Review: Vampire Flower Language

Vampire Flower Language by Angela Castir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The problem with most romance stories is that the plot tends to revolve around a conflict that the characters see as big, but that the reader sees as small. This is because romance authors want there to be tension with the characters not being able to get together, but for the reader to desire them to be together anyway. The easiest way to achieve this is to set up a comedy of errors: a misunderstanding that would have been resolved had they been truthful, or, if the story is from before the 1990s, a misunderstanding that would have been resolved had they just had access to a mobile phone. Occasionally, the problem is a love triangle, so the conflict is because the characters aren't polyamorous; or the problem is that they live in different worlds. These stories are slightly better because they don't rely on the characters holding the idiot ball, but they never seem to reach the level of rational fiction, where the characters are thinking properly, and the conflict stems not from their errors in thought, but in differences in value.

Angela Castir (or, rather, the two-person-author team that calls itself Angela Castir) expertly navigates this hole by creating a rational romance story where the plot doesn't revolve around silly misunderstandings. (Don't get me wrong: misunderstandings do occur, but they are appropriate to the characters.) Instead, the tension of the romance story comes from the disconnect between the worldview of a baseline human during world war 2 and a very, very old vampire. Their story is realistic and sweet; heartwarming and heartwrenching. I expect fans of general vampire romance to be blown away by the sheer competence of the surrounding story and events; I expect fans of rational fiction to be blown away by the fact that the author was able to create a romance story in the ratfic genre. Regardless of where you come from, I expect you'll enjoy this story.

The remainder of this review has spoilers; please stop reading here and start reading the story itself if you haven't already. It's worth it! [Seriously, spoilers are ahead. Do not read further before reading the story itself.]

I love the themes present in this book. A gay romance in this time period would historically be seen (by humans) as entirely inappropriate in society, but the focus starts on vampire society instead, where the tension is a romance between a vampire and a human being considered inappropriate. The reader starts out thinking that this is the allegory: the inappropriateness from vampire culture's point of view mimics the inappropriateness from human culture's point of view. But by the end this reader expectation gets upended: the more important allegory here is of understanding. Can a relationship where people love each other persist when their values don't match? To what extent must those values change in order for the people to have a meaningful relationship?

The protagonist's sister is not okay with homosexuality, to the extent that she eventually refuses to be close to her brother, even while loving him; this matches the protagonist's refusal to be close to his partner, even while loving him. Seeing this parallel is what causes the character to update toward being more comfortable in his relationship, so that he does not make the same error that his sister does. More importantly, at the reader level, we now see that the value mismatch which we thought was a huge divide for the majority of the book should instead be considered a minor hurdle. It's not just the characters who update on this revelation: the readers are intended to update as well.

The Julius storyline introduces a truly alien alien: a character whose value function seems to be set in the way an AI might. As the reader is given access to Julius' internal thoughts, this seems like the scariest part of the story. A slightly misaligned AI, valuing its expectation of one's happiness rather than a person's stated goals, can easily go wrong. You see this manipulation occur freely and easily with Red (a mere human), and it is only because William (the vampire) is more competent that things do not immediately fall apart. Even so, William's competence is not sufficient to be immune to Julius' machinations; I expect that Julius was given away by their previous owner on purpose for this reason. When the story jumps ahead in the epilogue, we see that Julius has been somewhat reigned in, not by William's competence, but by Red's morals being forced onto Julius. We readers don't see Julius' internal state in the epilogue, so it is left ambiguous whether the situation is actually better or worse here, but its appropriate for the story to end here anyway, as the story we've been following is not Julius' story, but William and Red's story.

I was enthralled by the worldbuilding, but my favorite part of the book was how characters would ask questions that I, too, would ask if I were in that situation. This allowed me to partially self-insert myself into the story, a feat that is exceedingly rare in romance novels, given that I am poly and asexual. I really appreciated the way that characters sought out information. What I didn't like was that so much of that information remained hidden, even to the end! I recognize that further stories in this world are going to be told, and so it is appropriate to leave dangling threads. But it was unsatisfying all the same. I am left wanting more!

