Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Missing the Boat

Missing the Boat

I live in a rural area where all we have is dial-up or satellite. Satellite was a big improvement but it is being eclipsed by the ever growing demands for modem speed. I bought a computer game and in order for it to load it has to download a support platform called “Steam.” This is a good name because it really steams anyone trying to get it to down load. My wife bought an IPAD and to load IOS-5 for Apple was going to take 25 hours. We had to take it back to Best Buy for the upload. I still haven’t gotten my new shooter game, “Black Ops” to load. I suppose if I ever do it will be worth it but right now I am so ticked off by the engineering morons who package it that I have vowed to never buy another that uses the Steam platform. Get real. You buy the disk and then have to wait 24 hours while it uploads… Oh and if your machine shuts down because windows pops in out of the blue, you can expect to start over…. This is all a bunch of crap. On the disk you get with the game or application you pay for should be 99% of the code required. The other 1% to prevent hackers should be on a server somewhere but not 24 hours worth of code. Don’t these pin head developers realize they are antagonizing their customers and the cure to the security issue is worse than the disease?

Last night I had another vivid dream. No it wasn’t a nightmare… Thank goodness. As a young man I led combat patrols in Vietnam. The dream I had was that the CIA needed to go somewhere and find and extract an agent who had been compromised. The patrol got all botched up, not by interference from the enemy but rather by a host of logistic and human errors… to the point where the participants were called together at Fort Benning to make a “Lessons Learned” film that demonstrated how what can go wrong will go wrong. In the first filming there was simply a walk-thru that examined the multitude of things that were not being executed well, none of which in themselves was so bad, but which collectively led to blunders and the blunders to failure. It was sort of like watching an NFL football game where the contest is decided by mistakes and who makes the most, rather than by skillful execution.

When I read some of the things written here at WDC I see a real analogy. The compositions are filled with mistakes, missed assignments, penalties and a lousy game plan. It isn’t just one or two huge shortcomings but all those little things that continuously undermine and detract from the overall quality of the work. As you read the momentum of all the good things in the work stalls, the wrong scuttles the piece, and the reader or audience loses interest. I am beginning to think that the science of writing is the defense and the art is the offense in executing a good composition. It isn’t one or the other but both, working in harmony with each other. For this to happen there has to be some structure and planning to go along with the artsy part.

Under the statistics of my blog there are URLs that indicated where the reader was before visiting the blog. When I clicked on one it highlighted a line from one of my blogs. I don’t know quite how it happened but here is the line. “Most inexperienced writers are more focused on the gilding than the lily.” If you don’t know what that means consider taking some courses at New Horizon’s Academy.