metapunk

Sometimes around Christmas, I send my family a wish list of practical things I need, so we can both be sure I’ll make good use of whatever they get me.  Some may find that a bit crass, but I figure: I already have a lot of stuff I don’t use.  I have a strong impulse toward minimalism, and a heavy dislike of pointless materialism.  So, while there’s no dissuading my family from getting me something (I’ve tried), at least I can let them know what I can use and everybody will be happy. Here’s the list I sent them, for the lulz:

Things I can use:

Realistic Gift Ideas:

• 1 pair of decent running shoes
• 1 pair of durable work boots
• Simple, sturdy wooden chair (office chairs are not cat-proof, and rolling chairs won’t stay still).
• 2 pairs of inexpensive pants
• Set of queen sized bed sheets
• Amazon gift card
• One 14 & 1/2 inch by 18 & 7/8ths plank of 3/4 inch chipboard, and a can of matte black spraypaint
• Kitchen sink (okay, just kidding. This is just here so you can’t say this list has “everything but the…” … Actually, now that you mention it, we could use a new aerator nozzle head for the kitchen sink. I keep meaning to pick one up from Home Hardware, but keep forgetting. We almost got one at Canadian Tire, but they’re obscenely expensive there—ten freakin’ bucks!  I remember seeing one at a Home Hardware five towns over for 79 cents!  I should have got one there but I wasn’t thinking.)
• Fall / spring jacket, bomber style (used / thrift store is ideal and inexpensive, as long as it’s in good shape).

Full on Pie-in-the-Sky** Wishes:

• Class in basic C or Visual C programming
• iPad 2 & some reader apps (mobi, epub, pdf, cbr) for it.
• Self-discipline
• Good Government and Gainful Employment
• A genuine Hattori Hanzō katana. Or a Masamune. Or a Lightsaber. And probably Kendo lessons.
• Winning Lotto Ticket
• True Love (Wub, Tawoo Wub may also be acceptable)
• World Peace (But please, no whirled peas)
• A wish granting genie and unlimited wishes?

**I was tempted to add “flying pie” to my list of pie-in-the-sky wishes; but I realized I’d probably get that wish—and that the pie would be flying toward my face.

Remember that machine we wanted to build when we were kids? That supercomputer that could be used to monitor, simulate, and predict cultural trends; maybe even physical events? (Okay, I was a strange kid, so what?) We thought this would be some sort of standalone machine. Something centralized and owned by some government. But no.

I just learned about Twendr (yes, I’m a tad slow with these things; bit of a Luddite, really). I hate the baby-talk name; but anyway, it tells you about twitter trends as they happen by spotting keywords in people’s posts.  In other words, it just tells you what everybody is talking about in a global sense, in real time.

But think about how this could be applied to utilities like Google Street View and Google Earth and blogs and 4Chan and whatever remains of journalism in the twenty-first century, and every other frigging thing out there.

Think of where this is going. We’ve made maps, representations, of the real world since the beginning. We called them words and ideas and symbols and myths, and sometimes, actual maps. We learned to manipulate these representations. We realized we could use them to highlight certain facts and ignore others, and so could understand the real world better—and alter it to suit our interests.

We’ve had conflicts not only because our interests collide, but often because our representations of the world, our maps, feel more real than the actual world. Or they block out our view of the actual world. Indeed, we tend to bury our faces in our maps and forget to put them down and look where we’re going.

Get out your Hawaiian shirts, folks. Everybody’s a tourist.

But now comes the internet, which, among other things, is like a huge map—not only of physical space, but of cultural space as well. And with things like Twendr and Google Earth, we’re updating that map in nearly real time, with commentary.

I mean, the internet—I can’t say it’s alive, exactly; but it’s certainly some kind of evolving organic system. It’s a cyborg brain with people for neurons and electronics for synapses.

And the thing is: this vast representational network, this colossal meta-map, is becoming more complex every second, like some zygotic panopticon.

We can imagine a day when the map becomes more detailed than the territory. And as this happens, we’re developing biotech and nanotech that will one day give us the power to edit the physical world as easily as we can edit photos and documents.

The map, already approaching 1:1 scale, will bleed off the page and into the world, The word “reality” will have no meaning beyond the conversation about it, shifting with our desires and delusions. The medium will literally be the message. We will truly dwell in a collective hallucination that every saint and sinner, every starred commenter and asshat troll will tug and twist with all available might. Whether that hallucination will be consensual and mutually worthwhile, or if it’ll be a bad trip for some or all—that’s anybody’s guess.

But maybe, if we know we’re all hallucinating, we can choose to make it a good one; because we’ll know that every act, every idea we nurture, will contribute (however minutely) to what the next moment brings.

Maybe we’re already living in a Matrix-like world mediated by digital mapping and manipulation, and thereby shaped by the hopes and fears of the minds contained therein. Maybe the singularity happened a long long time ago, and we just don’t realize it. Maybe we’re gods and mortals by turns… fallen from Olympus with self-imposed amnesia and arbitrary limitations, just so we can experience the whole existence thing with fresh and passionate eyes—even if it means we also suffer, and are occasionally brutal to each other. I mean, it’s the challenge that makes the game worth playing, right?