One note I would give to the authors for future stories: please consider restricting the reader's point of view to a single character. Although it would have made for a different book, had the entire novel been written from Red's point of view, then that could have included a mystery element for the readers: is William sincere? Should we also want Red to run away? But by letting us see into William's mind, this possibility is lost completely. I recognize that's not what you were going for, so it's unfair to complain about this. But this could have been done at least with Julius and it would not have changed the story too much. By letting us see into Julius' mind, we get access to knowledge that cuts the tension too much. I honestly believe it would have been better to never allow us access to Julius' thoughts, so that readers could be honestly divided on whether Red's or William's point of view were best. This would have added to the tension of the split that occurred. I hope in your next book you take care to only allow the reader access to more limited points of view to allow for more mystery in your story beats.

Even if this weren't an exceedingly well written book, I would still recommend it for the novelty of being in the rational romance genre. However, this book is genuinely well written, with rational characters and tension that realistically flows from the worldbuilding set up by the authors. I enthusiastically recommend this to anyone interested in either rational fiction or vampire romance.

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Loving Life

A small selection of why I'm not depressed.

I love life.

Sometimes I read posts by people who are depressed. A common theme is that they feel that life is not worth living. At times, I have wondered if I have depressive tendencies: I’m lazy to a fault; I spend much of my free time sleeping; it takes a lot to get me in a good mood; my idea of a day well spent involves lots of playing games while at home and ordering in so I don’t have to cook. On a 0–10 scale where 0 is no happiness and 10 is all the happiness, I’d consistently rate myself at 1. Yet maybe this is more because I can imagine a lot more happiness than I’ve ever felt, as opposed to me being less happy than I’d otherwise expect.

But when it comes to life, I’d always prefer more of it. This is the primary reason why I avoid ever saying that I am depressed, no matter how down I may get.

Life just has so much to offer. How amazing is it that we can reason about obvious necessary truths sufficiently far that we can make unexpected discoveries about other not-at-all-obvious necessary truths? In the latest Star Trek: Discovery episode, much is made of the aphorism that “all is possible”. Yet isn’t it so much more amazing that we can discover for ourselves that some things are not just contingently false, but necessarily impossible?

I’ve also been watching Ted Lasso, where a common theme is about the intersection of virtue ethics and deontological ethics. As a consequentialist, I find it fascinating to see how flawed protagonists work within a world where they believe certain actions are right, even while I, as a viewer, think they are just plain wrong. I know that I’m reading more into the writing than was intentionally put there; Plato was certainly right when he said that some poets can’t see the beauty in their own poetry. But watching shows like this makes gives me an enjoyment of life that is outsized from the quality of show it is. Ted Lasso is nowhere near the epitome of good television (The Wire it is not), and yet it, like other shows at its level of quality (Friendship is Magic; She-Ra; etc.) still give me significant enough enjoyment that I’d strongly prefer to continue watching them than to end my life, ceteris paribus.

Fiction aside, I really enjoy video games. Even not-so-great games give me thrills that I don’t get elsewhere in life. I just finished Grandia, which irritated me for not being nearly so challenging as I might like (even with zero-attack weapons, it’s just way too easy to beat the final boss), but I still really enjoyed it. This generalizes, I think. So much in life consists of these simple pleasures: seeing the trees change as they grow; feeling the wind in my hair when I go fast; finding an unexpected result in recreational mathematics; slipping on the most luxurious socks in the world; competing at your best in the Bee Game League; interacting with siblings during the holidays. There’s just so much enjoyment to get out of life.

Much of that enjoyment comes from Katherine. She truly is an ideal partner for me. She supports me in every way that I need to be supported, and the things she needs help with correspond closely to the things that I most able to help with, with few exceptions (e.g.: dishes!). I get a lot out of relaxing with her; debating with her; dissecting reality with her; imagining with her. I love the way that we interact when it comes to her art. I love the way that we mesh when we decide on what food to eat. I never imagined that I would be as satisfied with a partner as I am with her.

