Category: Other Writing

A Pretty Solid 5min Explanation of Neural Networks, Genetic Programs, and AI as “Thinking Machines”

My 9-year-old has been pretty concerned about consciousness and the evolution of intelligence and AIs and such recently (for the non-childed: this isn’t humblebragging; my kid is indeed a weirdo besought with weird worries–because of Nature and Nurture–but this brand of light-weight epistemological crisis is pretty much developmentally on the ball among humans).
Anyway, without malice aforethought (or any real forethought at all), I let him watch half of this X-Files episode where a building-maintenance AI murders a dude, and that sorta made things much worse, in terms of his growing terror about what is and isn’t knowable–esp. know that I’d compounded the problem by introducing the possibility that an autonomous building might try and kill us if it felt even the least bit threatened.
So I showed him this video, which gives a much more complete sense of how academically interesting–but largely trivial–modern autonomous AIs are. It’s a very concise, but nonetheless enlightening 5-minute primer on neural network AIs and genetic programming. We watched it a couple times, he groked it, I asked if it seemed threatening, and he agreed that MarI/O could not hurt anyone–with the proviso that this was because they’d hooked it up to a Nintendo. If they’d hooked it up to something else . . .
And, well, I had to concede his point. That is sorta the story of evolution, isn’t it? Red in tooth and claw, etc., etc., etc.
Anyway, it’s still a nice little lesson for those of us with no working understanding of the field (and I’ve got it on good word that the video is basically on the ball).

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Shakespeare Talked Like a Newfie #FACT


(tl;dr: This video is a lit-nerd treasure trove. WATCH IT NOW!)
HEY DAVE, WHAT THE CRAP IS A “NEWFIE”?: “Newfoundland” (pronounced “new-fin-land,” I learned the embarrassingly hard way) is that big ole island in the Atlantic alongside Canada. It’s kinda remote, Canadians hardly ever remember it exists, the weather isn’t great, and they sorta have an attitude (e.g., it’s nicknamed “The Rock”–you know, like the prison Alcatraz–and didn’t actually join Canada until 1950-ish, and then only because they needed the money.) The folks that live there are “Newfies”; they drink a cheap rum called “screech,” eat cod cheeks, and put 10,000-year-old chunks of glacial iceberg ice into tourists drinks, because it fizzes and impresses the hell out of tourists (thus making it easier to overcharge them). Also, quite beautiful country–on account folks don’t generally bother going there or messing with it much. In other words, it’s the Upper Peninsula of Canada. I like it quite a bit.
But for the purposes of this account, what matters is that they have a remarkably whack-ass accent, a crazy burring brogue that sounds like an Irish person ate a Scottish person, and then gave birth to a riding lawnmower. The lawnmower is the one talking in this example, and it’s insisting on telling you about how great their Healthcare system is and how dangerous is is to drive at night, on account of the moose. That’s basically every conversation I had with any Newfie: A lawnmower that works as a trucker, loves socialized medicine, and is really worried that because you are an American (and thus, implicitly, a dumbass) you are going to insist on driving at night and hit a moose (which, I guess, like to stand around on the highways at night because the blacktop stays nice and warm after the sun goes down).
HEY DAVE, WHAT THE CRAP IS THE “GLOBE THEATER” THIS VIDEO IS GOING ON ABOUT?: The Globe was Shakespeare’s theater–the one where he staged most of the plays throughout his career; he and his actors built it themselves after getting in a dispute with their landlord that culminated with them tearing down down the Theater (their previous HQ), carting the timbers off, and using them to frame the Globe (which, side note, is the best landlord-dispute resolution I’ve ever heard, and my whole damn family is in commercial real estate). The Globe burned down in 16-something, they rebuilt, and it burned down again after Shakespeare died (I’m glossing somewhat; a lot of this is foggy to me, because it’s been several decades since I was last asked to recount it using a number two pencil and a powder blue exam book).
At any rate, the Globe in the video was rebuilt in around 1994, just a few hundred feet from Shakespeare’s original Globe. This new Globe is dedicated to verisimilitude, which is pretty damn rad. They go out of their way to perform as Shakespeare’s actors would have, to use period-appropriate costumes (i.e., when they stage Julius Caesar, they dress as moderately educated Elizabethan Englishmen believed ancient Romans dressed), blocking, sets, hand props, and so on. Starting a few years ago, they expanded this to include period-appropriate pronunciations–so called “Original Pronunciation” (in contrast to the more popular modern “Received Pronunciation,” which my American readers probably think of as “BBC English” or “that stuck-up snooty-ass style British accent.”)
HEY DAVE, WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME ALL THIS?: Shakespeare and his Elizabethan actors apparently had the same accent as modern Newfies. That bawdy pirate going on about how, hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, then hour to hour we rot and rot? That is spot on *exactly* what every long-haul trucker I drank with in Newfoundland sounded like.
This Newfie sound really stands out at 3:17, with both the pronunciation of words like “War,” “harry,” “port,” “heels,” and “hounds,” but in the cadence. Also, check out some great (and very Newfie-like) dirty talk at around 8:00. For folks interested in the ins-and-outs of actually staging a play, there are some interesting bits around 7:00. I don’t know that folks who’ve never staged a play ever think about pacing, but it really is your central concern as a director/performer; pacing is what makes or breaks any performance, and it’s a failure to attend to pacing that tends to make student productions absolutely intolerable.
BONUS: Here’s another one from Ben Crystal (the younger dude in the above clip) where he takes a stab at explaining the mechanism whereby modern Newfies ended up talking like Elizabethan Londoners (FYI, I’ve heard a similarly argument made to explain why modern U.S. Appalachians use intransitive verbs–like “to learn”–in a transitive mode, just as Shakespeare and Donne did, despite it no=longer being considered grammatical in “proper” English).
The basic thrust of the premise: Folks who wound up being “transported” to the New World (i.e., sent against their will as punishment for largely petty crimes) came disproportionately from the streets of London, and *that’s* the language preserved in these Shakes scenes.
Again, lots of fun; this is one charming mutherfucker:

