Waffle

Things I learned at work that I’m using in NaNoWriMo:
* Calculating future workloads.
* Sitting down and doing it at the time available for it.

Things I learned from NaNoWriMo that I’m using at work:
* Ignoring (finally) distractions.
* Sticking to it until the work is done rather than flitting between tasks.

Both are terribly bad for my shoulders and arms though.

Last night, instead of working on NaNoWriMo, I went to bed at half past ten, having spent the last hour and a half before then in a zombie-like state. I don’t think I’ve run up a sleep deficit in the short period since last weekend, when I slept into the afternoon on two consecutive days.

I was irritable and unable to focus on Monday. I eat constantly if food’s in front of me (breakfast included chocolate) - if not, I can’t be bothered to fetch it or prepare it.

Yep, looks like seasonal depression is hitting me early this year. I’d better hit the Vitamin D, hard.

Evening Update: Strangely, this does not affect productivity at work - in fact, I’ve been unusually focused and productive all day, producing over 4000 words of new translations. I’ve also been much more organized; organization has been a known weak spot in my work performance but today and yesterday I’ve done fine at it. Just maybe the extra sleep has helped me after all.

Also, I’ve gone back to working on my NaNoWriMo project. It’s not easy but I will make quota and maybe a little more.

First off: follow my NaNoWriMo effort on My DeviantArt site. It’s a Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story and actually fills in the big gap in the archives between The Stone of Contention and the stories that feature Jodoque as a character.

Second, here are my latest original scans for Invasion:

It’s slow going… it’s not so much a question of time as of motivation and priorities. For the weekends, my number one priority now is catching up on sleep. After that follow some time talking to Aggie online, grocery shopping, household and administrative chores, NaNoWrimo (during November only), and then working on ROCR if I still have time and energy. I find writing Feral particularly hard at that point so I work on Invasion first as that’s already scripted. The reason Feral is hard to write is because the original outline has been superceded by the shape the story ended up taking in execution. This means that I can’t end it on a cheap gag as originally planned and have to rethink in mid-story. This takes effort and concentration which I may not necessarily have in me. I do hope that the discipline of NaNoWriMo will help me improve in this area.

Because I sleep very little during the working week, I give my body as much time as it needs to catch up during the weekends. I turn off all external wake-up cues. So today I slept until half past one, PM! Admittedly, it had been a late night as I’d been up writing until past 2 AM, but that’s still a long time to spend in bed.

So for ROCR outside of the NaNoWriMO novel-in-progress, this weekend is once again a bust; I know I’ve been racking up a lot of busts in the past six months, and I do want readers to know that despite appearances to the contrary, I am still engaged in my work on the series as a whole, just at my own pace and in the media that I can work with the most easily, which right now is the written word.

What does this mean in practice?
One way or another, the King Groy story will make it to the ROCR website, resulting in a complete archive by the time I finish off the series. What I think will happen is that the second draft of the novel will go on the blog. The final draft will then be posted to the website proper, with illustrations. Historically, putting prose based stories into a webcomic archive has not been a successful move for those who have tried it, because readers tend to get stuck on their expectations and can’t get over the work not being a comic anymore. However, I’m willing to give it another shot, provided I am convinced that the finished product is really, really good. It’s going to take a lot of work to get from what is on the DeviantArt site to the quality I’m looking for. So it won’t be any time soon.

Two more articles that caught my fancy:
A letter from Iceland at the Financial Times online. Everyone on my reading list seems to have been linking to that today. It’s a long explanation of the economic city in Iceland.
Iceland is probably the miner’s canary for the coming recession in that it’ll define the limits of how bad things are going to get, and reach those limits a few months before everyone else. Right now, it’s pretty bad, but not riots in the streets-level bad.

Retailers feel Pinch of Returns at the New York Times. What strikes me about this is that consumers still aren’t getting it even when they believe they do:

More forgiving policies may be good news for Ms. Kakouris, the real estate agent in Miami. From time to time, pangs of conscience have caused her to regret a purchase before she has even stepped out of the store. “I’ll be on the escalator, and already I’m thinking, ‘I can’t do this,’ ” she said.

Returning such items is a matter of principle, and also a matter of pride, she said. “It’s self-control — that’s a positive thing, isn’t it?” Ms. Kakouris added. “At any rate, I’m clearing off my
guilt.”

Impulse-buying items and then returning it is not self-control. If you can’t afford to buy stuff, keep your money in your pocket, instead of shafting the retailer with the extra cost of dealing with the return. Buyer-protection laws are for when an item is defective or you’ve been pressured into buying it, not for when you want the thrill of shopping without the consequences.

