Ran Prieur

September 24.

2018-09-24T12:20:37Z

September 24. Three links about slowing down. Myst, one of the most influential games ever, turns 25:

Prior to Myst, if you said "adventure game," a PC owner might see... third-person view, inventory, copious dialog (often funny), lots of characters, constant peril, verb-based interface. Myst did away with all of that. It was Spartan, lonely, calm, and low-stakes.

Why athletes need a 'quiet eye'. Every sport is different in where the athletes look, but in every case, "the better the player, the longer and steadier their gaze" at the key moment, and "the expert athlete actually slowed down their thinking."

Slow Reading: the antithesis of speed reading:

It's related to the concept of a 'close reading' - a technique used in critical analysis where the reader pays close attention to details. With slow reading, the reader consciously slows their reading speed down. Slow reading can help you understand the piece better - and it can help you enjoy it more.

In my English papers in college, I specialized in close readings, and my writing is the same way, especially my fiction, always pushing the idea-per-word ratio. Here's my favorite recent sentence, added to the rewrite of book 1, chapter 5. The context is that a character is riding a metal ingot up a cable to space: "As the space elevator's acceleration spent itself on speed, she squatted and watched the stars as the last air dropped its lids from their eyes, and they glared blinkless in her awestruck face."

September 21.

2018-09-21T21:50:29Z

September 21. So I've been reading Michael Pollan's new book, How To Change Your Mind. It's about psychedelics, mostly psilocybin and LSD. The trip reports are all stuff I've read before -- and it makes me envious, because I've tried both drugs without getting any visions or hallucinations, only seeing conventional reality (especially nature) as much more beautiful and important than it is when I'm sober. But there's all kinds of stuff I never knew about the history of LSD, and unsurprisingly, it's tied to power politics.

Al Hubbard was one of those people who are wildly successful at everything they try to do. He was also politically authoritarian, and when he tripped on LSD, way back in 1951, he decided to use it to change the world from the top down. He persuaded a laboratory to give him a massive quantity, and went around the world giving it to the elites -- political, financial, technological, and cultural. At that time, psychedelics were legal and perfectly respectable -- in 1957 Life magazine did a glowing article on "magic mushrooms".

Then Timothy Leary ruined everything. I agree with his basic idea: to give psychedelics to the masses and change the world from the bottom up. But he was such a loose cannon, and so cult-leaderish, that he became the focus of a backlash. As Leary himself said, "Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them."

In another twist, the pioneers of Silicon Valley did lots of LSD, and it probably gave a huge boost to the development of computers and the internet. And the universe of the internet is indeed super-trippy -- but I imagine a better timeline, where the world's increasing trippiness is not centrally controlled.

Anyway, here's some awesome psychedelic music, from 1968: The Incredible String Band - A Very Cellular Song. At over 13 minutes, it's too long for our speed-dazed age, but it clearly influenced David Bowie's Memory of a Free Festival, and most of the stuff Peter Gabriel did with Genesis, like Supper's Ready.

September 19.

2018-09-19T19:30:41Z

September 19. Today I donated blood, something I try to do around every solstice and equinox, and then came home to vape a pinch of Gorilla Glue and write. Oddly, yesterday I vaped twice as much Sour Diesel, but today's "launch" was stronger. It could be the blood loss, or the GG could be better weed, or maybe what happens is that a smaller dose, which takes less time to vape, packs the whole multi-temp vapor profile into a tighter window. I'll continue to experiment.

After Monday's post, Bill said my style reminds him of James Tiptree Jr, a sci-fi writer whose real name was Alice Sheldon. I checked out what I could find online, and indeed, some of her sentences are just the kind of thing I aim for. From the story The Girl Who Was Plugged In (pdf), here's a beautiful short sentence: "But P. Burke proves apt." And a longer one: "At the corner she strains to send one last fond spasm after the godlings' shuttle." So I'm going to get a few of her books, because it's been hard for me lately to find any fiction that I have fun reading. If anyone's into Enneagram, it occurs to me that most of my favorite authors are Sevens. Surely Tiptree was, and also Roger Zelazny, Roald Dahl, Lord Dunsany, and probably Isak Dinesen (another woman with a male pen name).

I've been listening to Syd Barrett's album The Madcap Laughs. The sonic textures are only subtly psychedelic, but Syd's songwriting is the gold standard for psych-pop. A good example is Octopus. The lyrics seem like improvised nonsense, but this close analysis, Untangling The Octopus, finds it carefully crafted and loaded with meaning.

September 17.

2018-09-17T17:10:47Z

September 17. Today, a look under the hood of my fiction writing. A year ago I posted what I thought was a final version of my novel, but then I wrote a sequel, and now I'm doing deep rewriting of book one. It started this summer when I decided to write an alternate version that's more readable, and I still have a long way to go on that project, but it's already feeding back to improve the main version.

This is a sentence from chapter six, drafted in February of 2017: "Torisa, still cogmodded, fumbled the handflight upface as the Captain raged through hyperacute stimslash."

