10/21/2013
I have to get back in the habit of writing journal entries again! Uhg! I feel like I’ve lost some fundamental habit because I spend so much free time doing other stuff.
Not even active stuff either. It’s like… reading, or watching science shows, or playing video games, or Andy will get off work shortly after I do and will want to get dinner and I just never back track to my potential journal entries. Not that reading, science, or video games are bad, but I need to start allotting time after work to writing. Especially with NaNoWriMo coming up. I’ve told all my friends about the science fiction I’m working on now, so I have to follow through with at least a mildly substantial amount of work or I’ll never be able to live down the shame.
But on the other hand, the nature of what I’m writing is opening up a lot of really cool other budding interests I had never even thought of until recently, like how the human brain works, the basics of robotics, how we would colonize another planet and terraform it, etc. This is mainly the reason I tend to veer away toward potential writing time.
I’ve bought several books in the last few weeks that have very deeply got my attention. So much so that they’ve almost completely eclipsed my urge to read about and attempt to understand the concept of religions, which was until recently my leisurely side project. The first books are a trilogy of science fiction stories written by a…excusing the language… fucking BRILLIANT writer. I don’t know how I had never heard of him before last month.
Kim Stanley Robinson. The first book in the trilogy, Red Mars, is about the building of the first permanent colony on Mars and the first one hundred people who are sent to make it happen. It’s not your typical ‘space battles and laser guns’ science fiction. It’s not action packed or high stress, but it feels plausible. Like this is literally something that could happen in the next fifty years or so. It feels like he did years of research on this subject and covered many different areas. Not just astronomy, but biology, physiology, geology, chemistry, psychiatry… everything a colony group should potentially need to make a lasting colony on another planet. It’s immense. He’s one both the Hugo and the Nebula aware for the first book alone.
Thus, and since it’s in a sense related to the story I’m writing, I was intensely interested in the ideas posed by this book and I bought other books to complement it. I already had The Age of Spiritual Machines, which is going to be my first attempt to understand the concepts and ideas behind trans-humanism (this is mostly what my own story will be about), but I’ve since bought The Case for Mars, which is the non-science fiction study that seemed to me very similar in thought to Robinson’s work (perhaps even related, I haven’t looked it up to be sure), Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell (which have both been on my reading list for a long time anyway), and the next book I’ll be picking up will be something on basic robotics. Robotics will be closely related to the trans-humanism aspect of my story, so I figured I should learn a little something about it.
Also, more on a side note than anything, Richard Hammond’s How to Build a Planet is a thing on the Science channel now, along with How the Universe Works and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. These are mainly what I watch when I watch TV, if they are on.
Also! In case you haven’t heard! NEIL DeGRASSE TYSON IS GOING TO BE HOSTING A NEW VERSION OF ‘THE COSMOS’ TV SERIES! I am excited about this!
Guys, science is so cool. We should all learn things.
I don’t think any of the community colleges around San Diego teach basic robotics courses though. I should look in to that.
Anyway, that’s what most of my free time has been consisting of the last few weeks. Lots of reading and watching TV.
I’ve finally taken my car in to get repainted and it should be done by sometime tomorrow, which means I should be able to pick it up on Wednesday. I just got a call with an update on it today saying they only needed to finish up the detailing and they were waiting on some sticker for something, I don’t know what.
I can’t wait to have my own car back. I’m driving an old Infiniti of my Uncle’s and I’m pretty sure the thing is just waiting to explode. It’s got 250,000 plus miles and there’s something wrong with the right passenger side tire that makes it sound like it’s going to fly off. It’s a relief I don’t actually have to drive on the highway or at any sort of distance to get to work. I don’t know what I would be doing right now if I still worked in El Cajon and had to commute 20 minutes on the freeway twice a day. I would have had to get a rental I guess.
Flight lessons are halted…again. Because I spend too much money too frivolously. It was going so well too. I need to get my ass in gear though. San Diego has pretty good weather year round but we get our share of storms during the winter. I can’t fly without good visibility because I’m a n00b. I need to take advantage of the weather while it lasts.
Alright, that’s it for now. I won’t promise to write again soon because I probably wont. But things are going well. I have been dismal at keeping up with everyone and I am very, very sorry for that. Please know that I think of my OD friends often and hope you are all doing generally well.