C.A. Lang's Blog, page 2

Curry Time

It’s kind of hard to believe that I’ve avoided writing about the one thing I know how to do pretty well that normal people actually like.

Cooking.

I took cooking for granted before getting into college. Going back even further, my days as a single person pretty much involved little more than lots of running during the day and cooking interesting things while drinking alone and listening to jazz in the evening.

Of course nothing close to that is possible anymore, and I’ve mostly lost my taste for drinking alone. But there’s something special about drinking while cooking. The point here is that I didn’t realize what a luxury it was to be able to just cook for the hell of it.

The other day I nailed a curry. Not just any curry, but my absolute favourite one from an Indian restaurant in town. It was completely off the cuff and improvised, cobbled together from three different recipes that all sounded wrong but somehow managed to mimic almost exactly the thing from the restaurant.

What is it? Hard to say, really. When I stumble over the Indian name for it at the restaurant, the waiter always brushes it off and tells me it’s “butter chicken.” I don’t think it is, to be honest. I used hardly any butter and it tasted almost the same. The name on the menu is murgh malai masala, if I remember correctly. Here’s how I did it:

1 can of coconut millk

1 tsp each of turmeric, dried ginger, cumin powder, dry-toasted cumin seeds, mustard, chili powder

1 tbsp dried coriander

1 lemon

2 tbsp brown sugar

Salt

100ml (approximately) tomato paste

1 onion

800g chicken

Tsp black pepper

Cayenne pepper

As with any curry, you have to start off by frying all those spices listed above in oil. I use a mix of  grapeseed oil and butter, both to keep the calorires in control and to make the butter more resistant to burning. Of course if you’re using ghee like you should, the burning probably isn’t an issue. I don’t have an exact quantity, because I basically just kept adding bits of oil to the spices until it became a paste. After about 5 minutes of medium-heat frying, just add the onion and chicken, fry it for a couple minutes, and add coconut milk and 4 big tablespoons of tomato paste. Let it simmer for 10 mins or so.

I know real recipes are just a set of instructions, but at this point I think you have to use your own palate to get the balance of sugar, salt, and lemon right. The acidity of the tomato needs to be dealt with delicately–if you’ve ever been disappointed by tomato-based jar sauces it’s likely because they seem to universally suffer from this problem. Definitely let the tomato paste settle down for the 10 minutes (or more if you have time, but this isn’t some 70′s slow-cooker deal, remember), then start playing with the right amount of brown sugar and salt. After you balance that, I think the lemon is easy to make work. I just squeezed two halves into it. Once that’s done, just let it simmer for 5 minutes and serve it with rice and naan. Adding a swirl of cream on top at the end can be nice, but I don’t find it necessary. Tossing in some fresh coriander leaves is also a good idea.

The acidity of the tomato, to me, seems quite different to the sour acidity of the lemon. In a tomato-ish curry the former really needs to be contained properly without beating it completely into submission. The success of the spices–which need to pop properly in these dishes–depends on getting that tomato raunch into its proper place. Brightening it up with the lemon is the thing that  makes these flavours  work.

That’s probably a lot of writing for a recipe, but then I don’t write anything if it’s something everyone else has already done . . . Even if it’s a recipe.

My fiancee insists that I mention that tzatziki on the side pushes this dish to the next level. I’ll take her word for it. I’m not into yogurt and the like, except when absolutely necessary, like it is when you make other types of curry.

Another thing: I mentioned above about cutting some of the calories, or at least making some of them unsaturated fats, and I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Cutting back the grease is sometimes a necessary evil, especially when you’re cooking for other people as well. If you can handle a shitload of butter, do it!

I’ll add some photos when I’m less lazy.

. . . In which I link 70s economy cars to diesel technology . . . but mostly talk about Hondas.

My first daily driver was a 1979 Honda Accord. I phrase it that way because for a short time I had a ’71 Cutlass Supreme, but a kid generally has a hard time running a beast like that and I ditched it in favour of something I could afford fairly quickly. Anyway, I think something lost on us now is the appreciation of basic engineering in our vehicles—we’re obsessed with supercars and how expensive they are and hold a narrow view of what makes a good car. Not that I mean to downplay fast cars . . . of course they’re cool and have their own set of engineering landmarks, but those shouldn’t come at the expense of some of the more mundane aspects that are actually pretty neat.

