Hey Folks!

Andy and I joked this morning that we were running out of the internet. It’s true, I seem to be getting though it with some speed these days. I had been using an open source news (rss) reader for some weeks, because it was open source and because it handled feeds from live journal a little better than what I had been using. I switched back to a newer version of the program that I had been using, NetNewsWire, and I must say that it’s way better. While it still won’t do friends-locked live-journal feeds, I can somehow read things faster. I also did some culling of dead blogs, and things that I’m no longer reading. This means that I’m down to 83 feeds, from a high of about 500 when I moved from Wisconsin. This is progress, and at this point it means that I can budget some time to read more sci-fi and cool knitting related blogs.

I’ve been knitting a little bit here and there and I’ve made some significant progress on my Morocco sweater.

It’s probably about three inches longer now. If you omit the large bottom border (ie, that entire picture,) I’m almost 1/7th or so of the way to the beginning of the saddle shoulders. Which is convoluted. While the resulting jacket will look much like Joyce Willams' (it’s her design after all,) I’m going about it in a completely different way. Because I’m perverse like that. But it’s a great deal of fun.

I’m going to go caffinate and see what comes of it. I think I need to give up on my old favorite color of fountain pen ink, so we’ll call me mister blue hands. It’s not drying fast enough, anymore, or maybe it never did, but maybe I’m using thinner, less absorbent papers.

See, when I say I’m scatter brained, I mean it.

Cheers!

First a poll. A somewhat low tech one, just leave a comment. If you read, say a science fiction book, where the name of the ships all had dutch names, but the characters all had english names what would you think?

Moving on…

I knit a square last night.

A friend is opening a yarn store in, less than two weeks (wow), and I’ve been drafted somewhat, consensually, into knitting swatches for the store. I must admit that where my mother has knit like 20 of them, I’ve knit… almost 2.

The thing is, mostly that I really really hate knitting squares. Once upon a time I disliked knitting things that weren’t in the round, because I didn’t like purling. Now, I don’t knit things back and forth because I hate turning the work. It’s not the movement of turning, it’s the way that this action breaks the rhythm of knitting.

I called--and I suppose still do call--the knitting section of TealArt “the knitting savants” and I think this is completely appropriate, because while I know a thing or two about the craft, I’m really picky about the kind of work that I do, and only tend to knit vary specific things, and if I have to knit something that isn’t one of these things for very long, I tend to get irritable and bored. So I’m thinking of naming the collection of essays and knitting writings that I’ve been casually working on for a while “the knitting savant,” because I think it would be cool.

Later, assuming that life doesn’t come crashing in I’ll post pictures of my current knitting, though it’s grown about 2 inches since I took the pictures. I finished the border of the sweater and it’s been flying since then.

With the recent uptick in membership in ravelry, I’ve been getting a lot of feedback on my stuff from the site, so I’d like to thank you all. I’ve spent too long doing this whole blogging thing sort of in isolation, it feels good to have a community again. And I really love ravelry, it’s great stuff and the community seems to really be “working.” So huzzah!

I’ll be in touch. I have a lot to ramble about, but I don’t want this post to get too unfocused, so I’ll see you all right here real soon!

Though I heartily accept and cherish “science fiction” as a genre that can describe and support the kind of fiction that I’m interested in writing, and I’ve often really enjoyed very fantastic science fiction--stuff with magic, stuff with aliens--it’s not something that has really occurred to me to write. Well that’s not true, I’ve thought about it, but have never really thought of a way to do it without coming off as cliche.

Let me interrupt this reflection with a theory:

I think there are two major kinds of science fiction, the first kind that answers major “what if questions,” like “what if there is time travel,” or “what if aliens come to visit earth from a far away planet,” or “what if a galactic empire collapses and a group of academics does what it can to save civilization,” or “what if an alien probe has been watching over human development for the last 3000 years,” or “what if corporations and the government wage a war on the internet to control the citizens of cyberspace.” The second kind science fiction elaborates on the kinds of questions above, and says “what if modern technology was based on gears and brass rather than transistors and silicon” (steampunk), “what if such and such happened to the collapsing galactic empire,” or “what happens if the government is able to crush cyberculture” (post-cyberpunk). Now lets be clear, I don’t think that this second class of science fiction is bad, quite the contrary, it’s often the best stuff; but I think it contributes to the genre discourse in a very different way. Ok. Done.

There are tropes in science fiction, like aliens, like magic, that are more about fitting in with the discourse of the genre, than about the direct questions that the trope asks. So, often, I think telling a story with aliens is more about responding to and thinking about all of the science fiction that deals with aliens, from Star Trek, to Stranger in a Strange Land, to War of the Worlds. and less about what aliens means in a bigger picture sort of way. I think the same thing goes for magic, the examples are different but the discursive structures are pretty much the same.

So for whatever reason I’ve kept things pretty realistic in my writing. While I haven’t been ultra vigilant about keeping track of the speeds that my spaceships are flying at, and I do muse on the possibility of telepathy a fair pice, other than that… I feel like it’s pretty straight up. Humans are from Earth, the speed of light hasn’t been broken, the current date system are used, and I occasionally have oblique references to present-day events.

I’m thinking, though, that, my previous aversion to aliens might be misplaced, and I’m actually thinking that aliens might be just what I sort of need in this short story I’ve been playing with for a while… Anyone have thoughts on the subject or am I just being weird?

The piece I’m knitting is probably about 8.5 inches long now, and I have about 5 more rows to knit, except that I have made an error in two of those five rows, and have to do some un-knitting. Sigh.

