If you came to this blog or this post hoping to read English, sorry
not sorry. It’s only fair, really, given how many people on Facebook
can’t read the massive English textwall posts I’ve spammed them with for
so long.
(streak)
≥1 of you should know what is being referred to.
Oh yeah, I love being first. Of course the approximate price is that I have to expose the world to the innocent naïveté of my fourth-grade self. So far nobody mean has ventured there yet, but who knows. Darn, two years. Darn, Cards Against Humanity. I need more of that in my life. I don’t know what else is happening but music is good.
I always tell myself, okay, I will actually just draw something
facetiously and get it over with, nobody comes to this blog to admire my
GIMP mouse doodles, but then perfectionist tendencies kick in and I get
carried away and it ends up
taking more than an hour or so.
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?
Short blog content for daily posting streak. Standard disclaimers apply. Not much to see here.
At some point in the past, because I was a bored teenager, I memorized this.
So now, in theory, I can tell you the capital of each state of the U.S. This is already a lame trick, but as I realized yesterday, it’s made even lamer by the fact that the data structure I chose only supports O(n) lookup.
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:
20 posts so far in my daily
streak, ignoring the time I posted after midnight but including
exactly one of this post and the commitment-starting post. You pick
which one. The arithmetic works out either way. My last four posts have
been made with less than two minutes to spare before midnight, and my
last post in particular made it by just seven seconds. This is working
as intended in that I’ve knocked out nine drafts that I’m pretty sure
would have rotted in my draft folder for at least a few more months
otherwise, and I’ve also jotted down more spontaneous thoughts and
posted them instead of postponing them until they was too late to be
applicable. But this is also a problem because I can’t spend every day
procrastinating blogging and then frantically blogging before midnight —
I have some serious programming work to do, and a talk to prepare for,
and, of course, linear algebra homework!!!
If you remember, Part 1 was
here and my goal is to construct a theoretical system of
standardized tests that I would be satisfied by. Here’s what I’ve got.
As usual, because of the daily
posting streak I have openly committed to, standard disclaimers
apply.
We’d have a first-tier test like the SAT, except this will be
explicitly designednot to distinguish among
the high performers.
The goal of the test is to assess basic proficiency in
reading, writing, and mathematics. Nothing else. Most good students,
those who have a shot at “good colleges” and know it, will be able to
ace this test with minimal effort and can spend their time studying for
other things or engaging in other pursuits. Students who don’t will
still have to study and it will probably be boring, but the hope is
that, especially if you’re motivated to get into a good college, there
won’t be much of that studying.
For colleges, the intention of this test is to allow them to require
this test score from everybody without having to
put
up disclaimers that go like,
there is really not a difference in our process between someone who
scores, say, a 740 on the SAT math, and someone who scores an 800 on the
SAT math. So why, as the commentor asks, is there such a difference in
the admit rate? Aha! Clearly we DO prefer higher SAT
scores!
Well no, we don’t. What we prefer are things which may coincide
with higher SAT scores…
