February 19, 2024
It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma….The expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own speciality. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principle, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop.
Frank Herbert (Children of Dune)
August 31, 2023
It’s a lie. It’s all a lie.
When you believe in a lie, you fool yourself. When you say it with conviction, you fool others.
Get enough people fooled, and you got yourself a new religion.
August 25, 2023
I’ve kept a journal (OK, a diary) for many, many years now. It first started in September 1984 as a junior high school 1st year (7th grade) English assignment — each day, we would be given a writing prompt and at the end of the 10-week term (quarterly system back then), the English teacher would look it over and write feedback.
At least, that was the idea. In mid-October my family moved to a county and school system about 60 miles away (it’s more complicated — we couldn’t move in to the new house at first and so my siblings and I were looked after by various relatives, so we didn’t go to school for about nine to ten days). The new school didn’t use journals at all. English class was boring. Grammar and sentence diagramming.
So I kept writing at home, almost on a daily basis in the beginning.
But I’ve been fairly inconsistent over the years. I filled several notebooks, all different sizes and shapes. I stopped writing in one notebook at some point in 1999 when I moved to Japan and started another one. Then some time in 2004 I decided it was a waste of paper not to finish the 1999 one. Then I filled it up and started typing in a Word file. Then I went to Montreal four years ago and started writing in paper notebooks again.
It’s, quite frankly, a great big mess.
But there are some good ideas in these notebooks, and lots and lots of bizarre poems that I swear I do not remember writing. (Also at least half a dozen attempts at “automatic writing.” If you don’t know what that is, look it up.)
So from time to time, I’ll post some bits and pieces here. Just for safe-keeping.
Who knows? I may wind up publishing some of it at some point. Or at least drop some of it into the mouths of future SciFi characters.
July 17, 2023
List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.
1. I know it to be certain that the wording of this prompt is a bit odd. Is this meant to mean “know to be true”?
2. I know it to be absolutely certain that there are many things about which I am far from certain.
3. I also know it to be absolutely certain that at least one of the things I know to be certain will annoy at least one person who reads this.
4. I also also know it to be absolutely certain that at least one of the things to know to be certain will amuse at least one person.
5. One of these things I know to be absolutely certain may even irritate and amuse the same person (👈 maybe even this one right here).
6. I even know it to be absolutely certain that writing a list of ten things that are absolutely certain takes a considerably longer time than I had initially anticipated.
7. Just to be sure I irritate someone, it is absolutely certain that the world is a warmer place than it was when I was a kid 40 years ago.
8. The fact that June 2023 was the hottest month on record is absolutely certain.
9. I know it to be absolutely certain, however, that we have only been keeping records on temperatures worldwide since the late 1880s, and records were measured using different instruments
10. But the most important thing to be absolutely certain that I know is that Sony says they have the technology to make humanoid robots but can’t figure out what to use them for. I have an idea or two about that…
July 2, 2023
Have you ever had surgery? What for?
Yeah, minor surgery. On March 3, 2020, I had a benign tumor the size of a gum ball removed from my left shoulder.
It had been created by repeated rubbing of my shoulder bag strap on sweaty skin. Or rather on sweaty shirt over sweaty skin. I walk half an hour back and forth the train station to my workplace each morning and evening, and the summers in Kyoto are hot hot hot.
So there I was lying on a surgeon’s bed, getting my shoulder skin snipped into three pieces and pried open. My blood pressure shot up to 190 at one point. The surgeons told me to relax.
Uh. Yeah. They didn’t tell me how close the tumor was to a major artery, but I could make an educated guess.
There was a cloth screen between my face and my shoulder so that I couldn’t see what they were doing. And of course they had numbed the entire area and I couldn’t move my left arm at all.
But it was an unpleasant experience. No pain, but I could of course still hear the clip clip clipping of scissors on skin. And I have an imagination.
