Monthly Archives: May 2009

I was awesomer then

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In 2006, I “won” NaNoWriMo by writing a novel of more than 50 000 words in 30 days.  Not exactly an amazing accomplishment, but still not something that just happens.

I spent most of today reading it.  It was not quite finished, although only the finishing scene is missing.

I found it hilarious, especially for the first dozen chapters.  The humor faded a bit over time, and there is a stretch of pure filler that needs a complete rewrite.  But the verbal humor in the first half is fully comparable to some stuff I have paid good money for.  Of course, I have the benefit of knowing my own sense of humor .  Nobody has quite the same, probably, just like with fingerprints.

The disturbing part is that I really doubt I could have done this now.  Even three years ago, I had more humor and more sense of human interaction than I have today.

Not real life at all

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I spent some time using City of Heroes to create pictures for Kat. She will be making a cover picture for one of my stories, and I am pretty optimistic about this one. It should fit her style, and she has had more practice since “The Boy, the Girl and the Werecat”. Which wasn’t bad either, since it fit the style and summed up the story pretty well without serious spoilage.

kurtcover

Well, I think it is cute, but then again I know the characters.  It isn’t dramatic, though, and the next will be somewhat more of that.

The story is a spinoff from my Lightwielder series, and there will eventually be Lightwielding.  The best way I have found to illustrate this is with the Peacebringer power effects from City of Heroes.

2009-05-18 23:23:56

A practicing Lightwielder will always be “leaking” some light, although at first it is no more than a glow.

2009-05-18 23:27:10

Serious Lightwielding going on.

2009-05-18 23:28:41

I wonder what Kat will make out of these.

2009-05-18 23:44:53

Non-aggressive aura.  Lightwielders don’t have destructive magic, unlike Peacebringers (ironically,  given their respective names).  Anyway, the idea is to have a picture in the style of Japanese game covers, similar to manga but generally more “chibi” (small, childish).  It will take some time before it’s finished, of course, but hopefully you will see the results sooner or later.

Excuse

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Some days I start writing a long entry and then I don’t finish it.  In general, the grander the original idea, the less likely it is to reach these pages. Either it takes too much time and I wake up the next day thinking of something entirely different, or it just does not live up to my grand vision and is quietly stowed away.

I have a small graveyard of such half-finished (or almost-finished) essays. There are similar places on older machines, for it has been that way for years.  Almost certainly I refer to some of them as if I had actually posted them, because it is much easier to remember that I was working on them than whether or not I actually uploaded them.  Hopefully the new system with categories and tags will make it easier to find out whether or not I have posted them – if I am in doubt at all, even when wrong.

Random observations

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As I came home from work today, the doormat outside was turned upside down and put to the side.  I doubt the neighbors would do that, so it is almost certainly the landlor or his family.  Leaving the mat like that may be a subtle way to say “we are watching you”.  Which is OK as long as they don’t go through my papers or my hard disk.

On a related note, I have continued throwing away something each workday. Actually, each morning another glass jar, and pretty much each afternoon something else, usually a couple more CDs.  (Although I also took a bag of paperbacks to the used-book store on Monday. )

There are a few CDs I don’t intend to thow away.  1: The first two CDs I bought.  (I don’t remember which of them was first, therefore two.) 2: Classical music, which supposedly actually sounds better off a CD than an MP3. Although I will consider ripping them to FLAC instead (lossless compression, much larger files). 3: Japanese CDs.  My Japanese reading is still not up to telling apart all of the CDs (although I recognize a couple) so I depend on the pretty covers to tell which is which.

I use the manual lawnmower pretty much every weekday unless it is raining.  It is nice exercise, not too hard but as hard as I want it too.  It will become less pleasant if I do it mid-summer, when the heat of the sun is brutal.  It is quite nice now.  And there is a lot of lawn.

