Suddenly Sudowrite

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Children playing ball, impresionist image

Children playing Calvinball, as imagined by the AI art program MidJourney. Clearly today’s rule is “Bring your own ball”. Luckily today’s main character has that and a spare.

Returning readers will probably not be surprised to learn that I have written millions of words in my lifetime. That doesn’t really take much. I usually write a couple of thousand words at least on an average day when I am not sick, and that’s not counting anything I might write for my job. As you may guess, “writer’s block” is not really my thing, because my writing is like the old house by the river where I lived in 2010, which had three outer doors plus a shed roof you could climb out on from the upper floor. If one of the exits were to be blocked by the copious snowdrifts we had in winter, I could simply use one of the others. And so it is also with my writing.

I am very nearly the worst imaginable candidate, I guess, for the Artificial Intelligence-driven creative writing tool called Sudowrite. It is specifically designed to combat this mysterious phenomenon, “Writer’s Block”, that many writers claim to have experienced. Naturally, I had to try it. (Not writer’s block, but Sudowrite.)

I had read a few reviews (and watched a couple more on YouTube) and they mentioned that you have to apply for access, then after a couple of days you will get an invitation and then you can join. So I signed up, planning to use those couple of days to read more practical reviews and how-tos so I would be prepared when the invitation came. Instead, after I had signed in with Google (Facebook is also accepted) I suddenly found myself on a website that was, in fact, Sudowrite. It gave a very quick tour of the most central couple of features, then left me to my own devices. Luckily there was a link to a (still very brief) Sudowrite guide. But otherwise, I felt much like Galadriel in Amazon’s hilarious new Lord of the Rings parody, where she has rashly jumped into the ocean en route between Middle-Earth and the Undying Lands. Now what?

***

The obvious choice, I thought, would be to copy the not quite 1000 words long prelude to my latest fiction story. In this scene, the narrator picks up a very unnatural-looking crystal that he found embedded in a stone, and immediately falls into the Nexus of Worlds, which is (very obviously, I thought) the user interface to an alien virtual reality simulator that uses Artificial Intelligence indistinguishable from magic to produce a world based on the user’s memories. In this case, he is sent back to 1999, but a 1999 with magic.

Now I tasked Sudowrite with writing a continuation. It proposed two very different passages. I took the first one, deleted the crazy plot twist, and edited the rest. Then I wrote my own short continuation, introducing the Ultimate Book of Magic which is the central item in my actual Work in Progress. I asked my new friend Sudowrite to describe the look of the book, and I actually kept most of that. Sudowrite is really good at feminizing novels by proposing all kinds of sensory information, going into detail on how things look, feel, sound, smell, and taste. In case you wonder how the Ultimate Book of Magic smells, I can tell you now: “The worn leather smelled like a library. Like the smell of wood and old paper. The book smelled of mold and dust. The metal clasp like rusting iron and blood.” And should you be so lucky as to get your hands on it, you would notice that “The cover was worn and smooth. If I had to guess I’d say it was oiled, but there was no sheen to it. It looked like it had been oiled a thousand times.”

(I am told women love that books contain all kinds of sensory detail. I noticed it first in Clan of the Cave Bear, which contained more information about Ice Age vegetation than my encyclopedia at the time. If I were to add stuff like that, my books would be thousands of pages long. Y’all know how verbose I can be even without that kind of peacock tailfeathers. In all fairness, it is not like all male writers excel at self-limitation. There is, one might say, no such thing as a tad Williams.)

Anyway, Sudowrite and I continued taking turns writing a couple of paragraphs each. I would delete wild plot twists, edit the rest, then try to steer things back on track in my own paragraphs. It quite feels like trying to write a collab with Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes. There is always a lurking sense of Calvinball, defined from the horse’s mouth: “Other kids’ games are such a bore!
They gotta have rules and they gotta keep score!
Calvinball is better by far!
It’s never the same! It’s always bizarre!”

You may as well memorize this little verse before you start writing fiction with Sudowrite. Or nonfiction, for that matter, because Sudowrite will play Calvinball there too, unlike the various AI writers that are tailormade for writing ads and paid blog posts. (Rest assured this post is NOT paid by Sudowrite or even their competitors.) Quote Techcrunch: “Asking Sudowrite to describe what a startup is had me laughing so hard I was gasping for air.” Yeah, I can imagine. That is, after all, the purpose of Calvinball. And Sudowrite is nothing if not Calvinball.

