Back of the Envelope

I've received a lot of visits this weekend, mainly due to a link in Right Wing News's weekend sidebar. The last time that happened I created a "Best of" post to direct people to some of my better postings. But that was before I had topics, so instead I'll suggest that you visit my topics' pages, depending on whether you're interested in Politics, the War, or Religion. If you decide you're tired of all that, there's always my Fiction page.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News is now a full time blogger. I'd say that was really cool, but I don't think he's entirely happy with the circumstances that led to it. Still, I think he'll do okay. Go read, and make sure you visit his sponsors.

I went to a new Bible study last night, one which contained a couple of people I knew from MIT and a lot of new ones. It was a lot of fun, but I didn't get home until 10 pm, so I'm afraid there won't be much blogging today. Maybe I'll post something this evening.

The Christian Carnival is now online at Wallo World. I submitted my posts on Christianity and Slavery.

I've complained for a while that I no longer have the #2 spot on Google for "back of the envelope." Well, guess what? I'm back. I'm not quite sure how that happened, or what put me up there. Or even whether I'll stay when my front page's content changes. If I were to guess, however, I'd say that it was probably Joe Carter's Church Directory that put me back at #2. Thanks, Joe!

Joe Carter of the Evangelical Outpost has a new job. He'll be paid to be the manager of Internet Development at the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. Not bad for a blogger who isn't in IT, huh? No one's offered me a really cool job because of my blog, although I did get a really cool job because of my Ph.D. Of course, for me, the Ph.D. was more work. I really think that Joe has put more work into his blog than I put into my Ph.D., however.

Well, Chris at Powerblogs has been reading my complaints, and recently he rebuilt the archives so that the weekly archives are now truly weekly, each week starting on Sunday and ending on Saturday. Wow, they really spoil me, don't they? Once again, Powerblogs shows that it has incredible customer service.

I mentioned this before, but Doc's been complaining about my slacking off and not having the next chapter of Eyes in the Shadow done in time:

Donald has once again posted something that I've already read. Get cracking, guy! I'm waiting to find out what Red Eyes is up to.

...Donald's stories rely on suspense and adventure and when you get left not knowing what happened it's a major pain. Sheya's stories are more centered around personalities. There is some suspense, but it's more intimate. Sort of like getting a letter from someone who tells you what is going on in their life. You get left not knowing how it came out, but that's not so bad because you mainly just wanted to know how they are doing.

That's why Sheya's continuing stories don't annoy me as much as Donald's.

The ironic thing is that while I like keeping some suspense, I usually resolve the immediate situation. Only Chapter 1 was an actual cliffhanger. But Doc's post reminded me that I really need to keep the suspense up, so I made this last chapter a cliffhanger, just for him. He's already told me how much he appreciates it.

Okay, that's not exactly true. I was planning a cliffhanger anyway. Like I said in an earlier post, I felt the need to change the direction of the story, and this is it. On the downside, this was the easy part. The next chapter will be the hard part. Doc needn't worry though. I wrote about 2,000 words last night, so I should be done in time. Okay, technically, not all of those 2,000 words were part of Eyes in the Shadow, but it's more writing than I've done in a while.

By the by, I originally forgot to post chain Chapter 8 with the others. I've fixed that now.

I was watching the show Mythbusters on the Discovery channel last night. If you're not familiar with it, this is a show where people with special effects experience take myths and urban legends and test them out to find if they're feasible. This isn't the Snopes type of research where they look through news stories to find out whether something really happened or not. Instead, they try to reproduce the story. For example, one of the things they tested last night was whether someone shot with a bullet could really be knocked backwards, blown flying across the room, like what happens in the movies. In order to test this, they took a 180 pound dead pig, precariously balanced it hanging from a hook, then shot at it to see if they could knock it off. Sounds fun, huh? They found that they couldn't, which makes sense when you think about it. With Newton's third law, whatever force the bullet makes on impact, it should also direct the same amount of force in the opposite direction when fired. In other words, if your bullet knocks someone back ten feet, it should have knocked you back ten feet when you fired it. (Fortunately, this force is better distributed on the shooter than the target.) They said as much after they had had all the fun shooting at a dead pig. Well, I'm glad I'm not a Hollywood director making films that are so inaccurate to real life. I'm not obsessive about it, but I try to at least be deliberate when I break the laws of physics in my own stories...

Um, wait. Didn't I...? Hold on a moment, let me check...

...

...huh, what do you know? I did, in fact, use gunshot knockback to dramatic effect in Chapter 4 of Eyes in the Shadow. I can't change it now: it's too integral to the scene! But, wait, it's a dream sequence, so, um, yeah... I meant to do that. It's a dream, so it's not supposed to be realistic. In fact, it makes more sense if it follows the movie logic, since it's all happening in Ryan's brain. [Good recovery. -ed. Oh, shut up! -DSC]

I haven't had much to blog about the last couple of days. Aside from not being very inspired, I've been trying to go to bed earlier, since I feel like I haven't been getting enough sleep. I can make it through the day, but I feel exhausted by the time I get home, which is when I do all my blogging.

Hopefully, if I can get a good sleeping schedule, I'll feel up to more blogging. It doesn't help that going to bed early doesn't necessarily mean that I get to sleep early. I've occasionally lain awake for two hours or more just trying to sleep. If there's anything more boring than trying to get to sleep and wondering if you should just get up and blog, I don't know what it is.