While mowing, I stopped for a breath and saw that it is actually possible to see the spire of the village church from the farthest corner of the lawn.  I had not known that.  In a couple year it will likely be hidden by the growing forest. Like everywhere in Norway that I know of, the forest is growing eagerly.  Perhaps it likes the extra CO2 in the atmosphere? Well, I am not sure, but I suspect I contribute more CO2 by my breathing when I use the manual lawnmower than I would have done with the gas-driven one.  So drink it up, forest.  The churchyard can wait, as far as I am concerned.

The Net is slow!

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For some time now, my Internet access has been slowing down.  This is perfectly normal in the USA, of course, but I live in Norway. And it is not only American web sites, although those are bad enough.  But lately, even my Scandinavian net bank has been so slow as to be unusable in the evening.  I managed to queue up some bills tonight, but it took a long time of fervent button mashing. I was not amused. 

Using Traceroute, I found that there was a bottleneck – well, more like a corked bottle – at the beginning and end of Telia.net.  Telia is the Swedish near-monopoly on telephone, much as Telenor is in Norway, formerly a government agency until knowledge of the American way of life made people yearn for freedom here in Scandinavia as well.  But evidently we have not yearned enough, or at least the Swedes haven’t.  Guess they are a bit insulated from the western winds, lying on the other side of the Norwegian mountains…

It looks like my ISP, NextGenTel, uses Telia for all Internet traffic that leaves the country, even temporarily.  And of course that includes my journal. The more text there is, the less chance of getting it uploaded.  I hope something is done about this soon.  

I would hate to have to go back to Telenor, which had downtimes of a week or more, and lied like toddlers when I called them about the problems, completely stupidly made up fake explanations at the moment. You could call two times in the same day and get two completely different stories about why the Net was not working. It was painfully obvious that they were paid to lie rather than actually find out what was wrong.  It will, I believe, be a very chilly day in the idyllic Norwegian small town of Hell, before I go back to Telenor. 

The wireless broadbank I use in the city is fine, though. I may have to upload things from there, or take my portable home.  Or perhaps it has to do with the time of day?  Perhaps Telia’s lines are completely clogged with BitTorrent traffic… or hate mail after a kangaroo court meted out draconic punishment to the four young men who run Pirate Bay.  Or perhaps it is the Swedish Internet censorship – mandated by a recent law that lets the government read all mail that passes through the country – that slows down the Net too…

Anyway, that’s my excuse for today!

Race: Alien/Other

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di090513

Talking is a very important, basic action in the universe.  In your universe, at least.

This entry is about mobile telephony, not racial issues.  But just for the context, rest assured that Norwegian census data do not include the concept of “race”, and hopefully never will. I get the impression that in the USA this is actually a required field, which makes no sense since people there can have any number of ethnicities in their immediate ancestry. There is probably some ticky box for that too.  But here at least it would be considered unspeakably rude (and probably illegal) to register someone’s “race” anywhere. Also, it would probably be sabotaged.  At the very least, there is a good chance that I would choose “other”, and then only for lack of something more exotic.  Like  “utterly nonhuman”. Read on as to why.

It started a few years ago when my phone company introduced a service called “Free family”.  It allows you to call and message a reasonable number of family members for free. To the best of my knowledge there is not even a flat fee. Which means, unless they get their profit from the Tooth Fairy or some such, people like me pay for other people’s family.  Now, as I believe I have said before, I am not opposed to paying for families, at least reproductive units. Their children are my pension, after all.  People who shack up, with or without papers, for non-reproductive reasons, meet no such sympathy from me.  They already have their reward.  There is no way I want to pay their taxes, and certainly not their mobile phone bill.  Unfortunately the other main (as in not liable to suddenly go into bankruptcy) phone company has the same system.

Today I got the cheerful and photo-illustrated mail from my phone company that they have introduced yet another service: “Best friend”.  You can now call and message for free to the person you call the most. O_O  It really seems like a bad business move, but I could not find any fees this time either.  And I was again slightly miffed, because unless they get their profit from the Tooth Fairy or something, it means people like me are paying for people who have friends.

