misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
May 19. Three weeks ago Jerah recommended a new sci-fi novel called The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. That link goes to a nice review by Cory Doctorow. I got the book from the library and finished reading it a few days ago. It's very good! You know the kind of plot twist where the author has been carefully hiding something from you, and then suddenly reveals it? I hate that annoying fad, and The Windup Girl doesn't do it at all. Instead, it has the good kind of plot twist, where a character makes a crazy move that seems to surprise even the author. Also it has impressive moral complexity, leaving you totally on your own to decide what's wrong or right. And best of all, this is the first fiction I've seen about the medium-distant future that sees it the same way I do: Oil-based civilization will collapse, but large complex systems will survive and regrow using a different resource base; and biotech will be much more important than computers.
I have only one complaint. Why does so much "quality" science fiction take place in a cutthroat world where everyone is trying to fuck everyone else? Why are so many characters either hyperselfish or agonizing over their own inadequacy? I have a theory: this is the personality that develops in humans who are allied to powerful technology. Because the technology does the hard stuff for them, they never develop inner strength, or learn to cooperate with other people. And sci-fi authors are noticing this trend and exaggerating it.
Compare this with fantasy. In dumb fantasy, characters are intrinsically good or evil, and this determines whether they use magic for good or evil purposes. In smart fantasy, evil characters become evil because of magic, and they are opposed by good characters using inner strength, cooperation, and the power of nature.
In this context, biotech becomes extremely interesting, and that's all I'm going to say for now.
May 19. Emails on Monday's subject continue to roll in. Even among readers of this site, people have stronger feelings about dating than about the end of the world as we know it. I swear, when we're all wandering the blasted postapocalyptic landscape, we're still going to be mostly looking for sex and love. Anyway, if you want to continue the discussion, you might check out the Attract Women Anywhere blog (thanks Isaac). Compared to most seduction writers, Cameron respects women and really thinks about the issues.
May 18. Today is the 30th anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption. I was 12 years old, living in Pullman, 250 miles east of the mountain. The ash cloud looked like a spooky giant thunderhead, and when it settled in, it got darker than night, and the ash fell like fast snowflakes. Volcanic "ash" is finely powdered rock. We got about an inch of it on the ground, and got the last few weeks of school off.
So here are some links on the latest disaster. A couple weeks ago Dmitry Orlov explained why the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is an American Chernobyl. And here's a good Daily Kos piece about how the leaking methane is worse than the oil. "3000 times worse" is deceptive. There are 3000 cubic feet of gas for every barrel of oil, but the actual damage might be only 100 times worse. The worst part is that the methane is depleting the oxygen in the water. Here's a post I did last summer on the possible coming anoxic extinction: If the ocean has no oxygen, it fills up with anaerobic microbes, which produce hydrogen sulfide gas, which bubbles up and poisons life on land. And check it out: air tests from the Louisiana coast reveal that "hydrogen sulfide has been detected at concentrations more than 100 times greater than the level known to cause physical reactions in people."
So that's why I only wanted to spend one day writing about dating problems. But here's a link that ties the subjects together: Being Bad at Relationships Is Good for Survival. Researchers fed smoke into a room, and the people who are clingy in relationships were the first ones to notice the smoke, and the people who are aloof in relationships were the first ones to leave the room.
May 17. I have a lot of other stuff to write about so I'd like to finish off today's subject. Dermot writes:
I gave some links to a romantically challenged co-worker. He found that the tips worked, and ended up in a toxic relationship with a nymphomaniac. He moved past that phase, and when he found women responding to the techniques, he was disgusted by it.
I feel the same way, and not just about techniques for attracting women, but any techniques for influencing people on a subconscious and senseless level. The better it works, the more I despise them, and I don't want to spend my life among people I despise. If I'm applying for a job, and I hear that wearing a certain kind of pants will make them more likely to hire me, I have a strong urge to wear exactly the wrong pants to wake them the fuck up.