SPOILER ALERT: It’s a Parable about Global Climate Collapse

Cautionary tale: A parable of science fiction.
Yes, to a large chunk of folks it’ll be suitably obvious what Plait is driving at by about graff 3, but I still want to put this in front of folks because the piece is sturdy (if a touch tedious at moments, and clunking in the conclusion) and rhetorically useful. For those who are aware of climate collapse in a sort of background-noise way, it’s likely to be instructive.
Anyway, just to be super-duper clear: We are indeed already in the midst of an Extinction Level Event. I’m not saying that to be cynical or dramatic or to spur you to this action (or inaction) or that one; I’m saying it because it is factually the case.
For rather obvious reasons, it puts me into the mind of this song:

“Junkshop Percussion” in the Wild: Techno Goes Acoustic

I’ve been wrapping up my new book, which dedicates an entire section to “Junkshop Percussion”: washboards and cajons and spoons and buckets, and all the great “instruments” that are just detritus-plus-panache.

So, folks like this–who take a musical form that arose from digitization and mechanization via insanely expensive studio gear, then make it a dirt-cheap, no-tech, hands-on, all-acoustic expressive art form–just tickle me pink.

Like this guy, he’s a pure delight with the speed, steadiness, and raw sweat of that drum-n-bass:

Around the 2:15 mark this guy emulates a classic EMD filter sweep with his foot muting a bar; wünderbar!!!

Or check out the Pipe Guy’s PVC-and-flip-fop electro trance:

OMFG! I *love* old-school analog drum machine claps (like you get on a Roland 808, or my treasured Boss DR-110)–and he’s getting that sound from a goddamned flip-flop! *Outstanding!* I especially dig the point near 2:55, where dude launches into a cover of Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy”, then abruptly segues into the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” (although I’m kinda disappointed that this never becomes a cover of the Knight Rider theme, ’cause it hovers right at the cusp of doing so).

