My Actifit Report Card: April 29 2022
Good day today. Not a lot of formal progress on writing, but that’s because I’m now in the editing pass of Carrion Birds. That’s not to say everything’s done. There are a few parts that still need to be fully fleshed out, but I’m comfortable enough to go in and start doing editing while simultaneously working on the rest.
I’ve decided to revive Genship Exiles, which will run in parallel to Kenoma. Kenoma’s progress has been making slow but not fruitless progress, but I’m starting to rethink how rough this initial launch should be. I want at least a few more graphical elements, which goes along nicely with the new WIP map of Kenoma.
I had the idea that I should go and do an architectural visualization style render of Alcove, with the idea of making it into a mock-up ad or something. That might actually be something that I could do a few different things with, assuming I’m clever with how I render it out. It could be the basis for an architectural rendering-style advertisement for Alcove, I could take an overhead shot of “satellite imagery” from the Day showing the nascent Spiral, and I might even be able to render out the Spiral and Alcove in a purely illustrative shot.
I’m not a fan of 3d in books, but it’s gotten to the point where a good render is practically indistinguishable from a photograph. I’m actually not a fan of photographs either, but it’s probably not impossible to process a render output so that it looks acceptable, especially when you’re dealing with effectively inanimate objects rather than things like people and objects in motion which can be pretty easy to get wrong, and because the amount of firepower you can invest in rendering out a single static image far exceeds what you might be able to do with an animation. Of course, it’s cheaper and cheaper to do 3d animation now too–Blender’s fast renderer is practically as fast as a very simple scene with old technology, and its most realistic renderer has support for graphics cards with dedicated hardware.
Physical activity was low. I finished listening to Sowell’s Vision of the Annointed and have to say it was good, though perhaps not surprising in any way to those of us living in 2022 (though being unsurprising when making statements about a modus operandi and predicting the future is not exactly a bad thing).
I’m surprised how conservative Sowell sounds compared to how I remember him. Of course, some of that is that I associate the majority of grousing over progressive causes with conservatives, because even the more right-leaning libertarians I associate with just say “yeah, the government shouldn’t even be doing that” instead of complaining that progressive ideas ruined a good thing.
In short, I guess I’m surprised by how much Sowell’s argument seems to be “it’s bad because the wrong people are in charge” and not “it’s bad because it will put the wrong people in charge.”
Some of that might also be my background in political realism, which basically always just presupposes that you’re going to have a massive failure in any effort to set up a power structure that keeps people from leveraging power structures (in short, if you set up a centralized system to prevent a centralized system it’s not going to work, though for someone with anarchist leanings like myself there is always the out of explicitly avoiding power structures other than voluntary associations, since any breach of voluntary association will lead to the creation of arbitrary governance and a de facto, if not de jure, state).
This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io
