Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 10

Video: Deep Work by Cal Newport

Paul and Dan on Deep Work (by Cal Newport). We discuss negative reviews, St. Augustine’s “Tolle Lege” moment, Ric Furrer’s Viking sword forging, the Monastic Practice, and solitude. Stay tuned for Dan’s rebuttal next week.

December Newsletter: The River Toenail

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In my dream, I was peeling layers of the nail of my left pinkie toe. The nail had flared out from the small digit into a palm-shaped platter, which was worrying. The layers broke of easily, though, without any pain. Just a dull snap, like brittle acrylic. They were surprisingly thick, transparent as mica and eaten through with tunnels.

The tunnels were branching and tentacular, less like trees than the tracks bored by woodworms, less like lightning than the deltas of rivers.

When I woke up, I knew I had to stop playing with that map.

(The church Sveti Sedmochistlenitsi on Shishman street)

Between Christmas and New Year’s, while the girls were playing with their new toys and the family had plenty of leftovers to eat, I went upstairs, plugged in my tablet, and gave myself unlimited time to spend on my new project: a map of the world of Ghost of Mercy.

The plan was in place: build up the terrain in blue for the sea floor, teal for the continental shelves, green for the lowlands, yellow for the highlands, and so on up to purple and white for mountain peaks. Each color/elevation would get its own layer in Krita.1 Using what I knew of the planet’s water and air currents, I could predict where rain would fall, and there I would erase through each layer in succession, creating rivers. It would be easy. Something a computer could do.

In other words, what I was doing wasn’t art. It was something algorithmic and mechanical. Apply the eraser and make. Problems popped up and were easily solved. Eraser, paintbrush, select color. The process ground on, swelling, bloating, taking up all the resources I used to think with. The world became slick, transparent, brittle, and I vanished all together.

I’d only crash out of my fugue hours later, with aching hands and shoulders ached, my eyes  strained and sensitive. I hadn’t eaten or used the bathroom all day. I could barely form a coherent sentence.

And I itched to get back to my map. Problems popped up, and the solutions were easy, but I couldn’t implement them because I wasn’t at my computer. I saw water running down the shadows of rumpled sheets and clothing. I kept tuning out of conversations, erasing through layers in my head. People became difficult to deal with, because they weren’t river systems.

(A good sky behind some panel blocks)

After a week of setting and ignoring timers, scheduling and then bailing on other fun activities, and in general failing to break free of my map, I finally finished it. That is, I posted the map on my Patreon, where my patrons could see it. It’s theirs now, I thought, and visualized folding it up and putting it in a box. The map’s problems were no longer mine to fix.

I wasn’t quite free. The rest of the day and part of the next, I still twitched at the thought of rivers. It took time to come back. I had spent a week rewiring my brain into a machine that drew maps.

And not very good maps, either.

In my fugue, I’d keep forgetting which elevation I was working on, or the climactic zone. I’d see that something was ugly, get rid of it, then add it back in again. Most of all, I’d get caught up in details that worked against each other on the big scale. Those rivers, for example. They look fine until you remember they’re supposed to be on huge continents.  At this scale, they should be irregular, jagged lines, like lightning. It’s only when you zoom in that you see lazy curves in rivers, which is why my continents look more little islands. I’m going to have to do the whole map over.

But not any time soon. Not until I figure out why I’m making the map, and how I will know when I’m done with it. Not until it becomes art, rather than algorithm.

In other news, happy New Year! I didn’t do all that much in December, but (map aside) I am rather happy with what I did. There’s that picture of a giant mouse, for example, which I like not only as a picture and example of speculative evolution, but as an example that I can still draw.

I used the giant mouse as the cover picture for one of the episodes of my Build a Better Monster workshop, which you can see here. I also produced a Quotidian to go with my improved Monumental. And I screwed around with AI-produced mock-up covers for my upcoming books, but you can’t see those unless you’re a Patreon.

In the word-world, I did an interview with Sea Lion Press about The World’s Other Side (currently being serialized on Patreon), “Levski’s Boots” (available here), the joys of exploration, and the pitfalls of writing Alternate History.

Reflecting on the last three months, I see myself as spinning my wheels. According to my sales figures on Amazon, I actually did better in the spring, when I wasn’t giving any interviews or workshops at all. That’s why you’ll see me experiment this spring with marketing. Specifically I plan to renovate my website and revive my mailing list. Do you have any suggestions for me? How can I get people to read my books? I’ll put your suggestions into the hopper and see what happens.

