Author: admin

The word of the day is: Anondyne (serving to alleviate pain)

The World of the Day is: Minecraft

Xantheum 6

This would be nothing like Xantheum 3. He knew this as absolutely as he knew the snug fit of the headset would result in neck pain if he didn’t log off in under four hours. These were truths. Xantheum 6 felt right. Of course Xantheum 4 fel right as well. She’d even said so on that first day. By the 18th week her resolve had hardened into something else entirely. The world didn’t last long after that.

Xantheum 6 started him at -198, 64, 123. He considered going for 0, but the way the sun was creeping towards the horizon told him to hunker down, find some sheep, and manage to sleep through the night.

Gregory’s worlds were built on the principle of one life one world. Once a character died that world died with him. Xantheum 1 had lasted two years in this fashion. Xantheum 2 was where he found her, and they thrived for a long time–even after the update that added raiders to their virtual world. Xantheum 3 hadn’t worked the same. This world, however, felt promising. Already he’d found a vein of coal that would power light through the gloom of evening and on through the next day.

As Gregory hacked through his fourth tree he felt a gentle buzz fill his temples. A message filtered through his console. It read: Are you playing again? –Alena. He didn’t respond. This world would certainly be different. Off at the edges of his vision he could see the block outline of a jungle biome. That was promising. Even if he didn’t find an abandoned Temple the wildlife alone created opportunities he hadn’t seen in many worlds.

The buzz filled his head again. Another message: Can I play? –Alena. He deleted this along with the first. Afterwards he set a pile of dirt into a circle shape. He used the wood he harvested to manifest a door and a worktable. This left space for a bed and a small clearing within the raised circle for the beginnings of a staircase into the earth. The roof remained open to the night sky and he ringed the circle with torches.

3rd message: Please? — A.

He didn’t bother to delete this one. Instead he lay in his newly crafted bed staring at the night sky. There were shapes moving up there among the clouds and anodyne dots of light masquerading as stars. He thought about each of those dots, how each of them could be seen as a new world; a new Xantheum. The beauty of these worlds was that they could become anything he wanted them to be, so long as he remained in control.

Writing is my life.

There, I said it. This has always been the truth of the matter, but over the last two weeks I have been extremely limited in my capacity to write and that taught me a lesson about the value of writing. In short, life without creation is crap. There is a hole that is there when I am not writing that I believe makes me a darker person. I ended up playing a few hours of minecraft and watching tv shows as a way to fill that void, but it didn’t. Instead I just dealt with it the way I deal with all things: cross-addiction. Find the feeling in another way.

But it isn’t the same feeling. Often I don’t know if I have one true story to tell, but I do know that it matters to me to tell stories and to shape narratives around dynamic characters who, often, are reflections of the people in my sphere. It is a catharsis to come to the page and unload these things. It fills me with a sense of wonder to imagine that someone somewhere might actually read a thing I wrote and smile for a minute or at least feel for a minute–even if they hate it they felt something at that is what matters.

As I sit here at my ever-evolving work station griping my shoulder in the hopes that the pressure will ease the pain, I find myself hopeful and wishing for a time where the words will flow more naturally and more often and that slow trickle of production will give way to what I intend: a lifestyle.

What would that look like? Well, I wake up and take a walk (hopefully with my partner, ,but it is early so…) then we sit and have coffee and talk about our day and our lives. Then I go to the workstation and I grind out the words for a few hours (many writers suggest 4 hours at first sit, but I like 2) and then we move into the other aspects of our day for a while before I return to the page for another burst of the fiction.

After long over forty years I’ve only figured out what the first half of a magical day would look like. I’ve also discovered that this day is built so that it can take place anywhere–any city, any shore, any orbit should that one day become an option (at this point it would take Alien intervention, which I do not expect in the next 1000 years and when they do come they will likely appear in the form of signals and software first–things that can be transmitted by wave and understood once we discover a universal programming language which shouldn’t be a terribly strange concept, but somehow always is).

What is next for me is to sit with my mate and discover what the rest of that day looks like. It is to be our grand adventure.

I ought to talk about the Madden season. This is not going well. I started the season with the hope that the team I picked up in shambles after a ten year sim would have a thrilling second year with me at the helm. It has been thrills indeed. Lost once (badly) to one of my kids and realized that I didn’t have the secondary to compete. So I went out and traded for some speed. That hasn’t worked well thus far, because now our run defense is junk. Our run game is junk too with the seemingly useless trade for the oft injured Saqoun Barkley at the end of his professional tether and the move of my powerback to fullback and the acquisition of another speedback. None of that has proven to add up to big wins. In fact, we’ve been scraping by in games. We give up leads and then need to come back in the 4th on plays I know the CPU struggles to stop.

The main issue here is the QB situation. Zach Vick (who the system continues to call Mike Vick and it is odd because this is the Falcons) is in a contract year. He wanted 120 million and he is only an 83 (sometimes 84 and sometimes 82 depending on the game). I wound up having to trade him because he went three games in a row with 1 total td and 9 picks–only two were risky throws the rest didn’t go anywhere near where the ball was supposed to. Play for your contract, man.

I found some kid named McKnight who I got for a backup center and a swap of first rounders. He may not be the long term answer, but he is cheap and he will help me finish out this season. I expect I’ll go 13-3 with one more loss on the books after the CPU threw me a bad beating in Vick’s last game. The new kid is making tutty’s and limiting turnovers to one or maybe 2 a game. He isn’t going to win games for me, but he isn’t going to lose them either. I will go into the playoffs with an improved D and hopes of a gameplan to stop the one son of mine in the NFC. Should be interesting to see if I can come up with a plan to stop his speedy TE. That’s the entire show there–A TE, a QB and a WR. It’s basically KC and I gotta be the big bad bucs. We shall see…

Some Thoughts:

1. One of those days… My work computer just died. It froze, so I turned it off and now it refuses to turn back on. So, that happened. I am working now from a backup machine I bought a few years ago as a DJ computer for my bday. I never got the thing outfitted and now it just gets passed around to people who need it or serves as a desktop-style backup. Apparently now it is my main deck.
2. Baseball contracts are out of control.

The mind is the key to everything. It is how we process information. It is how we experience the world. It is–if there is a soul–the linking mechanism between that soul and the body. The mind is a biological machine that needs to be maintained. It is also a mechanism that can be completely derailed and broken. Those who commit suicide do so because that mechanism is so out of whack that the halting state feels like a better idea than continuing. Unfortunately the brain is not a non-biological machine. It cannot be rebooted. That is not to say there are not other ways to dive under the hood and get the thing working right.

Doing so is important. One of the ways I do it is through watching shows and reading books. I know, garbage in, garbage out right? I don’t always watch the best stuff or read things that make me a better writer or person. Often I watch and read junk and that still makes me feel good. The idea that it makes me feel good is part of this diving under the hood.

I’m learning how the machinery of my brain works. Along the way I am discovering myself and discovering a path of less stress.

Spent some time with a chiropractor today. She had nothing good to say about my spinal health. I suppose part of my problem is how I live: I write, I play games, and I teach online–all from a position that has me looking down at a screen. I’m doing that right now in fact, and I can feel it through all of the neck and shoulder areas that have been hurting over the past week. The numbness has lessened at least.

The next step is to continue navigating the nightmarish health care network and try to find in-network support. It is tough. Everyone wants one of those FSA accounts and I only very recently discovered what that even was. Turns out I don’t have one. Turns out that is how most of these outfits get paid. Sigh. Well, at least some of the cracking helped.

I’ve been taking morning walks. I go at least a mile each day and today I did more than that. The experience gives me a chance to get my blood flowing and feels like a darn nice way to start the day. Ideally I’d follow that up with coffee and writing, but I have not gotten that far yet. I have parents who don’t have healthy habits and have lived into their 60’s and seventies. I believe I can be that prosperous in life if I just continue moving towards the right way.

Some Thoughts:

1. For the first time in my life I don’t have the vaguest concept of who or where I will be in five years. There is a part of me that believes I will be somewhere dark and utterly alone.
   1. Started work on ‘The Lab’ and discovered in the process that I lost one of my music cases in the move. I do not know how so much was lost in the move but I know that I lost far more than I would’ve thought possible. It sucks to have lost so much history, but it is helping me shed weight. The less I need to carry, the easier it is to move from place to place.

On occasion I want to sit and talk about the technique of story. Lately I’ve been listening to The Stand, an epic by Stephen King. There are moments in this story that are absolutely brilliant simply because of how they are constructed. There are small moments, such as when he moves from the internal character voice to the external voice and the two are not the same and through that we get characterization. This is accomplished in a simple matter. He may write for example:

She asked, “What is that look on your face?” Tom saw it all going badly then. He thought about the many ways that he could explain the way he was looking at her; the possibilities through which he could explain away that hunger. Out loud he said, “You have something on your chin.”

See how the above presents a contrast that makes the scene more dynamic?

I’ve been thinking about those scene dynamics (ooh! that is now the official title of my eventual book on writing). I’ve been thinking about how I want to return to the world of fantasy but bring that modern sense of writing to the stage there and create a feel that at once shows you ‘this is not our when’ but feels familiar all the same. I’ve been thinking on this for months now as I get deeper and deeper into the sci fi writing that I am doing. It is so very different in concept than the fantasy from whence I started.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m serious about the Scene Dynamics thing… If y’all steal it I will point to this blog.
2. On a personal note, the neck pain is horrendous. I’m excited to try to get in to a chiropractor tomorrow.

