News You Can Bruise for 2002 September 27

I wrote part of a short story last night. I hope it turns out well. I'm not a very good writer (of short stories), but practice is the only way to improve.

• The alternate history was pretty believable in the large, though not so much in the details. For instance (and this is the thing that bothers me most about alternate history), a lot of famous people in real history are also famous in the alternate history, usually for different things. They dealt with this a little bit, in the "We're dealing with this a little bit to stop Leonard from complaining about it, so that everyone else can just enjoy our flights of fancy" way. Well, it didn't work! However, it makes sense in a heavily class-based society like Victorian England for certain people to be well-known regardless of the specific path of history, so I don't mind much.
• The MacGuffin was a big anticlimax. I can't believe I'm saying this about the thing that the MacGuffin turned out to be, but there it is. There are some things man was not meant to use as a MacGuffin.
• It had dinosaurs, or at least their study, which is great.
• Near the end of the book there is a brief digression into fictional secondary sources. I am always suspicious of this because it's something I'm often tempted to do, and as previously noted I am not a good writer. Bizarrely, the fictional secondary sources only rehashed exposition that had already been accomplished. I don't understand why they were included, unless it was to showcase the authors' abilities to write in different styles.
• It's funny (in the sense that it dates the work in a funny way) that the omniscient narrator in the alternate universe of The Difference Engine made the same mistake in analyzing the anatomy of Hallucigenia as did real people in the actual universe. I feel like that needs a spoiler warning ("What? Wonderful Life was wrong about Hallucigenia?!?"), but why should real life need spoiler warnings? Actually, that could be interesting. "Caution! This textbook contains chemistry spoilers!"

Just spent some time packaging the software (which barely deserves the designation) I wrote for Seth's birthday. I hope I'm able to demonstrate it at the party; it has dependencies which may not be met at Seth's house. Link forthcoming after the premiere, go it well or ill.

Sumana gave me the idea of writing a poem about Seth, and it wasn't difficult to whip up a quick one (though I used a secondary pronunciation). Here you go:

There once was a human named Seth
Unconstrained from pronouncing "Macbeth".
When the actors did say
"Call it 'that Scottish play'!"
He observed, "What an odd shibboleth!"

ksethdavidschoen

Need to read: The Flying Inn by G.K. Chesterton. Not present in this shockingly long list of Chesterton on the Web.