Looking at Plotting Examples

My shoulder's doing much better this week. It only bothered me a little bit in specific situations. The rest of the time it felt back to normal.

My main reason for wanting to do a middle grade series was to practice plotting novels. Middle grade has a low word count, so I could do a trilogy with roughly the same number of words as a normal novel. It would come out longer but not excessively so. It depends on how many words per story I used, which kind of depends on the market. For the price of a normal novel, I could get three practice "novels" done. It seemed like a more efficient use of time than practicing on full books. The books on the front burner need to come first, though I did have a random idea for the middle grade trilogy that solves a problem I didn't know I had. Like Messengers, it involves travel to another world. I had the idea for how to get the main character there but hadn't put any thought into how he gets back. I had an idea pop up for that this week. I'm thinking something like a maze. I'll have to look it up and see how it's been done before. Surely, the idea can't be original. If it's been done by a best selling book, I'd probably need to do it a different way.

This week I looked at a lot of plotting examples. In theory scenes should do more than one thing. I saw some real world examples of scenes that do that and and even do three things. A good example was a scene in which a fugitive cop called his old partner, but the partner didn't report the call. Later when she presents evidence that shows the fugitive's innocence, it looks like she's covering for him just like she covered up the call. Later when the fugitive tracks down the real killer, it was foreshadowed by the phone call. The phone call scene does three things: 1) Sets up inadmissibility of the exonerating evidence. 2) Foreshadows the confrontation between the fugitive cop and the real killer. 3) Gives a brief sketch of what the fugitive is doing while he's on the run. I suppose a fourth thing would be that it shows the relationship between the fugitive and his former partner.

The ending for the B'vellah War series is already plotted, but it never hurts to take another look at plotting in general. That and I'm still tired from this tooth abscess. It's hard to concentrate and be at my best behind the keyboard at night when I'm dragging through the day. 

Have a great weekend.

What is the Metaverse?

A few weeks ago, I missed a week after helping someone who promised it wouldn't take long. The week before that I mentioned that I had dipped below the price limit on the Forex account and didn't know what the consequences would be. I was up for the week and had done better that week than the two previous weeks combined. Nevertheless, I was dinged for the infraction. I now have to start over with a new trial account.

By now you've heard of the Metaverse and have heard things like Facebook is betting the company on its success. Hopefully, that's true. We could do without Facebook in the world. So, what is the Metaverse? Metaverse is a brand name for Facebook-specific virtual reality. Basically, it's Facebook VR, which makes sense. A while back Facebook bought out a company that sells VR goggles. It's natural for them to create a VR platform to drive goggle sales.

This is great news for the rest of us. VR has been around at least 30 or 40 years or more. It never catches on with the public. The people who love VR are typically video gamers, 3D chatters and university researchers. Almost everyone else couldn't care less. Something like every ten years a company comes along and tries to succeed in the VR space. It makes a splash then goes away. Hopefully, the Metaverse is more of the same.

VR is marketed as exploring online worlds that we can't explore in the real world, etc. There's some truth to that, but the real truth is that we already have a real life equivalent to VR. It's called dress up dollies. When the founder of Facebook gave a presentation showing off his VR avatar, that was his dolly. It was dressed, so he had to dress the dolly up ahead of time. The VR house where his dolly lives was his dolly's dollhouse.

When all the hype is stripped away, the Metaverse is playing dollies and dollhouses. That's why VR never catches on with the general public. People with children know all about dressing up little people and buying clothes for them and providing housing, etc. Why would VR companies expect people like that to pay money to do it all over again online while wearing a mask as large or larger than a diving mask? ha ha ha

Something else to think about is Google and Microsoft's entries into the VR space. Remember Google Glasses? That was Google failing at the metaverse. Remember Microsoft Hololens? There was an article the other day saying that Microsoft may abandon it. If true, that's Microsoft failing at the metaverse. Both of those companies are smarter than Facebook.

If Facebook follows the historical VR pattern, the Metaverse will make a splash then fade away over time. Facebook has seen the handwriting on the wall. The Facebook software isn't worth buying or subscribing to. Younger people fled it years ago. Now. it's mostly older people posting pictures of their grandchildren. At least, that's what I mostly see when I post my weekly blogs. When I'm not rejecting friend invites from scammers, that is. In fewer than twenty years, the Facebook demographic will have aged out of the platform. Facebook has delayed its inevitable death by buying companies that its younger users have fled to, but that can only work so long. At some point those companies will fall out of favor just like Myspace and Facebook. Retaining customers by buying the companies they're fleeing to is not a viable business model. Facebook may really be betting the company on VR.

