@hg47's Blog: The Tweet & The TakeAway

Artists only get Paid if they Go Viral

Artists only get paid if they go viral.

Sometimes not even then.

My personal take on great artists and writers is that they do it WRONG over and over until their personal Wrongness gets noticed, and proclaimed a New Form of Right. That's just my personal take.

I have no clue how to turn your personal Wrongness into a new form of Right; but I did go viral once.

1306 days ago, I tweeted a Twitter Art sequence of #140art tweets of an airplane crashing into the Twin Towers. The next day I tweeted the same sequence without the hashtag.

Within a 24-hour period I was retweeted more than 10,000 times. One of the tweets got more than 4,500 retweets.

That was my moment of viral infamy.

For me, my Art and Music and Writing has been more about patience than skill. Endurance is possibly more important than both of them together.

@hg47

Ego

Ｔｈｅ ｅｇｏ ａｄｖａｎｃｅｍｅｎｔ ｏｆ ｏｔｈｅｒｓ ｉｓ ｔｈｅ ｋｅｙ ｔｏ ｙｏｕｒ ｓｕｃｃｅｓｓ.

Now, if only I could figure out how to inflate other people's egos online. Actually, I can't even do that IRL.

Some inflating of my own ego is necessary, in my case, to create anything artistically. If I don't daydream of BIG RESULTS and HUGE SUCCESS I never get started. But drawing interest to my own written work has always been beyond me.

Perhaps I just haven't found my niche.

@hg47

Literature And Censorship

The NSA starred this tweet, so the safest thing for you to do is stop reading now and avoid any interaction with these 134 characters.

I used to think that it was "fair game" for me to write about ANYTHING. I used to be a Total Free Speech Nut-Job. Now, I'm not so sure. I'm starting to appreciate the other side; that The State (and, yes, The United States Of America) may have good reasons for restricting the free flow of information and shutting up disruptive people.

There are things I am afraid to Google. For example, I don't "get" how fertilizer can be used as an explosive. I'm curious. I would sort of like to know. But I don't dare start searching. I imagine the FBI would drag me out of bed to question me, and that I'd get put on a NO FLY list, and "Worse." Sometimes I feel like a Muslim who doesn't dare to explore his own religion (no, not because of "bombs" but because most of the Muslims in Islamic Hell are there for political reasons, for doubting Islam or their Prophet or questioning religious leaders.)

Does the NSA have a dangerous and illegal power to track my every movement by cell phone and monitor my thoughts by data mining? Or is the NSA keeping me safe by watching me and listening to me and inferring my every whim?

Edward Snowden. It's not clear to me whether Snowden is a Good Guy or a Bad Guy. But my brother Greg, who works for the IRS, comes down firmly on BAD GUY. Similarly, Wikileaks: I get the POV that spilling secret information may tend to keep the people in power honest. "Shouldn't the average citizens know what is really going on?" But I also get the POV that the State has serious secrets which it needs to protect for the stability of the State.

In 1994 a Tom Clancy novel was published about a commercial airliner crashing into the United States Capitol Building during session, which killed most of the Senators and Congresspeople. A strong argument can be made that Flight 93 was sent to hit the U.S. Capitol Building and that the whole 9-11 thing was inspired by Clancy's novel.

It will surprise me if any of my own novels will ever be accused of similar damage (unless women in the future actually do eliminate the male sex, or the military weaponizes my "teleportation-suppository").

WiReD magazine had an article a few years ago detailing exactly how a dozen committed terrorists willing to die could render Manhattan uninhabitable for 50 years. (I am probably slightly misremembering the numbers.) This article is no longer online.

So, yes, censorship has its place, even in the West.

@hg47

Why Do I Love Her? - Why Does She Love Me?

If we did everything “perfectly” EVERYONE Would HATE Us Unreservedly. It’s the things we do “wrong” that endear us to others.

If you could take a Self-Help Motivational Course guaranteed to fix every last flaw in your personality, in your passion, in your sexual expression…

…don't go there.