One thing that confuses me is what we consider good fuel economy right now. Why? Well, a first-generation Honda Civic with a CVCC motor and special Weber side-draught carbs could achieve economy nearly on par with the collection of random junk we call “hybrid” cars. There would be no extra cost and environmental concerns associated with batteries and so on, no extra moving parts, and the car would cost practically nothing to make nowadays. How does it make sense that today’s compact car struggles to reach 30mpg? And even stranger, why do we now consider that to be pretty good, even for a 4-cylinder economy car?

But let’s get back to less abstract things, like Honda’s CVCC engine. CVCC means “Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion.” The cool part about it is that this and other stratified charge engines is that it separates the fuel into a lean mixture, which goes into the cylinder, and a rich mixture at the spark plug. And if the reader is wondering what this could possibly have to do with dieselpunk, the idea of a stratified charge came from Rudolph Diesel. In fact, the direct-inject direction most engines are taking now seems to refer back to the diesel engine.

What was the result? Meeting emissions standards without using a catalytic converter. Sounds boring right? Well, it’s not that easy to do. I don’t think anyone even tries to anymore, possibly due to a massive conspiracy perpetrated by Big Catalytic Converter, and perhaps to a lesser extent, Big Lithium Ion Battery.

 

My Honda CVCC was in rough shape, but still worked pretty well. The whole thing seemed like a mess of vacuum lines, and perhaps this mechanically-derived route to emissions control was part of what killed this type of motor. Mine had a manual choke, which I found hilarious and still do. It was slow as hell, no thanks to the 2-speed Hondamatic transmission—although this was itself a fascinating piece of machinery. If I remember correctly, the Hondamatic wasn’t just a powerglide knockoff, but an automatic transmission that used gears more like the ones you’d find in a manual. I once drove this car for a week with the oil light on, and the thing didn’t give me any more trouble than it did before that erm . . . minor oversight.

Strangely enough, CBC News is on as I type this and I just caught a bit about an epidemic of catalytic converter thefts . . . see, people? That entire rash of minor inconveniences could have been avoided simply by driving a 200-dollar car from 1979.

Okay. So fuel injection comes along and is supposed to be more efficient. But . . . but it’s not? Why do these carbureted dinosaurs offer better economy?

I have no idea. The cars now, compact ones, are a lot heavier, perhaps. New safety standards and such. I don’t think anyone would ever accept a car with 80 horsepower these days, even if they just wanted a basic grocery-getter. But I think in Japan they might have turbocharged a later version of the CVCC and gotten decent performance out of it.

The importance of this isn’t lost on absolutely everyone though, since it has been designated as part of the Mechanical Engineering Heritage of Japan. I’m not entirely sure what that really means, but I assume it’s like a monument in Civilization XXX (I’m too old to know what version of Sid Meier’s Civilization we’re on . . . I ran out of time for that game around Civ 3 . . .) and when you look at the other, erm, “things,” on the list, it seems like quite a big deal.

As to why our expectations have changed, I can’t quite get it. Maybe the phrase “fuel economy” needs to be taken more literally—that is, to mean the optimum amount of consumption given the market, not necessarily some absolute race to the bottom. I know to a conspiracy theorist that sounds like stating the obvious, but I do think there’s a difference between “oil companies want you to use all the oil that is humanly possible so they can make tons of money right now” and “our perception and expectations of how we use resources changes depending actual conditions.”

First Semester Down.

 

It’s hard to believe but the final marks are in and it’s already time to start thinking about next semester. The days since the end of final exams crawl by in comparison to during classes—if this is old news to everyone else, bear with me. I never, ever, EVER had planned to be doing this and the post-secondary school world is way outside my zone.

That’s the funny thing about this turn in my career plans. For the last decade, I had plenty of plans. Plans are important, they always said. They never really explained how to gauge the quality of those plans, nope . . . all they said was that there were plans and you had to make them to get anywhere.

It’s funny because getting into engineering was totally unplanned and outside the box; yet it was the best decision I’ve made to date . . . well, besides the decision to get engaged, but that’s another area of grown-up life beyond the scope of this post. Heh.