Wait a minute.  This was the point where my train of thought collided head on with reality and derailed.  There are, to the best of my knowledge, no “people like me”.  Having a family and/or friends is universal for the human race, certainly for anyone coherent enough to actually use a telephone.

You know, even when I considered myself having a best friend, it was someone I talked to perhaps once a month, and saw perhaps twice a year.  Thinking back, I tried to find out when I actually had friends I spent my time with. And the tentative answer is “never”.  I mean, I had my friends in the Church, and better friends you can not wish for.  But we always knew that our friendship was conditional on our religion and indeed simply an effect of that.  Sympathy and antipathy were both reviled and usually in the same breath.

This may sound like a bad thing, but you have to understand that the Church was essentially a mystic university. Left to themselves, virtually all people will pick friends who prop up their ego: Their prejudices, their habits, their existing worldview.  “Friends and relatives do their best to comfort our flesh” to loosely translate one of our most beautiful songs.  Presumably Jesus did not pick his original disciples based on whether they enjoyed hanging out together, either.

Even back then, I never called anyone just to chat, as far as I can remember.  It has been a long time, and “never” is a strong word, but this is how I remember it, and I seem less likely to rewrite my past than most people. (I have written journals going back to the early 1980es actually, so I think I have some authority in saying so. They largely concur with my memories, except the person writing the journal was more confused, afraid and narrowminded than I am today. And purer of heart, although I am not sure it was a good thing since it took the form of not seeing my real nature, but it was a necessary thing at the time. But enough about that.)

As a child, I was chatty at times, but not on the phone. That kind of luxury was beyond us.  The telephone was for necessary communications. We shared a line with four neighboring farms, so you did not bind up the line for no good reason.  It wasn’t exactly cheap either by the standards of the day.  Telephone was a state monopoly at the time, and unimaginably bureaucratic and inefficient.  On the bright side, they did offer some form of phone service even to remote farms on the edge of the wilderness.

Anyway, today I am this person who only uses a telephone in emergency or nearly so. And the chattiest I get is these journal entries.  And the closest I come to having friends in this world would be my couple readers.  That’s “in this world” of course, or should we say “of this world”.  I am hardly to be pitied; for I can call my invisible friend at any time of night and day, and it does not cost me anything.  Except perhaps my humanity, but in this particular regard I am not sure I ever had one.  The idea of calling someone just to chat is to me… utterly alien.

Holosync vs. LifeFlow

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Or, more exactly, not. Something I have noticed on the Project Meditation forum is that there are people who go for LifeFlow because it is cheaper than Holosync, which they have considered before or even started with. (I am guilty of picking up LifeFlow after Holosync as well, although for other reasons. Holosync has a lot more PR, so people tend to discover it first.)

The thing is, the two competitors have quite different approaches. You cannot just substitute one for the other and use them in the same way, then expect the same results. Oh, there are similarities: They both use binaural beat technology to create a standing wave in the brain of a desired frequency, and they both warn their users that this may cause weird experiences as formerly unconscious material comes to the surface. Even unpleasant or scary stuff to some degree. But they both maintain that for most people, the pleasant experiences dominate. And reports from several users seem to bear all of this out.

However, Holosync uses more of a “brute force” approach. They start with delta waves from day one, which may be nice if you want to substitute meditation for sleep, but is very hard to assimilate. They actually claim that the intention is to overload certain parts of the brain in the hope that it will reorganize on a higher level of efficiency. I have mocked this in the part, I hope, saying that if so they should play the sound of screaming babies. No other sound overloads my brain at least faster than that. Clearly that cannot be what happens, or at least not the only thing that happens.

