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
March 23. Anne has a great new post, A Naked Lunch in Brussels, about that Bruce Sterling talk that I linked Monday, with more details about Sterling's thoughts on failed surveillance states, plus some new thoughts about GMO's as a technology of control, heroin as capitalism, and how radical groups, mass shooters, and Donald Trump all get their power from the emptiness of the big systems. You might also want to read this transcript of Sterling's Reboot 11 speech from 2009. The ending is weak but I love his idea that "progress" is no longer objective -- instead of getting better in a way that we all agree on, the world is just chasing preferences now.
Over on reddit there are lots of comments on yesterday's post, including this thoughtful comment about the value of creating vs merely consuming. I suppose I was exaggerating how little "my moment-to-moment actions to feel meaningful and rewarding" without games, because I do get some of that from writing, which is why I keep doing it, but it's nothing like what I get from a really compelling game. That must be why some creative people create so damn much, because they really do get the same feeling from the creative process that I get from a good tower defense game, while other people destroy their lives because they get that feeling from stuff that's actively bad for them. There are deep questions here that I'm not getting into yet.
March 22. Well, that's what happens when I say I'm not going to post. I just wrote an 844 word reply to this subreddit post, where I tried to explain what's wrong with society, the path to make it better, and the value of imaginary worlds and altered states of consciousness.
March 21. I'm officially out of ideas and relying on links from readers -- most of which I still don't feel like writing about, but today Anne sends a recent hour long Bruce Sterling talk. I just listened to the whole thing while playing Windows Freecell, and if you want a fun challenge try solving #569 using only one of the four cells.
Anyway, Sterling is very smart and has lots of fun and cynical comments about technology and government. His basic theme is that all the control systems are ineffective and out of touch. He argues that the very rich aren't actually that powerful, and that surveillance doesn't work for social control: "Is there anyone with a drone over their head who is actually doing what guys with drones want?" I like his idea that Bitcoin is insecure for social reasons while enthusiasts are blinded by its mathematical perfection.
Sterling is already assuming that Trump will be president, and his surprising and realistic prediction is that Trump will be like Berlusconi in Italy, just using the job to have fun and ignoring his serious duties while the whole system freezes.
I'm taking the Greyhound to Seattle on Wednesday and will probably post again only one more time this week. If you're in Seattle and interested in going out for Ethiopian food this weekend, drop me an email.
March 18. Bunch o' links. Continuing Wednesday's subject, The Trip Treatment is a long Michael Pollan article about the miraculous benefits of psilocybin. I'm wondering how psilocybin relates to computer-generated artificial worlds: in 50 years if everyone is tripping, will it make us totally uninterested in that kind of thing, or just more discriminating?
Robots will take your job is about the growing power of artificial intelligence and why it will force us into an unconditional basic income. While I basically agree, I think the article is too optimistic about the power of data crunching. Computers as we know them are great at finding correlation, but they don't understand causality, so if they make adjustments in complex systems they're likely to make mistakes.
Short video, Marcus du Sautoy explains the fractal nature of Pollock's paintings. The good part starts at 2:15, where they show how you can zoom in or out on a Jackson Pollock painting and it looks basically the same.
I really like this artist, Roman Avseenko. He's bad at drawing people, but he's good with color, and his subjects are a great blend of fantasy, sci-fi, gothic, and ruins.
Fun reddit thread, What's something you're pretty sure has only happened to you? My favorite is the one about the pumpkin.
Also from reddit, this comment, from a thread asking people what changed their mind about suicide, is one of the most poetic things I've ever read:
What "changed" me? A sunny spring day, and the rain clouds were moving in. I went past a daycare where a little girl was dancing around, away from all the kids, by herself. "You just never know." I thought to myself. What if I had killed myself, all that long time ago.
March 16. I seem to be running out of stuff to write about, which might be related to what I'm writing about today: Magic Mushrooms May Permanently Alter Personality. Specifically they increase openness, which normally slowly decreases for adults. Here's a reddit comment thread with lots of reports of good changes from psilocybin mushrooms, and a few reports of bad changes. From another thread, this comment speculates that mushrooms can be harmful if they open up repressed anxiety faster than people can integrate it. I would recommend trying cannabis first, which does the same thing but more mildly.
I debated on whether to post my own report here or post it anonymously somewhere, and I think it's worth the risk to reach more readers, especially since mushrooms affect me in a way that I haven't read about anywhere else. I recently took a medium-high dose that would make most people trip, and my expectation and intention was to have an intense and fun mental experience. Instead I had an intense and not fun body experience. It was like being drunk and having the flu: I felt stupid, dizzy, nauseated, feeble, itchy, and had an overwhelming urge to curl up in total silence and darkness. There I drifted at the edge of sleep the same way I might do if I was sick. On this long list of cognitive and visual effects, the only thing I got at the time was mindfulness: an inability to focus my attention anywhere but inward. Other than the nausea this wasn't unpleasant (and I've since read that you might avoid nausea by making tea out of the mushrooms, or eating some ginger with them). After an hour or two I was able to get up and walk around, and enjoyed a nice body buzz and foggy thinking like I might get from marijuana.