I think one of the lost posts on here might have addressed this in a meandering way—the precious idea that everyone is supposed to be “passionate” about one or two things and only pursue those for their entire lives. Going even deeper but probably too deep for the purposes of this blog, this idea ultimately arrives at the myth of the “true self” and candy-coated way people pigeonhole themselves because they’ve been told that whatever little box or category is most readily available to the outside actually defines “who you are.” It’s a dumb idea, and one so far entrenched in our culture that it isn’t recognized as the social oppressor it can be. Excuse the dramatic language.

Not that there’s something inherently wrong with picking something you like and sticking with it for life. Not everyone is restless and feels the need to question everything, and when that questioning becomes far too reflexive, it can manifest as self-doubt, which is one of the most crippling character flaws imaginable.

So there’s that meandering again, rearing its head. Reel it in, Petropunk.

Basically I surprised myself. I was sure that I’d failed a couple classes, but that was nowhere even close to happening. And while I’m very surprised and happy with what I did grade-wise, now that I know what school is like again and have a good benchmark for what kind of marks you get for the amount of effort put in, I can shoot for better marks next time. You’ll never get me to go along with all the new no-pressure strategies they are trying to introduce into high school grading now, but it’s a little unfortunate that the actual process of learning isn’t taken into account. A crappy student who makes big improvements still gets a crappy average, while a world-weary veteran of the school game can blow through, learn almost nothing new about themselves and earn endless praise despite the fact that he didn’t even show up most of the time. Ah well. Nothing is perfect. Attempts to reinvent the system haven’t produced anything that isn’t laughable yet, as far as I know. Anyone into “new math?” Didn’t think so.

Writing stuff:

I’m doing an interview/google hangout on Jan.11 with my publisher. You know, the one that was supposed to happen months ago but I had to bail due to other obligations. I’ll get a link up here for it soon, but if you’re curious about other authors on a similar wavelength, Tyche Books has their other authors’ interviews on the youtube. They’re worth a look.

Also, I’ve started work on another episode for Archon. After reading an article about how it has become acceptable these days to expect authors to work for free, I’m not into doing that whatsoever. Writers write stories. I respect guys who can give away their writing for free and make money off their appearances/other vague products, but that doesn’t mean every author should be expected to work for free and hope to make money from ad revenue or speaking engagements. My auto mechanic wouldn’t rebuild my transmission for free in the hope that I’d watch his weekly podcast and click on ads, and I think as writers we get backed into this corner of thinking that for some reason we need to live like that.

So I’m going to get a few episodes done and try to sell it. It may not see the light of day now, or it might just take a while.

 

That is all.

 

Well no, not quite. Ian Thornley rules.

 

That is all.

 

Two Things You Don’t See In Steampunk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Concrete and the Pacific Northwest–I haven’t seen much of either in steampunk, so let’s take a look at both at the same time. Just for fun. Concrete isn’t something we normally associate with steampunk. It kind of gets lost in all the brass and  . . . collars. But it became quite important in the later half of that era.

 

The Kaleden Hotel: 1910

Lots of other things were going on in the steam era. Yes, Balloon Captain Baron Britishperson is interesting to read about and we all can’t get enough of things made of gears that don’t really need to be made of gears; however, while Balloon Captain Baron Britishperson was doing his thing in Europe, his compatriots were also doing stuff way the heck out here in British Columbia. A few of them decided to build a bunch of orchards in the Okanagan Valley, and those who didn’t feel like making the trip invested in some of these communities. One such place was Kaleden.

Unlike a lot of the small towns around where I grew up, this wasn’t a staging point for miners and railway workers. It was a project undertaken by English bourgeois to irrigate the area and produce a lot of fruit. Elites back home funded much of the operation, which was mostly a success—it’s still a beautiful, dignified little place consisting mostly of orchards and, more recently, vineyards. It has remained bourgeois for most of the last 100 years.

The above photo is of the ill-fated Kaleden Hotel. No, it didn’t burn down. There are no ghosts or tragic stories. The skeleton you see there is a dramatic example of how ambition and lack of expertise turned a nice hotel into an abandoned shell.

