Time flies…

Time flies while we’re having fun, and so do I. Fly while having fun. Flying is somewhat more complex in Champions Online than in City of Heroes, but it is still nice to do sometimes.

Between Memrise (see previous entry), Champions Online (see earlier entry), a bit of Sims 3 and a bit of fiction writing, the days just roll off the conveyor belt. Especially workdays, I usually don’t leave until close to 5 or close to 5:30, depending on which bus I aim for. It is already dark when I come home. Dark and icy cold, so no jogging anymore.

In Champions Online, I discovered a light-based class, or archetype as they call it. One of the two initial powers is a long-distance ray of light that will heal heroes but hurt villains. I’m starting to like this game! It’s not City of Heroes but then nothing is.

A downside to experimenting with heroism and Japanese for hours is that I don’t get to read the good books I thought I would. Pretty much every day I plan to get some reading done, sometimes I even pick out a book, but in the end I don’t actually read it. Perhaps just a little, but not seriously. I need to rebalance this. But first I have memories of Japanese phrases to water.

Memrise!

Tiny angels of curiosity

Are you insatiably curious? Then this website may be for you.

I have found another fun thing to do: Memrise, a website that teaches things, mostly vocabulary of foreign languages. Of course, there are many such websites, but this one uses state of the art psychology which lets you learn better using less time.

By “less time” I mean less time in total, when you sum up the hours of your life you have spent on learning the thing. It does not mean that you can sit down the night before an exam and learn at superspeed. One of the three “legs” on which this method stands is spaced repetition, which I have written about before (SuperMemo and Mnemosyne.) But this time it is combined with two other “legs”:  Mnemonics and motivation.

Mnemonics is the use of images or other associations which we connect to a random piece of information. Except for small children, most people have a hard time remembering something that is unrelated to everything else. The more vivid, amusing or emotional the association, the easier it will be to remember. If it also is associated with something we think about regularly, the energy that flows through the neural pathways will spill over on something associated. The best mnemonics therefore are those which we associate with ourselves, because we tend to think of ourselves a lot. This site cannot really help with that, but every piece of random data comes with a number of “mems”, images or thoughts that can make it easier to remember. Not as good as making your own, but easy and reasonably effective.

Memory refreshment, or spaced repetition, is the art of reviewing something just before you have forgotten it. This is the ideal time. If you review it while you still remember it easily, the effect is less. If you review it after you have forgotten it, you have to put more energy into re-learning it. The website remembers when you learned each word or fact, and even sends you a mail to remind you. At first, you repeat every few seconds or minutes during the main drill, but then it can take half an hour, four hours, 12 hours… it depends on how many times you have already reviewed it and how well you did. If you keep acing your reviews, it could soon be days or weeks. If you fail miserably, you will have to return to it soon.

Unfortunately, the calculation completely ignores work and sleep, so it is unlikely to work too well in the intermediate range, when you are supposed to review in a few hours. By then you are probably asleep or at work, hopefully not both at the same time!

Motivation is the third and often ignored factor. Most electronic teaching systems assume that you are already motivated by an external factor, and that may well be true. But this one has taken a leaf from the popular Facebook games (or “social games” now that we have Google+ and other venues for them). In these social games, people come back every day or even several times a day to water and harvest their plants or do other boring task to get some small imaginary reward, especially when they can share these with their friends. Memrise uses the same model. The initial learning of a word or fact is called planting a seed. Later you return to water it by testing your knowledge of the word after some hours. Finally you can harvest it into your long-term memory. You get points for each successful action, and your “wealth” of points is visible to your Memrise friends. (My name is itlandm4b by the way.)

As already mentioned, the website will mail you when you need to return to water or harvest your memories. You can also see if you go into each course how long it is until your next interaction with each plot of verbal crops. I have a lot that fall due in 12 hours, when I will hopefully be at work. This thing may be better suited for students. But no worries, if I fail miserably, I will simply have to return to them faster than I otherwise would. The game… er, teaching site keeps track of each individual fact, helping us work more on the difficult ones and less on the easy ones … for us personally, not some imaginary average person.

