part of the “what I learned after four years at MIT” series, I
guess?
I hated timed essays in high school. It’s pretty clear if you skim
that part of the blog archives:
My [SAT] essay got a 10 out of 12. It’s an essay I’d be ashamed of
posting anywhere else; it’s disgustingly traditional and formulaic. […]
This was simply because I knew that using my normal essay-writing
mindset, I’d get maybe a 3, because I’d spend the first twenty minutes
debating myself over which side I was on and rewrite the introduction
ten times. Too bad. I wasn’t there to write a good essay; I was there to
get a good score on the SAT.
The worst issue is that students do not need to give in-depth
explanation of anything they learned. Due to its stringent time limit,
the essay portion rewards quick reckless writing much more than deep
thought. […] encouraging students to practice writing 25-minute essays
in order to improve their college-bound skills is like encouraging
people to play Grand Theft Auto in order to improve their driving
skills.
I took the Grand Theft Auto analogy pretty far. I’m not proud enough
of these posts to link them, but you can find them if you try. In short,
past me thought timed essays rewarded writing too quickly, with a
disregard not only for facts but for the opportunity to lay out your
opinions and thoughts so you could clarify and revise them, which was
actually the most valuable part of writing.1 I
conceded that the time limits made sense as a practical concession to
allow you to test students’ writing skills fairly,2 but
I felt like there was still way too much emphasis on the raw speed.
I hate doing things under time pressure, but I have to admit I do a
lot more things when time pressure exists. One of the things is writing.
Another is posting the things I write. They aren’t very good, but
they’re better than writing that doesn’t exist.
It’s interesting that I can impose time pressure on myself by
declaring commitment devices by fiat and it works. Other people have
developed other methods of doing this — I recently discovered
The Most Dangerous
Writing App, which puts time pressure on you to type every five
seconds or it deletes everything you wrote. There are many other ways
it’s done.
This post’s topic might be the most controversial thing I’ve posted
here ever. I hope the points I want to make aren’t.
One of the excuses for not blogging I came up with and then deleted
while rambling about not
blogging was that I’m getting more feelings about real-world
real-person issues, things that people take heated positions on — it’s
not topics like what food I ate or what games I’m playing in fourth
grade any more — and my identity is pretty public here, so who knows
what’ll happen. Oh well. I’m probably just paranoid.
It’s also delayed, as the articles I’m talking about are old; the
latest two news items are the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando
Castile and then the police shooting at the Dallas rally. That was also
really sad, but I don’t think I have anything insightful to say about
it. Let me point you to the
MIT
Admissions post, “Black Lives Matter”, and then for something a bit
more optimistic out of a huge range of possible choices,
this
Medium article.
Although after I started writing this post, the story about
a
Muslim man preventing an ISIS suicide bomber came out, so now this
is mildly relevant again. Anyway, I guess the delay is no different from
how I put up life posts weeks after the life event happens. So today, I
bring you two old news articles about Islam that my friends shared and
discussed:
The second one first, whose argument is, to be frank, weak. I think
this piece from The Atlantic by Wood,
“What
ISIS Really Wants”, is a better-researched overview of ISIS while
still being pretty readable. One caveat is that it’s somewhat old. But
its central claim is quite the opposite:
After a misstep on the fourth
day I managed to post one post every day, completing the rest of the
streak! This post is scheduled
to go out around the time my plane takes off.
I’m free!
I’d insert a Frozen gif here if I could find a good one,
but I don’t like any of the ones I found and besides, copyright is an
issue. So instead:
IMO2007.C6. In a mathematical competition some competitors are
friends. Friendship is always mutual. Call a group of competitors a
clique if each two of them are friends. (In particular, any group of
fewer than two competitiors is a clique.) The number of members of a
clique is called its size.
Given that, in this competition, the largest size of a clique is
even, prove that the competitors can be arranged into two rooms such
that the largest size of a clique contained in one room is the same as
the largest size of a clique contained in the other room.
Author: Vasily Astakhov, Russia
If you remember where I first posted this to break a combo, you have
an excellent memory and/or spend too much time stalking me. If you
remember the context under which I posted this to break a
combo, you have a better memory than I do.