(the Sofia Synagogue)

And here’s what I read in December:

The Armies of Daylight by Barbara Hambly — a flawed but tasty portal fantasy

Sometimes I’m in the mood for Barbara Hambly. Her world-building is always tasty (Darwath was founded by King Dare. Mmm mm!) and her characters are superb. The king is toweringly tragic, and the air fairly thrums between the main character and the attractive older wizard. And yet I don’t remember any these people’s names. Also I came in at book three of the series and didn’t feel like I’d missed much. There should have been tension, especially over whether our heroes would go back home to Earth, but there just wasn’t. Maybe I should be happy that Hambly entertained me for a couple of weeks.

At Home by Bill Bryson — a generous tour around Bryson’s house, as well as yours

I read a sample chapter of At Home at the end of his African Diary, and was charmed right out by this sweet, dorky book. Our kindly host Bryson guides us through the rooms of his house in England, pausing in each to gently lecture us on where such things as chairs, pepper, and windows, and where they came from in the first place. From these digressions, he digresses further into the personalities and foibles of the medieval and early modern people who shaped our homes, and presents snapshots of their lives. At Home is most of all about the evolution of comfort, and it is a comfortable book indeed.

Power Your Profits by Susie Carder — a no-nonsense set of instructions for would-be entrepreneurs who know nothing about money (like me)

Money is less of a blind spot for me and more of a hot spot. It’s uncomfortable to think about, which means I try to ignore it, which means money is a mystery, which causes problems, which are uncomfortable, and around we go. It’s fortunate my entrepreneur wife isn’t scared of money, so when she recommended this book, I bought it. Carder goes from the absolute basics (what depreciation is) to advanced (the signs your accountant is skimming your funds). Most importantly, she forces you to stare at your motivations and mental blocks. This is a book I will have to return to many times in order to digest and implement. But I am convinced that I should.

French Lessons by Peter Mayle — a funny, gentle waddle through a few of France’s regional food festivals

Mayle guides us through his long affair with French food, notably his most recent bouts of gastro-tourism. He hits the major experiences – frog’s legs, truffles, escargot, wine tasting – with a balance of wit that makes you wish you were there and feel a bit relieved that you’re not.

Atlantis by Carlo Piano — an Italian journalist and his architect father sail around the world, searching and reflecting

I have to admit this book isn’t much for me. I was interested in the stories of architect Renzo Piano and how he saw and solved the engineering problems that came up in his work. The bulk of the text, though, was written by Carlo, who annoyed me. Aside from his real and vulnerable description of his experiences in New York on 9/11, Renzo doesn’t have much to say. I wished he would make his father talk more.

Cesar Millan’s Short Guide to a Happy Dog by Cesar Millan — a very surprising guide on mental health

I’m not a dog person. I picked up with book because I was doing research and it was included in my Audible subscription. I was totally unprepared for Millan to pour his heart out onto the page the way he did. He talks about sneaking across the American border, divorcing his wife, and very nearly committing suicide. And dogs, yes, but also people. Over and over I was struck by how well Milan’s animal husbandry mapped onto mental health. We should all treat ourselves as well as Milan treats his dogs.

All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot — the sweet and joyful life of a vet in 1930s Yorkshire

I watched and enjoyed the BBC series way back when, but the book is even more charming. Herriot describes the people and animals of his 1930s veterinary practice with humor and compassion. He also has some vivid things to say about fulfillment. When he says the best moment of his life was when he poured cold water over an ox on a sunny day, I believe him.

The Chair — an uncomfortably clear look at pre-Covid American academia

I loved Misaeng and wished someone would write something so honest about the US. Then, when somebody did, I was too scared to watch it. I couldn’t watch Misaeng after 8pm because it got me so mad I couldn’t sleep, but I’ve been making progress since then and anyway I watched the Chair around lunchtime. My recurring thought during this series was “thank god Covid crashed down on this broken system.” I hope that things have and will continue to change.

See you next month. Have some ballerinas.

1 Technically, it’s Photoshop that has “layers.” Krita calls them “nodes” for what I presume are copywrite reasons, but I have to say “layers” because otherwise it’s not thematic otherwise. I wasn’t peeling nodes off of my toenail, for god’s sake.

