…

I dreamt there was a woman making some sort of passionate political rant against capitalism or something. Whatever it was, I didn’t like it. But the rant itself didn’t bother me so much; what bothered me was the crowd standing around her, listening to her every word as if they were all experiencing profound epiphanies. I thought to myself: “How can these people be so blind? How can they believe this nonsense? I must stop this at once!” However, I didn’t feel like getting into some political argument or a shouting match. Fortunately I knew I had the power to fly. So I climbed a tall nearby wall, which would have been very dangerous to people who could not fly, and this instantly got some attention. Then I proclaimed to the people something like: “Stop listening to this woman, she speaks lies! Who are you going to believe? Her? Or someone who can fly?” I then stepped off the wall and floated in air. There were gasps of amazement and all who saw believed.

Afterwards, I met one person in the audience who was not impressed with my tactic. It was Foreman from House.

“You didn’t have to do it that way,” Foreman said. “It was manipulative.”

“I had to do it that way,” I replied. “Those people were too dumb to think for themselves. I wouldn’t have been able to use reason with them. They need to be manipulated. They need to see something powerful to associate their beliefs with.”

Foreman continued to disagree. And then I realized he was just acting. He was not really Foreman, he was just an actor playing Foreman. I was on the set of House, and I was supposed to be fixing the carpets. And for some reason my dog’s beds were there, for some reason I had given them to Foreman and Taub.

And then I woke up.

So some of that was nonsense, but the philosophical question remains… are some people too dumb to understand what you think is true through what you believe are rational arguments? If so, is it morally acceptable to manipulate them into agreeing with you? Especially if them not agreeing with you could have devastating effects?

By S P Hannifin, ago

Couple interesting blog posts on writing

I came across these two interesting blog posts the other day:

First there’s: The Dos and Don’ts of Your Online Presence. The post has some good advice, and summarizes at the end with:

DO:

– Have at least a rudimentary website
– Let people know a little bit about you
– Give people a way to contact you
– Blog about your life and interests

DON’T:

– Alienate your future editors and fans
– Create a digital monument to failure
– Be an unwelcome dinner guest on Twitter

I’m partly guilty of the “digital monument to failure” part. If you remember, I used to have a tally of rejections on the side of this blog, and on my wiki I kept track of who had rejected what. Fortunately I rethought this practice, though I doubt I’ve done enough for editors to really look for me. The reason I thought it was fun to track rejections was two-fold. Firstly, rejections are pretty useless otherwise; they don’t get you anywhere. If I could tally them, keep stats on them, at least I could get some use out of them, at least they’d have some effect. Secondly, I thought it might be interesting for readers of my blog to see, since we all know it happens, yet there’s not much info about how much it happens to more successful authors. I now do my submission and rejection tracking duotrope.com, which I’m sure is better. From an editor’s point of view, who wants to be reminded of a bunch of failure? Even if they can guess just about every author’s been rejected, it’s not great for your impression on a stranger, is it?

Second there’s: Pushing the Boulder: Making the leap from short story to novel. Hey, *gasp* that’s what I’m doing! As the post writer says:

I love short stories for many reasons. At a pace of roughly one story a month, I’ve been able to dabble in all sorts of different things, from fantasy, horror, and science fiction, and things that slip between the cracks. Feedback from beta readers comes faster, within days or weeks, providing encouragement and confidence for an inconsistent ego. Positive reinforcement, sooner, kept me going when I otherwise might have given up.

Like the mountain, novels are a different beast. Unless you’re sending work to faithful beta readers, chapter by chapter, it can be months or even years before your efforts are validated. It can seem insurmountable when observed from page 1, with no end in sight.

It takes a leap of faith in yourself to scale the mountain, especially for the first time. The journey will be long, uncertain and difficult, with treacherous passes and pitfalls never imagined. The risk is greater, but so is the reward.

