Old posts

Over the weekend Best Buy had a great deal on a really slow Gateway laptop computer, somewhere around $300. So my brother and my father and I split the bill and bought the thing, which I’ll be able to take to school on Mondays and Wednesdays. It will help me stay awake in class.

Oh, I also got Dr. Robert Epstein’s The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen from my university’s library (I had them order it). If you look at the reviews on Amazon, you’ll see the reviewers tend to either love it (5 stars) or hate it (1 star). I’m only about 40 pages into it, but I think I’ll be on the love side. (Though most of the bad reviews seem to have something to do with one point the author makes about corporal punishment… they are probably completely missing the point of the book, but I haven’t reached that part in the book yet.) I couldn’t agree more with some of the negative opinions mentioned about the modern schooling system.

One thing you might not even think about, especially when actually going to elementary school, is how students are split up for the most part entirely by age, and that determines your curriculum for a year. Does that really make any sense? Does it come from an attempt to make the dumb kids not so jealous of the smarter ones? While I can imagine that could be a real issue in education, I don’t think making the smarter children suffer for it is a good idea. (And, for the record, I do not really believe “slow learner = dumb”.)

Who decides on the curriculum anyway? A vast majority of what is taught remains unused and is forgotten, making the teaching of it a waste of time. Why do so many dedicate their lives to continuing the cycle without question? Jay Leno likes to go around and make fools of people who do not know trivial facts, but, besides some politics related trivia, do the answers really matter? I might be considered an idiot if I didn’t know what photosynthesis was, but knowing it doesn’t really gain me anything. A student’s interest should guide their curriculum to a greater extent, but first ending useless curriculum material is a greater priority. There is no such thing as learning for the sake of learning. Learning for the sake of interest, yes. Nobody goes around reading everything they get their hands on, it would be impossible. Instead, what we choose to read is guided by our interests. I know adults might be scared that without a school and busy work, children would just watch TV all the time, but if their interests are supported, I think most students would be quite motivated to learn and work quite a lot.

“I like to see their eyes light up when they finally figure something out,” said a teacher once upon a time. This reason is inappropriate for becoming a teacher. The subject of what you’re teaching should be more important then how students look at you.

“This plays DVDs really slow… it keeps having to buffer.”
“You mean you have to be connected to the Internet everytime you want to watch a DVD?!”

I finally finished writing [the rough draft of] Chapter 13 of The Game of Gynwig, my epic “children’s” fantasy novel. I’m still not very far along; the addition of Chapter 13 puts the book at 37,000 words so far, so it’s still not even a novel yet. By my last outline, there will be 60 chapters, but I’m sure that will change as my plans for the rest of the book continue to change chapter by chapter. I find it’s much more exciting to write when I use the outline as a guide but start out each chapter as if I don’t know where the story will go… that way the story can still surprise me and it makes the actual writing less boring. Unfortunately it means I have to redo my outline after every chapter. Whew.

As I was driving to weekly time-wasting (college), I heard some excellent music on the classical radio (the less art your kids get, the more it shows) so when I got to my university I looked up the radio’s playlist and discovered the music I enjoyed so much was Respeghi’s 2nd “Ancient Airs and Dances” Suite for orchestra. Seems the old composer stole, I mean used old lute melodies and orchestrated them for an orchestra. The end results sound wonderful, especially that last movement of Suite No 2. I was able to check out the album from my university’s library, one of the only good things about being at a university.

In other news, one of my old high school English teachers had his book published! According to the school’s website, the book is being published by PublishAmerica! A vanity press… I am afraid that is not exactly much of an achievement… their website excited me a couple years ago, but after a bit of research one can see it’s a very misleading company. Be warned! Now, that doesn’t mean the company is necessarily bad if you know what you’re getting into. PublishAmerica will publish just about anyone, despite what their website may say, so don’t feel too accomplished if they accept your novel. And they’re probably not going to really edit it like a real publishing company would. They will not spend any money to promote your book either, other than listing it on its website, so you, the author, will have to do all the marketing yourself… so it’s basically a lot like self-publishing.

Last time I looked into it (about 1.5 years ago or so, maybe things have changed) the company would publish your book free of charge, but request that you tell friends and family members about your book so they could buy it. It was then their money that truly paid for the print-on-demand publishing. If you really got published by a real publishing company, you’d get free copies to hand out to loved ones.