It looks like Doc isn't too happy at the delays in Eyes in the Shadow. Well, the next chapter will be up in time for the next Storyblogging Carnival, so he can relax.

Today is the one year anniversary of Back of the Envelope. It is also Valentine's Day. What of it?

In honor of the day (my Blogiversary, not Valentine's Day), I am reprinting my very first post:

After wasting hours and hours reading blogs and wishing I was doing something productive, I decided to start my own. That way I can waste hours not only reading, but also posting, which means that I am producing something, so that, by definition, I am being productive, even if what I am producing is pure drivel.

So now you see why I started a blog. My original blog was on Blogspot, and the entire first day of posting is archived there. It's been fun, and I look forward to another year.

The twelfth Storyblogging Carnival will also go up today. Now, if I had only begun the Carnival two weeks earlier, my blogiversary and the Carnival's half-anniversary would go up on the same day.

The latest Christian Carnival is up at Dunmoose the Ageless. This is, incidentally, the first time I remember seeing the Christian Carnival on a Livejournal. It looks to have come out pretty well.

I got my first comment spam the other day. It read:

Your blog is great! If you are interested in playing slots online, we have something for everyone! To play slots for free or for real big money jackpots.

(Links removed.) I actually feel like I've reached some sort of milestone with this, but I've decided that any spam like this will be deleted on sight. Now I don't have a registration policy, and I don't want to have one, so unless it becomes unmanageable I'll just delete these posts as they show up. If they're this easy to spot, I doubt I'll be deleting any legitimate comments by mistake, but I intend to be pretty careful, just in case. I don't mind people posting links in my comments, and I've even let people post commercial links (linking to things they're trying to sell) before, as long as they write a comment actually relevant to the post when they do so.

David at faith*in*fiction is warning authors that "returning home" to find fulfillment has become not just cliche, but dangerous:

It strikes me as somewhat unhealthy.

Basically the underlying message is:

A) We're all pretty much unhappy where we're at.
B) Life was better when we were teens.
C) The answer to my unhappiness is something (or someone) I left back where I grew up.
D) Plus God. I forgot about God when I moved away.

Now, finding God is never a bad thing. But to suggest that God can only be found in a certain place—which is the implicit idea—seems somewhat dangerous. Plus the whole thing feeds into the grating American theme that life is greatest from 16-22. The exultation of responsibility-free, halcyon living.

I have a somewhat different perspective on this. If you check out my bio (not yet updated for my new move, since that's going to require me to modify the image and, more annoying, the image map), you see that I've lived in a lot of places. Seventeen on the non-updated page, eighteen or nineteen, depending on how you count, by now. The concept of "returning home" doesn't mean a whole lot to me. Returning to where I grew up would mean, what? New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina?

For rather obvious reasons, home is not where I lived during my teenage years--or any other easily defined period of my life. To me, home is where the people I care about are. Thus St. Francisville in Louisiana is home, because that is where my parents and my sisters live, despite the fact that I've never spent more than four contiguous months there. The only time I recall being homesick is when I lived in Rochester, New York, doing a postdoc for a year. I found that I really missed Boston, a city I first came to for Grad school, largely because of the people and the communities I was a part of there.

So I guess I've never really given much thought to the idea of returning home as a theme in the stories I write, so it surprised me when I read David's post and then realized that a homecoming theme of some sort had crept into a story I was writing. Eyes in the Shadow ain't a homecoming story in any traditional sense, but since Chapter 4, the goal of the characters has been to reach Emily's home. It flows very much from how I view home: it's where the people whom you love and who love you are, the people whom you trust when you're in trouble. It's certainly not the nostalgia schtick that so irritates David, but the two do overlap, in that home is where you feel safe. If nothing else, it's a sanctuary, and I think that is both natural and right.

Of course, I still don't know for certain whether Ryan and Emily will reach Emily's home. Ryan still doesn't see the value in doing so. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

For once, I'm doing my month in review at the beginning of the next month, rather than closer to the end. I used to do these as Weeks in Review, but since moving to the new blog, the archives work differently, so it makes more sense to put it at the beginning of the month. Here are my most significant posts this month.

Storyblogging Carnivals (links to the category page) -- Michele Catalano hosted the ninth Storyblogging Carnival, but I claimed number ten for myself, while Sheya Joie hosted number eleven.

Well, I'm here -- I arrive in Boston and start moving into my apartment.

Armstrong Williams -- As usual, it takes me a little while to actually comment on news, but here I take the opportunity to spell out my own full disclosure policy. I start to question my conclusions about Mr. Williams later, though.

Doc Rampage: The most metaheroic blog in the world? -- Doc gives me a chance to put my full-diclosure policy in action by paying me for my commentary.

The Old Testament Law -- I share some of MIT Intervarsity Staffer Kevin Ford's thoughts on the continued relevance of Old Testament law.

Christian family murdered in New Jersey -- Islamist violence isn't something that only happens in Iraq.

Military nanotechnology -- I have some thoughts on an IEEE article proposing International controls on military nanotechnology.

So, you want a quantum key distribution system? -- Quantum encryption may be closer than you think.

RSA Encryption -- I talk a bit about RSA encryption and what makes Shor's algorithm so powerful.

Dr. Dobson and Mr. Squarepants -- I try to figure out what all the fuss is about.