While I sort of fear that my novel won’t be good enough when I’m finished, I’m also more afraid that I’ll just lose interest and stop writing, and it will turn into yet another failed attempt. I guess the trick is to not think about the whole novel all at once, or how long it’s going to take you. Just tackle it one little piece at a time. Really, really. Of course, easier said than done, eh?

I’ve been thinking about starting another podcast to chronicle this novel-writing attempt, mostly for my own benefit, as a way to try to keep myself on the novel-writing path. (It’s easier to blather in voice than to try to write out coherent blog posts, methinks… not that my blog posts are really all that coherent but you know what I mean chickens and ducks and stuff… oh, oops, excuse my noncoherency.) Does the world really need another writing podcast? Well, no. But it doesn’t really need another fantasy novel either, so who cares about need? Not sure if I’ll do it or not… we’ll see…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Stories and code and stuff and whatever

I hit a snag in my in-progress short story Through a Flame of Blue and Green. I realized one of my scenes is purely expositional. The information given in the scene is important for the story, but there’s no action, at least no action that’s important to the story. My natural response to this snag is to just stop writing the story until I can figure out a way to make the scene work. “But wait,” I say to myself, “just skip the scene! Come back to it later!” Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? “You just did!” I say to myself. Oh yeah! Both I and me are the same! So I’ll do that… later.

I’m still working on my Android melody generator program as well, but learning to program Android interfaces is boooooooooring, so progress is slow. However, a friend of mine recently gave me some extremely helpful feedback on the screenplay I wrote last year, The Melody Box, so I’ve been thinking about sending out another round of query letters, this time mentioning that a potential film could have the tie-in of software that does what the melody box in the screenplay does: generate melodies. Seems like both products would boost interest in each other. Not sure if that will truly interest anyone, but it’s worth a try, yes? Then I’ll get back to trying to learn how to program Android interfaces.

Other than that, I’ve been endlessly tweaking my outlines for Atarius Destroy This World. There are some tricky little issues here and there. But I’ll probably start writing on Saturday or next week. I’m kind of scared to start. I’ll have to keep saying to myself: “It’s just a rough draft. It’s allowed to be awful. Just get something down.”

By S P Hannifin, ago

Novel plotting almost done…

I’m almost done plotting my next novel attempt. I’d consider it mostly fantasy, though there are some sci-fi elements to it. It might be considered YA fantasy, since the three of the four main characters are under 18, but I hope it will be an interesting story for any age. (I’m not aiming specifically for the YA fantasy market.) I was calling it The Designers, but I am retitling it Atarius Destroy This World. I’m not sure if that will be the final title or not, but I think it has a nice ring to it… should make people wonder what it’s about.

I’m not completely done the plotting; I still want to go back over all my notes and make sure everything is consistent from the POV of each character. My current outlines call for 42 chapters, though some are very short, so I might end up combining them, and some are a bit long, so I might end up splitting them. The book will probably have an appendix that serves as a book within a book; a guide to the story’s magic system that the characters refer to near the beginning of the story.

If I succeed in actually writing this, I hope it will be the first of a long series, as I think the world holds countless story possibilities, though I probably won’t stay with the same characters. But who knows…

By S P Hannifin, ago

Misunderstanding Ayn Rand

This article was printed in our newspaper today by Michael Gerson: Ayn Rand’s adult-onset adolescence

The article touches on quite a few things, but I really wanted to comment on one thing, because it shows that Gerson might need to check his premises. He writes:

Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible.

First of all, anything can be summarized on a napkin, given that the reader understands the terms involved. But then we have to argue about semantics. What is “reason”? What is “selfishness”? What is “altruism”? What is “self-sacrifice”? I think most readers just take these terms at face value, which leads them to completely misinterpret Rand. For example, if you jump in front of a bullet to save a loved one, many would call that self-sacrifice. But if you love the person, then it’s not actually self-sacrifice, it’s an act of selfishness. Ayn Rand has nothing against you jumping in front of bullets or donating loads of money to charity, etc, if you’re doing it out of your own self-interest. And you can’t truly call yourself compassionate if you’re not doing it out of your own self-interest.

