Friday Notes (Sep 8, 2023)

Another (very) late edition and in the same week [see previous post]. In this case, it’s because I hadn’t planned a Friday Notes post for today, but I’ve gotten so indolent lately that I’m falling out of the habit of blogging. (Or, the eternal question, have I perhaps gotten weary of it?)

But, as polite people say, “Stuff happens.” And because it does, I have enough perishable notes that I may have to put out two Notes editions this month.

Assuming I can get back in the blogging habit.

Summer has just been too much fun. Except for the wasps. And the occasional heatwave. But we’ve got it pretty easy compared to some folks down south. In fact, I had the A/C on last weekend because of the heatwave, but a few days ago I turned on the furnace because temps suddenly dropped into the 50s and 60s.

Minnesota can be kind of crazy when it comes to weather. Our record high (from July 29, 1917) was +115° (Fahrenheit, obviously, this is Minnesota). Our record low (from February 2, 1996) was -60° F. Which amounts to a 175° temperature range here.

Granted, those are extremes, but low 100s are common in the summer (call it a high of +105°), and it gets down to -20° at least once each winter. So, we typically experience a 125° temperature swing over a year. I like it; keeps things interesting.

Point is, it’s been especially nice this summer. A key indicator being the ratio of open-window days versus A/C-days. Obviously, those are mutually exclusive, and I vastly prefer the former. Especially since winter has the Yin-Yang pair of open-window days (rare) versus furnace-days (most of them). Spring and fall are the only certain open-window days, so I value summers mild enough to not require A/C.

But it’s made me lazy.

But, no, not really. It’s some combination of age, retirement, the current state of the world, the apparent direction of the world, the horror-show of politics, technological blues, and serious social ennui. (And the wasps.) All on top of my baseline raging misanthropy. So, when a particularly nice summer comes along, it’s easy to say, “Screw all that, I’m kicking back and watching the ride for a while.”

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I’m pretty lazy. (I must remember to relate what a college professor of mine said to my best friend about me. Truer words.) In contrast to my innate laziness, my indolent ten years of retirement, I’ve finally gotten around to doing a bunch of things I’ve been meaning to do for a long time.

Like get my furnace vents and dryer duct cleaned. (The latter was overdue and plugged, which made my dryer burn out, and I had to have the heating element replaced.) Got a medical checkup and various sundry vaccinations (pneumonia, COVID booster, TDAP, shingles).

And I finally made a Will (along with associated documents such as a Health Directive), set up beneficiaries on property and finance (such as it is), and made arrangements for my eventual cremation.

Not that I’m planning on checking out any time soon, but life can happen suddenly. In particular, circumstances can change suddenly and unexpectedly, so one is wise to preplan what one can. And it’s ultimately inescapable. Death and taxes, as “they” say (and some manage to dodge taxes).

For many people I know, all my gettin’ ‘er done the first six months of this year would be their normal week. But for me it was a lot. And, I think, a big part of why I’ve been coasting lately. Still got a few big-ticket items to accomplish before I can completely relax, though.

Enough of that. On to the notes…

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Stephen R. Donaldson wrote one of my favorite fantasy series. [See The Darkest Trilogy section on this page.] It’s hefty. Three distinct-but-related series comprise the whole. The first two are trilogies, the third is a tetralogy (four books). [See Fantasy Chronicles]

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant isn’t easy reading. One challenge is his vocabulary. A few years ago, while re-reading the first two trilogies in preparation for the finally released final tetralogy, I made a list of words I had to stop and look up:

mephitic, febrile, nacre, travertine, caducity, architrave, irenic, periapt, mansuetude, macerated, attar, etiology, inchoate, evanescent, nystagmus, chatoyant, analystic, catafalque, roborant, ur, benison, malison, condign, expiation, carious (eyes like fangs), telic corruption, viridian, sendaline (texture), cymar, obloquy, threnodies, hebetude, vermeil, febrifuge, anademed, chrysoprase, tabid, rede, triremes, coquelicot, innominate, etiolated, barranca, heiratic, anile, preterite, roynish

If you know most of these, you’re a far more literate person than I. (Some of those in the list I knew but added anyway because the list evolved into an example of Donaldson’s vocabulary.)

I’ve had that list hanging around for years. Now I don’t. (If I need it, I know where to find it.)

As an aside, it’s interesting to compare Donaldson’s ten-book fantasy series with Robert Jordan’s 14-book Wheel of Time series or What’s His Name’s five (six?) (seven?) Game of Thrones books. Not a fantasy series, but we could include the nine books (plus short stories) of The Expanse. Not to mention the (technically speaking) six books of the fantasy classic, Lord of the Rings. Food for another feast, I think.

[A pet peeve: writing about books and authors easily turns up phrases such as, “…Author Name’s Book Series…” A problem arises when I want to link the author’s name to, for instance, their Wikipedia page. I don’t want to include the apostrophe-ess in the link (because it’s not part of the author’s name), but not including makes the link look broken. I end up forced into awkward constructions, such as, “…Book Series by Author Name…” to avoid the possessive. A trivial problem, but it vexes me. (Above I didn’t bother with author links. Or even names in two cases.)]

