Voices in my head

Okay, it’s Christmas season around these here parts, and I thought I would share my little rant about Santa Claus. Because, believe it or not, there are kids who do not believe in Santa Claus. For that matter, there are also adults who do not believe in him. I’d expect a few teenagers to refute him just because they’re teenagers and being contrarian, but the rest… (I sadly shake my head.)

Let me lay this out in logical fashion:

Santa Claus gives presents.

He gives additional presents. All the various relatives have to give their own presents, they can’t lay claim to Santa Claus presents. (1)

So there may be all sorts of evidence against his existence (say, you saw Mom wrapping the presents for stockings or saw Dad dressed up in a red suit with a white beard, or you took a moment to consider the physics of flying through the air with reindeer) but clearly all of this so called evidence is trumped by the simple fact that he brings presents. It is completely counter-productive to deny the existence of someone who is giving you presents.

After all, someone who doesn’t exist, can’t give you presents, and there isn’t any greater issue at hand. It’s just a matter of, present or no present? A bit like Cake or Death.




Santa Claus clearly lives because his existence makes the world a better




(1) I’d also like to mention that Santa presents being additional is a wonderfully useful thing from the opposite side as well. Say you found the perfect present for someone but its not something you want to be known for giving, you wrap it up, sign it from Santa, and stick it under the tree. I did this a couple of years ago just for the fun of it, and the chaos it created was hilarious.

I recently stumbled across What's Special About This Number?, a perfectly awesome website that shows math trivia. This reminded me of one my gripes about Numb3rs fanfic. There are some very good stories in this fandom, but I have found very, very few that actually center around any math.

Are there just too few math majors writing fanfic? Surely not.

Is it too hard? It can't possibly be. After all, I have personally heard Quakerism explained by the solving of a quadratic equation, which is alas, not online, although I may need to bug the author to post it. (You know who you are, You-Know-Who.)

Admittedly, the canon authors aren't doing much better. However, frankly, that's more common than not, and most fanfic authors seem to take inspiration from the failing of the canon authors to Do It Right. So I would really like some authors to go do it right. And then let me know.

Anyway, for inspiration, here are links to the few stories I have found that are at least vaguely math-based:

The Arms of the Galaxy by audrarose 

Calculus Is Easy by frostfire_17 

Game Theory by halcyon_shift 

Alas, I do mean "vaguely"

If anyone reading this has more suggestions, please let me know.

Romance novels are a rather major genre. Nearly any bookstore, or any store that happens to sell books, will have a romance section. These are books where the main plot arc is the romance. There are frequently other plots, too -- murder mystery, action heist, fantasy quest -- any sort of plot that would appear in any other book, just made into the backdrop of the romance rather than having any romance be a side note to the plot, as happens in those genres.

That is actually annoyance #1 for me, especially within science fiction / fantasy. 

Good science fiction / fantasy involves requires world building. It requires an author think through what powers or abilities are there and what the consequences to those are, how the world and society are affected. Examples of ideals are Tolkien for fantasy and Asimov for science fiction. Tolkien created a world with history and societies and geography and the whole works, and it all fits together. Fabulous. Asimov looked at our world, added robots, and made it real. Artificial Intelligence academics still look at his Three Laws of Robotics. It makes sense.

Romance novels, on the other hand, don't put that much effort into creating their backdrop, since it's not the important part, and wind up with these peculiar societies that are useful plot devices on the top layer and completely and utterly messed up on all the layers under that. There are, alas, way too many examples of this. One example is Nora Roberts who wrote a whole "In Death" series that's set in the future. There's all sorts of computer gizmos that can do all sorts of things but the heroine is still banging the side of her desk top computer when the speech portion goes on the fritz, and the hero is still hacking complex systems by typing really fast on a keyboard.

Problem #2 is more general to the Romance genre than just the fantasy romance, and it is the characters.

I read my first romance novel a few weeks into my first year of college. It was about the same time as we were getting all sorts of orientation materials. One bit of orientation was on social skills for living away from home and with a bunch of other young adults, and included a list of warning signs for date rape. Curiously enough, it was also a check list for all the major character points for the hero in the majority of romance novels. The characters and their relationships are almost always awful! I want to smack them upside the head. Because no real attention is paid to the actual plot, there are rarely reasonable explanations for how the characters get into the problems they are in, which pretty much means they do something extremely stupid or fail to do something common sense demands, and lo and behold instant plot. Then they lie to themselves and each other and there's jealousy and possessiveness and all sorts of things that, really, nobody wants. But it's all very sexy in the book.

And when they're not being stupid/creepy/slime-y, they're being too perfect/rich/beautiful. It's a genre pretty much devoted to Mary Sues. Which are really oddly addictive. Alas, you may have also noticed that I feel well-read enough in the genre to make generalities. There's a reason why so many people write Mary Sues and it's a lot like why people eat cotton candy.

(There's even a sub-genre for lonely women who are unappreciated in our time being sent back in time to a more romantic era so that they can be loved and dominated by handsome brutish and possibly even vaguely historic heroes. These stories push my limits and I avoid them like the plague.)

However, these problems actually all lead to pro #1.   (I'm counting the addictive quality as something of a wash, both pro and con.)

These books are so very bad, their characters are so bad, and their plots are so bad, that they make really the perfect writing prompt. Do you have writer's block? Read a romance novel. Unless you somehow manage to luck out and find a fabulous one (I'm assuming such a one exists though I never found it), then you are instead going to find something that desperately calls out to be fixed. So all you need to do is fix it.

What would it take to make the premise work? What would the world actually look like? 

What would it take to make the plot hold together? What would fill in the plot holes?

What would it take to make the characters make sense? Be sympathetic? Would the main characters even wind up with each other? 

Of course, by the end of this, you don't even have a fanfic because you've probably made so many changes that it's an original work. But that is my response to writer's block. Read something good to be fulfilled in mind and spirit but read something bad to be inspired to write.

Consider the X-Men universe. Various politicians demand that mutants be identified and registered as such. The various mutants don't want this to happen and tend to have these amazing powers: telepathy, telekinesis, fire, flying, weather control, control of magnetism, etc.

However, assuming that these are actual mutations that work like any other type of mutation, there are a few other things that need to be considered: 

(A) The amazing abilities such as the x-men have, would actually be fairly rare in comparison to smaller modifications of the standard human. Thus there should be a lot of people who test positive for the X gene without having a visible or useful mutation (The housewife who can make perfectly round pancakes without any trouble. The guy who can always tell how fast he's going even without looking at a speedometer.) or have an ability that never gets used. (The kid who will never be harmed by fire but learned as an infant not to touch it because that's what parents teach their kids. The guy who could speak with whales or dolphins if he ever came into contact with them but he lives in Iowa and never visited the aquarium.) If the politicians who propose registration ever got it passed, I imagine a significant portion of the population would be in for a surprise.

(B) But while the minor abilities would be more common than the more spectacular ones, even more common would be the ones that are simply not viable. There should be a dangerous increase in miscarriages and still-born children with disturbing birth defects. Some of the politicians would worry about controlling dangerous mutants, sure, but a lot more should be worried about maintaining the population and not have too many grieving would-be parents. There should be movements to find the source of the X gene and eradicate it, not because they hate mutants, but because it's killing off so many babies.


Anyway, this all came up because if I have a mutant power, it may very well be a sort of anti-thickening power. No amount of boiling or cornstarch can withstand the awesome power of the anti-thickener. Thus, my cupcakes will, once more, be glazed rather than frosted. Hmph.