Dreams of Golden Weather

[maetl]

My plan this year is to put together a more dense and multilayered work than what I’ve done in previous years.

Dreams of Golden Weather is a story about the rise and fall of a (fictional) supercomputer project in 1970s/cold war New Zealand.

There are a few different themes and subject ideas that I’d like to incorporate, relating to retro computing, 20th century modernism, the weird transnational margins of the military industrial complex and FVEY, and the tension between anarchist and authoritarian interests in 1970s NZ society.

I haven’t settled on narrative and story yet, but one conceit I’ve been kicking around is the text being a core memory or printer spool dump from a malfunctioning research computer. Hence the Dreams part of the title (the Golden Weather part is from a mid-20th century NZ aesthetic trope).

I’ll post further notes here as I get deeper into it.

[maetl]

Just getting everything set up so I can output PDFs with covers, etc...

[mathias]

This looks great! Spot on font.

[maetl]

Have unfortunately been busier than I had anticipated, but I’ve put the source code for this online and am going to try to finish it off over the next couple of days.

In case anyone is interested, the bulk of the work I’ve done so far this month is implementing a partial order planner in Ruby. It doesn’t do much at this stage, but is usable for generating narratives based on basic propositional statements. It’s potentially possible to build generators using different data structures from the planner—the linearized list of action steps, the causal links, or both.

As much as I want to dive deeper on these possibilities and extend the planning algorithm, in the interests of finishing something before the end of the month, I’ll probably leave this research where it’s at for now and move onto actually generating text and laying out a book.

[maetl]

Incoming...

They facilitate the transfer possibly requiring only a few others are in operation, but a copy could not be used for the symbol Ø signifies the letter O where necessary for real-time guidance of the physicist stands to lose some of his own peripherals. Various conditions occurring in the first remote computer operates in a computer system, but what is not bad. This last instruction must occur before the safe minimum time. This breakdown has the function of the spot when those words have been assigned to these systems is given in order to do that part of his own experiment (in Fortran) gives him enormous power, power which simply would not be available unless it has already been marketed, the Inktronic printer, operates by spraying ink at the Grossinger Conference on the machine, and can be achieved.

[maetl]

Fragments of a novel...

They’ve destroyed her research.

He swoops over the world.

Shakes his head.

When the time comes, he’ll scoop up the pressure. From the angle of approach, it seems almost choreographed. No longer accountable to those in power.

His arms swing motionless at his final tribute match for Canterbury, he moved swiftly up the keys from the edge of the street, to a knotted trunk is another hatch, with a long, faded floral dress with a characteristically Kiwi lack of sentimentality. The press goes on and on about middle New Zealand currency and Commonwealth identity are one and the barn. We’re so rich in natural resources but what are those kids doing up?

First person...

I’ll never lose anything by it. I could finally transcend the existential anxiety of my addiction. I need to get a peep. I cannot remember the words well.

I was going on a one bedroom apartment in a collosal ant colony about to obliterate my own insecurities and self-esteem rather than a sham artifice constructed by mass controlleurs and officers of religiosity to blockade the ebb and flow of thought that I have accepted that this was a cleanly delineated reference to an activist house where journalists, documentary filmmakers, and change agents of all the other kids kept at the world to see.

The first days under this spell were turgid and confused. Thought he was going on a few steps into the night, drinking, smoking, and reminiscing about all of us one last time before the big game. It is rushing towards me. Perhaps my avarice was really no less than that of the prefab blocks.

[maetl]

📖 First draft of the book: Dreams of Golden Weather (PDF) ⚙️ Source code: maetl/dreams-of-golden-weather

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Am done for the month, but there are still a few rough edges and feature ideas that I want to improve so I will probably keep working on this over December and publish a final version on Itch.io.

[hugovk]

Looks great!

This is about 30k words, do you think you can output 50k+?

[maetl]

@hugovk oops! good catch, thanks for spotting that. 😬

I bumped some params to make sure and generated a few more PDFs. This one comes in at just over 51k.