So… hopefully my old English teacher didn’t get tricked (maybe it’s a different “publishamerica”?) and for now I’ll spare this blog a rant about how useless and wasteful high school English classes is… er… are. But someday…

Anyway, check out Writer Beware for all your publishing warning needs. And Google “PublishAmerica hoax” for more warning tales.

I’m still working on my fantasy novel, I’ll have an update about that tomorrow… or the next day.

At Quicktime.com a teaser trailer for the next Batman movie, The Dark Knight has been added. It’s the worst teaser I’ve ever seen, there’s absolutely no content at all! It includes only the Batman symbol breaking apart with some voice clips. Whoever forced whoever is in charge of trailer-making to make this trailer is foolish. They just forced the creation of the worst movie trailer of all time.

I bet the movie will be a lot of fun though, it will have some good dialogue…

And it doesn’t come out until July 2008… I’ll be out of college by then! Woohoo!

I finished reading Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes today. (Took me long enough, it was quite an easy read.) I love Bradbury’s style and the plot itself was great, fantastical, and memorable, but in the eternal words of a cartoon George Lucas “he didn’t really capture Something Wicked… the way I would have.” As I said, the book was a quick read, but I think it might have been better if it were a slower read… I mean, if there were more details, more delicious style to savor, more insight into what the characters are thinking and what they’re going through and what they choose and how they change. Then again, it really wouldn’t match Bradbury’s rhetoric style to do such a thing, but still, the book conjures ideas for stories in my mind with similar themes yet a much different handling of them. In the end, it’s certainly one of the better books I’ve read this year.

I randomly chose my next book: Eyes of Silver by Michael A. Stackpole. This does not look like it will be a quick read at all, at least not for slow-reading me. It’s 450 pages with small text and thin pages. I’m almost through with the prologue and I’m already confused… too many names and history and information… isn’t Stackpole supposed to be against prologues?

Oh well, bit by bit, putting it together, only way to make a work of art…

I’m still working on that novel I began back in November 2006… soon it will have been a year, and I’m not even half way done. But, oh well, at least I haven’t given up.

I got two books out of the library today, one called “Plot & Structure” and one called “Character, Emotion & Viewpoint”. My goal with these books is not to study them really hard and apply everything they say to my novel, my hope is that I can read through a chapter or two before I begin writing just for some ideas and some inspiration… not the corny kind of spiritual inspiration, but the excited “I want to try that” inspiration, like when you see a behind-the-scenes look at the making of some movie or TV show and you say to yourself, “geez, anyone could do that kind of work, I want to try that!”

Also, the books may very well give me some material to blather about! Woohoo!

I recently asked my university’s library to order this book called The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen by Dr. Robert Epstein. (I recently blogged about an article featuring his ideas in “Stuff I Found”.) The book looks very interesting, especially since it seems to echo, in some respects, arguments I’ve made earlier somewhere in this blog about the uselessness of the teenage education system.

Speaking about useless education systems, I’m taking a required computer science course this semester having to do with computer architecture in which we learn how a processor and such process instructions, such as assembly instructions. This course is a perfect example of a complete and utter waste of my time. If there’s a job out there that requires this sort of knowledge, I don’t want it. There is no good reason for this course to be required, many of us CS majors will get along fine without it for the rest of our lives. There is no good purpose for making this course a requirement. This, like many other courses, are a complete waste of my time and tuition! But it’s not just the universities that I think are to blame, it’s the industry… the companies who hire graduates with a BS in computer science. Instead of searching for actual signs of a skill in something, they seem to put more emphasis on a piece of paper representing that you got a C or better in a bunch of courses.

The professor went around the room of and asked each of us why were in the course. Some students were genuinely interested in the subject… good for them, somebody’s gotta carry on doing this nitty-gritty work in the future! Some students seemed to fake answers to please the professor. I, like about a third or a fourth of the class, was honest and said I was there because it was a required course. The professor didn’t seem very pleased, I’m sure he’d rather be teaching students who cared a bit more. Oh well.

To continue ranting…

I once asked in a game programming forum which was more important, a degree or a portfolio? Obviously a portfolio should be more important, but employers for some reason don’t always agree. According to this website:

the asker is showing his laziness, trying to find a way to get out of having to have both a portfolio and a degree. And the asker has the naïve belief that there is a cut-and-dried preference for one over the other. Life just ain’t that simple!