So, a little further down, Gerson writes:

If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence. Many of us experienced a few unfortunate years of invincible self-involvement, testing moral boundaries and prone to stormy egotism and hero worship. Usually one grows out of it, eventually discovering that the quality of our lives is tied to the benefit of others.

Yeah, see that last sentence? Read it again and think about it. You should see Gerson’s misunderstanding pretty easily. If the quality of your life is tied to the benefit of others, then helping them is a selfish endeavor. I guess Gerson agrees with Ayn Rand after all!

By S P Hannifin, ago

If I were the God of Education

In the comments section of this post I made a while back, someone asked the following:

Your criticism of the Khan Academy, as well as the current public educational systems, all the way from elementary schools up to college is not entirely without merit. I agree with your major premise. However, it’s always easy to criticize, but much harder to solve a problem in a constructive manner. So, with that idea in mind, what would these systems look like, if you were the God of Education, and could tailor-make them exactly to your own whim? How would they be so different from what we already have?

So here is my ideal education system…

Firstly, this answer is based on the belief that it is a waste of time for a student to be forced to study material that is unusable and uninteresting to him. This is a completely foreign concept to most people working in education, because they tend to just take the actual content for granted. Anyway, if you do not agree with this premise, I don’t expect you to agree with my thoughts that follow.

Secondly, I know there are a lot of details that would need to be figured out. One person is not going to have the complete set of solutions for how to run such a large system. There are many factors that would need tweaking. Such a complex system is not going to be perfect right out of the bag.

Thirdly, in addition to the issue of “what would the ideal education system look like?” there’s the issue of “what practical steps do we take to get there?” This post is not about figuring out those practical steps. I don’t think we could make them anyway until more people agreed with the basic premise that “it is a waste of time for a student to be forced to study material that is unusable and uninteresting to him.” Acceptance or denial of this premise should not be dependent on the practicality of implications. (Abolishing slavery had some huge economic implications, but that didn’t justify slavery.) You start with the premises, and work from there.

Fourthly, my ideal education system has more to do with abolishing and remodeling the education system as it applies to the upper-grades, as that is where I think the greatest problems lie. Remodeling kindergarten and such can come later.

Break the degree system

The ideal education institutions would talk to employers. If people are struggling to get good grades in high school so they can go to college, and if they’re going to college so they can get degrees, and if they’re getting degrees so they can get a job, why the heck are employers hardly involved in this process?

We need employers to tell schools what exact skills they want potential employees to have. Vague qualities like “creativity, agreeability, dedication, independence” obviously don’t help. What do workers actually do? There seems to have been so little communication between employers and schools that schools just teach whatever the heck they feel like, or design these weird hodge-podge curriculums that lack focus. The student ends up learning very little about whatever they might end up dedicating their life to outside of school.

From the employers’ perspective, they want to make money. Taking the time to recruit new hires is a necessary cost as old workers retire, but taking the time to actually train new workers is much more expensive, and possibly less rewarding, so why bother?

That’s why it needs to be up to the education system to teach the more basic skills that are used in a job. They’re going to have to pay employers to take some time out of their day and just talk about what exactly workers do in their company. After seeing what workers actually do, the education systems can break down how they do those things, and then teach them (I’ll get to how they should teach them in a minute).

(It’s possible that there’s an education conspiracy out there. Maybe employers do not want very many people to have high level skills so that they can have more non-independently thinking slaves who will just do what they’re told, and only a small set of elite workers can keep those higher level, higher paying jobs. If this is the case, oh well. I don’t think there’s anything practical that can be done about it. We can’t force employers to reveal all information about their inner-workings. But they’d certainly get some tougher competition with a better education system.)