Yet: even though I think it wrong to ever call myself depressed, I must nevertheless wonder: why do I experience such lows? Lows that make it so impossible to open my own mail that it sits for months unopened until I get the strength to open it all at once? Lows that prevent me from being able to fill out forms even when there’s a huge incentive for doing so? (I am reminded of being in college and being presented with a form that I had to sign and turn in. I was told explicitly: sign this and you get $2k for tuition; don’t sign it and you don’t get the $2k. I was told that there was absolutely nothing negative that came from me signing it. I read the document and it did not require me to do anything that I found morally questionable. It was just a document they needed signed in order to process this particular scholarship. I left that document on the top of my desk all semester long. I can remember putting it on top of my game controllers so that I’d have to physically move it anytime I wanted to play a game. I still never signed it, due to a combination of akrasia and some kind of weird psychological aversion to signing documents in general. At the end, my counselor forged my signature in frustration, a clear case of a perverse incentive that carries me through to today.)

I have been told by friends that I sometimes have trouble with “adulting”. Others have said that I have executive functioning issues. None of these people are professionals, but I see this myself: I feel anxious during times when I probably shouldn’t; and, conversely, there are situations where I’d expect most people to be anxious where I don’t feel anxious at all. Maybe this has nothing to do with depression at all, but is instead symptomatic of some alternate condition that I’m not familiar with.

Regardless, I know that I love life. Life is varied and full of surprises, regardless of where you look. I’m not a poet, but there are people who go deep into poetry, taking pleasure from a short succession of words alone. I’m no musician, but some people memorize the discography of entire genres, finding beauty in details that I know nothing about. To a mathematician, there is unparalleled joy in realizing that you can find a certainty of truth in unexpected contexts; to a person of faith, there is a similar joy in having faith regardless of where reason might otherwise take you. There is all of this and more: the vastness of space; the game of solving good detective novels before the third act; the wind whipping through one’s hair as you rollerblade on the street; the simple joy in having a nicely plated meal on a tablecloth even when you're eating a meal all by yourself. There is simply too much on offer for me not to love life.

Thank you to my family here, especially my brother and sisters, and my father and new mother, who constantly seek to make my life better through simple interactions. Thanks also go to my old family, including my mother, who did much to raise me well when I was young, even if she no longer is capable of having a relationship with me today, and also to the rest of that side of the family, who, through no fault of their own, I have not seen in some time. Thank you, Katherine and Terry, who are able to enrich my life through little more than conversation, and yet continue to do much else for me on top of this. Thank you to my many friends that I see only rarely and mostly online; to Jon for his closeness in intent and dedication; to Dorek in his contemplation and natural action; to Matt, Greg, Jason, Russ, Davids, Kevin, Carlos, and so many others for their past inclusion even if we no longer interact much; to Amber, Allison, Stephanie, Laura, Rosemary, Amanda, Day, and several others for their severe impact on my current personality; and to Robin for being there for me in times when I rarely deserved it. Thank you, Jasper, for opening me up more in love than I previously thought possible, and to Adrianah, whose nonpresence has influenced me more than some others' presence. To all of you, and especially to you, Katherine, I give thanks for making my life as wonderful as it is. The pleasures of life may come from all sorts of places, but it is from fellow beings like you that end up meaning the most to me.

I love life, and as a corollary: I love you all.

Review: Octo

OCTO by Z. Albert Bell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While definitely not perfect, let me go ahead and recommend that you not google this story and just start reading blindly. Much of the value in this rationalist sci-fi horror story comes from not knowing what will happen next, so if you consider a 4 star review from me sufficient to entice you to read a rationalist sci-fi horror story, then do so now. Spoilers are ahead.