Think about it.

What do you love most about her? The funny gravel-tone in her voice. The way when she is excited, her words speed up so fast you have to focus to understand her and then slow down, almost to a stop, in the same sentence. The way you know she hasn't understood a word you've been saying, these last ten minutes, until she giggles, waves her arms wildly to shut you up, kisses your inner elbow (My inner elbow? Why would anyone kiss me there??) and says, "Shut up," in her special smiling way, which means: "OK, you and I will do it your way."

It is not the "unique" things about her that I love most, but the "wrong" things about her.

Please tell me I'm not the only one.

@hg47

New Hope

I love that endorphin rush of New Hope…

…right before Brutal Reality crushes it forever.

This is probably why I love writing First Drafts of novels so much. All the Hope. None of the Rejection.

I spend a year or three writing a first draft; I spend a year or two cleaning it up; I spend a few months trying to promote it, give up, and find another novel to write.

Insanity? An addictive personality in action?

@hg47

P.P. (Post post):

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

1963…when Martin Luther King was marching on DC…the Mormon church still would not admit Black members & did not admit they were fully-human.

My Life Is Not A Train Wreck

♀: “Your life is a train wreck!”

♂: “No. That would imply that there was first something that was going somewhere.”

♀: “Good point.”

Last year somebody's quote sunk into my brain hard enough to have an actionable effect. The quote was:

"Do what terrifies you most. Or continue in mediocrity."

So I spend a third of last year writing a book on Islam that has so many hyperlinks that it can only exist in an eBook format, and half-way into it I realize that no eBook publisher anywhere will take it on. Now, I've got this monster, and all I can think to do with it is dump it on my website, a chapter at a time.

At the moment, I see no upside. I'm going to piss off Muslims. I'm going to piss off the Politically Correct crowd in the West. And I doubt my words will ever find their way into the eBook format, which was my original intent.

Well, hell, if I knew what I was doing, I wouldn't be doing it!

@hg47

Elegant Solutions

Some of my most elegant solutions are preceded by periods of intense frustration.

If it was easy, everyone would do it.

I don't know about other people, but there is an emotional component to my problem solving. Mine is not a cool intelligence methodically sorting through hypotheticals.

After I throw my "gut instinct" and my "first approximation" and my "usual toolbox of methods" at a problem, and it still busts me, I GET MAD! This is not a calculated thing, it's an out-of-control thing.

One of my favorite quotes says something to the effect that the right perspective is worth 35-points of I.Q. But before I can think outside the box of my own comfortable thinking, my emotions have to forcibly evict me from my own prejudices.

YOU CAN ONLY SEE

AS
FAR
AS
YOU
CAN
THINK

That states it backwards, but still makes the essential point that the way we approach a problem and how fond we are of our own preconceptions can limit our ability to solve that problem.

All through the first draft of DAUGHTER MOON, I was sweating the ending, and having my time traveler meet himself the second time, and tying up all the loose logical ends. I wrote the novel on faith, with a default plot, hoping that I would think of something before I got to the end. But when I got near the end, I realized that I had been thinking about the ending all wrong. I didn't need to tie up any loose ends; what I needed was an emotionally satisfying ending and a lead-in to the sequel!

In plastics profile extrusion, there is always something that limits line speed: Maximum extruder output, top puller speed, length of cooling tank, whatever. As a general rule, the faster you can run the part the better, because electrical costs and labor costs are fixed. There is a category of profile parts that has to be run absurdly slow because it has a lopsided cross-section and thus the cool final product will be curved and out-of-spec if it is run too fast. The faster the line speed the greater the uncontrollable curve becomes. Heater strips can be used down-stream to straighten out the part, because applying heat to one side of the moving part will make the part bend in toward the heat. I wasted a huge amount of time trying different experiments to heat up the side of the part so the line could be sped up.