But it also occurs to me that this is a luxury. If your kids are starving, you're going to wear the hypnotic pants. We live on a planet of zombie monkeys, and we have to choose our battles, and compromise between meeting our needs and making the world better.
May 17. (permalink) Brian comments on the seduction community:
For better and worse, the Seduction Community has changed my life. I never realized that people were so irrational, that they responded to the silliest manipulations, and that sexual attraction was based on such crazy irrational things. It's crazy to think that there are people whose lives revolve around figuring out ways to get laid as many times as possible by as many attractive women as possible. It's really disheartening me and has changed the way I view humans, for the worse.
It's also made me much more protective of my significant other. I never realized why I was trapped in the "friend zone" with everyone, and reading things from the Seduction Community revolutionized my approach, and has made me much more attractive to women in general. But... when I thought my girlfriend loved me because I was awesome, fun, wanted to change the world, I was never worried about losing her. When I think that she is attracted to me because I'm cocky/funny, and initiated attraction a certain way, now I'm worried that any guy can do that. Especially when reading pick-up artist blogs about how these guys get happily married women to sleep with them, within one day of meeting them. It's really fucked up. It's hard for me to ever think I can fully love/trust someone again.
This is similar to how rich guys never know if women really love them, or just love their money. And there is a simple and difficult solution: Don't use the techniques. It will make it harder for you to find someone, but when you do, you will know that she likes you for something you have and other guys don't.
But this answer is too simple, because when you look through the advice that pickup artists give, some of it is psychopathic and some of it is insightful and benign. Here's an example that two readers sent: The Sixteen Commandments Of Poon. In the third commandment, he tells you not to make a woman the center of your existence, but then immediately says that "women want to subordinate themselves". Yes, this is a culture that can't even imagine a relationship where one person is not controlling the other. The sixteenth is great advice: "Never be afraid to lose her." But in this context, the seventh is telling: Keep another woman as a backup, because otherwise your main woman can threaten to leave you, which "will rend your soul if you are faced with contemplating the empty abyss alone."
These guys don't have it. And not having it is both the cause and the effect of faking it. Consider number eleven: "Be irrationally self-confident." Why not build up a basis for rational confidence? Motivational gurus who talk about "confidence" are exploiting a bug in the English language, which uses the same word for two different things. One is cockiness, and the other might be called mastery: having skills and being aware of them. Cockiness can be bootstrapped, but skills must be learned through struggling and failure. Cockiness is a tempting road, and it can take you a long way, but eventually you have to go back to the beginning and start over. The "empty abyss" is the place where you should have built something real to stand on.
I follow the straight and patient road of not-seduction. Here's a little list of rules:
1. Be Transparent. Show what you're feeling; say what you're thinking. Offer and accept communications at face value. Do this from the beginning, and the bad relationships will run from you like shadows from the light. Now, this doesn't mean you can't use non-verbal techniques to make people feel better -- but here is the test: If you were to explain everything you are doing and why, would the other person feel exploited, or honored?
2. Become Skilled at Being Single. Learn to make good food, pay your bills, motivate yourself, stay sane, and get sexual release, by yourself and with help from friends. Then why do you even need a partner? Exactly. But you might still appreciate a partner, which is a stronger position.
3. Embrace the Friend Zone. Having friends is a good thing. The suffering of the "friend zone" is an illusion created by desire. Let go of desire and the prison becomes paradise -- or the false friendship is exposed. Of course, you might still fantasize about another kind of relationship. The key is that you are not holding tension between where you are and where you are not.
4. Broaden Your Standards. Typically, guys who complain that women are attracted to assholes, are themselves attracted to asshole women. (Actually, this explains a lot about pickup artist culture.) Remember that nice person who you rejected for not being sexy enough? That's karma: you must follow the rules you make. At the same time, nobody wants to be settled for. Practice valuing qualities that are valuable.
5. Be Like Water. Do not push anything, but move instantly to fill any opening. This will not generate nearly as much sex as aggressive seduction, but it will make it better, by filtering out sex for the sake of proving something, and leaving only sex based on strong mutual attraction.