Flights of Foundry Specbio panel

This is the video of the specbio panel I moderated last year at Flights of Foundry. I’m a little slow getting started, but my guests had some excellent things to say, so  please skip ahead a few minutes and hear such things as:

“The stranger it is, the more likely it is to be real” – Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Did you give it a butt-hole?” – Casey Lucas

“pythons use constipation as a predator strategy” – Peter Watts, helpfully

“What kind of flesh instantiates that idea?” – Peter Watts

“the worms come out of the toad…this is why I thought of you, Peter” – Julie Czerneda

“We break the laws because…we don’t know everything.” – Peter Watts

“Of course the birds know what they’re doing” – Julie Czerneda

book reccs

Science as a Process

The Kindly Inquisitors

Winter World

Parasite Rex

Evolving the Alien

“I go to the bibliography and tear it up” – Casey Lucas

Interview with Sea Lion Press

Gary Oswald of alternate history publisher Sea Lion Press asked me some very good interview questions, and I think I answered them well. We talk about the “difference problem,” the “reality doesn’t have to make sense” problem and the joy of exploration and discovery.

November Newsletter: The Scarf

I fell through the door with a sense of desperation.

There wasn’t anything particularly wrong back there in the building, just my office with my computer on the big table and my backpack and slightly uncomfortable chair. I had sat there this morning and written, just as I was supposed to. And before that, dropped off our younger daughter at kindergarten. Before that, combed her hair, woke her up, coffee, low-carb breakfast, the alarm at 6:15.

We often hear stories about the terror of routine. The daily grind. The cage. You do what you do because that’s what you do at this time. After writing comes lunch and coffee, checking my email, one English class, planning, another class, more planning. It could have been a series of fun and interesting challenges, but it wasn’t.

I could see from my calendar that I was taking more time to get less done with each passing  week. Part of my class planning was to video myself telling a joke1 and I had to do four takes just to appear to be alive. Why was everything so gray?

So here I was, escaping the building for just a few minutes to buy lunch. I stumbled over the pavement and looked across the street where, between the expensive Italian grocery and excellent (and cheap) spaghetteria, a new place had opened: “Africa inspired fashion.” And, according to my calendar, it was time to buy Pavlina a surprise present.

I fell through the door with great relief.

“Hello,” said the proprietor. She was a short black woman with a broad face and darker skin around her eyes. Maybe she hadn’t been sleeping well, either. Her accent reminded me of a friend of mine, who’s from Nigeria.

“I’m looking for a scarf for my wife,” I said. Scarves are always a good bet because you can’t possibly buy one that doesn’t fit.

“Okay,” she said. “How big?”

“Uh…”

I looked around the little shop. There were shirts on hangers on either side, piles of folded cloth on a cabinet, and in the back, a desk with a sewing machine. My brain failed to combine these clues and I still thought I could just buy a ready-made scarf and get back to work.

“A thin scarf will just go around the neck.” She mimed helpfully. “A wider scarf can go around the neck or around the head. Let me show you.” She held up her phone, which displayed photos on woman with elaborately-wrapped heads.

Was I late in checking my email? “I don’t know if my wife knows how to wrap a scarf like that.”

“Don’t worry. I will teach her! You bring her in here.”

And I thought: a human connection. What a relief.

The proprietor showed me the folded bolts of cloth I had thought were scarves, and I chose a black, gold, and blue pattern, pretty as a poison dart frog. She approved, and picked up a second bolt of fabric, talking about how she would make a scarf for herself as well. I knew something about her day. Or else she thought her choice was better than mine.

She calculated a price for me and I figured out when I could pick up the scarf. I went back to the office, and the rest of my work passed just as gray-ly as I described. But when I shut down my computer and switched my audiobook to fiction, I felt something aside from the usual cracked-open-and-scooped-out exhaustion of the end of the work day. I was looking forward to that scarf.

I got it (“Bring your wife back here and I’ll teach her. She can tell her friends.”) and strode down Shishman street, swinging my bag, listening to the audiobook of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Giving Pavlina that scarf was the best thing I did that day.

It could be a simple story, but I’ll add another layer; that evening I fell asleep on the couch at 8:30.

My routine wasn’t the problem. Nor was a lack of magnesium or the inability to catch the lightning of inspiration every morning. The problem was that I wasn’t getting enough sleep.

The routine helped me. Like a frame around my day, it showed off the bright blue and gold of the one spectacular thing I did. And like a frame, it gave me a place to rest my spirit level and determine what was crooked.

In other news, that Specbio workshop went well. We built mice the size of elephants and carnivorous rhinos. You can see the recordings starting here. And tell me if you want me to do more of these things.

Not much to report about the books. Centuries Unlimited is still waiting for a publisher to pick it up. Fellow Tetrapod is now nearing its two-thirds mark, but I don’t think I’ll be done with it before Christmas. This draft turned out to be slower going than I intended, maybe because I’m aiming for a less organized, Douglas-Adams-type style. I love the sound of deadlines whooshing past my head.