And the practice of “Wardrobing” mentioned in the article? Just don’t get me started. (via)

Yesterday when I joined the NaNoWriMo website, I had to fill in my profile information twice, because the site forgot everything I entered. This morning, my profile page linked to someone else, and neither my user name nor password were recognised. I have set up a new account but will not be dropping profile data into a bottomless pit. If it still shows my name tomorrow, I’ll think of maybe putting some identifiable information there. Until then, you’ll just have to take my word that it’s me.

At long last, thank you.

I was going to leave it at that, but I got this message in from the Union of Concerned Scientists that I thought I’d share:

Dear UCS supporter,

What a night! On so many levels, this is a historic moment. President-elect Barack Obama promises positive, productive leadership on many issues members of the Union of Concerned Scientists care deeply about—building a clean energy economy; reengaging in international negotiations on global warming and nuclear weapons; and restoring the integrity of science in federal policy making.

With your continued support, UCS is poised and ready to do what we do best: use top notch science and analysis to help Congress and the new administration craft the most effective policy solutions—actions that will make our world cleaner and safer while strengthening our economy and enhancing our national security.

With your help we will:

* Take bold action to put the brakes on global warming by working with President-elect Obama and the new Congress to implement strong emissions reductions that are in line with what the scientific community has deemed necessary to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. We’ll also work to realize the new administration’s commitments to invest $150 billion in alternative energy over 10 years—revitalizing our economy and strengthening our national security; further increase vehicle fuel economy standards; and reengage the United States in international climate negotiations.

* Work toward a world free of nuclear weapons by working to extend the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia before it expires next year, finally end the Pentagon’s wrong-headed plans for a new generation of nuclear weapons, build Congressional support for long-overdue ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and halt further development of an unproven missile defense system in Eastern Europe.

* Restore scientific integrity in government by working with the new administration and Congress to guarantee federal scientists’ freedom to publicly communicate their findings, publish their work, disclose misrepresentation and censorship, and have their work evaluated by peers—all without fear of retribution.

Even with a supportive president, we still have our work cut out for us. With uncertainty on Wall Street, automakers and those in the oil and coal industries are already playing the politics of fear, hoping to delay action on many fronts. We know from experience that we cannot underestimate the power of entrenched corporate interests and the legislators who support them. This is a moment of enormous opportunity, but real change doesn’t just happen. We must work hard to ensure the important groundwork we have laid becomes reality.

Together with your support, we are ready to make real change. Let’s get to it.

Sincerely,
Kevin Knobloch

President

The effort to reconstruct the United States after eight years of Republican misrule will be long and arduous and will necessarily have to focus on fixing the economy and the United States’ ruined international reputation. But scientific integrity in government is an important issue and one in which change can happen very very quickly (hint: fire the creationists).

The two pages from Invasion above (not shown on some feeds) are all I have to show for myself in terms of new comics work over the past few weeks. My motivation to do comics has been down a bit, in favour of individual illustrations and living my life, but at least with these pages that are already scripted all the way to the end, it’s easier to snatch some time here and there to execute what’s already planned. I don’t know if there’ll be any more ROCR after Invasion and Feral are both finished.

There were some plans for Aggie and me to work on the next episode of Feral together while I was with her last week, but we didn’t get around to working on our art much at all. The week just flew by. It would have been convenient, because the page in question as it floats around in my head involves horses, which I’m kind of wary of drawing. But it’ll be a while before we get around to it now. I think I’ll just wrap up Invasion first. It’ll all be in the right order in the archives anyway.

The Shockwave Rider has been listed among Brunner’s great novels along with Stand on Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit, and The Sheep Look Up, and it has been written up as a novel that anticipated the emergence of the internet and coined the term worm for a self-replicating, malicious computer program. Wikipedia article on The Shockwave Rider. So is it?

Not quite. On reading it, I found it weaker than the other three “great” Brunner novels. It’s simpler and more linear and while it had some of the kaleidoscopic trappings of the other novels, it didn’t quite take them as far as the other three did. It also felt very much like a repeat exercise. Stylistically, it didn’t gel for me either, though on the plus side, it did have an engaging female character in Kate Lilleberg.

As for it anticipating the internet, it was a bit late for that, having been published in 1975 when DARPANET had been around for a few years. The use of the term “worm” does seem to be original though what Brunner speaks of is “tapeworms” and his description of them suggests that he conceptualizes them as being essentially worm-like in structure as well as behaviour. In other words, the lead character’s descriptions of his worms suggests that they are segmented creatures and that this is part of the reason why they are called that.

