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
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
February 29. Three articles from the Guardian about video games. First, 10 great video games about the meaning of life. I've played Passage, which despite its simplicity is so emotionally powerful that I don't want to play it again, but I probably should. I've also played several games in the Civilization series: they're all addictive, none of them are about the meaning of life, and Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is the best.
Firewatch: how games are getting inside the heads of their characters. Roger Ebert famously said that games will never be art, which was not only a failure of imagination but a failure of logic: interactivity is a dimension, and anything interactive can match and exceed anything you can do with film or other non-interactive experiences. Anyway, the article has several examples of games that blur the line between game and not game.
And coming later this year, No Man's Sky: the game where you can explore 18 quintillion planets.
"No game has made it possible to fly down to a planet, and for it to be planet-sized, and feature life, ecology, lakes, caves, waterfalls, and canyons, then seamlessly fly up through the stratosphere and take to space again."
The game works through cutting edge procedural generation, where solar systems and planets are created on the fly as you explore them. I happen to think reality is created this way too, and I'm excited enough about No Man's Sky that I might buy a gaming computer so I don't have to wait five years to play it. If you're skeptical, here's a reddit thread, How might the game be pathetically underwhelming? But all of these imagined problems could be fixed by later versions of the game, or new games on the same kind of foundation, or existing games using fractal math to add limitless size and complexity. Imagine Legend of Zelda with 18 quintillion dungeons and towns.
Computer graphics are well into diminishing returns: every doubling of computing power makes the pictures prettier by a smaller margin. But procedural generation is a new frontier, and it could improve as much in the next ten years as graphics improved in the 1990's. I'm wondering how long it will take for AI creativity to match good human creativity, or if that's even possible for AI as we know it.
February 26. This new Matt Taibbi essay, How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable, is so much better than anything I've written that I should take a break from writing about politics, but I'll probably fail because this election is so crazy.
For the weekend, drugs! From AskReddit, What does an LSD trip feel like? And some fascinating thoughts about How to secretly communicate with people on LSD, using afterimages or "tracers" which are normally only visible on psychedelics. I have yet to try LSD, and I failed to trip on mushrooms because of a high natural tolerance.
Several readers suggested treatments for restless legs syndrome, but the one thing I've found that works is high CBD marijuana edibles. Of the many cannabinoids, THC is what makes everything wonderful and CBD is what makes you relaxed, and it also synergizes with THC and makes it work better, so I bought a high-CBD strain and mixed it into my latest batch of cannabutter. A good dose keeps my legs calm for up to a week, and I'm not sure this is good because RLS forces me to build leg strength.
I've also been experimenting with lemongrass essential oil, which is loaded with myrcene. Myrcene is already present in marijuana, more in some strains than others, and more in fresh weed than old weed. It has lots of medical benefits, but the benefit I notice is stronger highs. I mixed about one percent lemongrass oil into my cannabutter, and if you do this, add it without heating it much above body temperature because myrcene is highly unstable.
I also accidentally discovered a way to delay an edible high. Two weeks ago, testing a new batch, I went to bed at midnight thinking it was super-weak and I'd have to change the recipe, and then I woke up at 3AM at a [9]! I think this happened because I ate the cannabutter a half hour after eating a big meal, so the enzymes in my stomach were used up on the food, and the drug snuck through to my intestines.
My cannabutter recipe: 1) Grind the bud. 2) Bake at 240F for 45 minutes, or 90 minutes for a high-CBD strain. 3) Optional: mix with 100 proof vodka, just enough to get it all moistened, which is supposed to help with the terpenes but might not make any difference. 4) In a pan, mix with clarified butter or coconut oil, and cook it at a low temperature for a few minutes, or longer if you have to drive off the water and alcohol from the vodka, but keep the temperature below 250F. 5) Strain with a gold coffee filter and put the oil in a jar in the fridge. 6) Optional: to get the last of the goodies out, add water to the strained bud, simmer, strain again, cool, and take the butter off the top. 7) Optional: barely remelt finished cannabutter, add one drop lemongrass essential oil per teaspoon of butter, and mix well. 8) Test potency. I would start with an eighth of a teaspoon (about half a gram), and wait an hour before taking more.
February 24. Continuing on American politics, I'm finally afraid of Donald Trump.