Wealthgiver is gearing up for its final pre-agent revision. I’m going to print it out and read through it this weekend so if you have things you want to tell me about Wealthgiver, now’s your chance.

And I drew some! I have a whippomorph, a bit of world-building material for the First Knife sequel, and some funny fishes. I’m drawing fairly regularly now. It’s almost – dare I say? – a routine.

(“Two Great Cats Dancing” by my younger daughter)

And I read some stuff this month:

Red Roulette by Desmond Shum – The autobiography of a wealthy Chinese entrepreneur up to the point where the Party kidnapped his ex-wife. I read this as research for a novel, and it gave me exactly what I was looking for: an honest and occasionally vulnerable perspective on the powerful people of 21st-century China. Shum’s bitter disillusionment with the Chinese Communist Party is honest and very personal. And aside from that, I enjoyed learning how one goes about importing chicken pieces and building airports.

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett – the History Monks have another difficult day. As always, I had a lot of fun watching Pratchett explore what happens when you mess with time. This was my third re-read, I think, and this time I saw the seams in the story. The ostensible main character(s) don’t come together until close to the end, and are rather less interesting than Lu-Tze and Lady LeJean. But there are still some inspired visuals – I can still see orange blur zipping away into the deepening twilight of ever-slower time.

The Wisdom of Teams by Jon R. Katzenbach – how teams make themselves (or fail to). I went in expecting something as useful as insightful as Good to Great, or as human as The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, but we never got there. The lessons ended at “succeed as a group against high odds,” which is fine, but what about failure? What about people who don’t fit? I wish they’d dug deeper.

Reaper by Will Wight – the gang fights a hungry labyrinth. We get a rather nice explanation of the Dreadgods and where they came from. The most interesting stuff is about how a team can work when every individual is struggling for self-betterment. How do you not leave your friends behind, but also not slow down? If only Wight gave us an answer to that question.

The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold – Miles ends up accidentally in command of a mercenary fleet again. This was maybe the third time I’d read this book, and this time I was intrigued by the structure. Each chapter is almost a short story in its own right, especially at the beginning. Sometimes it seems as if Bujold was lost and fumbling around, but there’s also a charming verisimilitude to the way we actually do feel our way from one part of our lives to the next. You get the promotion, just not in the way you thought you would. (And at the end, Bujold ties the psychological cords together masterfully.)

Woke Racism by John McWhorter – how to live graciously around the politically correct. McWhorter tells us why he thinks the new political correctness (a.k.a. “wokeness” or “Electism,” as he calls it) is a religion. This model was immensely helpful to me, because I thought I was going crazy, or else watching the Anglosphere go crazy. Now I feel like I have a better grip on what’s happening. I’ve had profound conversations with the devout of other religions, so why not my PC friends? I got less use out of the second half of the book, which is about what we should do now. McWhorter doesn’t think it worthwhile to make people reject their new religion, but only to live around them. I’m worried that this advice boils down to “choose a different bubble to live in.” There is one piece of wisdom I treasure, though: “you *will* be called a racist on the internet.” Yes. May I stand tall enough to one day be called a racist on the internet.

On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson – what we can expect from H. sapiens, at least until genetic engineering. This was research for a book, and a re-read. I didn’t remember much from the first time around, but maybe that’s just because I internalized the information on human behavior. Like other old, influential books, On Human Nature suffers from the passage of time. The true parts now appear obvious, and the false parts ridiculous. I wish there was a more current wide-scope book for laypeople about the behavior of the human animal, but I haven’t found it yet.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality – what if Harry Potter was a scientist? There’s something Terry Pratchett said in an interview about a wizard who produces sparkly lights in the air, and how that’s actually a lot less impressive than the way we make sparkly lights in the real world, which is by means of a tradition of science and industry stretching back five hundred years. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is that observation threaded through a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic. I originally bounced off the written version, but the audiobook on spotify worked in a way the text didn’t. Yudokowsky makes a lot of first-time-writer mistakes, occasionally loses his grip on the plot, and works him self up, but the brilliant flashes of insight make up for a lot. I spent my day looking forward to listening to the next chapter, which means that this is a good book.

Morality for Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall Smith – Mma Romotswe thinks about men. This was a reread, and I liked it much better the second time. I think the first time I was frustrated by the very slow pace and oddly-balanced pacing — this is a mystery novel in which the investigations take up only the last three or four chapters. The characters spend a long time wandering around and thinking their thoughts. But now that I’ve read the first three books, I know that these are interesting characters. And now that I’ve grown up a little, I can appreciate those interesting thoughts.