Was my streak a success? On the bright side, I definitely generated
lots of posts, many of which were radical departures from my old
blogging habits:
This is not Part 3. It’s just two things I thought of tacking on to
part 2.
What can I say? Part 2s are easy blog post fodder; Part 2 appendixes
are even easier.
One, there’s one other wall I run into often during those rare
attempts when I get motivated enough to try to write a story: naming
characters is hard. At least, it provides an excellent motivational
roadblock whenever I even consider committing a story to paper, a point
before I’ve actually written anything at which I think “maybe I should
give up and go on Facebook instead” and proceed to do so. Aggh. And I
think there’s more than one reason for this:
I have trouble coming up with names to some degree. Sure, it’s easy to
browse BabyNames.com and look for choices, but a lot of the names there
are really weird and contemplating them for every unimportant character
kind of rips me out of the immersed mindset.
Reading great stories in English class and elsewhere may have gotten me
feeling like every name ought to be a deep meaningful allusion, or at
least pun fodder. I feel like I will regret it if I write a story and, a
few months and/or chapters down the road, realize I missed a better name
or the name I chose has some undesirable connotations in context or
provides an atmosphere-ruining coincidence.
But I think the real kicker is simply that some part of me is
terrified of the awkwardness of giving a character the same name as
anybody I know, because then they might read the story and wonder if the
character is somehow based on them. And too many of the names that I
consider common enough to not lure readers off into looking for hidden
meanings are used up that way. This is obviously worst if the character
is an antagonist. But it seems just as awkward if the character is a
protagonist in accord with everything I’ve written, i.e. a paper-thin
character blatantly created for escapist purposes. I am already kind of
terrified I might ever meet anybody with the same name as one of my
mentally established characters even though I haven’t actually written
anything about him. And there’s a well-established convention of
not
reusing a first name in a work, so this gets even harder with every
work; I’m just as worried, what if somebody thinks this character is
related to the other character in that story I wrote in second grade? Oh
no!!
It’s like not reusing variable names in a programming language where
everything is in the same scope. Positively nightmarish.
And I actually discovered some evidence this is a thing in my past: I
found some stories I wrote in 2004. They are possibly the most extreme
exemplification of
Write
What You Know imaginable: the main character, Michael, goes to
school and makes friends. That’s all.
Illustration courtesy Brian2004
I kind of want to share these stories, but fast-forward a few years
and you’ll see that a classmate named Michael entered my grade and we
stayed in the same grade until we graduated.
Hi, Michael. You’re probably not reading this, but the character I
created in 2004 is not in any way based on or inspired by you,
especially not this image. And unlike later in this post where I name a
character after myself, I’m not being sarcastic, really.
Part 1 was here. This is
still part of the daily posting
streak I have openly committed to and standard disclaimers still
apply. Just as in my original
post, back to the flip side — let’s see what I have to do to
write fiction to my own satisfaction. And this time I have a
guide: the list I made in the first part of this post. Could I create
fiction I would enjoy reading?
1: I enjoy calling things before they happen…
2: …I also enjoy the Reveal for questions when the author has done
something clever I didn’t catch…
Well, obviously, I can’t predict things in my own plot. But I can
develop riddles in the plot, set up expectations and drop subtle clues
and use Chekhov’s Tropes. Can I?
I blogged about this before in
2013 — how I felt that the analysis trained into me by English class
was dulling my ability to appreciate and write the types of fiction I
really enjoyed. After thinking about it I realized the mismatch goes
deeper than that. Because the things I seek the most in fiction are
escapism and entertainment. I like simple fiction with obvious (though
maybe not
that
obvious)
Aesops
and extreme economy of characters via making all the reveals being of
the form “X and Y are the same person” (which does not quite seem to be
a trope but may be an occurrence of
Connected
All Along, with the most famous subtrope being
Luke,
I Am Your Father (which is
a
misquote!), and is also one common
Stock
Epileptic Tree, so maybe this isn’t the best example), because not
only are such reveals fun, they make the plot simpler. What can I say,
it works.