That said, it is a true Artificial Intelligence. The more you work with it, the more it gets to know you (and the other way around). Take the following sequence, where you can hardly see where one of us leaves off and the other takes over:

“Apart from the proper Sigil, and the correct postures and incantation, the Affinity of the Binding is limited by the quality of the Exemplar – the object symbolizing the Source – and the mage’s natural Resonance with the Source.”
“If the mage’s Resonance is weak, the mage will need to use an extremely potent and pure Exemplar. If the mage has a strong Resonance, they will have more leeway in choosing an Exemplar, and if the mage already has a strong Affinity with the Source, simply having a properly prepared Exemplar may be enough.”
Hooray for hyperlexia!

Here the first paragraph is by me, while the explanation is by Sudowrite, except for a single word added. And yes, it was Sudowrite that wrote “Hooray for hyperlexia!”
Shut up and take my money, Sudowrite.

***

I may not actually use this in my writing (except perhaps during NaNoWriMo) but, in the winged words of Sims 3: “Magnus is having so much fun it is almost criminal”. Sudowrite is not going to write your next novel for you, but it can help you create new ideas, new characters, new plot twists, and descriptions varying from the mundane to the ridiculously elaborate, depending on what tone and style you prefer. Personally, I am keeping my Sudowrite experiment separate from my current writing project, but ideas are good climbers.

For those who have been working on their Great American Novel for twenty years and take it very, very seriously: This is not for you. Madness is not the only danger in writing: There is also the danger that something may be understood that you didn’t want to know. Like, that writing can be fun. But as for me, I already knew that. I am never lonely when I have my invisible friends in my head. Sudowrite is just another disembodied companion joining my brainstorming sessions. (But possibly the most hilarious one.)

Will I become an Artificial Intelligence?

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This painting of a west Norwegian farming village is actually made by an artificial intelligence named MidJourney. And indeed, it is a sight many of us west Norwegians would not bet against having seen in our travels. It is not copied off the Internet though: I watched the AI go through several versions of this painting before I settled on this one.

Today, September 10th, 2022, was the first time I heard a YouTuber greet his audience as “human and AI”. I wonder if that will be the new “ladies and gentlemen”? Maybe the time is finally drawing close when, as a much better man than me once said, “God can wake up children for Abraham from these stones.” I have already long had in mind when writing my journal, that someday after my passing, an AI may read through Google’s archives and find my excessively detailed thoughts there. But maybe it won’t even be after my passing, if I take my vitamins and cut down on the Pepsi. You see, the progress in the field of AI has been nothing short of remarkable recently.

I returned to this topic of interest a couple of weeks ago after a casual mention on a website of a new program that generates images from text prompts. Turns out there has been released a flurry of such image generators this year, and they are growing steadily more advanced. My current favorite is MidJourney, and it is probably the most popular these days. After the latest upgrades, it gets faces right much of the time, at least when it gets to focus on them. This has proven to be one of the most difficult parts for AI, with the notable exception of the AI that specializes in them. Yes, “This person does not exist” which provided my picture in October last year, is also an AI.

So this is not my first run-in with Artificial Intelligence, far from it. Grammarly, a spelling, grammar, and style checker that I use under doubt after it has been greatly improved, is also an AI. It still makes some embarrassing mistakes, but then again so do I. Together we do better.

In my archives, you will find a number of versions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the speech-to-text program that eventually became better than nothing. I used it for years when my wrists hurt worse than my throat, but these days it is the other way around so I rarely fire it up. It is pretty amazing now though, and probably even better if you have English as your first language. Actually, that might depend on your dialect, I guess. According to Dragon, I speak Great Lakes English. I am pretty sure they don’t sound like the bandits from Skyrim though, while I do. Anyway, that’s another Artificial Intelligence application. In fact, it was based on the work of Ray Kurzweil, the great prophet of AI and modern futurism in general. And he is indeed planning to become an AI of sorts, by uploading his mind to a computer when the technology is ready for that. Good luck with that.

***

Anyway, today I was planning to demonstrate for y’all an AI tool that can take a brief outline or just a bunch of idea keywords, and expand them into a full-sized blog post. Doesn’t that sound amazing? But given that all the paragraphs above were my introduction before I started on the main topic… maybe I don’t need it. On the other hand, maybe we all (if we live long enough) will begin to use AI in so many facets of our life that we gradually become them, without ever noticing.

 

Harry Potter: Magic Awakened

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It is supposed to be a boy!

Overly pretty boy Itlandm lounging in his room at Hogwarts, waiting for the game’s time lock to open again so he can earn more cards.

