Month: October 2021

I’ve been listening to a lot of early Greta Van Fleet recently. I haven’t gotten into The Battle at Garden’s Gate yet.

Mara ebook (Kindle) is free on Amazon for 5 days starting tomorrow. It’s really an adult book about children, but a kid-safe adult book. There should be another category for that.

The wrong movies get remakes. Good movies usually don’t need remakes. (Usually. Some movies were good when they came out and the remakes are good, like Jumanji. That was a technological update, which made sense) Bad movies don’t get them. Does anyone really want to see a Howard the Duck remake? But movies that could have been great but weren’t don’t get remakes, and they should. Someone should remake the Hobbit with a cogent script, pacing, and editing.

I need to go grocery shopping.

A CME hitting Earth today was supposed to cause effects visible as far south as Colorado. I went as far out as Kenosha Pass but couldn’t find clear sky.

I’ve always wanted to see the northern lights.

From talking to my friends, I think they aspire to improve their kids, teach the young, and make a better, wiser, kinder generation for the future.

Instead, they mostly try to teach their kids not to lick the wall sockets.

The kids hear ‘lick the wall sockets’ and run off to tell their mothers Dad said they can lick the wall sockets.

My friends who are Dads all look very tired.

If boy meets girl, boy and girl get along, they have a relationship, and everything ends well, that’s not a story.

Fiction is different from real life.

Someone is bailing out Evergrande.

I’ve got two things really cooking right now.

One I write exclusively on hard-copy, as in physical notebooks with nice paper, a mechanical pencil, and eraser. That’s fun, because top quality equipment (good notebook, pencil, eraser) collectively run about $20. Most of that is long term too. The pencil isn’t done when the story is, nor the eraser. The story will probably take a few notebooks, so maybe a few bucks more there.

Writing is interesting because the hard part, writing the damn story, is also the cheapest. Editing, more editing, layout, etc. are all reasonably expensive, but the really fun part isn’t.

In case you’re curious, Kuru Toga pencil, Pentel Hi-Polymer eraser, and Maruman notebook.

Those are all Japanese companies. Is notebook-writing big in Japan?

I like the Kuru Toga metal pencil bodies. Plastic ones are fine, but the metal ones have just the right amount of knurling so I can get a comfortable grip without it ripping up my fingers. The erasers on the pencils are terrible, so I use the Pentel ones. Those are about perfect.

The notebook is a N236ES with 70g/m^2 paper, which is perfect for pencil writing. I rarely use pens, so I don’t know how it is for that. They use a nice spiral binding. The other notebook I really like, Mnemosyne (also by Maruman, now that I look), uses a wire comb binding which keeps losing pages. Their wires are bent so each hole has two wires, but the wires stop to bend back. That leaves a little hole where pages can fall out. These ones have a normalish spiral binding.

The big problem with pencil writing, dragging your hand through a written line, is an issue, and the slick paper doesn’t help. I sometimes cock the notebook at an angle to avoid it. A rougher paper like newsprint might fix that, but I don’t like writing on newsprint.

Mara is going to be free on Kindle Nov 1st through Nov 5th.

We needed the rain.

I said the difference between emotional and logical arguments is consistency. Let me change that to ‘a difference…’ Also different are the validities of the Appeal to Authority and Ad-Hominem Attacks. In logical arguments, they’re not. In emotional arguments, they are.

An example is whether or not I care about whining. A relative of mine has had a problem. I care about this relative and their complaints were sound, so I cared about their complaints and problem. But I just read a news story of someone complaining about equally valid points, but the person in question struck me as an inveterate whiner. No matter what, they’d be whining about something, so I didn’t really care about what they were whining about now.

Logically, that distinction is meaningless. A logical issue has nothing to do with how many other issues an arguer brings up.

Emotionally, I’ve only got a certain amount of mental energy to care, and once that’s used up, I don’t.

The key distinction here is whether the argument is devoted to the points being sound vs whether I do/should care. Both points were sound (logical) but I cared about the one, not the other (emotional). The logical arguments were effectively won, but I think the news-story arguer was making an implicit argument that something should be done about the issue in the story. Nah. Maybe someone else will.