The air conditioning upstairs broke on my bedroom/computer floor. The temperature up here has been steady at 83 degrees for quite some time now. It doesn’t seem like much more over the 76 or 77 degrees downstairs, but it means going from no sweat to tons of sweat for me …
Archive for August, 2006
I just performed the first in a series of new experiments which deal with exploring the possibility of using the two hands to perform two separate writing-based tasks, including written language, writing music, or drawing.
I examined first writing with the right hand and drawing with the left hand. The opposite does not work very well, but this configuration is rather productive. The probable
Woah, I think I discovered something awesome.
Headers!
Anyway, I think Catleya is probably most valuable to me as a backdrop. With oodles of characters and places to dabble with, it’s really a place that I know intimately.
Sadly, I have yet to achieve what I really wanted to achieve. Ultimately, I want to create something of an epic – an operatic tale of grand proportions and meanings. Although I have attempted this task many times, I have not been able to realize it except in the area of simple romance stories, which I feel that I am done with for the time being.
I wonder what sort of plot I should spin. I can make little twists and turns in a simple story well enough, but to create a complex plot has always been the huge problem.
So what is my ultimate story that I want to tell?
It’s definitely a story about philosophy. It needs to make heavy use of symbolism and allegory. I want the scenes to be dramatic and compelling when they need to be, and light and comedic when drama is uncalled for. Although I love writing romance scenes, ironically I feel that they are the most ingenuine … they lack the purity of beauty that I really want to achieve.
I think one of the key importances is a good setting. It’s easy to write about your average city or even a futuristic one. But to have the right buildings, the right nuances, the right textures – that can really be everything.
The mystic qualities of life at its core .. those are what I wish to capture. The fleeting moments of foreign nostalgia, dust-covered memories of lives one never lived. That cold chill, that fear of the unknown and the unexplainable.
Overall, I’d just like to say that my brain is one of the most useless things known to mankind. It has 0 attention span and 0 capacity to remember things. Like what I was trying to say. Night night!
My mind is in a thousand pieces, recorded on thousands of sheets of paper. Even though I carry only my present knowledge with me – the knowledge of skills rather than the memories of my past – I know that somewhere among these sheets of papers is my answer.
The answer I have been searching for for so long, so long — I am sure that it is in here. As I uncover each sheet, I recover another shard of my memories. Piecing them together, I feel a small flame rekindling inside my heart.
The things that I created, that I explained, that I diagrammed – and then forgot – these things must mean something! They are all about just one world, one world that I created piece by piece, word by word, drawing by drawing.
I am compiling a grand encyclopedia of my world. It is probably going to reach about 200 pages in length. I have written ten so far, and will soon start drawing in the illustrations.
Maybe, finally, everything will come together …
Here is the table of contents:
Section I. Locale in space and planetary profile
1. Astronomical Features and Solar System
2. Environmental Phenomena
3. Flora and Fauna
Section II. History
1. Early Geographic History
2. The Rise of the Uriments and Anuriments
3. Arrival of Humans: Aegun, New Aegun, Gonosa, Sonosa, and Corenthan
4. The Silver Age, the Holy-Human Wars, and the Golden Age
5. Arrival of Cats and the Dark Ages; Ket’s Kato
6. Establishment of Modern Society: Conodee, Meow-Meow, Quetzcato, etc.
7. Recent Events
Section III. Present Day Katliya
1. Language and Communication
2. Science and Technology
3. Politics and Legislation
4. Economics
5. Population Demographics and Statistics
6. Pop Culture and Sports
7. Current Issues and Trends
Pretty dang awesome Starcraft origami by (presumably) a Korean dude.
http://kr.image.yahoo.com/GALLERY/read.html?img_filename=44505eb360b6
Talk about mad skills! Among others, I spot Guardians, Mutalisks, Hydralisks, Siege Tanks, Battlecruisers, Ultralisks, Dragoons, and Reavers.
Link is thanks to the blog “lolicontrol.”
Subject. A code outline for the query option.
Input: a list of words to search for. Example: [‘blue’,’green’]. Plus, a maximum allowed distance, say 6.
As a side note: another proposal: distance should be minimally increased if two concepts appear apart from another in some considerable fashion.