With that said, Zeno Albert Bell is in desperate need of a professional editor. It seems that every idea they’ve come up with has made it into the text, and I don’t just mean this in terms of word choice. Still, the ideas themselves are great, reminiscent at first of Hal Clement-style Needle aliens, but done in a rational hard-sci-fi way. The end result is (and the spoilers start to get heavy here, so stop reading this and go read the book if you’re going to at all) lovecraftiam kaiju hard sci-fi, and that is legitimately hard to do.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the story is the inclusion of css+javascript to spruce up the text. Creatures who only understand some spoken words have other words of dialogue obscured in the text, although we as readers can still hover over the text or otherwise copy it in order to know, narrator style, what is said behind these obscured words. Later, anti-memetics come into play, causing the relevant text to change before your very eyes, as you read along. While some other authors use this as a way to permanently change text, messing with what was previously written as a kind of mind fuck, Bell is kind enough to not use cookies, and they allow readers easy access to replay potentially missed material just by refreshing and starting from the top of the page again. While these effects aren’t what I’d call accessible, I nevertheless appreciate them for those of us capable of seeing it; they're cute effects that are done quite well. It’s also foreshadowed appropriately without spoiling; early chapters include vibrating text for explosions or flashing text for warning readouts. This prepares the reader for more advanced text-based shenanigans later without spoiling just how significant those textual changes will end up becoming. Hopefully the text modifications that occur throughout the story are sufficient to train the reader to be able to handle the final chapter, which perhaps requires a bit more patience than some readers may give it.

Octo is not my favorite story, but its level of uniqueness and excellent presentation make up for the authors seeming unwillingness to edit the story into something half as long with a much tighter narrative arc, with the end result being a hearty recommendation from me. But I may be being too hasty: it's not entirely clear to me, but there is the distinct possibility that the author Bell is trying to make a meta narrative here: the protagonist’s view on patience may be a commentary on the readers' views on patience. Without getting too spoilery, the protagonist is willing to wait, but the text itself does not: as you read at the top of your screen, you start to notice text moving lower down, where you haven't gotten to yet. Later in the book, you start to notice that text is disappearing, or moving away from you, or changing before your very eyes. There starts to be a race between your ability to read and the text's ability to change. Bell is careful to allow you to reset if you refresh the page, so you never really miss out on anything, but there's clearly something going on with rewarding impatient readers more and more — until the final couple of chapters, when everything flips, and suddenly you start to miss out on text if you go too fast. The final chapter really underlines this: after reading, you have to wait several moments if you want to see the last parts of the book.

I'm fascinated by the idea that the connections between what the text itself rewards readers for doing has such consonance with what the protagonist clearly prefers. The points of views of humans are so fast in comparison, and when you get the point of view of a feline, you can just feel the irritation of wanting to go even faster. These points of view at the character level match that of the trained reader, and this makes the alienness of the protagonist even more stark.

And this is why I'm not quite sure of what I said earlier about the author needing a professional editor. This theme of patience — of rushing and not rushing and being rewarded at different times for different things while the characters themselves see reality at different rates — this is echoed and subverted continuously at the literary level by the author including unkilled darlings that the reader dare not fast forward through. I'm not going to claim that this is necessarily intentional; as Plato pointed out in The Republic, many poets will write poetry that has qualities the authors themselves do not always see. But regardless of its intentionality, there is a direct parallel between the unlocking of the library and the written inclusion of scenes that can’t be skipped. The animal scenes are great — be sure to hover over every “meow” — but their inclusion doesn’t have a payoff in future chapters. In any other book, this content would be cut. As great as these ideas are, any author would cut them and put them into a different short story, rather than keep them in Octo. The fact that this author does not cut them is what gives me pause. Is this intentional? Are we including fun and well written chapters that really should be cut on purpose? Is this a commentary on patience, making the reader deliberately have to wait?

I don't know. Maybe the author is just a beginning author and doesn't realize that you can cut great ideas like this and incorporate them into their own short stories, separate from this book. Maybe they have yet to realize that great writing requires major amounts of cutting. But maybe the author is playing a level above me, and these chapters are here on purpose to show you what it means for the protagonist to be okay with waiting. This story has a lot to do with alien thinking, and this might be yet another way to make the reader feel like they are reading about an alien. Seeing events from the points of view of a canine or feline feels alien. That the cat wants to rush through the situation, wants you to skip text and dialogue that you can, if you slow down, also read, has a distinctly alien feel. And that the entire sequence is just dressing, a side story, not relevant to the ongoing plot, feels even more alien still. Maybe I shouldn't give the author credit for this, but including sub-par editorial parts felt almost right to me. It was irritating, but they were well written and entertaining. It felt like reading small short stories occasionally right in the middle of the book. It felt appropriately alien.