Before I get to that, here's why I was thinking he might be okay as president: 1) Until recently he was a moderate, and he's probably just pretending to be an extremist to exploit the Republican base and get the nomination. 2) American voters like to give the presidency and congress to different parties, and we might do better with a moderate Republican president and a Democratic congress than the other way around. 3) Trump might break through the gridlock and take the system apart just enough that it could be put back together better. 4) The Trans-Pacific Partnership is really bad, Hillary supports it and Trump opposes it.
Yesterday I saw two links that changed my mind, and the crazy thing is that Trump supporters love both of these links. One is Winter is Trumping, where someone has photoshopped bits of Trump's speeches into scenes from Game of Thrones. For a while now I've been imagining the presidential candidates fighting it out in Westeros, and it seemed like Trump would be the clear winner because he's sly and confident and ruthless. But when I actually see his facial expressions and tone of voice next to Game of Thrones actors, he's not a good king or even a good evil king -- he's a snot-nosed buffoon who would not have made it to the third season.
The other link is the Trump For President subreddit, and what stands out to me is the emotional tone. I've never seen a political community that reminded me so much of a 13 year old bully, with so many posts pointing out enemies and smugly condemning them as disloyal or impure or weak.
Trump's supporters frighten me more than Trump himself. One meltdown and his career is over, but they could be around for decades, and other politicians will tap into their energy. It almost seems inevitable that someone will ride them into another world war, and the same thing could be happening in other countries. I fear this is a global emotional illness related to economic decline, and I might get into more detail in a future post.
February 22. Stray technology links. Is it time to rethink recycling? Given the costs and benefits of recycling vs raw materials, some experts say that we should be recycling almost all cardboard and aluminum, and almost no plastic and glass.
Why I don't like smartphones, a short page with several arguments that you might not have seen yet, mostly about how smart phones take our power away.
How a College Student Used Creative Commons to Dominate Political Photography. Professional photographers are upset that this guy is undermining their jobs with free photos, but I think he's a piece of a better world that still has pieces missing. When we have an unconditional basic income, then no photographers will have to be professionals, because they'll all have the option to be hobbyists, working forward from what they enjoy instead of backward from what makes money. It will be the same for hairdressers, landscapers, graphic designers, and so on. If they let you do it your way, you'll do it for free, but if they want it done their way, they'll have to pay you. Then it will become obvious to everyone that money is about control.
Related: Bernie's Army of Coders. Bernie's volunteer-driven bottom-up campaign organization is not only cheaper than Hillary's top-down organization, it's more creative and adaptable. The problem is, the political system is still completely top-down. Even if Bernie becomes president, his supporters will be out in the cold because there's no mechanism to channel their energy into the workings of government. This frustration is what drives revolutions, and it's why the system that follows a revolution is rarely better, because humans have only had large complex systems for a few thousand years, and we've barely begun to explore ways to organize them other than hierarchy.
February 19. Continuing from the last post, a reader sends this link about structured procrastination. The idea is that if you have a big job you're putting off, it's psychologically easier to do other things; so a good motivational strategy is to put something at the top of your list that seems more important than it is, and put the stuff you really want to do lower on the list so you feel like you're cheating when you do it. This reminds me of something Joe Abercrombie said, that when he writes he feels like he's looking at porn.
I think this is related to the fact that great creative works are rarely respectable in their own time. If you look at the stuff that stands the test of time, in its own time it's usually considered either too commercial or too weird to be high art. This makes sense, because the less you feel like you're doing something Important, and the more you feel like you're doing something trashy, the easier it is to get the work done, and I think it's also easier to unlock real creativity.
My taste in music and art are at opposite ends of the trash spectrum. I've been trying to get into Cerberus Shoal's later albums and I've found just one thing I really like, and this will sound like awful noise to most of you, but the section from 3:20-4:10 of Baby Gal puts me in ecstacy. Meanwhile, maybe because I'm a beginner at art appreciation, my taste runs to kitsch. I recently discovered the Imaginary Colorscapes subreddit, and my favorite artists in that style are Caring Wong and Scy Nem.
February 17. Yesterday on the Showerthoughts subreddit there was a post on one of my favorite subjects: using game metaphors to think about the meaning of life. The post said "Procrastinating is just enjoying all the side quests in life whilst you delay the main quest story mission." I read the whole thread looking for something insightful, and found this comment by SynapticDisaster:
There is no "main quest" in life. Life is all side quests. Grind is what you do when the side quests you really want to complete are too difficult to pull off, so you resign yourself to doing some mind-numbingly monotonous shit that isn't rewarding in and of itself, but levels/gears you to get where you want to go and do what you want to do. But the gear, the skills and the henchmen are only important if having them on their own satisfies you.