The query algorithm will run like this:
a for loop on each term in the query list
begin with blue. blue is appended to the currentlocation list [0,’blue’,0]. The first number is always the distance from “home”. When it exceeds the maximum, the location should then backtrack. The second number indicates “where we left off.”
blue entry is found as matrix row #40 (starting at 0): [‘blue’,’whale’,4]
the curloc is updated [0,’blue’,41,4,’whale’,0]. Note that if the result is identical to the immediately previous word (a “pingback” in a sense), it will be discarded, while if it is identical to a word before the immediately previous word, or to a word in the results list, it will be noted but NOT searched (treated as though it were a dead-end). If this rule is not implemented, the search will take infinitely long due to a circular loop. While this happens in humans (causing headaches), it is not permissible in a computer.
now we search for whale (always search for end-2) on range 0 (always last) thru end of matrix. Suppose we turn up dolphin(2) @ 64.
curloc is now [0,’blue’,41,4,’whale’,65,6,’dolphin’,0]
Now the algorithm should determine that the maximum has been reached. This is one “escape” situation, the other being when a word has been exhausted (search returns -1).
Both escape situations yield the following results:
a. write the last word to the results file.
b. delete the last three entries in curloc.
Now we resume searching under whale, starting @65.
Alright, so this goes on for awhile, and we end up with this hypothetical “search result,” quotes omitted for convenience. Note that in the real thing, there *will* be alphabetical sorting, unlike what you see here.
[blue,whale,dolphin,mammal,ocean,animal,ocean,sea,fish,whale,sky,clouds,birds,sun,bleu,
French,cheese,France,blue-green,peacock,green-blue,turquoise,color,yellow,red,orange,violet,
purple,green,blah blah blah]
The task now is to find out which words appear most often. One way to do this is the make the results list into a results dictionary that keeps personal tally values associated with the word keys.
Concentric ring designs (summoning circles or transmutation circles if you know them that way) are really cool. And from the looks of it, not so hard to create. You know, a certain Flash site might do well to be based on one … hmm!
:)
After reading a bit about faster-than-light (FTL) travel and warp drives, etc., I found a line that was particularly telling: that hyperspace is always regulated in some way.
Now, I don’t believe that hyperspace can be used for travel (for one, there are no “alternate dimensions” to access — they’re all here right now; what is meant is clearly an “alternate universe” or another *set* of dimensions. The fourth+ dimensions are all Planck-scale in length anyway, so who could ever use that …) in any feasible manner. However, this is common theme and problem in sci-fi or in fantasy, too. Extremely powerful weapons or units have a limit. But why? We invented the internet and cell phone. We certainly have no limit to their use – that is to say, we could communicate with anyone in this world, instantaneously, provided that we had the technology, which is roughly affordable. So if we invent the hyperspace drive, wouldn’t we exploit it in precisely the same fashion, or not use it at all? If we could use it, we would, and we would use it so much that it would become cheap; or, if it were too expensive, no one would use it and the technology would be lost.
The problem is that people are unwilling to accept widespread use of instantaneous travel. Just as people long ago I’m sure would not have been able to conceive of how life would operate when the nation can be traversed in 5 hours by plane, I don’t think that people today can properly conceive of the true future, if travel indeed became instantaneous. I mean, just think about the differences! No more traffic jams; criminals would run rampant; long-distance relationships would be just as good as nearby ones.
We have erased the boundaries to communication, and with that, we have completely changed the way of life. When we erase the boundaries to transportation, the same will happen – but it will happen nonetheless.
I think it is silly to “limit” high technology. There’s no such silly RPG rule like you can only use your most powerful move once per battle. No, the “superweapons” would be mass produced and used to their full extent. We didn’t just build one atomic bomb, did we?
anyway, mind strayed again
I have been attempting to convert my left hand into a usable hand over the past three days. I think that I have made significant inroads. Although my left hand remains something like 1/3 the speed of my right hand, it can write reasonably legibly and has gained the ability to execute curves. I have unfortunately hit a few roadblocks that have taken time to correct, lest they become permanent crutches to performance:
1. Hand smoothness. This is a very silly thing, but it has huge effects. Basically, the surface of my right hand that touches the paper is flat and extremely smooth – not bumps whatsoever. I wish my facial skin were this smooth… . In any case, this is an adaptation because rough skin, such as that on my left hand’s edge, tends to catch the paper, and when I shift the hand to move to the next word, or try to slide while writing a word, the paper is caught and crinkles or, worse yet, moves with my hand. Thus, I have been doing a lot of large-line marks in order to get a “sandpaper effect” going. I have also rubbed the skin a lot to shed off the uneven cells. The mobility has improved, but is still not quite up to snuff.