I am vaguely sorry for not posting anything at a time when people my age die in droves from the ongoing pandemic. Or as I call it, the Longevity Nerf patch to Real Life. It seems the Developer has decided that human lifespan has become a bit too long, and has taken steps to adjust it. Anyway, my hour has not yet come, though it may draw nearer now that the Norwegian government has decided that Covid-19 Omicron is welcome and done away with all restrictions.

But on a more upbeat note, since most people out there are much younger than me and probably more playful as well, let’s talk about the newest game I have found. This is not something that happens often, but this is actually so new that it is still in beta. Well, actually it is already quite successful in China, but the English version is in beta during February 2022. If all goes well (for the game), the servers will be taken down at the end of February and new servers will be set up later this year. I may play it again then, if I’m still around.

***

Harry Potter: Magic Awakened is another Portkey game, but unfortunately it has no exercise component like my previous Harry Potter mobile game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, which unfortunately closed at the end of January. It was awesome and wholesome. This one is just awesome, I guess. It does not encourage exercise, quite the opposite. Well, except for your fingers I guess.

The game is set in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, starting around 10 years after the final book in the series. You play as a young and way too androgynous student getting a surprise letter of acceptance from the school, and working your way through a long storyline spanning years. Probably. I am still in the first year and there’s barely a week left of the beta. But there is supposedly a lot of story content in there, and what I have seen is pretty fun, at least if you can identify with teenagers.

During the introduction, you select some things about your character, like gender and dress code (within limits). You are led through the sorting hat ritual and get to know a few students: A female potential love interest with a dark past, a male potential love interest who probably also has some personality, a couple of helpful friends, and the haughty and naughty female antagonist and her twin lackeys. You can play as either gender, but both the looks and the choice of antagonist imply that girls are particularly welcome to play. Unsurprisingly, the game encourages socializing and making friends, although you can socialize without friends too, or bring your own.

The game has RPG elements, but is really a collectible-cards game. You get some cards through the storyline, but also you get cards and gold from daily activities like participating in class, friendly duels, or exploring the Forbidden Forest. Unfortunately, the Forbidden Forest is the only purely single-player activity (except the storyline) and then only at the lower difficulties. Luckily the game will just throw you in with random strangers for your class activities and there is no need to talk to them, yay! If you pick a time of day when there are too few volunteers for classes, your AI friends from the storyline will join you instead, which I find a lot more relaxing. Duels are always against other players, unfortunately.

Most classes are combat-oriented. Combat requires you to play cards from your deck. The deck is limited in size, so it is smart to make several small decks for different occasions. I mostly use the same deck all the time though, one focused on protection, healing, and summoning creatures to fight for me. So far it works well enough, but I am still early in the game and will probably always be.

The classes vary from day to day, but one common class is History of Magic, which is actually trivia from the books! No combat needed. You just pick the correct answer out of four, your two friends do the same, and you get rewarded based on the sum of your effort. How very Asian. Luckily I am doing surprisingly well, given that I stopped after the first book where one of the kids was killed. (I really hate it when people kill kids.) I picked up more than a little lore from the previous game I played, though, and from friends elsewhere gushing about characters.

Another fairly non-violent task you can do daily is dance in the ballroom! The worst that could happen is that you step on someone’s feet. You control the dance by pressing circles that briefly appear in various directions around your character, in time with the music. My sense of rhythm is horrible, so stepping on toes is sure to occur. And despite Ivy saying she wanted to dance with me again, there are always just strangers when I come there. (Ivy is the artificially intelligent puppy-love interest.) I hope our future AI overlords don’t take this badly, but I would rather step on artificial toes than those belonging to fellow humans.

Successful classes, duels, dances, and explorations reward you with baskets you can open. But you cannot do this all day long: It takes a couple of hours from you open a basket till you can open the next. However, if you don’t play for some hours (for instance while working or sleeping) the baskets will pile up. You still need to do your dailies to unlock the baskets, and then you can put the game aside and do other things. Thank you, Chinese dictatorship, for forcing kids to not play the same game from dawn till dusk (or worse yet, the other way around).

And on that note, time for my evening walk. Even without Harry Potter, I will walk while I still can.

Ignoring vacation and Celtic singing

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The kid is supposedly 12 years old, but she sure can sing. 