The reason I mention this is that in an age where pioneer buildings were built of wood, someone decided to build a hotel out of concrete. Now, there was hardly anything around at the time as far as industry goes. I have no idea how or where they got their aggregate and what the logistics of that were. More on that later. But back to the story—the project fell on some financial trouble, and in that case the guy did what we all do when we need some cash: tear out the floors and sell it all! Right . . . .

When things got better, the guy wasn’t allowed to put it back together. Thankfully there must have been an engineer around—it was deemed unsafe because they hadn’t even reinforced the concrete.

Apparently the concrete was poured by hand. That means carrying it up a ladder and dumping it into the forms. That’s what the few historical accounts say—I’m not sure why nobody would have thought to use a rope and pulley, but I digress.

“But its concrete, how interesting is that?” you ask.

Concrete has been around forever, but actually wasn’t used very much between the ancient Romans’ time and the 1800s. The thing that revived it was the invention of Portland Cement (no relation to Portland Oregon or Maine), which made concrete a whole lot more consistent. To use concrete you need the right kind of rocks and the right mix of sizes of these rocks, and they need to be in a certain condition for it to work with the cement paste. Those gravel pits everyone doesn’t want in their back yard and writes letters to the editor about? Well, they’re actually very important to building a city and having them closer probably cuts down on pollution from trucking it around everywhere, but that’s another post entirely. The point is that the people who built this hotel had hardly anything available. There are tons of wood structures around from the same era, so I’m not sure why the builder chose to use concrete in this case. This is mostly conjecture, but to me the hotel was a ballsy move—a deviation, perhaps, from the overly practical “pioneer” temperament. Or is that kind of bravado a trait of pioneers? I’m not sure.

So while in mainstream steampunk land we have man portrayed as having such mastery over technology that he creates mechanically grotesque indulgences, here we have a case of that same bourgeois confidence falling flat in the face of ineptitude, the environment, circumstances, or some combination thereof.

Here’s a closer photo of the concrete. I chose this one because it shows just how random the aggregate in this concrete is. The big, long, flat, sharp rock is an example of everything you don’t want in concrete. Perhaps the reason they didn’t use rebar was because the size of this aggregate wouldn’t be able to pass around it and the concrete would separate. More likely is that they just used whatever they could find in the area. Also from the look of the rock, it’s dachite or something equally as unsuited for concrete use. When you look at geological maps of the area, most of the minerals they’d find are potentially bad.

In small towns that’s how concrete was done, though. And based on accounts I’ve heard personally from old guys around here, they still knew what worked and what didn’t, though in a broad sense. Of course now we know that mixing it in terms of “x-bags of cement with y-shovels-full of gravel” still isn’t good enough, but they made it work for house foundations and so on.

To the left you can see more of the same evidence of random rocks thrown into this concrete, and the pop-outs resulting from that choice.

Some might be disappointed that there isn’t some big dramatic fire behind this concrete skeleton, but to me the story of technical failure and financial blundering offers a lot more to think about. I guess readers don’t always see the underpinnings of a story, but for myself, and I imagine a lot of steam/dieselpunk writers, often the coolest stories full of action and drama stem from studying everyday situations like the one I’ve been writing about. And sometimes that starts with something as mundane as thinking about building materials, or electricity, or how a city is designed.

Balloon Captain Baron Britishperson is a fun character to play with—the aim of this post and my dieselpunk leanings isn’t at all an attack per se on those types of characters. But what I love about dieselpunk, and writing about “new world”—ish settings as opposed to opulent old empires is that Balloon Captain Baron Britishperson’s sense of entitlement and theoretical knowledge mean less when you change the rules of society. Industrial and entrepreneurial skills rule dieselpunk. Entitlement gets you nowhere—assuming that throwing money or status at a construction project will hemorrhage that old English money in an instant. Now, I don’t have a clue about what the person’s attitude was when they tried to build this thing, but it’s something that happens even today and is mitigated by the fact that we aren’t in the middle of the woods with no expertise or proper materials available.

The main point is that . . . well, sometimes things that aren’t interesting actually are. And that steampunk ought to exploit gold-rush type settings a bit more.

(Okay, so I have been doing blog posts straight from MS Word and it’s pretty neat . . . only apparently sometimes the formatting gets messed up in the process. Derrrrr.)