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Speaking of lists of words (or wyrds), at some point in the misty past I found myself bemused by all the words for various states of alcohol intoxication (a topic on which I have more than a passing familiarity). So, I started a list and planned to do a post about other phrases and terms but needed to research them (and watch Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour Hamlet again). Which I never got around to, so here’s the list of words:

warm, mellow, glowing, flown (archaic), tipsy, feelin’ it, happy, hammered, pie-eyed, pissed, blasted, ploughed, smashed, two sheets to the wind, snockered, snootful, shit-faced, sloppy, falling down

Roughly in order of inebriation. Problem: the list is too short, and I wanted to come up with more terms, but only words with a specific connotation of alcohol consumption. Words such as maudlin or raging are too general. (Even happy doesn’t really belong, but I have a friend who uses it specifically to mean a snootful.) So, I’ll throw it open to suggestions for the list. I may yet write that post.

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I mention Hamlet because part of that post about the large number of common phrases that come from that play. Every time I read or see it, I’m amazed by how many there are. (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”)

But I can never remember them (my infamous Swiss cheese brain), so I’d need to read the play or, preferably, watch the Branagh film version. It’s really good and well worth watching again, I just haven’t gotten around to it. (My queue is so loaded with new material to watch that it’s hard to spend four hours — more with stops for note-taking — on something I’ve seen several times.)

In that post, I also planned to write about common phrases from baseball because, again, there are a lot of them. The terms grand slam, three strikes, and home run get used in many other contexts than baseball. Others include getting to first base, being off base, from left field, and even pitching someone an idea. Baseball has been around a long time as the quintessential American sport (including all the Americas) and has contributed to the language.

There is even a Wikipedia page.

But I keep trying to get into a mode of writing more contemporaneously and less as an explainer. I just hate to throw away notes without doing something with them. I spent energy reducing entropy and organizing information into a note. I hate wasted entropy reduction.

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I’ve been updating a lot of my old posts with the <P> fix [see WP: Classic Editor vs Reader], and I realized I’ve written plenty (and often then some) about certain topics. One of them being what’s happened to modern storytelling. So, I think that’s enough posts about that (and other topics).

I do have a last pair of notes that linger:

Moral Decay

Post about Star Trek as a barometer of social change. TOS was social parables for adults. The science fiction element was secondary (as in all good SF). Over time it became more pop, even childish (c.f. Below Decks).

Deconstruction & cynicism. Since Watergate. [Since M:I #1 – Jim Phelps!] Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Superman, Picard. Berman’s Vulcans.

Amazon’s Lord of the Rings. Galadriel is evil but viewed as good. Weeds.

Reflection of our worst qualities, not aspiration. “Relatability.” Heroes: leaders or clowns? (Is there a Superman popularity curve? Is he less popular in jaded cynical times?)

There is a two-way connection between media and culture. Both influence and reflect each other.

No writer can write above themself. (Which is why Atlanta is so good. Donald Glover is amazing.) Need to be adult to write adult. Need to be intelligent to write intelligent.

Modern writing utterly one-sided and presumptive. Preaching in storytelling is boring, even for those who agree with the point. No conversation, no nuance, a lecture, not a story.

Recasting Roles

Stories revolve around the characters, so character roles are part of the storytelling language. Holmes/Watson vs Poirot & Hastings. Is the latter more fixed as a (white) Belgian than the former as (white) Englishmen? Black Holmes: on stage, no prob. In realistic (film!) depiction, it’s a form of anti-realism. But so?

But there is some difference between adapting a source and retelling that specific story versus writing a somewhat (or very) different story based on a source. This isn’t unique to books-to-film. It exists when any story is adapted, regardless of medium.

There is an asymmetry to character malleability. We tend to view altering fictional female and non-white characters negatively. Rightfully so, it further reduces a scarce resource. We view altering white male characters as sharing an over-abundant resource, thus positively. Again, generally speaking, rightfully so. But still, leveling up seems to imply respecting everyone’s identity.

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This is an interesting plot:

It’s part of some experimenting I did about linear versus geometric versus exponential. I will probably post about those eventually. I included the chart for some visual appeal. For now, I’ll just point out the logarithmic vertical scale and mention that the curves involve x*n (red), n^x (purple), e^x (black), and xⁿ (green).

Speaking of visual appeal, I also threw in the image of the spheres above. It’s nothing special, but I did generate the “spheres” pixel by pixel by using a cosine function to give me a color value along the sphere. It’s just interesting to see how geometry can render a visual shape.

I also threw in the video above. It’s the tree outside my home office window. By March I was taking a picture every day (usually at the same time of the day, 2:30 PM). But they are handheld pictures, so the image changes too much. Maybe I’ll buy myself a GoPro camera for Christmas, mount it on my window, and program it to take an image every day (or whatever). It is kind of interesting to see the tree change with the season.

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I meant to mention the wasps. And my smoke alarms going off for no reason. Small vexations on my summer. High-tech overly sensitive smoke alarms. Phooey.

As for the wasps, they apparently appear magically (inside). No idea where they’re coming from. Usually about one a day, but one day it was five. They don’t seem belligerent or even inquisitive. Just hanging out.

I have a spray bottle filled with isopropyl alcohol. Deals with them nicely without being too hard on whatever else gets sprayed. Knocks them right down. Triple threat: wets their wings, chills their body, and poisons them.

Stay safe, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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