Not doing something that is not needed is not laziness. But unfortunately the answerer is correct in that there is no cut-and-dried preference… but there should be, and it’s employers’ fault that there’s not and it’s because of them I’m stuck in some boring class wasting my time and energy. Life is very simple, it’s just not easy.

Why are so many people so scared to admit that most of the stuff learned in high school and college is useless? I feel like I’m countering the evil of Ayn Rand’s “secondhanders” … I guess because I am.

Maybe it has to do with red hair.

I’m commuting to college this semester… started this Monday. I’m only taking four courses this semester and I was able to schedule them so that I only have to go to school on Mondays and Wednesdays. Walking around campus knowing you don’t have to stay there all month, or even all day, makes the place feel much more… “free”. It’s awesome. I’m not trapped!

So, if you are considering commuting to college, even though it may annoy your family, it is much much better than being stuck in a dorm.

Ah…

Last night I was happily working on my computer. I had heard earlier on the radio that a severe thunderstorm was on its way. The sky looked fine to me, so what did I care? Then, a couple hours later… zzzzt. My computer flickers and restarts and I lose most of what I’m working. Two seconds later thunder crashes in the distant mountains. (Okay, actually there are no mountains near here, and the thunder wasn’t distant.) So I shut my computer down and sadly call it a night. How am I supposed to get any work done if these stupid thunderstorms keep coming? I only blog this becuse I just heard thunder rumble in the distant mountains and if it gets closer my computer’s power will get farther away (because I’ll unplug it). I was relieved when the power flickered and restarted my computer yesterday that it didn’t wipe its memory or blow it up.

Tomorrow is the first day of college and I’m commuting from home, woohoo!

Oh, and please don’t believe wrong things about the Coriolis force.

Finally, here’s my humble little review of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind. Just my opinions of course; it’s much easier to be a critic than a book author, and I’m not sure why anyone would care too much anyway.

I’ll start off with what I didn’t like about the book: everything. Just kidding! I just wanted to see your reaction, you should’ve seen the look on your face. To be honest, I thought the main character, Kvothe, was arrogant. *gasp* (Picky, picky, picky.) I think if I were to meet him in person he might want to lecture me on how much I don’t understand him. He is quite fond of mentioning how much he doubts others can understand such-and-such… for example:

Asking to hold a musician’s instrument is roughly similar to asking to kiss a man’s wife. Nonmusicians don’t understand. -Page 219

If you cannot understand why I couldn’t bring myself to tell them this, then I doubt you have ever been truly poor. -Page 340

If you have never been desperately poor, I doubt you can understand the relief I felt. -Page 407

“Listen, I’ve had an exceptionally irritating couple of days, my head hurts in ways you don’t have the full wit to understand, and I have a friend who might be in trouble.” -Page 590

I laid my lute case down beside the bench and absentmindedly flipped open the lid, thinking my lute might enjoy the feeling of a little sun on its strings. If you aren’t a musician, I don’t expect you to understand. -Page 602

If you have never been deep underground, I doubt you can understand what it is like. -Page 644

“What you don’t understand,” I explained to Simmon one afternoon as we sat under the pennant pole, “is that men fall for Denna all the time.” -Page 652

If you have never read this book, I doubt you can understand what I feel. But seriously, saying that you doubt someone can understand something is a bit worthless. If you truly believe it, then don’t try to describe what you want. This sense I get from Kvothe is why he seems a bit arrogant… assuming that I can’t understand him. Okay, he’s not really talking to me, he’s technically talking to some other characters in the book, but all the same it’s not a quality I like to see in other people, doubting I can understand them if I’m not poor or a musician… just describe what you want and be done with it! Doubting I can understand something gains nothing, except to proclaim your own arrogance! I’m being picky of course.

Ah, you say, what about this?

“Why can’t it be described?” I asked. “If you understand a thing, you can describe it.”

“Can you describe all the things you understand?” he looked sideways at me.

“Of course.”

Elodin pointed down the street. “What color is that boy’s shirt?”

“Blue.”

“What do you mean by blue? Describe it.”