The next day I was tired and irritable, and the next two nights I had high energy and slept only briefly and deeply. I was motivated to start some projects I'd been putting off, like doing more pullups and replacing the lights on my old stereo receiver, and I noticed that I had lost interest in some silly things, like the showerthoughts subreddit and certain ways of thinking about politics and society. I still feel like I'm putting my intuitive value system back together. This was not a one-time anomaly because something similar happened, but not as strong, when I tried a smaller dose last summer.
tl;dr: Psychedelic mushrooms reboot my brain without tripping. Aiming for recreational value, I get only therapeutic value. I think I'll wait a while before trying again.
March 14. A few comments on politics. I'm assuming that Hillary Clinton will be the nominee, because Bernie Sanders is so far behind in delegates that he could win every remaining non-southern state by 20 points and still lose. While I support Bernie's policies, America is not ready for them, and won't be until the giant blocks of money have a little more time to ruin the world and be correctly blamed for it.
A month ago Scott Adams made this post, Scalia and the Pillow, about a conspiracy theory that the Clintons killed Scalia. I agree with Adams: they didn't do it, but the way his death benefits them is fascinating. Millions of left-of-center voters despise the Democratic party for its interventionist foreign policy and pro-big-money economic policy, but they hold their nose and vote for the Democratic candidate because of the Supreme Court. Scalia's death puts this issue even more in the public eye, and Hillary will get more "I'm just doing it for the Supreme Court" votes than any candidate ever. The crazy thing is that the Republican congress could wipe this advantage away if they "kill the hostage" and let Obama appoint someone. Their choice is to concede the Supreme Court and probably win the presidency, or dig their heels on the court and probably lose the presidency and then also the court.
That's not the only way Republicans are failing to think strategically. If they want to stop Trump, they can still do it by narrowing the non-Trump field to a single candidate, because Trump's ceiling is about 42%. The coming primaries are mostly winner-take-all, so Trump gets all the delegates against two opponents and no delegates against one. They're not going to do this, and if Trump wins Florida tomorrow it's going to be hard for even a unified opposition to catch him.
My dream scenario: Trump doesn't get quite enough delegates for the nomination, the convention is a giant spectacle where the other candidates unite against Trump and nominate Cruz or Rubio, the Republican party tears itself apart, Hillary wins, the scandals catch up to her, the economy collapses, both parties get taken over by outsiders, and I live to see an unconditional basic income, a financial transaction tax, single payer health care, copyright reform, and a zero-growth economy with demurrage currency.
March 11. Random stuff. Someone is trying to revive the Realpolitik subreddit which has been dormant for years, so yesterday I made a comment there to help out. I want it to succeed because I want a place to discuss politics with zero moral subtext. I'm just tired of the emotional reflex of pointing out villains and idiots. Maybe that's why my interests have shifted to altered states of consciousness and speculative technology -- because those subjects, more than politics and society, attract an emotional tone of curiosity and excitement. Well, one exciting political thing is that the Republicans seem to be headed for a floor fight at the convention, which hasn't happened in either party in decades.
Another exciting political event, still decades in the future, is an unconditional basic income, and a reader sends this inspiring blog post, YouTube as an Intrinsic Motivation Window: people are making videos purely for the love of it, and other people are learning difficult skills from videos, all with no money changing hands (except between advertisers and Google).
I've been making a lot of videos lately by using Avidemux to edit Electric Sheep computer animations to fit Big Blood songs, and I assume that no one else is interested, so I was unpleasantly surprised that these are going to my Google+ feed. I forget now why I got a Google+ account, but I never intended to post anything, and I think I've managed to shut off my videos going there but I'm not sure. If you actually want to see my videos, here's my channel.
If you want to hear music you like and haven't heard, you'll have better luck with Papel de arroz. I found that channel a few weeks ago and since then I've been going through it discovering all kinds of great stuff... well, mostly weird folk music. My momentary favorite band is The Sad Bastard Book Club, and here's a good song with a great title: If We Were Half as Clever, We'd Be Twice as Alive. Unless We Got the Math Wrong, In Which Case... Dead
March 9. I like to lie in bed daydreaming, and lately one of my favorite things to think about is how I would live my life differently knowing what I know now. The point is not to dwell on regrets but to imagine possibilities, and my life could have been a hundred times better all the way from my first memory to the end of college, if I had known what I was doing.