Now, all that said, I’m not trying to imply that education has to be completely paycheck oriented, as if education was just some fancy training program. But it should be at least that. (After all, even in our current system, that’s what degrees are for! Unfortunately degrees have become very vague impractical ways of going about it, because of the disconnect between employers and educators.) The hope is that students would be pursuing areas that interest them, and they won’t have to have their time wasted by being forced to study things that don’t. If I want to program computer games, I shouldn’t need a long course in statistics, or how RAM works, etc. With the extra time that will give me, I can pursue other areas that interest me.

How to learn / How to teach

So, the preceding section describes where educational institutions should get their content from, the material for their curriculums; it’s guided by what employees out there actually do. (Keep in mind that university research institutions and such are also employers.)

I think just having curriculums designed that way would improve education immensely, but we can and should go further.

Keep in mind our original premise, that the student should not be forced to study information he does not need or has no interest in. How does a student get a job after school? He must demonstrate that he has the skills the employer is seeking, and perhaps has even more skills than the employer is seeking. Schools need to realize that a student getting hired is ultimately completely up to the student. Therefore, schools shouldn’t force students to learn anything. If students choose to learn nothing, or try to skip necessary skills, they won’t get employed and they’ll have to go back and get those skills. There’s no reason for the education institution to have pre-requisites or credit requirements.

But we need to go further still. The current learning fashion involves a teacher standing in front of a class, blathering about his subject of expertise, giving out exercises and tests to students, and then grading them. This is a pathetic and archaic way to learn.

Firstly, the relationship between the teacher and student needs to be more open. Lectures make sense if the teacher needs to talk to a bunch of students at once (and such lectures can always be recorded or written in book form; it’s a waste of time for teachers to keep giving the same lectures over and over). Class time should be conversation time between the teacher and the student, an opportunity for a student to interact with someone who knows the field the student is interested in.

Furthermore, teachers do not need to be in the business of assigning exercises or tests or quizzes or keeping grades. A student might request an exercise if he’s having trouble understanding something, but it’s not up to the teacher to command it. After all, the education institution is for the student. (This will probably be a new paradigm for most teachers, and they might not want to relinquish so much control. If so, tough! They have to! If they are snobs who think they are imparting grand life-changing truths upon their students, they’ll just have to get over themselves. No man should become a teacher out of love of control.) Grades are unneeded because the only true assessment that matters is whether or not the student can get a job afterwards. (If employers are using grades as a gatekeeper to determine potential employers, they’ll just have to change their ways; too many flaws in the current system. And if hardly any schools are giving out grades and degrees, employers won’t have a choice. It’s not up to them.)

Since after school students will need to be able to demonstrate their skills to potential employers, I suggest students learn skills by applying them to self-directed (but teacher-guided) projects. For example, if I want to learn programming, I would involve myself in a programming project of some sort; probably something small at first. A teacher would give advice and answer questions that come up while I am working on the project. If I want to study calculus, I might do a project detailing how an extra planet in the solar system might orbit the sun or something. Or maybe I’d write a book detailing how to calculate the journey of the Voyager. The point would be to create something (not just read books and watch lectures; those don’t necessarily require synthesis) that demonstrates skill and conceptual understanding. Because the projects would be student-directed, the student’s interest is implied.

Conclusion

So, in the end, this is project-based learning, with an emphasis on employer-based skills. In place of homework, students work on projects that interest them. In place of grades and degrees, students produce projects which can be shown to potential employers. In place of weekly lectures, students talk to teachers about their projects.

You might say: “hmmm, some students will not be smart enough to do this.” Well then they can go die. Um, no, I didn’t mean it! But they certainly shouldn’t spoil it for everyone else. They can go to some special program where someone else tells them what to do and what to think, etc. Give them a magic eight ball or something. They can decide their fates with a shake shake shake. They don’t need to be going to school.

I know there would still be plenty of finer details to figure out and problems to solve with this education system, but that’s the overview of my ideal.

Also, there’s of course plenty of room for students who want to employ themselves and start their own businesses; I’m not trying to imply that all students will want to work for someone else after school. Wouldn’t a project done during school time while you’re still learning be the best time to start building the foundations of a new business?