It’s mostly that I got carried away and forgot to read the chart. After the 5 rows, I have the body of the sweater to knit, which I do hope will fly by really quick on up to the underarms at which point it gets interesting again… in the good way. It’s going to be a long coat/jacket type thing. I’ll take a picture of it soon I hope.

There’s also sleeve knitting that I very much need to spend some time on.

Back to writing.

If I have to do step back once more I might punch someone, just saying.

And a fieldtown-ish version of the lolipop man by a women’s team that’s kinda cool:

And of Course:

So here’s another little post about my writing project and process. It’s what’s on my mind, and insofar as tychoish.com is a reflection of that, it’s what I’m writing about.

But first, I do so apologize for not being in closer touch with you all these last few days. I’ve been morris dancing a lot, and unfortunately that doesn’t leave a lot of time for writing of various sorts. But I’m in a good place with all of my various commitments and feeling pretty grounded at the moment. Here’s hoping this sticks.

I’m trying to get this story laid out to the point where I feel like I can safely write it without having the big super-structural frameworks shift on me when I’m half way up there. I’m sure some writers are better with making those kinds of adjustments, but I know I’m really bad about that, so getting things worked out ahead of time makes the writing easier.

Once upon a time I outlined projects like this by taking a spiral notebook, and on each 2 page spread I’d outline the content of 4-5 scenes which I thought made up a chapter pretty well. I’d include snippets of conversation, and really it was a kind of free writing. The beauty was that I was able to take these ramblings and pull out the critical information “where do the characters need to get by the end of this, and what do they need to have seen on their way.”

What this massive longhand aspect of the project did was force me to sit around with the plot and the characters for a long time, so that by the time I got to the actual writing, I had it pretty down pat.

The novella that I’m beginning to edit now was easier, because I was able to sketch it out a number of times on a single sheet of paper, and then transfer those notes to the computer. It also helped that I wrote a synopsis as part of an earlier project years earlier, so the characters had been in my mind for many years, and though the process wasn’t as formal, it was similar in terms of all the important parts.

For the current project I’ve done a couple of series of notes in my day to day notebook (the book I cary around and use for everything from writing and writing, to to do lists, to phone numbers and driving directions), but nothing formal like I used to. I then started a digital notebook in plain text file. It’s about 2,600 words at the moment, and the core 1,600 words or so is a first draft of the outline broken down by chapters.

I’ve been contemplating the next step, because the outline that I have so far is a bit rough. Because there are more characters in this, there are huge chunks of the outline that don’t have characters, or details, or even a more specific scene division broken down.

So what I’m doing now is creating a stack of index cards--the paper kind, of course--where each story chunk is on a card. This way I can play with discreet story elements and I can insert points on the outline as I need to. This is hard to pull off on the computer, because I like to outline on paper, and I often feel that notebooks have a very linear structure in the way that I tend to use them. I do know about scrivener, and even a wiki type program might work, but I like the way this is working and the way that I’ve changed my writing as a result.

We have this rather large, and by this point, somewhat middle aged cat. He’s incredibly shy around people he doesn’t know, and there are only a very select few who aren’t us that have seen him (maybe a dozen? not more than two dozen) in the 7-8 years we’ve had him. The neighbor who cleans up after them when we’re gone refers to it as “cleaning up after our invisible cats” because she’s not seen them. (We’ll, she’s seen the one, at a distance, I think).

Anyway, so we were talking about the feline hierarchy in the house, in particular how Nash (the large, shy one) would theoretically respond to a new feline member of the household. I said:

Think about how he treats us--the herding, the mewing, and so forth--ok, now he’s a big cat, but we’re bigger than he is. Another cat wouldn’t be. Think about how he’d cope with someone smaller than him… I’m just saying, it could be a problem.

I’ve just wasted spent a few hours looking through the open source options for software that allows you to run cognitive psychology experiments. This is one of those realms where open source/free software really shines, I think.

One big reason for this is that most of the available proprietary options suck, because its never going to reach mass appeal or distribution. There are probably only a few thousand people who migh ever need software like this, so between competition and obsolete homegrown solutions that use hypercard or something. On the other hand, the faculty member reports that they “wrote their own experimental environments in QuickBasic,” which is a product of the late 80s, and she went to grad school in the late 90s. Maybe she meant visual basic and misspoke, in any case, it’s frightening. I’m frightened.

I think we should all just sigh at this point.

Ok, so open source is made for this kind of situation. Not only do the proprietary options lack a certian grace and flexibility, but there’s a lot of polish that we don’t need and on the whole we’re talking about a really rather simple program. It also helps that a good percentage of “cognitive scientists” are trained a computer scientists, not psychologists, alhough the literature doesn’t cross over as much as you’d think¹: despite this project, it’s not really my field, so I’m not completely “up” on the literature. In any case, computer scientists generally have the knowledge to write these kinds of programs, and because they work for universities…

Anyway so I found one of these programs called WebExp, that uses XML to define the experiments, and outputs data in a pure XML file. The only disappointing factor is that it runs in java. I’m not a java fan, because installing all the frameworks and what not has always seemed less than desirable for me. But what? I’m a fearless OS X user. I open up my terminal window, and on a lark, I type:

$ java -version

This was the response:

Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_07-164)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_07-87, mixed mode, sharing)

Which is good enough for this program. I love OS X. Now all I have to do is unzip, run, and set up the XML file to design the experiment. It will even automatically counterbalance or randomly order stimuli! While I think the intention of this program is to let people do experiments at home, there’s nothing to stop you from running them locally on your own system. How cool is that?

The best things in life are free.