6. Sex Is Not the Goal. There is no goal. There is only the process: be who you are, and engage with what you encounter on that road.
May 14. Random links on the usual subjects:
The latest Archdruid post, After Money, has a great section on the transition from the Roman empire to the feudal system. Money and lending almost vanished, and symbolic wealth was replaced by direct relationships based on labor and land.
This Oil Drum article has the most pessimistic (or the most optimistic) analysis I've seen on how much coal is left: It's worse than you think. China is now a net importer of coal, one study says global coal might peak this year, and there might not even be enough extractable coal for catastrophic climate change. If we do have decades of coal left, I think we're going to get an anoxic event.
You've probably heard that using a dishwasher is more efficient than washing dishes by hand. I always doubted that, and this short video debunks it. A guy shows how he washes enough dishes to mostly fill a dishwasher using only a gallon of water, and speculates that only the most wasteful hand-washing technique uses more water than a dishwasher.
And this fascinating article, Linux Versus E. coli, looks at complex systems, and discovers that the one with fewer middle managers, and more independent modules, is more efficient and resilient.
May 13. Yesterday on the girlfriend subject, I gave almost no information, so it was interesting to see how people filled in the blanks out of their own imaginations. My favorite comment came from Greg: "At the end of the day all I want is a best friend to make out with." And he asked for my overall view of couple stuff. I think what we call romantic love is mostly pathological, and the healthier kind of love develops only after you've known each other for a few years. So partners should mostly choose each other based on compatibility, but it's okay to balance this with physical attraction and chemistry.
Also, I think the "seduction community" had some good insights and then went over to the dark side. In any context -- sex, money, politics -- if you benefit from influencing other people on a subconscious level, then you are making an alliance with unawareness -- a deal with the devil. If you know how to get what you want from others by "pushing their buttons", the ethical choice is: 1) don't do it, and 2) draw their attention to it so they learn to not let anyone else do it either. Human awakening is going to take us thousands of years, and the time to start is now. But in the short term, this choice makes your life more difficult, and it requires some self-discipline.
May 12. I'm single again, sort of. I don't want to get into the details here, but we have made a decision to take some time off for logistical reasons. And while I'm writing about myself again, this Onion article is close to how I feel all the time: Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once.
May 11. Something I've been putting off for weeks, from reddit IAmA: I used to have a personal assistant. He put an ad on craigslist looking for a personal assistant, offering $300 a month, and got hundreds of applicants! Related: Fiverr, where people post things they're willing to do for five dollars.
An ideal society would adapt to economic decline by keeping everyone employed but reducing their hours. But our actual society is too inflexible to do that, so it lays off half the workers, who become destitute and depressed, and keeps the other half overworked and exhausted. But now the informal economy is adapting to that, by finding ways for the overemployed to pass some of their work and money to the underemployed.
May 10. Now that it's getting warm, I expect to be spending more time on the land. Also I'll be hanging out more with Kelly, and for the next year or two I'll be dealing with family stuff that I'd rather keep private. So you can expect a general long-term decrease in blogging, but I don't plan to disappear for more than a week at a time.
Also, sometimes it seems like everything I want to say, someone else has already said. For example, today a reader sends this Wired article, The Lost Tribes of Radio Shack, which back on April 19 said the same thing I was going to say on May 4, about how the American relationship with technology has changed from making and doing stuff to buying and throwing away toys. Another reader sends this Joseph Tainter article on Social Complexity and Sustainability, and Tainter can think circles around me on these issues. The thing I can do is summarize the issues for people whose IQ is only 120, but I usually do that by reading the Archdruid, who translates it from 150 to 120, and then I just have to translate it from long to short.
Finally, another reader mentions that someone has already done a good vinyl rip of Gord's Gold. Don't click that unless you really want it, because the page is loaded with adware. This is the first time I've heard of 24-bit/96kHz audio, which is apparently three times as detailed as wav files on CD's. I'm skeptical that anyone can hear the difference, since it's already damn hard to hear the difference between wav and high-bitrate mp3. It's also available in "Redbook", which means CD audio, in this case in the form of three big rar files which together uncompress to the whole album on flac files. You can find free software to convert flac to wav or mp3. Anyway, this rip definitely sounds better than mine, so I've separated and uploaded the "Affair on 8th Avenue" flac to Megaupload and Depositfiles, and I've put the links permanently on my favorite songs page.
