A Visit from the Spamfiles

For those new to this: I collect spam. Whenever I get a spam message or a spam comment, I copy it and put it up on the Spamfiles because it’s like a letter from a madman and I find it hilarious. Someone once described them as “found art” and I have to admit, that’s pretty accurate.

Take a look at this one, for example.

After Google upgraded its spam filters, I stopped getting crazy anonymous comments that were obviously filtered through a translate program that doesn’t work correctly. I’m not even sure what this one is trying to sell me. First it talks about online gambling, then “Culture is powered by peer tension”, and Battlefield 4 screenshots. Then it finishes with a link about a soccer video game. I can’t even imagine what the original thought behind this was.

I don’t have products on a “trading site”. I don’t have a company, esteemed or otherwise. I don’t have a catalogue. Nope, no idea what’s going on.

I certainly don’t see the business sense in randomly giving away over a million dollars. But maybe the UK branch of Coca Cola does things differently.

This one might be my absolute favorite. Please note the date of this alleged transaction that is netting me forty four dollars: over a month away.

That’s right. Time travel spam.

May God have mercy on our souls.

Language of Confusion: Feeling Bushed

Bush is one of those words that gets weirder the more I look at it. If you look at a forest, there’s probably going to be some bushes there. But if you’re really tired, you’re also bushed. So if a bush is tired, it’s a bushed bush.

Words! There’s a reason I call these posts “Language of Confusion”.

Bush, the plant, comes from the Old English bysc and further back, the West Germanic busk, which had the same meaning. There are similar words in other languages (Old French had busch, which meant wood, while Medieval Latin had busca), but it seems that West Germanic was the one that started using the word first and it permeated through other European languages. It’s worth noting that the modern French word for wood is bois, which was passed along to French Canada as boisé, which is where the capital of Idaho comes from. As for why it also means tired, the only real guess is that it’s from the sense of being lost in the woods. I guess that would make anyone tired.

Is that all? No, you don’t get off that easily. There’s also the word ambush. It first showed up in the early fourteenth century from the Old French embuscher. As I mentioned, busch means wood, and the em- prefix means in, so it means “in woods”. Which is a good place for an ambush. Seriously, that’s why ambush is ambush.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Google Translate

Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English

University of Texas Arlington

University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

Dictionary of Medieval Latin

Dreaming

In general, my dreams are pretty entertaining (excepting that week where I dreamt I was doing really boring things like cooking and shopping…no idea what that was about). They’ve certainly yielded a lot of potential stories for me, and if I was ever a famous writer being interviewed on television and they asked where I got my ideas, I could answer “From dreams” and it would be true. Although perhaps not exactly the whole truth.

Dreams, or at least, my dreams, are both hectic and scattered, so writing a good story from them wouldn’t be translating exactly what happened because that would just be a big mess. And also a bunch of stuff I’d be embarrassed for people to see.

Saying I get my ideas from dreams undersells the whole process. While a dream inspired me to write COLLAPSE, exactly none of it made it into the final product. Hell, none of it made it into the first draft.

The creative process isn’t just imagining something and making it happen. It requires thought, it requires focus, it requires a bunch of stuff that’s BOOOOORING to the casual observer (and about everyone else, too). But “From dreams” is the easy answer, the one that doesn’t require me to explain every detail about my thought process, some of which even I don’t fully understand.

So now I’m opening the floor to other opinions: How do you (or will you) answer the question “Where do you get your ideas?” Is it even possible?

The Downfall of Society

Remember when I said I post rants sometimes? This is going to be one of those times.

The most amusing part of this situation is that whenever I read the letters to the editor in the local paper and see that my former English teacher sent something in, I know it’s going to be good. First she was complaining about the fact that schools were dropping cursive from their curriculums and all her former students who were writers (a-hem) used cursive all the time and couldn’t believe it wasn’t going to be taught. Okay, I’d like to know where she’s getting this knowledge from because all the people I know who had her for English couldn’t stand her and maybe I’m wrong, but I can’t imagine her former students call her on a regular basis just to inform her how much they’re using cursive. I’ve also gone into detail about how much I can’t stand cursive and personally am glad it’s being dropped because it was invented when people used quills and ink and wanted words as connected as possible to prevent blotting.

In her latest printed spiel, my old teacher was complaining about (of course) television, and how mean it is these days, full of violence and sex. Now, one of my many many many many many many pet peeves is that I can’t stand it when people complain about how the lamentable state of television, music, video games or whatever is bringing the downfall of society. No wonder everyone in the world is…I don’t know, dying or whatever. They never seem to say what the direct consequences are, just that they’re bad. And we need to go back to a time when it wasn’t bad, i.e. the nineteen fifties.

The easy argument to make is that back during that time period, fathers encouraged their daughters not to become engineers but wives to engineers, people of color could only be stereotypes, and women could only do shopping and laundry and it was okay to threaten them if they spoke out of turn. So why would anyone want to go back there? But, like I said, that’s the easy argument. Why not have the same “victimless” humor and be violence free without all the blatant bigotry?