I Still Exist.

Once again I feel the need to reiterate that I exist, despite having left this revamped blog thing hanging. It’s the end of the first semester and I’ve found some extra minutes of time to consider things other than math and concrete. Some of these things include:

Eating properly


Doing things


Picking up some, but not all of my guitars


Running


The gym


ARCHON Part I

Somewhere in this period the plan was to get my entire condo painted and replace the floors. And by “get my entire condo painted” I mean “make a huge mess everywhere myself and hope it ends up looking better than it did in 1976.” Is that still going to happen? Derr.

Make no mistake—I’ve only completed one of seven final exams. So am I trying to weasel out of painting by mentioning that? Who knows.

What’s been really been on my mind outside the realm of civil engineering is Archon. The one good thing about not having time to write is that I get to totally forget what I’d written. When I read over the latest draft of this project, it was so foreign to me . . . a lot more foreign than what I’d experienced when I was writing all the time. When writers give you advice to put away your work for a while, it’s not just something that sounds nice. I never fully grasped the concept. Sure, I gave a mandatory three-month cooling-off period before attacking first-drafts. But I admit I did it more because it was standard practice than anything. Going over those drafts felt nothing like the strange world of reading something you can barely recall writing.

What of it? Well, you tend to catch idiotic writing tics a lot faster than normal. They’re like glowing toxic waste spills in the middle of your manuscript. You can’t miss them. But you can definitely miss them if you’re still close to the draft. The actual editing seems faster this way. Before it would take three or four passes to catch a lot of these things. We’ll see where I’m at after the first round of revisions, but it looks like it should take less time to polish.

Of course the other angle here is the fact that the story itself appears new again. It’s actually a good read this way. Before, it was kind of painful to keep reading stuff I already knew word-for-word. Not so this time. Part of why I’m so excited about this project is the very fact that it passes this test—the test of holding my interest at a time when I have no attachment to it whatsoever and have a million other things I need to do besides worry about my fiction. This is a really cool serial, and that’s why I don’t mind stringing along potential readers like I have been. Once it finally appears, it’ll be worth the wait. The only other time I felt anything close to this was with Blightcross, and that was just one novel among eight others . . . and consequently the only one that made it to print.

So what’s the holdup? I can get this thing ready to go relatively soon. I’m just unsure about the idea of cover art. If I just release this for free on my own (which is probably what I’ll do), I don’t want it to just be some text file floating around on the internet. Trouble is, I can’t make it myself and don’t know how to solicit artists on my own, never mind pay for it. The other option is getting it in with a few of the epublishers out there who handle serials, but the problem there is that they’d want at least two episodes up front. That I can do, but then the wait would be extremely long since I’d have to wait for the second part to materialize . . . and that might take a while given the current circumstances. I’d rather gauge the time I spend on future installments on reader interest in the first one.

Is cover art a big deal?

Am I too concerned with window-dressing? Should I just quietly place it on my blog and hope people find it?

Right now, I need some feedback about how people are finding new stuff to read. This is especially important given the niche audience I have.

Who wants to read some out-there dieselpunk where epic fantasy collides with Memphis Belle?

Website revamp.

 

Since this page has been dead for a few days, I should probably write something about what happened.

I’m improving my website and making it more specific. Now it will be, for the most part, engineering and dieselpunk-related. I still might add the occasional post about fitness on here, but with school and struggling to promote dieselpunk, I need to refocus any extra time I might be able to find on the computer so I can provide something of interest to the reader. And that means cutting a lot of the excess out of my blogging and articles.

Soon there will be a proper bio, a technical writing sample, and resume. I also have a short article about a concrete building from 1910 that should be up soon, and of course there’s that eternal promise of my dieselpunk serial . . .

While I won’t post a lot of fitness stuff on here anymore, I still am willing to answer questions!

Character Motivation As A Social Barometer

Oh joy! A few minutes away from math to ramble about books, even though I haven’t been able to read one (that doesn’t involve math or concrete) for ages!

Yes, it’s a long weekend and there are midterms I need to study for. But I think there’s been enough dead air for my two readers. Never mind the fact that I had to reschedule the google hangout I mentioned a while back. Look at it this way–both of you will have that much more time to think of ways to make me uncomfortable on the internet!