LifeFlow takes a different approach. While meditation is optional with Holosync, it is a central part of the recommended use for LifeFlow. And LifeFlow starts with pure alpha wave soundtracks, a form of brain waves that occur naturally in humans while awake, although it is most common just as we are about to fall asleep. Still, many people experience alpha waves simply by relaxing and closing their eyes. And if that is not, rolling the eyes back gently (as if trying to look through your forehead right above your nose, the so-called “third eye”) will usually trigger it. To further recognize this type of brainwaves, you will notice that it is incompatible with mathematics and other stuff that normally would make you furrow your brows to solve problems. Even long sentences may be hard to handle in this mode. However, you are still very much aware, in fact in some ways more than before. More present, perhaps. And sounds may sometimes seem louder.

Anyway, you should be able to recognize the alpha waves from daily life. If all goes well you should be able to spend most of the meditation session in this state. Not that you can’t do that without artificial stimuli too. But after about a month, you move on to a slightly deeper alpha level. Each month you get access to a deeper frequency. After something like three or four months, you are within the range we call theta waves. I think those are kind of overrated, they appear naturally in shallow sleep if I understand it correctly. Contrary to the claims on their website, vivid dreams (REM) actually use beta, same as waking thought and experiences. Although in me at least, dreams during shallow sleep can be scaringly intense and lifelike, as I have written about earlier this spring.

Over the course of about a year, you gradually get used to lower and lower frequencies, until you can supposedly experience delta waves and remain conscious, or at least aware. I wonder about that. It probably takes much longer time for most. But at least it should be theoretically possible.

I still use Holosync to wake up in the morning. It has a great combination of the meditative background sounds and the clanging of metal bowls that helps keep one awake even if sleepy. But I am not so sure about the psychoactive effects. The standing wave seems to remain confined to the deeper layers of my brain (and it probably is real, since I seem to need less sleep when I use it regularly) but my mind is not affected, or not noticeably.

This may be just as well, since without getting used to lower frequencies gradually, I would almost certainly go into deep sleep. The ability to retain witnessing awareness during deep sleep is something only the most adept meditators experience. (Although it can happen spontaneously once or a few times in life for others. It happened to me once when I was sick and had been awake at a time where I should normally be in deep sleep. I did fall asleep again, but somehow I did not lose consciousness completely. I have described it as a single candle somehow burning in the lightless deep somewhere in the ocean, hundreds of yards below the surface and its light, but it was not actually scary, and it was not actually a candle, just the “light” of awareness. Perhaps a better description is in the song by G.O.L: “All sound had died away, and it was quite dark. But in the void and in the silence, there was still a kind of knowledge, a faint awareness. Awareness not of name or person, and not of memories of the past. The awareness knew only itself.” Unlike the rest of their song, however, the experience was absolutely peaceful and not at all creepy. Merely detached awareness, without reflection or wishes.)

Now, I have no such experiences with either Holosync or LifeFlow, and I don’t know if I ever will. Probably not. I seem to be quite resistant to the actual experiences, which is ironic since I can have intense experiences of alternate states from music or sometimes silent meditation. But I hope to continue my experiments for some time to come, if I have some time to come at all. (Not that I know anything else.)

…keep you Spotified

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di090511

“Maybe I didn’t hold you, all those lonely lonely nights…”

Music has never been the huge part of my life that it is for some.  (My oldest brother comes to mind, but then again he was a performing artist from his youth.  But there are many others.)  Even so, there were times when I spent more time (and money) on music.  Over the last several years, this has waned.  I wonder if this is because I am growing older, or because of my unique lifestyle, or because there just isn’t so much good new music anymore.  That would conveniently explain why the recording industry experience steadily lower sales, even though online copying (“piracy”) is increasing.

“Wait, what do you mean, even though?  Isn’t that the problem?”  I mean what I say, because every study on the topic shows that people who download music illegally also purchase significantly more music than those who don’t.   This is, as far as anyone can tell, by now a scientific fact, even if you don’t like it.  Now it may be that they would have bought even more if they did not download, but this is not certain. It may be that they would have been exposed to much less music, and therefore have bought less.  Nobody knows.  But we DO know that they are your best customers, and you go out of your way to threaten them with unrecoverable ruin.  Not some for-profit shop, but ordinary students and housewives.  There is not a day, it sometimes seems, that your hate is not raining down on your best customers.  Wonder why you sell less and less.