Of course, those are mere technological details. What makes Brunner’s most ambitious work interesting is his broad-brush depiction of entire social systems. In The Shockwave Rider, what Brunner puts under the microscope is the influence of extensive data registration and manipulation on society as a whole and the well-being of its individuals, and what happens when corporations and governments try to control and suppress their data while still having access to that of individual consumers and citizens. And in its handling of these concepts, The Shockwave Rider does not disappoint. Some choice quotes:

At Tarnover they explained it all so reasonably! Of course everybody had to e given a personal code! How else could the government do right by its citizens, keep track of the desires, tastes, preferences, purchases, commitments and above all location of a continentful of mobile, free individuals?
Granted, there was an alternative approach. But would you want to see it adopted here? Would you like to find your range of choice restricted to the point where the population became predictable in its collective behavior?

Chilling, huh? And (in character):

The behaviorists reduced the principle of the carrot and the stick to the same kind of ’scientific’ basis as the Nazis used for their so-called racial science. It’s not surprising they became the darlings of the establishment. Governments rely on threat and trauma to survive. The easiest populace to rule is weak, poor, superstitious, preferably terrified of what tomorrow may bring, and constantly being reminded that the man in the street must step into the gutter when his superiors deign to pass him by. Behaviorist techniques offered a meanst to maintain this situation despite the unprecedented wealth, literacy and ostensible liberty of twenty-first-century North America.

Unlike The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider ends more or less happily, with the “good guys” dealing some serious blows to the (as always mostly anonymous) powers-that-be. It’s well worth reading if you’ve already read the other classic Brunner novels and are hungry for more.

Edited to add: one impressive feat of technical prescience that hasn’t been mentioned as much in criticism of The Shockwave Rider is that the novel anticipated the rise of the mobile phone: ubiquitous phones tied to a person rather than a place, which are used, among other things, as data devices.

I’ve had John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up by my bedside for months, but hadn’t had the energy to finish it. Actually, I have several books that have been partially read over the past few months, and during my latest plane trip too Tennessee I finally got around to finishing some of them. The Sheep Look Up, one of Brunner’s sprawling dystopian novels from the late 1960s, early 1970s, has a huge underground reputation as a classic tale of ecological catastrophe, and it lives up to it almost completely. Like his better known Stand on Zanzibar, it has a huge cast and a caleidoscopic structure in which future press cuttings, parodies of old poetry, anecdotes, TV commercial and some present-day information get mixed up with the interlocking storylines. Unlike SoZ, though, it is almost unrelentingly grim, with every member of the huge cast falling sick, and dying either from that or through violence. As usual with the Brunner dystopias, there are some moments of uncanny prescience, such as the portrayal-through-soundbites of a buffoonish US president who goes by the name of Prexy and serves no purpose at all but to distract the population through one-liners, a credit crisis, creeping socialism introduced by a conservative government for the benefit of its patrons, “organic” food that isn’t, climate change resulting from the wasteful lifestyles of the developed populace and much more. One particularly chilling aspect is the set-up in which there is one smart, well-informed activist character who offers insight into the problems and even some solutions, who is already marginalised at the start of the novel. As he disappears from public life, extremists take up his mantle and resort to terrorism, which serves to taint that character, Austin Train, even further. Meanwhile, throughout the novel, a thoughtful, reasonable, not-at-all-activist thinker is patiently working with computer models to come to a thoughtful, reasonable solution. A silver bullet that will solve everything without having to listen to the Luddites. What this thoughtful, reasonable person comes up with at the end, as the problems have multiplied and the United States are collapsing into fascism and anarchy simultaneously? “Eliminate the most wasteful 200 million people from the population”.

The Sheep Looks Up is not quite as good as Stand on Zanzibar - the characterisation, particularly of female characters, doesn’t always work, the technological forecasts are dated (Brunner famously anticipated the Internet, but that was in another novel - here, he has completely missed out on the increase in computing power that would happen in the real world, and while a seasoned science fiction reader can ignore that most of the time, it still detracts from the verisimilitude of the rest of the novel) and there are some dull bits towards the end. But it is very, very good and speaks to many concerns that I for one have today.

(Personal note 1: I am writing this from sunny Tennessee where I’m staying with Aggie. No work is getting done, and blog posting will be light for a while. Also, I can’t be bothered right now to polish up this review like I would if I was posting from home.)

(Personal note 2: I will be reading that other novel, The Shockwave Rider on my trip home. I do need a writer of Brunner’s caliber to distract me from the fact that I won’t be seeing my girlfriend for two months after that).

Second in the Hyperinflation sequence, and a sequel to Hyperinflation .
I’ve been a fan of the Uncle Scrooge comics since I was a child… so this drawing was a lot of fun to do. The top hat, spats and blunderbuss have, to me, at least, iconic qualities.

To a lot of people, holding on to what they’ve got will become a very high priority, and yes, some will take it this far.

I really enjoy drawing with pencils now… and these larger images are more satisfying to do than the little boxes in which a comic takes place. Some progress is being made on the comics, but it’s very very slow because I’m more motivated to do these.