Been spending a little time on wallstreet bets reddit and it is very interesting. I know that there are industry bots in the system logging info and using it to further the algorithms for the largest hedge funds. This is all part of the interesting side of the situation. As this GME thing spreads to other stocks I find myself riding a strange wave. I am invested in marijuana (been getting legalized everywhere and the people are feeling it) and the reddit found its way back into the news for talking about that market. So, My stock tripled and then dove deep. What happened? Options trading. The algorithm got involved and was used maliciously to stop a rally that would hurt those in a short position. Hedge funds love the short.

I don’t know how to use this yet. I am writing something corporate and all of this falls into my deepening understanding of the systems. Still, I think the real fun is reapplying those systems to other things. Often biological or semi-biological things. What will that be for my writing? Not sure yet, but that is part of this blog. This is the part where you get to see the beginning of a story before it is hardened by characters and situations.

Some Thoughts:

1. The Saga Continues… My pinched nerve continues to plague my life and limit my ability to function. I will be seeking medical aid in the next few days.
2. Madden. Still fun. Minecraft. Still takes me to that zen place.

Freewrite Friday is going to be postponed until tomorrow because I don’t have it in me today. I drove across the desert back home to AZ from a brief vacation in California during which I learned a lot about my life and my relationship. I also discovered how difficult it is to write with a pinched nerve in your neck. These blogs are the most I can muster in a sitting position before I start to tear up. No, I’m not being dramatic. This is bad enough that I am locked into full desperation mode, looking for the cure. I’m going to see a chiropractor as soon as one can get me in.

I’m going to see a lot more than that. Used to be a time where I thought I could solve all the ills in my life on my own. I don’t feel that anymore. In truth I feel lost and at risk of losing what I’ve built. That is all I can really say about all that right now. I’m going to take time to think about things and talk things out and really get a handle on how I’ve become mostly everything I’ve hated.

Self loathing aside, I am finding moments of real writerly inspiration. I’ve watched good tv, done good reading/listening, and I am more focused now than ever on sharpening my brain. The forties are extremely rough. For a while they’ve felt like an exit from this world. I want them to start feeling like a reentry.

Some Thoughts:

1. My curiosity about the Mass Effect remaster turned to disappointment when I learned that all they really did was reshoot a few shots and rebalance a few AI things. They decided to use the extended cut ending as the main ending, which fails to really address the issues with the ending that most of us had. Blech.
2. Yes, I want to play it all again anyway.

What if we decided to raise AI?

What if we made the choice to culture AI based on ourselves in the way we culture algorithms to respond to our shopping and searching habits? Cultured AI would be a gateway to a new form of interspecies relationship similar to the companionship we seek from our animals. While AI are not ‘true life forms’ as of yet they are already at the responsive capacity to understand who we are and respond in ways that make us feel better. These digital children would be embedded with base code and learning algorithms which would allow for the end user to ‘teach’ it based on the users behaviors. We could sequence program digital behaviors based on what the user inputs as needs as we already do through some of the more complex dating apps.

I don’t know if this is already underway, but it is an idea I will be pursuing in future writing. I have stories on tap that would be really enhanced by this technology and in fact I have stories I want to tell about this type of technology and how it would impact community. I started thinking about this because of the upcoming conference on humans and AI. I believe I will pitch on the subject. I believe I have something to say here–something worth writing about as well. Virtual Children may not end up being the title, but the idea is one that has a lot of steam behind it in my mind. You will hear more of this from me soon.

Let me write Madden 22. The story has not been good for years. The organization is too focused on showing the ins and outs of the new game mechanics through story and less so on telling the actual story of a professional athlete. We have to start looking at the Madden story as an opportunity that interacts with the gameplay but is not guided by it. Here’s one example of what I mean:

What if the player starts at the YOUTH level and builds up from the playground to the middle school to exposing the reality of High School recruiting and then exposing the reality of College recruiting? After a college run in which our protagonist has a chance to switch positions, we are led into the updated combine and draft process and finally the player is packaged in an actual downloadable draft class.

What I am talking about is a process that alights the possibilities of the college game and also moves us into a pro career that can be played as a version of the franchise mode. This is all about possibilities and I think the game has been too limited and stagnant for way too long. It is time for Madden to step up and become something of actual value as opposed to something complained about to the point where the designers are forced to make changes. Believe me when I tell you that nobody wants to be forced to change. It puts a shadow over the whole thing. However, if this is all Madden is going to ever be then it comes down to accepting and living with that or moving on. Soon the fans will have somewhere else to go…