Some time ago I came across this song on YouTube Music, and I thought it was beautiful. At the time, I did not see the video, and I did not know the lyrics. Not listening very closely, I assumed she was singing in Gaelic or some such Island Celtic language. I can’t tell what gave me that impression, maybe her accent, maybe the arrangement, but it was really hard for me to hear that it was English. (In my defense, it is my third language, and I use it mostly for reading and writing.) It was really only when she sang the last line, more slowly and clearly than the rest, that I realized that the song was at least partially in English.

I played it again, but still couldn’t make heads or tails of it, except for that recurring phrase, “away from the role of the sea”. (Roll, actually, but I can’t hear the difference.) There were other scattered words that sounded English, but they did not make sense in context. For instance, “ignoring vacation”? Why would someone ignore vacation in a sea of Gaelic? (Turns out it was “give no indication”, but I still today hear it as “ignoring vacation”, maybe because I have a tendency to do that myself.)

Anyway, it is a beautiful song. The fact that I can sense beauty to some degree gives me a modest hope that my soul is not entirely blackened and shriveled. Although I suppose my liberal friends may be right and I’m just a delusional ape. Eternity will show, or not as the case may be. But that can definitely wait. For now, I’m fine with this preview of the supposed nice version of eternity. Singing, harps, innocent kids. I can think of worse fates.

(Also, I should probably try to get some vacation before the year is over. I have something like 8 weeks left, I think.)

Humans are beautiful

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This person does not exist

This person is so ordinary as to not even exist. Still beautiful to me, like millions of others.

I saw a question on Quora, one that appears again in different forms: Why hasn’t evolution made everyone beautiful like supermodels?

Well, supermodels are optimized for photography rather than reproduction, and photography is a very recent invention, so there is that. Also, beauty is not the only thing needed to have surviving grandchildren. There is a lot of hard work between this and that.

And yet, modern humans are for the most part amazingly beautiful. Compare them to the average Neanderthal or other archaic humans, and most humans now are amazingly refined. And things got even better once smallpox, cowpox, chickenpox and whatnot fled before the vaccination needles. These days many people even keep their teeth for decades, which doesn’t hurt their appearance either, I guess. Be that as it may, I sometimes find myself glancing at ordinary humans and admiring how beautiful they are.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I have very beautiful eyes. For it seems to me that ordinary humans are beautiful indeed. If their behavior was as pleasing as their appearance, cities would be like a glimpse of paradise, despite the concrete and steel. (And yet most people truly want to be good, it is just really hard to do and easy to delay. I know, I have tried.) Sigurd Bratlie, the unpaid spiritual leader of Smith’s Friends back before the Revival, once mused that if people actually got a visible halo from being good, they would pay as much attention to their inner life as to their outside.

Yeah, people put in quite a bit of effort to look nice, but they also have a great deal of help from nature. I remember back in my more innocent days of this blog, back when I thought I was a fairly normal human, I wondered why my friend Supergirl made such an effort to paint her face each morning when she was beautiful already at the breakfast table. I don’t see a lot of people straight out of bed (and I never saw her in it, but she was definitely unpainted when she showed up) but from my limited sample, I’d say humans are almost always decorative.

I wish I could live for thousands, no, millions of years, if only so I could gaze on all the beauty of this one world, let alone the countless stars and galaxies beyond our reach. But if science gives humans such a lifespan, it won’t be in my time. And if God gives humans eternal life, it will likely be people more innocent than I. Still, I am glad to see beauty, and I believe it to be a Divine quality. Huston Smith compared it to seeing the sun reflected from a bit of broken glass. Although the broken glass is just broken glass, the light of the Sun is still real, coming from a far greater source. Maybe it really is so with human beauty as well, or maybe it really is in the eye of the beholder, a gift I can only enjoy and not share.

(As for the person in today’s picture, this person does not exist, but is computer-generated from millions of photos. It was the first to come up when I visited the site, and will never appear again. And neither will you, but hopefully you last longer.)

Now with more imiquimod

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It’s so great to be alive! Long may it last.

I returned triumphant from the medicine man, who gave me an expensive and painful home treatment aginst the deathmark of the daystar, to stop it before the mark can develop into the consuming death curse.

Or in other words, the doctor confirmed that I had solar keratosis, skin damage caused by being out in the sunlight at various points in my past without sunscreen. (Probably some time ago, since I have avoided sunshine when possible lately to avoid migraines.) This keratosis can worsen over time and turn malignant, that is to say cancerous. Based on the size and appearance he was confident that we caught it in time, despite the appearance of a new blood vessel connecting to it. (Angiogenesis, the creation of new blood vessels, is one of several steps necessary for tumor-forming cancers. I remembered that from back when SuperWoman studied medicine in Germany. Well, also my tendency to remember weird stuff, as you may have noticed.)