So the title of this post probably sounds a bit dry. It’s definitely not as charged as the trigger for my writing this, which was fellow Western Canadian dieselpunk writer Lindsay Kitson’s latest post about female characters. Read it here.  I have never thought of it in those terms. You just want to think, “ah look at all these reluctant female kickass characters, equality isn’t an issue anymore.” But she’s right–it’s not totally the same as having the characters themselves become the driving force of the story’s conflict because they want something.

The main thing that got me thinking was the end of the post, which mentions the popularity of dystopias and how relying on characters to merely react to their surroundings is a symptom of our generation’s hopelessness. Now I wonder if it actually is a symptom of this one generation, or if it’s just the post-World War II nihilism still hanging on. In the end, that traumatic kernel, or “end of history,” is what dieselpunk is bucking against. Actually I don’t know how true that is with other dieselpunk people. Maybe some are purely interested in the look and using it in the same postmodern confusion as anything else these days.

FIrst off, I think (perhaps unfortunately. . . I keep going back and forth on this issue) once again Ayn Rand shows us as dieselpunk writers how we need to react to what’s going on. Dagny Taggart is exatly the kind of character Lindsay is talking about being underrepresented. Is Xena tougher than Dagny because she’s really tall and kills people? Not exactly. I don’t think you can even compare the two motivations, to be honest. “Get the fuck away from my children/dog/family” is different to “I want my own fucking railroad.” Both are tough, but they are entirely different.

I don’t know if this is a gender issue though. Let’s go back to where the reactive, reluctant fantasy hero originated: Elric of Melnibone. He’s not that strong, morally labile, and generally bewildered. An “anti-hero.” The way Michael Moorcock wrote this character and those stories was incredibly dense and deliberate–far from the empty postmodern heroes with anti-hero tendencies we’re used to now. To me, Moorcock’s experimental postmodern writing was the legitimate reaction to experiencing the second world war. But as with music, I think after the 1970s that honesty in general faded and since then we have been writing postmodern emptiness because we simply don’t know anything else. Rather than shocking us into a different aesthetic like global warfare did, things like the internet and 9/11 haven’t forced us out of the postmodern emptiness, but just driven us deeper into it. Popular character motivations seem more than ever to be centred around nihilistic gimmicks–like exploring criminals or people turning to morally bankrupt lives in order to achieve something better. It’s like writers only know how to grab us by screwing around with boundaries we set for ourselves–”ooh, you don’t like drug dealers? HAHAHA I will now make you empathize with one so you begin to doubt your own morals!” As usual for gimmicky writing, I think that crap is best left on cable TV.

So maybe you can make the argument that the above example isn’t much different to Elric fighting for both sides depending on the situation. Again, I’d say it’s entirely different. I can’t identify any big event or experience to cause us to still be doubting ourselves this much, or rejecting boundaries. You can only hang on to that postwar confusion for so long–writers these days have no claim to it and need to sack up and write some characters who have their own lives and aren’t afraid of thinking in certain absolutes. Agents and writing workshops always establish this necessary pattern of starting your story by upsetting some everyday pattern, which then forces your character to react. Those same agents would then put your story in the round file and tell you that your character is too passive; yet a lot might find a character written like Rand’s as too bombastic and unrealistic.

What would be much more interesting is if characters (and people) stopped accepting the idea that you can’t make up  your mind, aren’t allowed to judge, and shouldn’t be selfish and got themselves into trouble because they wanted their own railroad or space station or to win something. I think we have become more than comfortable enough with the idea that nothing is wrong and that everyone is right and that everything is purely relative.

Now does this mean we need to forget about Elric and go back to ridiculously awesome but flat manly pulp heroes? Nah. All I’m saying is that we should make an effort to break with the tendency to pat the postmodern reader on the head and console them in their nihilism. Instead,  writers should think about making them uncomfortable with heroes who know how to get shit done, want more than to return to the pre-conflict homeostasis, and have no problem telling the reader that they are likely morally superior.