There is a future where these dudes appear on a Skynet-hosted show called HUMANS GOT TALENT. Howie Mandel continues to host, because he is a cylon.

At any rate, more to the point: If you dig things like these dudes are doing, then you might dig my next book (out in July). If you can’t wait to start building instruments and making sweet-ass sounds, you can start *right now* with a free download of the two most popular music projects from my fist DIY book:

Get your Junkyard Jam Pack download NOW!

Prepare to Fall in Love with the HTML 5 Drum Machine

There’s a lot to love about the HTML5 Drum Machine. For starters, it’s all in HTML5, which means you can look at the source, monkey with it, and run it locally regardless of OS. On top of that, it apes a stripped down version of the venerable Roland 808 by default, with fairly faithful sounds (esp. the clap and rim, as well as those distinctively WtF?! “conga” sounds). Most importantly, it’s super easy to get your head around and use. Here’s a quick sample of a track a tossed together in roughly the amount of time it takes to listen to.
Yes, the response is a little sludgy (jeez, it’s browser based, for crissakes!), and it lacks some of the things I really love in Roland’s hardware drum machines (like the way the closed hat would clamp the decay on the open hat–’cause, you know, that’s how physical hi-hats work)–but, oh jeez, is this thing a ton of fun!
GO! Make a good noise here!
HTML5 Drum Machine
(via Free HTML 5 Drum Machine For Your Web Browser — Synthtopia )

Stop Beating Yourself Up for Not Being as Productive as Your Artistic Heroes

Nifty inforgraphics here based on data from Mason Currey’s significantly niftier Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

One thing I really, really want to flag, though: Look carefully at the green “Day Job/Admin” bars. Fewer than half of the folks listed here (which are a very small sub-portion of the folks dealt with in the book, as I recall) have *any* time devoted to a day job. Those that do (Kurt Vonnegut, Wolfgang Mozart, and Sigmund Freud we’re specifically called out for “spending a good deal of their time working a separate day job,” even though Kafka seemed to have a more regular job than any of them) still only put in a half-day by modern American work standards.
Maybe you are like basically every artist I know: Someone who creates things, and also puts food on the table and keeps the lights on by selling his or her labor the old fashioned way. If that’s the case, and you are feeling down on yourself because you aren’t cranking out stories like O’Connor or Dickens, cut yourself some slack: You work for a fucking living.
Still feeling glum? Then take a second to imagine Vladimir Nabokov making cold calls trying to get folks to answer survey questions or Maya Angelou troubleshooting connectivity issues with the office’s wifi enabled printer.
Yeah, you, me, we aren’t writing Lolita, but Nabokov would run screaming from a half-day of what we do. Solidarity, brothers and sisters.

Write Better: The Coyote, the Road Runner, Sympathy, and Craft as the Art of Constraint

Back at the beginning of March this list of Chuck Jones’s Rules for Coyote-Road Runner cartoons made the rounds:


(The pic, taken by filmmaker Amos Posner, shows a display in the Museum of the Moving Image’s “What’s Up, Doc? The Animation Art of Chuck Jones” exhibit. It’s identical to the Coyote-Road Runner Rules Jones listed in his 1999 memoir Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist)

There’s some question as to the consistency with which The Rules are followed, as well as their pinned-to-the-wall workaday legitimacy, but as I work through a set of hard revisions on an almost-just-about-right SF novella, I’ve been thinking about these rules–not because I’m employing any of them in my edit (I’m not), but because they embody a different way of looking at constraints[*], and I’m very fond of drafting with a fuck-all attitude and revising with a sharp blade and very narrow constraints. By hewing to constraints we drive our work towards the Graceful Universality of fairytales, Willie Nelson songs, Basho haikus, Jones’ Coyote-Road Runner shorts, and the like. Besides, even if you miss the “graceful universality” bullseye, it’s effort well-spent, since the entire target constitutes “stuff someone will pay money for” (i.e., “work that meaningfully touches people”).