Then again, perhaps it is simply because there isn’t much good music.  I certainly haven’t seen much lately, and it has almost all been either New Age or Japanese.  Then again it could be just I who has changed.  Although I hear it from other adults too.  I suppose this could be part of growing middle-aged:  The people who made your favorite music die or at least retire, and the kids these days just don’t measure up to the Great Old Ones.  On the other hand, I will point out that the 90es was a bit of a high point for me in buying music, with a wealth of great Ambient, Trance and Euro-Dance to choose from. Ace of Base, Infinity and the sublime G.O.L.  And at the same time we had the height of the Celtic wave represented by such stars as Clannad and the angelic-sounding Enya.  Seriously, it was a time that could easily compete with my own youth, as far as I was concerned at the time.  (Of course, arguably this WAS my youth, since I hadn’t been young much when I was young.)

Be that as it may, I haven’t had that much interest in music the last few years.  I don’t like to have it on unless I can actually listening to it.  I like silence better and better as the years pile on.  I suppose that could be because of my lifestyle.   I had a musical renaissance when I discovered Pandora (which soon after restricted itself to America) and later Last.FM which I still use somewhat, although I now mainly listen to my loved track now and again.  With my forays into brainwave entrainment sountracks this spring, music faded almost completely.  After all, when you can write directly to your brainstem, it kind of takes presedence, right?

Well, music has another chance, if a small one.  This is thanks to the European music streaming service Spotify. Based in Sweden, it covers much of Europe, including non-EU member Norway.  UK residents can listen to it freely, others will either have to pay a modest monthly sum (as I do) or receive an invitation and listen to some advertising. The invitation model is available currently in Sweden, Norway, Finland,  France and Spain.   It is not available outside Europe though.  I guess that is fair.  We don’t get Pandora, you don’t get Spotify.

As I am pretty sure I’ve said before, Spotify is a lot like having a million songs on your hard disk.  You can stream any of them at any time, in any order, again and again.  Not like other “Internet radio”  stations where you at best can give a general guideline for what you want to hear, and skip tracks you don’t want to hear.  This is more like your own harddisk. A very big harddisk full of music.

Unfortunately none of this music is Japanese or New  Age, so it is not really worth paying for, for me. I do so anyway, because unless it drains me too badly, I like to spend money on things that I wish to encourage, things I want to be part of the future.  This is it.  In fact, many years before the coming of the Internet, I wrote a science fiction story in which people anywhere on the planet could listen to any music they wanted at any moment, beamed to them from a network of satellites.  These days, the Internet is almost that omnipresent.  And indeed, I use Spotify with wireless network at work, although I have no idea whether the signals have passed through a satellite at any time on their way to me.  They combine peer-to-peer when feasible with a server fallback.  It is highly reliable and faster than piracy!

Lacking my first choice in music, I have instead revisited some ballads from my earlier layers of music interest. For some obscure reason, one of them have stuck for some days now. I think you call this “earworm” in English. That actual song is Always on my mind, which I know from Chris de Burgh’s album Beautiful Dreams. This is one of the few times when he sings a song not made by himself.  I may have heard it performed by Willie Nelson before that, possibly but probably not Elvis Presley.  (I mean, he did sing it, but I never listened much to Elvis.)

Anyway, this song keeps repeating in my head, except the voices in my head has subtly altered it.  The line that reads “Give me one more chance to keep you satisfied”?  Yes. It now says “Give me one more chance to keep you Spotified.”

And that is my message to you, dear readers.  I happen to have 6 spotify invites lying around, so if you live in one of the countries listed above and for some inscrutable reason don’t have one, mail me.  Give me one more chance to keep you Spotified.  Chances are you will enjoy it more than I do.