Is there any way for Metaverse to work? Something Facebook has that historical VR companies haven't is psychological manipulation of users. If you've read articles about Facebook, you already know that they have algorithms that tell them what mood a user is in. They can tell when an individual is depressed or happy, etc., based on things like sentence length, word usage, chat usage(who the individual does or doesn't talk to, etc), typing speed, grammar usage and so forth. Facebook knows it can trigger people's moods by presenting Likes and such. A real world example is that Facebook can tell if someone is depressed and needs a pick-me-up. They can send a specifically-targeted Amazon ad for a product that, based on the person's profile, the person would like and that the purchase thereof would give an emotional boost. Ads like that that take advantage of the user's emotional state have a high success rate, according to published articles. Obviously, an ad like that would cost more for Amazon.

If Facebook can manipulate the addiction response in Metaverse users that way they do with Facebook users, the Metaverse might last longer than VR splashes usually do, but will it succeed in the long term? Let's hope not. Let's hope this is the inevitable death of an extremely toxic company.

Have a great weekend.

A Scent of Desperation

Sometimes, you see news stories that are connected without the reporters mentioning the connection. February 7th saw two stories like that. In the first story, it was announced that Amazon is raising the price of Amazon Prime by $20. The second story was about Amazon raising the base pay cap for corporate executives from $160,000 to $350,000. Ah, so they raised the price of Prime and then gave themselves more than a double pay raise. Yes, I think I see the connection there.

However, there's one more connection to make. The following day saw this story: Silicon Valley is no longer the edgy tech frontier as workers flee Google and Amazon for crypto and Web3 startups, recruiters say. According to the article, some of the "best and brightest of Silicon Valley" are leaving Big Tech in a brain drain on those companies, and it's happening very quickly. Fascinating. Apparently, the move to jack the price on Prime and give executives a massive pay raise is fueled by desperation and fear.

I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing what happens to Big Tech after the brain drain. During my watching of French news videos, I ran across a story saying that the European Union has caught GAFAM red-handed tampering in U.S. elections in order to change the outcomes. This is in defiance of the will of the American people. The EU has declared GAFAM not only a threat to U.S. democracy but also a threat to European democracy. GAFAM is an acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. Caught red-handed tampering in U.S. elections and yet that never appears in our news media. Funny, isn't it? It'll be interesting to see if the brain drain hampers future election fraud.

It was another week of recovering from shoulder pain. Last Friday, the pain was almost gone. Somehow, I re-injured it. I think the dental chair had something to do with it. I also think sitting in the chair in the living room instead of at the computer was the main culprit. I wanted to be away from the keyboard to give it time to heal, but I could never get comfortable in that chair. It seems to have really aggravated the injury. However, after staying out of it, the shoulder is doing much better. I could raise my arm today without the same level of pain as on Wednesday, for instance, but it's still not back to normal. This is the shoulder for the arm I broke when I was a kid.

Have a great weekend.

Anti-aging News

I missed last week. I was helping someone who was driving us to a location. The promise I had that I'd get back in time to do the blog fell through. The person wanted to do that to me again this week, but I didn't let it happen. Sometime, it's okay to say no.

The big news this week was that I hurt my shoulder. I think I slept on it the wrong way. It feels a lot better today, though. I'm able to type now without pain. By the way even if you're in your thirties, you can hurt yourself sleeping. I hurt the same shoulder sleeping on my side on a couch one afternoon. Just when it was getting better, I slept on it the wrong way again, and it took about a year to fully heal. So, if you're in your thirties or older and are thinking about sleeping, please, be careful.

Occasionally, I'll post something about longevity research. Here's an article about Jeff Bezos wanting to "stop aging" in humans. Another article said he wants to make us immortal, a blatant click bait lie. A better article is this one in the Financial Times. Altos Labs has raised $3billion to cure diseases and increase human healthspan, which presumably would increase lifespan. Bezos is one of the investors. I've been saying for a while now that a billionaire needs to put money into curing aging rather than some of the incredibly frivolous things billionaires squander money on. What's the point of having that much money if you're going going to die in a few years? The world doesn't need the metaverse. It needs longevity and a cure for all diseases.

The challenge now is to live long enough to see all this come to pass. Here's an article from November about a true anti-aging treatment. It's another version of the story I posted a while back about people going into a hyperbaric chamber 90 minutes a day 5 days a week for 3 months. It lengthens telomeres. If I could afford it, I'd already have done it.

I'm still suffering from my abscessed tooth. My dental appointment is Monday. We'll see how that goes.

Have a great weekend.