To keep track of everything and mail you when needed, the site needs you to register. You can create a new account or log in with Facebook. Unfortunately it does not take any of the other popular identity managers, like Google or Twitter or OpenID. Then again, it is free. If you don’t like having to create a new account, you don’t need to. But you may lose out on some of the most entertaining learning, or most instructive fun, on the web.

Wait! If it is free, how does it pay its bills? Well, so far it survives on generous investors, it seems. The plan is to take a cut of for-profit courses, but so far these are notable only by their absence. This may not bode well for the future of the website. But on the other hand, expenses are probably moderate as well: The users are making pretty much all the courses. After developing the software, the founders basically just need to run the server, and people contribute everything from single mnemonics to complete courses. So hopefully it will be around for a while. By then I should have learned thousands of new things. Perhaps. Or I might flutter off like a butterfly to the next flower. You know how I am with such things. Time flows differently for me. A month is an ocean of time, at least until it is over…

http://www.memrise.com/

Imaginary heroism: Resumed!

“The price is that it changes your personality in the real world.” The anime Sword Art Online, which is about the virtual reality online games of the near future, supports the school of thought which we may call “habituation”, that our behavior in online games gradually affects our behavior in the real world. The opposite, the “catharsis” theory, says that people in games get an outlet for tendencies that might otherwise build up and be expressed in real life. It would be nice to know which was true right now.

OK, I have now actually tried Champions Online, and it is very similar to City of Heroes. It is more cartoonish in style, both the graphics and the atmosphere are closer to a comic book than the more realistic terrains of CoH. The control system is a little more confusing too. But overall, it is probably the closest thing, which is not so strange since it was made by the same developing house (although many of the artists and developers stayed with CoH when NCSoft bought it up.) And it does have the clear-cut morality, you know right away who are the good guys, and you get to rescue civilians from the clutches of evil. (For some reason, only evil has clutches? And cars, I guess, but I never hear of the clutches of good.)

Anyway, I should probably solemnly consider whether I should continue to fight imaginary evil on my free time or choose a more peaceful way to employ my mind for whatever time I may have left. I guess each has its benefits. Having my favorite crime-fighting game disappear beneath me may have been a helping hand from Heaven, or at least an opportunity from fate. Then again, it may be said that this self-satisfaction of the justice instinct may also contribute to strengthening it, and to maintain a lawful good self-image that will hopefully spill over into everyday life.

I mean, it is widely assumed by the populace that if someone satisfies their sexual drive by computer animation of child molestation, even though no actual children are involved, this person is probably capable of doing the same in real life, and may even become gradually more intent on doing so. (Scientists are not so sure of this, but then there is a lack of test subjects, for obvious reasons.) Logic dictates that by the same measure, people who derive pleasure from doing good in a virtual world, may be inclined to do good in the real worlds as well. I can’t say I have seen a lot of that in my life, but hey. At least I am not much of a force for evil, which is pretty good considering my youth.

That said, I wonder whether I should follow through with my original plan of limiting my game time to The Sims, a very peaceful and constructive single-player game. Or even cut out gaming to spend my time reading and writing good books. But the latter would be rather a big shift. I think I would have to feel very sick to stop gaming altogether…

Writing fiction is easy

It was a dark and not particularly stormy night. Self-Sim was sitting in front of his old computer…

Writing is easy – it is writing well that is hard. But not everyone will agree with this, at least not with the first part. During this year’s National Novel Writing Month (“NaNoWriMo“), I have had a couple interesting discussions about “filler” or “padding”. NaNoWriMo has a quantity goal, not a quality goal, or not much of one. The idea is to write 50 000 words of a new novel during the month of November. Novels are usually longer than that, but 50 000 words in 30 days is already stretching it for a new writer (and some not-so-new writers as well).