With that said, the pacing and narrative structure was terrible due their inclusion. The writing goes through successive sections that are fast and slow, with no regard to what the narrative arc demands. If a movie were made this way, people would walk out. As it is, I imagine most readers may opt out. But if you struggle through — if you are okay with seeing an action scene pause mid-scene while you watch a short entertaining commercial before the action resumes — then you will enjoy Octo. It genuinely puts you into a place where you can start to appreciate something so incomprehensibly alien.

I also want to give a shout-out to that great ending. The IRL aliens take pity and expend resources on letting the instanced beings play out their story, but it’s not at all clear whether the simulation will do anything to help them solve their library problems. I personally read it as a tragedy: this simulation won’t have the humans attack the library, and so can’t possibly show how the humans in the real world destroyed it — but I can also see how someone else might think that the lateral thinking nature of how upraised humans think might be sufficient to help solve the problem of fixing the library without the simulation ever giving rise to the specific acts that humans used the first time around. Either way, the ending is great, because we don’t care: the story follows the protagonists of the simulation, reminding us of who we the readers should truly be concerned with.

I eagerly look forward to Z Albert Bell's next project. Just, please, Bell, if you're reading this: do consider using an editor to help you parse your overly creative brain’s ideas down to what is needed for the story’s own purposes. You can always use the cut ideas in even more stories, you know!

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Lighting for the Lazy

There's a phenomenon that occurs only to the lazy, like myself. I'd like to share it here so that go-getter types could also know of the experience.

Each room in my house has several lights. In the master bathroom, a half dozen lightbulbs are just above the mirror; in the kitchen, several inset ceiling lights help to illuminate my cooking; in the main room, flush mounts and floor lamps predominate. When the house was first moved into, all of these fixtures held working lights. But, as time passes, light bulbs fail. I could replace them. But why bother? The other lights work well enough without them.

How many lights?

One by one over the years, a light bulb will peter out, never again to provide lumens for our nighttime activities. To some people, this would be intolerable; but, to me, what does it matter, really? I usually keep all the lights off in the daytime anyway, thanks to several large windows throughout the house. A small nightlight keeps the bathrooms visible with no windows installed. And at night, the only light I need is that from my computer screen. Or my television set. Or my Switch. (My partner, an artist, requires extremely bright light, but it is solely directed toward her art-making, and isn't on unless she's working.)

Eventually, rooms with several light fixtures get down to their last working light bulb. One day, they, too, will break, and work will have to get done. I will have to purchase new light bulbs and replace the entire rack. But light bulbs these days last years, so I am not too worried. The day will assuredly come, but perhaps not this year. Perhaps not even next year.

Here, we teeter on the edge. Where once our rooms were bright, now the occasional flicker catches my attention. On some days, this is exciting. It is living on the edge. I feel as though I am in a dramatic video game, stalking the halls of a long disused factory, with only a few scattered lights still functional. On other days, it feels emblematic of our general aging: slowly, we are shutting down, the prime of our light long past.

My home isn't as bad as this real hospital.

What's weird about this is that I've experienced this scenario several times in my life. I can remember clearly in my twenties feeling this same emblematic-of-aging gestalt, even as I feel it now. I don't think it has anything at all to do with my actual age. It's just that I have a dim memory of the rooms being brighter, and yet now they are so poorly lit that, although life is still functional, the experience of the room has an entirely different feeling to it. What's really fascinating is what happens after: when the last of the bulbs goes off in a room, that gets me to replace all the bulbs in the house. The change is quite literally palpable: you can feel in your fingertips just how much more bright everything is. The mood changes significantly. Life renews, like an early Spring day.