Or maybe I’m just a lunatic, and you should ignore everything I’ve said here.

Choice is quite a thing, no?

So, the good news?  My computer malfunction is more or less solved.  Without getting into details, it turns out I wasn’t being cracked, specifically.  The software was out of date on one of my firewalls, but not where I could easily update it.  Now that it’s been taken care of, I get almost no link spam and sites like this blog are now accessible again.

So, problem solved.  I’m back baby!

Big news?  Not really… just some quick updates:

• Although the game is approaching a more final form, it still hasn’t  gelled properly in a couple of important ways.  I’m thinking of consulting the Forge about this, but the Forge is entering the “Winter” of its intended lifecycle, and so activity there has slowed down a bit.  I haven’t been active on there for months myself, either.
• The Christmas holiday was incredibly busy and tiring, and I’m only now really getting back to normal.
• Got a couple of new & interesting videos to post on the topic of spirituality / psychology. They’ll probably be the subject of my next post, so tune in if you can…  if anyone can hear me…

*crickets*

Oh well.  In the meantime, be good, keep it real—or as real as reality gets—and enjoy your evening!

Yup, so this time it’s not my fault that my posts are infrequent. My home network has been badly cracked and/or infected by some sort of crazy redirect virus, which prevents me from actually seeing my blog page from my home system.  And with only modest computer experience & resources it’s taking some time to resolve. But have no fear, it will be resolved, even if I have to call on the c00l p0wurz of y3 0lde d1g1t4l g0dz of y0r3!  Or the power of Grayskull.  You know… whichever.

Just this: A story from the Onion about the religious punishment of stoning in Iran. Told from the point of view of a man throwing the stones, the back-handed ha-ha-only-serious cynicism of a standard Onion story gives way to something eerily touching. It’s the apotheosis of gritty satire—reminding us of how every one of us dies a little when barbarism and tyranny pretend to be religion.

This:

That is all.

I love the irony of that headline—because today’s post is all about a similarly sensational headline on YouTube. “Did the Vatican Create Islam?” the video’s title asks, enticing, provoking you to watch—whose curiosity can resist such a bold claim?

So watch I did, and after enduring the painfully slow text, slideshow, and ominious music (and the second and third part videos), I was informed that the Roman Catholic Church had secretly trained and guided Mohammed to create a social movement that would wipe out the “true” Christians that the church hated, and re-take Jerusalem from the Jews and deliver it to the Vatican with minimal effort. (continue reading…)

So, the follow up atheism post will have to wait for now.  In the meantime there’s this…

A user on io9 posted a link to something called Lifenaut, which plays with the transhumanist notion of an uploaded or copied consciousness.  The idea is that you store a genetic sample in their cryo facility, and program your virtual avatar with your personality and experiences, and as the technology develops, they’ll be able to make a copy of you long after you die.  They say it’s like immortality—although I think that’s pretty silly, because a copy of a person is not the original person.  Still, the idea of near-perfect simulations of people is intriguing, if somewhat unsettling.

They have created a few historical figures that you can chat with; like primitive AI “constructs” straight out of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy.  They’re far from perfect: Lifenaut’s Abraham Lincoln just talks like an encyclopedia; replying to anything you say to it/him by reciting irrelevant facts about himself.  But Gandhi is a lot more interesting:

The conversation I just had with him is really quite hilarious; and even a little spooky.  Spooky, because I recently watched the first episode of “Through the Wormhole,” with Morgan Freeman, in which they talk about cosmology, including the theory that the universe we know is really a clever digital simulation—a matrix of sorts.  So, imagine the gymnastics my mind did when AI Gandhi insisted he was the real human, and I was the program… and that’s only the beginning of the weirdness.

Here’s the transcript: (continue reading…)

A lot of people on the glorious interwebz have raised issue with the lack of subtlety in James Cameron’s recent film Avatar. It’s a fairly derivative plot, featuring a conflict between a heavily stereo-typed military-industrial complex and a fairly contrived native society (which incidentally, is also the central conflict in Martian Cycles, but hopefully with more depth).  In any case, people have brought up the issue of White Guilt and subtle racism. Now, I’m not disagreeing with these articles, exactly. I just think they’re kind of missing the point. (continue reading…)

So it’s been a busy last couple of months, hence the lack of posts. One of my best friends just got married, so there was a lot of gearing up for that. Lots of work hammering out core mechanics for the two games, lots of paperwork and family stuff going on that needed taking care of, plus the onset of the Christmas season…

In any case, I’ve got several topics for discussion lined up, including: A metaphysics of gaming, which is amusing and maybe interesting, if a little far out. I may discuss an intolerant atheist’s misguided outburst on Wikipedia’s Religion article talk page, although I’m not sure it’s worth the time (except for the reminder that no one, theist or atheist, is immune to believing too much in their own bullshit). There’s also a couple of spirituality-related projects (i.e. homework for anyone interested!) that I have in mind, and of course the standard design project updates.

I’ll hopefully be posting one or two of those later on today. So, stay tuned folks, there’s more to come…