The expensive and potentially somewhat painful remedy is imiquimod, which has nothing to do with iniquity (as far as I know) but was a treatment for genital and anal warts (why are these even in the same sentence everywhere) and then was discovered to also kill off skin cancers and pre-cancerous skin changes. It works by riling up the immune system locally, so killer cells attack any cells that look a bit weird. I hate it when people do that, but I guess for cells it is OK, as long as it stays local. When the immune system starts doing this all over the body, you get auto-immune diseases like lupus, which can be painful and even deadly. So this stuff is not something you wash down, it is something you put on your skin in the evening and wash off in the morning. It may still turn the spot red and tender or possibly even painful, but as they used to say in Eastern Europe: “Better red than dead.”

The doctor told me repeatedly that it was expensive, but it turned out to cost barely two full-price expansion packs for Sims 4. (OK, those are hilariously overpriced, but then they don’t treat or prevent cancer.) Medication and medical treatments are heavily subsidized in Norway, but they are not entirely free as some American socialists believe. There is a small copay so people don’t bother doctors and pharmacists on a lark. But there is a pretty low ceiling (approximately 6 expansion packs) on how much you can pay before you get an exemption card for the rest of the calendar year. I’ve had that a couple of times, but most years I don’t even have that much expenses. (I also don’t buy 6 expansion packs for EA games, but I totally would if they cured cancer.)

My next doctor appointment is in November, at which point we are supposed to see if the “sunspot” is gone. Look forward to it? (And possibly to a review of Sims 4 Cottage Living.)

Still mortal (after all these years)

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Screenshot anime Hanada Shounen Shi.

Give me immortality or give me resurrection! Death is not on my wishlist at all. Unfortunately, it won’t always be up to me.

“My goal is to be immortal. So far, so good.” Uh, about that…

I am double-vaccinated against COVID-19, but I can still get cancer. And probably have, but we’ll know more about that by the end of August at the earliest. But when I saw the patch of red, scabby skin on my face had grown a new little blood vessel, I did not tarry overlong requesting a doctor appointment. Angiogenesis – the creation of new blood vessels – is not something bacteria or fungi can do, but cancers do this routinely as they mature, because without extra blood supply their growth is limited. So yeah, probably cancer this time, or at least a precancerous growth. Which sucks, but not as much as it did a couple of generations ago.

When I was a kid, the word “cancer” was pretty much a death sentence. But that is no longer the case, especially with cancers that are easily detected, like basal and squamous skin cancers. (This is probably one of those, if it has even advanced to the cancer stage at all.) Today, the greater risk for me is the simple and streamlined structure of Norwegian public health care (which is almost all the health care we have, except for a booming beauty industry).

***

Norwegian health care: Each person is assigned a regular doctor, called “fastlege” in Norwegian. Unfortunately this has nothing to do with the English words “fast” as in speedy, but rather means fixed, immovable doctor. (They can be replaced though, but it is a procedure.) Mine has been looking out for me for many years, most lately by gambling on me getting vaccinated in a far-away location without getting infected along the way. So I’m fine with the system in general. But doctors need a vacation too. Regular doctors, specialists, all kinds of health personnel celebrate the short Norwegian summer by taking a month or so off. Last time I was suspected to have cancer (false alarm, yay) I had to wait a couple of months for further investigation because of summer vacation. This time I am only waiting 1 month for my regular doctor, but of course it feels longer.

After seeing my doctor, he will hopefully apply for an appointment with a dermatologist. (Ideally my local doctor would remove the skin lesion first, but that may be too much to hope for.) Then a couple more months (possibly more since people have stayed away for 18 months during the pandemic). Hopefully the dermatologist will remove the thing and get it checked for cancer. I would like to have this done before Christmas, but again, there is likely a backlog from the pandemic. And I guess I have contributed to that, so fair is fair.

Generally, our health care has two lanes: Emergency and everything else. Cancer is not an emergency, at least not until it is too late. So it is perfectly normal for people to wait for months to diagnose and remove a small cancer, and then have a fortune of tax money spent trying in vain to get rid of all the metastases that were created during the wait. This may not be perfect, but it is simple and streamlined, the way we like things here in Norway. It wouldn’t be like this unless the people wanted it this way, what with us having a pretty effective democracy as such things go. A small downside of our current democracy is that dead people don’t vote. (Unlike what I hear from some other countries.) So if some feature causes people to get removed from the voting pool, those who suffered from it will not be around to vote against it.