I struggled for a moment, failed…

-Page 617

That’s some nice dialogue, but it’s not what I was talking about. My point was not that Kvothe should’ve described everything, my point was that saying something like this is worthless: “The shirt was blue. If are blind, I doubt you can understand. Blind people don’t understand.” Just say the shirt was blue, and leave it at that.

And this annoys me:

“Some of these young men from the court come in, fanning their faces and moaning about the latest tragedy. But their feet are so pink and soft. You know they’ve never walked anywhere on their own. You know they’ve never really been hurt.”

-A shoe seller, page 207

Arrogant shoe seller, assuming to know what other people have been through! Seriously, I find it quite horribly arrogant when people claim that others have never felt pain. Physical pain, it may be true, but emotional pain is far far worse and everyone feels it, it’s part of being human. It doesn’t matter if you’re the richest person in the world or a poor homeless guy with hunger pains. It’s true, some people whine more than others, and it’s tempting to say to them “oh, give me a break, you don’t know real pain!” but that’s just as whiny. Of course, this is a minor character in the book talking, so he can be wrong all he wants, but there are people in real life who talk like this. And just because someone is happy rather than sad doesn’t mean his life is “easier”. So please never assume that someone else doesn’t suffer, just because he’s rich and his feet are pink. Even a shoe seller doesn’t know what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes.

(You can see why this blog is called “Blather”.)

And to be really picky:

“No, I do not envy her her life. Nor do I judge her.” -Page 473

I’m just not sure that’s correct grammar… is it? Her her?

Here’s some more arrogance:

Small towns, rural inns, those places didn’t know good entertainment from bad. Your fellow performers did. -Page 106

How can one not know good entertainment? Isn’t the determining factor whether or not it’s entertaining? Is there anybody out there who can not sense whether or not they’re entertained? Picky picky me…

Now for some less picky criticism… the book overall didn’t have enough central conflict for me. After the main character’s family is killed, Kvothe just kind of struggles to survive without any big goal. I didn’t get a sense of any big driving force in the book, nothing that would keep me reading if I didn’t have the predetermined drive to finish everything I read whether or not I want to. (Being a wannabe writer myself, I can learn quite a lot from fiction I don’t necessarily like, as long as it’s in my kind of genre, like fantasy.) Throughout the novel, there was little at stake for Kvothe. His only real drive is his natural interest in the Chandrian, which itself seems rather subsidiary to his interest in learning the name of the wind and in a certain girl.

But I suppose something is just strange with me since most reviews I have seen have been much more favorable…

And now for what I did like: I am not a big fan of poetry, but this book has the best poetry I have seen in a fantasy book (not that I’ve seen that much). It is far superior to Tolkien’s lame attempts. This is good, because at one part in the novel Kvothe ridicules another character’s attempt at poetry in a very humorous way… “I know limping verse when I hear it,” I said. “But this isn’t even limping. A limp has rhythm. This is more like someone falling down a set of stairs. Uneven stairs. With a midden at the bottom.”

I also very much liked Mr. Rothfuss metaphors (which makes me wonder why Kvothe has to say things about not understanding so often, when he at least has Rothfuss’s talent for metaphors to go with). For example:

Go out in the early days of winter, after the first cold snap of the season. Find a pool of water with a sheet of ice across the top, still fresh and new and clear as glass. Near the shore the ice will hold you. Slide out farther. Farther. Eventually you’ll find the place where the surface just barely bears your weight. There you will feel what I felt. The ice splinters under your feet. Look down and you can see the white cracks darting through the ice like mad, elaborate spiderwebs. It is perfecly silent, but you can feel the sudden sharp vibrations through the bottoms of your feet.

This is what happened when Denna smiled at me.

Mmmmm, delicious writing in my opinion, no? Isn’t that better than saying “If you have never had Denna smile at you, then I doubt you can understand,” though Kvothe was probably thinking it.

Overall, I’ll definitely have to read the next books in this trilogy, and perhaps even everything else Rothfuss ends up writing, but I do hope things improve story-drive wise, and it would be nice if Kvothe stopped seeming so arrogant, but that is unlikely to change since it is now part of his character… but it’s really hard to read a book when you feel like arguing with the main character, ya know?

You can check out Rothfuss’s blog here. He is a witty blogger, I actually prefer reading his blog rather than his book… *gasp*

Well, that’s that! Now I can return the book to the library… (*gasp* I didn’t even pay for the book!!)