Notes from Maine - 2021/03/07
We’re supposed to get some nice weather this week. I can’t wait. This time of year, it’s really tempting to think about summer and all the things I want to do outside. Focusing on the future is a mistake though. It’s too easy to sit around and wait instead of doing all the indoor things I should be getting done. I have a closet to build in Dad’s room. I have railings to weld for the balcony. There are a million cold-weather activities that I won’t want to do in a couple of months, so I should be knocking them off the list now.
My puppy, Albert, is growing fast. This week I made up a new game for Finn and Albert. It’s called, “Let’s see who can lie down and be quiet the longest so I can write!”
So far, both dogs are losing.
Most of the time, I don’t have any trouble getting lost in writing. The book starts to unfold for me and I’m just typing furiously, trying to keep up. If I notice a continuity error and I have to go back to fix something, it can trip me up, but that’s pretty rare. I’m not saying that I don’t make those mistakes, it’s just that I don’t usually catch them until the second or third draft.
Today, I’m offering a free eBook of Before We Die Alone. It’s one of my most fanciful books. I wanted to write something that had no restrictions whatsoever. It went to some strange places. About a year before that, I wrote the sequel to it, called After We Live Forever. When I wrote the first draft of After We Live Forever, I didn’t know that it was a sequel. So, about a year later, I decided that I couldn’t really do anything with After until I wrote Before. It was a strange process. Eventually, in 2016, I released them back-to-back in chronological order. I hope it makes more sense to the reader than it did for me. It took me forever to untangle that mess.
One theme is constant through both books, although it’s not a central theme. They both have themes of predetermination, influence, and surveillance to a lesser extent. Those two things, and how they work together, have been on my mind a lot lately.
My friend (Dave) and I were talking several weeks ago about old video games and X-Y oscilloscopes. Back in 1979, there was a game called Asteroids that used vector graphics. It was all green lines instead of characters (like PAC-MAN, for example). I’ve been disassembling old games lately to examine their code and figure out how they worked. Some of the techniques used by programmers back then were ingenious. I commented that it would be pretty simple to take the vector instructions from Asteroids and use them to control a laser so one could play Asteroids on a wall.
It was a fun conversation.
The next day, Dave forwarded a video that was waiting for him in his YouTube suggestions. It was a guy who had used an ESP32 (a microcontroller we also discussed) to recreate Asteroids using a laser so he could play it on a wall.
We hadn’t looked up any of these things or typed them into a computer or phone. YouTube just knew that he would be interested somehow and found a video (with a tiny number of views) to suggest.
I don’t doubt that some apps might be listening to us. This was either surveillance or an amazing coincidence.
The following week, I conducted a little experiment. I followed a thought trail and I didn’t write anything down, google anything, or even say anything aloud. The trail was this: I watched a rocket launch, thought about my friend Todd (a rocket scientist), thought about his glider (he used to fly a glider), thought about that kid in New Jersey who flies an ultralight. That kid goes up thousands of feet with nothing more than a lawnmower engine hooked a propellor and a parachute. Crazy.
The last time I watched a video of that kid was years ago. I’ve never understood the compulsion to put one’s life in jeopardy like that.
Four days after I conducted that thought experiment, one of those kid’s videos showed up in my suggested viewing. It’s possible that I scanned by one before and just didn’t notice it and that it seeded my thought experiment without me knowing.
I’m not sure if it was predetermination, influence, or surveillance. I hate to think it was surveillance, since it was only thoughts. I guess I have to believe it was influence. In a way, that might be the scariest of the three. If they could make me think about a video that I haven’t seen in several years, and make it be the conclusion of what I considered a natural thought process, then it might be possible to influence me into anything.
Que será, será.