The risk with that is this: readers can’t identify with the kind of drive and ambition from Rand’s stories. They’d find it offensive. They’d say it wasn’t “sustainable” for people to think that way. That it wasn’t socially conscious. Better off to write a story about an heroic anti-GMO protestor. Therein lies the problem facing us right now: any attempt at reintroducing science and industry and order is immediately mistrusted and assumed to be an attempt to imprison the world. But if you can pull it off and still keep credibility with the reader, I think  it would pay off big time.

The Left/Right Brain BS is . . . BS.

 

 

Going on my last post about how people falsely dichotomize artistic and logical traits, here’s some proof that the idea is just a whole lot of balloon juice.

 

Yep, straight from certified registered Scienticians. http://www.livescience.com/39373-left-brain-right-brain-myth.html

 

So next time your dope-smoking artist friend pulls that card, just call him a dimwitted poseur and hand him a math textbook.

 

That is all.

Google Hangout.

Yep, I’ve found ten minutes of my life-that-is-no-life to be able to write on here. I should have a while ago, because this is actually relevant to my awesome book and stuff.

Tyche Books has arranged a Google Hangout with me. It will be on October 14 at noon. I’m going to answer questions that you guys ask, and hopefully be able to think of other things to talk about from that. Once that’s done, the whole thing will belong to the ages and will be available to watch on the Youtube. If you’re just so excited and can’t wait a month, why not watch the Google Hangout they did with author Kevin Harkness?

Honestly, do not miss this chance to make me nervous. You might even glimpse my half-renovated mess in the background. I have no idea what the screen is going to show. I guess I could hang up a sheet behind me or something, or a flag.

I like this because it reminds me that I’m an author. I’m kind of losing that in this engineering school business. To be honest, I thought people like me–people interested in lots of different things–would be more the norm because engineering is a broad subject. But surprisingly, no. I still get the weird looks when I out myself as a refugee from the arts. One dude flipped out because I just came out and said, “I can’t make reliable money to support a wife and kids doing what I used to do,” and couldn’t grasp the idea that I could also be interested in engineering. Then came the suspicious looks, and the question of whether or not I was interested in engineering at all.

I don’t mean to sound offended. Most of these kids have been raised around this stuff and it’s normal to them. Why would people like that ever think beyond the completely wrong assumption that all artists are necessarily not meant for practical work? It’s the default assumption and few people know anything beyond it, because of the artists who also make good technical employees/productive citizens not many discuss this issue like I am. They don’t discuss the issue because they’re smarter than I am.

What is also new to me is the physical aspect of having this much school. I don’t know how many people who read this can relate (in that I don’t talk to many readers who are also fitness-types), but sitting for THAT long is a hell of a lot more terrible on the body than I ever imagined. As a personal trainer/whatever I am, I know factually the details about the effects of sedentary life on the body. But living it is another game. I actually woke up with sciatica the other night. What. The. Hell. I’ve never had back pain in my entire life. I’ve done awful deadlifts and come out of it fine. Tried Mark Rippetoe’s low-bar squat dogma–but poorly–and put unecessary strain on the back there as well. But nothing. And now what’s got me writhing at night? Sitting in a fucking chair. The chair is a shitbird. I’d rather do crossfit . . . I’d be in less pain.

Anyway, like I predicted, this field of study has begun to feed my writing. Today was a trip to a concrete aggregate plant, and of course this setup of machines gets my mind going in dieselpunk land . . . when it wasn’t necessary to be firmly planted here, that is. As offended as Disco Boy mentioned above would be to know that simultaneously I am engaged creatively while learning about engineering stuff, it did happen. And that’s okay.

Disco Boy?

I don’t even know. But I like it and am going to leave it there.

But yeah. Google Hangout. Ask me stuff. Look at my unfinished walls. Do it.

High volume ain’t just for workouts . . . engineering school.

 

I’ve been lazy with posting lately and my presence in the world as an author might have dropped off the face of the planet as a result . . . at any rate, now that I’ve started school, I’ll be even more obscure. The shitstorm of work hasn’t quite touched down yet, so I wanted to take this last opportunity to write about random things, because I’ll be needing to write about not so random things very soon.