First of all, humor is designed to make us laugh at things that make us uncomfortable or gross us out. Fart jokes are easy because the typical reaction for a person is to laugh at them. Does this make them good? Personally, I don’t like them, but it doesn’t mean that they or other gross out humor isn’t funny. And as for the so-called mean jokes, yes, I think there are some shows out there that are just plain offensive, laughing at certain people instead of with them, and unfortunately, the at shows seem a lot more popular than the with ones. But that’s no different than it was sixty years ago when I Love Lucy was the most popular show on television. Seriously, the only difference between then in now is targets.

Now for the violence, of course, that’s desensitizing everyone and making them kill each other. You know what, one time, I saw this movie that was just horribly violent. It had rape and mutilation and torture murder-murder-murder. It starred Anthony Hopkins. It was called Titus. You know, that movie based on a play by some guy named William Shakespeare. Who lived five hundred years ago. If you’d like to go back a thousand more years, there’s also The Iliad, which was assigned reading when I was a high school freshman. Tons of fighting , sex, and blood there, although at the age I read it I couldn’t even go to an R rated movie without an adult present.

People have found sex and gore entertaining for as long as there have been people. Despite all the threats that television and video games have desensitized us, I really don’t think it’s doing anything that plays and poems and probably drawings on frigging cave walls hadn’t done to our ancestors.

If you don’t like blood or sex or people being jerks, don’t watch it. But don’t blame it for corrupting the world.

PS. It’s hilarious to think what probably happened when people first started drawing in caves. “Damn wall paintings. Ruining family time for hunting mammoths. It’ll be the downfall of society, mark my words!”

Secret Origins: R

Yay! I love doing histories on letters of the alphabet!

For those new to my alphabet posts, let me give you some of its ancestry. The writing system we use in English is the Latin Alphabet, which was taken from the Etruscan alphabet somewhere before the sixth century BCE. The Etruscans were the people who lived in Italy prior to the rise of the Roman empire and little is known about them these days except by writings of other (rival) societies, but they did adapt an alphabet from the Euboean Greeks that passed on to the Romans, and thus, the rest of western Europe. The Greek alphabet is at least 2800 years old, a hell of a long time considering its still in use.

It was created using the Phoenician abjad—a consonant alphabet, meaning the Greeks added the vowels themselves. The Phoenicians developed their writing system over three thousand years ago, taking it from what we now call Proto-Sinaitic, which was created around 3900 years ago. Proto-Sinaitic was developed to aid the Canaanites that used it in their trades with other countries—keeping track of things was a lot easier when you were able to write down records. It’s also pretty much the ancestor of all of western civilization’s current alphabets, including Hebrew and Arabic along with our Latin. The symbols were taken from Egyptian heiroglyphs—they picked a word that began with the same sound, and used that glyph for it.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can get down to business. Look at this alphabet gif to get an idea of R’s evolution over the years. The early Latin R is missing it’s second leg, making it look an awful lot like P (P on the other hand is missing it’s closing loop, making it look like a backwards 1). It was backwards in Etruscan, but then frontwards (at least, from our point of view) back as the Greek rho. You can go here if you want a better look at rho’s history, where sometimes it actually looks like an R (so I guess it makes sense that we have it like that) and sometimes it even looks like a D!

In Phoenician, it’s resh, which means head, and it looks like a backwards P. Why would they do something like that? Well, resh, or rashu in proto-Sinaitic, means head. And what does that P symbol that means R kind of look like? A head. And that’s where R comes from.

Sources

Omniglot

Ancient Scripts

Mysterious Etruscans

Phoenician.org

Alphabet gif

The End, Part 1

I finished another book. I don’t know how many this makes. I could count, but the number would be depressingly high considering how many I’ve had published (a big, fat goose egg, by the way, although considering some of my efforts, that’s probably a good thing :P).

So it’s the end, but not the end. Draft one is done, but it’s, well, not something I’d share with anyone. Ever. Not that it doesn’t have the potential to be better—far from it! I really love this story, even if I’m not sure how popular a future-fiction-action-adventure book would be with readers. It’s still great though. Or it will be once I get through with editing.

Editing is a big process, bigger than writing the book itself. Right now, MALICE is just under 100K, longer than it should be, full of subplots that went nowhere but are in because I thought they would (outlining! <shakes fist>), and words I just stuck in there because I could figure out exactly what I was trying to say (anyone else have writing moments like that?). Plus I think the book has unacceptable levels of telling instead of showing. And all the things I need to research, world building details I have to add, and, what’s it called? Descriptions.

So. I have my work cut out for me. It took something like two and a half months to write. Editing is going to take considerably longer. I need to do a read aloud, take notes of what needs to be fixed, fix said notes, about a billion other things. Then beta reads. And more notes to fix. Always more notes.

I can honestly say I don’t know when I’ll be able to write “The End” and mean it, or if that will ever be the case. All I can do is keep typing.

What do you do after you finish draft number one? What’s your editing process like? Please share, and don’t skimp on the details! : )

Survive a Zombie Apocalypse Using Geography

Or zombocalypse, if you will.

I can’t remember if I stumbled across the link to this or if someone sent it to me (if that’s you, sorry!), but I came across it sometime before the Challenge took over my life and now I finally have an opportunity to share it with you.

“How do you decide where to go in a zombie apocalypse?” a TED lesson by David Hunter. [http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-do-you-decide-where-to-go-in-a-zombie-apocalypse-david-hunter] Basically, it teaches you how you should decide where to set up base in the impending zombocalpyse using geography. In under four minutes!

Have a good weekend!