By S P Hannifin, ago

Melody project: the great reprogramming – update 7

Whew, I can’t believe it’s Friday already. This week I’ve been mostly learning Android programming. I played around with some OpenGL graphics programming for Android a year and a half ago, but that experience is really no help for what I want to do now. So I’ve been going through a book on Android programming and playing around with some examples. There’s a lot to learn, so I’m not sure how long this will take, but I’ve only got 8 more weeks until my leave of absence from Animation Mentor ends, so I hope it won’t take too long… even though there are features I still want to add to my melody generator, I wouldn’t mind releasing it as it is (at a small cost) if I end up running out of time. So my priority now is programming an Android interface for the program.

And that is all I have to say at this moment.

Happy Easter!

By S P Hannifin, ago

Skip the boring parts

I got some awesome writing advice last week: skip the boring parts. I’ve been always trying to write in a mostly completely linear fashion. But so often I get stuck or bored, and end up starting a new story. I’ve known there were people out there who wrote their stories out of order, but that didn’t seem like a good idea to me; seemed like it would be too easy to create discontinuities if you end up changing your mind about plot details. But I missed the main advantage of skipping: staying interested and excited in your own work. After all, when I think about writing a story, my mind jumps to the climactic arguments or the more interesting decisions the characters make. Makes more sense to write those scenes first and get them out of your head while they still excite you, and then building up to them can be easier and more interesting. You can edit them later if you need to. And it’s not like you have to skip huge important chunks. (If there are huge important chunks that have no interesting parts worth writing, then maybe they shouldn’t be in the story anyway?) Just skipping a couple introductory paragraphs can be enough to get the mind interested.

So a few days ago I finally finished another short story rough draft called The Final Dream of Samuel Shadows, and skipping around helped a lot. I’m looking forward to trying it with some of my other partly-written short stories, and eventually my novel, which I hope I can start in a month or two, whenever I can finish the plotting and planning of it…

Oh, and if you don’t mind some blatant self-promotion, I also got a little mention for my first published short story on this blog post reviewing December 2010 DSF stories… ego stroke…

A new moon in the sky marks the coming of a new Wizard King in “Maker of the Twenty-First Moon” by Sean Patrick Hannifin (debut 12/15). The wizard kings of the past were all tyrants. Jonlen and Slip have suspected Torkwill of wanting to be the next. A legend speaks of a wizard king’s only moment of vulnerability, on the night they make a moon.

“Maker” is a story with two sides. Torkwill wants to make the world a better place and shares the event with his son. Jonlen and Slip wish to take no chances, breaking into the wizard’s home to drag him into the forest. They refuse to heed the wizard’s warnings, Jonlen sure they are nothing but a bluff. He wants to make sure history is not repeated, even if he is the catalyst for past mistakes.

This story is rather good. It had an outcome I predicted but it was never obvious. Torkwill is convincing as a man trying to save his own life with Jonlen’s perspective. Not too bad.

By S P Hannifin, ago

Making a list… checking it once…

There are still plenty of features I’d like to give my melody generator eventually, but there are only certain features I think really need to be a part of my melody generator before I work on getting it out there for the world to play around with (in the form of an Android app). So here’s what I hope to work on before I try selling it:

1. – A couple minor changes to the main algorithm. (And fix that bug mentioned in the last post.)
2. – The ability to write 8-bar and 16-bar melodies.
3. – The ability to compose in any key.
4. – The ability to write a melody in major or minor.
5. – The ability to let the user decide the chord progression.
6. – The ability to let the user decide the ending note.
7. – The ability to let the user decide the tempo.
8. – The ability to write a melody in 2/4, 4/4, 3/4, or 6/8.
9. – Create an Android interface for all this.

Obviously there are other features I’d like my program to have eventually (more bar amount possibilities, more time signatures, key changes within a melody, etc.), but they can wait until the program is actually out there and on the market.

By S P Hannifin, ago