Jones’ Rules have been floating around the Internet for more than 15 years, during which time the list has swelled to as many as 11 items listed (in fact, Wikipedia editors only culled back to nine following Posner’s tweeted picture, even though Jones’ canonical nine-item Rules have been in print since 1999). Interestingly, the earliest instance of the Rules swelling beyond the Canonical Nine traces back to its *first* online incarnation back in 1999, which includes this 10th Rule:

(Rule 10.) The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote.

This isn’t in Chuck’s Nine Rules because it’s something he explains a few pages earlier in his memoir, while setting up the discussion of the Coyote-Road Runner Rules. he returns to the idea in his analysis at the end of the book. It’s tacked on as a 10th Rule in that ancient webpage, but it’s really the 0th Rule, the fundamental Truth: The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote, and to a greater or lesser degree the Rules guide the forward energy of each story toward this goal. The Coyote is humiliated not so much by an active antagonist (that damnable Road Runner) as by his environment, by the core physics of the universe, by shoddy consumer goods, and by his own mania.

You know, like the rest of us.

All of which is a nice reminder for me, that any part of the craft–all of the rules of thumb and editorial tricks and writing tactics and daily grinding–exist to serve the 0th Rule of the Coyote and Road Runner: You need to cultivate the audience’s sympathy for the protagonist. “Sympathetic” doesn’t mean “likable.” Likability, in my humble, is bullshit: We don’t “like” Richard III, on balance, or Hannibal Lecter, or Walter White, or Lady MacBeth, or Medea–but these are among the most compelling protagonists in Western narrative.

Similarly, “sympathy” isn’t “pity”; pity is a form of contempt. We feel superior to those we pity. But I don’t think most audience members ever feel superior to even the very disagreeable protagonists I’ve listed above, flawed and awful as they are. Why? I imagine it’s because, like Coyote, they may be failures, but they certainly aren’t quitters. We can respect that, and sympathy rests on a measure of (often grudging) respect.

Now there’s most certainly another 3k words I can put to this–especially as it applies to the modern argumentative essay and social media–but let’s stop here, with the nuts-and-bolts Write Better advice:

  • Our job is to cultivate sympathy–not to be liked or pitied.
  • We write better when we hew to constraints that guide our readers toward “feeling with” our characters (even the Bad Guys).
  • There are many ways of formulating constraints; it doesn’t matter how they constrain you, so long as they do in fact constrain, that you at some point in your process feel hemmed in and annoyed by the Rules that you’ve set for yourself.

Or, in other words, accept the Fundamental Truth that Chuck Jones never deemed worth saying–that most artists come to see as so self-evident that it doesn’t bear mentioning:

You cannot catch or eat the Road Runner. But you always must chase.
*Amen.*

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Write Better: The Genius of Sasheer Zamata


I love this piece for two reasons: It is perfectly structured, and it’s compassionate.

Structurally, we’ve got a clean three-part structure (which, established, I believe in with a passion that is sort of embarrassingly open and sincere) that conforms to my workhorse Setup-Tangle-Resolution formula. Although it doesn’t strictly hew to my favored 45/45/10 distribution (in terms of time devoted to each of these three sections), I do note that the gag itself Resolves at the final 10% mark, with the line “It was like a date, with a lot of stuff missing out the middle.” (I’ve got a sort of vest-pocket theory that having the Resolution drop into gear as you round the last 10% is fairly consistent across stories and storytelling modes).

More importantly, she offers us this perfectly structured, perfectly delivered story in the service of compassion. I mean, there’s really no way around it: in telling the story, Zamata inhabits a man who sexually assaulted her (however mildly, by some measures) and brings us to the point of identifying with and feeling pity for him. This is a joke, but it is an incredibly powerful joke, and even if it is an absolutely 100 percent factual account, it is also in its perfect craft an excellent example of moral fiction.

I’ve watched this over and over and over again, and I love it every single time. It is an excellent primer on storytelling. Watch and learn, Oh My Best Belovéd, watch and learn.

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