***

Well, it is not like I was in doubt about the mortality of my flesh before. I am that age after all, where I could live another thirty years or another thirty seconds. You have to get used to it. “All flesh is grass” a better prophet than me once said. But episodes like this one remind me of the unofficial motto of the Chaos Node: “We must say all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.” And I wonder if I have done that. Probably, and then some. But as long as you live, there are new things to learn.

Vaccinated, what now?

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Selfie with partial QR-code

License to not kill: The small printout is a “corona passport” from the Norwegian authorities, verifying that I am mostly harmless when it comes to transmitting COVID-19. It is a good start, but is it all there is?

So I took the chance to travel a long distance by public bus to get vaccinated, and it paid off: I got injected, not infected. It was a gamble, since there was a major outbreak in the area, and I wish it had not been necessary, but it was, and paid off. In my own municipality, people my age are being given their first dose of vaccine this week, and the second dose in 12 weeks, or around the start of September! By now I have also received the second injection with artificial genes, and recently two weeks have gone since that, so I am no considered as protected against COVID-19 as humanly possible. Presumably getting infected in the supermarket is now less dangerous than drinking the Pepsi I sometimes buy there.

For many people in the same situation, the obvious conclusion is to return to the same lifestyle they had before the pandemic. I am sure there are many who are genuinely hoping for that. But we are also many who think that’s too early, and some of us even suspect that there will be a new normal, one that is different from all that has been before.

But let us take the first thing first. As I mentioned, I was “privileged” with a chronic illness that is usually not hindering a moderately active lifestyle, but which could make COVID-19 even much more dangerous than it already is at my age. That is the reason why I was packed off to another municipality for early vaccination. But all around me here are other people in their 60es who are not vaccinated at all, or so recently that their immune system has not yet been set up properly to recognize the virus. And most people in their 50es don’t even have an appointment yet. But for the last couple of months at least, patients in their 50es have actually been the largest group at the hospitals here in Norway. Very few of them die, but those who get that sick tend to not recover fully in months, if ever.

Here in Norway, we don’t really have a problem with large groups avoiding vaccination because of superstition or following the teachings of insane or evil leaders who relish human suffering. So that’s good, even though we have a tiny minority who are personally too confused in their brain to understand the value of vaccination. And of course, there are a few who simply cannot be immunized, because of some genetic disorder, or because of transplants, or some such. In total, there is a large number of people who can still be infected. And we know that it is possible for a double-vaccinated person to get symptomatic COVID-19, although in Norway at least we have not had any severe cases. But even infections so light that you don’t get symptoms, can still shed virus for a while.

The main purpose of the vaccine is not really to protect us as individuals, although that may be our motivation to get it. It certainly was for me, because I am just that selfish. But the real plan is to achieve herd immunity, where there are so many vaccinated people that the virus simply gives up. We achieved that with smallpox, we almost achieved it with measles and polio before some evil or insane people starting seeding rumors that caused gullible and disturbed souls to reject vaccination. Now we will probably have to be on guard against these diseases for the foreseeable future.

It will probably be something similar for COVID-19, with waves of infections coming to Norway from the USA and developing nations, only to fail after a short time because most people are vaccinated. It seems that many of the vaccinated overcome the virus before it has time to replicate, even if some (especially older people) get sick for a short time. Statistics show that as vaccinations go up (at least with mRNA vaccine), transmission of disease goes down. In Norway, so far around 97% have chosen vaccination among the groups that have had the chance. This should be enough to stop the virus near the border, before it gets a chance to find the few vulnerable.

But that is all still in the future. For now, we need to show restraint. Avoid close contact with strangers (“ale and whores” as one says in the roleplaying community), stay home if sick, use masks in dense indoor settings.

The masks are probably come to stay. In East Asia, it has already for a time been normal to wear a mask if you have a cold or people around you have a cold. It is not seen there as a sign of covardice, but of acting responsibly and not causing problems for others. I believe this has a good chance of becoming the rule here in Norway as well. In the USA, it seems masks are now a political symbol, so they are probably going to stay in part of the population for that reason. That’s not how it was supposed to be, but luckily the USA is only 333 million people out of almost 8 billion. From the global perspective, the important thing is to get everyone who wants, vaccinated, and until then be careful to not cause more suffering and death than there has already been.

 

A final (?) hurdle

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Friendly bear surrounded by human family

Image taken from YouTube video “15 awkward families you won’t believe actually exist”. The places we will go for our readers… It will all make sense at the end, trust me. 