If you treat life like a levelling treadmill, it's going to end up as unrewarding as grinding one in a game. It feels great to accomplish something and gain an extra level, and other players might ooh and ahh at your equipment, but in the end you just might find yourself envying the ones that played the game passing up all the leet gear and instead spent every minute laughing their asses off beating the game with the broom.
(For more about this in the context of games, here's a good reddit thread on MMO grinding.)
February 15. Bunch o' links about human development and potential. Today's teens are better than you, and we can prove it. Well, they're doing fewer bad things than my generation, but it's hard to know if they're doing more good things.
When Are You Really an Adult? The article is really long but the big idea is at the beginning:
If you think of the transition to "adulthood" as a collection of markers -- getting a job, moving away from your parents, getting married, and having kids -- for most of history, with the exception of the 1950s and 60s, people did not become adults any kind of predictable way.
How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off. The author starts with the observation that child prodigies tend to fizzle as adults because they were learning success on their parents' terms, instead of learning creativity. Then he drops this bomb:
One study compared the families of children who were rated among the most creative 5 percent in their school system with those who were not unusually creative. The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule.
Why Quantity Should be Your Priority. I've seen the anecdote about the ceramics class before, where students who were graded on quantity cranked out hundreds of pieces and eventually did much better work than students who were graded on quality and did only a few pieces. I doubt that it actually happened, but it would happen, and I would explain it like this: When you do work in the physical world, you learn things you could never learn by doing the work in your head.February 12. I was planning to write more about motivation, but I'm just not smart enough today to put the ideas together, so instead I'll post some stray links about drugs and brains. From reddit last month, Addicts: What started it all? And a bigger thread full of great stories, Alcoholics of Reddit: What is your, "and then I realized I was an alcoholic" moment?
New drug: After years of daily 'wake 'n' bakes' I faced my battle with psychological weed addiction. The author thinks she had "amazing story ideas" while high and couldn't remember them. I write mine down, so I know they're mostly lame. But I still think marijuana is a miracle drug in moderation. Recently in my weekly sessions I've had deep psychological insights that I would never have had sober. I used to think communication was 90% on the surface, and now I think it's 90% or more under the surface. My life has been full of baffling conflicts and failures that are gradually making sense as I become retroactively aware of subtext.
Could Ketamine Be Used to Vaccinate for Depression or PTSD? The conventional view is that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, but the evidence is weak, and ketamine works according to a different model in which depression is caused by stress damaging the brain's physical structure.
And No Brainer is a fascinating post about people who have above average IQ despite having 95% water where their brain should be. The idea is, if a tiny brain can rewire itself to work as well as a full brain, what if we did the same thing to a full brain?
February 11. Loose end on yesterday's post: Anne informs me that Jared Diamond's story about how the Vikings in Greenland starved rather than eat fish is too simple. If I get a good link I'll post it, but the general idea is that it would have been really hard, not only mentally but technologically, for them to switch their whole way of life to seafood. This is good news, because it keeps open the possibility that they could have made the switch if it was a little easier. So maybe Americans will not fight too hard against an economic revolution, in their own interests, to decouple labor from money.
February 10. A week ago I argued that Bernie Sanders voters will get older and continue supporting left-wing policies because they'll still be poor. This analysis by fivethirtyeight has changed my mind: Why Young Democrats Love Bernie Sanders. Of course it's not for economic reasons, and I should have known that, because people always care more deeply about cultural identity than economics. The extreme example would be the Vikings in Greenland, who died of starvation rather than change their cultural identity from beef and grain eaters to fish eaters.
Young Americans, even if they're smart and poor, still accept the American-Calvinist framing story, where your income shows how good a person you are, or money is the phlebotinum of meritocracy. In this context wealth redistribution feels unfair, and young Americans oppose it almost as much as old Americans. They support Bernie Sanders for the same reason they supported Ron Paul: they feel left out of the dominant system, and helping an outsider break into that system is the only way they feel like they're participating.
In normal politics this is temporary, and by the time a new generation is in their 30's, the clunky political establishment will figure out how to make them feel included -- even if it doesn't serve their interests. If this doesn't happen, and older and older people remain radical, then some new factor is at work.
