Overthinking Things

Over the last few months, I've been thinking about my family, and their religion.

Rationalists often couch the value of reason in its utility. Reason is the way you get the most understood, and, by extension, accomplished.

But I don't think this utility is universal. Beliefs held in lieu of - and especially despite - rational evidence are there because a person is motivated to hang onto them. Where rationality fails to support one's dogma, there has to be some utility to be gained from it, otherwise it wouldn't survive.

Modern Western culture values dissent and diversity. We do not require that people think in accordance with the law - only that they act in accordance with it. Minds are still private things. We tolerate and welcome dispute and debate. Believing something that someone else does not is no crime, and we strive to cultivate peace, rather than agreement.

In the past, I have found it difficult to like and even love my family because I am offended by the things they believe, and the consequences that follow, how they choose to live. It's hard to accept their faith when I can both see the harm done to the world we know by all those who share their faith, and imagine the good done in the world we might have if they didn't. I have been trying to find a way around this, to reconcile with it.

And I wonder if I, too, might also find some utility in believing things that probably aren't true.

It doesn't surprise me to report I about ran this weekend on about 6-8 hours of sleep total.

My head's bleary. I've spent the evening traveling home alone, trying to put perspective on the events and desires and outcomes and events of the last couple of days.

I'm changing. I'm more satisfied with being supportive and of use than I am with being attended or understood. I'm satisfied that my inner world will just stay mine. I don't feel the need to share it as much as I once did, but I also need not fear doing so as much as I once did, either. When the moment interrupts, I am content to let it flow over and past me, and go where it will.

All memory is cache.

My smile is unconditional. I'm not sure what I really get from all this socializing, but I know that it's welcomed by those I do it with. That seems to be enough for me.

Some time, I might get lucky, and really get exactly what I want from someone else. But that's luck. I'm not going to try to beat the house.

I follow my heart, because without it... I'd bleed to death.

I hate Facehook, and I hate Apple.

Something needs to change, and they sure as hell aren't going to be the ones to do it.

It's going to have to be up to me.

I'm going to be in Vancouver this weekend. Poke me to arrange some facetime.

* I'm that tall guy that hugs you, lifts you off your feet, and spins you around all the time.

* My key count has dropped to ONE. This development pleases me. The key and a pair of nailclippers are now little more than a charm hanging off my mobile phone.

* Cake - Meanwhile, Rick James

robot:

Etymology

From both Czech robota (“‘drudgery, servitude’”) and Slovak robota (“‘labour’”). First appeared in the 1921 science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek after having been suggested to him by his brother Josef [1], and taken into the English translation without change.

robota:

1. forced work in the era of villeinage

villein (plural villeins)

Etymology

From Anglo-Norman villein, variant of villain; from Medieval Latin villanus "field hand" < Latin villa "country home".

1. (historical) A feudal tenant.

There's a lot of juicy, provocative ideas in here.

I once grinned at how mechanically articulated the Burning Man was becoming, after the fad of building bigger, taller pedestal-buildings to perch him on had worn off. In 1999, the Man was on a mere stack of hay bales. By 2003 (art theme: beyond belief), an enormous zigurrat underfoot had maximized his literal and carbon footprints. By 2005, interactivity had become the 'it' quality of the Man; some mechanism for people to make the Man move various parts of him under their (perhaps cooperative) control trumped the sheer magnitude or height of the supporting structure.

It was this articulation that hit me on the way to the burn in 2006: the Man was a robot!

The Man has long been a symbol without a referent. Everybody asks Larry Harvey what the Man is symbolic of, and he declines to answer. I always thought this was a clever move, directly in line with the event's principles of participatory creativity. Because the Man has no artist-inspired interpretation, it invites each participant to engage their own spark of creativity, and lend the Man - and his burning - their own meaning in their own lives. Such an invitation eschews, in its own small way, the industrial artist/audience producer/consumer dichotomy, and draws people into the creative process.

This is how the Man serves everyone, and it's this servitude that connects him, in a more abstract fashion, to the idea of the Man as robot.

But there's something insufficient to the conception of a robot as just a machine that does work, and it was the image of the Man that pointed the way to what was missing. The missing element is anthropomorphism. The Man isn't just a machine, he's human-like.

There are lots of machines out there that prosthetically extend the human body and mind, even automatically. I often think of my computers as brain prostheses. But they aren't robots.

Prostheses are extensions of a human person, but a robot is a thing upon we project a certain degree of sovereignty and autonomy. This is something that conceptually embeds itself (by way of negation) in the etymology of the Czech word 'robota' from which 'robot' originally springs.