When that came out of me, it was so much crazier than anything I'd written before, that I almost jumped off the couch. "What if I could write like that all the time?" But looking back, the sentence is flawed. In terms of exposition, it introduces too much stuff too fast. And in terms of lyricism, "fumbled the handflight upface" tickles the tongue, but then "hyperacute stimslash" gets the mouth in a car crash. And that prefix, "hyper", is just a pretentious way of saying "very", which is already usually a mistake.

If you're wondering what the sentence means, here it is all clunky and literal: "Still mentally altered by psychedelic drugs, Torisa fumbled to raise the controls from the floor, with which the Captain could fly the ship by hand, while he felt the pain of the sudden cancellation of his own drug effects."

A recent attempt to write it better: "Torisa, still cogmodded, stumbled to shove her mattress into the ship's nose, pulled the fingergrip edges of a floorpanel, and raised the handflight upface, all as the Captain raged through sped head-reset."

Now, here's what I came up with trying to use only simple words, but have it sound good: "Still drug-dazed, Torisa stumbled to shove her bed to the ship's nose, uncovering a floor panel whose edges she gripped to raise the wheel to hand-steer the ship, while the Captain ate the pain of brain-scrub."

I like that so much, that even with an unlimited vocabulary for the flagship text, the biggest change I made was to replace "dazed" with "befuddled".

September 14.

2018-09-14T14:40:50Z

September 14. Lots o' links, starting with two threads from Hacker News, one about the new European internet copyright law and how terrible it is.

And a discussion of the complicated causes of homelessness in Seattle.

A fun reddit thread, What's the creepiest/scariest thing that you've seen but no one believes you?

And a scary reddit thread about people who have fried their brains on LSD. I've done LSD a few times, and I absolutely love it, so I understand why people with a large supply are tempted to push the limits, but that's a really bad idea with a drug that can change your brain permanently.

From the subreddit, Where - and how - will the children play? This is actually good news, about a movement in New Zealand to make playgrounds more fun without being too dangerous. Now we just have to do the same thing with society.

It's been a while since I posted about my favorite sport, women's soccer. This one-minute video shows Sam Kerr's goals in August, and she's easily the NWSL's flashiest striker, but I agree with this article that the best all-around player is Lindsey Horan.

Finally, neotene @ctrlcreep is a super-trippy twitter feed, an ongoing brain-dump of sci-fi ideas. Of course, ideas are the easy part of writing, and the hard part is lining them up into a story. But I'd love to see a full novel by someone who can crank out stuff like this:

All of the stalactites are situated above quartz eyeballs, like the cavern is dripping potions into its own dilated pupils.

September 12.

2018-09-12T12:20:19Z

September 12. On the subject of anti-noise tech, Jed points out that we won't stop at silence and smoothness:

We'll have new design aesthetics, generating a low level of synthetic bumpiness so the real bumps don't stand out. We use this kind of aesthetic when we generate background rain/surf to mask less appealing environmental noise. The next step would be to build smart generators that incorporate the intrusive noise -- maybe create mild background thunder to mask a car door slamming in the street. As we achieve more control we'll do more design. Cars are getting quieter so we're already discussing how we want them to sound.

So our first instinct is to eliminate noise, and then we re-introduce noise as art. I'm thinking of music producers who add pops and hiss, or theme park rides designed to be excitingly bumpy.

Then I think the next stage is to go back toward reality. Kevin mentions this bit from Joe Rogan's Elon Musk interview, where Rogan talks about how much he loves driving his old Porsche 911.

...because it's so mechanical. The crackle, the bumps... it gives you all this feedback. I take it to the Comedy Store because, when I get there, I feel like my brain is just popping -- it's on fire. It's like a strategy for me now... I drive that car there just for the brain juice.

If you're the driver, mechanical feedback is interesting because it's integrated into what you're doing. But if you're a passenger, it's meaningless. And sometimes we can decide which one we are. If I'm walking through the woods, barefoot on a rough trail, my mind has to engage with the complex surface under my feet. If I'm wearing shoes on a paved trail, I can ignore the whole foot-ground interface, and focus all my attention on looking at the trees. And if I'm in a smooth bus on a highway, I can ignore my entire environment and read a book.

There's no wrong choice, but we usually make these choices without being aware of our full range of options. And in the middle ground, I imagine technologies that can give us sounds and motions generated not from the road but from the landscape, so you can feel the difference between forest and desert and city. Then it gets really weird if we have technologies that can give us feedback from beyond our human senses.

September 10.

2018-09-10T22:00:41Z

September 10. This 1943 George Orwell essay is titled Why Socialists Don't Believe In Fun, but it's really about the failure of utopian fiction to create worlds that readers actually want to live in. Orwell thinks it's because happiness comes from contrast, and fictional utopias are too static. But there have been some better imaginary worlds since 1943, and you can find the best ones in comment threads like this one from Ask Reddit: If you could live in any fictional world, which one would you choose?