February 8. Today, two loooong articles with some optimism. Why America Is Moving Left argues that the whole political landscape is shifting, as shown by the willingness of both parties to take ideas from the left seriously. I still don't like Hillary but I'm impressed with how much she's changing her position toward Bernie Sanders. I remember back in 2000, when Ralph Nader was drawing much larger audiences than Al Gore, and Gore did not move one inch toward Nader's platform. The article also mentions the paradox of Obama: that by running on the promise of change from within, and not delivering it, he energized people to try more radical strategies.
Complexity Rising (thanks Gannon) is a detailed look at complexity in human systems, and the big idea is that our challenges are growing in complexity, and soon they will be too complex to be solved by hierarchy. Then the old systems will either collapse, or adapt by gradually shifting power from top-down control to lateral connections.
February 5. Oh no -- 2016 is already ten percent over! Today I want to write about personal stuff, partly inspired by some emails. Last month my restless legs syndrome was really acting up. It's like an itch in my leg muscles that I can "scratch" by vigorously moving them, and if there were a pill that cured it, you couldn't pay me to take it. Leg strength is correlated with brain fitness, and I can spend a half hour a night doing one-legged squats and heel lifts, not because of self-discipline, but because I have an overwhelming urge to do so.
If only I had an overwhelming urge to write novels or play music. We imagine that highly successful people have some kind of magical virtue, when really they have various restless syndromes that compel them to do things that other people happen to find valuable.
As I get older, motivation is the only psychological skill that doesn't get easier. It feels like I'm in a room with a bunch of locked doors, which represent different activities and how hard it is to force myself to do them. Every night I have to push through a tiny wall of pain to floss my teeth, and the one reason I look forward to death (so far) is that I'll never have to floss again. For stuff I don't have to do every day, I watch the doors, and when one of them partially opens I dash through. "Oh, I sort of feel like cleaning the floors or going to the store, so I'd better do it right now or it will be much more painful later."
Other doors lead to long-term projects, but if it's just a hallway with one locked door after another, inevitably I wear out and have to stop. So far the only open hallway I've found -- the only activity that I continue to feel like doing, and that seems valuable, is this blog. But how do we know what's really valuable? It's an impossible question, but we still have to try to answer it. I try to find a compromise between what I feel like doing now, and what I think I'll look back later and be glad I did.
February 3. Some quick notes on the Iowa caucus. Trump's weak second place finish shows that it is possible to underestimate the American people, and if he really wants to be president, he has to do fewer PR stunts and act more like a serious candidate. For the Democrats, Bernie's virtual tie is a symbolic win, but in terms of delegate math, Iowa is the kind of young, white, educated state that he needs to win 2-1 to be on track for the nomination. To have any chance to overcome Hillary's superdelegates, he has to do much better than expected among black people.
Bernie's performance among young people is great news for the future: he got eight out of ten voters under 30, and six out of ten aged 30-45. You might say, in 20 years when those voters are older they'll switch to establishment candidates because they'll be better off financially. But they won't! That's age of growth thinking: "a rising tide lifts all boats." There will never be a rising tide again, in 20 years most of those voters will still be poor, and their grandparents will replaced by more young people who want cancellation of debts, an unconditional basic income, and a financial transaction tax.
More about the new economy (thanks Andy): Economics might be very wrong about growth. Experts are gradually noticing that growth is no longer exponential but linear, but the whole financial industry is still based on exponential growth, which is why it keeps collapsing.
And The Fed wants to test how banks would handle negative interest rates. I think the whole economy should be built on a foundation where concentrations of wealth tend to shrink over time instead of growing, and Charles Eisenstein wrote a good chapter on this a while back: The Currency of Cooperation.
February 1. I've put off writing about presidential politics because it's easy to get swept up and say dumb things. A few months ago I thought Hillary Clinton would crush Bernie Sanders, because I remember how in 2008 Obama barely beat Hillary despite being an establishment candidate with an all-time great campaign organization. Bernie has almost no superdelegates, his organization is nothing special, and Hillary has learned from the blunders she made in 2008, and yet Bernie is running strong. This makes me think the whole framework has changed, and candidates who can brand themselves as outsiders now have a big advantage with voters.