We all know what work is, and we all understand the value of machines in doing it. We also understand and largely reject the practice of forced labor - slavery. But we don't think twice about employing machines to do work for us automatically, without bothering to gain their consent - that would be absurd, in the case of a dishwasher, to say nothing of problematic (how exactly does a dishwasher agree to a task?). We don't think of these machines as robots because we do not project any sense of personhood or sovereignty upon them. Even if a robot isn't physically anthropomorphic, we perceive that it has a will, a consent that it may withhold or yield according to some complex and unknown criteria, as a human being does.

I think it's this idea of the internal liberty and sovereignty of a human being that lays the foundation for both the idea of slavery (by way of domination and negation of that liberty and sovereignty), as well as its ethical rejection in more recent human history. Where our own perception of personhood is lacking (as with the dishwasher), slavery can't exist. Where there are no slaves, there can be no robots, because the very terms are synonymous. 'Robot' describes, not only particular contrivances of matter toward the accomplishment of tasks, but ancient, cruel forms of relationships between human beings that we have attempted to abandon with a fair, if not complete, degree of success. The creation of a robot is the transformation, in one's own mind, of a machine from a mere extension of a human being, into a an autonomous other person, in order to indulge in domination over it.

The next question that springs to mind is whether there is a discrepancy between our mere projected perception of sovereignty, will, or liberty upon a machine, and any reality of such inhering within the structure of such machine systems. I wrote a story about it once.

Carnivale was well done, and well fun. My thanks and kudos to everyone who worked hard and played hard to pull it off.

I felt I had just the right balance of vigilance and contribution to making the event turn, and letting loose, getting down, and enjoying it for myself. Tickets, the fire show, Otherworld ticket sales (which we sold none of, but meh), and cleanup all seemed to go very well. All I had was a couple of tall ciders, which is good, because I think I enjoyed being coherent enough to connect to the people around me more than reconfiguring my brain to enjoy with the world inside. There's always time for that later. This was a prime opportunity to give.

My energy and stamina continued at the level I discovered and was surprised by at Recompression in 2009. I had dinner and a 'semi-nap' Saturday afternoon, and pretty much danced through the night, with liberal breaks and another 'semi-nap' ( consisting of closed eyes and a prone position, but not any actual loss of consciousness) at around 4-5am. But teardown and cleanup didn't take long, and though I was feeling the wear, I wasn't dragging much at all. Either I need a lot less sleep than I used to, or I get so much during my normal routine of life that when showtime comes, my body has plenty of surplus. It feels good.

I had a take-home realization, too. It's wasn't new, but it was nailed home for me pretty hard as the night wore on that most of the things that make me happy come from inside. Achievements, circumstances, and even relationships don't really make me happy - it's just something my brain does. I have been learning how to make it do that thing it does, and making them habits. Most of the steps that contribute to the environment for making that work, the 'feng shui' of the furniture arrangements, exist entirely within my skull.

It makes me feel positively indomitable.

Whisper of worship.
Soak girl in warm candy cream.
Caress until wild.

Because socialism has worked out so well for The Soviet Union China.

Seriously. Don't they //make// most of the things we have so much freedom to buy?

This place is changing me.

I'm not really sure what to call it - it's not an apartment, although there is a neighbor overhead. It's the lower suite of detached garage that was renovated into a pair of one-room suites, each with its own kitchen and bathroom. The building is located in the rear of a house, which also has a bachelor suite and what seems to be a one bedroom nestled within it, as well. The landlord is a plumbing contractor, which explains how much slicing and dicing has been done to this property.

I haven't even completely settled in yet. I still have to figure out the best way to locate the studs through the wall, so I can start installing bolts and hooks, the better to hang things across the walls and the ceiling. One nice touch is that there's an electrical outlet right on the middle of the ceiling.

My kitchen cupboards are mostly bare, which is due as much to their great volume as to my lack of dishes. I'm startign to find excuses to store non-kitchen stuff in cupboards and drawers that would otherwise return an echo when you called out into them.

Stuff has been tetris-stacked into the closet to great effect, and rearranging other bits has freed up adequate floor space to put down my futon, as well as the waterbed I haven't even started filling yet. I could sleep four in a pinch. There's not even anything stowed under my bed, a fact which pleases Smoke, my cat.

But it's the freedom that's getting at my brain; the yielding that my house does to my will. The music that plays every hour, even in the dead of night. It's the way the space within the walls owes more to what I wish than the whims of such petty things as daylight, or traffic, or the business of others (Smoke excepted - whose interactions I am noticing more and more as a result).

This is not just my home. It is becoming an extension of my body.

It's affecting my plans. I've devoted so much attention to finding this place that, now that it is here, my other plans have begun to appear again, in my mind, and I think I can begin focusing them down and making them blossom like never before.

It is becoming time to create once more; time to wake in the middle of the night with an idea, toss on a mix soundtrack, toss back a beverage, and start coding something I just had a dream about, because I can, because I have no obligations tomorrow, and because no one is going to stop me, or complain. It's time to look up from my workstation, and be startled to see sunlight creeping in through the blinds, only to realize, I'm still not tired, and continue debugging.