May 7. Last night I finished a project I've been working on for a while. Two of the songs on my favorite songs list have never existed in digital audio form... until now. One of them is the Gord's Gold version of Gordon Lightfoot's "Affair on 8th Avenue", which was cut from the CD for space, and not put back when CD's went from 74 to 80 minutes. I arranged for a high-quality vinyl rip, but unfortunately the record I bought, which looked flawless, was not. So it's still a bit scratchy. Here's a zip file, containing the song in 320kbps mp3 form, plus a text file, on Megaupload and Depositfiles. (Mediafire kills my browser.)
The other song is "Old Enough To Know" by Jack Nitzsche, which plays in the background in the film Cutter's Way. The soundtrack was never released, so I had to buy the DVD, figure out how to rip the audio, and then most of the song was obscured by dialogue and other noise, so I cut it down to the only part that plays clearly, the first 49 seconds. Again, zip with 320kbps mp3 plus text: Megaupload and Depositfiles.
I'd like to think these are safe from copyright takedown since you can't buy them, but intellectual property has always been about control, not money.
May 7. Two more scraps from readers: the full article from yesterday's post, which is less helpful than Staniford's summary. And a long PDF article on the Happy Planet Index.
May 6. Scary Early Warning post: Odds of Cooking the Grandkids. Stuart Staniford summarizes a subscription-only paper that finds a chance that the planet will heat up so much that, in many areas, "if you were outside for an extended period during the hottest days of the year, even in the shade with wet clothing, you would die." These include some of the most heavily populated areas in the world: India, northeast China, and the eastern United States.
May 6. Smart blogs sent by readers: The View From Brittany is mostly about collapse issues. And Heretic's Way has general deep thoughts, including some good stuff about wealth and poverty. The same author also does one called Kingdom of Introversion.
May 4. (permalink) Again on the subject of technological complexity: Wind turbines without gears are lighter, cheaper, more reliable. This is because they're simpler, with half as many moving parts, and permanent magnets instead of electromagnets in the generators. Engineers love to make this kind of innovation, and it's exactly what we need to smooth the ongoing collapse. If energy producers know how to simplify while preserving function, it's a good sign that the energy crash will not be catastrophic. But...
When was the last time you saw this kind of innovation in a consumer product? Can you imagine the next generation Ford F-series or Toyota Camry being smaller and cheaper with only half as many parts? The first Apple II could be taken apart without tools, and came with a schematic of the entire circuitry. What would it take for Apple to go back to that?
The deeper issue here is that consumers are powerless. Or, humans have fallen into a powerless role that we call being a "consumer". We have forgotten how to produce or create anything, except as part of a giant machine that eats the Earth to generate garbage and control. In this economic context, any business that empowers us erodes its own profit base. Apple built a great reputation by giving us participation in power, but its stock didn't take off until it took away our power and gave us toys.
But this economic context is not normal. I remember a saying from the late 90's tech bubble, and nothing so stupid has ever been mistaken for wisdom: "What doesn't grow, dies." It's true that what doesn't adapt dies, but getting bigger is a bad way to adapt, because it makes future adaptations more and more difficult.
So, today's big companies that make consumer products will mostly die out with the consumption paradigm, and the adaptations will be made by small new systems. What will those adaptations be? In the next age, the goal of a business will not be to enable investors to increase their money by doing nothing, but to enable customers to improve their lives by doing autonomous work. There are already businesses selling shovels and canning jars and tractor clutches. But if advanced technologies can be taken apart by users, the next step is to make the parts and let users put them together in different ways. Here's a related John Robb post, Modular Tools for Resilient Communities. And the next step is to just make the instructions for making the parts, and the next step after that is to give the instructions away free.