2. Moving the arm vs. moving the fingers. When I write with my right hand, my hand moves solely in the x-axis. The y-axis movements necessary to create letters is actually performed solely by my fingers. I noticed that even though I was writing letters correctly with my left hand, it was actually moving the entire unit – which is highly inefficient and which causes a lot of stress and tightness. The insufficient flexibility and strength in the index finger and the thumb seemed to be the problem, so I have knocked the speed down a notch in order to train my fingers to move with more flexibility.
3. Pencil posture. I hold the pencil “correctly” in my lefthand, resting atop my middle finger. I do not hold it correctly in my writing hand (right hand), and the pencil rests atop my ring finger. The consequence of the latter is that one grips the pencil at a lower point and therefore has greater control; however, a smaller range of movements is permitted. This posture is ideal for doing small details. The left hand is inclined to hold the pencil at the same point as my right, but this does not work because now I have an extra finger below that is in the way. I don’t want to teach my left hand the wrong way to hold a pencil, as it is already accustomed to the proper way, so I have been testing out different positions for the pinky to go in order to reduce the height, while also moving the gripping point farther from the tip of the pencil in order to meet the problem halfway from both ends.
My ultimate goals are to have my left hand capable of writing in case my right hand suddenly fails or is damaged (or is simply too tired to write, eg. on long essays). I also wish to experiment with thought-splitting. I currently have a single-channel system that only allows one pen-output at a time. However, it might be possible to split the channel such that I can take notes with one hand and doodle with the other. This possibility is very intriguing and I wish to explore it further to test its feasibility.
Catleya, of course, has very high technology. Once human technology began to intertwine with that of the gods and demons, it became very easy to go anywhere, whenever. But let’s step back and go through a brief history of how all of this happened:
500 B.C. (before cats) – this marks the beginning of the Golden Age of humans, during which the humans reached their peak and then began to collapse afterwards (making way for the modern era to begin). These humans never quite escaped Catleya, but they did have decent technology – tall skyscrapers, rapid-transit cars, etc.
In the modern era, around 6000 A.C., is when the cats finally surpassed the ancient human technologies by building a space-ship to the specifications of the excavated remains of an alien craft in the ancient sector of West Forest, Kylafrawis. This space-ship was sub-light-speed, though.
continued later
Consider this: in our sci-fi stories, we are obsessed with faster-than-light travel. While it is purportedly possible to travel faster than the speed light, the stars just that far away. Plus, most of them don’t even have planets, not to mention inhabitable ones. So no, the spaceships were not used to travel to distant galaxies.
Instead, as Catleya began to fill up, while space probes were certainly sent far off, the focus of technology was focused on creating new inhabitable satellites of Enifest and of Catleya itself. Certain large mines opened up with the objective of creating smaller outer-space satellites (since it is the surface area and not the mass of the object that defines how many people can inhabit it). The spaceships were relegated to the role of cosmic construction and ferry vehicles, and the first veritable “space travel” traversed shorter distances than to Catleya’s own two moons. While the moons were terraformed, it was much easier to first outfit these custom satellites to specifications.
The first aliens were of course the humans and cats: the humans were experimental travelers from Earth, who were split into several large ships. The idea was to explore the possibility of “effectively faster than light” travel – that is, taking advantage of the fact that you age more slowly (or, from another perspective, the distances are shorter) while traveling at near-light speeds. In essence, these humans forsook their homeland to explore, and the target planet was Catleya, which looked like a very Earth-like planet (which it was). The first humans settled down around 5000 or 6000 B.C., but the endemic viruses and unfamiliar environment forced them very far backwards in terms of technology. Indeed, knowledge was largely lost in favor of survival experience.
One ship strayed far, far off course and had to take a roundabout route to Catleya. This particular ship was the research ship and had many animals in it, used for testing. Note that time passed much more quickly on the planet than on the ship, due to the ship’s traveling speeds. By the time the ship made it back, the humans had conquered the entire planet and in fact had already gone to war with the local sentient beings, the Uriments (aka the “gods”). Although peace had been made, the humans had fallen into decline due to internal warfare and viruses that ravaged the biologically engineered crops. The ship, which had fallen into disrepair, suffered major damage upon entry into Catleya and crashed, killing all the humans on board and only sparing a couple cats that escaped when their cages were destroyed by the impact.
The cats, having the advantage of the best in technology as developed by the researchers during the long flight, not only survived but thrived, eventually forming into hunting packs and then into full-fledged cities. The cats migrated east and west from their crash-landing site, the ailing Kylafrawis.
The rest is history … .
The next alien species to be encountered were not so alien after all: because of reproductive isolation and a new environment, creatures unleashed onto newly terraformed regions rapidly speciated. These new and strange creatures might also be called “aliens.”