Otherness

I'm currently reading Otherness (as you can see on my LibraryThing thingy on the right of this blog's main page). It's a collection of short s.f. stories by David Brin. The theme "otherness" seems to be in somewhat academic context: other people's opinions/points of view/sets of values that are different from yours are valuable to everyone. I interpret it as something in the line if "diversify to be safe".

I find a strange attraction in Brin's stories. I personally think he has a problem with his endings--abrupt endings to stories that to me seems to unfinished. What attracts me is perhaps his weird and diverse science topic he uses to drive his stories. Another attraction is perhaps I tend to agree with his views.

Anyway, the comic drawing I'm going to seems to be approaching story telling phase. Last week we got short story (300 words) writing homework. The theme was playing around with well-known fairy tales. Simple stuff to get warmed up with. The process was enjoyable, actually. Story writing is different from drawing, yet they share a number of similarities too. Everything starts with ideas in my head, followed by a process of translating those ideas into something concrete. The difference lies in this process of translation.

In this case, the important thing is the difference.

This reminds me of a quotation I read while reading about Windows Forms (WinForms): "what important is the difference". I found this quotation interesting because it is the flipside of abstraction--factoring out common characteristics of things--a staple in computer science.