The Double-Barreled Detective by Mark Twain — A boy with a preternatural sense of smell is raised for the purpose of revenge. This story doesn’t live up to its promise, but I liked the part about the esophagus. That’s a good trick, what Twain did there.

And there’s a new season of Bluey! It’s even better than the first two.

1The one about the two horses

2Be warned that the audiobook is unfinished, will be 500 hours long when it is finished, and is only updated once a week.

Giant Mouse

I made a challenge for the participants in the Build a Better Monster workshop: make a mouse the size of an elephant. In my original sketch I gave it a long mobile tail (moving the elephant’s trunk onto its bottom), but I later had trouble seeing how that would work. The solution I came up with instead is four giant incisors growing through the skin of the lips, which can be used to gnaw down trees and demolish any smaller plants. A strong, flexible tongue (not shown here) gets food into the mouth. Funnily enough, its lost hair everywhere except the tail, which it uses as a visual signal and fly whisk. A naked mole rat converging on a hadrosaur.

Building a Better Monster 1/4

This is part 1 of a speculative biology workshop I gave to Amber Royer’s Saturday Nite Write group. We had a great time with the first exercise: what would a mouse look like if it was the size of an elephant? Please share your descriptions (or pictures!) in the comments.

Fishes out of Water

Some experiments with walking fishes.

Start with a fish (0) – this one is a teleost. Note the pectoral fins are right above (dorsal of) the pelvic fins.

The first tetrapods (1) evolved from lobe-finned fishes with the pelvic fins down close to the tail. A nice, stable platform on land, but boring!

What about (2)? the pelvic and analfins get repurposed as limbs. The pectorals are  lost.

Number 3 is something I see a lot of these days. The pelvic fins and the tail are limbs, which I think represents a problem with homologous structures. Any mutation that alters the development of the genes controlling the first two limbs (say, making them longer) will have to be followed by another mutation doing the same for the caudal vertebrae.  I don’t buy it. One way to get around it is if the same genes control the growth of the pelvic fins and the caudal fin, but I don’t know if that’s true. Also, the resulting limbs could be composed only of fin rays. Maybe they would be jointless spines. Maybe finger-like things. I need to draw that.

Number 4 is if the first fishes crawl on land with their pectoral fins dorsal of the pelvic fins (sorry I got them mixed up in the legend in the image). Now we have a problem where the pectorals have to be longer than the pelvics to touch the ground. One way of dealing with that is to move one set of limbs back toward the tail. Another is to repurpose the pectorals as hands. The third is to live in trees where it doesn’t matter.

And finally. The Land Flounder. He does his best.

More here

The City of Nuvil-La

What you’re looking at is the Saint Laurence river after a 60m rise in sea level, just south-west of Quebec city, where the Pierre-Laporte Bridge crosses the river.

The old Bequa city is north of the river, centered on the Star Fort (the other brown things are smaller sub-forts).

The Petwa (on the south side of the river) rammed their Battleship Palace into the shallows where the bridge’s foundations still remain, and built docks there. For scale, the battleship is about 500 meters long. The Petwa have put up dykes and drained large tracks of land, connected by bridges and canals. The Bequa have also recently put up their own dykes south of the Star Fort, and built their new town – a rather crass imitation of the Petwa.

Shortly before Mari’s Covenant, the Hudsoni and Devas attacked Nuvil-La, seizing that southwestern chunk of reclaimed land. After the Covenant, that chunk became a high tech Hudsoni town, centered on a Pillar of Friendship (the brown circle). It is now almost entirely abandoned.

The Angloes live in houseboats, mostly in the tidal marshes along the coast. Their greatest concentrations are northeast of Nuvil-La, and southeast, around the back of the reclaimed land and natural islands on the Petwa side, where the Petwa haven’t yet run them off.

I think that Shan lives just west of the Star Fort, on the opposite side of the canal. It’s an old part of town, once prosperous but now poor enough that its owners are willing to rent to Angloes. If he stands outside his shop and looks south, Shan will see one of the lesser forts and the masts of ships at dock. Looking north, he’ll see the roofs and chimneys of the Nuvil-La Old Town. West, he’ll see the barracks and still-fashionable town-houses around another lesser fort. To the east, just across the canal, he will see the looming wall of the Star Fort, with the leaves of trees visible over its top.

Announcement: Speculative Biology workshop

If you’re interested in specbio, you’re welcome at my workshop this Saturday “Making a Better Monster” hosted by @amber_royer and Saturday Night Write. If you don’t have access to facebook, it’s SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2021 AT 8 PM – 10 PM UTC+02. Tell me and I’ll tell Amber to have a link ready for you.