Anyway, I’m still alive, long may it last. Actually, that’s what I’m writing about today.

My native Norway is frequently mentioned as the world’s best country to live in. And that is probably true if you are a Norwegian, as I am. I am sure most Americans would rather live in America and most Israelites in Israel. Most of my American friends are already vaccinated against COVID-19, while I am not, despite being 62 years old and having paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, a condition associated with severe comorbidity with COVID-19. (Oddly enough my asthma seems to have no such effect.)

But real soon now, on April 29th, I am slated to receive my mRNA vaccine. (The two readily available vector vaccines, from AstraZeneca and Johnson&Johnson, are put on hold indefinitely in Norway because they can cause a fatal autoimmune response in women of fertile age. You don’t mess with our women without someone getting punished. In this case us. Countless men and older women will have to wait longer for their vaccines.) But finally it is my turn. Except of course it is not without a twist.

***

I am not the author of this world, or even the main character. But I am the viewpoint character, the observer who collapses the wave function and open’s the box to see whether Schroedinger’s cat is alive or dead. And it gets personal when the cat is me, and I am about to open that box.

You can’t have a good story without some drama to test the characters, they say. But sometimes this plot point can seem a bit contrived. Just look at this.

I live in Mandal, a sleepy little town on the south coast of Norway. The vaccination center for our town is within walking distance from my home. Not close, certainly, but enough that I would walk there with some regularity to change ownership of the Ingress portal there, back when I played Ingress. So not extremely far. I reasonably assumed that I would go there to get my vaccine, and then go home. But that would not be much of a plot twist, would it?

No, our benevolent government has instead given me an appointment on the opposite side of the nearest city of some size, Kristiansand, roughly an hour and a half away by bus. And bus it is, since I have not needed a car before the pandemic, and a pandemic is not really the time to start learning to drive a car. I could take a taxi, which would cost a lot more (taxi rides are very expensive in Norway) and still carry the risk of infection, just from the driver instead of fellow passengers. There’s no keeping distance in a taxi.

Luckily, Norway has been one of the least infected countries outside Oceania, with its sensible government, affluent population, and lots of space. We’re currently coming down from our fourth wave of the disease, but they have all been moderate by global standards, and we’re almost back down to the level before this wave and the last. So the risk should not be too great? Of course I signed up. The alternative was to go to the back of the line, probably in September sometime.

PLOT TWIST! A wild contagion appears! (“Wild contagion” is the literal translation of the Norwegian word “villsmitte”. In English it is called “community transmission”, which sounds like a collaboration project for making car parts. English is weird, y’all.) Suddenly after I signed up, my quiet little town has its biggest outbreak since the first wave, enough to make it to national newspapers. The Norwegian Institute of Public Health is intervening, there is mass testing and quarantining of contacts, but new cases keep popping up and one health worker is already dead. It is quite Texas here. Meaning anyone boarding that bus along with me could kill me just by breathing. (Unless they were a mask, which very few Norwegians do because it is traditionally associated with crime.) SUSPENSE!

***

As insane as this all seems, I have a pretty good idea of what happened. It is not simply the bureaucracy randomly doing random things. Rather it stems from the way the Norwegian primary health care is organized, with each citizen being assigned to a default doctor. You can choose another one, and you get to choose again every time you move. I lived in the rural municipality of Søgne, between here and Kristiansand, for over 20 years, and got my regular doctor there. That’s the guy who think most problems can be fixed with more exercise, and he is probably right about that. I have at least never had any compelling reason to change, so I kept him even when I moved here. It is certainly not within walking distance, but not very far either.

Last year there was yet another poltically induced reform, merging municipalities, especially towns absorbing the nearby rural communities. Søgne was eaten by Kristiansand which is bigger than Mandal. (Mandal got the villages west of it, and changed name to Lindesnes since tourists know the name. I still say Mandal.)

The government has probably assigned vaccination destination based on where my regular doctor is located, not on where I live. The reason for this is that the regular doctors were asked to go through the lists of citizens and see if there were any who should go ahead in the line. That probably happened to me, because of the heart troubles: The schedule for my municipality says that the last of those over 65 would be vaccinated the first week of May, and I am 62 and it is still April, just barely. So my turn would probably have come sometime in May, if not my friendly regular doctor had remembered me and recommended I be pushed a few weeks forward in the queue. Little did he know that he risked my life by doing so. If I had declined my appointment, I would go to the back of the line, which is currently estimated to be September sometime.