The qualities of being thought-provoking or heartwarming are only
bonuses for me; needless
complexity
in the number of characters or plots is a strict negative. Sorry, I
don’t want to spend effort trying to remember which person is which and
how a hundred different storylines relate to each other if they don’t
build to a convincing, cohesive, and awesomeReveal,
and often not even then. And I like closure, so I feel pretty miserable
when writers
resolve a
long-awaited plot point just to add a bunch more. Because of this I
am ambivalent about long book series; most of my favorite works of
fiction have come in long series but starting a new one always gives me
Commitment
Anxiety. Even when there’s closure, when I finish an immersive movie
or book I’m always left kind of disoriented, like I’ve just been lifted
out of a deep pool and have to readjust to breathing and seeing the
world from the perspective of a normal person on land. I like when I’m
reading good fiction, but I don’t like going through withdrawal
symptoms. If I want to read complicated open-ended events, I’ll go read
a history textbook, because at least the trivia might come up useful
some day; if I want tough problems I’ll just look at real life and think
about the possibility of college debt and having to find a job and
everything. (If it wasn’t obvious yet, this is why I hyperbolically hate
on Game of Thrones often.) Even worse than all of this is
multiple paragraphs full of scenery and nothing else, unless of course
parts or maybe all of the scenery are
Chekhov’s
Guns.
Some part of me is embarrassed to admit this because I’ve been
educated for so long about deep literature that makes social commentary
or reveals an inner evil of humanity or whatever. But then again, I
don’t really need an education to appreciate the simple, fun fiction I
apparently do.
So: there are a lot of famous classics or mainstream works I can’t
really enjoy too much, or in some cases, at all. And yet, sometimes a
random story or webcomic will appear and I just won’t be able to stop
reading. Why? I decided to try making a list of things I like in
fiction:
Blogging is weird. I’m still nervous when I post stuff because I’m
concerned I’m wrong, and end up looking unprofessional or attracting a
bunch of Cueballs or something.
Before I told people about this blog, during the time when 100% of
its traffic came from its coincidental placement in search results, I
didn’t have to worry about this. Now, I choose my words. Because some
Important Person™ might show up. Maybe even misinterpret something I
said and/or get furiously offended at a badly phrased joke.
I also fear that I’ll update my beliefs quickly; maybe I’ll change my
mind or discover a much better argument for the other side really soon.
But the blog post would still be there, displaying my old belief, giving
the reader an inaccurate or misleading impression of myself. People
might even chat with me to argue about it, and then I have to admit
I’m wrong oh no! It feels a lot better admitting I’m wrong on my
own turf, in my own time.
This passage from Lord of the Flies comes to mind (I had
hurriedly reread the book as ammunition for the AP Literature test and
noticed that my past self had marked it):
Obligatory life update: I have graduated
[from]
high school.
But that’s not what this post is about. I
contemplated setting up a schedule
for my blogging three long years ago, and decided against it,
because I didn’t think writing was a high enough priority for me. Well,
I am setting up a schedule now: I am going to post something on
this blog every day until I have to leave the country (which is
happening once before college, so it’s not for as long as you think; but
I might decide to continue the schedule anyway after I get back. We’ll
see when the time comes.)
Indexing debates are boring. Especially when you can just flagrantly
disregard all concerns about memory safety (because C++ never had any in
the first place) and write
int _array[100008], array = _array + 2; I do this
alarmingly often; hence, the title. Hashtag firstworldanarchists. Three
± 1 cheers for
Haskell
arrays.
Anyway. One of the disadvantages of entering an international
competition as the home team is a lack of time to completely absorb the
idea that what is about to happen is a Big Thing. There was lots of time
before the other international competitions I went to to spend
uncomfortably on airplanes trying to adjust for the timezone
difference.
Not so for a competition in one’s own country. Right up to the night
before entering the hotel that marks the beginning of everything, I’m
still at home, furiously refreshing the AoPS IMO fora and Facebook for
news (!!!), lazily solving trivial Codeforces Div II problems with
pointless point-free Haskell one-liners, and blogging.
(There’s more, but I kind of want it to be a surprise.)
Anyway, let’s set the rules. Well, there’s only one, honestly: