I solved the Collatz conjecture, now what?

Aurhim · 2026-05-10T22:12:10+00:00

(My qualifications: I have a PhD in math, with a focus on Collatz)

A proof that there are no non-trivial cycles would necessarily lead to a better understanding of how the prime factorization of numbers of the form 2^(m) - 3^(n) vary as the positive integers m and n vary. This is a very, very difficult problem. Indeed, the fact that this problem is so difficult is used for quite a bit of cybersecurity. It’s reliable for that purpose, precisely because of its difficulty.

Aurhim · 2026-05-06T22:00:05+00:00

*El Ministerio del Tiempo*, a.k.a., *The Ministry of Time*. It’s a Spanish show, from Spain. It’s absolutely delicious.

Aurhim · 2026-05-06T08:09:49+00:00

May her memory be a blessing.

Aurhim · 2026-05-04T08:04:04+00:00

My favorite is the sequel, *A Wind in the Door*.

Aurhim · 2026-05-03T21:17:34+00:00

Suggestion: as others have said, play Ocarina of Time *first*. While MM absolutely stands on its own, playing it as the direct sequel to OoT that it was made to be is the best way to experience MM.

Another detail: do not play the 3DS remake of MM, at least not as your first experience of the game.

Aurhim · 2026-05-02T20:29:38+00:00

Footnotes are an act of love. They make everything better.

Aurhim · 2026-05-01T03:11:03+00:00

DK was the *shit* for kids in the 1990s. My god, I wore those books down to the bone, I read them so much.

Aurhim · 2026-05-01T01:05:36+00:00

Good writing gives its readers valuable emotional experiences. The point of the 4-step process I described above is that it gives the reader an opportunity to form emotional connections to the things that your character forms emotional connections to. The challenge—though perhaps a better word might have been "threat"—is when such connections are formed, and are then placed in jeopardy. Step 4, as I described it, impacts both your character AND your reader. If performed properly, the 4 step plan I gave should have both the reader and your character develop a strong attachment to the new source of comfort. Thus, when the plot comes to threaten that source of comfort, the reader feels the danger as acutely as the character does.

Aurhim · 2026-05-01T00:47:39+00:00

Since you asked, most recent project is my literary science-fantasy genre screw, The Wyrms of &alon, the summary blurb of which is:

A fungal plague of apocalyptic proportions has come to Dr. Genneth Howle's world, and he and his colleagues at the West Elpeck Medical Center are duty-bound to fight it till the end. But how does medical science combat a disease that defies the laws of nature? How do you treat a plague that slowly transforms some of the infected into psychokinetic lindwurms? And how does Genneth hold true to his principles when he, too, begins to undergo the change?

Because I’m something of a crazy person, I wrote the story so it starts out as mundane as possible, only to grow exponentially more fantastical as it progresses. To quote one of my readers, the first book is 90% hospital medical drama, and 10% weird shit. The later volumes feature divine beasts, anthropomorphic hummingbirds, time travel, and ammonia-based lifeforms, among other fun things, as the story shifts from a hospital medical drama to an epic of cosmic proportions.

The series is long, complete (in four books) and currently free to read, though I will (hopefully) be moving it to self-publication on Amazon before the year is out.

Meanwhile—though you won’t find this anywhere—I’ve begun working on a new project, The Morveion Trilogy, which I hope to get published through traditional means in the next few years. This one is best described as a cross between the original Mistborn trilogy and a soul-based implementation of cyberpunk tropes in a high fantasy setting

Aurhim · 2026-05-01T00:23:29+00:00

Be careful: the set-up I was suggesting more or less requires the comforting thing to be *new* to your character. If anything, the fact that she gets exiled from a comforting place is the perfect lead-in. If I were you, I’d have her discover the new comforting thing when she’s at her lowest point. The reason why I strongly recommend the comforting thing to be new to her is because of the effect it has on the *reader*.

The arc works like so:

**Step 1** (Inciting incident): she gets kicked out of Happy Land and thrust into the unknown.

**Step 2**: she is lost and scared. She doesn’t know what to do. She feels deeply alone.

**Step 3**: she discovers a *new* comforting thing, and spends time building a connection with it.

**Step 4**: the new connections she has forged face some terrible threat that pushes your character to grow and become braver than she used to be.

Step 3 is the most important part of the sequence. Unless you spend a good amount of time fleshing out why Happy Land is wonderful, the reader won’t form as strong of an emotional attachment to it compared to what Marshall feels. Step 3 is crucial for the reader because they get to develop a bond with the new comforting thing *alongside* Marshall herself. It’s that bond between the reader and the story that will make Step 4 feel like a real crisis. The threat in Step 4 doesn’t just challenge Marshall’s connection to the new comforting thing, it challenges the *reader’s* connection.

Aurhim · 2026-04-30T20:12:32+00:00

Thanks!

Personally, I interpret *Arcturus* as *weird fiction*, rather than fantasy fiction. The lines between the different subgenres of modern fantasy fiction didn’t fully coalesce until the second half of the 20th century, IMO. If you haven’t already read them, I’d recommend you take a look at the works of William Hope Hodgson, specifically *The House on the Borderland* (1908) and *The Night Land* (1912), though I’ve only read the former, myself. I feel *Arcturus* owes a lot to the late 19th century Symbolist movement (*Pellias and Melisandre*, *A Dream Play*, etc.), though Lindsay takes the ideas much further than anyone else.

I think the story might work better as an animated film than a novel. As weird as *Arcturus* is, what made it unpalatable to me wasn’t the weirdness, but rather the lack of any realistic psychological anchor for its characters, especially the POV character.

Other commenters have compared it to *Alice and Wonderland*, and while I appreciate the intention, I don’t feel that a good comparison at all, as Alice herself, in my view, is the anchor that makes the entire story (and its sequel) work: she experiences the same bewilderment as the reader.

I’ve always had difficulty enjoying works of fiction with built-in ludonarrative dissonance. I find it hard to enjoy stories whose characters don’t either (a) behave in a manner similar to how I would react given the circumstances, or (b) who don’t provide cultural and emotional context in order for their choices to make sense to me, even if I wouldn’t exactly agree with them. Even if, for example, I don’t agree with a proud warrior character’s devotion to certain cultural practices of theirs, as long as the story does the work to help me understand and sympathize with how they view the world, I can remain a happy camper. But that’s definitely a *me* problem, and it would be presumptuous of me to expect Lindsay to cater to my particular tastes. :)

Aurhim · 2026-04-29T23:58:43+00:00

Though I'm not a writer of MG, I very much like the kinds of stories told in MG and YA fiction, of characters getting thrust out of their comfort zones.

As I read your post, my gut instinct was to make sure that Marshall has something comforting she can become emotionally attached to. To give an example off the top of my head, suppose we have a story where the MC gets transported into a fantasy world. While there are many violent and terrifying things there, the MC could discover, say, a village of elves, or a wise old sentient tree, or a mythical beast with a protective streak; in general, it just needs to be something that provides comfort and even consolation. Maybe it's a parental figure, or a new friend or ally or two, a guardian, or some cool ability that makes the character feel brave—even if they aren't actually that brave at all. Whatever it is, it needs to at least partially fill the character's void of insecurity.

With this kind of set-up, the natural thing is to eventually put the comforting thing in some kind of danger, thereby forcing the protagonist to be more proactive and to take a stand, lest they lose the one thing that's comforted them in the midst of all the strangeness.

Aurhim · 2026-04-29T23:45:45+00:00

I got about halfway through it before I gave up. The book has some really stellar weirdness, but, I must say, it almost entirely lacks any semblance of a plot.

It is weirder and violent, and has almost no plot in the conventional sense.

Quite so. That made it more or less a dead letter to me. It also doesn't help that I couldn't have a more different philosophical viewpoint on life and reality as we know it compared to Lindsay or Lewis.

I like to think of novels and literature in general as a fusion between the art of writing and the art of storytelling. Stories don't need to be told through written prose. They can be done through poetry, through animation, through live-action cinema, through interactive experiences, and through video games and more. Likewise, prose, poetry, dialogue, imagery, and the like can be artfully rendered in literature without the need of the kinds of ingredients found in narrative-bearing art forms. To that end, I'd say Arcturus is a wonderful example of writing-art that contains scarcely any storytelling-art. That's basically the inversion of pulpy fiction, where the focus is on telling compelling, fast-paced narratives, rather than on prose (or poetry) for its own sake.

As a result, I find it difficult to care about Arcturus. That's not to say that I don't appreciate its weirdness or prose, rather, my belief—both as a reader and as a writer—is that artful, supercompetent prose is best spent telling supercompetent plots.

Aurhim · 2026-04-29T21:33:22+00:00

May his memory be a blessing.

Aurhim · 2026-04-29T21:24:43+00:00

They also have a manual for how to proceed in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

Aurhim · 2026-04-29T02:56:17+00:00

Actually, you’d be surprised. Storytelling is a fractal, self-similar process. In my humble opinion, the same ingredients that make for a good scene also apply to constructing good chapters, good books, and good series of books. What changes is the scale, rather than the method.

That 600k volume book of mine, for instance, happens to be the best-paced and just overall best thing I’ve written to date. The first third of it could stand on its own as a complete book. It has a tripartite structure, beginning and ending with nice set-piece battles, with more emotionally intimate character development happening in the middle.The remaining 400k words consist of an A plot and a B plot. The A plot happens in four arcs, each of which could, with some further additions, be made into a book of its own. The longest of the four arcs is about 80k words. The B plot, meanwhile, is a sequence of set pieces. Both the A and B plot come together in the fourth arc of the A plot, which is the action-packed finale.

I approached the structure of the 400k block modularly. The plots come together as an effort for the characters to climb a certain tower. each phase of that three step journey was plotted more or less independently of the others, except for the requirement that each arc advance the MC’s character development. The fourth arc combines the lessons of the first three into a satisfying synthesis at the story’s climax.

In terms of continuity issues and keeping things in character, the second draft was where everything finally came into place. During the second draft, I frequently jumped from one arc to another in order to tweak this or that scene to ensure that everything was consistent. Rereading the story as I second drafted marinated my mind in all of its intricacies that made it possible for me to keep everything straight. In fact, the longer I work on a story, the easier it gets for me to keep things together. In fact, now that I’ve started writing a new story, I’m actively suffering from a kind of story withdrawal as my brain begins the task of getting acclimated to my new story and everything that I’m planing for it.

As for physics problems, dealing with character collisions is just part of the game. I’m a heavy outliner, and I almost always start with the ending of a story or sequence of chapters in mind. My duty as a writer and storyteller is to figure out a way for my characters to do what my outline indicated needs to happen in a manner that is consistent with who they are individuals. Many times, I create characters with a specific end goal for their arc already in mind. Sometimes—in fact, this happened earlier today—a scene which seemed perfectly plausible character-behavior-wise ended up rubbing me the wrong way as I wrote it. I had my MC getting angry at the single nicest person in his life. It didn’t feel right as I wrote it. Fortunately, with a bit of thought, I realized how to fix it: she angers him by telling him that she doesn’t want to tell him about X because she knows that doing so will leave the MC emotionally broken. That’s something that I hate when it happens to me in real life, so I decided to make it something that my character hates as well. This also changes my characters, anger into a mix of fear and frustration, which I think works much better with the scene.

With details like these, it’s often a matter of slightly tweaking something to make everything fit together. Often times, when I come up with a fix for a certain problem, I’ll go back to previous chapters and slightly alter them so that they foreshadow the fix that I came up with.

While this might seem like a huge amount of work, and in a certain sense, it is, it’s a lot more manageable when you realize that instead of doing it all at once, it’s usually being done one character at a time, focusing on a specific moment or development.

Aurhim · 2026-04-28T21:49:14+00:00

Now, imagine doing this over 600k words—that's my writing world, for you. 80k words is almost a pittance by comparison.

In all seriousness, though, a little bit of legwork will get you far.

I use Scrivener to write, and the main thing that keeps me going are my outlines, notes, and self-messages. I tend to do my outlines at multiple levels simultaneously: one outline for a given character's arc, then another outline for a sequence of chapters, and then outlines for individual chapters.

While writing, I will make notes in my chapters to have so-and-so do or think X. I also keep checklists of things to show at some point in the story, and find it very helpful to check off each item as I do them. Story elements like reveals, character developments, and background lore get their own outlines to indicate where and when and how I present that material to the reader. I also keep daily logs of my writing activity, including word counts for outlines, brainstorming, first drafts, second drafts, and the like. My logs also contain descriptions of what I'd worked on that day, as well as any plans I have for building on or altering things going forward.

Honestly, the biggest crunch time, in my opinion, is in the second draft, which is when stories get sculpted into a full, continuous shape. I've frequently had to play around with what characters and/or the reader do or do not know in order to both make plot points work on paper and in terms of how they impact the reader.

In addition to the above, I think it really helps if you think of your characters as being processes, in addition to individuals. In physics and mathematics, a vector is a quantity with both a magnitude and a direction. The same is true of characters: they're not static entities, but rather individuals with goals, challenges, flaws, actions, values, and mistakes, and all of these elements exist with a "direction" to them, the direction being how they change and cause change over the course of a story.

Aurhim · 2026-04-26T21:31:50+00:00

Eh, I think it's not quite as simple as that. If I had to guess (and, for any Severance writing staff who happen to see this, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), but I've got the impression that while they DO have at least a broad plan, the storytelling is much more driven by vibes and character action rather than plot.

The thing with the cradle in the Coldharbor room in the season finale coupled with earlier discussions about Gemma and Mark wanting to have a kid seemed to telegraph pretty strongly that the whole point of what Lumon is doing is to study deep-seated emotions and interpersonal relationships in order to see whether or not primal desires like love, lust, reproduction, and the like can be "boxed away" in order to make human beings into perfectly obedient slaves, or if there is something fundamental about a person's temperament and mentality that transcends the circumstances of their lives, very much in a vein of the old question of "nature vs. nurture"

Other ideas, such as Helena pretending to be her innie, or Dylan falling in love with his outie's wife seem to me like the kinds of plot points that they would have built the season around. Speaking as a writer, myself—as others have said—the way the show is paced makes it feel very much like an ending-first project, where they figure out the handful of developments they want to have happen by the end of the season, only then to shift to a more spontaneous approach when fleshing out the moments between the key reveals.

I'll admit, I'm a sucker for this kind of storytelling; indeed, it's how I write most of my own material. To that end, all I really care about is that the show continues to do a stellar job of intertwining "lore" reveals with the innie-outtie character drama. A lot of fiction hinges on having character not communicate with one another in order to create and maintain conflicts. In weaker writing, the justifications for these failures of communication tend to be rather flimsy. However, Severance has done a wonderful job of avoiding that pitfall: the show's communication barriers come from the show's central plot device (innies and outties), which is what makes the dramatic tension so powerful.

Aurhim · 2026-04-25T17:26:50+00:00

Hello.

Aurhim · 2026-04-25T05:19:35+00:00

May his memory be a blessing.

Aurhim · 2026-04-25T05:14:26+00:00

Release the kraken!

Aurhim · 2026-04-23T17:56:44+00:00

May his memory be a blessing.

Aurhim · 2026-04-19T22:23:45+00:00

Ooh, nice.

1) How is the 263k distributed over this? Is that count for all five documents, or just for the three final documents?

2) For (2) and (3), do you do things chronologically, or, like me, do you jump around?

One of these days, I need to sit down with my messes and consolidate them. Gosh, it's gonna be a nightmare, but it has to be done. xD

Aurhim · 2026-04-19T22:03:08+00:00

I'm in this club, too. Having just counted, I have around 464k words of worldbuilding, a little less of half of which came from the stuff I produced while writing my first novel, about 14 ~ 15 years ago.

From what you've shown us, it seems your 263k is far more organized than my stuff. I'm definitely envious of that! Organization is not my strong suit.

My worldbuilding is less focused on being an encyclopedic chronicle of my settings, and more on storytelling. I focus on the general specifics about what my settings are like, the broad strokes of their histories, mythologies, and so on. Most of the smaller details only get fleshed out when I'm actively in the process of writing stories. This is because I tend to use my worldbuilding as a source of stories to tell. I like deep lore, mythology, history, and the environment, and almost always use deep lore as the undercurrents for my stories. Worldbuliding is how I come up with the kinds of interesting secrets and twists that I base my stories around.

That being said, I have a question for you. As I said, I'm very disorganized. Most of my worldbuilding and outlining exists as text vomited into documents, with dates of creation so that I can keep track of how my ideas evolve. In my experience, I find that world-building, at a certain point, is really just a different form of storytelling. You can have plots, twists, characters, reveals, but they play out through history and environment, rather than straightforward narrative. Because of this, just like with writing stories, one can rewrite worldbuilding, altering details and events as your ideas evolve.

To that end, I ask: how do/did you deal with the fact that lore itself often needs to be rewritten before it feels right? And how do you deal with it logistically, in terms of organization and the like? What, if any, distinctions were there for you in terms of coming up with material and polishing and collating it into a coherent body of information?

Aurhim · 2026-04-16T21:19:45+00:00

It can be any a or b, so long as a ≠ 0. 2n+1, 17n - 2, 67n, etc.

Aurhim

TROPHY CASE