I don't think that non-lazy types can really fully appreciate how this feels. I am told that pumpkin spice has popularity specifically because it goes away and only comes back once each year. (I don't see the appeal, but to each their own.) Something similar is going on here for me, but on somewhat larger time scales. I enjoy the feeling of going from almost no lighting to full lighting. It is reinvigorating in a way that just keeping full lighting all the time is not. I like how the house undergoes seasons of its own, sometimes with dark shadows in particular corners, and yet other times with lighting all around, illuminating every corner to see. It is as though the house is a living, breathing thing, its breaths interspersed throughout years rather than seconds, and with lighting rather than gasps of air.

Being lazy has its drawbacks. But this — the effect over years from delaying replacing light bulbs — is not one of them.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go install all these bulbs I just received from Amazon.

On the surreality of .999 repeating...

When I was in grade school, I often had late evening talks with my friend, Peter. Topics of discussion varied wildly from day to day, sometimes about video games like Doom, sometimes about girls, and sometimes about math. On one specific evening, we talked about infinitely small numbers.

I think the topic held our attention because the books we had access to said, in no uncertain terms, that the decimal expansion .9̅ is equivalent to 1. This left no room for a smaller value, in between .9̅ and 1, but which nevertheless was distinct from 1. We found this perplexing, as there seemed to be nothing logically incoherent with the idea of having an infinitely small positive value which we could subtract from 1 — yet the textbooks made it clear that that resulting difference could not be .9̅, since .9̅=1.

This idea is not unique. Many people make the same error, thinking that .9̅ should be strictly less than 1. In the sci.math newsgroup, the main FAQ's top entry for decades showed that .9̅=1. When I took a look at sci.math just now in November 2021, one of the most recent entries is literally someone making the argument that they are distinct. This is a topic that gets brought up again and again, and there's always someone more knowledgeable around that works tirelessly to correct these misunderstandings. (I used to be that guy on the old skeptic forums, though thankfully not on math ones.)

But in order to tread new frontiers in mathematics, you sometimes have to take a "yes, and..." approach. Sometimes when you do so, you're able to reach new ground that later ends up bearing significant fruit. This is how it was with negative numbers, this is how it was with imaginary numbers, and maybe something similar could be said with the idea of a positive number so small that even adding an infinite number of them together will not sum up to 1.

I first discovered the concepts in Berlekamp, Conway, and Guy's Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays back when I was working my way through Feynman's Lectures on Physics. I had been gifted a very nice three volume set as a teenager, and while the first book wasn't terribly difficult to get through, I was having trouble understanding books 2 and 3. At the time, I had dropped out of school, and so my only way to read these Feynman lectures required me to first teach myself more complex mathematics. I went to the local library, taking out texts that would help me to get through what Feynman had written, and, occasionally, I'd use the internet to supplement my understanding. Back then we did not have 3Blue1Brown; the best online math explainers were merely paragraphs of html text alongside slowly loading jpgs. So it was hard going. Nevertheless, I kept at it and eventually learned what I needed in order to properly enjoy my boxed set of Feynman lectures.

Hackenbush girl from WWfYMP.

It was during one of these online math excursions that I came across Andy Walker's excellent late 1990s-era html maths-explainer: Hackenstrings, and the .999?=1 FAQ. Walker walks us through a simplified version of Conway's Hackenbush idea, showing the beginnings of what we now call surreal numbers. Here, Conway and Knuth take seriously the idea that there could be a positive number so small that adding it to itself infinitely many times would never add up to any traditional real number. This is the first time that an infinitesimal is taken seriously enough to warrant the creation of a new system of numbers. (At least it's the first time since limits replaced infinitesimals in our teaching of calculus.)

At the time, I was too immature to think that I should purchase for myself Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, but I ever so much wish that I had. It's an amazing book and well worth the read.

If you're interested in learning more, I highly recommend this excellent video by Owen Maitzen that does an absolutely amazing job of explaining Hackenbush. While it's an hour long, this is nevertheless one of the most entertaining introductions to a new type of math that I've seen anyone on the internet create. (He's even composed a soundtrack that suits his video perfectly!) Well done, Owen.