A few months ago I thought Donald Trump was a joke, and now I see him as an unstoppable juggernaut. Read this month old reddit comment about Trump's mastery of the media. I would go farther and say he has an intuitive understanding of mass psychology, and he's been laying the foundation for this run since the the 1990's. Because he has established a persona where people already expect him to say ridiculous things, he's gaffe-proof. Other candidates have to walk a tightrope between boring the voters and alienating them, while Trump is walking a highway where he can be popular and offensive at the same time. Somehow he can play the strong leader and play the clown. You can read more about Trump's powers in several smart posts on Scott Adams' blog.
Assuming it's Trump against Clinton in November, I see this as a repeat of 1996, where Trump is Bill Clinton, polarizing but charismatic, and Hillary is Bob Dole: unlikeable, boring, and unlucky. And Trump can easily rebrand himself as a moderate, because he has a long history of being a moderate before he talked like an extremist to win the primaries.
I don't think President Trump would ruin America, or save it. I would expect him to propose a bunch of simple-minded reforms, let congress rework them to fit the system, and where the reforms work he'll take credit, and where they fail he'll blame congress. Bernie Sanders could do the same thing, but because of Trump's pre-existing alpha businessman persona, and his myth manipulation skill, he would be more likely to get away with it and win a second term. The big doom scenario is if there's some disaster that shuts down congress, Trump takes temporary unchecked power, it goes to his head, and he doesn't give it up.
If I'm wrong, and Hillary wins, it will be with the votes of sensible old people, or because an independent candidate splits the Republican vote. The establishment Republicans would never admit it but they'd rather have Hillary be president than Trump.
If Sanders is the nominee, Republicans will unite against him, and Trump over Sanders could destroy the Democratic party, if they react to the loss by fearing voter passion exactly when they should embrace it.
January 30. Update on the feed: thanks Patrick for writing a new script! I'll wait until after my first post of February to upload it, because otherwise all January posts will show up as new.
January 29. Last week I went through the Official /r/ListenToThis Best Of 2015 list. It has never been easier to record music and put it out for an audience, and that's a good thing, but it has also led to an explosion of mediocrity. In many hours of listening, I did not find a single thing that really excited me, but I did find some stuff I still recognize as high quality. I'll post a few albums now and more another time.
Ezra Furman - Perpetual Motion People is creative, spirited, super-cool indie rock, and one of Leigh Ann's favorites of 2015. It reminds me of the Violent Femmes.
Ott - Fairchildren is complex, ambitious, well-mixed psychedelic pop. For me the vocals and rhythm section are too pop, and I don't hear any good songs.
Stara Rzeka is Jakub Ziolek, a dude in Poland who records impressive sound textures in his apartment. Here's a 2013 Stara Rzeka interview where he says cool stuff about both music and philosophy. His long 2015 album is called Zamknely sie oczy ziemi, and I love his sound, which is somewhere between psych folk and black metal, but I don't like his voice, and again I don't hear compelling songwriting. My favorite track is the instrumental Mapa.
Here's how I distinguish songwriting from style: if you strip a piece of music down to one acoustic instrument and one voice (or two instruments) played by average people, then that's the pure song, and everything you took out is style. Great songwriting means anyone can learn to play your songs and sound good, while great style means you can cover other people's songs and sound better.
I also distinguish between style that can be duplicated at will by skilled musicians, and something deeper that comes from somewhere more mysterious. For example, a bunch of artists have covered I Put A Spell On You, but what's great about that song is the energy that came through Screamin' Jay Hawkins and his band that one time. It's like people think they can play the same song and summon the same magic, but that's not how it works.
January 28. Quick note: a reader tells me that the feed for this page has stopped working. I assume it's because my web host upgraded their PHP interpreter from 5.3 to 5.5. I don't know PHP, but if someone does and wants to try to fix this, email me at ranprieur at gmail and I'll send you the script that Patrick wrote a few years ago.
Update: another reader says the feed still works for him, but "as long as I can remember, every post shows up twice", and today there's an image in the feed for the first time. I haven't touched the script in years, and I wouldn't know how, so maybe these changes are all being caused by changes in individual computers or browsers.
Second update: another reader, on a recent version of Firefox, says his feed is working with no double posting.
January 27. If you read enough about near-death experiences, occasionally you'll see an incredible report of someone living years in seconds. This guy lived another life for ten years. There are some comments from people who had similar experiences, and it was also explored by one of the best Star Trek episodes, "The Inner Light". If we ever understand this phenomenon well enough to duplicate it, and to choose the content of the experiences, imagine how the world would change.