Loneliness? I have no idea where it went. I know it will come back; it always does. But in the meantime, i'm not going to waste time missing it.

This place is my skull, wrought of drywall and concrete. My head is becoming a wonderful place to live. I lived in the old apartment for four years to the day, which is a record for me. I hope to live here at least as long. I can only imagine that falling madly out of control, and in love would deter that. Viva Victoria! I've been absorbed by this town. I'm going to live here until they deport me. Where's my membership card?

I was chatting with Bunny Ruffles yesterday about the conflicts I often encounter between my values, and those of others, even (and perhaps especially) my friends.

For example, lots of my friends are either going to school, or planning to - and I'm not.

There are many twists and turns to how the reactions, counter-reactions, play out in my reasoning, in the context of my particular life.

The promise of higher education is that, with a degree, opportunities for better-paying jobs open up. As an American drop-out living through the worst job market my parents have ever seen, I'm skeptical of that hypothesis. Furthermore, there's just no way to do it without getting into debt. It's one thing to give up the next four years of your life to school - but the next four or ten years beyond that seems a bit of a high price to pay for... access to decent job in a job market that's even more uncertain because it's ten years down the road.

It took me awhile, after leaving that conversation, to figure out exactly why I weigh those values out so differently than so many others I know.

*I* have a choice. And that is not due to any special virtue of my personality. It's not because I am an entreprenuer, or a persistent, hard working go-getter who never says die. I'm no Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story (even if that's just a euphemism for the time-rich Life of Reilly I lead).

I am simply very, very lucky.

Among American conservatives, the hysterical backlash against "socialism", especially as it has emerged in the Health Insurance reform struggle, there is a persistent and pernicious faith that the market as it exists is meritocratic; that the rich become so strictly because of what they do. Conversely, the poor are so because of laziness or some similarly despicable (by their lights) character flaw, and deserve their poverty. This is America, after all, where all that's necessary to succeed is to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work your ass off.

This utter disregard for the element of luck in economic circumstances contributes much to the dementia that is pulling the country apart.

If I were the one looking at a life of flipping burgers, stocking shelves, and cleaning toilets for a living, or going into debt for a //chance// at something better, I could see the appeal. If I had little control over how many hours I plowed into a convenience store, I'd be more tempted.

But I didn't get that degree, and I paid off my student loans. I'm lucky, because I self-taught web development, and managed to wiggle my way into an astonishingly secure part-time telecommuting gig in a very small business. This is not a repeatable career. Even *I* couldn't do it again if I had to. I've been living a dream gig for almost ten years now.

I was briefly confused by the fact that, well, I *do* actually have a friend that works full time at a convenience store, and he makes more money than I do. Where do I get off bragging (and who would think that if I did)? Soon enough, it occurred to me: I work many less hours.

Unlike almost everyone I know, I have a choice. The casino crap-shoot of higher education, higher debt, and the job market looks far less shiny to me, not because they're wrong, but because the attractiveness and desirability of a course all depend on what you have to compare them to. I'm just very lucky, and very unique, to have that other option. I wish more people had it.

I have put together a solution to do Otherworld registration on-site at Carnivale. There won't be any Internet access required, and it's all stored on a bootable USB stick, so I can borrow anybody's (intel-based) laptop, and boot straight to the registration form right off the stick. It simply adapts the form, the database, and the interface I built for the web site. Not bad for an afternoon's work.

The technical details of this are kind of interesting. I just used the Ubuntu USB boot disk creator utility (on the System > Administration menu) on a microSD card (with a USB adapter). The utility simply copies the read-only image of any normal bootable Ubuntu liveCD (the kind you normally use to test drive or install Ubuntu with) onto the USB stick; then, it gives you the option to create a persistent disk image on the remaining writable portion of the stick. Every time you modify the filesystem, it saves these changes to the writable portion. The next time you reboot, it boots the CD image as usual, and then overlays the changes you saved previously, so you have the same system you left - all without using the laptop's hard drive at all.

I just installed that Apache2 web server and the MySQL database server (which is what I was using on the website). Then I copied down and installed the data and some of the code (pulling down Drupal turned out to be painful and totally unnecessary) from BurnVic.ca's registration forms. A few modifications, and it was ready to go, saving registrations automagically to the USB stick.

Pretty slick, if I do say so myself.

The number of active duty military personnel that have committed suicide since 9/11 now exceeds the number of civilians killed by terrorists that day.

Try to spend more time doing things you want to do, and less time doing things you want to //get done//.

Google is like Barack Obama: They're bad, but also better.

Having something to hide is not a crime.

No one-man band is ever a one band man.

My scale tells me I lost 14 lbs over the weekend from moving.

...I'm a bit confused.

Something tells me this would work as an alarm clock. Especially when combined with the track immediately following.

...Not that I've needed one in years. But I know some of you do.