I think the difference between boring fictional utopias, and worlds you actually want to live in, is that in the former the author is "playing not to lose", trying to create a world with nothing wrong with it, and in the latter, the author is trying to create as much good stuff as possible and not worrying too much about avoiding bad stuff.

Now I'm thinking about American politics, and how Democrats have allowed Republicans to become the party of fun. But I'd rather write about technology, and I love this title: Bump-Canceling Bunk Beds Promise Supersmooth Bus Rides. It's about using quick sensors and tiny motors to cancel out bumps like noise-canceling headphones. It's a cool idea, but still, if we let supersmoothness become the new baseline, then even a tiny bump will become an annoyance. As we go down that road, we're spending more and more resources to be bothered by smaller and smaller things, and also to be more removed from reality.

This reminds me of a story from a Tom Brown wilderness survival book, where young Tom asks his Apache mentor, "Why doesn't the cold bother you?" The old man pauses and answers, "Because it's real."

On that subject, The Health Benefits of Being Cold.

September 7.

2018-09-07T19:30:00Z

September 7. I was going to write more about bridge collapse as a metaphor for social collapse, but then my metaphor collapsed -- because when a human snaps, the people around them tend to make up for it by getting stronger, and bridge cables don't do that. A social organism has to be in pretty bad shape, before one person's mental breakdown can take down the whole thing.

The other day I caught up on months of posts by smart blogger Siderea, and these are my two favorites. You Should Probably Know about Vienna is about how Vienna keeps rents low without rent control. I'm not going to summarize it because that post is already a summary of a longer article.

The New Behaviorism makes two points. 1) When psychologists talk about "learning" they're usually talking about eeeeevil behaviorism. 2) Behaviorism doesn't work very well.

This comes back to one of my favorite subjects: the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In a perfect society, motivation is 100% intrinsic, and that's actually been done by some hunter-gatherer tribes -- the test is whether a culture lacks the concept of "freeloading". As we drift farther from that ideal, into a system that depends on tasks that not enough people find enjoyable for their own sake, we need to use reward and punishment as clunky patches for a broken system. If we go too far down that road, supposed experts in human psychology might not even think about actions being driven by anything other than reward and punishment.

September 6.

2018-09-06T18:20:21Z

September 6. Catching up on links, the NY Times has a really good article on the Genoa bridge collapse. Basically, the bridge was designed with no redundancy, so the failure of one cable would bring the whole thing down, and then the cables were encased in concrete, which was supposed to make them resistant to corrosion, but instead it hid corrosion. Then they were sloppy with maintenance and testing. I wonder if the same kind of thing happens with social collapse, especially the part about corrosion being hidden.

More doom from this Flickr vid, Temperature Anomalies by Country 1880-2017.

Subtler doom from this reddit thread, What are some cliche things that people do in real life only because they've seen it done before in movies? For example, accidentally killing a guy by breaking a bottle over his head. The bigger issue is that our whole culture seems to be drifting from understanding how things really work, to making dumb mistakes because they seem cool. That has to be a normal way that people and systems are weakened by having too much power.

Deeper in that thread is a discussion of what autistic people are really like, including this comment explaining that the only way they become savants, is if they become totally obsessed with something at an early age. That makes sense. Nobody gets a skill by magic -- you have to put in the time. I don't want to say put in the "work" because if you're obsessed, it doesn't feel like work, which is why obsession is so powerful.

I imagine, when a society is young and strong, it emerges bottom-up from whatever people are obsessed with; and when a society is old and dying, like ours, there's almost no overlap between what people are obsessed with, and what they need to do to keep the whole thing going. A symptom of a dying society is a glorification of "hard work" that you do for virtue or status and not because you enjoy it.

A long article from the Guardian, How to be human: the man who was raised by wolves. It's mostly about how much he enjoyed living in the wild, and how difficult and painful it is to live among humans. There's much more about feral kids in this mirror I made of a Fortean Times article long gone from the internet, Wild Things.

September 4.

2018-09-04T16:00:02Z

September 4. From earlier this year, a smart blog post, notes on cheese. It's about cheese in the sense of art being bad because it's "cheesy". The basic idea is that you have to risk looking stupid to make good art, or even to be an interesting person.

Cheese isn't the same as deliberate camp or winking meta-textuality, because those things are ironic. They don't opt out of dignity; they opt out of trying. They might be trying at something, but not, the vast majority of the time, what they're winking at. Cheese isn't cheese unless it's sincere.

The final sentence mentions cheese as an attribute of whole cultures, which reminds me of an anecdote from the early 1940's. A Japanese guy was convinced that his country had such a vigorous culture that they couldn't lose a war with America. But then he saw some Hollywood musical, with forty chorus girls garishly dressed and lifting their legs in perfect unison, and he realized, a culture that could try something that ridiculous, and pull it off, was going to win the war.

I'm not sure if my own fiction counts as "cheesy". I think of it as elevated trash. At its heart it's cartoonish rather than literary, but I try to make every detail brighter than the sun. I actually admire the kitschy painter Thomas Kinkade. Even though his art lacks both darkness and weirdness, it takes both courage and skill to pack beauty so densely.