I have a good deal of intellectual baggage that I bring with me to problem solving. Sometimes this baggage is helpful, and guides me to a quick fix. But sometimes it just locks me up and traps me inside a box of thought that I can't get out of to where the answers are. It's always hard for me to throw out my preconceptions. Intense frustration is sometimes needed.

With a lopsided profile part, the solution was not more heat applied to one side downstream, but lopsided cooling upstream. But it took a whole different way of looking at the problem for me to get there. In fact, delivering extra cooling to the part upstream (to make the part bend away from the cooling) is an order of magnitude more powerful in controlling the straightness of the final part. Most of our parts in that category could be extruded at double the line speed, some parts at triple speed; with the "heavy-lifting" straightening adjustments made upstream with cooling, and the fine adjustments made downstream with heater strips. But I sure got mad before I thought of it.

It's like one of my favorite POSERS by Philip Kaplan:

A man has 12 coins, one of which is defective in that its weight is not the same as the other 11. In all other respects, the coins are identical.

With the aid of a balance scale how can the man determine which coin is defective and also whether it weighs more or less than the others, provided he is allowed only 3 weighings?

I remember I wasted about an hour and 15 minutes weighing 6/6 on paper, until I was finally so mad I couldn't sit still any longer. Then I calmed down and tried something insane: 4/4 for the first weigh. 15 minutes later I had the solution.

@hg47

Exceptional Abilities? Or Exceptional Disabilities?

Exceptional abilities have a downside. You think you reside above the norm? No. Spikes into brilliance are counter-balanced by dips to hell.

Sometimes I think that all the things that are wrong with me enable the best of me.

My compulsions, my addictions, and my enormous ego drive me everyday to the word processor for 2.5 years to complete a first draft of a science fiction novel.

IRL my bad behavior loses me most of my friends, so that I seek refuge online: any smidgen of "not-in-real-time" online success is due to my "real time" failures. I'm a writer because I'm not a talker?

Sometimes I even think that for every slice of pleasure I receive, later I swallow meds for the pain that follows. Or the pain precedes, in a twisted form of "inspiration."

@hg47

The Missing Tweet: Syria & Gas

Apparently, on Twitter, if you reply to a tweet when you are reading from a list, your reply will get deleted if the original tweet you replied to is deleted by that user, even if your reply gets starred and/or retweeted. Gone.

The original tweet from someone else, I forget who, was about Syria. Something about, Oh, gee, another war in the Middle East, won't this be fun. Irony.

My reply was something like, The rebels probably gassed the people on the sly to get the US involved in their cause. Cynical.

I was looking forward to doing a screenshot of a tweet that only got one star for this blog. As a change-up.

It's not clear to me that intelligence agencies in the West can determine who is responsible for the gas attack. I don't care if we have satellite images of the missile launch taking place from Assad's palace, I don't care how many Syrian officials we have planted listening devices upon. Fanatic Islamists have their own high-placed agents in the Syrian government.

What is clear to me is that whoever launched the gas urgently desires the United States to attack Syria. Maybe Assad hopes a US attack upon his government will swing other Muslim nations behind him as allies. Maybe it is the rebels, operating according to "the ends justify the means" Islam, attacking the people to get the US on their side. Maybe it is Hezbollah, so that after the US attacks Syria, they have a good excuse to fire off thousands of missiles at Israel.

But everyone knows that gas is a "hot button" for the US, so whoever gassed the people in Syria wants the United States to attack. The Bad Guys want us to attack! So, please, President Obama, halt, stop.

Please Don't Do What The Bad Guys Want You To Do!

@hg47

Sugar Coat That Bitter Acid Fact

Painting rainbows in the sky…

…to hide all the smog I spew.

The truly disturbing thing is that some of my smog is gathering far more POSITIVE ATTENTION AND NOTICE than most of my carefully constructed rainbows.

"They" seem to like my pollution.

The conversation goes something like this:

"Oh! What a pretty pile of poo!"

"Wait, but, look up! See my rainbow!"

"Nah, I see those all the time."

@hg47