***

A unique Norwegian expression, as far as I know, is “bear service” (in Norwegian “bjørnetjeneste”). It is based on the story of a guy who raised a bear cub. The grown bear was quite fond of the man, and one day when he saw a fly land on the man’s head, he decided to help by swatting the fly. Unfortunately he killed the man in the process. Based on this story, the expression has become a common part of the Norwegian language: To do someone a bear service is to try to help them, but harming them instead. It is quite common and I’m sure I’ve done it myself more than once. But obviously health care is one area where such services have extraordinary effects.

Then again, I may survive. It’s happened before.

I win again, NaNoWriMo!

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Screenshot anime Konasuba

Picking up women is overrated. (Screenshot from the anime version of Konasuba, widely seen as the best Isekai parody so far. I am not going to steal the first place this time either. But at least I wrote a whole novel, which is its own kind of heavy lifting unless you have trained long and hard.) 

Purrfect timing, as the resident catgirl of the team would say. On the last day of the (Inter)National Novel Writing Month, I finished the first draft of this year’s project, Crystal Dungeons. A moderately westernized variant of the Isekai Light Novel genre, it fits just fine in 51677 words. I’ve written so many things for so many years, but this is really the first time that I have naturally arrived at the natural conclusion in roughly the allotted size. I mean, the first time in my life, seriously. Usually it needs padding or cutting to get close to the target word count for the type of novel I write. This time, things just fell into place with minimal guidance to the muses. The big boss fight happened where it should, followed by the foreshadowed reveal that throws open the possibility of sequels, while still giving a satisfying ending to the book.
I’m temporarily impressed by myself. I would totally have paid $2.99 for this on Amazon (after proofreading).

Proofreading is tentatively planned for January, if I live and have the health and haven’t forgotten the whole thing. ^_^ If I try to proofread now, I’ll see what is in my head instead of what’s on the screen, because the story is still in there, at least loosely.

***

Isekai novels are a big thing in Japan, I understand, and there is a certain formula that has become very popular. It centers on a young man, typically teenager or early 20es, who is transported to a magical world or allowed to go there after his death. The world is often similar to a computer role-playing game. Due to some contrived circumstance, he is made superior to other people in that world, with exceptional magic and physical skills, and go around casually righting wrongs and assembling a harem of sorts. (There is usually no actual sex in the novels that are translated to English at least, but it is certainly implied that there will be eventually.)

Naturally you can only write the same story in so many ways before it starts to get stale, so we get a lot of branching trends. Some have female protagonists, who typically assemble friends instead of potential lovers. Some have older people as protagonists, but usually they become young again near the start and things proceed much the same way.

Then there are stories that subvert the trope, as we say: The premise is almost the same, but an important detail makes it all different. For instance, two popular series have the protagonist incarnate as low-grade monsters, a slime and a spider respectively. In the end they soon become excessively powerful in their own way, but it is less instantaneous and obviously their new form puts some limits to socialization…

There are edgy stories like Shield Hero, where the hero is rejected and betrayed by the world he came to save, becomes an outcast and does some morally questionable things before gradually being redeemed.

Finally there are outright parodies, like Konasuba, where things go horribly wrong in comical ways, over and over.

***

My vague idea for this National Novel Writing Month was a lighthearted half-parody on the standard trope: The main character gets to make requests (wishes) for what powers he wants to have in the magical world, but the requests are interpreted more literally than he expected.
–He wants great magic power, which he gets, but without the ability to actually cast magic spells.
–He wants an ultimate ability that kicks in to let him win life and death fights. This power turns out to be “Death cry”: When he is killed, he revives by draining the lifeforce of those who killed him, basically switching place with their life/death status.
-He wants the chance to pick up women in dungeons. (This is a direct reference to the title of another popular series: “Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?”) This is taken literally by the powers that be, so he ends up carrying around women for one reason or another, and they are rather heavier than he imagined.

In the end, however, while all this is part of the 51677 words I wrote, it ended up not really being a comedy. It is mostly lighthearted, but not laugh-out-loud funny for the most part. There is also drive-by commentary on racism, sexual harassment, worker exploitation, and the fact that the most beautiful people are not necessarily the ones you should trust. But there is plenty of banter, flirting, misunderstandings, and the occasional pun. So, fluffy, but not pure wish-fulfillment.

Looking back at the book I wrote, I suspect that the way the “gods” granted his requests was actually better for all involved than the way he imagined beforehand. So I guess in that one way it is a little autobiographical…