What It All Means

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Written by: Thomas Collette

Published: 15 July 2017

Just to clarify why the previous post is relevant, this excerpt…

The White Kitten. Greenside cries, helpless before the sight of frolic with the little girl. Romando normally would make no effort to hide his reaction to this pathos, or the memory of the rancor between himself and Deepwell at the video’s debut back at the Institute, but now he’s distracted by the intermittent hitches, the data drops marked by white, green, black pixels where the playback codec guesses at what’s not there. He pauses at intervals, takes screen shots, makes note of where the missing bits are on the raster. Once he has enough to form a pattern, he goes back and compares the placement of these ersatz bits and bytes on a sort of spreadsheet of his own design.
The data drops are not random. There’s a separate message here, encrypted inside the obvious one. The problem he sees now is, is it a deliberately encrypted message, or can it be attributed to something as natural as noise? There’s that little wrinkle that Shannon folded into information theory a couple centuries back, that the noise itself could be a message he can’t understand. It’s a reassuring thought, in that at least he knows this limitation, and that he’s adept enough at the languages of nature, such as DNA encoding and even his prowess at composing, that anything worth saying here will eventually come within his range of comprehension. But the longer he looks the less he thinks he can crack the code.

I stopped posting excerpts about the time I got this far into the first draft…

If Truth Is Not Stranger Than Fiction…

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Written by: Thomas Collette

Published: 12 July 2017

…they’re at least running neck and neck.

It’s obvious I’ve delivered this project to a sad state of neglect. I have at least updated the blog software so it works again and will into the foreseeable future. I have essentially finished the novel but have held off publishing it, as I come to realize what a collaborative effort this level of artistic endeavor really is. When you are your own editor, you can hold off indefinitely on deadline but the tradeoff is trusting only your instincts on what is working and not. So tweaks continue, whenever I have time.

What spurred my sudden reappearance was this:

I always knew it was coming, and by my clock, almost exactly on time…

Foresight?

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Written by: Thomas Collette

Published: 30 March 2016

“It was that fall that the country went through the convulsions of a national election, and the process of democracy produced yet another scapegoat-in-waiting for everything that was not right in the land. A former television network executive, the new President knew how to cater to the people’s need for entertainment. Spicing his campaign speeches with paradoxes such as ‘Hard work is nowadays more subject to punishment than reward’, ‘Americans have become too outward-looking to find inner meaning in their lives’, and ‘Efforts to remedy the country’s ills have only exacerbated them’, he managed to so mystify the populace that he at once became a viable alternative to the incumbent’s straightforwardness and reserved promises. The outcome was never in doubt.”

Water on the Moon, Chapter 4

I checked the handwritten rough draft I still have. I wrote that almost 35 years ago…

So… What?

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Written by: Thomas Collette

Published: 26 February 2016

It’s now been so long since my last post that the admin login page was no longer in my browser history. That says a lot. Part of the joy and impetus to write The Thread and the Stone was to accumulate enough draft material to post here every week or so, even though it was entirely an exercise in boosting self esteem. Well, someone might even eventually drift upon the work surfing across the wide sea of the web. In any case, it was just fun, diddling with the site, part of my larger exploration in the arts of computer graphics and programming.

But now 7 years have elapsed since I wrote of the inception of Nils Greenside’s adventure, the fate of Eta Canari, and my word count was topping 6,000 a month(!) Today I am only now revisiting last year's concluded rewrite and draft of the climax and denouement, succumbing to writer’s block without much of a fight. I still want to finish, to put it all out there. But other things intrude. I am closing in on a rendezvous with a guaranteed pension, something I never thought possible a quarter century ago. I find new ways to make myself indispensable to my employers. That quest, which began last summer, took a lot of wind out of the old sails. Now, I drift, though with purpose, in other seas, and am only coming back around to picking this thing—this thread, up again.

But this is a provocative thing that I do, imagining a fable of the conspiratorial evil of power, technology, wealth, religion, art, history, linking it to the reality all around me, and proposing how to take it down. The sexual content alone, misunderstood as it will be no matter how necessary to the plot, will turn some whom I must curry favor away should they find offense. But then I realize maybe I’ve never depended on anyone so much as myself to get where I am, and so I carry on. If this is big, then it won’t matter. And if this is all bound for oblivion, as is far more likely, then it will matter even less. So there…

Nevertheless, some posts of the newer material are forthcoming, if for no other reason than to get me back into the groove I once rode, as I entertained myself with my little discoveries and the workings of my mind with them. That was a nice place, and I need to get back there. So here I am, and here I come…