So where did that 6-week high-volume training plan get me? Not as much as I’d hoped, but I think 20lbs was ridiculous and unrealistic given my wrist measurements. Reading about any given frame’s capacity to naturally support lean muscle–based on height and other measurements–was a big game changer for me. Of course nothing is impossible, but the kind of time and energy needed to be 200lbs + of lean mass in my case would be a full-time job, and one that would leave me pretty poor and lonely. In the end, that high volume, high carb routine got me around 10lbs in 6 weeks. Guys often explode with this protocol, but my body loves high carbs anyway and I didn’t really end up changing the diet that much from what’s normal to me. Gaining was hard. Lots of fluctuation every week. I did enjoy the high volume workouts. Spending two or more hours just seeing how many sets you can do is fun. At least to me it is. But that could just be because I come from an endurance sport background anyway. Maximal effort outside of sprints is a bit foreign to me, even now.

Now, the high-volume work is schoolwork. I have 8 courses per semester in the civil engineering technologist program I’m taking. It’s going to be hard, but from what it looks like, it’s again an issue of volume and not so much intensity. In these technology programs, they pretty much distill the subjects to the things that are most relevant. It’s just that there are a lot of things to study. And as anyone who has done GVT knows, lower intensity doesn’t necessarily mean shit!

As an introvert, the social dimension is, in the end, another course in itself. If you read between the lines, every single instructor seems to have a warning for people who like to figure out stuff on their own. Introverts have to fake it to get a job in this field; that much has been made pretty clear more than anything else at this point. I know this and understand it and am okay with it. I’m not one of those anti-extrovert ranters. But it is a little unfair, I think, to single out people for certain cognitive differences. I mean yeah, the social aspect itself–dealing with people/potential clients/employers/being pleasant/blabla–makes sense in that regard, but for the purposes of actually getting through your course material, encouraging introverts to join in on class discussions makes our work harder than it needs to be. This doesn’t mean we are looking for an excuse not to talk to anyone–far from it. Confident introverts are fine with talking with others in class, but if the task at that particular moment is to figure out a problem and the teacher is nagging you to talk to your peers in order to figure it out, not all of us are going to process information that way. When I upgraded my physics and so on, I mostly worked alone but could hear the discussions taking place in the groups that had formed–people helping each other, teamwork and so on. Having that many people stumbling through a problem totally derails my cognitive process–it’s very hard to follow a train of thought to its logical end (and thus grasping the concepts so much more thoroughly) when dealing with a torrent of half-baked ideas and people talking over eachother.

I don’t think that kind of learning has much to do with workplace teamwork.

The funny thing is this though. Despite that I don’t rush to work with everyone else to figure out physics problems, if someone wants help and I can help them, I have no problem stopping my work to give them a hand. Quite a few times I’ve been the only student patient enough to help this or that person who just wasn’t getting it.

I don’t really get how and why people can still entertain the simplistic view of introverts–simplicities that would totally gloss over the example I gave above–and feel threatened by them. There’s no relation whatsoever between anti-social or unconfident or uninterested students/workers and people who process information a bit differently to others.

But that’s the way it is. So introverts have to fake it. Then maybe when they prove themselves in the workplace as professionals–and probably only well after that–they might be able to out themselves and be allowed to take a few minutes alone when they need to and not fear being blackballed for not being a team player.

Again, don’t mistake this for complaining. I don’t really care what I have to do to do what I want . . . I’ve had plenty of practice outside my comfort zone and am not that worried about playing the extrovert game as best I can. It’s just something that’s being talked about a little bit more these days, and I want to help push it into the open.

 

Speaking of the game, this Elliott Hulse video blew me away. Nothing I didn’t already know, but the way Elliott crystallizes it is incredible. It’s so simple. We call everything a game but forget about the fuckin’ game piece.

 

I was on the fence about whether or not to continue training the way I want. It would mean a lot of 5am mornings. But after watching that, I knew that despite what other people said, training was still the right thing to do.

 

 

Oh yeah. Archon. I really can’t wait to get that out, but am still struggling with the best way to release it. I want a cover, damn it. And if I wait until I write the second episode, it would be easier to interest a couple of epublishers out there, which would get me my cover. And maybe a slight increase in legitimacy. So. I don’t know. Unless anyone wants to donate dieselpunk cover art, I’ve got some decision making to do before I do anthing with it.