Oct 23, 2012

Are Long Posts Fun?

I write quite a lot, I'm aware of that. I don't really consider myself a typical "long letter" type of penpal, but I like writing. However often long, condensed, letter-dense posts are simply annoying. One would thing that it doesn't make sense when you like reading - many books, after all, aren't full of pictures, nor have short chapters or segmentations between chapters to help the attention deficient reader keep up with the story - BUT lets face it, letters and posts aren't often just as books.  Yes, it depends on what was written. Two pages, or 80 lines depicting in painful detail your blurry ideas about why peas are better than beans are not enticing. 200 densely written pages following the story of a vicious murderer that manages to decapitate people in a populated city while a brilliant detective is hot on their tracks... that's not nearly enough.

Anyway, this idea came to me just because I'm on this site, and I receive posts by e-mail for different forums, and there's this user who got a posting rush and has send us all ten long posts about sex and tantric sex. Yes, it would normally be very interesting, but... not. Fuck, how do you manage to kill sex?

So, yes, after that I've been brought to reconsider my posting habits, and really, REALLY make an effort to trim them. Not an easy task when your head is full of plotbunnies, or postbunnies or... just bunnies. Do you know what plotbunnies are? It's a word I learned in my fanfic writing days. Those are the ideas for a story that you have rolling around your head, but that haven't evolved into a full story. I have a couple of that... a couple A LOT of those, and some are.... well, they are not plotbunnies, but gara be like plot-horses or plot-dragons. Regarding stories, not posts. Wait, I have post plotbunnies too... Yes, well, anyway. Where was I and where was I going? Yeah, right, so it's not so easy to trim posts when you have a lot of ideas and things to say rolling around in your head. Has that happen to you too or am I the only person with a messy head and undisciplined thoughts?

Anyway, I wanted to tell you all a little piece of news: it's very, very likely that my thesis mate and I will be published. Yay! ^_^ I finally had a meeting yesterday with someone from the faculty, who reviewed our thesis, since we expressed our desire to find a way to publish it either as a book or as an article, and they told me that our work was actually rather good, that needed trimming some segments, but that our approach was actually refreshing and new within the given topic, and it would be great to publish it as an article. They quickly give us suggestions about which parts of the thesis use to construct the 15 page article (out of 195), and pressed on the matter that we should keep our focus where we had it: on the social part.

You see, my mate and I made our thesis about the artisanal fishermen of a given island. We were supposed to do a traditional economical analysis and propose a way to improve their activity, but once we arrived at the island we realized that all of that would have been a bunch of crap. The economical situation of the fishermen is tied tightly to their social circumstances, thus throwing at them all sort of market solutions won't work, as it hasn't been working for 20 years or so. Meanwhile they are vulnerable, exposed to abuse, and the sealife is in inminent danger, which only deepens their problems. As result, my mate and I changed our initial position and leaned heavier on the social side of the equation, explaining as clearly as possible that no model or mathematical proposal, no economical solution would turn this region into a burgeoning hub of commerce, but that inherent social issues had to be addressed first.

It's interesting to think that what's going on here is a miniature of what goes on around the world, and what can be seen in Europe. The "solutions" proposed are like trying to push a cart down a road that no longer exists, when the wheels of the cart have already broken off. You can't pretend a cart to rush smoothly as if it were racing on a highway when you are pushing it down a cliff. Yes it's going to rush in the short term, and it's going to rush downwards, free falling. Most of you are not interested by this topic, I assume so I'll close it by saying this: You know what pisses me off the most about the whole situation? Both European and the fishermen's? That there's this bunch of economists and politicians with big titles, probably prizes and publications too, and they are all so fucking blind about the reality that they think people in real life are no different than their paper modeling, and so they just throw in all sorts of "solutions" without actually thinking them over, almost as if expecting either to buy time to get their capital somewhere safe, or simply see if it works. It's not even like putting a band aid on a gashing wound, it's like having a gashing wound and putting stones on it.

Yeah, well, the important is that we might get published, that the first publications where my name appears won't be as a writer, a work of fiction, but as a scientist. ^_^ That's cool.

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