The other day I started thinking beyond college... and drew a blank. That's why this society is so depressing: even if you understand what's going on and what's important, even if you're not crippled by poverty, there are still no good options in the adult world. We have to make money, and there is basically no overlap between activities that make money and activities that I enjoy so much that I would do them for free. My first thought would be to use my social connections (which I would have this time from playing college right) to get the easiest job I could find, continue looking for higher paying jobs that are still easy, work 10-20 years while living extremely frugally and saving up money, and then retire. But at this point my incompetent real self would have caught up to my imaginary better self, because of all the crazy stuff I did and the mistakes I learned from in my 20's and 30's. So maybe I would play it the same way but just do a lot of little things better.
Two related reddit threads: What's the best job where you have to do almost nothing? And Turning 50. Ambition gone. Love of life doubled.
March 7. From last week on Reddit, What's the next "big thing" that most people aren't even semi-aware of yet? Well, you're probably aware of most of this stuff, but it's a good compilation of potential high tech, plus some culture and politics and doom.
When a new technology appears, at first we tend to think of it as acting on humans who are static and passive. So either it's a fad and we'll go back to living like we did before, or it will replace us. In practice we integrate technologies into our culture and consciousness, but that's harder to imagine.
One little example is this article I've posted before, The Departed Queen. It's by a chess player who beat a much better player in a tournament by spending two years playing against a computer to find a winning sequence of moves from an early queen sacrifice, and it wasn't just a gimmick -- he was using the computer as a coach to gain deep understanding that the computer could never have:
Somewhere between the machine as adversary and the machine as oracle, and somewhere above Ferrucci's vision of the machine as a tool, lies an elusive fourth possibility: the machine as a partner.
March 4. Going to the subreddit again for ideas, the other day Ian made a post about Creativity vs Genius, pointing out that there are completely different things that we might call "creativity", and there's a new computer tool that's better than humans at discovering equations from data.
When I think about it more, artificial intelligence will never be creative in quite the same way that humans are. Even if we can reverse engineer the human brain and build something that works exactly the same way, but somehow better, it would still be missing the intelligence of the body, which learns from actions in the physical world. The only way to upgrade human-like intelligence is to upgrade humans, which is in the realm of biotech or psychology or social philosophy or brain chemistry, but not information tech.
At the same time, computers are already smarter than humans in their own way, on their own path, and now this path can generate complex and beautiful virtual worlds that previously would have taken a legion of artists. It's still something humans could do, but computers can do it much faster. Inevitably, computers will be able to generate experience that humans can't. The deeper question is whether this has any value. This leads to an even deeper question: what is the source of value, or what is the meaning of life?
I don't think life is meaningless -- if I did, I would spend the rest of it in pure hedonism. The other day I made this comment about my Taoist-like belief in an objective source of meaning. And now I'm wondering, if AI can come up with laws of physics, maybe eventually it can help us with metaphysical insights. But how would we know?
March 2. Last week I mentioned global emotional illness related to economic decline, and that link goes to a subreddit post with a careful explanation of an idea that sounds right to me: a slow economic decline is more painful than a fast one. This fits a general rule of happiness, that chronic pain is worse than acute pain. (That's why I'm against insurance, because the ongoing loss of insurance payments makes me more unhappy than a sudden big loss.) And if you doubt that anyone would really enjoy a hard crash, read A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, or at least the first hundred pages.
Anyway, the idea is that Trump is drawing support from people who, consciously or subconsciously, want the system to collapse already instead of slowly grinding us down. I confess that Trump's wins yesterday felt good to me, even though the emotional vibe of him and his supporters will keep me from voting for him. But here's what I was going to say about emotional illness and economic decline:
There are two kinds of human systems, one with top-down or hierarchical power and one with bottom-up or shared power. Shared power is really hard to do, even in small systems, so our big systems are mostly top-down. The problem is that positions of power become entrenched, and the people who hold them become sort of evil. What I mean is, almost nobody thinks "I give thanks every day for my power over others and remember to use it responsibly, and if I lose it, well, it was a nice ride." Instead people come to think of their power over others as normal and fair, and losing it feels like an injustice.
In an economic decline, almost everyone loses power. The highest class holds onto it and the lowest class never had it in the first place, but the middle class is like, "I used to hire peasants to mow my lawn, and now they're living off the government when their labor is rightfully mine!" It's usually more subtle, with higher prices for products and services that require unseen human labor. My long-term answer is a utopia where tedious labor is automated, everyone is guaranteed basic survival, and money is decoupled from work. But in the near future we're going to see a lot of people beating down on anyone weaker to try to hold on to their feeling of power-over, and hopefully we'll see some new bottom-up systems where people can feel powerful in a healthy way.
While I'm writing about politics, I have one side comment: the Republican congress will bitterly regret their decision to not let Obama appoint a bland moderate Supreme Court justice, when they see the crazy destabilizing justices appointed by Trump, or the more liberal justices Hillary appoints with four years to keep trying.
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.)