(Fwiw I have written a short story based on getting my wisdom teeth taken out—also with local rather than general anesthesia—though I didn’t include the factoid that my root tips shot across the room like tiny cannonballs and were never found again).
Fortunately, the surgery was successful— they even showed me the tumor (it looked like a tiny blancmange, and now you’ll have that image in your mind next time you eat one). They even asked me if if wanted to keep it (um, no thanks).
And afterwards the scar was barely visible, so good a job they did with the stitches.
Two days after the surgery, we went into lockdown and had to wear masks everywhere.
Talk about good timing.
December 17, 2022
I’ve been testing ChatGPT over the last couple of days. (If you don’t know what this chatbot is, here’s a good NYT article about ChatGPT and others currently in development.)
The avowed purpose of ChatGPT is to create an AI that can create believable dialogues. It does this by scouring the web for data it uses to respond to simple prompts.
By “simple,” I mean sometimes “horribly complicated,” of course. And sometimes a little ridiculous.
As has been pointed out, chatbots only generate texts based on what they have been fed, i.e., “garbage in / garbage out.” So if you push the programs hard enough, they will generate racist, sexist, homophobic etc awful stuff — because unfortunately that kind of sick and twisted garbage is still out there, somewhere online in a troll’s paradise.
So far, I have asked the program to:
OK, and the verdict is:
Continue Reading
August 9, 2020
14 years ago, my wife and I went to Hiroshima by high-speed ferry boat, on our way back from visiting her parents in Kyushu. Her father’s family comes from Hiroshima (although her father was actually born in Dairen/Dalian (大連), China) and her uncle and his family still live about an hour’s drive north of the city.
It was my first time to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. We arrived about a week after the annual Peace Memorial Ceremony and Peace Message Lantern Floating Ceremony, but the museum was a very sharp reminder of the horror that my country visited upon Japan.
August 6th, 8:15 a.m. Hiroshima.
August 9th, 11:02 a.m. Nagasaki. Continue Reading
December 24, 2018
Yes, climate change is real.
Yes, some of these five classic SF novels from Tor are really about pollution and not climate change per se.
Yes, that doesn’t really matter.
The Sheep Look Up is still the best of the bunch. And (not surprisingly) somewhat prophetic.
Le plus chose change…
(P.S. Happy Yuletide. Bwah ha ha…)
July 25, 2018
It’s the end of the spring term (finally) at my university in Kyoto, which means I’ll be getting ready for my yearlong sabbatical in Montreal soon. From September I’ll be back at a North American university for the first time since 1997.
Ah, Notre Dame. Mixed lapsed Catholic-cum-agnostic memories. Continue Reading
March 29, 2016
I’ve been meaning to add a personal essay page to my web site for stories that didn’t seem to fit into any neat categories. The immediate impetus is an essay that was recently “rejected” by my former graduate program’s in-house literary journal…probably because it’s an essay and not a short story (I posted elsewhere an article about the quirkiness of the English-speaking world’s insistence on an artificial separation of “fiction” and “nonfiction”).
Rather than wait up to half a year to see whether I could get it published online in a magazine (most of which seem to only publish US-centric, “woe is me” or “OMG look at THIS” sensationalist drivel) I thought that at least I could share it here…
The essay is “En” (縁), a topic that Asians (particularly those in Confucian-influenced societies) know a lot about. I first encountered the concept as a teaching assistant in Gojo High School, Nara, about 15 years ago. Almost like a previous life. Maybe it was…
Check it out here.
Writing blogs is miracle I am a writer blogger and my site mission is to give information on maximum information to audiences
Reflections of an inquiring retiree ...
Grow with the seasons, be inspired year-round
Rock & Metal Reviews That Hit Hard
Darryl's random observations
Sharing ideas and inspirations about books we have read.
Ride the Tiger - 騎虎之勢
Author. Writer. Adventurer.
Blogger | IoT & Social Media Influencer
Something For Everyone!
M Thomas Apple Author Page 