In order to reach the goal of 50 000 words in 30 days, people have taken to various tricks: Not using contractions, always writing a person’s full name (and sometimes those names can get ridiculously long), writing out the lyrics of songs that are playing during a scene, random appearances of ninjas, etc etc.

I have mixed feelings about this. Not so much the contractions, they are overused anyway, and many Americans do not seem able to use them correctly anymore. But quotations, writing without thinking, I am opposed to. Quotations in fiction should only be used when they are important to the story. If you hear a song or a speech that changes your life, quoting the relevant lines is important. If a song is playing in the background while you are doing something else, the lyrics are probably irrelevant.

Still, there is padding and there is padding. Mindless writing is something I cannot really recommend, even if it gets your word count up. There are better ways to do that. A padding that is not just a padding. I think we could call it “reporting from an imaginary world.”

***

When we say to newcomers: “Just write”, we really mean writing their own creation. But it does not need to be good, or even part of the plot. For instance, describe the place where something happens. Is it a room? If so, there are probably windows and doors leading to other places. There is probably furniture, most likely some kind of decorations. Does a teen girl’s room have stuffed animals, or does it have half finished toy planes and a tube of glue? Are there framed pictures, and if so, who or what is depicted? Is the room tidy or messy? If there are objects on the floor, what kind of objects? Blue jeans, black underwear, a dog-eared copy of Scientific American? Putting this down on paper is writing, regardless of whether it makes it into the published novel, yes, regardless of whether that particular novel is ever published. This is the kind of work writers do.

Farmers farm, teachers teach, writers write. Even if you have to scrap most of what you write now, even if you have to scrap all of it, writing is what you do. There is no way around it. (Well, you can use voice recognition software, but that only moves the writing from your fingers to your mouth.) You want to write something that makes you rich and famous, or if you are like me, you want to write something that can lift the spirit of men and women and give them hope and courage in the ages after your passing. But that is like winning a 5 kilometer race in the World Championship. First you have to grasp hold of the dinner table so you can get up and stand on your two feet. That is how you begin becoming a world champion. Writing all those lyrics are like that, it is OK for a week or two or three, but then you must let go and start on the terrible and frightening adventure of walking unaided, of writing what you see in a world no one else can see until you have opened it for them.

Every world has virtually infinite reach in space and time, and infinite depth of detail. In time, you will have to select what to report from that overwhelming flood of information. But at first, when you drill your first holes through the barrier between worlds, there is no torrent. You can barely get anything out with a drinking straw. Keep writing, but keep writing from the other side of that wall. Not this one. Look around. Listen. If worst comes to worst, smell. Watch the way people (or elves) sit, the way their eyes shift, their quirks and tics. It is probably not important, but if nothing important is going on at the moment, this is what you’ve got, and it is your duty to report it. It may never reach the printing press, but that’s the way the world is. Tell it anyway.

You may think that those who write amazing novels, that they happened to see an interior movie that was simply that amazing, and they just wrote it down. Well, I guess that can happen too. But quite likely they choose the best 80 000 words out of perhaps a million or more that reached their paper / computer screen. Or, for the particularly skilled, their brain cortex. But if you are still starting out, you can probably not keep a million words in your brain, so use the computer hard drive instead. Think of it as an extension of your brain. You are a writer. Writing is what you do.

Actually, planning is what you will do, probably before you publish anything longer than a school essay. Planning is underrated, to say the least. But there is nothing wrong with diving in, even while your plan is still sketchy – perhaps even all in your head – and take a look around. Who are these people, how are they living, what are they doing? Make your world come to life. Remember, the possibilities in a human brain exceeds those in the visible universe. You can create worlds without end, or as long as you live and retain your mind. Unlimited space, unlimited time, unlimited detail. The story behind a stuffed toy or a faded photograph may be enough to fill a book all on its own. All there waiting for you to write it down. And write, and write. You are a writer, it is what you do.